They built something like a dynamic economic model of patents and innovations and looked at the results.
From the conclusion: "Intellectual property appears to be one of those areas where results that seem secure in the context of a static model are overturned in the dynamic model. Imitation invariably inhibits innovation in a static world; in a dynamic world, imitators can provide benefit to both the original innovator and to society as a whole. Patents preserve innovation incentives in a static world; in a dynamic world, firms may have plenty of incentive to innovate without patents and patents may constrict complementary innovation."
An example of what they are talking about is reasons to contribute fixes to free software projects: someone else maintains it in the mainline, you get more testing, you get more improvements, you get people trained on the fix at no cost to you you can later hire, the fix becomes a standard making communications about it easier, everyone's file formats with the fix are easier to interchange, you don't have to keep patching the mainline to use your fix with every new version, etc.
From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.
This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.
It begins:
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious.... "
It used to be in the 1980s one could make money raising and selling llamas because everyone wanted to buy them to make money selling them to those who wanted to buy them to make money doing the same etc. While legal, since llamas are beautiful animals in and of themselves, this approach to llama economics still smells to me a bit like a pyramid scheme. See for example: http://members.aol.com/LostCrk431/straightscoop.ht ml
Consider academia. Professors make money producing PhDs wanted by people so they can produce PhDs wanted by people who want to make money doing the same etc. Considering how an average professor might produce tens of PhDs, where will this lead?
See any parallels to llama production?
The Academic PhD market which was hot in the 1950s has over the succeeding decades been collapsing from the weight of overproduced PhDs relative to academic positions. (Yes there are other uses for a PhD but the main use historically was always to teach...)
With all the problems with software patents and broad interpretation of copyright laws and contributory copyright infringement related to projects that support free communications, why not a step-by-step easy-to-follow blueprint for free software projects incorporating a non-profit for liability reasons (say choosing the state of Delaware)?
Obviously people can donate code to the Free Software Foundation, but that seems both to centralize liability risk in one organization (why should FSF take the fall for infringing a bogus software patent?) and also to provide less protection to the authors while they are writing free software.
One can use the Apache model which was incorporated in Delaware, but Apache does not seem have any restrictions in their articles of incorporation related to not selling software. I haven't actually ever found the FSF bylaws or certificate of incorporation anywhere on-line.
It would be nice to have a detailed process to follow that is a no brainer -- use these words in the articles of incorporation and bylaws, pay some specific (well chosen) corporation that specializes in forming corporations to file the papers ($500), keep up with annual reports and your annual fees for your registered legal agent ($100-200), and you are up and running with a reasonable liability shield if anything innocently infringes.
I'm thinking of something like this for a free software related organization I'm starting, with wording chosen to ensure the materials stay free:
The organization's purpose is [details snipped...]
To that end, the organization may engage in any legal activity, subject to the following restrictions intended to ensure free licensing of the results of all the organization's efforts (with "free" intended to mean "free as in freedom" in the same way as the Free Software Foundation's current or future similar definition of "free" licensing for software or other creative works of various types -- e.g. public domain, GPL, LGPL, GFDL, Python 2.0.1 license -- for detailed examples see:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html and related writings or commentary by Richard Stallman included here by reference). The restrictions are:
1) that any copyrights the organization creates itself, or whose creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives as donations or otherwise comes to hold, must only be licensed under free licenses, and
2) that any patents the organization creates itself, or whose creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives as donations or otherwise comes to hold, must only be licensed under free licenses,
3) that any trademarks the organization creates itself, or whose creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives as donations or otherwise comes to hold, will only used to support and distinguish endeavors which require the free licensing of all the resulting copyrights and/or patents, and
4) that copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks held for any reason by the organization may not be voluntarily transferred from the organization without contractual guarantees that future holders will abide by these restrictions, and that the organization is required to enforce these guarantees to the maximum extent feasible.
5) that in the event of the likeliehood of an involuntary transfer of copyrights, patents, or trademarks from the organization such as from the result of a judgement against the organization, the organization must take all legal and feasible steps to prevent the transfer or to make a voluntary transfer to an appropriate non-profit organization as under section (4) or if appropriate place the item in the public domain. These restrictions may not be removed by future changes to these articles of incorporation.
One whole point of using a free OS like GNU/Linux or an open source program like Apache in a corporate setting is that is something goes wrong or requires change or is confusing you have a broad variety of support sources (RedHat, freelancers, other organizations, in-house people who work on it in their spare time, widely read mailing lists, etc.). Access to Microsoft source code under some sort of proprietary agreement effectively only means your in-house coders can look at that -- and they will not have years of experience working with the code base or other extensive support resources and so their ability to use the source to any good end is very limited. This is a "network effect" issue where free software widely distributed in a network is much more valuable than proprietary software supported at a few isolated nodes.
As another reply pointed out, copyright violation is now a criminal act, starting for around copying $1000 of retail valued materials (say, 100 CDs, or distributing 1 CD to 100 people). So, there are already millions of such criminals in the U.S. The statute of limitations is a few years. These people can be put in prison for several years and directly exposed to the risk of death from prison rape by those with AIDS. So, essentially, you risk execution by using Kaaza, just as you risk execution for marijuana use. Consider that RIAA just won a suit forcing Verizon to disclose the identity of a Kaaza user.
In any case, whether copyright violation was currently criminal or not, my point is that copyright will need a huge enforcement similar to the scope of the war on drugs given the ease of making copies on the internet. That enforcement effort will have a high cost which someone will need to pay. If it is the average tax payer, then it is a subsidy to copyright holders.
As far as the motivation of artists, you do point out a limitation in the studies referenced in that article in that they were mainly not about professionals but about average human subjects in lab studies. Sounds like a good place to do more research -- although it is always hard to do academic style research on professionals.
Still, if what you argued was true, why are so many artists not financially successful in life but keep doing it anyway? I'm not saying this is the way it should be, but it points to the fact that artists create for other reasons than financial rewards (even if financial rewards also have an effect good or bad).
Consider that 99%+ of artists and writers and musicians and photographers in the U.S. do not earn a living at it (novels in drawers, singing at a cafe or with friends, making digital paintings for home display, photographic retouching for home use) and so these artists lose out on a rich public domain which might make their spare time art more enjoyable and productive. Consider how the serious threats implicit in recent copyright criminalization combined with broad interpretation of copyright (covering even similar works) may have a chilling effect on these 99%+ of artists sharing their work, growing in creative expression building on inspiration from media they see around themselves, and in general on people sharing with each other.
Also, there are people giving away their own music for free on the internet -- poke around at: http://www.mp3.com/
However, consider this: frequently an artist's creativity is stifled by being rewarded. That is, publishers and fans generally want more of the same and are willing to pay for it. It takes a very disciplined person to turn this cash down and move into a new area and take creative risks -- but being a good artist often requires this sort of reinvention to keep fresh and growing.
First, the law of large numbers over the internet (like with GNU/Linux) shows people will create without direct financial incentive.
Second, this article: http://www.isi.salford.ac.uk/staff/ab/motivation.h tml
discusses how scientific studies find that for creative intellectual work, reward is often no motivator, and can in fact have negative effects on performance.
From the article: "The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings as these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of it. Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards. Employees who are praised for meeting a manager's expectations suffer a drop in motivation."
So, while what you say is essentially the "conventional wisdom" of our age, it may well not be correct as regards creative works.
Also, note that in order to enforce copyright in the internet age, we will need something equivalent to scope in the "War on Drugs" as a "War on Sharing". The War on Drugs effort keeps about a million U.S. citizens behind bars at a direct cost of 20-40 billion dollars a year.
And before you laugh and say it is not possible for a million people to be locked up for using Napster and Kaaza, consider that people in the 1960s would have laughed at the notion of a million americans behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s -- but it happened.
For the same amount of money, the U.S. could provide grants of $100K a year to around 400,000 artist, musicians, and writers who make their work freely available.
So, you choose which society you want to live in, however you label some part of it. And by the way, copyrights are monopolies, and monopolies are generally considered anti-capitalist.
If a copyright is to be like real property, tax it annually to pay for the social cost (courts, jails, derived works defferred or never made, researching and negotiating rights, inefficiency, etc.). And let anyone put it into the PD by paying the owner the self-assessed value. Suddenly corporations might not be so eager to hold onto many IP hot potatoes. And if people fail to register IP and pay tax on it, it becomes PD immediately. The bargain of monopoly for a limited time has been broken and this remakes that bargain in a new way. Oh, and don"t enforce foreign copyright unless they pay this tax too (self assesment might need to be done for each country if this went worldwide).
I very much hope you (and the public) win, and thank you for your efforts on behalf of the public, and I agree with your suggestion of supporting the public domain by making more free works.
As far as planning a next move for legislation in the public interest, here is a suggestion I have been floating on Slashdot (inspired by some comment I read here a long while ago). Since the bargain between copyright holders and the public has been broken by making copyrights so long, why not tax copyrights as "property" since proponents are so fond of calling copyrights "intellectual property"? Many jurisdications tax real estate and personal property, so why not tax copyrights annually as well? After all, just like real estate, copyrights place a burden on society (prison, courts, copyright research, derived works never made, indirect transaction costs to arrange or pay licensing fees, etc.). Anyway, something to think about. (By the way, I'd like to see this tax for patents too...)
Here is some more detail: essentially, copyright holders would assess themselves the value to them of keeping their work out of the public domain. Every year, a copyright holder will file a form for each copyright they claim stating this self-assesment and include a check for, say, a 3% tax of this value. If someone such as yourself wishes to see a copyrighted work into the public domain, the copyright holder would be legally bound to put the work into the public domain if they receive a payment from anyone equal to the self assesment for that year.
If copyrights are now effectively indefinite,
copyright holders should have to pay taxes
like real estate owners to keep works out of
the public domain. A starting amount would
be 3% per year of a self-assessed value, where
anyone could pay the entire self-assessed value
to the copyright owner to force the work
to be placed immediately in the public domain.
Just like real estate is taxed annually to support the upkeep of the physical and social infrastructure (police, fire depts, schools, parks, roads, courts, etc), copyrights and patents should be taxed annually if they are kept out of the public domain because they too impose costs on society (limiting creative raw materials, clogging courts, deterring developers, forcing people to be extra careful in handling materials, forcing people to spend time getting permission to use works, preventing people from sharing, prison costs to house a million copyright infringing Americans perhaps put behind bars over the next decade or two like we pay the cost of putting an extra million or so drug using Americans behind bars in the last decade or two, etc.).
One way to tax copyrights and patents is to let the rights holder each year set a current value at which they would allow anyone (any individual, business, or government) to pay directly to them them after which they are legally bound to put the work in the public domain -- then they pay some fraction (3 - 5%) of this amount annually as an intellectual property tax, apart from other taxes like income tax. To keep Windows 3.1 out of the public domain, Microsoft would have to set a self assessed value balancing a desire to keep the work out of the PD by risking someone will pay them the requested amount, and yet still wanting to minimize annual taxes. If Microsoft values Windows 3.1 at $100, someone would likely pay them that to PD it. If they value it at $100 billion, then they have to write a check annually for $3 billion in "intellectual property" taxes (or whatever the tax rate is -- might be higher for patents, lower for copyrights). Taxing so called "intellectual property" is a free market approach to force rights holders to stop squatting on works. Note that fees are now paid when copyrights and patents are renewed or registered, but those should not be seen as taxes, just processing fees, same as you pay to register a real estate deed transfer, but still need to pay annual property taxes. Note that this self assessed value might not be the same as what they might sell the copyright or patent for to someone else who wished to keep it proprietary and keep paying taxes on it. Also, the rights holder could change the self assessed value annually up or down as the market changed (so in 1995, Windows 3.1 might have been valued at $100 billion but in 2002 it might only be $1 billion).
The benefits of this approach are more tax revenues for the government, a clear way to lookup if a work is still in copyright and who the owner is (just check the tax records, say by a Google search on a Library of Congress archive of all currently taxable works, with a legal requirement to submit a copy), and likely a sudden increase in PD materials for all artists to draw on. Basically, since rights holder lobbying has broken the bargain of finite time monopoly for future public domain use, this IP tax approach remakes this bargain.
Re:I wonder if this is worth fighting...
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Copyright as Cudgel
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· Score: 2
Thanks for the Adam Smith pointer. Definitely strengthens the concept for a conservative audience.
On IP - mostly I just want to see this idea in greater circulation -- as you say, as Judo (or Aikido?) for various noxious social trends. I was pleased to see someone else bring it up, and adding something to is (like citing Adam Smith). Great minds think alike.:-) And as I said, the germ of it came from Slashdot for me too I think (wish I could track down the original inspiration -- think it might have been someone's sig perhaps a year or more ago now.)
Interesting idea to perhaps see it first in Europe. Although, with the looming budget deficits in the U.S., federal and state governments could use all the new taxes they could get.
Re:I wonder if this is worth fighting...
on
Copyright as Cudgel
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· Score: 2
The article made it clear -- patents have an external social cost (such as lawsuits, courts, USPTO, engineering time lost, licensing meetings, reinvention of the wheel, prisons, police, etc.).
So, why not tax patents annually, such as real estate is taxed annually, to help society pay those external costs? Patents could be taxes at 5% of the self-assessed value of the patent, with the proviso that anyone wanting to have the patent put into the public domain could pay the current year's self-assessed value directly to the patent holder (or indirectly through the U.S. Treasury). Then, anyone sitting on a bogus patent would have to pay yearly costs based on their speculation, and thus deterring patent squatting, and there would be a way for industries to buy out a patent holder without allowing them to monopolize an industry (such as one poster showed happened with Edison and the film industry). Essentially, this is saying patent holders can't have it both ways. If they say they have something valuable, they should pay taxes on it; if it is not valuable, they should not be able to use it to prevent others from innovating.
The same sort of logic can be used to tax copyrights and other forms of so-called "intellectual property" as well. Essentially, a tax on intellectual property turns almost all bogus patents and indefinite copyrights into hot potatoes that people would have to make serious business decisions about -- keep it out of the public domain at some annual cost, or let it go.
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech
(Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government
for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by
the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American
views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to
assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary.
The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially
just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software
and media content has long been privatized to great economic success.
Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws
banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our
economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must
I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster,
that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has
confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to
release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates,
music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low
levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry
was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned
and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these
successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a
similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know
them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as
part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most
fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and
cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to
sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of
course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to
repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold
dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment
each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person
anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large
amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on
a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate
capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we
can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy
view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so
called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start
because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called
free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court
procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really
more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in
cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old
time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? --
around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are
made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by
large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the
motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of
their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses
what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge
fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to
innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience
applause].
And why should your hard earned tax dollars go to pay public citizens to
sit on juries and render raucous open justice when things could be done so much
more quickly and cheaply by commercial organizations working politely behind
closed doors? Why, with free law each and every one of you might have
to take time out of your busy schedules to sit in a court room and
decide the guilt or innocence of a peer!
And why pay a judge's salary out of taxes, such has been proposed?
Judges clearly should be compensated on a royalty basis by anyone
referencing decisions a judge produces. This encourages judges to
swiftly produce more decisions as well as decisions that big legal
corporations like MicroSlaw want to cite more often, which is good for
the economy.
Top law schools would have to shut their doors if most law was not
proprietary, as who would pay $100,000 up front to join a profession
where initiates release their work mainly into the public domain?
Obviously there would no longer be any legal innovation without private
laws requiring royalties when discussed, since who would spend their
time writing new laws when there is no direct financial return on their
investment?
And of course, lawyers will not be paid well without earning royalties
on private laws, since if they can't sell all royalty rights to their
legal work directly to large corporations, how will they make a decent
living? Why, even if public money is spent on developing laws, say, at
universities, it is clear such laws will not be respected, further
developed, or widely distributed unless somebody owns those laws too and
so can make money from selling access to them. It's beyond me why people
sometimes act like there could be a spirit of volunteerism in this great
land of ours after all the effort we have put into stamping that out,
such as by making it illegal to help someone for free. Also, since the
Internet had to be shut down early in this administration to prevent
children from viewing pornography without paying, distribution of new
information will always be expensive.
Each lawyer out there should remember to uphold the current proprietary
legal system, because you too may win the law lottery and become as rich
and famous as the founder of MicroSlaw -- but only if you start with a
trust fund! [Indulgent audience laughter]
I know some lawyers out there are concerned about being replaced by the
lawyers most major law corporations are now importing from India and
China. Let me assure you, this does not threaten your livelihood,
because there is currently a lawyer shortage restricting our economic
growth, and those Indian and Chinese lawyers have extensive resumes
indicating years of experience developing U.S. laws. For you business
people out there, it is also my understanding those imported lawyers
make model workers because they can't easily change jobs. Thus I have
supported removing all restrictions on bringing over such imported
lawyers, in an effort to stimulate economic growth in this fair land of
ours.
[Inaudible shouted question] Citizenship? Naturally we would not want to
offer such imported lawyers any form of citizenship when they come over
because they are not Americans -- that should be obvious enough. We're
hoping they go back to where they came from after we are done with them,
since there are always eager workers in another country we can later
exploit at lower wages, I mean provide economic enhancement
opportunities for. Besides, dammit, have you seen the color of their
skin?
[Inaudible shouted question] Ageism? I remind everyone here that,
obviously, as has been conclusively shown by studies MicroSlaw itself
has so charitably funded, older American lawyers can not be retrained to
know about new laws, so I implore all lawyers as patriots to plan to
learn a new profession after age thirty-five so you do not become a
burden on your beloved country.
[Inaudible shouted question] Prisons? There are only a million Americans
behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about
the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years.
No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now,
thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being
privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public
or private is a criminal terrorist. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, as
those terrorists aren't technically criminals or subject to the due
process of law are they? Well it's true these days you go to prison if
you complain about the drug war, or the war on terrorism, or the war on
infringers of copyrights and software patents -- so don't complain!
[nervous audience laughter] After all, without security, what is the
good of American Freedoms? Benjamin Franklin himself said it best,
those who don't have security will trade in their freedoms.
I'm proud to say that the U.S. is now the undisputed world leader in per
capita imprisonment, another example of how my administration is keeping
us on top. Why just the other day I had the U.N. building in New York
City locked down when delegates there started talking about prisoner
civil rights. Such trash talk should not be permitted on our soil. It
should be obvious that anyone found smoking marijuana, copying CDs, or
talking about the law without paying should face a death penalty from
AIDS contracted through prison rapes -- that extra deterrent make the
system function more smoothly and helps keep honest people honest.
That's also why I support the initiative to triple the standard law
author's royalty which criminals pay for each law they violate, because
the longer we keep such criminals behind bars, especially now that
bankruptcy is also a crime, the better for all of us. That's also why I
support the new initiative to make all crimes related to discussing laws
in private have a mandatory life sentence without parole. Mandatory
lifetime imprisonment is good for the economy as it will help keep AIDS
for spreading out of the prison system and will keep felons like those
so called fair users from competing with honest royalty paying
Americans for an inexplicably ever shrinking number of jobs.
Building more prisons... [Aside to aid who just walked up and whispered
in the president's ear: What's that? She's been arrested for what
again? Well get her off again, dammit. I don't care how it looks;
MicroSlaw owes me big time.]
Sorry about that distraction, ladies and gentlemen. Now, as I was
saying, building more prisons is good for the economy. It's good for the
GNP. It's good for rural areas. Everyone who matters wins when we
increase the prison population. People who share are thieves plain and
simple, just like people who take a bathroom break without pausing their
television feed and thus miss some commercials are thieves. Such people
break the fundamental social compact between advertisers and consumers
which all young children are made to sign. And let me take this
opportunity to underscore my administration's strong record on being
tough on crime. MicroSlaw's system for efficient production of digitized
legal evidence on demand is a key part of that success. So is the recent
initiative of having a camera in every living room to catch and imprison
those not paying attention when advertising is on television, say by
making love or even talking. Why without such initiatives, economic
analysts at MicroSlaw assure me that the GNP would have decreased much
more than it has already. Always remember that ditty you learned in
kindergarten, Only criminals want privacy, because a need for privacy
means you have something evil to hide.
[Inaudible shouted question] Monopolies? Look, nothing is wrong with
being a monopoly. It's our favorite game, isn't it? Sure, we might slap
somebody on the wrist now and then [winks] but everyone in America
aspires to be a monopolist, so why not just have more of them? Why not
let every creative lawyer be their own little monopolist permanently on
some small piece of the law. It's the American way; it's the will of the
people.
Look, these questions are getting annoying. The next person who asks a
question will have their universal digital passport suspended
immediately via video face recognition!
[Hush from crowd.] Or at least, someone who looks like you will!
[General relieved laughter.]
Here is the bottom line. If all law was not proprietary, lawmaking
corporations like MicroSlaw wouldn't be able to make as much money as
they do the way they are currently doing it. So the economy would
further collapse, plunging the U.S. into an even worse recession than
the one we are in now, which, as experts have shown, is the legacy of
all the illegal software and media copying in the late 1990s. Look,
we've already cut all nonessential government programs like Head
Start, monitoring water quality, researching alternate energy, and
improving public health. Free law would mean a further reduction of
tax revenues and we would have to make tough choices about reducing
spending on essential things like developing better weapons of mass
destruction, imprisoning marijuana users, propping up oppressive
regimes, and promoting unfunded mandates like higher school testing
standards. I assure you, these priorities will never change as long as I
am president, and I will always make sure we have money for such
essential government functions, whatever that takes. So I urge you to
never support the creation of free law, which might undermine such
basic government operations ensuring your security, and further, to turn
in anyone found advocating such.
By the way, I am proud to announce government homeland security troops
are successfully retaking Vermont even as we speak. Troops will soon be
enforcing federal school standards there with all necessary force. Their
number one priority will be improving the curriculum to help kids
understand why sharing is morally wrong. Too bad we had to nuke
Burlington before they would see the light, har, har, [weak audience
laughter] but you can see how messed up their education system must have
been to force us to have to do that. Why, kids were even found there not wearing their Digital Rights Management helmets (invented by Gordon Mohr) which automatically "fog up" any time you lay your eyes on something that you haven't bought a license for viewing. Such flagrant disrespect for rights holders should not be encouraged in our youth, no matter how well meaning people are who complain about the uncomfortableness of such helmets. We must all willing accept a little discomfort to keep our democracy functioning and innovating; as Ralph Nader said, there can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship licensing fees. It has been said that States are the lab rats of democracy, and have no fear, any State that
threatens the American way of life in a similar fashion will be dealt
with in a similar way to a lab rat. I give you my word as an American and as your
president sworn to uphold your freedom to live the American lifestyle we
have all grown accustomed to recently, and MicroSlaw's freedom to define
what that lifestyle is to their own profit.
So, in conclusion, a body of legal knowledge free for all to review and
discuss would be the death of the American dream. Remember, people who
discuss law in private without paying royalties are pirates, not
friends. Thus I encourage you all to report to MicroSlaw or your
nearest homeland security office anyone talking about laws or sharing
legal knowledge in other than an approved fashion and for a fee. Always
remember that nursery school rhyme, there is money for you in turning
in your friends too.
God Bless! This is a great country! [Wild audience applause.]
Addendum -- March 4, 2132 -- Freeweb article 2239091390298329372384
Archivists have just now recovered the above historic document from an
antique hard disk platter (only 10 TB capacity!) recently discovered in
the undersea exploration of a coastal city that before global warming
had been called Washingtoon, D.C.. It is hard for a modern sentient to
imagine what life must have been like in those dark times of the early
21st Century before the transition from a scarcity worldview to a
universal material abundance worldview. It is unclear if that document
was an actual presidential speech or was intended as satire, since most
digital records from that time were lost, and the Burlington crater has
historically been attributed to a Cold Fusion experiment gone wrong. In
any case, this document gives an idea of what humans of that age had to
endure until liberty prevailed.
Copyright 2002 Paul D. Fernhout
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in
any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
[Treating the insight in your comment seriously...] I heard a Unitarian-Universalist minister (Peter Samson) give a talk once called "Religion in the space age" about how people find meaning when they realize they live in a cosmos immense in both space and time. Wish I had a copy of that to link to here.
When you think about the Athlon on your desk running GNU/Linux, you could consider it not so much as a "computer" itself but as an tiny interface to a deep computational reality that is the universe. That is, your Athlon only computes because it is a certain special pattern of bits in a larger system which supports computation. So, your Athlon provides a special kind of interface between your mind and that larger computationally reality -- say, like a Series 1 minicomputer was often used to provide full screen editing interfaces to much larger IBM mainframes. An Athlon may be a tiny little keyhole to peak through compared to the size of the universe, but it is perhaps better than nothing. Think of your Athlon as being more like a telescope or microscope than a thing of study itself (not to say an Athlon can't be studied of course). Someday, perhaps we will store information in the very fabric of reality itself, and computations will be perfomed on that information without physical silicon needing to be present. Probably we'll still just mainly use it to embed smiley faces everywhere though.:-) Or edit them if one is so inclined.:)
I feel the problem can't be tackled head on with increased surveillance without destroying (intentionally or not) much of the liberty which America claims to stand for. I'm not necessarily for reducing preexisting efforts, just questioning increasing the budget for ones that have been proven not to work. But that doesn't mean there aren't things we can do about it. It's just that in a complex world, sometimes the solutions are not as straight forward as we and our bureaucrats would like them to be. Still, I very much liked your original point that started all this which was that there is a safety issue and discussions of liberty aren't resolving that safety issue.
but your arguments lead to inaction.
I wouldn't advocate inaction as opposed to increasing surveillance. I argued for promoting decentralization, education, charity, efficiency, research, arts, and community as all ways to confront and minimize terrorism. In another response I talk about the value of improving home insulation to combat terrorism (a form of decentralization of energy production). I talk about increasing fuel efficiency standards. Of promoting local family farms to minimize key supply lines. Charity to refugees can help prevent terrorists from coming into existence. Promoting stronger and friendlier and healthier communities at home and abroad make it more difficult for terrorists to operate.
Unfortunately extending surveillance and other operations of a war on terrorism will leave less money to support the initiatives I feel will be more effective in reducing risks from terrorism. Increased surveillance may also in the long term undermine some of these like promoting friendly community (because of the abuse of such powers which inevitably come). I'm all for appropriate vigilance, though perhaps the line between increased vigilance and Orwellian 1984-style surveillance is a thin one, and what we may also need in Congress is a more extensive discussion about what is appropriate, not a wholesale signing over of all individual privacy out of fear. I did write my Congressional representatives, but they don't seem to be listening judging on what legislation is being passed.
In a way, increased terrorism is like a symptom of a failure to foster more of those other basics like justice, fairness, compassion, and charity. I can also point to many other indicators -- higher suicide rates, more homelessness, increasing domestic violence, more child abuse, lower literacy levels, increased drug use, high per capita imprisonment, and so on which are also symptoms of a U.S. social malaise. I think to treat one symptom of this malaise (increasing fear of terrorism) without addressing the whole is not going to be effective long term.
And the reality seems to be the governmental focus in terms of $$$ is on surveillance, not promoting healthy and resilient communities here and abroad. So, you will get what you say you want -- just remember the Oscar Wilde quip, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers".
"But at the end of the day if someone wants to inflict horrible damage upon you and your
population, then they will."... if someone hits you, you tend to hit back.don't microanalyze this fact. just deal with it and incorporate it into your flawed logic.
I don't see how his logic is flawed. Essentially, surveillance is ultimately ineffective. If surveillance worked, then why do prisons have such a problem with contraband drugs or prisoner rapes (leading to more AIDS deaths)? Additionally surveillance is expensive, taking away money from real solutions for safety such as decentralization, education, charity, efficency, research, arts, and community. Also, surveillance creates an unpleasant social environment where those in power selectively enforce laws against their opponents.
I think you make good points about personal responsibility, and the issue of where to draw the line in excusing people's behavior based on circumstances, and how the growing material abundance removes some presures for negative social behaviors, and how a life of physical violence (or, for that matter, economic violence such as by those supporting slavery in the past) can consume a person and their community.
Still, widespread one-way surveillance is an idea that sounds good in theory but is ultimately counterproductive in practice. Who watches the watchers?
Safety through better home insulation
on
Surveillance Update
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree with your post to an extent; certainly I'm starting to see the effect fear can have on causing people to make bad decisions. Scaring people isn't usually a way to make them more creative or more open to new experiences. Generally, people go with more of old solutions when frightened. In the U.S., that is the FBI, the CIA, etc. Never mind that these are the same people whose vision of the world has not helped prevent the problem. (Not to say there aren't many people there who are well meaning patriotic Americans -- just wish they had read the People's History of the United States, or Lies My Teacher Told Me).
To put all this hysteria in perspective, about the same number of people as died in the WTC disaster die on U.S. roads each and every month and few seem to mind. If writers want to end a character immediately in a soap opera, they can just say they had a car accident and no one will question it. Yet, U.S. policies still promote cars over other alternatives (mass transit, working from home, mixed use zoning). Millions more middle aged lives are cut short each year from lack of exercise -- where are the walking trails and bicycle trails in every U.S. city and suburb (compared to say, the Netherlands)? So from this point of view, even if a million U.S. citizens are killed a year by terrorists, bicycle paths are still a better investment in American health and safety than more surveillance. So, my starting position is what people care about seems really strange when looked at from the big picture perspective. And fear, and building and economy and tax structure and new laws based directly on short-term fear, have direct negative effects on U.S. society, as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
The problem is that the ways to safety have all been outlined for the last forty years and ignored. They are essentially summed up in: people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So, as an action agenda for the most safety:
1. Stop throwing stones.
2. Make houses out of something else than glass.
3. Help others to live in non-glass houses and to stop throwing stones.
I'm not going to talk about stopping throwing stones as that is now considered unpatriotic (although I have done so for a long time in the past). But I can still talk about glass houses, I guess.
Consider this book "Brittle Power" written around 1980:
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/art7095.php
Federal energy
policy continues to promote the most centralized,
unforgiving, and vulnerable sources and infrastructures,
while ignoring or suppressing the more efficient, diverse,
dispersed, localized, and renewable options that could in
time make major supply failures impossible by design. At
present, the Department of Energy, apparently unwittingly
but quite effectively, is undercutting the antiterrorist
mission of the Department of Defense.
The problem with the U.S. from a safety perspective is that because the way the economy is set up, the most money can be made by centralizing a service, like Microsoft centralizes the OS, or agribusiness centralizes monocultures, or the oil company centralizes with a few pipelines. All these are the most profitable concerns because they are centralized, and backed by social, legal, political, and financial systems that keep them that way and supress alternatives. And because they are centralized, they are vulnerable.
What are the safe choices?
Consider, for example, a suggestion I read years ago that taking one year of the money spent on maintain the Persian Gulf Deployment, and applying it to insulating U.S. homes, would eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The figures may have changed since (and may have been optimistic) but do you see the point? Passive solar architecture shouldn't just be an oddity -- it should be the law, if we are serious about building a safer society. Yet, it is more profitable to centralized companies for have the U.S. government subsidize oil costs (some economist say to $60 per barrel) than to consider a decentralized approach like home insulation. Same with resisting the non-brainer of fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.
Another safe choice -- local community supported agriculture, to reduce the length of food supply lines (typically 1500 miles). Other forms of alternative energy (especially wind power) could be developed. Well insulated refrigerators can be 10X more efficient than current ones (that is the major consumer of electricity in many american homes).
Basically, take much of the stuff environmentalists, consumer advocates, small farmers, civil rights leaders, and probably the green party have been saying for years, and do it. But you know what, it isn't "profitable". It's somehow "profitable" to tax Americans a trillion dollars a year to prop up the current system, but somehow talk about doing things that provide true safety, and while we're at it, also compassion, and justice, and humaneness, and fairness, and one will get mostly blank stares. Seems so much easier to just declare a war on terrorists and the problem seems almost solved -- it seems like the president is doing something, instead of providing leadership on home insulation (an effectively impossible thing for an oil man to ever do...)
My own tiny efforts along that line (mostly laughed at or ignored):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak
That, and helping people learn how to grow more of their own food with a garden simulator. The problem is, when the current approaches keep being tried, and they keep not working, any alternative is going to seem laughable. We can spend $300 billion dollars on defense, but suggest spending $100 billion dollars a year on sustainable technology research and that seems laughable.
The ironic thing is, all the people who messed up the system already as far as promoting policies producing an unsafe U.S. are mainly the ones getting rewarded by the new spurt of government funding. And we get solutions like pump more arctic oil when it will take ten years to get it, it will be expensive, and any yahoo with a hunting rifle can shut down the Alaskan pipeline for days or weeks (as recently happened from one shot).
These people are working on a report for Congress that will hopefully show a better way:
http://www.nepinitiative.org/
Bet they recommend insulating homes as the number one way to fight terrorism. A laughable idea, or is it?
Interesting twist. So you're saying the valuation is then essentially expected royalties (as opposed to market value of resale or replacement cost). Economically speaking, there might be some adjustment for discounted future value of royalties (i.e. a dollar received today is usually judged as worth more than a dollar received a year from now, as you can invest it).
Wondering how rights holders would calculate the dollars of royalty income -- there might be an incentive to cheat there. For example, one might allow someone else to play a copyrighted song one composed as part of a commercial and receive free advertising for something else one markets in return -- it becomes hard to account economically for these transactions as royalty income. One could use "fair market" value estimates but it requires all these transactions to be recorded as barter (and they may not be). Also, the royalty recordkeeping and related auditing is a privacy concern. Also, when measuring royalties, is it gross received, or net after expenses (including executive salaries).
Also, if a rights holder values something low to avoid taxes, and sits on it, and then when interest perks up, the raise the value, then the public is not served by having a chance to free the work at the lower valuation -- or I guess the back taxes make up for this? (Are they with interest?) Part of the original concept is the public could buy the work into the public domain at this year's current valuation -- do you see keeping this provision in your plan? In either approach, there is a risk/reward aspect to rights holders setting valuations -- they want to avoid paying taxes but avoid being bought out by the public until they have maximized their gain, and so they must make a complex decision (in either scenario, based on cash on hand, probabilities of the work becoming popular, expected interest rates, and so on). But, this is a great example of letting the market decide the value of a work (in the agent of the rights holder setting a valuation to the best of their knowledge of all these issues).
Are we assuming then that valuations only go up? No tax refund if they lower the valuation?
I'm not sure how I follow free software owners keep ownership -- or are you saying they set a low valuation (to avoid taxes) but then get no royalties so a buyout never occurs? Would the donations count as royalties?
Great ideas here even if some issues remain; the more variants we can explore of all this, the better. For example, I really like the idea of thinking about how passing on the cost to consumers accelerates the public domain process -- neat line of thought. I think that is a strong point of your proposal. I also like your notion of setting up a tax structure that encourages entities to produce higher value works (since so much new stuff is junk or copycat things).
One variant I've thought on the original idea, and it might apply in your suggestion, is when adding the 1% tax on self-assesed valuation, to also remove any income taxes on royalty income. This provides an incentive to financially successful rights holders to support the legislation, while those with copyrights no longer deemed valuable to them commercially (guessing close to 99.9% of works now under copyright) will just let the works fall into the public domain to avoid the intellectual property tax. If that course was pursued, then one might want to set the tax rate at somewhere from 3-15% of assessed value (to make up for some of the lost royalty tax revenue). Under this system, copyright holders would have an incentive to report all income they could as royalty income so it was tax-free. Added to your suggestion, such an idea might counterbalance any trend to under-reporting royalties.
(I posted this idea a day or so ago in another thread, but I think this could be a good thing to start asking congresspeople about.)
Why don't copyright holders pay an annual tax of 1% on an assesment of the value of keeping their copyrights out of the public domain, like real estate holders do? If they stop paying annual intellectual property taxes, the copyright could revert to the public domain, like real estate reverts to the state when real property taxes are not paid. This would be a great way to increase federal and state tax revenues, while also promoting the public domain.
Essentially, since the "for limited times" bargain has been broken by copyright holders lobbying for extensions, shouldn't the bargain be re-balanced by now taxing all copyright holders for keeping their works out of the public domain? Why are copyright holders so fast to claim they hold so called "intellectual property" and yet they so far seem to remain exempt from any sort of annual "property tax" for the upkeep of the information superhighway that makes their so-called property so valuable, and the public domain of ideas which they draw from to create copyrighted works?
==== more background ====
If the Supreme Court rules against Eldred etc. and allows indefinite copyright extensions (or even if they don't), here is an amusing idea. I think I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot months ago -- and now that I poke around the web and usenet I see that many others have discussed it a tiny bit. In such a worst case where copyrights are indefinite, perhaps a property tax on copyright owners might be enacted as a last resort, where rights holders get to choose an assessed value for having the monopoly of all rights to the work, and rights holders pay some percentage (1%?) per year of that assessment, with the restriction then rights holders have to release the work to the public domain if a payment to them is made for the assessed amount.
Possibly the assessment would be broken down into rights categories, so that there could be payments for freeing specific subrights -- like non-commercial use. This category approach would allow a work to be bought into the public domain in stages.
For example, if the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust puts, say, a million dollar valuation on the "Skills of Xanadu" story (ironically about freedom) relative to releasing it into the public domain (say, so they could pursue movie rights for it), at an "intellectual monopoly" tax rate of 1%, the trust would have to pay $10000 per year to keep the monopoly. But if the Trust puts only a $1000 value on "The Skills of Xanadu" to avoid significant taxes (only $10 a year then), I'd take out my checkbook, maybe along with some other fans, and it would be free today.
Note this assessed amount is for release into the public domain, not necessarily the amount to be paid by someone else who wants the monopoly transferred to them, which might be higher or lower, just like what real estate sells for isn't necessarily the assessed rate. Since it it hard to assess the value of a copyright, let the rights holder do it, as long as this public domain buyout clause was in place to prevent overly low self assessment of monopoly value.
If some people call patents and copyrights "intellectual property" (yes, I know that term begs the question of how to handle them) then why not laugh at them and just tax ownership of such "property"? After all, just like real estate owners pay taxes to offset the heavy continual burden their property puts on society (a need for police, fire departments, water, roads, sanitation, planning boards, zoning, local schools, etc.), there is a heavy continual burden on society for enforcing copyright (prisons for infringers, costs of salaries for judges in court cases, the time cost to individuals of making fair use determinations, government subsidized distribution channels like the internet, the need for the government to maintain accurate records, lawmaker's time, etc.) which ideally should be born by copyright holders as opposed to the general public.
Yes, I know such a tax might wreck havoc with the GPL or other freely licensed software too. Most GPL copyright holders would probably need to set their copyright assessment prices low and risk public domain buyouts. And there are issues with previously selling off exclusive rights separately to a work (although such rights holders could pay part of the tax.) And there are issues with incrementally developed works, or works with multiple copyright holders...
Still, the big issue is that the cost to society of the copyright monopoly on any work is potentially high, and the person who should be paying that social cost is really the rights holder, rather than passing on external costs to others, as a form of social pollution. Some would argue rights holders already paid a copyright tax when they registered. Yet, people who get real estate pay a title transfer fee (sort of like a copyright registration or renewal fee) but they still pay property taxes afterwards too. If there was no records of taxes paid on a copyright, it could be presumed public domain, or the copyright owner could be pursued for tax evasion (until they disclaimed it to the public domain, of course). This would make the state of copyright much clearer than the current situation where it is very expensive to determine if a work is under copyright, and if so, who currently owns it and how to contact them. With real estate, all this is a matter of public record.
When registering to pay "intellectual property" taxes for their monopolies, copyright holders might be required to deposit a complete copy of the content and preferred form source in digital format in escrow. This escrow would be in part to allow people wanting to use public domain materials to easily search published content against registered works. Escrow would also be in part to ensure the work would be available unencrypted and unprotected when it became public domain, such as if the rights holder stopped paying property taxes on it.
Perhaps the way to win the copyright battle, if all else fails, is to give copyright holders what the want, then something else too that naturally goes with it. Microsoft would have to put a price on releasing the Windows source code to the public domain for example (including all previous versions, which might have separate prices), and then they would finally be forced to pay taxes. Yes, perennially people have resisted taxes on capital, so it's an uphill battle, but it is another front of the copyright battle to consider.
Obviously, stocks and bank accounts aren't often taxed by the federal government while held (though some states do like with Florida's "Intangible Personal Property Tax"),
http://www.myflorida.com/dor/taxes/ippt.html so the argument would have to be worked through if the taxation was at the federal level. And of course this makes the government meddle more in everyone's affairs (at least, those claiming copyrights or software patents) but maybe that's OK considering the alternative in this case and how much they meddle already.
And, while I'm dreaming:-), half the money raised from the intellectual monopoly tax could be used to fund more free software and free content (and the other half would go to pay down the Federal deficit).
Note: even with laws like the above, I would support some form of author's moral rights regarding their works, enforced separately from copyright.
If the Supreme Court rules against Eldred etc. and allows indefinite copyright extensions (or even if they don't), here is an amusing idea. I think I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot months ago -- and now that I poke around the web and usenet I see that many others have discussed it a tiny bit. In such a worst case where copyrights are indefinite, perhaps a property tax on copyright owners might be enacted as a last resort, where rights holders get to choose an assessed value for having the monopoly of all rights to the work, and rights holders pay some percentage (1%?) per year of that assessment, with the restriction then rights holders have to release the work to the public domain if a payment to them is made for the assessed amount.
Possibly the assessment would be broken down into rights categories, so that there could be payments for freeing specific subrights -- like non-commercial use. This category approach would allow a work to be bought into the public domain in stages.
For example, if the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust puts, say, a million dollar valuation on the "Skills of Xanadu" story (ironically about freedom) relative to releasing it into the public domain (say, so they could pursue movie rights for it), at an "intellectual monopoly" tax rate of 1%, the trust would have to pay $10000 per year to keep the monopoly. But if the Trust puts only a $1000 value on "The Skills of Xanadu" to avoid significant taxes (only $10 a year then), I'd take out my checkbook, maybe along with some other fans, and it would be free today.
Note this assessed amount is for release into the public domain, not necessarily the amount to be paid by someone else who wants the monopoly transferred to them, which might be higher or lower, just like what real estate sells for isn't necessarily the assessed rate. Since it it hard to assess the value of a copyright, let the rights holder do it, as long as this public domain buyout clause was in place to prevent overly low self assessment of monopoly value.
If some people call patents and copyrights "intellectual property" (yes, I know that term begs the question of how to handle them) then why not laugh at them and just tax ownership of such "property"? After all, just like real estate owners pay taxes to offset the heavy continual burden their property puts on society (a need for police, fire departments, water, roads, sanitation, planning boards, zoning, local schools, etc.), there is a heavy continual burden on society for enforcing copyright (prisons for infringers, costs of salaries for judges in court cases, the time cost to individuals of making fair use determinations, government subsidized distribution channels like the internet, the need for the government to maintain accurate records, lawmaker's time, etc.) which ideally should be born by copyright holders as opposed to the general public.
Yes, I know such a tax might wreck havoc with the GPL or other freely licensed software too. Most GPL copyright holders would probably need to set their copyright assessment prices low and risk public domain buyouts. And there are issues with previously selling off exclusive rights separately to a work (although such rights holders could pay part of the tax.) And there are issues with incrementally developed works, or works with multiple copyright holders...
Still, the big issue is that the cost to society of the copyright monopoly on any work is potentially high, and the person who should be paying that social cost is really the rights holder, rather than passing on external costs to others, as a form of social pollution. Some would argue rights holders already paid a copyright tax when they registered. Yet, people who get real estate pay a title transfer fee (sort of like a copyright registration or renewal fee) but they still pay property taxes afterwards too. If there was no records of taxes paid on a copyright, it could be presumed public domain, or the copyright owner could be pursued for tax evasion (until they disclaimed it to the public domain, of course). This would make the state of copyright much clearer than the current situation where it is very expensive to determine if a work is under copyright, and if so, who currently owns it and how to contact them. With real estate, all this is a matter of public record.
When registering to pay "intellectual property" taxes for their monopolies, copyright holders might be required to deposit a complete copy of the content and preferred form source in digital format in escrow. This escrow would be in part to allow people wanting to use public domain materials to easily search published content against registered works. Escrow would also be in part to ensure the work would be available unencrypted and unprotected when it became public domain, such as if the rights holder stopped paying property taxes on it.
Perhaps the way to win the copyright battle, if all else fails, is to give copyright holders what the want, then something else too that naturally goes with it. Microsoft would have to put a price on releasing the Windows source code to the public domain for example (including all previous versions, which might have separate prices), and then they would finally be forced to pay taxes. Yes, perennially people have resisted taxes on capital, so it's an uphill battle, but it is another front of the copyright battle to consider.
Obviously, stocks and bank accounts aren't often taxed by the federal government while held (though some states do like with Florida's "Intangible Personal Property Tax"),
http://www.myflorida.com/dor/taxes/ippt.html so the argument would have to be worked through if the taxation was at the federal level. And of course this makes the government meddle more in everyone's affairs (at least, those claiming copyrights or software patents) but maybe that's OK considering the alternative in this case and how much they meddle already.
And, while I'm dreaming:-), half the money raised from the intellectual monopoly tax could be used to fund more free software and free content (and the other half would go to pay down the Federal deficit).
Note: even with laws like the above, I would support some form of author's moral rights regarding their works, enforced separately from copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you really want to be putting stuff into your body that has been touched by Microsoft quality control people? :-)
They built something like a dynamic economic model of patents and innovations and looked at the results.
From the conclusion: "Intellectual property appears to be one of those areas where results that seem secure in the context of a static model are overturned in the dynamic model. Imitation invariably inhibits innovation in a static world; in a dynamic world, imitators can provide benefit to both the original innovator and to society as a whole. Patents preserve innovation incentives in a static world; in a dynamic world, firms may have plenty of incentive to innovate without patents and patents may constrict complementary innovation."
An example of what they are talking about is reasons to contribute fixes to free software projects: someone else maintains it in the mainline, you get more testing, you get more improvements, you get people trained on the fix at no cost to you you can later hire, the fix becomes a standard making communications about it easier, everyone's file formats with the fix are easier to interchange, you don't have to keep patching the mainline to use your fix with every new version, etc.
This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.
http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302
From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.
This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.
For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:g e&NodeID=650
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypa
and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)i l03.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.
Here is a paper by an intellectual property lawyer against the current system: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarHere are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889
It begins: "My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. ... "
It used to be in the 1980s one could make money raising and selling llamas because everyone wanted to buy them to make money selling them to those who wanted to buy them to make money doing the same etc. While legal, since llamas are beautiful animals in and of themselves, this approach to llama economics still smells to me a bit like a pyramid scheme. See for example: http://members.aol.com/LostCrk431/straightscoop.ht ml
Consider academia. Professors make money producing PhDs wanted by people so they can produce PhDs wanted by people who want to make money doing the same etc. Considering how an average professor might produce tens of PhDs, where will this lead?
See any parallels to llama production?
The Academic PhD market which was hot in the 1950s has over the succeeding decades been collapsing from the weight of overproduced PhDs relative to academic positions. (Yes there are other uses for a PhD but the main use historically was always to teach...)
For details on "Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" see: http://his.com/~graeme/cpsj.html
Having said that, obviously some PhDs, like some llamas, are a valuable addition in this diverse world.
With all the problems with software patents and broad interpretation of copyright laws and contributory copyright infringement related to projects that support free communications, why not a step-by-step easy-to-follow blueprint for free software projects incorporating a non-profit for liability reasons (say choosing the state of Delaware)?
d related writings or commentary by Richard Stallman included here by
Obviously people can donate code to the Free Software Foundation, but that seems both to centralize liability risk in one organization (why should FSF take the fall for infringing a bogus software patent?) and also to provide less protection to the authors while they are writing free software.
One can use the Apache model which was incorporated in Delaware, but Apache does not seem have any restrictions in their articles of incorporation related to not selling software. I haven't actually ever found the FSF bylaws or certificate of incorporation anywhere on-line.
It would be nice to have a detailed process to follow that is a no brainer -- use these words in the articles of incorporation and bylaws, pay some specific (well chosen) corporation that specializes in forming corporations to file the papers ($500), keep up with annual reports and your annual fees for your registered legal agent ($100-200), and you are up and running with a reasonable liability shield if anything innocently infringes.
I'm thinking of something like this for a free software related organization I'm starting, with wording chosen to ensure the materials stay free:
The organization's purpose is [details snipped...]
To that end, the organization may engage in any legal activity, subject
to the following restrictions intended to ensure free licensing of the
results of all the organization's efforts (with "free" intended to mean
"free as in freedom" in the same way as the Free Software Foundation's
current or future similar definition of "free" licensing for software or
other creative works of various types -- e.g. public domain, GPL, LGPL,
GFDL, Python 2.0.1 license -- for detailed examples see:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
an
reference). The restrictions are:
1) that any copyrights the organization creates itself, or whose
creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives
as donations or otherwise comes to hold, must only be licensed under
free licenses, and
2) that any patents the organization creates itself, or whose
creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives
as donations or otherwise comes to hold, must only be licensed under
free licenses,
3) that any trademarks the organization creates itself, or whose
creation it directly supports in whole or in part, or which it receives
as donations or otherwise comes to hold, will only used to support and
distinguish endeavors which require the free licensing of all the
resulting copyrights and/or patents, and
4) that copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks held for any reason by
the organization may not be voluntarily transferred from the
organization without contractual guarantees that future holders will
abide by these restrictions, and that the organization is required to
enforce these guarantees to the maximum extent feasible.
5) that in the event of the likeliehood of an involuntary transfer of
copyrights, patents, or trademarks from the organization such as from
the result of a judgement against the organization, the organization
must take all legal and feasible steps to prevent the transfer or to
make a voluntary transfer to an appropriate non-profit organization as
under section (4) or if appropriate place the item in the public domain.
These restrictions may not be removed by future changes to these
articles of incorporation.
One whole point of using a free OS like GNU/Linux or an open source program like Apache in a corporate setting is that is something goes wrong or requires change or is confusing you have a broad variety of support sources (RedHat, freelancers, other organizations, in-house people who work on it in their spare time, widely read mailing lists, etc.). Access to Microsoft source code under some sort of proprietary agreement effectively only means your in-house coders can look at that -- and they will not have years of experience working with the code base or other extensive support resources and so their ability to use the source to any good end is very limited. This is a "network effect" issue where free software widely distributed in a network is much more valuable than proprietary software supported at a few isolated nodes.
In any case, whether copyright violation was currently criminal or not, my point is that copyright will need a huge enforcement similar to the scope of the war on drugs given the ease of making copies on the internet. That enforcement effort will have a high cost which someone will need to pay. If it is the average tax payer, then it is a subsidy to copyright holders.
As far as the motivation of artists, you do point out a limitation in the studies referenced in that article in that they were mainly not about professionals but about average human subjects in lab studies. Sounds like a good place to do more research -- although it is always hard to do academic style research on professionals.
Still, if what you argued was true, why are so many artists not financially successful in life but keep doing it anyway? I'm not saying this is the way it should be, but it points to the fact that artists create for other reasons than financial rewards (even if financial rewards also have an effect good or bad).
Consider that 99%+ of artists and writers and musicians and photographers in the U.S. do not earn a living at it (novels in drawers, singing at a cafe or with friends, making digital paintings for home display, photographic retouching for home use) and so these artists lose out on a rich public domain which might make their spare time art more enjoyable and productive. Consider how the serious threats implicit in recent copyright criminalization combined with broad interpretation of copyright (covering even similar works) may have a chilling effect on these 99%+ of artists sharing their work, growing in creative expression building on inspiration from media they see around themselves, and in general on people sharing with each other.
Also, there are people giving away their own music for free on the internet -- poke around at: http://www.mp3.com/
However, consider this: frequently an artist's creativity is stifled by being rewarded. That is, publishers and fans generally want more of the same and are willing to pay for it. It takes a very disciplined person to turn this cash down and move into a new area and take creative risks -- but being a good artist often requires this sort of reinvention to keep fresh and growing.
For support for elimitating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:g e&NodeID=650
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypa
and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)i l03.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889
First, the law of large numbers over the internet (like with GNU/Linux) shows people will create without direct financial incentive.
Second, this article:h tml
discusses how scientific studies find that for creative intellectual work, reward is often no motivator, and can in fact have negative effects on performance.
http://www.isi.salford.ac.uk/staff/ab/motivation.
From the article: "The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings as these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of it. Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards. Employees who are praised for meeting a manager's expectations suffer a drop in motivation."
So, while what you say is essentially the "conventional wisdom" of our age, it may well not be correct as regards creative works.
Also, note that in order to enforce copyright in the internet age, we will need something equivalent to scope in the "War on Drugs" as a "War on Sharing". The War on Drugs effort keeps about a million U.S. citizens behind bars at a direct cost of 20-40 billion dollars a year. And before you laugh and say it is not possible for a million people to be locked up for using Napster and Kaaza, consider that people in the 1960s would have laughed at the notion of a million americans behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s -- but it happened.
For the same amount of money, the U.S. could provide grants of $100K a year to around 400,000 artist, musicians, and writers who make their work freely available.
So, you choose which society you want to live in, however you label some part of it. And by the way, copyrights are monopolies, and monopolies are generally considered anti-capitalist.
If a copyright is to be like real property, tax it annually to pay for the social cost (courts, jails, derived works defferred or never made, researching and negotiating rights, inefficiency, etc.). And let anyone put it into the PD by paying the owner the self-assessed value. Suddenly corporations might not be so eager to hold onto many IP hot potatoes. And if people fail to register IP and pay tax on it, it becomes PD immediately. The bargain of monopoly for a limited time has been broken and this remakes that bargain in a new way. Oh, and don"t enforce foreign copyright unless they pay this tax too (self assesment might need to be done for each country if this went worldwide).
As far as planning a next move for legislation in the public interest, here is a suggestion I have been floating on Slashdot (inspired by some comment I read here a long while ago). Since the bargain between copyright holders and the public has been broken by making copyrights so long, why not tax copyrights as "property" since proponents are so fond of calling copyrights "intellectual property"? Many jurisdications tax real estate and personal property, so why not tax copyrights annually as well? After all, just like real estate, copyrights place a burden on society (prison, courts, copyright research, derived works never made, indirect transaction costs to arrange or pay licensing fees, etc.). Anyway, something to think about. (By the way, I'd like to see this tax for patents too...)
Here is some more detail: essentially, copyright holders would assess themselves the value to them of keeping their work out of the public domain. Every year, a copyright holder will file a form for each copyright they claim stating this self-assesment and include a check for, say, a 3% tax of this value. If someone such as yourself wishes to see a copyrighted work into the public domain, the copyright holder would be legally bound to put the work into the public domain if they receive a payment from anyone equal to the self assesment for that year.
If copyrights are now effectively indefinite, copyright holders should have to pay taxes like real estate owners to keep works out of the public domain. A starting amount would be 3% per year of a self-assessed value, where anyone could pay the entire self-assessed value to the copyright owner to force the work to be placed immediately in the public domain.
One way to tax copyrights and patents is to let the rights holder each year set a current value at which they would allow anyone (any individual, business, or government) to pay directly to them them after which they are legally bound to put the work in the public domain -- then they pay some fraction (3 - 5%) of this amount annually as an intellectual property tax, apart from other taxes like income tax. To keep Windows 3.1 out of the public domain, Microsoft would have to set a self assessed value balancing a desire to keep the work out of the PD by risking someone will pay them the requested amount, and yet still wanting to minimize annual taxes. If Microsoft values Windows 3.1 at $100, someone would likely pay them that to PD it. If they value it at $100 billion, then they have to write a check annually for $3 billion in "intellectual property" taxes (or whatever the tax rate is -- might be higher for patents, lower for copyrights). Taxing so called "intellectual property" is a free market approach to force rights holders to stop squatting on works. Note that fees are now paid when copyrights and patents are renewed or registered, but those should not be seen as taxes, just processing fees, same as you pay to register a real estate deed transfer, but still need to pay annual property taxes. Note that this self assessed value might not be the same as what they might sell the copyright or patent for to someone else who wished to keep it proprietary and keep paying taxes on it. Also, the rights holder could change the self assessed value annually up or down as the market changed (so in 1995, Windows 3.1 might have been valued at $100 billion but in 2002 it might only be $1 billion).
The benefits of this approach are more tax revenues for the government, a clear way to lookup if a work is still in copyright and who the owner is (just check the tax records, say by a Google search on a Library of Congress archive of all currently taxable works, with a legal requirement to submit a copy), and likely a sudden increase in PD materials for all artists to draw on. Basically, since rights holder lobbying has broken the bargain of finite time monopoly for future public domain use, this IP tax approach remakes this bargain.
Thanks for the Adam Smith pointer. Definitely strengthens the concept for a conservative audience.
:-) And as I said, the germ of it came from Slashdot for me too I think (wish I could track down the original inspiration -- think it might have been someone's sig perhaps a year or more ago now.)
On IP - mostly I just want to see this idea in greater circulation -- as you say, as Judo (or Aikido?) for various noxious social trends. I was pleased to see someone else bring it up, and adding something to is (like citing Adam Smith). Great minds think alike.
Interesting idea to perhaps see it first in Europe. Although, with the looming budget deficits in the U.S., federal and state governments could use all the new taxes they could get.
Here's something I wrote on this earlier which you might be referencing: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33200&cid= 3588180
And as I mention there, I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot perviously.
See also later posts: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33247&cid= 3592289
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34231&cid= 3707446
So, why not tax patents annually, such as real estate is taxed annually, to help society pay those external costs? Patents could be taxes at 5% of the self-assessed value of the patent, with the proviso that anyone wanting to have the patent put into the public domain could pay the current year's self-assessed value directly to the patent holder (or indirectly through the U.S. Treasury). Then, anyone sitting on a bogus patent would have to pay yearly costs based on their speculation, and thus deterring patent squatting, and there would be a way for industries to buy out a patent holder without allowing them to monopolize an industry (such as one poster showed happened with Edison and the film industry). Essentially, this is saying patent holders can't have it both ways. If they say they have something valuable, they should pay taxes on it; if it is not valuable, they should not be able to use it to prevent others from innovating.
The same sort of logic can be used to tax copyrights and other forms of so-called "intellectual property" as well. Essentially, a tax on intellectual property turns almost all bogus patents and indefinite copyrights into hot potatoes that people would have to make serious business decisions about -- keep it out of the public domain at some annual cost, or let it go.
(Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause].
And why should your hard earned tax dollars go to pay public citizens to sit on juries and render raucous open justice when things could be done so much more quickly and cheaply by commercial organizations working politely behind closed doors? Why, with free law each and every one of you might have to take time out of your busy schedules to sit in a court room and decide the guilt or innocence of a peer!
And why pay a judge's salary out of taxes, such has been proposed? Judges clearly should be compensated on a royalty basis by anyone referencing decisions a judge produces. This encourages judges to swiftly produce more decisions as well as decisions that big legal corporations like MicroSlaw want to cite more often, which is good for the economy.
Top law schools would have to shut their doors if most law was not proprietary, as who would pay $100,000 up front to join a profession where initiates release their work mainly into the public domain? Obviously there would no longer be any legal innovation without private laws requiring royalties when discussed, since who would spend their time writing new laws when there is no direct financial return on their investment?
And of course, lawyers will not be paid well without earning royalties on private laws, since if they can't sell all royalty rights to their legal work directly to large corporations, how will they make a decent living? Why, even if public money is spent on developing laws, say, at universities, it is clear such laws will not be respected, further developed, or widely distributed unless somebody owns those laws too and so can make money from selling access to them. It's beyond me why people sometimes act like there could be a spirit of volunteerism in this great land of ours after all the effort we have put into stamping that out, such as by making it illegal to help someone for free. Also, since the Internet had to be shut down early in this administration to prevent children from viewing pornography without paying, distribution of new information will always be expensive.
Each lawyer out there should remember to uphold the current proprietary legal system, because you too may win the law lottery and become as rich and famous as the founder of MicroSlaw -- but only if you start with a trust fund! [Indulgent audience laughter]
I know some lawyers out there are concerned about being replaced by the lawyers most major law corporations are now importing from India and China. Let me assure you, this does not threaten your livelihood, because there is currently a lawyer shortage restricting our economic growth, and those Indian and Chinese lawyers have extensive resumes indicating years of experience developing U.S. laws. For you business people out there, it is also my understanding those imported lawyers make model workers because they can't easily change jobs. Thus I have supported removing all restrictions on bringing over such imported lawyers, in an effort to stimulate economic growth in this fair land of ours.
[Inaudible shouted question] Citizenship? Naturally we would not want to offer such imported lawyers any form of citizenship when they come over because they are not Americans -- that should be obvious enough. We're hoping they go back to where they came from after we are done with them, since there are always eager workers in another country we can later exploit at lower wages, I mean provide economic enhancement opportunities for. Besides, dammit, have you seen the color of their skin?
[Inaudible shouted question] Ageism? I remind everyone here that, obviously, as has been conclusively shown by studies MicroSlaw itself has so charitably funded, older American lawyers can not be retrained to know about new laws, so I implore all lawyers as patriots to plan to learn a new profession after age thirty-five so you do not become a burden on your beloved country.
[Inaudible shouted question] Prisons? There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now, thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public or private is a criminal terrorist. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, as those terrorists aren't technically criminals or subject to the due process of law are they? Well it's true these days you go to prison if you complain about the drug war, or the war on terrorism, or the war on infringers of copyrights and software patents -- so don't complain! [nervous audience laughter] After all, without security, what is the good of American Freedoms? Benjamin Franklin himself said it best, those who don't have security will trade in their freedoms.
I'm proud to say that the U.S. is now the undisputed world leader in per capita imprisonment, another example of how my administration is keeping us on top. Why just the other day I had the U.N. building in New York City locked down when delegates there started talking about prisoner civil rights. Such trash talk should not be permitted on our soil. It should be obvious that anyone found smoking marijuana, copying CDs, or talking about the law without paying should face a death penalty from AIDS contracted through prison rapes -- that extra deterrent make the system function more smoothly and helps keep honest people honest. That's also why I support the initiative to triple the standard law author's royalty which criminals pay for each law they violate, because the longer we keep such criminals behind bars, especially now that bankruptcy is also a crime, the better for all of us. That's also why I support the new initiative to make all crimes related to discussing laws in private have a mandatory life sentence without parole. Mandatory lifetime imprisonment is good for the economy as it will help keep AIDS for spreading out of the prison system and will keep felons like those so called fair users from competing with honest royalty paying Americans for an inexplicably ever shrinking number of jobs.
Building more prisons... [Aside to aid who just walked up and whispered in the president's ear: What's that? She's been arrested for what again? Well get her off again, dammit. I don't care how it looks; MicroSlaw owes me big time.]
Sorry about that distraction, ladies and gentlemen. Now, as I was saying, building more prisons is good for the economy. It's good for the GNP. It's good for rural areas. Everyone who matters wins when we increase the prison population. People who share are thieves plain and simple, just like people who take a bathroom break without pausing their television feed and thus miss some commercials are thieves. Such people break the fundamental social compact between advertisers and consumers which all young children are made to sign. And let me take this opportunity to underscore my administration's strong record on being tough on crime. MicroSlaw's system for efficient production of digitized legal evidence on demand is a key part of that success. So is the recent initiative of having a camera in every living room to catch and imprison those not paying attention when advertising is on television, say by making love or even talking. Why without such initiatives, economic analysts at MicroSlaw assure me that the GNP would have decreased much more than it has already. Always remember that ditty you learned in kindergarten, Only criminals want privacy, because a need for privacy means you have something evil to hide.
[Inaudible shouted question] Monopolies? Look, nothing is wrong with being a monopoly. It's our favorite game, isn't it? Sure, we might slap somebody on the wrist now and then [winks] but everyone in America aspires to be a monopolist, so why not just have more of them? Why not let every creative lawyer be their own little monopolist permanently on some small piece of the law. It's the American way; it's the will of the people.
Look, these questions are getting annoying. The next person who asks a question will have their universal digital passport suspended immediately via video face recognition! [Hush from crowd.] Or at least, someone who looks like you will! [General relieved laughter.]
Here is the bottom line. If all law was not proprietary, lawmaking corporations like MicroSlaw wouldn't be able to make as much money as they do the way they are currently doing it. So the economy would further collapse, plunging the U.S. into an even worse recession than the one we are in now, which, as experts have shown, is the legacy of all the illegal software and media copying in the late 1990s. Look, we've already cut all nonessential government programs like Head Start, monitoring water quality, researching alternate energy, and improving public health. Free law would mean a further reduction of tax revenues and we would have to make tough choices about reducing spending on essential things like developing better weapons of mass destruction, imprisoning marijuana users, propping up oppressive regimes, and promoting unfunded mandates like higher school testing standards. I assure you, these priorities will never change as long as I am president, and I will always make sure we have money for such essential government functions, whatever that takes. So I urge you to never support the creation of free law, which might undermine such basic government operations ensuring your security, and further, to turn in anyone found advocating such.
By the way, I am proud to announce government homeland security troops are successfully retaking Vermont even as we speak. Troops will soon be enforcing federal school standards there with all necessary force. Their number one priority will be improving the curriculum to help kids understand why sharing is morally wrong. Too bad we had to nuke Burlington before they would see the light, har, har, [weak audience laughter] but you can see how messed up their education system must have been to force us to have to do that. Why, kids were even found there not wearing their Digital Rights Management helmets (invented by Gordon Mohr) which automatically "fog up" any time you lay your eyes on something that you haven't bought a license for viewing. Such flagrant disrespect for rights holders should not be encouraged in our youth, no matter how well meaning people are who complain about the uncomfortableness of such helmets. We must all willing accept a little discomfort to keep our democracy functioning and innovating; as Ralph Nader said, there can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship licensing fees. It has been said that States are the lab rats of democracy, and have no fear, any State that threatens the American way of life in a similar fashion will be dealt with in a similar way to a lab rat. I give you my word as an American and as your president sworn to uphold your freedom to live the American lifestyle we have all grown accustomed to recently, and MicroSlaw's freedom to define what that lifestyle is to their own profit.
So, in conclusion, a body of legal knowledge free for all to review and discuss would be the death of the American dream. Remember, people who discuss law in private without paying royalties are pirates, not friends. Thus I encourage you all to report to MicroSlaw or your nearest homeland security office anyone talking about laws or sharing legal knowledge in other than an approved fashion and for a fee. Always remember that nursery school rhyme, there is money for you in turning in your friends too.
God Bless! This is a great country! [Wild audience applause.]
Addendum -- March 4, 2132 -- Freeweb article 2239091390298329372384 Archivists have just now recovered the above historic document from an antique hard disk platter (only 10 TB capacity!) recently discovered in the undersea exploration of a coastal city that before global warming had been called Washingtoon, D.C.. It is hard for a modern sentient to imagine what life must have been like in those dark times of the early 21st Century before the transition from a scarcity worldview to a universal material abundance worldview. It is unclear if that document was an actual presidential speech or was intended as satire, since most digital records from that time were lost, and the Burlington crater has historically been attributed to a Cold Fusion experiment gone wrong. In any case, this document gives an idea of what humans of that age had to endure until liberty prevailed.
Copyright 2002 Paul D. Fernhout
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
When you think about the Athlon on your desk running GNU/Linux, you could consider it not so much as a "computer" itself but as an tiny interface to a deep computational reality that is the universe. That is, your Athlon only computes because it is a certain special pattern of bits in a larger system which supports computation. So, your Athlon provides a special kind of interface between your mind and that larger computationally reality -- say, like a Series 1 minicomputer was often used to provide full screen editing interfaces to much larger IBM mainframes. An Athlon may be a tiny little keyhole to peak through compared to the size of the universe, but it is perhaps better than nothing. Think of your Athlon as being more like a telescope or microscope than a thing of study itself (not to say an Athlon can't be studied of course). Someday, perhaps we will store information in the very fabric of reality itself, and computations will be perfomed on that information without physical silicon needing to be present. Probably we'll still just mainly use it to embed smiley faces everywhere though. :-) Or edit them if one is so inclined. :)
By the way, I first saw this idea of "the universe is a computer" referenced in the 1988 book by Robert Wright called "Three Scientists and their Gods:Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information" in the part about Edward Fredkin, see for example: http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/reviews.wright.htm l
and:
http://digitalphysics.org/Publications/Fredkin/New -Cosmogony/
but your arguments lead to inaction.
I wouldn't advocate inaction as opposed to increasing surveillance. I argued for promoting decentralization, education, charity, efficiency, research, arts, and community as all ways to confront and minimize terrorism. In another response I talk about the value of improving home insulation to combat terrorism (a form of decentralization of energy production). I talk about increasing fuel efficiency standards. Of promoting local family farms to minimize key supply lines. Charity to refugees can help prevent terrorists from coming into existence. Promoting stronger and friendlier and healthier communities at home and abroad make it more difficult for terrorists to operate.
Unfortunately extending surveillance and other operations of a war on terrorism will leave less money to support the initiatives I feel will be more effective in reducing risks from terrorism. Increased surveillance may also in the long term undermine some of these like promoting friendly community (because of the abuse of such powers which inevitably come). I'm all for appropriate vigilance, though perhaps the line between increased vigilance and Orwellian 1984-style surveillance is a thin one, and what we may also need in Congress is a more extensive discussion about what is appropriate, not a wholesale signing over of all individual privacy out of fear. I did write my Congressional representatives, but they don't seem to be listening judging on what legislation is being passed.
In a way, increased terrorism is like a symptom of a failure to foster more of those other basics like justice, fairness, compassion, and charity. I can also point to many other indicators -- higher suicide rates, more homelessness, increasing domestic violence, more child abuse, lower literacy levels, increased drug use, high per capita imprisonment, and so on which are also symptoms of a U.S. social malaise. I think to treat one symptom of this malaise (increasing fear of terrorism) without addressing the whole is not going to be effective long term. And the reality seems to be the governmental focus in terms of $$$ is on surveillance, not promoting healthy and resilient communities here and abroad. So, you will get what you say you want -- just remember the Oscar Wilde quip, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers".
I don't see how his logic is flawed. Essentially, surveillance is ultimately ineffective. If surveillance worked, then why do prisons have such a problem with contraband drugs or prisoner rapes (leading to more AIDS deaths)? Additionally surveillance is expensive, taking away money from real solutions for safety such as decentralization, education, charity, efficency, research, arts, and community. Also, surveillance creates an unpleasant social environment where those in power selectively enforce laws against their opponents.
I think you make good points about personal responsibility, and the issue of where to draw the line in excusing people's behavior based on circumstances, and how the growing material abundance removes some presures for negative social behaviors, and how a life of physical violence (or, for that matter, economic violence such as by those supporting slavery in the past) can consume a person and their community.
Still, widespread one-way surveillance is an idea that sounds good in theory but is ultimately counterproductive in practice. Who watches the watchers?
To put all this hysteria in perspective, about the same number of people as died in the WTC disaster die on U.S. roads each and every month and few seem to mind. If writers want to end a character immediately in a soap opera, they can just say they had a car accident and no one will question it. Yet, U.S. policies still promote cars over other alternatives (mass transit, working from home, mixed use zoning). Millions more middle aged lives are cut short each year from lack of exercise -- where are the walking trails and bicycle trails in every U.S. city and suburb (compared to say, the Netherlands)? So from this point of view, even if a million U.S. citizens are killed a year by terrorists, bicycle paths are still a better investment in American health and safety than more surveillance. So, my starting position is what people care about seems really strange when looked at from the big picture perspective. And fear, and building and economy and tax structure and new laws based directly on short-term fear, have direct negative effects on U.S. society, as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
The problem is that the ways to safety have all been outlined for the last forty years and ignored. They are essentially summed up in: people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So, as an action agenda for the most safety:
1. Stop throwing stones.
2. Make houses out of something else than glass.
3. Help others to live in non-glass houses and to stop throwing stones.
I'm not going to talk about stopping throwing stones as that is now considered unpatriotic (although I have done so for a long time in the past). But I can still talk about glass houses, I guess.
Consider this book "Brittle Power" written around 1980: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/art7095.php Federal energy policy continues to promote the most centralized, unforgiving, and vulnerable sources and infrastructures, while ignoring or suppressing the more efficient, diverse, dispersed, localized, and renewable options that could in time make major supply failures impossible by design. At present, the Department of Energy, apparently unwittingly but quite effectively, is undercutting the antiterrorist mission of the Department of Defense.
The problem with the U.S. from a safety perspective is that because the way the economy is set up, the most money can be made by centralizing a service, like Microsoft centralizes the OS, or agribusiness centralizes monocultures, or the oil company centralizes with a few pipelines. All these are the most profitable concerns because they are centralized, and backed by social, legal, political, and financial systems that keep them that way and supress alternatives. And because they are centralized, they are vulnerable.
What are the safe choices?
Consider, for example, a suggestion I read years ago that taking one year of the money spent on maintain the Persian Gulf Deployment, and applying it to insulating U.S. homes, would eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The figures may have changed since (and may have been optimistic) but do you see the point? Passive solar architecture shouldn't just be an oddity -- it should be the law, if we are serious about building a safer society. Yet, it is more profitable to centralized companies for have the U.S. government subsidize oil costs (some economist say to $60 per barrel) than to consider a decentralized approach like home insulation. Same with resisting the non-brainer of fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.
Another safe choice -- local community supported agriculture, to reduce the length of food supply lines (typically 1500 miles). Other forms of alternative energy (especially wind power) could be developed. Well insulated refrigerators can be 10X more efficient than current ones (that is the major consumer of electricity in many american homes).
Basically, take much of the stuff environmentalists, consumer advocates, small farmers, civil rights leaders, and probably the green party have been saying for years, and do it. But you know what, it isn't "profitable". It's somehow "profitable" to tax Americans a trillion dollars a year to prop up the current system, but somehow talk about doing things that provide true safety, and while we're at it, also compassion, and justice, and humaneness, and fairness, and one will get mostly blank stares. Seems so much easier to just declare a war on terrorists and the problem seems almost solved -- it seems like the president is doing something, instead of providing leadership on home insulation (an effectively impossible thing for an oil man to ever do...)
My own tiny efforts along that line (mostly laughed at or ignored): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak That, and helping people learn how to grow more of their own food with a garden simulator. The problem is, when the current approaches keep being tried, and they keep not working, any alternative is going to seem laughable. We can spend $300 billion dollars on defense, but suggest spending $100 billion dollars a year on sustainable technology research and that seems laughable.
The ironic thing is, all the people who messed up the system already as far as promoting policies producing an unsafe U.S. are mainly the ones getting rewarded by the new spurt of government funding. And we get solutions like pump more arctic oil when it will take ten years to get it, it will be expensive, and any yahoo with a hunting rifle can shut down the Alaskan pipeline for days or weeks (as recently happened from one shot).
These people are working on a report for Congress that will hopefully show a better way: http://www.nepinitiative.org/ Bet they recommend insulating homes as the number one way to fight terrorism. A laughable idea, or is it?
Interesting twist. So you're saying the valuation is then essentially expected royalties (as opposed to market value of resale or replacement cost). Economically speaking, there might be some adjustment for discounted future value of royalties (i.e. a dollar received today is usually judged as worth more than a dollar received a year from now, as you can invest it).
Wondering how rights holders would calculate the dollars of royalty income -- there might be an incentive to cheat there. For example, one might allow someone else to play a copyrighted song one composed as part of a commercial and receive free advertising for something else one markets in return -- it becomes hard to account economically for these transactions as royalty income. One could use "fair market" value estimates but it requires all these transactions to be recorded as barter (and they may not be). Also, the royalty recordkeeping and related auditing is a privacy concern. Also, when measuring royalties, is it gross received, or net after expenses (including executive salaries).
Also, if a rights holder values something low to avoid taxes, and sits on it, and then when interest perks up, the raise the value, then the public is not served by having a chance to free the work at the lower valuation -- or I guess the back taxes make up for this? (Are they with interest?) Part of the original concept is the public could buy the work into the public domain at this year's current valuation -- do you see keeping this provision in your plan? In either approach, there is a risk/reward aspect to rights holders setting valuations -- they want to avoid paying taxes but avoid being bought out by the public until they have maximized their gain, and so they must make a complex decision (in either scenario, based on cash on hand, probabilities of the work becoming popular, expected interest rates, and so on). But, this is a great example of letting the market decide the value of a work (in the agent of the rights holder setting a valuation to the best of their knowledge of all these issues).
Are we assuming then that valuations only go up? No tax refund if they lower the valuation?
I'm not sure how I follow free software owners keep ownership -- or are you saying they set a low valuation (to avoid taxes) but then get no royalties so a buyout never occurs? Would the donations count as royalties?
Great ideas here even if some issues remain; the more variants we can explore of all this, the better. For example, I really like the idea of thinking about how passing on the cost to consumers accelerates the public domain process -- neat line of thought. I think that is a strong point of your proposal. I also like your notion of setting up a tax structure that encourages entities to produce higher value works (since so much new stuff is junk or copycat things).
One variant I've thought on the original idea, and it might apply in your suggestion, is when adding the 1% tax on self-assesed valuation, to also remove any income taxes on royalty income. This provides an incentive to financially successful rights holders to support the legislation, while those with copyrights no longer deemed valuable to them commercially (guessing close to 99.9% of works now under copyright) will just let the works fall into the public domain to avoid the intellectual property tax. If that course was pursued, then one might want to set the tax rate at somewhere from 3-15% of assessed value (to make up for some of the lost royalty tax revenue). Under this system, copyright holders would have an incentive to report all income they could as royalty income so it was tax-free. Added to your suggestion, such an idea might counterbalance any trend to under-reporting royalties.
(I posted this idea a day or so ago in another thread, but I think this could be a good thing to start asking congresspeople about.)
:-), half the money raised from the intellectual
Why don't copyright holders pay an annual tax of 1% on an assesment of the value of keeping their copyrights out of the public domain, like real estate holders do? If they stop paying annual intellectual property taxes, the copyright could revert to the public domain, like real estate reverts to the state when real property taxes are not paid. This would be a great way to increase federal and state tax revenues, while also promoting the public domain.
Essentially, since the "for limited times" bargain has been broken by copyright holders lobbying for extensions, shouldn't the bargain be re-balanced by now taxing all copyright holders for keeping their works out of the public domain? Why are copyright holders so fast to claim they hold so called "intellectual property" and yet they so far seem to remain exempt from any sort of annual "property tax" for the upkeep of the information superhighway that makes their so-called property so valuable, and the public domain of ideas which they draw from to create copyrighted works?
==== more background ====
If the Supreme Court rules against Eldred etc. and allows indefinite
copyright extensions (or even if they don't), here is an amusing idea. I
think I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot
months ago -- and now that I poke around the web and usenet I see that
many others have discussed it a tiny bit. In such a worst case where
copyrights are indefinite, perhaps a property tax on copyright owners
might be enacted as a last resort, where rights holders get to choose an
assessed value for having the monopoly of all rights to the work, and
rights holders pay some percentage (1%?) per year of that assessment,
with the restriction then rights holders have to release the work to the
public domain if a payment to them is made for the assessed amount.
Possibly the assessment would be broken down into rights categories, so
that there could be payments for freeing specific subrights -- like
non-commercial use. This category approach would allow a work to be
bought into the public domain in stages.
For example, if the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust puts, say, a
million dollar valuation on the "Skills of Xanadu" story (ironically
about freedom) relative to releasing it into the public domain (say, so
they could pursue movie rights for it), at an "intellectual monopoly"
tax rate of 1%, the trust would have to pay $10000 per year to keep the
monopoly. But if the Trust puts only a $1000 value on "The Skills of
Xanadu" to avoid significant taxes (only $10 a year then), I'd take out
my checkbook, maybe along with some other fans, and it would be free
today.
Note this assessed amount is for release into the public domain, not
necessarily the amount to be paid by someone else who wants the monopoly
transferred to them, which might be higher or lower, just like what real
estate sells for isn't necessarily the assessed rate. Since it it hard
to assess the value of a copyright, let the rights holder do it, as long
as this public domain buyout clause was in place to prevent overly low
self assessment of monopoly value.
If some people call patents and copyrights "intellectual property" (yes,
I know that term begs the question of how to handle them) then why not
laugh at them and just tax ownership of such "property"? After all, just
like real estate owners pay taxes to offset the heavy continual burden
their property puts on society (a need for police, fire departments,
water, roads, sanitation, planning boards, zoning, local schools, etc.),
there is a heavy continual burden on society for enforcing copyright
(prisons for infringers, costs of salaries for judges in court cases,
the time cost to individuals of making fair use determinations,
government subsidized distribution channels like the internet, the need
for the government to maintain accurate records, lawmaker's time, etc.)
which ideally should be born by copyright holders as opposed to the
general public.
Yes, I know such a tax might wreck havoc with the GPL or other freely
licensed software too. Most GPL copyright holders would probably need to
set their copyright assessment prices low and risk public domain
buyouts. And there are issues with previously selling off exclusive
rights separately to a work (although such rights holders could pay part
of the tax.) And there are issues with incrementally developed works, or
works with multiple copyright holders...
Still, the big issue is that the cost to society of the copyright
monopoly on any work is potentially high, and the person who should be
paying that social cost is really the rights holder, rather than passing
on external costs to others, as a form of social pollution. Some would
argue rights holders already paid a copyright tax when they registered.
Yet, people who get real estate pay a title transfer fee (sort of like a
copyright registration or renewal fee) but they still pay property taxes
afterwards too. If there was no records of taxes paid on a copyright,
it could be presumed public domain, or the copyright owner could be
pursued for tax evasion (until they disclaimed it to the public domain,
of course). This would make the state of copyright much clearer than the
current situation where it is very expensive to determine if a work is
under copyright, and if so, who currently owns it and how to contact
them. With real estate, all this is a matter of public record.
When registering to pay "intellectual property" taxes for their
monopolies, copyright holders might be required to deposit a complete
copy of the content and preferred form source in digital format in
escrow. This escrow would be in part to allow people wanting to use
public domain materials to easily search published content against
registered works. Escrow would also be in part to ensure the work would
be available unencrypted and unprotected when it became public domain,
such as if the rights holder stopped paying property taxes on it.
Perhaps the way to win the copyright battle, if all else fails, is to
give copyright holders what the want, then something else too that
naturally goes with it. Microsoft would have to put a price on releasing
the Windows source code to the public domain for example (including all
previous versions, which might have separate prices), and then they
would finally be forced to pay taxes. Yes, perennially people have
resisted taxes on capital, so it's an uphill battle, but it is another
front of the copyright battle to consider.
Obviously, stocks and bank accounts aren't often taxed by the federal
government while held (though some states do like with Florida's
"Intangible Personal Property Tax"),
http://www.myflorida.com/dor/taxes/ippt.html
so the argument would have to be worked through if the taxation was at
the federal level. And of course this makes the government meddle more
in everyone's affairs (at least, those claiming copyrights or software
patents) but maybe that's OK considering the alternative in this case
and how much they meddle already.
And, while I'm dreaming
monopoly tax could be used to fund more free software and free content
(and the other half would go to pay down the Federal deficit).
Note: even with laws like the above, I would support some form of
author's moral rights regarding their works, enforced separately from
copyright.
If the Supreme Court rules against Eldred etc. and allows indefinite
:-), half the money raised from the intellectual
copyright extensions (or even if they don't), here is an amusing idea. I
think I saw the germ of it first in another user's comment on Slashdot
months ago -- and now that I poke around the web and usenet I see that
many others have discussed it a tiny bit. In such a worst case where
copyrights are indefinite, perhaps a property tax on copyright owners
might be enacted as a last resort, where rights holders get to choose an
assessed value for having the monopoly of all rights to the work, and
rights holders pay some percentage (1%?) per year of that assessment,
with the restriction then rights holders have to release the work to the
public domain if a payment to them is made for the assessed amount.
Possibly the assessment would be broken down into rights categories, so
that there could be payments for freeing specific subrights -- like
non-commercial use. This category approach would allow a work to be
bought into the public domain in stages.
For example, if the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust puts, say, a
million dollar valuation on the "Skills of Xanadu" story (ironically
about freedom) relative to releasing it into the public domain (say, so
they could pursue movie rights for it), at an "intellectual monopoly"
tax rate of 1%, the trust would have to pay $10000 per year to keep the
monopoly. But if the Trust puts only a $1000 value on "The Skills of
Xanadu" to avoid significant taxes (only $10 a year then), I'd take out
my checkbook, maybe along with some other fans, and it would be free
today.
Note this assessed amount is for release into the public domain, not
necessarily the amount to be paid by someone else who wants the monopoly
transferred to them, which might be higher or lower, just like what real
estate sells for isn't necessarily the assessed rate. Since it it hard
to assess the value of a copyright, let the rights holder do it, as long
as this public domain buyout clause was in place to prevent overly low
self assessment of monopoly value.
If some people call patents and copyrights "intellectual property" (yes,
I know that term begs the question of how to handle them) then why not
laugh at them and just tax ownership of such "property"? After all, just
like real estate owners pay taxes to offset the heavy continual burden
their property puts on society (a need for police, fire departments,
water, roads, sanitation, planning boards, zoning, local schools, etc.),
there is a heavy continual burden on society for enforcing copyright
(prisons for infringers, costs of salaries for judges in court cases,
the time cost to individuals of making fair use determinations,
government subsidized distribution channels like the internet, the need
for the government to maintain accurate records, lawmaker's time, etc.)
which ideally should be born by copyright holders as opposed to the
general public.
Yes, I know such a tax might wreck havoc with the GPL or other freely
licensed software too. Most GPL copyright holders would probably need to
set their copyright assessment prices low and risk public domain
buyouts. And there are issues with previously selling off exclusive
rights separately to a work (although such rights holders could pay part
of the tax.) And there are issues with incrementally developed works, or
works with multiple copyright holders...
Still, the big issue is that the cost to society of the copyright
monopoly on any work is potentially high, and the person who should be
paying that social cost is really the rights holder, rather than passing
on external costs to others, as a form of social pollution. Some would
argue rights holders already paid a copyright tax when they registered.
Yet, people who get real estate pay a title transfer fee (sort of like a
copyright registration or renewal fee) but they still pay property taxes
afterwards too. If there was no records of taxes paid on a copyright,
it could be presumed public domain, or the copyright owner could be
pursued for tax evasion (until they disclaimed it to the public domain,
of course). This would make the state of copyright much clearer than the
current situation where it is very expensive to determine if a work is
under copyright, and if so, who currently owns it and how to contact
them. With real estate, all this is a matter of public record.
When registering to pay "intellectual property" taxes for their
monopolies, copyright holders might be required to deposit a complete
copy of the content and preferred form source in digital format in
escrow. This escrow would be in part to allow people wanting to use
public domain materials to easily search published content against
registered works. Escrow would also be in part to ensure the work would
be available unencrypted and unprotected when it became public domain,
such as if the rights holder stopped paying property taxes on it.
Perhaps the way to win the copyright battle, if all else fails, is to
give copyright holders what the want, then something else too that
naturally goes with it. Microsoft would have to put a price on releasing
the Windows source code to the public domain for example (including all
previous versions, which might have separate prices), and then they
would finally be forced to pay taxes. Yes, perennially people have
resisted taxes on capital, so it's an uphill battle, but it is another
front of the copyright battle to consider.
Obviously, stocks and bank accounts aren't often taxed by the federal
government while held (though some states do like with Florida's
"Intangible Personal Property Tax"),
http://www.myflorida.com/dor/taxes/ippt.html
so the argument would have to be worked through if the taxation was at
the federal level. And of course this makes the government meddle more
in everyone's affairs (at least, those claiming copyrights or software
patents) but maybe that's OK considering the alternative in this case
and how much they meddle already.
And, while I'm dreaming
monopoly tax could be used to fund more free software and free content
(and the other half would go to pay down the Federal deficit).
Note: even with laws like the above, I would support some form of
author's moral rights regarding their works, enforced separately from
copyright.