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Economic Gridlock – the Invisible Cost of IP Law
smellsofbikes writes "This week's New Yorker magazine has a financial article, 'The Permission Problem,' discussing the hidden cost of patent, trademark and copyright laws. It's a subject anyone here already knows well, but he brings up two interesting points: 1) He uses the term 'tragedy of the anticommons.' Instead of depletion of a shared resource, this describes under-use of hoarded resources: areas that can't be explored because they're encumbered by patent/copyright issues. As he points out, the result of this is an invisible loss: drugs not made, software not written. The loss is impossible to quantify and difficult to see. I like the term 'tragedy of the anticommons' because it encapsulates a long-winded explanation into a pithy, memorable phrase that will stick with people unfamiliar with the topic. 2) He also cites a study by Ben Depoorter and Sven Vanneste that discusses why anticommons effects are seen, beyond mere competition. Individual right holders value their contribution to the overall project as a significant fraction of the project value, so if there are more than three or four right holders, their perceived value can far exceed the total value of the project, making it uneconomical."
The project wouldn't work without my function to reverse the string!
But I was too lazy...
Oh, Sorry about the flying car bit too..
Gotta go, cartoons are on.
I've been anti-copyright for years, testing the water in a large variety of industries to see how getting rid of copyright can actually aid artists. I've now discovered that in every market I've tested, holding on to copyright creates less profit for the artist.
In music, I helped 3 bands (one who is now on an international tour, has had MTV coverage, and sells out a lot of shows) move away from copyright. Tell your fans to bootleg your album, and amazing stuff materializes. It's free promotion, and the tour is where you make your money. Let the fans design their own shirts, and you're getting your own artists for nothing. The plumber makes his money doing repeat work, the musician does the same. The plumber goes to school, and learns new skills all the time; the musician does the same when they compose music.
I moved on to photography and discovered that giving away your photography (say, as free stock imagery) is the best form of marketing your ability as a photographer. I now know at least 3 photographers who openly give their images away online, and have seen their hired work double or even triple. Again, marketing is free if you give it away.
As a writer myself, I repudiate copyright on all I do. I openly ask others to reprint my writings, and even stick their own names on it if they want. Because I write about niche markets, the aid of distribution of my thoughts means more people are attracted to those ideas, which means they'll likely eventually find me. That's a huge benefit for me as I can then sell future newbies to the market on my newsletters, or even hire myself out as a ghost writer or personal writer. My income has surged because I don't copyright my writings, or even ask others to attribute me during the redistribution process.
Copyright doesn't inhibit a market in any way, it inhibits the artist who thinks they can retain creative control and distributive control of prior labor. That's over -- if you didn't charge for the labor, it's now a marketing tool. If you did charge for the labor, you've profited. If you market your abilities correctly, you'll get hired for the work in the future.
I do understand the "need" to patent medicines, but I truly believe even that is useless. Research and development for medicines does not need to be publicly funded or protected by patents. Instead, research can continue the way it always has: fund raisers, private charitable donations, and other ways to get the money needed to develop new medicines. What is the biggest reason medicine costs hundreds of millions to develop? The FDA and other organizations which restrict the market due to government intervention. No different from why copyright is a failure and harms the copyrighter more than it helps them.
YouTube cartoonists will trump Disney eventually. Online music distribution has already destroyed the record stores. Free PDF newsletters, blogs and other web products are killing the newspaper industry and periodical industry. Free product = marketing yourself for being hired to do new work. It's a good thing.
"WKRP in Cincinnati" was a mildly popular TV show in the late 70s/early 80s. It was one of my favorite shows and I waited anxioously for it to be released on DVD. Delays delays delays until finally, last year it was released. Unfortunately it was butchered. You see popular (for its time) music played an integral part of the background of the show and quite often character dialog was over music. Unfortunately, when the time came to release the DVD, music rights could not be secured and they had to re-dub the audio of major major parts of most of the show with different (not the original) actors. If you, like I do, remember the show vividly, these re-dubs jolt the senses and make the DVD basically unwatchable.
TDz.
Let me translate.
People are greedy.
Making a profit is good. Making a fair profit is better.
Of course, this article points out what the problem is without tendering a solution. No, I don't have a solution, either. Is this just human nature?
I recall reading in "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" how an anthropologist was paying a local tribe a bounty for every bone or fragment recovered from a fossil field. He soon discovered that the bounty hunters were smashing the large bones into tiny fragments in order to maximize their profit.
In this case, of course, it's an ill-thought-out bounty - whereas I don't know the answer for the IP question from the article. However, it points out the same conclusion: People will tend to maximize their profit whenever they see a way to do it that doesn't involve extra work on their part.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
As he points out, the result of this is an invisible loss: drugs not made, software not written. The loss is impossible to quantify and difficult to see.
Perhaps we should resort to *AA-style "loss calculations." Two can play at that game, and it would be just as valid.
I'd prefer not to stoop to their level, but you don't win against a bully by fighting fair.
Write your MPs now and tell them to can C-61.
How so, I thought it's been blindingly obvious for many years.
Patents, once the means to help an inventor have a little time to make their money back, have become an economic weapon. That was never going to end well.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I've seen a situation where a few major manufacturers dominate a field (which i wont name) but all have cross-licensing agreements with each other.
It'd be like Ford holding patents on wheels, doors and windows but GM holding streering wheels and brakes. Then they agree to cross license all their patent portfolios.
This effectively makes it nearly impossible for a newcomer to break into the field. They don't have the resources to challenge fords "wheels" patent, and all the people who are resourced to have that thrown out - aren't motivated to because they have a licensing agreement.
1. Full disclosure of the intellectual property, including human readable, compilable source code for any algorithms covered by patent, and programs covered by copyright. (Yes, that means source code for Windows.)
2. Declared value for all intellectual property, with taxes levied based on the value. The owner could set the value at zero in order to escape taxation, but that leads to...
3. Competitive bidding, where any person or group can offer an amount higher than the declared value to put the property in the public domain. The owner would have the option of matching the bid (and paying taxes on the new declared value), or accepting the money and releasing the property into the public domain.
To give an example, let's say I write the great American novel. As the creator, I own the rights to it. I declare a value of $0 because I hate paying taxes, and shop around for a publisher.
Unfortunately, no publisher wants to give me my preferred price of $100K. One offers me a $10K advance for exclusive rights, which I ignore. He then bids $5K to put the book into the public domain. I then have a choice of matching that bid (and paying whatever tax rate has been decided), negotiating with that publisher for a higher price, negotiating with another publisher for a higher price, or accepting the 5 grand and releasing the work to the public.
This not only encourages new work and allows derivative work, it also forces intellectual property to be used.
Discussing patents and copyrights can quickly become an exercise in futility when people have an almost religious fervor about their rights. While some would say that copying ideas is natural human behavior, which IP laws artificially restrict to a degree in the name of public good, others would argue that IP is an inherent human right which IP laws simply recognize. These two positions are fundamentally opposed.
But even IP fundamentalist can be convinced that fully exercising one's own rights is not always in one's own best interest. For example, suppose we believed that each of us had the innate right to rule the world and everything in it. That right would work fine if humans could live far enough apart so as never to have any contact with each other. We could live under the illusion of total dominion (at least until we wanted to reproduce). But stubbornly defending that right in practice would be a huge obstacle to forming any kind of functioning society.
Modern IP laws and their vocal proponents have gone a long way toward convincing the public that IP rights are indeed inherent and sacred, not merely privileges granted by lawmakers "for limited times," but a fundamental requirement of civilization. In discussions about limiting copyrights or patent rights, IP fundamentalists invoke images of a backward, anarchic world without modern conveniences, medicines, literature or basic services. It's a false dichotomy, but one that has been painted all too vividly on the public's mind.
I've always found that real-world examples are a good way to point out the flaws in absolutist arguments. The example of the aircraft patent pool illustrates how IP cooperation can be beneficial even when it has to be forced. But there are readers out there who will argue that even that specific example was a bad idea. Some people feel threatened by any notion that something they consider theirs might be taken away from them. They seem to feel that losing everything is at stake whenever they give up anything, and that totalitarianism is always just around the corner. I don't know how to communicate with those people.
Sharing is a crime. Never share anything.
I make singleplayer PC games. Can you explain to me how abandoning copyright makes me better off?
I hear these claims a lot. They generally come from people who aren't the ones risking their livelihood on an unproven business model.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
IP fragmentation is also a huge problem in biotechnology. Golden Rice is a classic story of the anticommons.
Statesman
How about keeping the well-known description, instead of inventing new ones?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Brilliant point. 'Tragedy of the commons' has too long been standard munition in the pro-copyright arsenal. This should counter it nicely.
Copyrights / patents ... if you cannot turn a profit in 14 years then it's your fault.
The system was not ORIGINALLY intended to provide someone with a lifetime's worth of income. It was to ENCOURAGE development.
... because once you have created it, the supply of it is essentially unlimited.
In short, it makes no sense to pay someone for work they've already done when you can pay them for something you want them to do.
For example it would be silly to try to sell 2 + 2 = 4 because there is no real constraint in getting this from something else (your head, google, a calculator, etc.). It would not be silly to sell someone a device (such as a computer) that can compute this, as the supply of computers is not unlimited.
If the result of 2 + 2 were not known, it would sense to pay someone to find out what it equals as time (for humans) is a very limited resource. Once they've done that they can start to work on other mathematical topics and you (or anyone else) can profit from their gain.
Why would you do this instead of waiting for it to "Just Happen"? Well, say you're building something real, like a bridge, and you need to know what 2 + 2 equals in order to construct a part used to make it. Given that you've been contracted to build it, the customer has time constraints, and you have a deadline. In this case paying a mathematician (or a kid with a calculator) is required to sell your actual product (a bridge). People don't pay for the parts that make up a bridge, they pay for something you can walk (or drive) across. Just because you made it easier for future generations (or other bridge contractors) doesn't mean that you can't charge the first customer what it took to figure out how to do it.
Similarly, if you run a hospital and have lots of patients with lung cancer, it makes sense to work with other hospitals to contract researchers to find new medicines and techniques to treat it. You don't need IP to create supply (a limited amount of success in surviving cancer) and demand (people with cancer). People aren't buying pills in this case, they're buying survival. Once you've cured lung cancer you can move on and work towards curing things like bad breath or belief in invisible things like IP.
is to require that any patent or copyright holder be actively developing and/or selling related products. In other words, the economy must be able to obtain the "benefits" of the "innovation" in order to justify the government grant of monopoly. Remember that these "rights" are actually privileges granted by the government on behalf of the people for their greater benefit. Limitation or revocation of these privileges is not confiscation and should not be viewed in the same way as a taking of land or other tangible property; it is appropriate in cases in which the public interest is clearly not being served by their continuation.
For copyright, this approach is fairly easy because the work subject to protection already exists; if a work subject to copyright protection has not been newly licensed by or performed for an end user (i.e., not a reseller) in the past 3 years on terms generally available to other end users, that copyright expires. This definition prevents the holder from offering a work for sale at an absurd price, transferring it among subsidiaries, or giving away one copy a year to a "lucky winner" to avoid losing protection. Perpetually out-of-print books, obsolete software, and music owned by defunct record companies would all be freed from copyright protection.
Patents are harder because the patent may exist before commercially viable products do. One possible first-order approximation might be that patents may not be owned by holding companies; only individuals and operating companies may possess them. This requirement would make it difficult for patent trolls to execute their business model. Another strategy might be to require holders to notify the patent office when they first manufacture a product they believe is subject to protection under a specific patent; the patent office could then allow double-blind challenges (to protect trade secrets associated with ongoing R&D) to patents that are not apparently in use and are at least 3 years old. An inspector would then attempt to obtain evidence from the holder that product development is actively occurring; if it is not, the patent is invalidated. There are plenty of pitfalls here; I challenge everyone to try writing a definition that actually solves the problem. The principle is sound, but it's harder than it looks.
Therefore we should adopt new system. The patent office should be shifted to somewhere in desert, and the application forms should be kept close to peak of K2.
The applicant, after filling 469 pages application, should appear personally in front of patent officer. Patent officer should be sitting in the bunker, to be only opened by a unique key combination which applicant is supposed to search based on clues in that entire fort in the desert. The fort should be made full of snakes, wild animals and hidden guns, which triggers by tiles in random positions.
Applicant once got the key combination, should be allowed to go through number of dark tunnels, one of which correctly leads to the patent officer.
The only "costs" of IP law are: (1) Free software can't copy proprietary software as much as FOSS developers would like to (that is, recreate entire proprietary systems down to their every last detail), and (2) you will need to pay for software, games, and music.
Seriously, cry me a river.
It only prevents legal innovation by someone other than the rights holder or a licensee.
Problem is, fighting wars is more important to the Govt. then educating and keeping its citizens healthy.
Our govenrmennt is corrupt to its core and needs to be replaced.
Cases in point: they suppressed publication of research about
In the first of these, the FDA was more murderous than the Vietnam War; in the second, they were responsible for more torture than the Spanish Inquisition.
And their only use for altruism is to use it to try to whitewash their lust for power.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
is a better analogy. You know that there are places where you step on and go boom (or get a big lawsuit after finishing and doing something successful, whichever is worse), and there is places where knowing that takes far more work than actually doing something. You not only are forbidding (or putting serious barriers at least) the use of certain resources, you are forbidding the use of most, having an owner or not.
In music, I helped 3 bands (one who is now on an international tour, has had MTV coverage, and sells out a lot of shows) move away from copyright. Tell your fans to bootleg your album, and amazing stuff materializes. It's free promotion, and the tour is where you make your money.
How should bands in genres that aren't suited to live performance make their money? And how will touring still make money as the cost of energy for transportation rises?
Online music distribution has already destroyed the record stores.
Really? I bet the major music publishers could find something in their vast back catalogs that's close enough to the new independent music that they can pull a Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs against any online recording artist who makes it big.
Have to laugh because I was just thinking about this stuff this morning.. I've been ripped off a lot. Sometimes I've later met the folks that ripped me off, and when they realize who I am they get kinda quiet. But it's ok, because I'm still vastly more inventive then they are. Ideas are just building blocks, you make one, then you stand on it and make another that goes on top, etc. In that sense, when I get ripped off and somebody takes the idea to market, they just built a platform for me to continue to build on, training customers and creating workflows that I can easily leverage on to the next thing. Sure, that doesn't work that way every time.. but it works often enough. Now, if I wanted to own the planet, it would annoy me. But I don't, and the people that do can't seem to figure out how to do it anyway, so it's all good.
Sure it's "economically-inefficient," but the fewer customers who appreciate something enough to pay for it will then have something unique to distinguish themselves, culturally, as opposed to a monoculture of dancing baby videos of such bullshit variety as will not displace Disney now or ever.
When things are available at zero or very low cost, it reduces their cultural value. Enough Chinese have seen Star Wars to appreciate the unparalleled superiority of American culture and how their own "culture" is simply garbage in comparison. What have they written in the past 2000 years even worth translating into English, let alone learning Chinese for?! A backwards and degenerate race of monkeys, to be sure. Chinese talking about culture really is worth entsichering meinen Browning over.
It is therefore incumbent on civilized societies to learn the lesson of the abysmal cultural failure of Chinese and ensure that thought leadership is economically valued - not just highest quality at lowest price of given X, which must be pre-identified as a social good by the bureaucracy. In the latter case, you necessarily wind up with crap for culture, because there is no reward for its creation.
The problem of the commons therefore still applies to cultural and intellectual artifacts. The problems of excludability created by IP protection can be solved by creating more efficient markets for it and organizations disparagingly referred to as "patent trolls" are one way to do just that.
To suggest that the market for anything in the realm of thought can be improved by ensuring that they're low-cost or free is to suggest that the problem of hunger can be solved by making bread low-cost or free.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
but let's leave it up to the individuals and groups to decide if they want to take that path.
So how do I avoid lawsuits from the individuals and groups who have decided not to take that path? What can a musician do to make sure that he doesn't accidentally copy part of a song that he had heard on the radio a decade ago?
As an aside, they are one of only three honest classical-music publishers I know (the other two being Novello and Oxford U Press, both British); all the others make a practice of claiming copyright for music written even before the American revolution.
I think that such fraudulent claim of copyright (as is the usual music-publishing practice) should be punished at least as severely as copyright infringement. Scaled by the number of copies sold. And (under the legal doctrine of assumed competence) counted as wilful infringement, so that the penalty is at least $750/copy. Many of them would have fines measured in the tens or hundreds of millions.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Western society has to make something to be economically solvent. We can't build our economies by making everyone a sodding barista.
If you go for manufacturing, then you create a population of poor people and shatter the illusion of prosperous capitalist society. If you, as most western countries have done, outsource the dirtiest jobs to other countries you can provide the illusion of prosperity for all, you must rely on more high tech industries that tend to require IP, and you kill innovation in the name of having a nice middle class buffer between the billionaires and the sweatshop workers.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You develop it, keep it secret, get the approval and sell. Anyone else needs to do the same approval process, which will take them the same time
Even if the approval process includes public documentation of the active ingredient?
Their competitors have no incentive for improving it, because the original is patented and you can't turn your improvements into money.
I thought it was called a "cross-license": You can use my improvement if I can use your original invention.
They can take your book, put it in the public domain, make a film adaptation and copyright that. No one can compete with them, because they can afford to outbid most other groups to keep the copyright on the film active for as long as it makes them a profit.
Studio D's copyright on a film adaptation of a given public domain book doesn't prevent studio N from getting its own copyright on Warner's own film adaptation of the same book. See Pinocchio (1940) vs. The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996) and every other adaptation of Collodi's novel before or since.
I call it the "don't wait for government to solve your problems" plan.
Because the discussion in your journal has been automatically archived after two weeks, I have to reply here. Your solution is to have some organization buy copyrights from their owners. But copyright owners will probably decline to sell key copyrights for any price less than the market capitalization of the company. For example, Disney will probably want $60 billion for Song of the South, which it continues to keep out of print for political reasons, claiming that publishing the work would expose Disney to accusations of racism. Individual and privately held copyright owners have even more of an incentive to be "irrational" as you call it.
...I can't get seasons 1 and 2 of Reboot because the current copyright owners (Universal) are just sitting on it.
Maybe a law should be introduced, which makes it impossible for patent holders to charge more for the use of their patents, than a fair share of the profit of the project the patent is utilized in.
It may seem difficult to fairly determine the significance of various patents used for a project, but hey, if one can value a real estate property, one can learn how to do it for patents.
Or just limit the patent enforceability to one year, so the inventors will need to hurry up and actually deliver products to the market. Hell, that's even better.
I think people would be quicker to fix the economy if the problem were called "economic constipation".
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
And the copyright holder cannot prevent someone else from coming up with a work that resembles his or hers, so long as care is taken not to lift passages of prose or source code verbatim or steal video footage, copy the names of characters and places, etc.
I beg to differ. The holding in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music was that subconscious copying of a song heard on the radio years earlier is an infringement of copyright, and the judge awarded damages of about a million USD to Bright Tunes.
It's all drivel because copyright does not prevent people from creating their own original works
Unless the entrenched owners of vast copyright repertories are waiting in the wings to slapp the next successful independent recording artist with a plagiarism suit.
Your mechanism imposes taxes in advance of anyone receiving any actual income
So does the tax on real estate.
Moreover, if anyone thinks the source code for Windows should be in the public domain, they can make Microsoft an offer to buy the rights for it. If it's a credible offer relative to the potential profits Microsoft expects to make, I'm sure they will take it. Right now, the market values Microsoft at around $257 billion, so if you assume roughly half their profits come from Windows, an offer around the $200 billion mark might be attractive enough for investors to take it.
How much do you think it would cost to buy copyright in Song of the South from The Walt Disney Company, a work that Disney has kept out of print for political reasons?
How about keeping the well-known description, instead of inventing new ones?
Because it seems most Americans are unfamiliar with the image of a dog in the manger. Especially those living in urban areas associate "manger" with a song about baby Jesus.
i'm no big fan of his work, but he obviously takes his work very seriously, and he has won amount of critical acclaim, so these words from him mean a lot to me (an interview from aintitcool.com from 2004):
so the real perversion here is the guy who discovers something obscure, labors over it to rescue it from decaying media, make it popular again by distributing it in new art, which means more exposure for the original artist, and what thanks does he get for that? HE GETS PUNISHED
that's the state of intellectual property
fuck intellectual property
the entire concept is bankrupt
we need to not just ignore, but we must somehow actively subvert and destroy, to the best we can, the bankrupt, dead concept so called intellectual property
its a dead fucking farce
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
C-61 is actually a pretty interesting piece of law, if my limited reading is accurate. The thing that really got me was the bit about circumventing DRM. Does it include methods built into the program? For example, an album purchased from the iTunes store comes down as Protected AAC, but when it's "backed up" to CD (which is suggested BY iTunes) it can then be ripped back, also by iTunes, without logging as being DRMed, and can be played on any device. Now, this does coutn as illegal copying, and by extension making available, but could it possibly count as circumventing DRM, when all the functions are built in and even suggested?
My point being, it's not a perfect legislation by any means, but ditching is a bad idea in part - we NEED SOMETHING in place because ambiguity is killing us - refinement is deffinately needed, but the fact that motion is being made is not wholly bad.
/devils-advocate
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
If you look at the disruptive growth of Linux HPC clusters, you will find that there are no IP agreements. I actually wrote about this: Why Linux On Clusters?. The absence of IP agreements allowed the HPC community to work together and grow faster than anyone imagined. On the famed Beowulf mailing list (started by Don Becker BTW) their is a free exchange of ideas and no one claims ownership of any IP. I call it a "Lawyer Free Zone" similar to what was proposed in Scotland back in the late 90's.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
You get the market for that book for a year before someone else can write a copy.
And after that year, someone wants a NEW book, not a re-hash of a year old one.
And you've spent that year writing a new book...
or suing for using Harry Potter in your kids webblog. Or creating a lexicon. Or using the same layout as a 100 year old game...
From reading comments here for years, its pretty clear people don't actually know anything about IP law pretty well. If tragedy of the anticommons is a new phrase to you, then I think you really need to take a lot more time studying this area and a lot less time writing about what you think you understand.
About 20% of Americans think George W. Bush is doing a good job as President which just goes to show you that 20% of Americans are freaking idiots who will not accept reality no matter how clear the facts are. I'm sure there are idiots who still think the Earth is flat. It's probably some of the same tools who think the Earth was really created in 6 days and that George W. Bush is doing a good job.
I will argue that its pretty clear this is happening, and will only worsen.
One could also make an argument that this might be part of the end goal of some of the mega-large corporations as they buy up more and more 'defense' patents.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If someone busts his ass producing something, he has the right to determine what to do with it. If he wants to give it away, fine. If he wants to restrict it a million different ways, fine. It's his work, so it's his choice.
But if I buy something, I am paying for it with the product of my work (the money). I don't get to determine what the copyright owner can do with the money I gave them, why should they get to determine what I can do with the product I bought? Now really I know why but the reason comes down to that it is a social contract. Arguing copyright as a natural right rather than a social contract is destroying the copyright system.
To the extent that content producers could be said to have any natural right to control their work after releasing it, their natural right to control their work is in conflict with my natural right to use my computer and the internet (copying machine and distribution network). It is very common in humans that when parties rights are in conflict, they all give precedence to their own rights. So arguing for copyright as a natural right is doomed to fail. Arguing for copyright as a social contract has good prospects for success but the copyright holders need to be offering terms a lot more reasonable for people to be willing to voluntarily cooperate with the system. Lets get at it.
Enforcement is another issue. You need widespread agreement to cooperate with the copyright system or you need to implement it by force. If you don't have cooperation, the measures needed to enforce it (trusted computing etc) will be a large step towards the end of a free society. So in essence we have three choices:
1) Reduce the copyright terms to the point that people will largely voluntarily follow them.
2) Have no effective copyright.
3) Help bring about the end of free societies to have copyright.
Granted, trusted computing, DRM are only some of the steps that will end freedom as we know it, but they do go along that path, and other steps are already being taken (various laws I shouldn't need to point out as they are widely discussed). Option 3 should be unacceptable to everyone, option 2 is unacceptable to many who wish to copyright their work. Only option 1 seems viable to me.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
We'll need to wait 200 years after Disney goes belly-up before we'll see anything come into the US public domain.
"doesn't screw the people doing the hard work"
Today's patent and copyright system inherently screws the people doing the hard work.
*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly.
It's not just /.ers who call patents monopolies, economists and politicians do too. Monopolies: "Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service". Patents give the owner exclusive control of the invention. "Economists, beginning with Adam Smith - a friend and teacher of James Watt - have carefully documented the problems of monopoly." This is about a patent. "The Patent Controversy in the XIXth Century" [doc]: "Whether justice required that society reward an inventor for his services; if so, was a patent (i.e. a temporary monopoly) the fairest means of reward?" From Findlaw: "What Do You Have When You Have a Patent and Is There Any Risk?"
"If granted, a patent gives you a 20-year monopoly on selling, using, making or importing the invention into the United States. Your patent gives you the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention in the United States."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
i can steal a car. you only have one car
how can i steal an effortless copy of your mp3 of britney spears oh great swami?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where I take issue is with people saying "how DARE you interfere with my business model!" or "people should be able to do what they want with what they create".
I agree with the first part but not sure about the second part.
The problem is that people have got it into their heads that the only valid business model is to sell items at retail to consumers at a fixed price.
That has worked, with a few bumps, for years. Apple's iTunes is now one of if not the largest music retailers in the world. Walmart is the largest retailer, for now, and it's worked for them. Actually in the US people many have complained about how Walmart imports all that cheap stuff from China yet they continue to buy it and Walmart has opened a number of stores there as well so Chinese can afford the stuff as well.
If entertainment became more collaborative in nature, rather than produced and consumed, would that really be such a disaster? Would it be so terrible if entertainment consisted of local bands who played largely for the fun of it, who held day jobs and made a few dollars on the side playing at a bar on a Friday night?
I'm all for making your own entertainment. I used to play, a long tyme ago, the clarinet and I have a wood carved flute I want to learn to play. In college though my major was Computer Engineering I took dance and theatre classes as well. At the same tyme if you read through my posts on this subject I believe a person shouldn't also have to have a full time job doing something else when they want to play or sing music, write, or be another artist.
Would it be so terrible that we need to sacrifice all manner of civil liberties, we aren't allowed to tamper with our own computers
Elsewhere I've posted about liberty, civil, economic, and political. I don't know how many tymes I've quoted Benjamin Franklin's saying on liberty and safety, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
The parent of my original post complained about not being able to make money creating single player games without copyright protection. I ask, so what? Either find some way to make money off this that doesn't rely on artificially restricting supply, or do something else and create games on the side. It may sound harsh, but does anyone really have a right to earn a good income in precisely the manner he or she desires?
Yes, it does sound harsh. What sounds harsher, at least to me, is there being no or little progress. While I believe there will still be progress with no patents, I haven't made up my mind about allowing or banning copyrights. I mention above that I was in college majoring in Computer Engineering, however a bad accident I had ended that. Now there's not much I can do because of my injury. I am hoping to get into photography though and copyrights may help me there.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
One possible way to solve the patent problem is barrow some ideas from the recording industry. When you sell a technology item, you pay a fixed percent of the sales revenue as a kind of "patent tax". This protects you from any patent complaints on the product. It moves the litigation burden and uncertainty away from manufacturers and vendors and puts it on the patent holders making a share claim for the given product. Patent holders would place their claims against products being sold to get some of the allocated patent tax revenue. If other patent holders dispute a given holder claim (which would diminish their slice size), they sue the other claimer(s), or reach a settlement, such as a reduced slice.
To apply for a slice, an existing patent holder would submit a standard form that describes why their patent applies along with a small filing fee. The patent office would give it a rudimentary check-over and then assign an even slice to the holder if it passes. Most of the policing of mis-applied patents would be from other slice holders who don't want their "shares" diminished. The vendor or manufacturer need not worry or care about these disputes because his/her fee rate is fixed regardless of the outcome. Whether his/her fee portion is divided 2 ways or 80, it won't matter to him/her.
Perhaps the fixed-rate option should be optional. However, once one commits to one plan or the other (traditional vs. fixed rate), they can't switch. Switching would result in gaming the system.
Note that the process of obtaining a patent would not necessarily change. It is the revenue approach that changes.
Also note that this would not necessarily diminish total lawsuits regarding patents. What it does is let producers and vendors move forward creating and selling products without fear of litigation and surprise patents. It reduces a barrier between producers and consumers, especially for little guys who cannot afford big-time lawyers.
Table-ized A.I.
Their competitors have no incentive for improving it, because the original is patented and you can't turn your improvements into money.
I thought it was called a "cross-license": You can use my improvement if I can use your original invention.
So now you have a cartel instead of two separate monopolies, shutting down their now common niche against newcomers and settling in comfortably. Yeah, I see, better for all and all that.
10.2139/ssrn.10.2139/ssrn.592166 should be 10.2139/ssrn.592166
A link would look like http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.592166
It's not just copyright, either. I can't begin to guess how much software I haven't written due to employment agreements that basically say "whatever you write while in our employ is ours." So even if I were to write software that was completely unrelated to my company's business, and written completely on my own time, they'd own it. And better yet, if I suggested we build something, and they decided not to do so, if I built it on my own time, they'd still own it! So I didn't write stuff...and they didn't get any benefit from it. Of course, nobody else did, either.
The Law of Unintended Consequences holds true once more.
> Let's say that there was no copyright... then the reality of things is that publishers would have not have any incentive to publish the works of an unknown without an up-front payment
One of the things they're trying to do is to get rid of any NEED for publishers. This is the internet. People can copy it themselves.
Anyhow, it's not always easy and there aren't always canned, guaranteed solutions. But it seems unreasonable to me to expect to somehow be guaranteed a profit if you can't make one yourself.
Also, I very much agree with dada21 about letting people republish your ideas, even under their own name. Feel free to copy this. As someone who writes to persuade, there's nothing better than to have other people take my ideas as their own.