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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?"
If we assume that technology and communications is improving, and the pace of progress is increasing then logically the duration of monopoly should get shorter and shorter rather than longer.
Nowadays if a movie is good it makes a profit within a few weeks of its release. If it's not good, stop making bad movies then.
It is ridiculous that there should be a monopoly for > 100 years.
Think about it, if copyright only lasted 7 years, do you think Microsoft would dare release something as crap as Vista? They'd have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000.
If Microsoft won't want to play by those rules, I'm sure Apple or some others will be happy to take over.
As for patents and people talking about drugs needing long patent terms, the AFAIK drug companies spend more money on marketing (aka bribing doctors with goodies and holidays) than R&D, and FDA approval.
The goal should be to encourage innovation and creativity. Copyrights nowadays just last too long. This encourages hoarding because you can make tons of money by collecting essentially endless copyrights. It encourages lawsuits because the value is in the ownership and money earned over time, not improving the product and giving something people want to buy right now. It discourages derivative works because building off the original costs so much, which, for instance, seriously harms hip hop music. It also discourages new works from going commercial since you can sell a proven product much more easily than creating a new one and teaching the public about it. An individual creator deserves to make money off their work because it gives them an incentive to make more and improve our lives. The current system does the opposite so the social contract is broken. Until balance is restored, I have no problem disregarding pretty much all claims of copyright, short of selling someone's product myself. Then there's patent law...
Whenever a dispute arises regarding intellectual property, it is usually, though not always, rooted in physical property. For instance, disks, books, or other material holding that property. The laws surrounding intellectual property limit use of your own physical property. 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?
You can also look at ideas akin to something like fire. You take a candle and light another candle, and nothing was taking from the first candle. Ideas are the same - they are not a limited resource and thus should not be analogized to physical property.
I live in China right now, and the concept of intellectual property is relatively new here. It's a more natural part of Chinese culture to take ideas from each other. Instead of innovating into uncharted territory, Chinese innovate in place, creating immense depth within a single discipline, for instance martial arts, tea drinking, and calligraphy. This is because there are no intellectual property laws retarding development of these disciplines, and people have been copying and improving upon each others' techniques for thousands of years, spreading across a huge nation.
Chinese culture's reputation for the mysterious and secretive also comes out of this. With no protection of intellectual property laws, valuable ideas are kept secret through guilds and lineages.
Anyway just a few thoughts.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
1. I do not believe in intellectual property. However, I do believe that creators must be compensated for their hard work, to, as the US Constitution stated, "promote the sciences and arts", or something to that effect. As such I acknowledge the fiction of intellectual property as a necessary evil, much as I acknowledge a corporation as a fictitious person as a necessary evil in order to better help commerce (though whether or not corporations should be manifest in the form they are presently in is another story entirely).
2. Simple. Flat-out time limits. They may have a limited ability to be renewed, but cannot be extended. Seven years is probably plenty for most copyrighted works, possibly with an option to extend to another seven, resulting in fourteen total. A similar system seems to have done well for patents - a little too well, as a matter of fact, from the way the patent trolls seem to have sway. I think that people would be FAR more sympathetic towards copyright enforcement if we knew for a fact that it was for a limited time. There might be ways to have a limited form of protection in the case that something is suddenly popular after being out for, say, 18 years - I'm not sure what that would be, though, and if need be, this provision could be discarded for the greater good.
1) Company A gets the patent, licenses it to shell company B.
2) Company B does nothing with the patent license, but since A has licensed it to *someone* - it wont automatically go into public domain
3) Profit!
The concept has its merits, but RMS makes a good point here. Using the term "Intellectual Property" distracts from what we're really talking about: Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents.
And, within that, it's possible to break things down even more. Math should never be patentable. English prose should pretty much always be copyrightable. And so on. That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? Oh, it absolutely is illusory. Big fat "duh" on that point. What you're asking is whether or not we should behave as though it's equivalent to physical property.
I do believe IP -- especially copyright -- is a valuable concept. It's not equivalent to physical property. Specifically, copying something to which you do not have the right is not equivalent to physical theft -- and, more importantly, the only way to "steal" intellectual property would be to obtain legal copyright for something you shouldn't have.
And I believe we're far too early in the game to even know what the ethics around this should be. 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? That's a bit over my head, but if your concern is things like DRM, that's absurdly easy to deal with: Just don't. It is entirely possible to make money without DRM.
In more depth: What I would do is remove DRM from the game, drop the minimum damages (whatever that's called?) for lawsuits, and try to educate the courts a bit on technology, so that real proof is actually required.
And then, I would let the content creators figure it out for themselves.
As a content creator, I would stop seeing piracy as anything other than a competitor, and start looking at what I can do to compete. For successful examples, look at real-world systems which don't have a serious piracy problem, and also don't employ any of the tactics we despise (DRM, etc). Big, obvious examples: Radio, World of Warcraft, most books, and some indie music sites.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> 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?
It is imaginary (aka: illusory).
> If not, why?
Because the "natural" root of "property" is that if take something from you, you don't have it anymore. This is why property have been a necessary evil in human society (because if I let you take my axe and go away with it, I won't have it when I need it to cut wood). Note that the extension of property rights to real estate is already slightly dubious.
In the Imaginary Property field, if I take an idea from you, you still have it, so it you don't loose it. What you loose it the opportunity of making money from it, but that is a vastly different issue.
To see why this is a different issue, let's compare Imaginary Property to Protection Racket. Why isn't that legal after all ? I can argue that I was the first to racket a specific road, hence I should have the right to extort money on businesses or people there. This is very similar to being the same having some specific idea.
The difference between Imaginary Property and Protection Racket, is that it is supposed that Imaginary Property gives society back some value, while Protection Racket doesn't (it could be argued that correctly implemented protection racket is similar to some private police and that it could be a Good Thing if properly managed).
On can argue that Imaginary Property is somewhat worse than Protection Racket, because you can be racketed multiple time for the same thing by different people (in the patents case). In general, racketeers offer a better deal: "you only pay me, and I take care of the others".
So I think that Imaginary Property is effectively a Protection Racket, that I can only find ok if properly managed. In particular, the racket should be temporary, the amount to be paid should be low and fixed, and stiff penalties should be served to abusive racketeers.
(Btw, that is a quite a nice flaimebait, slashdot. You've got a winner here.)
This is exactly right. I think a lot of the problems with the current system arose from people treating IP as physical property, which implies the ability of the owner to fully control it in perpetuity. After all, your ownership of physical property never expires, why should IP be any different?
As far as fixing the system is concerned I think the following steps would help:
1) Forced licensing for copyrights to be used in derivative works. Something like say 15% of profits. This will allow for innovation while still rewarding the original creator.
2) Actually, forced licensing for patents may not be a bad idea either. If you can't make a go of your idea with the advantages of being first to market and not paying licensing fees, then maybe you don't deserve to keep a monopoly on your idea.
3) Much stricter non-obviousness standards for patents. This one is tough, but I think in order to hold a patent you need to show that a top 5% professional in the field would not be able to reasonably come up with the same idea.
4) Repeal business patents. Business patents have a low enough development cost that being first to market should be reward enough in itself.
5) The point above also applies to software patents.
Intellectual property isn't even property in any real sense of the word. It's obviously illusory since IP doesn't exist in any physical sense.
That being said, a government-granted monopoly in the dissemination and exploitation of creative works for the purpose of edifying the public is a valid government objective and I support such a monopoly. I support the monopoly only to the extent which those goals are satisfied.
HTH
In a perfect world, where I was dictator, we'd have a 5-year commercial copyright with an option to renew for another 5. Copyright protection would require registration and a copy of the work in question would be deposited with the Library of Congress. For example, if MS wanted Windows 7 to have any copyright protection at all, they'd have to turn over the source code to the LoC.
Patents would work much the same way, but I'd have them only for physical processes where a working model of the invention exists. Business method and software patents need not apply. If someone comes up with the same process independently of another, the former need not pay patent fees.
Trademark law is, for the most part, acceptable.
Trade secrets would have no legal protections outside of standard contracts. No one would be subject to criminal prosecution for divulging company secrets.
Profits are up for cinema, DVDs, ringtones, etc., it's only the music industry which is currently suffering.
Maybe the problem is with their product, not the copying.
I think the way people listen to music has moved away from the "album" and more towards "top 40". Apple has partly responded to this and is making a lot of money from selling music. The RIAA OTOH has completely failed to respond, with inevitable consequences.
No sig today...
I think that is a good answer to question 1.
For question 2, there are copyrights and patents to consider.
Copyright:
Eric Flint (who is an author himself) makes a pretty good case for 40 years' copyright on literary works, possibly with the addition that copyright does not run out during the lifetime of the author:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
I think this argument can be extended to movies and music.
Patents:
I think those already do more harm than good. While patents help the inventor, they also can be used against anyone who made the invention independently and just was a bit slower to file for the patent. Which is compounded by patent offices handing out patents for far too vague ideas with too little explanation. That breaks the basic covenant that the inventor gives away his secret and gets a temporary monopoly in exchange.
Also, if you look at the history of important inventions, many of those pop up in different places at nearly the same time, not always patented. I take this as evidence that inventions happen when the time is "right" (the supporting technologies are there) and patents as incentive are not needed.
Overall, I think the patent system is counterproductive in most cases and needs to be abolished. With the possible exception of pharmaceuticals. In that field, the clinical studies take long enough that competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Hm, I wasn't aware the world was divided into the two groups you describe: on one side, talentless, incompetent people who do nothing towards society but just want things; and nice, intelligent people on the other who only make things and never share in the riches created by others.
We are all in this together. Different people have different skills and interests; and new ideas do not occur in a vacuum, but build on what has gone before. We all want pretty much the same things: housing, food, joy, wealth... a share in the success of the human race. Because someone once had a flash of inspiration, or was ruthless enough or powerful enough to crush competing ideas does not, in my book, entitle them to a greater share than anyone else. In fact, I believe this is a dangerous and pernicious idea that should be stopped in its tracks.
Property is anti-people: if you've got something, and you need it, fine; if you don't need it, let someone else get the benefit. With ideas, and digital information, you can let someone else have the benefit and still enjoy all the benefit yourself. Not doing this is immoral and indefensible.
As an anarcho-communist, I have to say, I don't acknowledge property rights. Why? Because property rights boil down to "I was here first, I stuck a flag in it, it is mine", and everything had a flag stuck in it before I was born, and I refuse to acknowledge a system that considers all of this to be someone elses property. It is not. It is my birthright, to share with others of my generation. If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.
As far as intellectual property and creative works are concerned, there are two ways to measure the value of those. The first way of measuring the value is to determine how much leverage you can achieve over your fellow man with them, how much they are willing to sacrifice to get it. That is a valuation based entirely within the system of property rights. But there is another way to measure the value. These types of works can also be measured in the advantage they bring humanity. The more people who are enlightened, entertained, educated, cultured, the more value.
The first type of value is entirely arbitrary. The intellectual work doesn't create the physical work that was used to pay, the amount available to pay was fixed before you came on the scene, and you will get less than is available, because the creator needs some too, and he's inclined to compete and give you as little as he can.
The second type of value, the real value, it is destroyed the more you restrict the propagation of the intellectual or creative work. Your neighbours become a little more barbaric, their lives a little more desperate, their minds a little more closed, their thoughts a little less effective. You cripple their capacity to be your allies and friends, and give them reason to wish to break the system and take the wealth that is being destroyed, because they know it's being destroyed simply because you would pay armed men to keep from them what it would cost you nothing to share with them.
Private property is a bad system. But intellectual property in its myriad forms is a needlessly destructive and utterly stupid system for any person to support who doesn't have harming their fellow man and keeping him small as an agenda.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I pretty much agree with the above.
#1 ... don't acknowledge the legitimacy of creating artificial scarcity
#2 ... don't know, but if we have to allow monopoly rights, they should be for a much shorter timeframe - like 7 years at most, 1-2 is more typical. We need to distinguish between sharing, which is a natural human trait, and piracy, which is an attempt to profit off the work of others.
Ideally we can reach a rough consensus on when digital data (movies, music, software etc) should and should not be shared.
"intellectual property" is the 21st century's version of the victorian slave trade and other issues.
think about the phrase "intellectual property" for a moment.
intellectual. property. information. owned. intelligence. enslaved.
therefore, "intellectual property" is the "enslavement of intelligence".
this isn't some sort of waffly joke, the words "intellectual property" _say_ so.
the implications are quite straightforward: the use of the phrase "intellectual property" has behind it just as much enslavement and disempowerment as physical slavery.
* when you sign an employment contract, your "intellectual property rights" are taken away. you are given money, as a "sop". you cannot get any work anywhere else - you cannot get any money to live on - if you do not follow the "norm".
* when you come up with an idea, which you find that nobody is implementing, you are afraid to make money from it because there might be someone who will bully you into submitting to their will because there is a "patent" - a government-sanctioned right to bully - the owner of which has been waiting for someone just like you, so they can take money away from you.
ultimately, however, "intellectual enslavement" is driven by "maximisation of profit".
fortunately, there are solutions: read muhammad yunus new book, "creating a world without poverty", in which he describes "social business" as being "capitalism with non-loss, non-dividend" at its core.
if you have non-loss, non-dividend replacing "maximisation of profit" at the core of your articles of incorporation, then you do not have to suppress or own to "make money". you can cooperate with your former competition, working towards social goals.
it's a long story.
This reads to me like an excellent defence of patents. The whole concept of patents is that the ideas are out in the open, and the inventor can talk freely about their idea without worrying that they will have their idea pulled from under them by a larger competitor with more resources.
The alternative would be much as you describe, with inventors fearing to talk about their ideas lest they become public knowledge, and the inventor sees no return. It's a nasty world where NDAs roam free and lips are tight.
There's also the case of value. An idea might be intangible, but it obviously has value if it can generate a profit. There's also the real cost of intangible things such as technical and economic feasibility studies. An idea doesn't lead straight to a product, there is R&D involved. Here the cost is not tangible matter, but time and salaries.
The idea that only tangible things can have value is absurd. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that your house would still be worth the same amount after it had been knocked down - after all, all the material is still there. In reality, it is the architectural design of the house (an idea), and the man-hours involved in building it (time and salaries), that make up the bulk of its value.
Therefore, suggesting that you should be free to take my idea is tantamount to saying that you should be free to come along and knock down my house.
Of course, this suggests fixed terms, rather than life-plus-N terms.
The purpose of patents is to allow oligopolies to control markets.
The purported motivation of patents is to ensure that inventions are disclosed. However, this does not happen in practice, since the primary focus of patent law practice is to obfuscate patents to the greatest extent possible.
The land is still not yours, you just own a piece of paper that the King will use violence to enforce on your behalf
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns. I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights, and by my act of agreeing not to shoot the "king", I consent to be governed and live by the laws of the USA. Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
This is my sig.
It is not just about seeds. Monsanto wants to trademark a species or a product which have been produced "thousands of years" by "the farmers". If Monsanto would have patented the mozzarella cheese, for example, the Italians would have sued the asses of Monsanto off. Just think about Monsanto patenting the champagne.
The problem with the concept of intellectual property is, that the term doesn't have any boundaries. Property has very well defined boundaries: The real estate boundaries are drawn down in maps, the house has a wall, the car has a tangible surface.
Everything intellectual is missing exactly those boundaries that separate the "owned" part from the "not owned" part. Mark Twain once told the local parish: "Your sermon today was magnificent, but at home I have a book that contains every word of it." The priest was offended, until he saw the book: a dictionary.
So what is the "owned" part in that sermon? The words are not. The sequence of words maybe? It surely contains lots of quotes from the Bible, so those quotes are not owned either. Many of the sentences have been told by other people too. Many of the conclusions were drawn by other theologists. The priest might have used the book of a philosopher or theologist as inspiration. So those parts are not owned either. What is owned is at maximum a certain individuality, of which we aren't even able to tell which part is just random chance and which part is the actual work of the intellect.
So in every piece of intellectual works we have layers and layers laid upon each other which are not owned by the intellect who created the work. 99% of every work is in fact owned by others. That's the famous sentence in the correspondence of Newton and Hooke: "If I've seen further than others, it's because I was standing on the shoulders of giants" (which itself is just a quote of a quote of a quote).
On the other hand intellectual creation is larger as the work itself (you could call it 'greedy' in the regular expressions sense). It doesn't just put well defined building blocks together. It redefines the building blocks themselves. A word once used in a famous quote will always have the connotation of this quote attached. So somehow this word is not fully in the public domain anymore, it has now an individual character thanks to the intellect using it. Case in point: No nerd will ever be able to use the number 42 anymore without having some Douglas Adams associations. So somehow the once public 42 is partly owned by Douglas Adams' intellect, even though he never invented the 42, and 42 is definitely not his work.
So there is no definable property in the intellectual work, because property is a way to define boundaries: Here is yours, and here starts mine. Intellectual works are missing exactly those dichotomy between yours and mine. Intellectual works are "blurred in the property space".
So I don't think the concept of
All forms of property are constructs by society.
All sorts of different rules have been tried through the ages by different governments. Most of them have been found to be extremely inefficient, which is why we have the current system for real estate and for "stuff".
For the various forms of IP, very few models have been tried at all, and the trend from the start has been to strengthen the rights given to the IP owners. Trademarks are not really problematic because they are very limited in scope and giving people strong protection does not limit the improvement of society.
Copyrights are inefficient, because so much of what is being produced is buried and forgotten because copyright law ensures that society can't get free access until the work is obsolete and has negligible value to anyone. A world where copyright lasted for 5-10 years would produce much more value to society in the form of derivate works, based on texts that are still current.
Patents have negative value to society for the most part. They are an effective way to hinder progress in most fields. We have found that awarding monopolies create inefficiencies in all forms of trade and yet we hand out monopolies in the form of patents all the time. It used to be that patents were useful to get the inventors to divulge how they did something, but these days it is enough to know that someone did it to be able to reproduce it. For instance I know of no-one in the software field who reads patent applications to pick up ideas for how to solve problems. The exercise is totally pointless, because the patents serve only the purpose of setting up a barrier, should you come up with the same idea as what is covered by the patent. (Ok, it serves as protection against others trying to patent your idea as well, but that is normal terror balance stuff.)
IF, unlike the cases so far, you have not purposely gathered said seeds and planted them with the goal of avoiding purchase. The GP takes an abstract and acts like it happens. Read up on the cases.
I also think it's interesting that IP (generally) has absolutely nothing to do with birthplaces, birthrights, etc, and has not been completely staked (not even close). I.e. it possesses none of the characteristics that turned you away from property, yet you still oppose it. Why?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Prior art = the multiplication and growth of seeds. Monsanto has conscripted "air", and is now charging you a fee to breath air. Monsanto is infringing on nature, is infringing on the bounty nature hath provided, is stealing from you. You can see clearly th incentive for Monsanto is to create an internet virus that invades every field eliminating natural competition and then collect extortion fees.
Copying, the action, the method, the process, of copying, is "IP" just as much as any product is "IP". So how is it all "IP" copies the ideas of copying and limiting copying?
COPYING IS PUBLIC DOMAIN TECHNOLOGY, with billions of years of prior art. And all "IP" claims are infringing that public domain technology, and are therefore invalid.
Stupid clueless IP proponent idiots are deaf, dumb, and blind as to how they are copying the ideas of others whilst crying like infant children how people copy them while refusing to see how they copy others. It's no wonder IP proponents get their clocks cleaned in debates on philosophical, ethical, economic, and scientific grounds. They are in one word, demonstrably "*dumb*".
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Awesome point! Fruit, grains, all agricultural products which exist naturally are being infringed upon by Monsanto's derivative genetic modification work. Monsanto didn't invent any new fruits or vegetables that didn't already exist. They are essentially writing new Harry Potter books using the trademarked and copyrighted characters of the b/witch that wrote them. If taking Harry Potter characters in adapted derivative works is illegal, then so too is taking public domain "oranges" and "corn" and making them, for instance, "seedless", an illegal public domain infringing derivative work.
Those farmers sure shouldn't be able to label their genetically modified harvests by their common public domain agricultural names. If genetically modified "oranges" are being sold in grocery stores under the label "oranges", they are engaging in fraud. So it's time they start properly naming their produce in the same manner car manufacturers label their models. Do you want to buy an "orange", or an "OXSeven", a seedless genetically modified non-orange that is likely an infringing derivative work of a real orange?
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
I like the first post about time limits but...
The issue with a patent license is probably something that will become obvious to the business involved and may turn into a contingency of the contract. One possible outcome would be to have the contract execute fines or additional fees if the lessee fails to produce a product in a time period that is 75% of the patent time limit. (Recall that I don't agree with 12 months so I used 75% instead.) This will greatly inhibit the tendency for companies to make money by leasing patents because the risk to the lessee is much greater.
But I think the intention here is to force patent holders to play out their hand on their patents and not just camp on the intellectual territory surrounding their product. Where I work they routinely have calls for more patents of any kind to try and expand on the IP range that they cover to try and prevent competition. There is no intention of executing 90% of the patents and for many, they are obsolete by the time they are granted. But it screws with anyone attempting to compete.
We would go along ways to revert back to the notion that you need to bring in a working demonstration of a patent to the USPTO before a patent could be granted. But today that would be unrealistic. Still, some limit must be established.
You do not have a right to what you did not create.
Okay, let's follow through with that initial statement...
It's my land
Really? Did you pull the baryonic matter from the void, shape it into a neat rectangular plot of land, and paste it onto the surface of the Earth? Of course, I hope you pay for the right to use all that "free" gravity on "your" land, unless you made the entire 3d solid of "your" land going all the way to the core, right? Same goes for the air and water, naturally, unless you live in a habitat bubble.
my property
Did you create your TV? Your microwave oven? Your washing machine, refridgerator, computer, couch, even your house itself?
and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Thanks, but I like yours, and you don't sound like you could put up much of a fight, so I think I'll take yours. Your naivete and belief in fictional "laws" over the reality of a cold hard monkey-eats-monkey world does not give you the right to hoarde the best bananas just because you found them first.
but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
You forget that throughout most of history, "taking yours" did count as the "work" needed to obtain such things.
Do we have it better today? Well, we certainly live longer... Of course, while pre-agricultural-revolution humans worked roughly 10-15 hours per day to obtain their necessities, we work 40-50 hours per week. Does living longer matter, when doing so just means slaving away for the gain of those who's ancestors, as the GP put it, first stuck their flag into the land we still need today?
I'm not very good at explaining things. However, this is a much deeper question than initially hinted at. In today's world isn't not solely about IP, but about general economics. In the end, economics says the product will reach its replication and distribution costs. For digital medium, once it's created, it's $0. It's a whole economics between scarce and non-scarce goods. But, like I said before, I'm very bad at explaining these things. Check out TechDirt (www.techdirt.com) and Mike Masnick's posts. He's covered this in great depth (and even offers personal one to one discussion on the topic) far better than I ever could.
There is no solution. Intellectual Property is a fantasy. Here's a great example: giving a speech. We call it "giving" a speech, because after you've said it, it's not yours anymore. The same is true for a performance - we "give" those too. You can't give a speech and then take it back, nor can you publish a book while keeping it to yourself.
If you want to control your "intellectual property", you have to keep it to yourself.
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.
I've had this discussion many times in academic circles. The discussions are typically rational with well-founded arguments. Then I talk to business people and lawyers. They don't see their actions as hypocritical because their actions are legal. As difficult as it may be to understand, there are people who are only guided by what the law allows (or doesn't), and not by intellectual honesty or fairness.
They believe that it's not hypocritical to require their posterity be paid by those who use their IP, while they don't pay Volta's family for the battery because there is no law requiring them to pay.
It's the most frustrating thing to talk with people about the way it could/should be (and was) only to have them re-explain the way things are.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I absolutely deny the validity and existence of "intellectual property". It is a metaphor stretched beyond breaking point to reach a bunch of invalid conclusions. The "intellectual property" metaphor falls apart because, as others have pointed out, it is the physical nature and consequences of same - uniqueness, scarcity, nonduplicability - that provide the underpinning to any meaningful notion of ownership rights over same that we call "property rights". If I steal your physical property, I deprive you of the use of it. If I "steal" your "intellectual property", you still have it. The information regarded as "intellectual property" can be replicated, perfectly, (and at essentially zero cost); because there is no limit on supply, there is no basis for an economics of supply and demand, and hence no grounds to support a system of proscriptive rights over it.
If physical property was like that, would we feel the need for physical property rights? Most likely not, or they'd be something entirely different from what we currently thnk of as property rights. If I could walk up to your parked car in the street, press a button, and drive away in an exact duplicate, and you still had your car right there, would you feel robbed? I don't see how you could claim to have lost anything. You couldn't even claim that the value of your car had diminished in some intangible sense owing to the increased supply that existed because of my copying - remember, to truly compare physical property to "intellectual property", we have to imagine we're living in a Star Trek-like future world with matter replicators and an unending abundance of all material goods; nothing would be scarce and scarcity would add value to nothing.
The current "intellectual property rights" movement is more like an act of enclosure of the commons by a gang of rent-seeking feudal lords. Information is not like objects that can be owned as property, because you can't hold an intangible. "Posession is nine-tenths of the law": your rights of physical property ownership depend on and arise from your ability to physically control the object in question, to keep it in your posession and deny access to others by force if necessary. You simply cannot do that with an intangible. The intangible realm of information is "Terra nullius", a new and unclaimed land, and it is meaningless nonsense to say you can pace out boundaries and stake a claim to an area of it; your fences are non-physical, your barriers to entry do not exist, and you cannot keep people out, as a simple matter of fact; you are unable.
Rather than attempt to overturn and deny this reality in pursuit of an illusory comparison with physical property, the law should accept this difference as being definitive of the fact that intellectual property cannot be owned.
"for no reason whatsoever"
Control over finite resources == survival in hard times, for example both sides of this (remarkably civil) thread are willing to kill to defend their 'rights'. What they really mean by rights is access to basic needs like food, water, shelter, sewerage, electricity,...,playstation,...,where does 'basic needs' stop? Who dies if there is not enough water for everyone? - How much is 'enough'?
Nature rewards survival, the two opposing forces of competion and co-operation explain much of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The answer is simple. We use property taxes to ensure that land is kept productive in the USA, otherwise, the property is confiscated by the state and auctioned off to someone who will enforce that claim. Or, the owner may transfer the land to the public domain - usually the county or state. For example, Annenberg donated a large part of New Jersey's natural woodlands for this reason and now they exist for the public benefit.
The same should be done with intellectual property. If someone files a copyright or a patent, have them pay taxes on it, annually. If they can't pay the taxes, they are not entitled to the claim, and they can either have the IP confiscated by the state for auction, transfer ownership to a charitable organization, sell it, or give it to the people in the form of public domain.
That lets people get stinking rich off of new ideas, which encourages innovation, but also discourages rent seeking, which promotes stagnation.
I'm surprised that liberals have not thought of this already. Of all great ironies, here it is the conservative Republican reminding you liberals of actually why property taxes were invented, and you invented them. They solved the problem before, and can solve it again.
This is my sig.
The purpose of property rights in modern society is, at heart, to make sure that someone is not deprived of the fruits of his labor. If I take care of a farmhouse, if I work the land and make it productive, it is only just that I be allowed to keep the house and the lion's share of the food I produce; anyone can see the injustice if someone came along and took over my house and stole all the food I grew, because for all my work I am now homeless and starving.
It is fundamental to the nature of property that someone can be deprived of it, and that is the reason we have laws to protect it. It's not about money, it's about natural rights. However, natural rights for ideas go in the opposite direction. If I hear an idea, it is my natural right to think about it and try to apply it to my life in some way. The saying "Information wants to be free" is true insofar as there is no real impediment to an idea propagating itself indefinitely, and that once known it is not easily forgotten. Thus, information is actually the opposite of property.
Nevertheless, in order to make it economically feasible for people to come up with new ideas (books, music, inventions), the government allows an un-natural right to monopoly that is limited in duration so that the writer and the inventor can enjoy the fruits of their productive labor like the farmer does.
Really, it ought to be called 'intellectual un-propery', because that describes precisely what it is.
I think the solution to the problem is complex, and a number of things need to be addressed. One thing that is a problem is that a lot of patents that get issued are obvious and/or based on prior art. That definitely needs to be addressed. NTP was able to make money on their suit because they had the patents even though most, if not all, have been turned back. I think one reform should be that until all refutations are completed, no patent is actually owned. NTP also didn't sell anything with their patents in use, and neither did they make any attempts to sell a license to anyone. I think the solution to that is simple: 1) You must market and sell a product that includes your patent or 2) You must actively seek to license it to other organizations or 3) You must make the patent available for public use in something like the GNU/GPL licenses If one of the 3 conditions does not exist, then you have no cause to bring suit. Another way to limit damages would be to institiute a time limit on how long after a competitor brought a product to market you would have before your suit is brought too late. I think a period of 6 to 12 months is more than enough time in which to bring a suit, but wouldn't argue against a lesser amount. Finally, a lot of companies don't search for existing patents when they bring a product to market because they would then open themselves to liability at 3 times the damages. I think it should be a requirement for companies to do the due diligence, and document why they felt that their product infringed on no existing patents. At the same time, since we require them to do it, do away with the treble damages clause. Just my tuppence, Woadan
You can't bend reality to meet your perceptions.