Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
"Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate."
Really. Interesting - innovation seems to predate "intellectual property law" by at least millenia.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
LOL.
The 'reason to innovate' is to make money by making better stuff than your competitors.
Or do you really think our ancestors sat around in a cave saying 'you know, I'd really like to invent the wheel, but since I couldn't patent it, what's the point?'
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
Yes, I am aware of the irony of making the above comment on the internet.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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).
The fashion industry manages to innovate just fine without strong IP laws for anything but trademarks.
The food industry does just fine without patentst on recipes.
etc
it's a myth.
A myth perpetuated by a horde of business graduates who wouldn't know an original thought if it bit them in the ass and who just accept the idea that patents are utterly essential because the general idea sounds kinda good.
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
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!
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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).
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."
If they don't have a working model, then they don't really have it outside of a piece of paper, do they? When it comes to codecs, use it or lose it. Sure they can write something up, so they should. If all you have is a piece of paper saying you own something, but you don't have it, well that is pretty dumb if you ask me. You don't truly own it since you don't have it. You say that you do so that you can sue if anybody really makes it. That needs to be stopped. These are to the point where companies are owning ideas. That is why we have not seen many super innovative thing in the software market. Sure, there are some incredible ones out there that are new, do not get me wrong, but there could be so many more if these companies did not "buy ideas".
The world is how you make it
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
That wouldn't be a problem if corporate morons weren't so naive as to assume that the Chinese weren't doing it.
It's still a problem because overseas manufacturers (not just China) move fast. Anything that they can copy and which sells well gets copied. For example, I have a friend who runs a US business selling a certain small plastic product. Only two things currently protect his business: 1) he's too small to get noticed by potential overseas competitors who could easily enter his market, and 2) the US-side competition is really stagnant. He has a patent on the product so that provides some defense against US competitors, but it won't protect once the overseas competition gets wind.
At best, he's hoping for a couple of good years of business and maybe some further licensing income from places that have to respect patents.
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.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
Innovations are made in spite of and not because of strong IP laws. The amount of ideas popping out of your mind doesn't increase if you can make one innovation or magnum opus and then live happily on it for the rest of your life. That actually stifles innovation.
Force the innovators to continue innovating, by taking away their exclusive rights after a time short enough that they can't rest on their laurels.
And make copyrights and patents non-transferable and only licenseable for a year at a time.. If the company who hires you only have access to your innovations as long as they still pay you, the bright minds who come up with the ideas would be rewarded much more than the fat cats who reap the profits from other people's ideas.
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.
Really. Interesting - innovation seems to predate "intellectual property law" by at least millenia.
In ancient Egypt: "Hey, buddy! You in the chariot with the wheels! Pull over! I own the IP for my innovation of the wheel, you owe me license fees. So pay up, or take them off the chariot!"
In the sixteenth century, the Venetians innovated ways to make colored glass. They protected their IP by turning the glass blowing factory into a fortress. Revealing the secrets to folks outside the factory was punishable by death.
The Chinese had a monopoly on silk making, and used similar methods to ensure that no silk worms left the country. Italian monks eventually managed to smuggle some out hidden in hollowed out walking sticks. Hey, ancient Industrial Espionage!
So ancient cultures did understand the value of protecting their innovations. They just used different methods to protect them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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
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!
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate."
I work in web shop developing software for WordPress. Before we switched our license to GPL, we found that copyright was essentially worthless. People did whatever they wanted with our software, and there was very little we could do to stop it. In essence, we would have to litigate the world if we wanted to create a feeling of protection. Even then, it would have no effect on the actual infringement.
I guarantee that this is exactly the feeling that the media industry has. They know that they can never win the IP fight, but they have way too much invested in the old way of doing business to do nothing and have a hard time convincing themselves and their investors that change of business practices could bring greater profits.
For us the solution was simple, go GPL and stop caring about the delusion of control. You know what changed for us? We had to change some text in our files and got a little press for switching our licensing. Other than that, not a thing changed. We still have customers that buy products from us and ask for support. Our stuff can still be found all over the web, just as it was before. We still have the same level of control over what people do with our code, none. And personally, I don't mind that one bit. I still put well beyond my 40 hours a week into creating new code and trying to be "innovative," yet the farce of IP and the delusion of control it would seem to offer has nothing to do with my efforts nor with the efforts of anyone else I work with. In addition, all the devs I know that do similar work don't have any thoughts about protecting their work. They are just concerned about making something new and making things better, because that's how we make money.
Can the same be said of everything? Maybe. Maybe not. There could possibly be legitimate need for some kind of IP protection. I'm not quite sure. I do firmly believe that most of the belief in IP is just our being conditioned to think that ideas can be possessed like tangible pieces of matter. I also firmly believe that most IP protections have grown wildly out of scope (I'm looking at you infinite copyrights, software patents, DMCA, and careful manipulation of IP laws permitting businesses to legally perform anti-competitive practices).
If the goal of IP is to foster innovation, it has failed.
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.
Swift Boaters and the like then show up to do all the dirty work that the candidate can't do themselves any more. There are plenty of huge and powerful interest groups not directly connected to the politicians willing to speak for them.
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!
Well, there's no reasoning with pure authoritarianism. If the law is the law because it's the law, and breaking the law is bad because it's against the law, the law is always right, tautologically. Any sane individual (and most insane ones!) will realize that there are just and unjust laws. People imprisoned for possession of marijuana are victims of a repressive regime. There is absolutely no reason why that should happen, the punishment should fit the crime.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Strong IP laws?
There is no such thing as IP. There are only liens on pieces of the intellectual commons (which is stupid). There were originally supposed to only be liens on pieces of the market commons.
Make the liens relatively short, according to the subject and the market.
70 years for copyright might as well be a grant of nobility for the author^H^H^H^H^H^H publishing company.
20 years is too long for patents in a fast moving industry like computers. 3 years is almost a grant of nobility in computer hardware, and 1 year might as well be in software.
The core original problem, however, was underfunding the patent office, so that they were unable to use the developing information technology to make a searchable database of all the developing technologies.
No, the core original problem is that Americans want the trappings of royalty without the name, to try to worm their way around the Constitution. Underfunding the patent office and the other things that happened to advance the cause of the blockers over the innovators, all that was just strategy on the parts of a loosely-organized bunch of arrogant rich people who got rich because making money is easier than making things of actual value, and, because they never made anything useful, now they have inferiority complexes and have this insane need to protect what they mistakenly think they have.
Malice? Incompetence? Never believe they can be separated for long.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
as if tens of thousands of people in jail
But they feed the 'prison-industrial complex'!
Quote: "Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/4669/
Take note of the year!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... 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
How can the summary (and presumably article too) say that you can't have both [innovation and prop up old business models], but then talks about a balance between the two? A balance would be somewhere in between, allowing for *both*...
Oh well.
Is this a rhetorical question?
The purpose of IP laws isn't specifically to foster innovation and you're right, innovation occurred before IP laws.
The purpose of IP laws is to foster the sharing of information. In the old days, if you had a really clever idea, you kept it to yourself because that's how you could make money out of it. Sure sometimes really clever people could work out what you'd done, but that's why you formed a guild and beat the crap out of anyone operating in your sector who wasn't a member.
The problem with this of course is that important information doesn't always get to the right people. A guild is highly unlikely to contain many experts from other fields who might take an idea in a new direction and if the only people who know something die it can be lost. See Damascus steel for an example. IP law basically says to innovators, you can have all the benefits you had when you kept everything secret while at the same time letting everyone know what it is you discovered so that it can be built upon and preserved.
If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret.
That's not to say that the current IP system isn't broken and isn't stifling innovation. The system is so complex and so uncertain at the moment that it's pretty much impossible to tell whether something you're developing is covered by a patent or not, or whether there's prior art or not, or whether either of those things actually matters. The system desperately needs to be reformed, but eliminating it won't make information free, it'll just make it secret.
The food industry is not an innovation industry, it's a manufacturing industry. You might see clever recipes, but what you're paying for is how well they're cooked. You don't need legal protection for talent, only for lack of it, and the fashion industry doesn't require protection because they're business model involves last seasons stuff being worthless anyway so they don't care if anyone copies it or not.
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
"See Damascus steel for an example."
Vastly overblown, really. We produce far superior steel today (in terms of strength and ability to hold a fine edge).
"If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret."
And this would be any different from the "fuck you, you will never manage to use it unless you're also a giant corporation" and "fuck you, good luck seeing anything ever enter the public domain, ever" setup we have now how precisely?
Are you an American citizen? If so you are subject to more than 40,000 pages of local, state, and Federal law. You may rest assured you've broken more than one of those laws today, probably before you finished your breakfast. You just haven't been caught.
Sometimes the problem is the law. That's the case with the War on (Some) Drugs.
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.
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.
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.
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'm not implying that you are a fascist or totalitarian thug. I'm directly accusing you of it based on immediately obvious observations. Your willingness to do violence to random third parties for consuming substances you dislike in private is clearest, but the real clincher is the law-worshipping mentality evident in your original post: you regard law as defining ethics, and identify yourself with its enforcers. It's the classic authoritarian submission trait identified by Theodor Adorno.
This is, of course, a complementary to the authoritarian aggression trait: you assuage your psychological insecurities by identifying with established power, and express your sadistic tendencies vicariously through its violent enforcement, which is why you find criticism of that structure so threatening. Really, people like you are the slime of humanity; merely pathetic when encountered singly in a context like this, but lethally dangerous in sufficient numbers.
Oh, and for the record: I'm more of an LSD sort of girl.
Say my adult friend suffers from chronic anxiety. Occasional panic attacks. It's hurting his marriage. He tries yoga and meditation. No go. He visits the Doc for a physical, nothing is found wrong. He visits the shrink, only to have pills pushed in his face. He takes the first batch of prescription pharmaceuticals, which have seriously debilitating side-effects. He's trying fight the sandman at work, even though he had a full night's sleep, and he's afraid to drive; the second batch are worse yet, in the sense that it puts him into a metal fog and for some inexplicable reason, also makes his anus incredibly itchy.
He remembers his college days, how a little toke of MJ calmed him down before tests. He finds some people who know other people, and long story made short, he self-medicates. The MJ has none of the unpleasant side effects, and more importantly, he doesn't feel like his heart is constantly going to explode. This happened before the current medical MJ trend, mind you. He now functions at work, and again has a happy marriage. Even now, despite the will of the people in his state, it's still illegal at the federal level. If he's caught with it, he's potentially in a world of hurt.
Who can argue that he doesn't need it, to be a happy, functional human? It's just easier to make it legal, to those who want it. The people who want it already have it, anyway! The stigma and the black market interest will go away, to the people who want it because they're told they can't have it, at the least. The violent gangs will go away, because the profit will go away. That's what we call hitting five birds with one stone, son. Prohibition never works.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"You should have got one."
They usually come in pairs.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
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".
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.
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?