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Why IP Laws Are Blocking Innovation
DrJimbo passes along this quote from Groklaw:
"The White House is asking us to give them ideas on what is blocking innovation in America. I thought I'd give them an honest answer. Here it is: Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation. President Obama just set a goal of wireless access for everyone in the US, saying it will spark innovation. But that's only true if people are allowed to actually do innovative things once they are online. You have to choose. You can prop up old business models with overbearing intellectual property laws that hit innovators on the head whenever they stick their heads up from the ground; or you can have innovation. You can't have both. And right now, the balance is away from innovation."
Business gets what business wants.
No IP was a contributing factor.
proud caffeine whore
Patents. Bloody software patents, and fat cats using patents to bludgeon little guys. IIRC, the intention was pretty much the opposite - patents were supposed to be a way to put the law on the side of the little guy. Where did it all go wrong?
As for copyright - no more damn extensions. Indeed, ratchet back.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate. Any suggestions? Clearly this debate belongs on a larger basis than the 1D, "stronger - weaker". How about a policy of "use it or lose it?"
The original goal of copyrights and patents was to reward people for creating things that benefit all of us, not to create huge corporations that prevent people from creating things that benefit all of us.
The internet has become mostly a method of keeping the people distracted.
It seems to be bread and circuses all over again.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I totally agree. I have been saying this for a while now. If the government wants to make up some of that deficient, they should rebuild the patent office "correctly" and then throw out all the patents and let people reapply for them in a matter that helps everyone and does not require so much litigation to make something as simple as a screw or lever. This would as help flush out patent squatters.
It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable. One result of the fast and loose IP laws is an entirely new method of profit for enterprise: using the court system as a means of revenue (i.e. sue for profit.) In the end, the IP laws have become the United States undoing because how can we be technological innovators and leaders if the would-be inventor is scared off by some superfluous patent over something ridiculous.
examine western european history in the 300 years in between 300 AD and 600 AD. you will see that the feudalization of economy and politics in that period closely resembles the feudalization of economy, and now intellectual sphere in our modern times.
a concept is like a bridge. once you give the ownership of the bridge to someone, that someone has the control of that bridge, can use it to do anything, toll anyone, deny access to anyone. and buy more bridges. eventually, most of the bridges get concentrated in the hands of minority, which then end up controlling the social, political and economical aspects of life through their power. its the inevitable result of inheritance-supported, unlimited ownership.
Read radical news here
You fail to patent, or file slowly? That's okay! We will patent for you, and then sue you for violating our patent!
As I understand first to file, prior art published outside a patent application can still invalidate a patent or application. It makes a difference only when two inventors have pending applications on the same thing (e.g. AG Bell and Elisha Gray).
Why is it OK to block innovation and commerce with environmental laws, racial preference laws, licensing laws, union preference laws, unreasonable liability laws, international trade laws, and thousands upon thousands of regulations?
Who said that's OK?
And it's worth noting that those regulations have resulted in a huge amount of business moving out of those highly-regulated nations to places like China which couldn't care less about them.
I am a web developer by day, and am a software developer by night. I make software so that I can sell it. One of my biggest worries is that I will make a really great piece of software, start selling it, then some big company filled with lawyers starts suing me because it run in Windows, and according to some messed up, obscure patent, I can't do that. I understand that they would not touch me right now since, let's face it, none of you have heard of me (as with the rest of the world). I am not banking hardcore. It is possible that one single program I write will though. That is a very high possibility. I try to program safe and not go too insane with the software I make and sell. If I go insane and make something incredible, these sleazy, douchbag lawyers will want a piece of my pie even though they had nothing to do with it, so they sue me. You should not be allowed to simply buy up a patent. You should be required to have a working model of what the patent is for. If you have a software patent for software that does not exist and you have no proof it exists, why are you allowed to own it? You have nothing to do with the software outside of a small piece of paper saying it. You have no programmers on payroll. You have no engineers on payroll. You are not paying or contracting anybody to make these innovations, you simply own them to say you do. I think it should be revamped to make these people show proof of concept at the very minimum in order to own a patent. Unfortunately, for people like me who make just as much selling software on the side as I do at my normal job (and it is not a small amount, it is just not big either), it is only a matter of time before the "I can retire now" software gets sold off, and then I get sued for some software patent from a company that has nothing to do with software outside of having a piece of paper saying they can. Proof of concept, or you lose it.
If these patent trolls started losing patents for no proof of concept, that would up the innovation then and there as other big companies would be bringing in people to make a proof of concept so they could own the patent. A 2 for 1 deal and it is super simple. Innovation gets sparked, and patent trolls get smacked in the face. And all we do is force the patent trolls to show proof of concept of every single patent they own.
The world is how you make it
Yeah, the good old days, when you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
Thanks but no thanks.
Stephan Kinsella, an IP lawyer, has written an essay basically demolishing the philosophical and empirical reasons for supporting IP:
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
Highly recommended reading!
The thesis "Current IP law stifles innovation" is a good one, however I don't agree with the examples provided in the paper. I think a more persuasive argument would have used company vs company lawsuits are are going crazy right now (between the like of Apple, RIM, and Sony) and the hoops that things like the GPL has to jump through to placate Novell selling out to M$ amongst other attacks on open source software. Comparing the situation to the aircraft industry pre-WWI and using other examples of stifled innovation would have given our current situation more context as well. /sighs
Anyway, I just think the sheer amount of licensing boondoggles and lawyers required to build any kind of useful tech device these days is completely out of control, and I don't know if the paper made that clear (it didn't to me anyway).
Leaving the form up on the website long enough for people to reply would be a good start...
Have to agree with most people.. patents have destroyed innovation.
Too many laws as well, When you do innovate you get messed around because of some law you never knew existed.
Proof of concept, or you lose it.
Perhaps the original inventor had a working model, but a nonpracticing entity bought the patent from the inventor's employer when the inventor's employer went bankrupt.
Besides, a working model requirement wouldn't clear up, say, the video codec situation. Any of the companies holding patents in MPEG-LA's AVC pool probably has the expertise to write its own AVC encoder and decoder.
There is a fine line that IP laws have to walk. On one hand, they have to be sufficiently liberal to ensure that ideas' implementations don't get stifled by the laws. On the other hand, they have to ensure profitability for an inventor with a sufficiently "good" idea. Both these goals are necessary to promote innovation because *having an idea is not the same as implementing that idea*. Generating ideas is mostly an automatic process that will happen regardless of IP laws: few are the people who are paid to sit around and think (I'm not saying they don't exist), so a society doesn't get far with respect to pure ideas by promoting their development with monetary incentives (i.e. by allowing patents). However, implementation of an idea is usually hard, and it is the only way for an idea to be useful. Patents, then, motivate the implementation of ideas by allocating a set amount of time (17 years) during which an inventor has exclusive rights to profits from his invention. At the same time, patents require a fairly detailed specification of an idea, from which an implementation can usually be derived, and so once a patent expires, parties other than the original inventor can easily implement the technology described, and society can further benefit from the idea.
The real problem here is that the 17 year period granted by a patent is far too long given the rapid rate at which innovation occurs in the computer industry. In 17 years a technology will likely be obsoleted, so a patent on a technology effectively bars others from *ever* using it, and so open source activists seem to think that "no patents whatsoever" is the solution, because they equate "patent" with "permanent ban on implementation". However, a better solution would be to shorten the period allocated on technology patents to, say, 4 years.
Given the advances in manufacturing capabilities in other industries, it would also be a good idea to reevaluate this 17 year period with respect to other types of technology, for example, drugs. Perhaps having a patent system where there are multiple classes of patents with different patent periods addressing different types of inventions would be best.
-Kerrick S
I tried to read the link. It was long and rambling. Using Napster as your starting point for a discussion will immediately turn off your target audience. Go back to your unabomber shack you wingnut.
The DMCA. A law that made reverse engineering illegal. As though anyone ever built a better mousetrap without tearing someone else's apart first. Oh well the Chinese have no such illusions.
you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
How is that different from today, where the wealthy patron is a mainstream publisher? Try to do it yourself and risk getting sued for plagiarism.
All those votes were probably from me. I just got really high and forgot that I'd already voted.
Sorry about that.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Wireless access for everyone will spark innovation? There's someone in a cabin in the woods in Montana ready to build the next Google. If only she had broadband?
Wireless access for everyone will enable residents of rural communities to share videos of their cats with the world. That's it.
Have gnu, will travel.
to:
"without strong ip laws there is no reason to innovate"
Software (pre and post Software Patents is a great example), Fashion, Cookbooks, Numerous countries that do not have the same fashion of IP laws, and a lot of history all say otherwise.
Music was recently just able to be copyrighted (1909?) in comparison to the time line of music. Yet very few real music innovations have occurred, everything is primarily made of four cords still.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all. Suggestions about how Napster would some how result in great if the law hadn't shut them down seems like a pretty odd argument to make. Sorry, but I can't get on board with that. I'm fine with much shorter copyrights, but why in the world does anyone think that eliminating copyright leads to innovation (other than the fact that they're judgment is being swayed by the desire for endless free stuff on the internet)? The fact of the matter is that people aren't that generous, which means creators will have to get by on 1/10th of what they currently earn. There are plenty of examples of the fact that people aren't that generous. The most recent example is the fact that in 1990, Encyclopedia Britannica reached $650 million in revenue in a single year*. Now, wikipedia in 2010 is struggling to get $12 million in donations. Sure, that might be fine if someone's bringing down a million dollars a year, and now they'll earn $100,000 a year, but most creators are earning a lot less than that and it ultimately results in gutting the industry of people.
If this ever happened to the consumer software industry, the only thing we could do in defense is put everything on servers behind a paywall. In other words: create a techical barrier to prevent people from getting our work for free when "free" means going bankrupt.
Further, the article is completely off base when it argues that somehow peer-to-peer offers all these increased opportunities for small creators who can't afford a webserver. There's plenty of places that will host your music for free (like MySpace, Rapidshare, Grooveshark, etc), and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. It seems like it would be a lot more effective to put your music on a website (with band pictures, videos, tour dates, etc) than to put it up on Napster or a torrent or something.
Many of the author's examples didn't seem that solid. For example: "Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The US’ Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony) Or: "Here's an example of what one successful company, Google, does about hackers -- it puts them to work and pays them to tell them what to fix" (Gee, you mean a company that gives away its software doesn't worry about hackers/pirates?)
"I'm trying to answer the question asked -- what is blocking innovation in the US -- and the answer is that all the energy has been going into locking everything down, with the law tilting away from users and innovation, and that's not creating a fertile field for innovation. " When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation. Things like DRM and paywalls are a defense against those pirates. Complaining about companies "locking things down" is a bit like complaining about the money society spends on locks and alarm systems for their houses and cars. Yes, in some sense, it's a waste of money, but the problem isn't with spending the money on locks and security it's with the people who won't treat you fairly - i.e. the thieves. In the context of intellectual property, those are the pirates. Throw the blame at them for their degrading effect on innovation.
* "By 1990, sales of Britannica's multivolume sets had reached an all-time peak of about $650 million." http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/books-non-fiction/807-how-encyclopedia-britannica-was-blown-to-bits.html
Probably because people who say that are full of it. With the possible exception of international trade law you're completely wrong on all counts. Nice hedging on "unreasonable liability laws" it's bad form to use a phrase like that without any hint as to the actual meaning.
The issue is that those things don't bar innovation, in fact most of those things you list are powerful tools of innovation. Imagine how much innovation would have happened if you looked at all the innovations that have been contributed by various minority groups. Sure most of that would've come about eventually, but it would've taken a longer time, sometimes diversity is invaluable when trying to innovate.
Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation.
To be absolutely clear, 'intellectual property' as a term comprises copyright, patents, and which other things that have actual laws and legal definitions? The quote comes from groklaw, but for those not in the know, it might help to be unambiguous about it
I wish I hadn't blown all my mod points to increase the visibility of a couple titty jokes. You should have got one.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In the "good old days" artists needed a patron not because there was no IP law but because most artists' audience was incredibly small by today's standards. The Church and the aristocracy were about the only ones to commission artworks or have their buildings elaborately decorated. Not because everyone else got their art fix from ThePirateHorsecourier but because everyone else was too busy working their arse off to feed themselves or bashing in skulls. Given the circumstances I would still consider that era a prosperous time for the arts. I agree with GP's point that the ability to freely use whatever you got your hands on and create something new from it was a very good thing, and I would like to extend this to say it contributed considerably to the wealth of cultural legacy that has serves artists up until this very day as a solid foundation to build upon and a rich repertoire to draw inspiration from.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Firstly, many people are against all those, so that's not an argument for IP laws.
Secondly, even those who aren't may say that innovation is only one factor and that the benefit of those regulations outweigh that factor, while the benefits of IP laws don't.
Dilbert RSS feed
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
No IP was a contributing factor.
I don't know what you people are talking about. There is considerable innovation in America today. The US is the leader in CDOs, derivatives, tax avoidance, and is always coming up with new and innovative schemes to part working people from their money.
No lack of innovation there, it's just misdirected.
Politicians need money to win the next election. Corporations have the money to give. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the connection and obvious solution to the problem, remove the need for money.
1) Pass a constitutional amendment that states that money does not equal speech.
2) Give all the candidates equal and free access to the public airwaves. If the cable, satellite and TV companies don't like it revoke their license. Someone else will gladly take it over.
3) Let the US Government printing office provide print materials for mailing their fliers, signs,...
4) Post office provides free, or paid by the treasury (new election tax) services.
5) Forbid any candidate to spend a cent on their election.
FINI.
... are too easy to game by way of ignorance and overwhelming the staffs ability to approve them. Not to mention lobbying, bribes and kickbacks. People just do not have the skills to properly assess patents/copyright, I mean come on amazon's 1 click patent and others relating checkout? I mean seriously.
They will just be abused endlessly, they should be junked. What really needs to be innovated is the business model, laws that grant legal monopolies would merely force innovation on the business model end, instead of through the legal system. The idea that there are no solutions or "there would be no incentive" suffers from a complete lack of imagination on the part of the critic.
Well done! Anarchist principles incorporated into a philosophy of intellectual property. I did not expect that. (btw, I'm not being sarcastic.)
What the hell... it's already closed for comments.
Yay Slashdot timeliness!
Plagiarism is a lot harder to prove than you think. And, if you sue somebody for that and lose, you're probably going to end up on the wrong side of another lawsuit, and end up paying out big bucks in damages.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The people I want to hear most from are not the IP intellectual discussions about moot points of IP policy, but from actual patent holders who have innovative technologies that have been blocked from innovating by the patent system.
I used to be against most forms of US IP, but now in a position where I may be able to actually capitalise on some of my own IP, I find the system much more friendly than I thought. While I still find my own knowledge lacking, here are the two things I wish were reformed:
-A patent does not give freedom to operate, it only gives the right to exclude. For example if you patent A, and then I patent B, but B is a subset or derivative of A, I can't actually bring B to market because A blocks me, but the holder of A can't do it either because B blocks it. This ends up stifling innovation. To correct this problem requires an entire re-think of the rights given to patent holders.
Second, patent holders get the standard term to block others, regardless whether the holder intends to or ever does bring the innovation to the market. I wish we had a system that gave 22 years of protection, but only if the holder uses the patent within 2 years of granting (with an appeals process that allows extensions if reasonable work is still being done on it). Essentially, eliminate defensive patent library weapons of mass destruction.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
http://ksd5.techaos.com/index.php/The_Surprising_History_of_Copyright_and_The_Promise_of_a_Post-Copyright_World
Yes because this stuff is not patented!
Artists can go fuck themselves. What, you think creativity is in short supply? I'm an artist - pay me. Market your product, then we'll talk.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Nearly all industry in the US seem to be either intellectual property or service oriented. Manufacture and agriculture are critically diminished and everything it getting outsourced and sent overseas. What we have left is IP which, as we know thanks to the secret ACTA negotiations, IP has become a matter of national security.
But Obama doesn't want to know the truth. He is in the pockets of those who want to keep their arsenal of intellectual property... and arsenals they are as we see an increase in IP's use as a weapon against other companies. It's as if they know something is about to change and they are trying to cash in on their IP while it still has some value.
I assume you are referring to games.
I would agree that current IP laws go too far. That said, how would you make money if they were eliminated altogether? Donations from users? If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles, which you would still be locked out of, without paying you a cent.
It's also worth noting that your argument does not apply equally to other artistic fields. Music, for example, can be and is produced outside of the major label system. I would argue that most of the better music of the last couple decades has been produced independently.
TFA is built on the premise that crime would pay if there weren't patents on the crime methods.
Napster? Really?
Napster wasn't hit with a patent suit for its method of stealing music. It was busted up because it was stealing music.
I couldn't read the rest after it started with that. Someone tell me if it redeemed itself.
How can I innovate if I can't copy and sell the ideas of others?!
Its all about cooperation - or in this case lack of it.
We are going to die, because antibiotic discoveries are at an all time low while antibiotic resistance is at an all time high.
Plenty of research has been shelved because 'that company has wall to wall patents over the place' so its not viable to look there - there is no money. Speed and urgency creates winners and lots of them. Impose patents and lawyers, and that missing jigsaw piece may remain buried until such time it might have value again.
Lawyers are advising 'Don't tell anyone, don't publish , don't patent it' because you don't have the money to fight a claim.
OK, you have taken the first step admitting current system is broken. The 'Haves' don't want to give up a dollar - not one, and use the legal system to game things and punish 'parasites', and lawyers to bleed them financially in long drawn out cases.
The solution is to allow 'independents' a piece of the action and money flow straight away - which means rolling back other peoples 'rights'
Just copy another country innovation, get a patent and voila! new cash cow.
Napster wasn't hit with a patent suit for its method of stealing music. It was busted up because it was stealing music.
If you're going to be anal about terms you should make sure you aren't playing fast and loose with them yourself. Napster didn't *steal* anything.
Patents != Copyright, however IP covers both Patents and Copyright.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
The prosecutor can be more distinctive about the term he wants to use, but since the money you collected belongs to the copyright holders, it doesn't matter that you invented the machine that made you that money.
And my point stands. The idea that stifling crime is stifling innovation therefore it shouldn't be a crime is a canard.
Imagine a world where cooking wasn't covered by IP law you'd never be able to set up your own restaurant!
Why would a chef ever come up with a new recipe?
Surely if he came up with a good one then McDonalds would just steal it and include it in their own chain and lock that chef out.
As soon as you came up with a good idea, theme or dish someone would just swoop in , copy your ideas and push you out of business.
Nobody would ever even try!
We'd all be stuck without anything good to eat!
My crystal ball, my Magic 8-ball, and my Steve Jackson Tarot deck all agree that the USA has deliberately shackled innovation for the last 10 years. I don't know why. But the signs are unmistakable, even for those who can't sense the aether.
There was no question what would happen when the US Patent Office was changed to fee based financing. The flood of junk patents, and their suppressing effects on innovation are a surprise to no-one. In the intervening years, there has been ample opportunity to revert.
Similarly, for years we have encouraged monopolies and cartels that we know will suppress innovation.
The demotivating effect of the H1B Visa program can't be a surprise to anybody. Chaining the technological elite into lives of indentured servitude has always suppressed innovation.
So, the current course of technological stagnation is a deliberate choice.
The US won't change pathways until we unmake this choice.
Miles
... but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all.
Please show where the article suggests we do away with copyright law. You can't because it doesn't. PJ is a big fan of the GPL and she knows very well that the GPL only works because of copyright law.
If you disagree with what she says, fine, that is your prerogative, but why do you just make up crap like this?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
No IP was a contributing factor.
I don't know what you people are talking about. There is considerable innovation in America today. The US is the leader in CDOs, derivatives, tax avoidance, and is always coming up with new and innovative schemes to part working people from their money.
No lack of innovation there, it's just misdirected.
Bwahaha I pissed myself.
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
Napster was no more stealing than the person who wrote the first FTP client and server was stealing.
If your "innovation" runs afoul of IP laws, then it wasn't an innovation. It was something someone else already did.
How about increase education spending? People are more likely to come up with innovative technologies if they have a better understanding of existent technologies and ways that they could be improved. It isn't rocket surgery.
IP = Internet Protocol and Intellectual Property rights as copyright, patents, and trademarks for corporate control of creativity and innovation are the biggest block to innovation.
Open Idea Protection (OIP) for the artist, scientist, engineer... is needed.
1. The artist, scientist, engineer... that is the driving intellect should have exclusive and lifelong rights to their creations and innovations irrespective of any corporate/government investments. Allow artist, scientist, engineer... to contract out rights (to others/businesses) exclusive rights for a limited period of a decade or less for production or manufacture of a product/object, never allow a business/government/religious... institution to own the rights to anything intellectual. So, the artist, scientist, engineer... is always paid for their creations and innovations.
2. Provide by law that any non-production or non-manufacture use of a item/information/product/object... is always legal and allowed for furthering research, design, development... curiosity in study/improving upon all creations or innovations.
3. Arbitration by expert peer review to determine the added value and division of proceeds when an item/information/product/object... is used for production, manufacture, and commercial/economic exploitation.
4. Why, because only humans (artist, scientist, engineer...) are in fact intellectual. Institutions have explicit/written financial/governance processes/policy, but absolutely no intellectual capability. IOW: You don't create you don't own. Copyright, patents, and trademarks are should protect the artist, scientist, engineer... not the brainless/amoral institutions.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Maybe IP is just yet another tool that large, established concerns can use to raise entry barriers for new competitors.
Coincidentally, I just read an article today -- Rethinking IP -- that suggests doing away with the concept of IP, entirely:
"We must start by taking a close look at the traditional libertarian assumption that IP is, in fact, a legitimate type of property right. And it turns out that advocates of the free market have made a mistake all along. Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market."
Pi Ran Out
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
You cannot 'steal' a digital bit. It simply exists and is copied or erased. But you cannot 'take' or 'steal' it in any way.
Napster is a bad example but for a different reason. Napster was busted for violating the copyrights of the music they were allowing to be traded.
How about Guitar Hero being killed because the copyright holders of the songs demanded ridiculous amounts when the game amounts to free advertising for them? They are certainly in the rights to do so, but it doesn't mean that 'innovation' isn't being stifled by it.
Patents are the bigger problem. Specifically software patents, but patents in general too. That Tivo can be sued because someone patented a completely vague idea without actually building their idea hurts everybody. Vonage also got sued over really technical things that Verizon (I think) purchased patents for and then sued Vonage. Worse, 'Patent Trolls' - companies that literally don't make anything purchase lots of patents solely for the purpose of suing companies who actually create things - *that* stifles innovation significantly.
I'm not advocating illegal sharing of copyrighted works. I am advocating that the current mindset of today's 'media' companies is very short sighted and backwards. Digital copies, instead of being a 'product' like a CD, are now the 'advertising' they should be using to drive people to buy things that aren't available in infinite supply. (This is not saying that because it's illegally available they should just give up).
Digital copies can be made in infinite numbers at just about zero cost. Say I'm selling apples and one day, someone comes and, without taking any apples, creates an apple tree next to my apple stand. Now apples are available for free right next to me. The value of my apples is lowered. I have not lost anything, nor been deprived of anything. There are simply more apples on the market and that causes value to go down. An infinite supply of apples puts the 'value' of any one apple at zero. I can complain that free apples exist - this is what 'media' is doing today. Or I can shift to having people come to my cart to by my 'worm free' apples. Instead of selling apples, I'm now providing a service of quality apples. I can certainly take apples from the tree too, I just spend time verifying they are worm free; that's the 'value' I am providing.
For the music industry, the 'value' is in live performances and merchandising. You simply can't produce a live performance infinitely, it can only be done at the concert with those musicians for a finite set of people.
But unfortunately we have billions of dollars fighting this basic fact of the digital world. Best description I've heard "Trying to make digital bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet".
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How about a 'perfect storm' of patents? Some kind of social media phenomenon encouraging people to attempt to patent anything and everything they can possibly conceive of, as much as they can afford given the time and/or money required. Get enough people doing this, corporations will speed up in return. Patent offices will be simply unable to keep up with the amount of submissions, creating years worth of backlog and likely clogging the system up so much it'd become ineffective.
All it takes is a couple of people, all willing to start the trend and get their friends in on it.
I don't know what you people are talking about. There is considerable innovation in America today. The US is the leader in CDOs, derivatives, tax avoidance, and is always coming up with new and innovative schemes to part working people from their money.
No lack of innovation there, it's just misdirected.
You forget the biggest of them all: the US is leader in making remakes of remakes of any remake that has ever been filmed.
Quite pathetic, really.
There's NO WAY they are going to liberalize patents in the slightest-- get real, Big Pharma patents forcing sick consumers to subsidise drug R&D & massive profits, is too big of a piece of what bought us this crappy government.
has the answer and it is this obsession with having an enemy at any cost, even an invisible one will do. The mass hysteria, paranoia and delusional feeling of insecurity envelops the entire country putting brakes on any real creativity.
I wish I hadn't blown all my mod points to increase the visibility of a couple titty jokes. You should have got one.
Even the jokes need their patrons.
TFA is built on the premise that crime would pay if there weren't patents on the crime methods.
Your response is built on the exact same premise. IP laws are government enforced restrictions on freedom of expression. And yes, the freedom to say what someone else has said is a fundamental component of the freedom of expression.
So crime already is paying because of the violation of basic civil liberties.
Oh, "But wait!" you say, eager to point out that the situation is not the same because we as a society have decided to permit IP laws so, by definition, using them is not a crime. Well, right back at you -- TFA is saying that we as a society need to change those laws.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Nobody would ever even try! We'd all be stuck without anything good to eat!
Yeah! We'd be stuck in a world where McDonalds served Lamb Tajinewith candied Tomatoes, Parmentier de canard confit en cocotte, and Galette Feuilleté with Candied Fruits for dessert. Oh, the horror!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
And what do you think that flawed position is?
I think libertarianism starts from the belief that people are inherently selfish and that rather than try to outright fight human nature - a war that has been and apparently will be fought and lost countless times - we should channel it for the best possible good. But maybe I don't understand the basis of libertarianism, so perhaps you could explain it to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yes because this stuff is not patented!
Tax strategies are and have been patentable for awhile. I wrote a paper that discusses them but it is a bit outdated now. There is a strong movement against them but I don't really see Congress doing anything in the near future.
human only innovates when sharing
if human can profit from proprietary.........they have no need to innovate......
thus general stupidity is enhanced.....
I assume you are referring to games.
A lot of times I am, given my reputation for whining about the lack of deployed home theater PCs in comments to articles about PC vs. console, but this time I'm talking about music. Accidental plagiarism is copyright infringement. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music: George Harrison got sued and lost for having copied half of a Chiffons song into a song on his solo debut album. Is there a set of best practices to prevent accidental plagiarism when writing and recording a song, or a way to avoid being bankrupted by damages once accidental plagiarism is discovered?
If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles
This already happens. Microsoft looked at Nintendo's Pokemon and Animal Crossing, took some from column A and some from column B, and released Viva Pinata. Even Animal Crossing itself appears to draw heavily from the works of A. A. Milne and Lego's Fabuland. See Follow The Leader and Dueling Games. But then it's legal to copy general concepts (Capcom v. Data East) as long as you don't copy the appearance of identifiable characters more than necessary for the genre (Atari v. Philips).
We know what we want changed, but what do you think Obama will say? The cynic in me says he's probably going to blame it on the Chinese or something. "We have great ideas, but they keep stealing them away. So we don't have ideas anymore. Bad Dog!" Any competent lobbyist can turn this drive for innovation into a tool to push their agenda.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
The number one issue for reduced innovation is all of the regulations. When companies spend billions on accountants and lawyers practicing non-market strategies, they have less money to spend and care less about innovation.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Thanks to the Jewish bankers.
Firstly, many people are against all those
Zero Slashdot editors are against all of those.
Secondly, even those who aren't may say that innovation is only one factor and that the benefit of those regulations outweigh that factor, while the benefits of IP laws don't.
I don't see anyone saying that. I see favoring innovation today at the expense of IP today and blocking innovation tomorrow because XYZ issue is my issue and innovation is only good when it's at someone else's expense, never when it challenges my favored position.
I look around and see more innovation occurring than at any other time in history. The sheer number of things occurring is mind boggling. Anyone who can't see the innovation is too narrowly focused.
How is it stealing?
For the US, the law says copyright is enforced at the federal level only - if violation is stealing, then the states are being prevented from prosecuting thefts that happen within their borders.
Theft doesn't end with aging of the stolen goods. There's no interpretation of theft laws that says it's OK to steal antiques because the protection expires after X number of years, for example. If CV is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible.
Theft has limits on civil suits for punitive damages based on the actual value of goods. Statutory damages for some kinds of theft, but limited actual damages for stealing other things of the same price? That sounds like a major violation of equal justice under law. doesn't it? I'm not saying that there aren't some such legal anomalies in theft law now, i.e. grand theft auto laws,, but we should be careful of legal interpretations that would create more of them. After all, past anomalies included the various death penalty for horse theft statutes
Copyright violations are not always criminal, even now. What the hell is non criminal theft?
Copyright law is all in one federal title, and ALL criminal law was originally kept carefully in a different Title. That sure sounds like such luminaries as Jefferson, Madison, John Hay and others didn't think the constitution should establish any link at all between copyright violation and theft, and went out of their way to make sure the original US federal code didn't draw such a link.
I stress, ALL the founding fathers, ALL the early supreme court justices, ALL both houses of congress for literally the first 200 years of US history as a separate nation thought this was the right way to treat it. This wasn't some area where many prominent legalists disagreed seriously and the law gradually became so cluttered with compromises that it eventually shifted, but, like the court decision recognising corporate personhood, making any forms of copyright violation criminal at all was the sudden, major break with just about everything prior to that point. In fact, there was much less precedent for the shift than for such major changes as the overturning of the Dred Scott decision or the adoption of Miranda rights, where several precedents that broke with tradition did actually exist to be reinterpreted, and there was strong support by some faction for such reinterpretation.
Who is John Cabal?
So you're saying that the guy who was equally qualified and lost out because his skin color wasn't "diverse" is, on average, less innovative than the fellow with the "diverse" skin color? Can you prove that, or is it just your particular prejudice?
There is only one way in which our current IP protection laws are flawed: They allow companies to patent and copyright things and concepts and mothball them....This is wrong. If you want to change that aspect, say introduce a "use it or lose it" clause (and apply it to EVERYONE, including the US government) then fine. Meaning that you'd have a max of 3 years after being issued a patent or copyright to bring it to market before you'd lose exclusive rights to utilize said patented or copyrighted IP. Otherwise I see nothing wrong with the idea that if I think it up, I should have exclusive rights to produce it. But if I don't produce it, but rather sit on the patent and sue people...then I need to be treated like the douche I am acting like, and have the patent snatched....Done
-Oz
Well that is the hint at the real problem, being better at innovation than the rest of the world. Sorry Mr President but, brown skinned, slanted eyed people, slavs etc.are not all born stupid and most of them do not celebrate ignorant redneck thinking from the gut. Innovation is a competition with IP laws, the rest of the world caught up (excluding those that were already there) and as such reality means, the numbers have pushed the US from the lead, apart from of course financial chicanery, the military industrial complex and the whole mass media lobbyist propaganda machine.
The biggest problem with the US right now can quite simply be detailed in one statement 'Greed Is God' the solution is just as simple, make it illegal to tell lies to generate a profit and that would be across the board but, especially mass media and, politicians.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"You should have got one."
They usually come in pairs.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
the belief that people are inherently selfish
Well, there's your problem. It turns out that belief is wrong.
We are as altruistic as we are selfish. Altruism and empathy are beneficial adaptations, which allowed us to build the most complex social structure in the history of Earth (called "civilization"). The belief that we are inherently selfish and nothing else is pseudo-science, similar to the pseudo-science of the late 19th and early 20th century known as "Social Darwinism".
Btw, this is not pulled from my ass; this is old, accepted science going back to Darwin himself. Random link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/. We're not even the only species that has it. If we accept your definition of Libertarianism, then Libertarianism is pseudo-science.
Good luck rebuilding your world-view. We all have to go through it at least once in our lives.
It's a bit sad, considering the amount of energy spent on Slashdot discussing IP and innovation, that a sweeping and incorrect generalization like "No IP protection in the Baroque" that is still considered "Insightful." You would have hoped that people would have spent a fraction of the time writing and ranting instead reading.
There were of course considerable legal efforts used to keep smart people in place and harvest their output. This was an era when monopoly rights were routinely granted to restrict competition and the wealthy were obsessively worried about secret knowledge.
If you were, say, a glassblower in Venice, it would be impossible to take that knowledge and use it elsewhere within Venice; risky to use it outside Venetian control; and downright fatal if you did use it outside Venice and then returned home. By comparison, a patent lawsuit where most of the time you split the profits is downright encouraging.
In the arts, Handel basically had to defect from Hannover to compose in England.
This is not to over-dramaticize; states were weaker and their understanding of what could be considered a "valuable innovation" much more limited. I don't know how you could reasonably compare "IP" restrictions and say one era was better or worse; they were just very different. It would depend what you were trying to do.
I'm afraid my own opinion is fairly bland--clearly IP laws hurt innovation and clearly IP laws help innovation. (I could give personal examples of both--projects killed because an invention was patented but not developed by a competitor; projects not considered because you couldn't establish exclusivity and thus saw no path for ROI.) They have different effects in different industries. The proper balance between freedom, basic fairness and innovation is tricky.
I'm going to buck the trend here and say it's NOT patents and copyrights and IP laws that are blocking innovation. No, it's a little more of a direct cause: An unproductive workforce that expects to get paid just for showing up with a degree.
There are a lot of people out there in the professional world, in technical professions, in engineering, in project management, etc. who can talk and talk but can't or won't deliver results. A lot of people full of degrees and education and smooth talk but no actual practical skill or work ethic. All hat and no cowboy as some say. I interview people all the time who bill themselves as hard-core in-the-weeds technical people, but when you actually dig and ask probing questions you find it's all superficial and the person actually isn't really capable of providing much value. For example:
Me: So, you write C++ software and work at XYZ corp, great! We're looking for C++ talent. Tell me about a project that you worked on! ...
Candidate: Well, we developed software that did ABC...
Me: We? No, what exactly did YOU do?
Candidate: Well, I worked on a major sub-component of the software...
Me: OK, so what are some of the algorithms and/or data structures you used while writing the code?
Candidate: Um, well I didn't use much of that. I provided analysis and resolution of major defects...
Me: So you fixed bugs. That's cool. What are some of the common C++ mistakes you have identified?
Candidate: Uhh, I didn't really get deep into the code. I basically facilitated the analysis.
Me: Oh, so you talked to the engineers and wrote bug reports?
Candidate: Well, no, but I ENABLED them to deliver their results by...
Me:
It sounds like the "So what exactly do you do, Bob?" segment in Office Space, but these people are everywhere, and not all of them are interviewing. Many are in nice comfortable do-nothing jobs in corporate division 23 department B in high tech companies everywhere. These people are dragging down our companies and our country and need to go away.
This country has a major talent gap. You guys all deride the government when they talk about the huge shortage of technical talent but it's absolutely true. We have a shit-ton of people with "Engineer" on their diploma. We have a lot of people who claim to be technical but simply sit in meetings and "enable" others who are actually doing the work. We have a very, very small number of actual implementors who know their stuff and can actually innovate.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is, but think I see the symptoms all around me every day.
Here here!
If you really look into the history of innovation in Great Britain you will find that a huge portion of the monopolies created by the early Tutors were reversed by Elizabeth the First near the end of her life as queen. The result was more shipping to the rest of the world, an incredible innovation in the sea fairing arts and the mathematics of navigation. Also all the secondary trades increased exponentially, because suddenly many trades people had more than one employer to work for. I believe that she saw and understood all this as being important to the future of the then tiny empire.
If we succumb to the patent portfolios of companies like Microsoft then it is in fact the equivalent to giving away the right to digital communications technology in perpetuity. Thank God the people who invented VisiCalc had the foresight to not lock out everybody. Unfortunately they did not count on shrewd business people using the idea in combination with patented function additions to dominate the software device and push all competition into obscurity.
Oh my lotus how it once did blossom, now the season is done and I miss your perfume to my eye.
Your smell might have been much sweeter if Excel had not been such a cheater...
Hey Hey the works not done till one two three wont run! Still echos in my ears a painful taunt and still goes on..
Patent/IP system is supposed to protect disruptive technologies/businesses.
Govt must constitute a panel to rewrite US Constitution and Quran
Please don't let these people make you afraid to share your ideas with the world. Please. If you have a great idea for a new recumbant bicycle, let the world know. Build it yourself, and share it with your friends. Worry about money later. Make the world a better place with your inventions and let the stupid scumbag litigators litigate themselves. At worst, your idea is making money for some pompous prick. At worst, your idea is making life easier for people.
Siempre dos, hay. No más, no menos
I couldn't agree more with the historical account. Mercantilism ruled until the short lived classical liberal heyday, but then gradually gave way to today's corporatism(in the US, at least).
I work in software development(worse, development for easy to copy digital music) and the knee jerk reaction is to use state violence to hurt anyone who copies our ideas. Fortunately, I listen to evidence and reason before going to such abhorrent solutions. My company does seek patents and such but only because the legal system permits others to do the same, and prevents anyone else from offering the product or service in question. So, in a way, we are complying with government legal stuff in order to avoid worse government legal stuff later.
As for ideas not worth implementing unless they are exclusive(and not enforceable in any other way than through government protectionism) , I've yet to see one that didn't have a solution. I won't categorically dismiss your claim because I know nothing of its details, but I can imagine all sorts of high level economic solutions that permit ROI for ideas that have some constant cost for R&D but have no way to be kept from others. They may not be as expedient as getting the government to threaten theft or kidnapping and such, sure but to say it cannot be done at all seems unlikely. I am always skeptical of claims that something of value to society cannot be created for the creators benefit in a peaceful way.
The belief that we are inherently selfish and nothing else
There's your problem - your entire argument is a strawman. I never said the "and nothing else" part. Of course humans are altruistic - but much of it is just long-view selfishness - especially "civilization." Please come back to the discussion when you have an insight that isn't based on putting words in my mouth. kaithxbye
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As far as the law is concerned there's no such thing as plagiarism.
You'd have more chance suing someone for pulling funny faces behind your back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yep. Remember what happened the last time the President used the internet to ask the people what they wanted? The most popular response, by a long shot, was marijuana reform. The President came out and laughed, as if tens of thousands of people in jail were some sort of joke. I don't expect patent reform to be taken any more seriously.
The public doesn't get anything by just asking, it has to demand, challenge, confront and shove the government into change and out of their free-tax-and-campaign-money-is-comfortable zone. Weapons are not helpful, it's about vigorous persistent strength in numbers and lack of respect for illegitimate authority.
If we want to change IP laws, we have to break them in public in large numbers, demand change, and make a public issue, not do it hidden in private and anonymously as if selling drugs. Setup a p2p in Union Sqare with 1000 laptops and copy lots of DVD and give them away, and call the press.
Letter writing campaigns help influence but won't do it alone. China is ignoring the IP laws and doing very well.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I think it's not necessary to get radical one way or the other. A reduction in the number of years that IP becomes public and some other options I believe would serve everyone's interest. If an inventor or writer can't earn something on his work after a decade or two, doesn't make an effort to sell or donate or license his ideas, and he's invented the equivalent of the cure to cancer or electricity, well, some mechanism is needed for people to get the right to use it. The need to be fairly compensated for one's creations is one thing, to be protected at the cost of social benefits of the ideas, but a state-protected right to make millions off it for a hundred years, while the idea may be badly needed by society for lesser costs, is something quite different. Financial ambition is not the only motivator for human beings as well. Plenty of people always create things for their own pleasure, or as a hobby, curiosity, need for improvement, to express their capacity, and other reasons. It's ridiculous to assert than human intellectual activity and creativity began when intellectual property law was created.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Great. My LEAST favourite period of music.
I like the way you think...
It's essentially the same today. Except that the patron has been replaced by corporations, and their means of "support" are a lot more nefarious. They don't pay you to work for them. Instead they wait for you to invent, then pull a patent out of their ass that you are violating and force you to fork it over. The only thing that changed is how it works.
It was:
1. Get hired by wealthy patron.
2. Write a piece of art for him.
It is now:
1. Invent your ass off.
2. Corporation checks if it can extort your invention from you.
3. If not, corporation hires you for pebbles and snatches away the invention.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, it certainly didn't start with it, but we're now facing the end of it because of the IP law system.
Going out and inventing or building something out of the interest, curiosity or "because I can" and then noticing how people love it and wanting to sell it to them (or, hell, handing it out for free) could soon find you at the unfriendly end of an IP lawsuit because some patent troll holds some obscure patent to something that he thinks applies to your creation.
Can you handle the strain of a lengthy patent law battle? Remember, no legal insurance on this planet (at least none that I'd know of) will cover this because of the absolute uncertainty how it ends. Can you finance a legal battle that can well take years?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So what if artists needed patrons. They found they and produced great work. It proves things can work that way.
This is simply more of Obama's rhetorical slight-of-hand.
The Executive branch doesn't make the law. It may choose what laws to enforce and in the process do Hollywood's bidding, but that's another issue.
The Executive can propose legislation (think PATRIOT act), but how often is s such legislation enacted?
I don't like to say this, but consider the Tea Party caucus in the House as our friends on this issue. They just succeeded in handing stinging defeats to House leadership. We ought to try and make the case that is the subject of this /. article to that caucus and its allies. Politics is education; this didactic moment will soon pass. It's only a matter of time before they are entirely co-opted by "External Forces".
As a drug innovator, I'd like to elucidate the problem at hand:
Lab X investigates biochemical origins for Parkinson's Disease at a university. In the process of their work, Lab X finds a significant biochemical pathway that contributes to the disease phenotype. After further investigation, they find that said pathway can be rescued by application of a specific chemical that has no current pharmacological history.
Lab X patents said chemical and its biochemical pathway, listing only two members of the lab on the patent.
Company Q purchases the patent for $500,000. All persons listed on the patent receive 5% of the sale. After four (miraculous) years of testing, the chemical is FDA approved, and used to treat patients of Parkinson's Disease, for $50 per bolus.
The cost of research to Lab X is $1,000,000 over three years, with dedicated effort from 4 people (two of which were not named on the patent). The average salary of these people is $50,000 per year. There is one other lab, Lab Y that has stumbled upon the same chemical, and pursues a patent, but two months later, so patent isn't awarded. Company Q is the sole producer of the drug for a few years, so Companies R and S cannot benefit from the technology, nor can they sell a compound that includes the patented chemical during this time. Meanwhile, the executives of Company Q all receive $100,000 bonuses for astutely purchasing the patent.
Now, who wants to innovate? ...Who wants to be a business executive?
Maybe IP can be good, but then maybe U.S. law should stipulate that original innovators receive a much higher chunk of profits earned from their work.
As far as the law is concerned there's no such thing as plagiarism.
As far as my comment is concerned, "plagiarism" means copyright infringement without attribution.
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
Infringement of copyright is not stealing because the U.S. copyright statute does not use the word "steal" or "theft" to describe it, except in the (nonbinding) title of the No Electronic Theft Act. It's far closer to trespass than to theft.
Plagiarism is a lot harder to prove than you think.
People have been successfully sued over cribbing nine notes; that's how much George Harrison copied from "He's So Fine" into "My Sweet Lord". Now a "note" is a duration of a pitch (rhythm) and the interval to the next pitch (melody). Assume notes can be long or short, and on average there are six pitches that sound musical following this one. Each note would then have 12 possibilities, and eight distinct notes would have 12^8 = 430 million possibilities. (The last note is not distinct because it doesn't have a duration or a following pitch.) If everyone on this planet were to write a song with an 8-note hook, on average 16 people would write the same thing.
If [infringement of copyright] is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible.
It doesn't take a change to Article I section 8 of the Constitution. It just takes periodic legislative extensions to the term, which is finite at any point in time and therefore constitutional. Eldred v. Ashcroft.
What the hell is non criminal theft?
It's not an exact analogy, but consider a theft where the thief pays restitution for the stolen goods and gets sentenced to probation.
If YOU claim for prior art, then only YOU are excepted from paying license fees.
This is true if prior art that anticipates the claim is kept secret; it's called "prior user rights" in some jurisdictions. But if prior art that anticipates the claim is published, then the claim is not novel and is therefore not valid in a patent.
If a company is actively licensing their patent portfolio and allowing them to be used by other companies, they're using the patents. If, OTOH, they're just sitting on their patents and waiting for a chance to sue somebody for infringement (i.e., acting like a patent troll) they're not making use of the patents
That doesn't distinguish much. Alleged patent trolls such as Intellectual Ventures already list inventions that they appear to offer for licensing. How would you define "effort to use the patent either directly or by licensing" to exclude this?
Just sowing seeds... I've got a feeling these will grow.
Your model of human behavior (it even has a goofy pseudo-scientific name: Praxeology) is just plain wrong, demonstrably wrong; on everything from game theory to evolutionary biology. You believe in astrology.
When you look at it, you've got to wonder about this compulsion to marry political ideology to (pseudo) evolutionary biology. Read about Social Darwinism, laugh at the woo-woo, and then look at your own beliefs.
(p.s. The kooks in Auburn, Alabama are proto-fascists.)
Zero Slashdot editors are against all of those.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the guy who actually wrote the article.
I don't see anyone saying that. I see favoring innovation today at the expense of IP today and blocking innovation tomorrow because XYZ issue is my issue and innovation is only good when it's at someone else's expense, never when it challenges my favored position.
No, the difference is that, unlike all the other regulations you cited, the whole purpose of IP laws is to foster innovation.
So, if IP laws are in fact blocking it, why should they exist?
If you said that environment laws were damaging the environment, or that racial preference laws were promoting racism, the analogy would be valid.
Again, IP laws' only purpose is to foster innovation, and they're having the opposite effect.
Dilbert RSS feed
It seems to me it all comes back to the pesky problem of whether a corporation is a person, with the same rights as a person. To me, the anser is an obvious no, but for some people, the answer is yes, and I have yet to figure out why.
But it seems to me, giving corporations personhood is key to what a lot of people are saying here, particularly the poster who pointed out that issuing patents to corporations and not people is a problem. However the Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people. So now what?
Uh, really?
First of all, your link just shows that altruism has an inherently selfish biological basis. Altruism is beneficial, therefore it is in our self interest to pursue it. Social structures that Libertarians love like capitalistic free markets embody this. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Secondly, people being inherently selfish doesn't preclude altruistic behavior. It simply means that most "altruism" is really self-interested and real altruism is much rarer than selfish behavior and self-interested altruism.
Thirdly, what's wrong with building a system from a defensive position? Wouldn't a system designed for selfish people filled with altruistic people work out just fine? Any inequities in the system could be easily handled through charity and other altruistic practices. The same can't be said the other way around...an altruism-based system would fall apart in no time if filled with highly self-interested people...maybe even just a handful of them, as they'd be able to abuse everyone else's altruism.
Fourthly, if altruism is such a strong force...then why don't most people living in developed countries give a rat's ass about poverty, starvation, and disease outside of their own country? I have a "bleeding heart" friend who was suggesting we distribute the wealth in the US so that the poor can have a decent standard of living, but when I suggested that we should go further and distribute it worldwide he did not like that idea...I guess $10,500 a year isn't enough for him. Oh well, out of sight out of mind, amirite? Which is exactly the problem...we don't benefit personally from this kind of charity as we don't interact with the starving children in third world gutters, so most people are not interested in it beyond what it can do to make them look good to those around them...
Lastly, your comment about "rebuilding your world-view" is arrogant, condescending, and wholly premature. It seems to me that it will just put off others from listening to you seriously, dismissing you as a troll. Plus, your argument about altruism is weakened by the inclusion of childish jabs at your opponent that are just there to make you feel smarter than them.
http://mises.org/daily/3682
OP, you suggested MY IDEA to the Obama Administration. Expect to hear from my lawyers PRESENTLY.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Except you can't create an apple tree out of thin air like that. You have to grow it from seed, water it, look after it for years until it produces fruit. There is a natural, physical constraint in that case.
The difference in effort between that and clicking a mouse button is why your analogy is retarded.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Food recipes aren't covered by ip law (except for trade secret) as far as I can tell. The specific written recipe can be copyrighted. The name of the dish can be trademarked. Possibly some new, completely unique way of processing food could be patented. Aside from that, however, if you can find out how to make it without violating trade secret provisions, you can make it and serve it all you want.
Maybe you were being facetious and I deserve a big whoosh.
All you've done is link to things you think describe my viewpoint but you've done jackshit to show that what you've linked to is wrong - calling it "astrology" is not in anyway meaningful -- nor have you have done jackshit to counter my original point that harnessing the human impulse for self-interested action is a reasonable basis for an economic system.
In fact, all that you have done is assume an absolutist belief on my part and then hand-wave that real life isn't absolutist. Gee whiz boy, I already knew that. But it isn't about absolutism, its about dealing with the common case.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I totally challenge " and clearly IP laws help innovation". Consider UBUNTU, APACHE. And copyright breaches don't seem to alter the quality of music and movies published (although those last 2 are open to argument I guess). Artists and Inventors will do what they do 'cos that's what they do.
So maybe performance artists will have to go back to performing live to make a living. And just give recordings away free as promotion material.
In technology an innovation that is great will be copied. But because of the difficulties of properly copying complex things, that is easier said than done. Buyers would probably get better results buying from the innovator, who will always have the latest ideas included, so long as he wasn't charging exhorbitantly (Like apples).
I am not advocating immediate, wholesale abandonment of the status quo. I would like to see the time that a patent "lives" shortened. Once upon a time, the first ten years of a patent life were used to tool up for production. Today production cycle is much shorter, and the market much larger, so lots of money can still be made, even if patent life were to be decimated every year till it's down to about 6 months.
That will end well.
That's a good point.
FWIW: Environmental laws often do harm the environment in many ways. Most recently and obviously, they create incentives for producers to shut down relatively clean, efficient factories and other operations in the US and then replace those operations with polluting facilities in China and elsewhere.
And racial preference laws definitely lead to race-based conflict. Any non-race-neutral law, regulation, or policy does.
didn't actually press the break
"brake".
You sounded legit until advocating copyright infringement (and no, don't get started on the silly, endless extensions) of a kind clearly having little to do with IP abuse; worse yet, the area most abused consists of patents, not vice versa, and as such you've conflated copyright IP and patent IP. "Little" errors like yours are the kind which the I-want-to-own-your-ideas-before-you-do-something-about-them-as-I-sit-on-my-ass-or-just-barely-do-anything-to-pretense-to-the-courts-that-I-intended-to-be-a-responsible-economic-entity,i.e. business-by-actually-creating-product, the lawyers, etcetera seize upon for their rhetoric. Good friggin' job at that.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
I totally challenge " and clearly IP laws help innovation". Consider UBUNTU, APACHE. And copyright breaches don't seem to alter the quality of music and movies published (although those last 2 are open to argument I guess).
Since I also said they hurt innovation, giving more example of things they've hurt is sort of supportive of half my point and irrelevant to the other half. But yes, I do agree with the suggestion that sometimes things aren't helped. Software patents specifically seem a real minefield for no apparent purpose.
Artists and Inventors will do what they do 'cos that's what they do. So maybe performance artists will have to go back to performing live to make a living. And just give recordings away free as promotion material.
The idea that "artists do what they do" is rather self serving. If you decide not to pay people for their labor, it's nice to pretend they don't care about the money. But I know artists who've quit spending time at it because they had a family to support and it became clear they weren't going to make it work as a profession. (Doesn't matter if you think that proves they weren't committed--they were producing art, and stopped, because of money.) I'm thinking mostly of people I know, but the brilliant cult SF writer John Sladek seems to have stopped his fiction output and gotten a day job near the end of his life. And some reasonably talented recording artists just don't like performing--the indie band XTC in the '80s, stopped touring because of Andy Partridge's stage fright but released a couple more good albums, and Gene Clark quit the Birds when his fear of flying got too much. Heck, the Beatles best stuff was after they stopped doing live shows. So a "no recording profits" rule would certainly cut some people out--ie, stop their innovation, even if it shifted it to others.
But really, I don't have much knowledge of the artistic 'industries' and don't have a strong opinion about how the world would change if we got fewer blockbusters and more garage bands, I don't like either much.
In technology an innovation that is great will be copied. But because of the difficulties of properly copying complex things, that is easier said than done. Buyers would probably get better results buying from the innovator, who will always have the latest ideas included, so long as he wasn't charging exhorbitantly (Like apples).
I am not advocating immediate, wholesale abandonment of the status quo. I would like to see the time that a patent "lives" shortened. Once upon a time, the first ten years of a patent life were used to tool up for production. Today production cycle is much shorter, and the market much larger, so lots of money can still be made, even if patent life were to be decimated every year till it's down to about 6 months.
Some things are easy to copy and hard to invent; in others the invention is less important than the skill to produce it. This is my whole point; there's a whole range out there in the world. In general, protections are going to be most useful when research and development costs are large or risky Picking industries where this isn't the case--like you did with consumer electronics above--don't prove any general rule, they just illustrate that there are situations where those factors don't apply and the benefits are less clear. People on Slashdot only know the one area--they often work in software, download non-mainstream music and buy smart phones--but if you actually care about the issue ignoring everything else is the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears.
The US government actually did an experiment to see if extra IP protection would spur development of new products in pharmaceuticals. That wasn't the point of it, but the Orphan Drug Law promised extra years of protection for diseases with small patient populations. It has been a great success, at least in terms of spurring research and getting companies to develop cures. (Predictably, sales cost while the products remain under a state-protected monopoly are quite high, so not everyone is enthusiastic overall. But that's not the point of this discussion.)
Credibility increases by offering credible alternatives, which inspire people and they can implement. Pointing out problems is easy.
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Except you can't create an apple tree out of thin air like that. You have to grow it from seed, water it, look after it for years until it produces fruit. There is a natural, physical constraint in that case.
And there used to be the same natural, physical constraint when it came to producing copies of music. Vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, etc. It used to be the *only* way you could get a copy of music. There was a physical component that required materials, input and money.
Now with the internet and digital music, those copies can be made at just about zero cost. Sure you could say there is electrical costs and wear and tear on hard drives and such, but those costs are so minute as to be effectively zero. And infinite copies can be made with zero physical input; i.e. no cost.
So yes the apples example exactly describes what has happened to the business of making copies of music. Do 'apples' physically match this example? of course not, but it's meant to show how a different existing situation would work in a simple example.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
America must choose: innovation or money.
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Explain why copyrights past death, then. Since after YOU are dead, there's nothing for YOU in it, why do there need to be copyrights? Note: can't be that the author will be killed, since the murderer will risk jail whilst EVERYONE gets the work copyright free, so greed would mean they would let SOMEONE ELSE kill the author.
Why? Can't be greed.
"People are inherently selfish" is as true as "people are inherently compassionate".
IP, as in software patents, did not give birth to software innovations either, the industry did fine before software patents were used (and still does, I believe that in most countries software patents are in fact *not* used - that's still the way at least here in Finland [and I fear the day when our legislators will accept SW patents *shudder*]).
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.