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What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?
StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
Intellectual Property = information.
If you want to control intellectual property, you need to be able to control the information exchanged between people. That is a very difficult thing to do, and may give you a totalitarian society as a side effect.
I lost my sig.
property and intellectual property are not similar.
property rights are important b/c of the problem of scarcity; if there were enough of everything, there wouldn't be fights over who owns what.
with intellectual property, there is no scarcity of the idea or musical recording or what not; it's free (or close to it) to copy.
IP (or some of it) can be arguably justified on purely utilitarian grounds to incentivize creativity, and certain rights are granted that are similar to property rights, hence the use of the word property, but the analogy is taken too far when people think of IP as actual "property"
1. No
Ben Franklin gave his inventions to the world, why can we not do the same? All IP is based on MINE MINE MINE and preventing people from building on your work as long as possible, under the self-interested characterization of other people as THIEVES until proven otherwise. All IP is based on rationalizations of this very selfish behavior.
We've had enough of compromise, all that has given us is unending nibbled-to-death-by-ducks as the lawyers extend and extend and extend the reach of copyright and IP and patents. Soon your great-great-grandchildren will be living off your IP which was never the intent. It always starts as "reasonable" laws passed to encourage innovation and then pass things into public domain as soon as possible.
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
The system worked fine before it was repeatedly "fixed" in recent years. Increasing copyright periods to ridiculous lengths, DMCA, allowing software patents, etc.
Our system worked FINE. The Internet actually brought no new cards to the table except speed. I could go on about that one for a long time, and bring up copy protection in the context of player pianos (which court cases also involved patentability of "software"). But that would take up a lot of time and space.
In a nutshell: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke. But they did it anyway, since the mid-90s, all in the name of corporate protectionism and profit. And in the process, they broke it pretty badly.
The solution is simple: put the laws back the way they were, when they actually WORKED and we had, arguably, the best-working set of "IP" laws in the world.
I'd have put it a bit more nicely. Something like "parse error" would have done better.
An anarcho-capitalist who believes in IP is like a libertarian who advocates for a monarchy.
See, this response is flawed. Monsanto does own their seeds because they invested a lot of time and money in the traits of those seeds. Nothing is being stolen from the farmers...they can use the same old seeds they have been using for thousands of years. You, person who thinks scarcity is artificial, have never lived in a world in which you must fight for your food or you must kill in order to stay alive. Business must make profit in order to enrich your life. DO not expect freedom of existence without a fight for it...you must earn it.
Now at the same time, Monsanto does not get to fly those seeds over random farms and drop them and then sue those farmers, thats bad business, so don't think I love this company, but dammit you fools, don't think some scientist in a lab didn't work their ass off to create this amazing thing. And dammit, they better make some money, otherwise all that scientist can do for a living is steal shit from you...course you live in a world in which there is no scarcity, so no one would ever steal from you.
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
That was sorta what I was already wondering.
In the west we already had a concept of, basically: you bought _a_ book, you didn't buy the rights to the novel. You bought _a_ record, you didn't buy the rights to that band's album. You bought _a_ (copy of the) newspaper, you didn't buy _the_ newspaper. Etc. It worked. Most people could already wrap their mind around that.
We had a first sale doctrine that worked perfectly well with that too. Yes, you didn't buy the rights to the novel, for example, but you bought a book and you can do almost whatever you want with it. Resell it, lend it to your friend, read it to your kid at bedtime, etc.
Then came for example software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold, 'cause if we sold it you might think you bought the rights to Vista as a whole!
Exactly wth is the fundamental difference between buying a copy of, say, Vista, and buying a copy of Huckleberry Finn? I'll go on a limb and say that people would have had no trouble using the pre-existing concept for software too.
And then based on the license stupidity, we had increasingly stupid stuff snuck in as licensing terms, that no consumer rights law would have allowed otherwise. E.g., you can't resell it. (See the recent AutoCAD lawsuit, but also all the software where you have to use up a serial number to use it, etc.) You can resell your old book, your old vinyl records, even your old copy of The New York times if you find someone interested in that particular issue, but you can't resell your old copy of AutoCAD. 'Cause it's licensed not sold. Some presume to unilaterally decide what else you can run on that computer. (E.g., it's quite common for game copy-protections to just quit or do this and that to you, if they think you have a CD emulator running on that computer.) Or what they can do to your computer. Or what you can use it for. Etc. Everything that consumer protection laws gave you for books, records, etc, the license took away for software.
And now unsurprisingly we see the guys from the other media, essentially go, "wait, wait, you mean we wouldn't have had to give customers all those rights, if we called it a license too? Damn, we want some of that too!" All the aberrations and stupidities built on that fallacy for software, we're now seeing trickling back to, say, movies and music. They too want a DRM scheme to prevent you from reselling it. They too want to unilaterally require your DVD player to phone home and spy on you, 'cause, hey, if software can do that, they want it too. They too want a say in what you can use the DVD for, and in which devices. (See copy protected CDs which actually play a reduced bit rate MP3 instead of the uncompressed music, if you play them on a computer.) Etc.
Heck, even Sony's infamous copy protection rootkit was, essentially, just trying to get the same control over that music as they have over software. In a misguided and flawed way, to be sure, but they didn't do anything much more underhanded than their copy protection already does for games.
And methinks it's about high time to say a collective, "WTF?" Or rather, a, "No, you don't. You software guys learn to live with what already worked for everything else, instead of everyone else copying your invented loopholes. Yes, you sold a copy, not the rights to the program. We know that. That already applied to everyone who bought a copy o
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For instance, you can purchase a hard disk with the bits set randomly, but once you re-arrange the magnetic charges in a specific fashion, you are infringing upon someone else's rights. This goes to show that intellectual property is indeed an illusion. Shouldn't you be able to do what ever you'd like with that chunk of metal in your room?
These sorts of hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid. At the end of the day a human is just a bunch of atoms. Shouldn't I be able to disrupt those atoms the same way I can disrupt the atoms in my own house if I want? And before you start on who "owns" atoms, "ownership" is just an arrangement of neuronal connections in people heads. ENOUGH!
If we accept that we're talking about things at a human level, not at an absurd reductionist level, then both ownership and copyright are meaningful terms about which we are able to have a discussion, and neither is an "illusion" as you state.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
The keyword is 'exclusive', meaning only 1 person can use it at a time. If I use a car to drive from A to B, you cannot use it at the same time to drive from C to D. All physical property works that way, somehow.
Now for IP, many people think it's the patented/copyright work that is the 'property' in IP. It isn't - you can copy things anyway, so they're not really scarce. It is the right to determine who is allowed to make copies and when, that is regarded as 'property'. And this is exclusive. Only 1 person or organisation can hold the copyright on a work at any given time. This right is the (artificially) scarce item that is used/inherited/sold and so on. Once you understand this, IP makes perfect sense from a conceptual point of view. I don't like this concept, but it's perfectly in line with how people deal with physical property.
Where IP doesn't make sense, is from a practical point of view. Copyright may have served a purpose 1 or 2 hundred years ago, but times have changed. I have yet to see a convincing proof that the world as a whole has benefited from past IP laws. That technological/cultural progress would have been slower without it. In todays fast-moving society, it serves even less purpose. Countless patents fall in the 'obvious' or 'bound to happen sooner or later' category. Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free. Nor are there any objective standards used to determine IP protections. Protection periods aren't calculated or estimated for optimal effect, but lobbied by greedy corporations for maximum profit. As a result, society as a whole loses.
And then there's implementation. Take for example DRM: you hand a million customers identical 'black boxes' with identical locks, with identical content inside, then you give those customers identical keys, and you tell them: "now go open your box, but don't share what you find inside". Aliens would laugh at how silly this is. Or a company invests millions into development of a new drug, then brings it to the market, but not everyone profits because the poorest can't afford the high price. All the hard work has been done, the company wouldn't profit less if there where a group of 'freeriders' who can afford production costs but not market price, but still: millions are suffering because corporate greed is deemed more important than curing sick people.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers. In the mean while, I just try to ignore IP law as much as I can get away with (like so many people, whether they admit it or not).
Well the problem with what you just mentioned is when the seeds does what comes naturally to them, that is spread and when the gene modified seeds spreads to a different farmers field he apparently owes monsanto extortion(royalty) fees.
A farmer in a community can't do without paying Monsanto royalty fees a few years after another farmer in that community decides he wants to use them.
That system is inherently flawed because the protected property will spread all on it's own regardless of the wishes of the original user or any new involuntary users.
Biology shouldn't be patentable. Period.
Monsanto invested a lot of time and money making their seeds. They did.
You know what? For millenia, men have spent their entire lives breeding stock or hybriding plants in order to get what they wanted. Did they own the rights to every offspring? No. They got to sell that animal or plant once. They could keep the genetic line in their possession and only sell meat or flour or whatever, but once that thing was out in the world, it was everyone's.
Tell me one good reason why GE is different.
Put identity in the browser.
Say you kill a landowner for his land. Now the land is yours. The next generation has no land. Who do you think they will want to kill?
Sorry, I do not want a war every generation because people feel it's their birthright to have land. It is not. Study, work, make money, buy it. I did, why can't you? If you try to take something that is rightfully mine because you are too lazy to work for it, then I reserve the right to kill you.
That is the evil of Communism, when you think everything belongs to everyone, individuals have nothing and the government owns everything. Anarchic Communism is even worse, because everyone thinks they have the right to everything, and without any government to keep the order, we'd be in a constant state of war.
You could say wealth & resources are available to anyone who works hard enough
You could say that, but you'd be wrong.
But the amount of wealth available to someone who works hard in the Congo is quite different from the wealth available to someone who works hard in the UK.
In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all.
Intellectual "property" is rapidly reaching the same state. Consider the notorious copyright on the century-old "Happy Birthday" song. It is currently owned by Warner Chappell, and you'd be hard pressed to show that the officers of that corporation have ever done anything that qualifies as "work" to realize the several million dollars in royalties that it brings them each year. OTOH, the Hill sisters that wrote the song never received any income from it at all, but as elementary-school teachers, they worked rather hard their whole lives (and produced the song as part of their job).
This is typical of how Intellectual Property actually works. The actual creators rarely realize any significant income from their creators; the income generally goes to the owners of corporations that control the mass-production and distribution channels. This control generally comes not from any sort of hard work, but rather from financial and political power that makes it possible for them to exclude competition.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
But even in the most equitable countries on earth the OVERWHELMING majority of resources (land and otherwise) is owned by a miniscule fraction of very rich people.
I don't have the answer either. But I find it amazingly arrogant to think that ones wealth is entirely due to oneself. That's nonsense. Most of my wealth is because I'm lucky enough to be born at the richest of all times (until now) in one of the richest countries on earth, with two well-educated parents, and am surrounded by a population that in general is well-educated.
None of this, or at best a miniscule fraction of this, is due to me. Had I been born to a single, uneducated teenage mother in Ghana, my life would've been very -VERY- different.
Yes, your own hard work makes a difference. But it's not by far the only thing that makes a difference. Infact even with the least possible own work, I'd have ended up better-off than 95% of the people in Ghana.