The cultural enterprise is a very different world. It is and will remain hand-craft. So is knitting, but when someone sells a hand-knitted sweater, they're not given life-long rights to decide the uses you may make of that sweater. Live performance. A live performance isn't an intellectual work - it's a physical performance. You cannot actually copy and sell a live performance because by the time this product reaches a consumer it is, by definition, no longer live. People will continue to pay for live performances even if there is no copyright. In fact, especially if there is no copyright, but now we're veering a bit off course.
I just don't understand the idea that someone else has the right to profit from my invention/idea/song/poem or whatever else. One might see it as a necessary evil I suppose. It is imperative, if our society is to move forwards, that the barriers to furthering our culture are as small as possible. Copyright represents a substantial barrier to this progress, and when we are now moving into an age where _everyone_ can effectively contribute to our culture, it is important that they be given the opportunity to do so. This means that doing so has to be free of charge. The most effective way (and, really, the only way) to do this is to build upon what others have done before you. This means that the works of others must be freely available, not only to copy and distribute, but to build on as well. If the works of others are protected by draconian copyright laws, however, this is never going to happen. So copyright has to go so that we may move forward. I also see it as a bit strange that intellectual production should be so different from physical production. If you produce a hammer and sell it, no one would expect you to want to have a say in what happens to that hammer for the rest of its existence. There is no fundamental reason why ideas should be different. The only reason we have become used to that idea anyway is that we have had very ineffecient distribution systems that have meant that the author needed to maintain a monopoly at least until the product managed to reach the market. Today, intellectual production should be held to much the same standards as physical production: you produce an idea, you sell it to the most immediately interested parties (your most avid fans, the early adopters, etc.) and you move on to the next idea. You cannot rely on one single good piece of entertainment to keep you and your heirs wealthy for decades to come - instead you must keep producing on a regular basis. Some superstars excepted, I don't expect this model is too different from what is actually happening today anyway. Non-superstar artists tend to have to produce new stuff and/or keep doing live performances and the like to make ends meet already. Copyright is only there to provide for the middle man (distributor) and he is not needed anymore so copyright can go.
If people are interested in spending money on something that I produce, I should be the one getting the money, not some no-talent dork who can only copy my cd's and sell them a little cheaper than me. I can understand why people feel like this but, again, just because people feel they shold get lots of stuff is no reason to give it to them. It is not necessary to give you a monopoly on the artistic stuff you produce, so why should we? If a talentless dork does a better job of distributing your stuff, then it is beneficial for society that he be the one doing this rather than you. If the Foo Fighters have a great song that everyone wants, they should have the right to make the money from the song. They should have this right, of course, but then so should everyone else. Unless Foo Fighters are completely inept at distribution, chances are they will be among the people who make the most profit from it since they are the ones in the public eye. Most music fans would prefer to get their stuff from their idols rather than from some third party. However, if anyone can copy and give away or sell the song on any media, then the band loses money . .. They do not lose money. What happens is that they earn less money -- _perhaps_. It isn't necessary that Foo Fighters make $millions, it is only necessary that they make enough so they'll find it worthwhile to continue producing music. . . . and will lose the incentive. Only if they make too little money. This is unlikely to happen unless they are either crap artists or have an abysmal online presence. Just a nit-pick here, but copyright is not just a "legislated" thing, it's a constitutional thing. I don't live in the US so this isn't much of an issue to me personally. I do believe the US constitution says that copyright _can_ exist though, not that it _must_. The reason it says this is presumably that the founding fathers realised that Copyright is a direct threat to everyone's basic rights and so for congress to be allowed to instate it, the Constitution had to explicitly say that they could (or else they would have been barred from doing so by the wording of the 10th or 11th amendment, can't remember off hand).
I am inclined to agree that the sledgehammer that is copyright may have been necessary in the past, for the reasons that you mention, but this is no longer the case. Copyright is only necessary so long as distribution is expensive since you need a middle man to carry out a very expensive and tricky logistics operation for you. Copyright-granted monopoly is what ensures this middle man that his investment enjoys some form of protection. With effortless distribution over electronic media, however, that middle man is no longer necessary. The author/artist/etc can reach out directly to his audience and collect payment from them. This leaves a system that requires much less profits than what used to be the case in order to encourage production of entertainment works. The fact that large numbers of people will obtain the product for free in such a system is therefore of little interest, since no capital is needed to fund distribution anymore and so the $millions that used to be necessary to break even can now be counted in the $thousands. Note that I realize that e.g. bands would still _prefer_ to be raking in the $millions. It is not, however, necessary for society to provide for this to happen since sufficient quantities of skilled artists will be quite happy to settle for $thousands and why should we pay more than we have to?
If I can't be guarenteed that I would be the sole owner of something that I create, I would have little profit incentive to create it. There are two immediate things to say about this. First: if, as you claim, there would be no incentive for you to create the good, then clearly you shouldn't. If people are not interested in spending money on it (thereby creating the incentive) then your good is useless and we're all better off if you spend your time doing something useful instead. Second: Since there is in fact (or so I assume) a demand for entertainment products, you _will_ most likely find a market for your goods (if you're any good) and so there _will_ be incentive for creating them. The fact that you won't be the only one earning money from marketing these products is neither here nor there. While I can understand that people have a pathological desire to "control" that which they "create", there is no need to legislate this urge.
Copyright laws institute monopolies on cultural goods and as such represent the antithesis of capitalism. In a capitalist system, anyone would be entitled to manufacture and offer the goods for sale. Supply would then fluctuate with general interest in the goods and the profit that could be made from providing them, unlike the fixed pricing schemes we are seeing with today's monopolistic situation. Of course, part of the point of a capitalist system would be that we'd get affordable items - it isn't difficult to understand why the entertainment industry would rather maintain the status quo.
The person in the picture only gets a veto if he is the main object of the picture. Street scenes, etc., as well as pictures of legitimate interest to the public are exempt. There is a list of exemptions and also, I am sure, numerous precedents on where the line is to be drawn. I agree wrt surveillance. Surveillance cameras on buses is one of the reasons I always ride my bike to wherever I want to go. I'm opposed to being under automated surveillance in general and I'm certainly not going to pay for a bus ticket just so I can have the privilege of being on video tape . . .
Your face is not an artistic creation (...) so I don't see how copyright is involved. I agree it's a strange place for this sort of law. I'd put it in a set of laws intended to protect people's privacy. (...) Privacy can't be an issue if you were in a public place. I heartily disagree with this as I feel that people have a right to be protected also in public places, but let's leave it at that: I'll vote for my people, you'll vote for your people, and we'll both bitch and moan about the results:-)
I find your view intriguing, seeing as this is pretty much the only part of our copyright law that I see any reason to hang on to:-) But then as part of privacy laws.
Your face belongs to you, a photograph of it taken in a public place does not. It does in Norway (to the extent that "IP" is "owned"), so it really boils down to where you're sued and what their laws are. I wouldn't expect this sort of law to be uncommon since there is an obvious need to protect people from their likeness being plastered all over the place without their consent.
While I know nothing of the case in question, many people like to take pictures of themselves in front of interesting sculptures, buildings, etc. These items, or their design, may be under some sort of copyright or other protection that means that someone other than you holds some rights to your picture. Another example of this would be if you took a picture in Norway that prominently displayed, among other things, me. Even if you are also in the picture, I may hold some rights to it since my face is in it.
Norway adheres to the Berne convention (or did last time I looked anyway) and if you take a picture of another person here, that person has a copyright on the picture. So does the person that took the picture, apparantly, but the person in the picture can veto any publication etc.
Of course, there is a lot of leeway for the media to use pictures that are in the public interest etc. even if the copyright holder might object, but the basic law is quite clear.
when you send me nude pics of your beautiful 300 lb naked self, you have no right to tell me what to do with them. In Norway, people automatically have copyright on any picture that is (mostly) of themselves. If this is also the case in the jurisdiction(s) in question, then the above is not the case.
Maybe the problem is that most governments are crap at running things. Most monopolies will tend to be crap at running things:-) They're often good at generating revenue though.
One of the main problems with classical economic thinking is that it assumes all people are 100% selfish. While this may make for some useful models, it can also lead to some astonishingly erroneous conclusions. I have seens studies done on people's behaviour in various social situations and it would appear that about 40% of us are quite cooperative people who don't go out of our way to get a free lunch but rather prefer to pay up even when we could have chosen not to. This is the demographic you would be selling to in a non-copyright, non-DRM world. That there are then 60% who may or may not get the product without paying for it is of little interest except to pathological control freaks.
The question, as always when discussing copyleft, is whose freedom to conserve/constrain. The GPL conserves the freedom of the user of software at the (apparant and short-term) expense of the freedom of the software's author. The copyleft idea is therefore, in principle, to cull Stalin's freedom in favour of increasing the freedom of Soviet citizens:-)
And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired. That one sentence manages to sum up the exact reason why DRM-encumbered western societies of the future will find themselves severely outclassed by those cultures that can manage to maintain a free exchange of ideas. While the other cultures continue to develop, we're setting up to fire (and even jail) our teachers. And all just because a bunch of suits find this to be an opportune way to guarantee their own profits.
First, I must apologize for the lateness of my reply. Been busy.
The GPL uses the power of copyright to enforce certain goals. If copyright loses force, the GPL loses force.
That will not matter since the GPL will have become largely unnecessary. While the new world without copyright will have problems of its own (see below), it will have far fewer of them than the one we have today.
With no copyrights, Microsoft could take FSF software, change it, and sell the result without releasing source code. RMS would not be pleased.
Microsoft would have the edge for all of two weeks before its source code is leaked and the world can freely use its code if it so desires. RMS wins in the end, and that's basically what he cares about.
The one drawback to no-copyrights and no-GPL is that there will be no obligation for anyone to release their source code. If you can get it, you can use it (trade secret legislation might complicate things a little), but it could take a while for it to leak out. This seems considerably less incapacitating than the complete ban we'd be facing today.
Note that their program would invalidate Creative Commons and the GPL as well. More importantly, their program would make both Creative Commons and GPL redundant. With no copyrights, everything would be in the commons, so a separate "Creative Commons" would not be necessary. The only reason we need the GPL is because commercial interests use copyright to artificially restrict their customers' freedom to do as they wish with their products. Abolishment of copyright would be a decisive victory both for CC and GPL.
Your objection points at yet another way in which the original question is flawed: it assumes that there are fixed points in a species history at which another species suddenly comes forth. This is generally not what happens. In the case of the chicken, chances are that the pre-chicken is so like the chicken they would be considered the same species. The whole idea that one can draw a line at some point and create a sharp divide between one species and another is born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution actually works and is problematic to use as an argument against evolution. In summary, the chicken and egg paradox falls to pieces when one realizes that it fails to define what a "chicken" is, exactly, and without a very precise definition, we will find it impossible to go back in history and find one specific birth (or reasonably small set of births) in which "the chicken" came into being.
BSD-like licenses are an attempt to make developers more free to do what they want with a piece of source code they come across. It's an admirable goal, but it falls down because 99% of us are not developers. This is true. RMS' focus is freedom for users, not freedom for developers.
If the GPL was about 100% freedom and choice, it would be called the BSD license.
Well, there's freedom and then there's freedom. It is generally not desirable that people have the freedom to take other people's freedom away, and this is what the GPL addresses which BSD does not.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
I write stuff I couldn't possibly perform.
As does Britney Spears, but that doesn't stop her from "performing" her songs and raking in cash for it.
(Well, ok, perhaps she doesn't write it herself, but you get the point.)
Surprisingly often, a personal appearance is all people really want. They don't necessarily care that the music they hear is playback. But for them to want to see you in the first place, it is presumably useful that they had a chance to fall in love with your music first. Distributing free MP3s seems a decent enough way to achieve this.
Paul's idea that if you are against software patents you are against patents is just wrong.
His claim is too theoretical. The distinction between good fields for patents and bad fields for patents is a practical one: if it is practical for everyone to experiment and innovate within the field at low to medium cost, then patents will be harmful. Ideas and innovation will be so abundant within such a field that offering temporary monopoly as an incentive for people to document their inventions will be redundant. The inventions will come anyway.
Today, this may only be relevant for software, but that will change. Once we start getting affordable high-quality 3D printers (aka prototyping machines), the same will happen for simple mechanical devices. The day we get affordable printers that can print functional microcircuitry, it will happen for electronics.
Software patents need to go for this reason, and we need to realise that patents will need to go for other fields in the future, as these fields become easily accessible to the average citizen.
Software patents are bad, except when they hurt the big guys. Hypocrisy anyone?
That isn't hypocrisy so much as it represents a pragmatic solution to the problem. The more big corps are hurt by current patent laws, the more probable that the laws will be changed. It may be a painful cure, but it is a cure all the same. (Depending on what comes to replace them anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
The cultural enterprise is a very different world. It is and will remain hand-craft.
So is knitting, but when someone sells a hand-knitted sweater, they're not given life-long rights to decide the uses you may make of that sweater.
Live performance.
A live performance isn't an intellectual work - it's a physical performance. You cannot actually copy and sell a live performance because by the time this product reaches a consumer it is, by definition, no longer live.
People will continue to pay for live performances even if there is no copyright. In fact, especially if there is no copyright, but now we're veering a bit off course.
I just don't understand the idea that someone else has the right to profit from my invention/idea/song/poem or whatever else.
One might see it as a necessary evil I suppose. It is imperative, if our society is to move forwards, that the barriers to furthering our culture are as small as possible. Copyright represents a substantial barrier to this progress, and when we are now moving into an age where _everyone_ can effectively contribute to our culture, it is important that they be given the opportunity to do so. This means that doing so has to be free of charge. The most effective way (and, really, the only way) to do this is to build upon what others have done before you. This means that the works of others must be freely available, not only to copy and distribute, but to build on as well.
If the works of others are protected by draconian copyright laws, however, this is never going to happen. So copyright has to go so that we may move forward.
I also see it as a bit strange that intellectual production should be so different from physical production. If you produce a hammer and sell it, no one would expect you to want to have a say in what happens to that hammer for the rest of its existence. There is no fundamental reason why ideas should be different. The only reason we have become used to that idea anyway is that we have had very ineffecient distribution systems that have meant that the author needed to maintain a monopoly at least until the product managed to reach the market.
Today, intellectual production should be held to much the same standards as physical production: you produce an idea, you sell it to the most immediately interested parties (your most avid fans, the early adopters, etc.) and you move on to the next idea. You cannot rely on one single good piece of entertainment to keep you and your heirs wealthy for decades to come - instead you must keep producing on a regular basis.
Some superstars excepted, I don't expect this model is too different from what is actually happening today anyway. Non-superstar artists tend to have to produce new stuff and/or keep doing live performances and the like to make ends meet already. Copyright is only there to provide for the middle man (distributor) and he is not needed anymore so copyright can go.
If people are interested in spending money on something that I produce, I should be the one getting the money, not some no-talent dork who can only copy my cd's and sell them a little cheaper than me. .
I can understand why people feel like this but, again, just because people feel they shold get lots of stuff is no reason to give it to them. It is not necessary to give you a monopoly on the artistic stuff you produce, so why should we? If a talentless dork does a better job of distributing your stuff, then it is beneficial for society that he be the one doing this rather than you.
If the Foo Fighters have a great song that everyone wants, they should have the right to make the money from the song.
They should have this right, of course, but then so should everyone else. Unless Foo Fighters are completely inept at distribution, chances are they will be among the people who make the most profit from it since they are the ones in the public eye. Most music fans would prefer to get their stuff from their idols rather than from some third party.
However, if anyone can copy and give away or sell the song on any media, then the band loses money . .
They do not lose money. What happens is that they earn less money -- _perhaps_. It isn't necessary that Foo Fighters make $millions, it is only necessary that they make enough so they'll find it worthwhile to continue producing music.
. . . and will lose the incentive.
Only if they make too little money. This is unlikely to happen unless they are either crap artists or have an abysmal online presence.
Just a nit-pick here, but copyright is not just a "legislated" thing, it's a constitutional thing.
I don't live in the US so this isn't much of an issue to me personally. I do believe the US constitution says that copyright _can_ exist though, not that it _must_. The reason it says this is presumably that the founding fathers realised that Copyright is a direct threat to everyone's basic rights and so for congress to be allowed to instate it, the Constitution had to explicitly say that they could (or else they would have been barred from doing so by the wording of the 10th or 11th amendment, can't remember off hand).
I am inclined to agree that the sledgehammer that is copyright may have been necessary in the past, for the reasons that you mention, but this is no longer the case.
Copyright is only necessary so long as distribution is expensive since you need a middle man to carry out a very expensive and tricky logistics operation for you. Copyright-granted monopoly is what ensures this middle man that his investment enjoys some form of protection.
With effortless distribution over electronic media, however, that middle man is no longer necessary. The author/artist/etc can reach out directly to his audience and collect payment from them. This leaves a system that requires much less profits than what used to be the case in order to encourage production of entertainment works.
The fact that large numbers of people will obtain the product for free in such a system is therefore of little interest, since no capital is needed to fund distribution anymore and so the $millions that used to be necessary to break even can now be counted in the $thousands.
Note that I realize that e.g. bands would still _prefer_ to be raking in the $millions. It is not, however, necessary for society to provide for this to happen since sufficient quantities of skilled artists will be quite happy to settle for $thousands and why should we pay more than we have to?
If I can't be guarenteed that I would be the sole owner of something that I create, I would have little profit incentive to create it.
There are two immediate things to say about this. First: if, as you claim, there would be no incentive for you to create the good, then clearly you shouldn't. If people are not interested in spending money on it (thereby creating the incentive) then your good is useless and we're all better off if you spend your time doing something useful instead.
Second: Since there is in fact (or so I assume) a demand for entertainment products, you _will_ most likely find a market for your goods (if you're any good) and so there _will_ be incentive for creating them.
The fact that you won't be the only one earning money from marketing these products is neither here nor there. While I can understand that people have a pathological desire to "control" that which they "create", there is no need to legislate this urge.
Copyright laws institute monopolies on cultural goods and as such represent the antithesis of capitalism. In a capitalist system, anyone would be entitled to manufacture and offer the goods for sale. Supply would then fluctuate with general interest in the goods and the profit that could be made from providing them, unlike the fixed pricing schemes we are seeing with today's monopolistic situation.
Of course, part of the point of a capitalist system would be that we'd get affordable items - it isn't difficult to understand why the entertainment industry would rather maintain the status quo.
The person in the picture only gets a veto if he is the main object of the picture. Street scenes, etc., as well as pictures of legitimate interest to the public are exempt. There is a list of exemptions and also, I am sure, numerous precedents on where the line is to be drawn.
I agree wrt surveillance. Surveillance cameras on buses is one of the reasons I always ride my bike to wherever I want to go. I'm opposed to being under automated surveillance in general and I'm certainly not going to pay for a bus ticket just so I can have the privilege of being on video tape . . .
Your face is not an artistic creation (...) so I don't see how copyright is involved. :-)
I agree it's a strange place for this sort of law. I'd put it in a set of laws intended to protect people's privacy.
(...) Privacy can't be an issue if you were in a public place.
I heartily disagree with this as I feel that people have a right to be protected also in public places, but let's leave it at that: I'll vote for my people, you'll vote for your people, and we'll both bitch and moan about the results
I find your view intriguing, seeing as this is pretty much the only part of our copyright law that I see any reason to hang on to :-)
But then as part of privacy laws.
Your face belongs to you, a photograph of it taken in a public place does not.
It does in Norway (to the extent that "IP" is "owned"), so it really boils down to where you're sued and what their laws are. I wouldn't expect this sort of law to be uncommon since there is an obvious need to protect people from their likeness being plastered all over the place without their consent.
While I know nothing of the case in question, many people like to take pictures of themselves in front of interesting sculptures, buildings, etc. These items, or their design, may be under some sort of copyright or other protection that means that someone other than you holds some rights to your picture.
Another example of this would be if you took a picture in Norway that prominently displayed, among other things, me. Even if you are also in the picture, I may hold some rights to it since my face is in it.
Norway adheres to the Berne convention (or did last time I looked anyway) and if you take a picture of another person here, that person has a copyright on the picture. So does the person that took the picture, apparantly, but the person in the picture can veto any publication etc.
0 2-eng.pdf
In Norwegian here:
http://lovdata.no/all/hl-19610512-002.html#45c
In English (but unoffical I expect):
http://www.ub.uio.no/ujur/ulovdata/lov-19610512-0
(para 45c)
Of course, there is a lot of leeway for the media to use pictures that are in the public interest etc. even if the copyright holder might object, but the basic law is quite clear.
when you send me nude pics of your beautiful 300 lb naked self, you have no right to tell me what to do with them.
In Norway, people automatically have copyright on any picture that is (mostly) of themselves. If this is also the case in the jurisdiction(s) in question, then the above is not the case.
Maybe the problem is that most governments are crap at running things. :-)
Most monopolies will tend to be crap at running things
They're often good at generating revenue though.
One of the main problems with classical economic thinking is that it assumes all people are 100% selfish. While this may make for some useful models, it can also lead to some astonishingly erroneous conclusions.
I have seens studies done on people's behaviour in various social situations and it would appear that about 40% of us are quite cooperative people who don't go out of our way to get a free lunch but rather prefer to pay up even when we could have chosen not to. This is the demographic you would be selling to in a non-copyright, non-DRM world.
That there are then 60% who may or may not get the product without paying for it is of little interest except to pathological control freaks.
The question, as always when discussing copyleft, is whose freedom to conserve/constrain. :-)
The GPL conserves the freedom of the user of software at the (apparant and short-term) expense of the freedom of the software's author.
The copyleft idea is therefore, in principle, to cull Stalin's freedom in favour of increasing the freedom of Soviet citizens
And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired.
That one sentence manages to sum up the exact reason why DRM-encumbered western societies of the future will find themselves severely outclassed by those cultures that can manage to maintain a free exchange of ideas. While the other cultures continue to develop, we're setting up to fire (and even jail) our teachers.
And all just because a bunch of suits find this to be an opportune way to guarantee their own profits.
First, I must apologize for the lateness of my reply. Been busy.
The GPL uses the power of copyright to enforce certain goals. If copyright loses force, the GPL loses force.
That will not matter since the GPL will have become largely unnecessary. While the new world without copyright will have problems of its own (see below), it will have far fewer of them than the one we have today.
With no copyrights, Microsoft could take FSF software, change it, and sell the result without releasing source code. RMS would not be pleased.
Microsoft would have the edge for all of two weeks before its source code is leaked and the world can freely use its code if it so desires. RMS wins in the end, and that's basically what he cares about.
The one drawback to no-copyrights and no-GPL is that there will be no obligation for anyone to release their source code. If you can get it, you can use it (trade secret legislation might complicate things a little), but it could take a while for it to leak out. This seems considerably less incapacitating than the complete ban we'd be facing today.
Note that their program would invalidate Creative Commons and the GPL as well.
More importantly, their program would make both Creative Commons and GPL redundant. With no copyrights, everything would be in the commons, so a separate "Creative Commons" would not be necessary. The only reason we need the GPL is because commercial interests use copyright to artificially restrict their customers' freedom to do as they wish with their products.
Abolishment of copyright would be a decisive victory both for CC and GPL.
Your objection points at yet another way in which the original question is flawed: it assumes that there are fixed points in a species history at which another species suddenly comes forth. This is generally not what happens. In the case of the chicken, chances are that the pre-chicken is so like the chicken they would be considered the same species.
The whole idea that one can draw a line at some point and create a sharp divide between one species and another is born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution actually works and is problematic to use as an argument against evolution.
In summary, the chicken and egg paradox falls to pieces when one realizes that it fails to define what a "chicken" is, exactly, and without a very precise definition, we will find it impossible to go back in history and find one specific birth (or reasonably small set of births) in which "the chicken" came into being.
BSD-like licenses are an attempt to make developers more free to do what they want with a piece of source code they come across. It's an admirable goal, but it falls down because 99% of us are not developers.
This is true. RMS' focus is freedom for users, not freedom for developers.
If the GPL was about 100% freedom and choice, it would be called the BSD license.
Well, there's freedom and then there's freedom. It is generally not desirable that people have the freedom to take other people's freedom away, and this is what the GPL addresses which BSD does not.
I write stuff I couldn't possibly perform.
As does Britney Spears, but that doesn't stop her from "performing" her songs and raking in cash for it.
(Well, ok, perhaps she doesn't write it herself, but you get the point.)
Surprisingly often, a personal appearance is all people really want. They don't necessarily care that the music they hear is playback. But for them to want to see you in the first place, it is presumably useful that they had a chance to fall in love with your music first. Distributing free MP3s seems a decent enough way to achieve this.
Paul's idea that if you are against software patents you are against patents is just wrong.
His claim is too theoretical. The distinction between good fields for patents and bad fields for patents is a practical one: if it is practical for everyone to experiment and innovate within the field at low to medium cost, then patents will be harmful. Ideas and innovation will be so abundant within such a field that offering temporary monopoly as an incentive for people to document their inventions will be redundant. The inventions will come anyway.
Today, this may only be relevant for software, but that will change. Once we start getting affordable high-quality 3D printers (aka prototyping machines), the same will happen for simple mechanical devices. The day we get affordable printers that can print functional microcircuitry, it will happen for electronics.
Software patents need to go for this reason, and we need to realise that patents will need to go for other fields in the future, as these fields become easily accessible to the average citizen.
Software patents are bad, except when they hurt the big guys. Hypocrisy anyone?
That isn't hypocrisy so much as it represents a pragmatic solution to the problem. The more big corps are hurt by current patent laws, the more probable that the laws will be changed. It may be a painful cure, but it is a cure all the same. (Depending on what comes to replace them anyway.)