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FTC Wants To Straighten Out IP Law
coondoggie writes with this excerpt from NetworkWorld:
"What do you get when you mix the government, the court system, company lawyers and Joe Consumer? A serious mess that would send most people screaming into the night. But the Federal Trade Commission is no such entity. It wants to straighten Intellectual Property (IP) out and today said it will hold a series of hearings — the first in Washington, DC on Dec. 5 — it will use to examine IP law and the myriad issues surrounding it. Interested bigwigs from the tech industry, including Cisco, Yahoo and the Computer & Communications Industry Association are expected to testify along with professors, lawyers and other industry players. The patent system has experienced significant change and more changes are under consideration, the FTC said."
The FTC held some different, but related hearings this week which addressed topics such as copyright law and DRM interoperability. Transcripts, podcasts, and summaries of the talks are available on the FTC-hosted "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade" site.
I sure hope the industry isn't colluding here and the government is looking out for our interests...
vc: buyers
When did it go gay?
s/Consumers/Corporations/g
that consumers and fair use get the short end of the stick at these hearings?
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Is there any way this can turn out well for the consumer?
Right from the summary:
Interested bigwigs from the tech industry, including Cisco, Yahoo and the Computer & Communications Industry Association are expected to testify along with professors, lawyers and other industry players
I don't see a mention of consumers, and since consumers don't pay for lawyers (except the few who defend IP suits) or professors (who's salaries are paid for by "research grants" from corporations), it sounds like this can only end in tears.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Aahhhh! Minnie Mouse is really Mickey in drag?
One of the three big lies is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you".
I'd remind you that every time the government gets involved in IP law at every level, it ends up worse for consumers. Every time. So you should be scared when you see this. We'll end up like crazy canadian laws where an entrenched monopoly gets a tax on anything that poses a threat to that monopoly (taxes on ipods, black CD's, and likely ISP taxes).
And that isn't the worst thing that could happen. The monopolies will be pushing for chips inside devices that can "tell" when media isn't authorized. In the name of helping the people of course.
I realize I'm giving worst case scenarios here, but ask yourself this... Is the FTC likely to say "Goodness, none of the current laws are very consumer friendly, therefore, copyright/patent will be reduced in time and scope, there can be no more DRM, and people should be able to use music and video wherever they want, whenever they want". Won't happen, because the FTC doesn't have the authority to make it better. They do have the authority to make things *worse* for consumers though in terms of mandates and taxes.
No thanks.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Let the lobbying begin. Money, spin, and rhetoric ftw.
Twinstiq, game news
That's what I'd bet on if I was a betting man. Give geeks and little false hope, then just totally screw them over with even more cumbersome intellectual "property" laws.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Does anyone else think that they're trying to get these hearings through before the next administration to make sure it goes through under this extremely corporate lobbyist-friendly administration?
"Defensive IP" is designed to be used as part of a counter-suit in the event that one big company sues another over IP infringement. This eventually gave birth to "IP Holding" companies whose primary purpose is to sue people over IP infringement and they are ultimately immune to counter-suits because they don't actually use or apply IP... just collect money from claims, settlements and law suits.
The problem with IP is that is has become an industry in and of itself.
And by IP, I mean copyrights and patents.
Obama won't be president until he's sworn in, in January.
THEN everything will magically and instantly be fixed.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
But at least they are discussing it. Although in all likeliness this will just result in more gov kowtow'ing to business interests, there at least exists the possibility that some progress may be made. Better to have it happen in the open and in the presence of the opposing side than snuck 150 pages deep in a friendly named/scary inside bill rushed through congress.
I doubt if the FTC intends to abolish it altogether, and that's the only egalitarian way to "straighten out" this collection of wealth-concentrating tactics. Too bad the general population is too unaware, uneducated, and distracted with their nine-to-fives and other minutia to even know or care how they're being disadvantaged by it. It's mostly the very same minority who stands to gain from it, in one fashion or another, which has any real influence to its existence. That's why IP law exists in the first place; those who are NOT egalitarian sought to cement and further increase their gains, and they succeeded because of general ignorance (again). We've been stuck with it ever since (centuries), in one fashion or another and to varying degrees.
Awww, still a little bitter? Better luck next time.
I wonder: did they invite people like Cory Doctorow?
Did they invite people like Eric Flint?
Or are they only going to listen to voices from the dark side, the side that believes culture was invented to make big companies rich and where "non-commercial" is a profanity?
We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of intellectual property.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Please go put all your money by the stairs.
Do not trust the price-gouger robot. Litigation will protect you.
StupidIPLaws > /dev/null
I'm sure that there will be plenty of lobbying to keep the laws that screw the little people, and lock people into paying and paying to keep defunct business models in operation. I don't hold out any hope of any "sorting" happening.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
For some meaning of the word "fixed".
I don't hold out much hope for Obama making things better, but he might slow the rate at which they are getting worse.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A good story for a M.C. Shampoo comment.
Haven't had my first pot of coffee yet this morning... can't think of anything just yet.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Do you see any mention of asking every day citizens whether they want to be able to copy a song from their friend? If not, it'll go industry's way.
Yahoo and the Computer & Communications Industry Association are expected to testify along with professors, lawyers and other industry players
That'd be you, me, and anyone else who keeps it going through consumerism (not used in a negative sense). Without us providing the driving need for the innovations that 'require' patents, there would be no need for any IP system at all. (And the "wants to hear your comments via a form" doesn't really qualify to me.)
Some people want to keep copyright, and for them the copyright law is good. Some other people want to share, but for them there is no law that supports them. Public domain does not exist in all jurisdictions, and in these countries that it exists it is too vague how one can place something into the public domain, plus in some countries it is impossible to give away some rights such as moral rights or the right to get credit. The laws are made with copyright in mind, without contemplating the possibility of someone wanting to share freely.
In most jurisdictions copyright is assigned to the author by default when a work is created, even before publication. Thus, no one can copy legally without having a licence from the author. But writing and giving licences is not always easy: the author has to think about such things as disclaimers, etc. Today there are standard licences such as GPL that we can use, but it was not always so easy. Plus I see no reason why anyone should be forced to write or attach a licence in their words in order to escape from the evils of copyright. Licences such as GPL are good, but very soon we run into problems like being unable to share with people choosing a licence of the same spirit but with different words, such as CC-By-SA or even GFDL.
Recognising that there are two groups of people, one group wanting copyright and the other group wanting to share, and believing that a government must accomodate both groups, I think governments should maintain two sets of laws: copyright for the control freaks, and copyleft for the sharers.
With a copyleft legal framework, one could write some code or a book and just say Copyleft (CL) 2008. No licence required: the law will take care of that, and if the governments prepare their laws after an international meeting like the Berne Convention the laws will be compatible in all jurisdictions. This helps the sharers without doing any harm to existing or future copyright owners (except if you consider free competition a bad thing). Control freaks will still be able to say Copyright (CR) 2008 for their software or books etc to signal that their creation is to be treated with the copyright rather than the copyleft law.
If governments ever do that, there will probably be some fight between control freaks and sharers regarding what the default law will be. Currently copyright is applied automatically. If a copyleft law is added to the legal framework, will everything be considered copyrighted unless it has a Copyleft (CL) 2008 notice? Or should we consider copyleft the default law and only apply copyright to whatever has a Copyright (CR) 2008 notice? That will be a question in the case a copyleft law is introduced somewhere. Another question will be whether the copyleft law should be real copyleft as in GPL/GFDL or permissive non-copyleft as in ISCL/BSDL/X11L. We could perhaps have three legal frameworks: copyright, copyleft, and permissive.
The current laws make it very easy to keep control over one's creations. You don't have to write a licence to have copyright, but you do have to write (or choose) a licence to enjoy copyleft. And choosing a licence is not an easy task because of licence proliferation: there are many licences to choose from, with subtle but important differences, and for many of them if you make an initial choice it will be difficult to change the licence, especially for massive collaborative works with no copyright assignment.
If the FTC really wanted to fix the mess surrounding copyright it'd give copyright the same term length as patents, 20 years.
The explosion of innovation coming from that simple act would likely generate so much economic activity, it could offset the losses from the current credit crisis.
Well, at least you're not blaming Clinton anymore. That was getting really old. It will be refreshing to hear about how Obama is responsible for every failed policy of the Bush administration. Let the blame games commence!
By putting such a hearing at the end of a lame duck presidency, and an extremely corporate friendly one at that, they're guaranteeing jobs for the current set of bureaucrats for at least another six months, even if the new president thinks they're all worthless and should be canned. They're looking for new work to do in the new adminstration, and expanding their existing bureaucracy to 'organize' the existing mess.
If they had a chance of discarding the existing software patent and current ludicrous copyright laws and setting out a sane standard, with clear standards for fair use and clear new patent guidelines that dump the current use of patent libraries to frighten developers away from releasing their smaller ideas, I'd say it would be great. But it's unlikely to occur in Mr. Barack's first term: he's going to have to set new standards in bureaucratic policy, as well. And that would take people at the hearings such as Richard Stallman as the author of the GPL.
If they really want to fix the law, the solutions are simple: -Bring back a realistic time expiration limitations(25 years should be plenty, with 35 at max), with software patents getting a very short time span (5-10 years). *this is the BIGGEST problem with patents* -Start increasing the costs of patents for those who get a lot, this would limit companies getting thousands of patents and from patenting everything under the sun. -set a date that the company must have a working prototype of a patented item. If they fail to have a working prototype then the patent gets voided. This will help stop people from creating a patent and waiting for someone else to create the item just to sue them for patent infringement. This would help, but I am fairly certain that nothing good will come out of this meeting, in the end the solution will be horrible and it will only benefit companies and screw the average person even more.
>> The FTC held some different, but related hearings this week which addressed topics such as copyright law and DRM interoperability. Transcripts, podcasts, and summaries of the talks are available on the FTC-hosted "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade" site.
Uh, no, these public hearings are from November 2006.
He can't do any worse the Bush has done at least
I don't hold out much hope for Obama making things better, but he might slow the rate at which they are getting worse.
In some ways, merely slowing down the rate at which things get worse might be the worst of two routes to take. It gives people more time to be accustomed to having Personal Right # taken away to the point when Big Brother comes looking for Personal Right #+1, they won't even take it into consideration that they've just lost 2 freedoms in the last X months/years - only one.
20 years ago, no one really cared if you were out passing your mix tapes around. Now hell or high water it's the end of the world if you download an mp3.
There's a difference of scale. Passing mix tapes took more labor per copy and was more limited in geographic scope than passing MP3s over the Internet is.
Fixed!?! Fires won't burn anything! Nothing will rust! Hooray for Obama, greatest @ ever!
Not a sentence!
Weren't you paying attention? YES. WE. CAN!
They can come up with whatever they want, make rules everyone can live with, and be in complete agreement with every fine point. Then Congress will scoop up their lobbyist money and ban it all with another DMCA revision. Don't people know this by now? Protecting Consumers? LOL
vi? Who's that?
wouldn't the easy way to fix this be to charge someone a yearly fee to keep a copyright active, with maybe the first 5 years free. and increase the fee by a significant amount each decade? That way greedy bastards get to keep Micky Mouse locked up forever, but might release older stuff that's not showing a profit and is now COSTING them money to hold onto.
Over time everything not making money goes into public domain, keeping both sides relatively happy.
I'd have the Library of Congress be the final decider of what is and is not public domain, and if you forget to pay your tax even once... it's public domain forever after.
Fixed!?! Fires won't burn anything! Nothing will rust! Hooray for Obama, greatest @ ever!
I'm pretty sure that politicians, as a general rule, are displayed as &, not @.
I'm sorry, but in a concentrated effort for CHANGE! this slogan has been replaced in favor of DOWN. WITH. WHITEY!
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Personally, I find the articles attached to this about "as clear as mud". That is politics. Maybe there is presently a mandate to protect DRM, but its very divided by nation-state. I bet dollars to donuts (even money) that the mandate will be retracted before it becomes law. Politics as usual. There are so many loopholes in such laws. I may get sued in some nations if I were to port an effective DRM-stripper to Windows. (No I don't make ports for Windows -- That is for beginners.) If put out a Windows port that converted one DRM standard to another, all of Europe would love it. In my neck of the woods, I'm actually encouraged to crack DRM. In a twisted way, its like the legal concept of a locked door means "no entry". You are not supposed to crack WEP or WPA, for instance, even if they are known to be highly flawed.
The whole IP thing is so 20th century Capitalism. I just don't see hard working authors, musicians and inventors losing to "piracy". The suits like patents simply because their livelyhood depends on leaching money from hard working intellectual people. Every job where a patent was involved that I've had has greatly delayed me getting my product out. I lose, the fucking suits leach big-time. Yes, in the end only the lawyers win is a true statement. At least Europe got over software patents and for the most part isn't all that serious about making any exceptions in law because of technology's changes. Copyrights are automatic and that is right for the most part. I do agree that 'copyleft' should be legal world-wide. There is very great benefit in giving IP away: No lawyers, suits and other expensive and trivial people. I've made $Millions by just getting to the market first. By the time you get a patent, the copy-cats got your ass and most of your profit goes to lawyers. I get royalties but they are measly compared to 'bypassing the system'.
In the states greed rules and its a bit different but fundamentally the same. I couldn't make any real money there due to very short-sided thinking. This should be contrasted with the very long-term patents and copyrights. The US has never made any sense to me. Don't get me wrong, there is an element of bullshit everywhere, but the material provided for this really takes the cake. Looks like business as usual, but Obama has just been elected and who knows, he might follow through. Give the guy a break and let's see what he really does. 80% of the entire planet supports him. Its not the US ruling everywhere anymore. The "Bush doctrine" has long been dead, if you must call it that. Corruption has ruled from high places in the US much longer than Bush. Nobody can reset the US government in four years and look what JFK got for trying.
IP laws are simply an extension of US corruption and greed that has taken the world. Maybe 'big pharma' deserves very long-term patents then again its equally possible the FDA has it all wrong. All it took was a single drug scare for a substance that proved to be useful -- after the patent expired. That is what the world puts Bush's name to. It all the 911 game played over and over. IMO, the Germans invented modern psychological warfare, a very dangerous game. In a sense the US is playing 'world cop' with all this crap. The whole world now sees its ran out for the USA. I'm so pissed off about paying a tax on my FreeBSD that I probably pay more in the total effort to legally circumvent the laws concerning CD blanks. Hard-drives are a better deal anyways, but you must have many, set up a RAID (A real RAID, not 'raid 0 or 1'), back-up and don't forget to replace a disk on the __first__ bad block. If hard-drives are ever taxed for material that is not on them when they are sold (save that occasional copy of Windows that is on some OEM drives :) the retailer is the loser as I'll get them wholesale. Presently retail prices are very good but that could change on short notice. CDs and DVDs are strictly back-up material or fodder for the car or a party. I rarely burn audio CDs in the first place! Those things can cro
There is an *artificial* monopoly law that says you shouldn't, but the default right is you CAN do it.
And make the awards financial burden relative to the taxable income. Then for infringement, you have three options
1) Pay up the fine and stop
2) Stop and recall the infringing product
3) Obey the license terms
We the People. Seriously, why should industry leaders be there at all? If it's the FTC, a federal entity, they should be convening a conference of constituents or their elected representatives.
I have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Bitter about what? Better luck with what?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All