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Do Away with Copyrights?
GroundBounce writes "Fortune.com has an opinion article in which Stuart Allsop proposes, among other things, completely elimniating government protection for intellectual property. In support of his argument, he points to cases (including Linux) where people have made money on unprotected IP, and the fact that copying can't really be prevented anyway. He also proposes removing copyright protection from Windows98 and Office as a way of dealing with the MS monopoly. "
As an institution it was never originally conceived of as giving protection to huge corporations. Nevertheless, the principle of equality before the law gave such protection to corporations -- and since the sixties they've been using it. (Earlier if you count newspapers and magazines, but they have their content written on a work-for-hire basis, which is a bit different.)
The real issue is that our original concept of copyright has been grossly misapplied, in a context it was never designed for. I think a blanket abolition would harm the small guys quite badly; but a case can be made on ethical grounds for removing copyright protection and copyright ownership from corporations.
One way this might work is that small guys still have copyright. Big companies don't, but can publish copyrighted works under license. The big guys license the copyrighted work and then publish it, and can if necessary legally defend their authors' copyright against plagiarism and piracy. For large projects, corporations might license their programmer's copyright in return for a salary. Of course, if a programmer then quits or is fired, this agreement lapses -- I am still scratching my head over how to plug this gap ... but as a big picture it seems to make more sense to me than a total abolition of copyright or a totally copyright-oriented world.
Yes, but no musician would post MP3s if it weren't for copyright laws. Without them, a majorr could take the cool song, rerecord with a good looking singer and never give a dime to the song writer. Song writers are not necessarily performers. How do they make money without copyrights?
Wanting to be compensated for your work is not greed. While the definition of the "best art" for instance is completely subjective, Leonardo DaVinci, who many would say produced some of the "best art" did not work for free. He often did work on commision and other times was funded by a patron.
Labourers aren't expected to work for free, in fact many skilled labourers are very well compensated. For a labourer a tangible amount of effort was expended to produce a tangible piece of work and in return an amount of tangible money was exchanged. Creativity is a labour as well though albeit not as tangible. The time and effort spent however is very tangible and without some form of compensation that creative process won't continue. I've known a number of excellent musicians and artists for instance who had to give up their aspirations for gainful employment. Almost none of them were looking to get filthy rich but couldn't even manage to make out a meager existance.
IP law is a great deal older than you imagine. There have been patent or intellectual property disputes for hundreds of years, probably longer. It is my firm belief that most of the people who loudly scream for the abolishment of copyright and patents are the ones who would never have anything that needs protection anyway. Note, I said most, not all.
It's an interesting article and is fairly well thought out. I personally think that the trademark, copyright and patent law system needs a big shakeup. Abolishing it entirely would be detrimental though.
First consider a trademark. This is legal acknowledgement that your company has the exclusive rights to words and symbols to represent your product and/or company. Suppose that trademark law didn't exist. This would mean no laws would be violated if some company with a competing product copied the marketing appearance of some other product. So for instance, I could develop a soda drink which happens to be a cola and market it in a container similar or identical to that of Coca-Cola. Regardless of how you personally feel about Coca-Cola the consumer itself can't be guaranteed of getting what they thought they were purchasing. Maybe they got Coca-Cola, maybe they got some other cola flavoured caffeinated and carbonated sugar water. Some form of trademarking is required, at the very least to protect the consumer. In this case Coca-Cola should be trademarkable, but the generic type of product, Cola, shouldn't be.
The abolishment of copyright law would result in the silencing of a lot of sources of information or art and so on. Copyright protection enables information of these types to be marketed, which enables the holder of the copyright to put a value on the information and eventually the author of the information gets payed. The middleman between the author and money will rapidly disappear from the equation as more and more people become able to self publish and promote, but the copyright protection is still required. People like RMS provide a great deal of free information, but not all of it, or at least not all of it is instantly free. Some of it is held back long enough for them to earn a speakers fee at whatever event they were invited to speak at. If anybody could get hold of his notes prior to the event and freely publish them they could be seriously devalued. The end result is if this is the only thing he has as a source of income that source of income would be jeapordized. Time to look for new work.
Patent law protects innovation, or more accurately it protects companies who innovate. Real innovation is an expensive process, experts need to be hired at high salaries. During the course of the innovative process the innovators themselves are a drain on the financial resources of the company. This financial burden is only recompensed if the innovation works and proves marketable. For every profitable innovation there are many unprofitable ones. In order to recoup the spent capital (and make a tidy profit, since thats the purpose of companies) the right to exclusive ownership of the patented material is provided for some lenght of time. The costs involved in this type of innovation are why you don't see much of it in the OpenSource community. For instance streaming audio and video, image compression, architectural enhancements of computer systems for the most part are the results of commercial ventures. The people with the skills to innovate in these fields want to be paid.
The above laws need a lot of work, they were established when commerce moved a lot slower than it does presently and there are a few things that couldn't be perceived of at the time of their introduction. If they were totally abolished the present technological pace would be significantly dampened however.
Stewart is closer to the truth than he realizes.
Once again, I'll trot out my lovable chestnut :-), Digital Sculptures, wherein I describe the economic realities of digital media, and the future it portends.
Alsop does overlook one thing, however. IP law shouldn't be abolished completely. Some laws would need to remain to prevent theft of reputation.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Getting rid of copyrights is like giving everyone a license to steal. In my line(s) of work, I do nothing but provide intellectual property. With my professional job, I do alot of psychometric research and computer programming to go along with it. Most of the stuff we do has never been done before of it has been done and that that have been implemented bave been rather poorly. For instance, I am working on a project that rates essays for content much like ETS (Educational Testing Services) now implements on the GRE. I'll be damned if someone is going to take what we have designed and implement it for free within their own multimillion dollar institution.
:)
Think about this, all those who've signed NDAs on the source you've had them peruse would now be free to take what you've developed and rebrand it as their own bcause the contract would no longer be valid. Then they sell it to M$ because even though their stuff sucks and they ruin everything they touch, Gates is one of the best damn salesmen in the world (if not the best)...Not one of you can argue this point.
In my side business, I design websites and povide content. I rely on my (c) to let people know that even if they want to take my shit and repost it, it will still bear my name and a link back to my site...this is the only thing I charge for reproducing my creations, but the (c) ensures that I will not be ripped off from even that.
Finally as my hobby (its starting to look like a business since the opening of our newest website) is that I'm musician and mostly a synthesist. I don't mind people passing around mp3 of my music, I would however mind them being put on another website or burned by someone other than end user. Unfortunately, MP3 doesn't store copyright information or let others know who created this stuff. I've even taken the shit off my site that I might want to shop around at some point and left the more arty stuff up there (ie., couldn't sell it if I wanted to). Past the mp3, I also design sound sets for the Kurzweil series of samplers. The cost of recording these didn't come cheap and if they weren't for my own personal usage, I would be charging others for their usage.
The whole point is that few people actually provide content and the rest of you damn vampires suck it up and expect us to work for free. If it wasn't for intellectual property protections, I wouldnt have a job. I could easily go back to repairing computers ad make far more than I do right now...as I find a great distain for this kinda stuff the last year I actually let people know I did it I was charging $75 and hour to swap a damn hard drive in the privacy of their own home (and what I see gets forgotten later, unlike bestbuy). I hate that shit, and unfortunately for most of the lusers reading this board, this is all you are cut out to do. If you really beleive in giving away your time for free, quit work and do so. If you don't, then your a fucking hypocrite.
Sorry to be so inflamatory, but some of us actually provide a service to the world that dosn't include manual labor or flipping burgers (like your ISP job isn't anything but). I may be an intellectual snob, but this is not less of an inflamatory notion that the Nazi's stealing from and killing the Jews just because they had the wealth of the time. When one doesn't have the intellectual capacity to create something on their own, those who can shouldn't be punished because of it.
clif
(yeah yeah, had to throw in some nazi imagery...it shows just how tired his arguement is. Whos law was it that said if ya brought up nazi's the arguements already been decided
I find it really hard to believe that this guy is a VC. The fact that he'd use Red Hat and companies that don't even have presence yet to support his argument that a non-IP world can work, demonstrates his ignorance. Look at what Red Hat has contributed: a few tk interfaces, gnome, installation menus, etc. While I like Red Hat and I believe that they make an important contribution to Linux, one must remember that their actual man hours(dollars) invested into software development is pretty damn small. They're paying about 3 or 4 developers for gnome, rather meager salaries at that. Furthermore, Red Hat is just a startup company, there is no proof that this business model is even viable. They're still a private company, no one except the few equity holders have seen their financial statements. This argument would be equivelent to trumpeting Yahoo's young execs as proof that young inexperienced kids can run a mature business, only worse.
Intellectual Property is a neccessity to maintain today's rate of innovation, It shouldn't even require argument. While a few ignorant fools may trumpet Red Hat as proof that a company can survive without 'owning' any IP, they do not even address weather or not it is capable of supplanting classic capitalism. There are so many flaws in their 'argument', that it is laughable. However, I'll save my breath -- because I know that 98% of the readers on
I never claimed my statement to be a rational argument. Secondly, I made two fairly obvious typos, that is not the end of the world. I'm sick of incomplete and incoherant arguments that claim to prove that IP is unneccessary and detrimental to society on the aggregate. My typos do not directly degrade my point. The author, and those who espouse similar notions, was writing an essay, whereas I was just writing a quick response. These require different levels of proof reading and structure. If you care to defend this author, defend the content. The act of bringing a few typos in my tirade to light does absolutely nothing to repair such a flawed piece of work.
No thank you.
I plan to graduate fairly soon and start a small software engineering company. I will neither have the time, nor the resources to compete with the millions of "L337 WaReZ d00dz" who may try to distribute my work, be it good enough to sell.
If it's not good enough to sell, or I don't feel like supporting it is worth my time I'll probably GPL or NCL it.
Sure I could use some elaborate copy protection scheme, but I personally find those extremely anoying.
Without copyright the small businessman/entrepreneur of the software industry is screwed (or humbled if you're that altruistic). He has no chance to be the next Bill Gates, not that being a Business Borg is a good thing. Young greedy bright kids just have to have a goal in mind, right?!
Without this greed motivating him the only ones doing anything will be those who either have the intellectual curiosity to code or actually give a damn about your software woes. Due to the scarcity of those characters I'd rather risk dealing with someone like Bill Gates.
Remember that "I would code if paid..." survey? Imagine that number being 1/8 or less.
Thoughts and ideas are certainly cheaper than a dime a dozen. Expressions of same are not.
Stepping aside from software, for a moment, consider fiction. There are only a handful of basic plots, and new fiction consists of reworking and combining those into a new expression. It takes work to write good fiction. Now, consider if there were no copyrights. Most authors would actually be little affected, because most authors don't make much money selling their fiction. However, the best authors make quite a bit of money -- lack of copyright would decrease their incentive to entertain us with new works (but not entirely eliminate it because authors tend to have a compulsion to write, just as hackers tend to have a compulsion to program). But there remains the editorial/publishing function. This is very definitely a value-added function: editors weed out (much of) the crap that we wouldn't want to waste our time on, publishers provide a distribution channel. The latter could be replaced, given the internet, when we have a technology that makes electronic books a little more comfortable to read (better screen resolution, and convenient for reading in, say, the bathroom). But the editorial function remains. Is it going to be worth anyone's time to (a) sift through the 'slush pile', (b) suggest revisions and corrections, etc if there's no fiscal return? Bear in mind that with no copyright, anyone is free to reproduce such selected and edited works with no return to the editor. Some editors may have the same sort of compulsion that many authors have (I can think of a few), and whose opinions on a work are worth paying attention to, but on the whole we'd find ourselves immersed in the same sort of signal-to-noise ratio in fiction that we now see on, say, Usenet (or perhaps on Slashdot, if there are enough volunteer editors/moderators).
Substitute 'fiction' above for any other category that can reasonably be generated by an individual - music for example.
Now consider if we'd ever see another episode of 'Star Wars' if that couldn't be copyrighted. Nobody is going to spend $100 million to create something that anybody can copy and distribute freely. Oh sure, there'll still be films - amateur efforts like 'Macbeth Star Wars' or 'Hardware Wars' or whatever. But really, is that what we want our choices limited to?
Copyright law certainly has its problems - the current duration of 50 years (or is it 75 now?) beyond the author's lifetime is a bit ridiculous - but lets think through all the implications before we junk it altogether.
-- Alastair
Without the at least nominal (if imperfect) protection of copyright, anyone who wanted to make money of their own work and intellectual property would release it only through such restrictive schemes as DIVX (coupled with some sort of copy protection), where each use can be monitored and approved of/billed.
How'd you like it if all studios only released movies on DIVX? How about (for those of you that need to use non-free software, including games) if your software was released only on a DIVX-like system?
Those with a vested interest in IP will find a way to reduce copying, copyright law or no.
-- Alastair
Anyone here think Lucasfilms would release any more Star Wars movies in this country if they weren't protected by copyright? The day after it opened (if not sooner) the whole thing would be available for download on a web site somewhere, and the videos would be in the stores a few days after that.
Nobody is going to spend $100 million to make a film if there's no copyright protection. If you're happy reducing the film industry to the level of amateur efforts like 'Star Wars Macbeth' or 'Hardware Wars', then by all means eliminate copyright. Ditto for fiction, music, etc.
Certainly copyright law has its problems, but lets think this through.
-- Alastair
A few hardcore fanatics might pay the $8. Everyone else will watch the freebie version, or goes to a cut-rate theatre showing an unlicensed copy.
Nobody will pay (much) to rent it from Blockbuster or pay more than the cost of a blank tape to own a copy. Blockbuster buys one copy (or downloads it from somewhere) of each movie and goes into the copying business. Fast-food outlets do their own movie tie-ins without paying the studios. Eighty-six different versions of "The Phantom Menace" start showing up as wannabe directors start doing their own edits, all of them bad, all of them downloadable off the net (if you want to sit through dl'ing a couple hundred meg each). The usenet crumbles. (If you thought alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* was high volume, just wait...)
-- Alastair
If you do away with copyrights, you do away with the GPL. Everything would be public domain. Free software as we know would cease to exist. Nothing would prevent Microsoft from taking Linux code, incorporating it into Windows, and then still keep the source code secret. Hell, they could release a MS/Linux and keep the source code secret. Without copyrights, companies would be forced to rely on secrecy even more than they do now.
Some classes of intellectual property are more suitable for the GPL than others. Commodity style software is one example (operating systems and development libraries) that works well with GPL and BSD. Other styles aren't, such as vertical applications and games that you only play once. By eliminating copyright, you force all software to be treated the same.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
As an example, the GPL only works because of copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws, Microsoft would be free to take GPLed code, change it, and incorporate it into binary-only distributions that only ran under Windows.
Software vendors would also resort increasingly to technical means of preventing copying (dongles, license servers, etc). Artists and writers would also be discouraged from making their works available electronically in an easy-to-copy format. Copyright provides a simple and not overly-constrained legal framework to enforce something that social convention alone is not strong enough to enforce.
One could imagine that the government could punch a rather serious hole in the copyright laws by substantially expanding the parameters of the "fair use" doctrine. Whether that's constitutional (insofar as the expansion would apply to existing copyrights) is hard to say, as the government's never really done anything like that so far as I know.
Here's a thought: Suppose Congress passed a law making an exception from the infringement laws for the creation of exact copies of copyrighted work (e.g., you can dupe a film and sell copies, but you can't sell colorized copies, or copies with missing scenes, etc.). Such a regime(*) would avoid some of the problems discussed above; in particular, you couldn't reattribute a work to yourself, and it seems -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that the GPL, LGPL and similar schemes would survive. Again, this proposal probably raises constitutional issues. It might, however, be attractive to some copyright holders, particularly those who make their money from advertising embedded into copyrighted work (e.g., television networks). I'd be interested in hearing if anyone is aware of any serious discussions of such proposals.
[* If you don't know, legal types informally call complex statutory structures "regimes"; the term has nothing to do with the third world sense of the word.]
He is not proposing that you don't "own" the product. He is proposing that others can build on top of your original work. You would still get credit for your original code...In fact, a lot more than if someone stole your code today, since whoever stole your code now would be hiding the fact. Copy protection is, historically, a new concept. For centuries music composers widely borrowed from each other's work. Bach, Mozart, Beethoveen all borrowed and were borrowed from and credit was given were credit was due. Similarly, in intellectual circles philosphers, scientist, etc...all freely interchanged ideas. This cooperation stimulated progress.
It seems that a lot of the arguments against copyright focus on how large companies use copyright to help themselves get larger. I see very few discussions of small independent developers who use copyright to protect themselves from larger companies who would steal their work.
Consider the music industry, since the "MP3 Issue" has focused so much attention there. If an independent musician writes and records a great song with her/his own money, copyright is the only thing that keeps a large record company from re-recording or distributing that song without paying a dime to the original artist. Without copyright, the original artist has NO recourse.
The GPL itself is a form of copyright. Remember that the GPL allows free modification, redistribution and use of GPL'd code, provided that the modifications are also placed under GPL. Without copyright, the GPL becomes meaningless -- GNU/Linux could be modified and redistributed in binary-only form.
It's easy to focus on companies using copyright to prosecute some kid who copies games, but we should remember that copyright prevents companies from copying and re-selling the game the kid wrote herself. It can work FOR the little guy, too.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Agreed. It seems that the chief argument here is that copyright is unenforcable in some circumstances, therefore it should be removed in those circumstances. There I disagree. The fact that something is unenforceable, in and of itself, doesn't make a law a bad law. However, the caveat is that those who wish to make a living off of copyrights must know that lawbreaking may occur, and that the Warez D00dz are hard to stop even with lawyers. If you still think that you can make a living on your copyrights, go for it. One of the nice things about OSS is that it sidesteps most of the copyright issue entirely (and likely makes us look like weenies to the d00dz). The fact that it works for us doesn't mean that we have the right to force it on anybody else.
--The basis of all love is respect
You should realize as soon as possible that You Have No Chance To Be The Next Bill Gates.
Dont get into the mass consumer software buisness. It will be gone soon enough. As it is today, if you become successful, you'll be bought out/killed off by Microsoft, or you'll be outevolved by free software.
If you do want to get into mass marketing, you should probably aim at games. They will be a profitable, altho difficult, market for the forseeable future. That market wont be targetted by free software either for a long time, if ever, and it's not a one-product-only market.
Otherwise, leverage off free software and create vertical market corporate systems. Good profits and not an endangered market either. Incidentally, copyrights dont matter much there anyway, since they have a tendency to be one-off to a few solutions.
Or just go into consulting and you'll have a safer life.
The difference between a copyright and a deed is simple; physical property cannot be utilized by many without decreasing the use the 'owner' had of it. With intellectual property you do not cease to have full use of your property just because someone else also has it.
Go look at www.ipnot.org if you wish to have a more detailed discourse on both the history of and the substance of intellectual property.
He's right, though: trying to prevent copying in an era where copying is sooo easy for everyone to do is pretty futile. I mean, I don't need a printing press to distribute my opinions anymore (I only need slashdot... heh heh).
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Interesting article. It's almost bang on with the end goal of the FSF: software (and IP) should have no owners.
We know that abolishing copyright is the proper choice for freedom.. what we don't know yet is if its the proper choice for economics. There never are easy choices in that regard. A physical property-driven society has led us to great advances in the standard of living among the industrial nations - should that right be extended to intellectual property, for the economic benefit of all?
In past, it was justifiable.. is it now?
Will "piracy" go UP when copyright is abolished, or will it stay the same & people continue to buy stuff because "it's the right thing"?
Will we figure a way to charge for copies when necessary?
What restrictions are reasonable on modification (of music, for instance)?
There are plenty of problems to be resolved, and I'm still very skeptical about how it would work for stuff like books & music, but... only with argument & debate will we find out if it'll work.
I'm sitting on the fence, with my foot somewhat on the "no it won't work" side, for now, but that might change.
-Stu
You're a bit mixed up, I'm afraid, over the GIF issue. Unisys was being idiotic over a patent they held on the LZW compression algorithm, which is used in compressing GIF images. They were not being idiotic over a copyright.
Copyrights are Good Things, when used correctly (an example: the GPL). It's patents which are causing all the trouble. Here's why:
Let's say Unisys had copyrights on their code for the LZW compression algorithm. I could write my own code for LZW if I wished, and release it. I have violated no laws by doing so, because copyrights only cover one specific set of code.
However, Unisys has a patent on the underlying algorithm. This means that I cannot write any code for LZW compression at all, because they have patented the idea (which I didn't think was supposed to be legal). Even if every single line of my code is different from the code Unisys uses, I have still violated their patent. Is that right? I don't think so.
- Without trademark protection, anyone can call anything they want to "Linux", whether or not Linus agrees.
- Microsoft has a trademark on "Excel" for spreadsheets, however, they do not own any legal protections over the idea of a computerized spreadsheet. Which means that I can develop the most wonderful spreadsheet, etc. etc., but I can't name it "Excel".
- Without trademark law, if Microsoft originally released "Microsoft Navigator vX.X (Internet Explorer)as a crappy browser, then any other browser named Navigator would suffer because of the named association, and the original company would have no legal recourse to recover damages to their software's reputation.
Alsop makes the point that Other software makers have been reluctant to create an alternate version of Windows primarily because of the threat of having Microsoft sue them. Smart people: Microsoft would have an excellent case if anyone tried to copy Windows or Office. What mindless tripe. I can't copy and sell Windows because I don't own the software or the copyrighted license to sell it. Companies haven't tried to duplicate Windows because of many other things, such as the high risk of creating an incompatible code base, etc.Instead, what I or anyone else can do is write programs/os/ etc. with all of the same functionality as Windows. Such as Linux + your GUI of choice + application software. The secondary authors just can't call their creation "Windows" or "Office for Windows" -- not that they'd want to, by the way.
Finally, there is an issue completely neglected in this article which I would like to present [as a relatively unknown but copyrighted author]. Without copyright law, I could invest years in developing a novel, theatrical play, screenplay, etc. -- and the moment my work was produced --anyone-- could then reproduce, distort, etc. my work.
Money issues aside, my "voice" is my own, and I deserve the right to keep what I say free of distortions. Just like Linus deserves the right (he holds the trademark) to say what is and isn't Linux.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The difference between a copyright and a deed is actually critical. Why?
A deed represents something tangible and scarce (that is, not in infinite supply). It does not represent any effort at all. It represents a thing. And this is good; it established the owner of that land.
A copyright represents, essentially, thought. How can someone own a thought? The paper it's printed on, yes. Or perhaps the media. But the thought itself? That cannot be owned. For that matter, it cannot really be given away, for the giver loses nothing in the giving (indeed, it can be said that an idea is worthless unless shared, for only when shared can it be acted upon).
Now, I don't think copyrights are in and of themselves bad things, but they're being horribly misused in the case of software (and don't even get me started on the idea of patents for software). But that's for another debate.