Slashdot Log In
What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon May 26, 2008 02:18 AM
from the do-you-believe dept.
from the do-you-believe dept.
StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Time Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Company B does nothing with the patent license, but since A has licensed it to *someone* - it wont automatically go into public domain
3) Profit!
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as intellectual property and creative works are concerned, there are two ways to measure the value of those. The first way of measuring the value is to determine how much leverage you can achieve over your fellow man with them, how much they are willing to sacrifice to get it. That is a valuation based entirely within the system of property rights. But there is another way to measure the value. These types of works can also be measured in the advantage they bring humanity. The more people who are enlightened, entertained, educated, cultured, the more value.
The first type of value is entirely arbitrary. The intellectual work doesn't create the physical work that was used to pay, the amount available to pay was fixed before you came on the scene, and you will get less than is available, because the creator needs some too, and he's inclined to compete and give you as little as he can.
The second type of value, the real value, it is destroyed the more you restrict the propagation of the intellectual or creative work. Your neighbours become a little more barbaric, their lives a little more desperate, their minds a little more closed, their thoughts a little less effective. You cripple their capacity to be your allies and friends, and give them reason to wish to break the system and take the wealth that is being destroyed, because they know it's being destroyed simply because you would pay armed men to keep from them what it would cost you nothing to share with them.
Private property is a bad system. But intellectual property in its myriad forms is a needlessly destructive and utterly stupid system for any person to support who doesn't have harming their fellow man and keeping him small as an agenda.
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you kill a landowner for his land. Now the land is yours. The next generation has no land. Who do you think they will want to kill?
Sorry, I do not want a war every generation because people feel it's their birthright to have land. It is not. Study, work, make money, buy it. I did, why can't you? If you try to take something that is rightfully mine because you are too lazy to work for it, then I reserve the right to kill you.
That is the evil of Communism, when you think everything belongs to everyone, individuals have nothing and the government owns everything. Anarchic Communism is even worse, because everyone thinks they have the right to everything, and without any government to keep the order, we'd be in a constant state of war.
Parent
Re:Your are just totally wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's my air, you can't breath it unless you pay me rent. See how silly this kind of thinking is? The only reason people get away with land monopoly is because it's easy to enforce, try enforcing a breathable air monopoly. It's very difficult and you'd be right to kill the person that attempted to do so.
This idea that property is a natural right is a farce, can someone own the sun or instance? You didn't create the sun, nor the earth, nor even yourself. Do I have a right to own people because I worked and invested money and all the resources in them? By your logic slavery should be perfectly legal, and you can own people and can be treat them as objects.
The truth is property rights are inconsistent across the board, people are made of the land, and when you create another human being you're investing resources and you're labor, yet we no longer allow the ownership of people, yet all they are is re-organized land.
Property Rights are just our backwards rationalization trying to solve complex problems and jusfify ou dominance over others in a world of scarcity, prejudice and mutual distrust and stupidity. Property is a form of tyranny when in the hands if idiots no matter which way you slice it, individual property rights ultimately has to compete with the rights of others and the common good. Any property someone owns they did not create, they merely re-organized what already existed.
Parent
Re:Your are just totally wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how far back you follow the chain, nobody did. It was simply there. At some point somebody stuck a flag in it and said "This is mine, for no reason whatsoever other than that I'll kick your butt if you try taking it", and made that stick.
Parent
Agree and disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
IF other countries haven't had that sort of chain of events take place, then, they aren't going to have that. In Kenya, for example, all of the good land is locked up by giant estates that are descendants of their colonial forbears. This arrangement was set up by the imperial powers to create products for export back to the mother country and on the cheap. So, in Kenya, you have thousands of acres of the very best farmland growing coffee for export to the West, all owned by a handful of people, while the vast majority of the country starves. The problem in these countries, is that, what happens is that a marxist revolution takes place, and the "people" wind up owning the land, but in practice the people are just another small gang of thugs and for the average guy, the situation hasn't changed at all, except what little he did have was lost in the revolution designed to liberate him.
Quite honestly, in those countries, what is needed is a redistribution of land into private ownership. You can't have an equitable system of property rights without everyone being able to own some sort of property!
Parent
Re:Agree and disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have the answer either. But I find it amazingly arrogant to think that ones wealth is entirely due to oneself. That's nonsense. Most of my wealth is because I'm lucky enough to be born at the richest of all times (until now) in one of the richest countries on earth, with two well-educated parents, and am surrounded by a population that in general is well-educated.
None of this, or at best a miniscule fraction of this, is due to me. Had I been born to a single, uneducated teenage mother in Ghana, my life would've been very -VERY- different.
Yes, your own hard work makes a difference. But it's not by far the only thing that makes a difference. Infact even with the least possible own work, I'd have ended up better-off than 95% of the people in Ghana.
Parent
Re:In America we don't need kings for that (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference. No matter where you are in the world you're on land which was once someone else's, and they were murdered or enslaved to get them off it. In the US that's more recently true than it is in Europe, but it's also true in Europe.
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too).
If what you're saying is 'I believe in property rights, but only those rights which were established after my ancestors killed your ancestors', then I don' think you've got a very solid foundation for your rights.
This whole issue gets very complicated. Look at Israel/Palestine. The Israelis claim it's theirs, because their (cultural) ancestors were there first, even though they were driven out. The Palestinian Arabs claim it's theirs, because they've always lived there. Who's right? It turns out that the Palestinian Arabs are genetically closer to the ancient Jews than most modern Israelis are. So what counts, your genetic heredity, your cultural heritage, or your actual possession of the land? And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after?
I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either. It's just that they are currently in the process which mostly finished in Britain by the eighteenth century and in the United States in the nineteenth, of driving indigenous people off their land by force. We've all done it. Everywhere in the world it's been done. No-one's innocent. But before you start talking about property rights, when's the date the rights start from?
Parent
Re:In America we don't need kings for that (Score:5, Insightful)
The type of people who have the sense of entitlement to the property of others, usually aren't that productive or cooperative, otherwise they would have property for themselves. At least in North America, where the majority of the working class are middle-class.
Property is an intellectual tool, that allows the property owners to become more powerful than non-property owners, and one that promotes long-term activity in the population (savings, investment, etc.). Property wins the social-evolution test as a stable and effective social system.
Social systems where anyone is allowed to take anything they want from someone else, pretty much only exists in a handful of pre-industrial societies, or in places where society gets messed up (i.e. immediately post-Katrina New Orleans)
Parent
Re:Your are just totally wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You could say that, but you'd be wrong.
But the amount of wealth available to someone who works hard in the Congo is quite different from the wealth available to someone who works hard in the UK.
In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all.
Intellectual "property" is rapidly reaching the same state. Consider the notorious copyright on the century-old "Happy Birthday" song. It is currently owned by Warner Chappell, and you'd be hard pressed to show that the officers of that corporation have ever done anything that qualifies as "work" to realize the several million dollars in royalties that it brings them each year. OTOH, the Hill sisters that wrote the song never received any income from it at all, but as elementary-school teachers, they worked rather hard their whole lives (and produced the song as part of their job).
This is typical of how Intellectual Property actually works. The actual creators rarely realize any significant income from their creators; the income generally goes to the owners of corporations that control the mass-production and distribution channels. This control generally comes not from any sort of hard work, but rather from financial and political power that makes it possible for them to exclude competition.
Parent
Re:Meritocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
A trust-fund baby will spend more unearned wealth during their lifetime than a welfare mother could ever dream of.
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Interesting)
This reads to me like an excellent defence of patents. The whole concept of patents is that the ideas are out in the open, and the inventor can talk freely about their idea without worrying that they will have their idea pulled from under them by a larger competitor with more resources.
The alternative would be much as you describe, with inventors fearing to talk about their ideas lest they become public knowledge, and the inventor sees no return. It's a nasty world where NDAs roam free and lips are tight.
There's also the case of value. An idea might be intangible, but it obviously has value if it can generate a profit. There's also the real cost of intangible things such as technical and economic feasibility studies. An idea doesn't lead straight to a product, there is R&D involved. Here the cost is not tangible matter, but time and salaries.
The idea that only tangible things can have value is absurd. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that your house would still be worth the same amount after it had been knocked down - after all, all the material is still there. In reality, it is the architectural design of the house (an idea), and the man-hours involved in building it (time and salaries), that make up the bulk of its value.
Therefore, suggesting that you should be free to take my idea is tantamount to saying that you should be free to come along and knock down my house.
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Time Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to point out to anyone, that this is not a US-only problem, it's a problem for the entire developed world (and affects the rest).
If a new system is to be functional, it has to do two things.
1. Ensure that the creator is compensated for his time, and the uncertainty inherent to creating a new products and works of art.
2. Ensure that the public gets to enjoy this product once the creator has been compensated.
Intellectual property is a concept aimed at balancing the need to boost creativity to the benefit of the public.
Both patronage and intellectual property ensures 1. But intellectual property is starting to fail at 2 in more than one way.
The amount of "compensation" for the creative work, is in many industries currently pushed way beyond reasonable and DRM is an attempt to ensure that 2 will never take place.
One of the interesting aspects, is that most of the music we see today, is still a combination of patronage and intellectual property.
The recording & distribution companies, pay the artist to create works, but now patronage means that the artist loses his or hers rights to the music. I don't think this was the idea envisioned in Intellectual Property.
so what's better?
How on earth would i know, I haven't studied it intensively, and neither has most!
Parent
no more artificial scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
Now at the same time, Monsanto does not get to fly those seeds over random farms and drop them and then sue those farmers, thats bad business, so don't think I love this company, but dammit you fools, don't think some scientist in a lab didn't work their ass off to create this amazing thing. And dammit, they better make some money, otherwise all that scientist can do for a living is steal shit from you...course you live in a world in which there is no scarcity, so no one would ever steal from you.
Parent
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
A farmer in a community can't do without paying Monsanto royalty fees a few years after another farmer in that community decides he wants to use them.
That system is inherently flawed because the protected property will spread all on it's own regardless of the wishes of the original user or any new involuntary users.
Parent
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Interesting)
Copying, the action, the method, the process, of copying, is "IP" just as much as any product is "IP". So how is it all "IP" copies the ideas of copying and limiting copying?
COPYING IS PUBLIC DOMAIN TECHNOLOGY, with billions of years of prior art. And all "IP" claims are infringing that public domain technology, and are therefore invalid.
Stupid clueless IP proponent idiots are deaf, dumb, and blind as to how they are copying the ideas of others whilst crying like infant children how people copy them while refusing to see how they copy others. It's no wonder IP proponents get their clocks cleaned in debates on philosophical, ethical, economic, and scientific grounds. They are in one word, demonstrably "*dumb*".
Parent
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
Monsanto invested a lot of time and money making their seeds. They did.
You know what? For millenia, men have spent their entire lives breeding stock or hybriding plants in order to get what they wanted. Did they own the rights to every offspring? No. They got to sell that animal or plant once. They could keep the genetic line in their possession and only sell meat or flour or whatever, but once that thing was out in the world, it was everyone's.
Tell me one good reason why GE is different.
Parent
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Informative)
(Watch documentary "The Future of the Food" for more details)
The biggest problem here is how to revert to non-contaminated crops and how to prevent future contamination (aka stop the wind from blowing).
Parent
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahahahaha *excuse me*.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2) your seeds (yes, in some parts of the world part of the harvest is still used as seeds for the next year) will fail to germinate, forcing you to buy your seeds from somewhere else.
Parent
Re: Artificial scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
The keyword is 'exclusive', meaning only 1 person can use it at a time. If I use a car to drive from A to B, you cannot use it at the same time to drive from C to D. All physical property works that way, somehow.
Now for IP, many people think it's the patented/copyright work that is the 'property' in IP. It isn't - you can copy things anyway, so they're not really scarce. It is the right to determine who is allowed to make copies and when, that is regarded as 'property'. And this is exclusive. Only 1 person or organisation can hold the copyright on a work at any given time. This right is the (artificially) scarce item that is used/inherited/sold and so on. Once you understand this, IP makes perfect sense from a conceptual point of view. I don't like this concept, but it's perfectly in line with how people deal with physical property.
Where IP doesn't make sense, is from a practical point of view. Copyright may have served a purpose 1 or 2 hundred years ago, but times have changed. I have yet to see a convincing proof that the world as a whole has benefited from past IP laws. That technological/cultural progress would have been slower without it. In todays fast-moving society, it serves even less purpose. Countless patents fall in the 'obvious' or 'bound to happen sooner or later' category. Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free. Nor are there any objective standards used to determine IP protections. Protection periods aren't calculated or estimated for optimal effect, but lobbied by greedy corporations for maximum profit. As a result, society as a whole loses.
And then there's implementation. Take for example DRM: you hand a million customers identical 'black boxes' with identical locks, with identical content inside, then you give those customers identical keys, and you tell them: "now go open your box, but don't share what you find inside". Aliens would laugh at how silly this is. Or a company invests millions into development of a new drug, then brings it to the market, but not everyone profits because the poorest can't afford the high price. All the hard work has been done, the company wouldn't profit less if there where a group of 'freeriders' who can afford production costs but not market price, but still: millions are suffering because corporate greed is deemed more important than curing sick people.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers. In the mean while, I just try to ignore IP law as much as I can get away with (like so many people, whether they admit it or not).
Parent
Re: Artificial scarcity (Score:5, Informative)
Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.
I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.
In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.
In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.
Parent
7 years long enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Nowadays if a movie is good it makes a profit within a few weeks of its release. If it's not good, stop making bad movies then.
It is ridiculous that there should be a monopoly for > 100 years.
Think about it, if copyright only lasted 7 years, do you think Microsoft would dare release something as crap as Vista? They'd have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000.
If Microsoft won't want to play by those rules, I'm sure Apple or some others will be happy to take over.
As for patents and people talking about drugs needing long patent terms, the AFAIK drug companies spend more money on marketing (aka bribing doctors with goodies and holidays) than R&D, and FDA approval.
The goal should be innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The goal should be innovation (Score:5, Funny)
[!] ...and here I thought there was no reason in the entire world for me to support long copyright terms.
Parent
Standard answer (Score:5, Insightful)
IP = Information (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to control intellectual property, you need to be able to control the information exchanged between people. That is a very difficult thing to do, and may give you a totalitarian society as a side effect.
no scarcity (Score:5, Insightful)
property rights are important b/c of the problem of scarcity; if there were enough of everything, there wouldn't be fights over who owns what.
with intellectual property, there is no scarcity of the idea or musical recording or what not; it's free (or close to it) to copy.
IP (or some of it) can be arguably justified on purely utilitarian grounds to incentivize creativity, and certain rights are granted that are similar to property rights, hence the use of the word property, but the analogy is taken too far when people think of IP as actual "property"
Re:no scarcity (Score:5, Interesting)
For question 2, there are copyrights and patents to consider.
Copyright:
Eric Flint (who is an author himself) makes a pretty good case for 40 years' copyright on literary works, possibly with the addition that copyright does not run out during the lifetime of the author:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3 [baens-universe.com]
I think this argument can be extended to movies and music.
Patents:
I think those already do more harm than good. While patents help the inventor, they also can be used against anyone who made the invention independently and just was a bit slower to file for the patent. Which is compounded by patent offices handing out patents for far too vague ideas with too little explanation. That breaks the basic covenant that the inventor gives away his secret and gets a temporary monopoly in exchange.
Also, if you look at the history of important inventions, many of those pop up in different places at nearly the same time, not always patented. I take this as evidence that inventions happen when the time is "right" (the supporting technologies are there) and patents as incentive are not needed.
Overall, I think the patent system is counterproductive in most cases and needs to be abolished. With the possible exception of pharmaceuticals. In that field, the clinical studies take long enough that competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.
Parent
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Ben Franklin gave his inventions to the world, why can we not do the same? All IP is based on MINE MINE MINE and preventing people from building on your work as long as possible, under the self-interested characterization of other people as THIEVES until proven otherwise. All IP is based on rationalizations of this very selfish behavior.
We've had enough of compromise, all that has given us is unending nibbled-to-death-by-ducks as the lawyers extend and extend and extend the reach of copyright and IP and patents. Soon your great-great-grandchildren will be living off your IP which was never the intent. It always starts as "reasonable" laws passed to encourage innovation and then pass things into public domain as soon as possible.
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
Intellectual property compromises physical (Score:5, Interesting)
You can also look at ideas akin to something like fire. You take a candle and light another candle, and nothing was taking from the first candle. Ideas are the same - they are not a limited resource and thus should not be analogized to physical property.
I live in China right now, and the concept of intellectual property is relatively new here. It's a more natural part of Chinese culture to take ideas from each other. Instead of innovating into uncharted territory, Chinese innovate in place, creating immense depth within a single discipline, for instance martial arts, tea drinking, and calligraphy. This is because there are no intellectual property laws retarding development of these disciplines, and people have been copying and improving upon each others' techniques for thousands of years, spreading across a huge nation.
Chinese culture's reputation for the mysterious and secretive also comes out of this. With no protection of intellectual property laws, valuable ideas are kept secret through guilds and lineages.
Anyway just a few thoughts.
LS
Re:Intellectual property compromises physical (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, you can purchase a hard disk with the bits set randomly, but once you re-arrange the magnetic charges in a specific fashion, you are infringing upon someone else's rights. This goes to show that intellectual property is indeed an illusion. Shouldn't you be able to do what ever you'd like with that chunk of metal in your room?
These sorts of hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid. At the end of the day a human is just a bunch of atoms. Shouldn't I be able to disrupt those atoms the same way I can disrupt the atoms in my own house if I want? And before you start on who "owns" atoms, "ownership" is just an arrangement of neuronal connections in people heads. ENOUGH!
If we accept that we're talking about things at a human level, not at an absurd reductionist level, then both ownership and copyright are meaningful terms about which we are able to have a discussion, and neither is an "illusion" as you state.
Rich.
Parent
We HAD a solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Our system worked FINE. The Internet actually brought no new cards to the table except speed. I could go on about that one for a long time, and bring up copy protection in the context of player pianos (which court cases also involved patentability of "software"). But that would take up a lot of time and space.
In a nutshell: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke. But they did it anyway, since the mid-90s, all in the name of corporate protectionism and profit. And in the process, they broke it pretty badly.
The solution is simple: put the laws back the way they were, when they actually WORKED and we had, arguably, the best-working set of "IP" laws in the world.
That was sorta what I was wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
In the west we already had a concept of, basically: you bought _a_ book, you didn't buy the rights to the novel. You bought _a_ record, you didn't buy the rights to that band's album. You bought _a_ (copy of the) newspaper, you didn't buy _the_ newspaper. Etc. It worked. Most people could already wrap their mind around that.
We had a first sale doctrine that worked perfectly well with that too. Yes, you didn't buy the rights to the novel, for example, but you bought a book and you can do almost whatever you want with it. Resell it, lend it to your friend, read it to your kid at bedtime, etc.
Then came for example software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold, 'cause if we sold it you might think you bought the rights to Vista as a whole!
Exactly wth is the fundamental difference between buying a copy of, say, Vista, and buying a copy of Huckleberry Finn? I'll go on a limb and say that people would have had no trouble using the pre-existing concept for software too.
And then based on the license stupidity, we had increasingly stupid stuff snuck in as licensing terms, that no consumer rights law would have allowed otherwise. E.g., you can't resell it. (See the recent AutoCAD lawsuit, but also all the software where you have to use up a serial number to use it, etc.) You can resell your old book, your old vinyl records, even your old copy of The New York times if you find someone interested in that particular issue, but you can't resell your old copy of AutoCAD. 'Cause it's licensed not sold. Some presume to unilaterally decide what else you can run on that computer. (E.g., it's quite common for game copy-protections to just quit or do this and that to you, if they think you have a CD emulator running on that computer.) Or what they can do to your computer. Or what you can use it for. Etc. Everything that consumer protection laws gave you for books, records, etc, the license took away for software.
And now unsurprisingly we see the guys from the other media, essentially go, "wait, wait, you mean we wouldn't have had to give customers all those rights, if we called it a license too? Damn, we want some of that too!" All the aberrations and stupidities built on that fallacy for software, we're now seeing trickling back to, say, movies and music. They too want a DRM scheme to prevent you from reselling it. They too want to unilaterally require your DVD player to phone home and spy on you, 'cause, hey, if software can do that, they want it too. They too want a say in what you can use the DVD for, and in which devices. (See copy protected CDs which actually play a reduced bit rate MP3 instead of the uncompressed music, if you play them on a computer.) Etc.
Heck, even Sony's infamous copy protection rootkit was, essentially, just trying to get the same control over that music as they have over software. In a misguided and flawed way, to be sure, but they didn't do anything much more underhanded than their copy protection already does for games.
And methinks it's about high time to say a collective, "WTF?" Or rather, a, "No, you don't. You software guys learn to live with what already worked for everything else, instead of everyone else copying your invented loopholes. Yes, you sold a copy, not the rights to the program. We know that. That already applied to everyone who bought a copy o
Parent
The solution (Score:4, Funny)
Let's break it down... (Score:5, Interesting)
The concept has its merits, but RMS makes a good point here. Using the term "Intellectual Property" distracts from what we're really talking about: Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents.
And, within that, it's possible to break things down even more. Math should never be patentable. English prose should pretty much always be copyrightable. And so on.
I do believe IP -- especially copyright -- is a valuable concept. It's not equivalent to physical property. Specifically, copying something to which you do not have the right is not equivalent to physical theft -- and, more importantly, the only way to "steal" intellectual property would be to obtain legal copyright for something you shouldn't have.
And I believe we're far too early in the game to even know what the ethics around this should be.
In more depth: What I would do is remove DRM from the game, drop the minimum damages (whatever that's called?) for lawsuits, and try to educate the courts a bit on technology, so that real proof is actually required.
And then, I would let the content creators figure it out for themselves.
As a content creator, I would stop seeing piracy as anything other than a competitor, and start looking at what I can do to compete. For successful examples, look at real-world systems which don't have a serious piracy problem, and also don't employ any of the tactics we despise (DRM, etc). Big, obvious examples: Radio, World of Warcraft, most books, and some indie music sites.
Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine (Score:5, Informative)
Before reading some chapters from Boldrin & Levine I was somewhat convinced that copyright at least had some beneficial elements to it that should be respected and preserved, but they sure put the nail in that coffin too. They went through the origins of copyright as a *relaxation* to a censorship regime by the crown (IIRC), and it just went downhill from there. Now it just seems like copyright is extended to every damn little thing, and that wasn't the original purpose of it by far. While they don't prove that removing copyright would be beneficial to everyone, they take a shot at showing that it wouldn't be a total disaster to authors/artists. For everyone else, it wouldn't prevent new books from being written, new music from being produced, etc., and it would be a net gainer, by far.
If you have the time to read a 300 page book this summer, by all means at least read a few chapters of Boldrin & Levine. You will understand intellectual property much better and hopefully lose a few sacred cows in the process.
You can select what you may want to read from this landing page:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm [ucla.edu]
Re:Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, 20 of the 46 top selling drugs had no need for patents. These are things that doctors still prescribe or use like aspirin, insulin, penicillin, quinine, morphine, vaccines, vitamins, etc.
It claims 54% of new drug applications use active ingredients already in the market, the "innovation" being merely in dosage amounts or other incidentals.
The book says that 75% of drug R&D costs are for development of me-too drugs. The way I would explain this is this: a lot of otherwise unnecessary patents are filed on slightly modified drugs based on a successful earlier design. The new drugs are heavily promoted to doctors so that it can earn the company royalties while the old, perfectly good drug is ignored by the big name pharmas. Drugs are not developed as things that the whole society needs, but rather on the basis of marketability.
The book argues that clinical trials for new drugs could (and should) be paid completely by NIH grants, and this would remove the conflict of interest of having the drug company doing its own testing. Doing so would eliminate any need for drug patents to exist, because this is the cost that the companies are citing they would need to recover (the marketing cost being optional and really up to them to decide). The legal costs of fighting patents would of course also go away (too bad for the lawyers).
So yes, surprisingly they would still be invented. Then there's the question about whether the generics makers would take all of the profits. Think for a moment about how patents are filed, describing the drug in detail. Without patents, the first drug company to produce a successful drug would have a very large lead over the other companies. The others, once they see the drug is selling well would basically try to reverse engineer it, but in order to produce the drug in significant quantities they would have to retool their factories and that takes time. If typically takes the generics manufacturers about 4 years to get up to speed, and that's about half of the length of a drug patent period anyway. Overall, that means drug companies can still recover their costs, save hugely on legal costs and still make a tidy profit.
The upshot is that after 4 years any given drug of any importance would be very, very cheap everywhere and thus widely accessible by all economic strata.
Parent
Physical property and I"P" are INCOMPATIBLE. (Score:4, Informative)
Physical property and intellectual "property" rights are incompatible. You simply can't successfully have both - the one necessarily undermines the other, as Stephan Kinsella laid out. See http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/ [stephankinsella.com], particularly "Against Intellectual Property" [mises.org] [PDF].
Since the choice is ultimately between physical property rights and intellectual "property" rights (and of course I already think the latter are rather suspect for a number of other reasons) I simply choose physical property rights.
When people say "but I'P' is valuable!" I say - of course it is, each EU or US patent granted steals value from literally hundreds of millions of people's physical property rights. A patent lets you usurp the value of everyone's physical property - A patent, by definition, says "you can no longer make your physical property into this particular form without my permission".
An I"P" system is death of a thousand cuts to the physical property system. "Anarcho-capitalists" who think they can support both should get a clue.
Back to the constitution. (Score:5, Informative)
-jcr
False dichotomy! (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, by its very nature it would have to not be equivalent. For example, if I infringe your intellectual property, I haven't deprived you of the use of it, as would be the case if I stole your physical property. Since the natural consequences of infringement are different, it follows that the rights should not be completely equivalent. However, that's not at all the same as saying that there shouldn't be any intellectual property rights.
artificial scarcity and capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
so why then do we have IP at all? because capitalism can only deal with scarcity: you can not sell sand in the desert. this shows a principal problem with capitalism. and if you look a bit closer then you see that this does not only happen with intellectual goods but with almost everything that capitalism deals with: it introduces artificial scarcity:
- advertisement: to create new demand for mostly useless things where there was no demand before.
- war: the most effective way to create new demand: destroy what was there before, create insecurity and create weapons that "protect",
...
- crisis: like the bursting housing bubble...
- ....
my employer pays me to filter out spam for him. other people are being payed by there employer to send out spam. etc..etc..the capitalist system is fundamentally broken. every year 10 million people are starving even though there would be enough food to feed them all... capitalism just does not cater to those with no money...
our so called "democracy" is becomming more of a farce every day: voters being manipulated by $$$-media... those with enough corporations behind them have more money for their election campaign... this all leeds to the fact that you can only rule if you represent the profit-interests of the big corporations...
greetings mond.
Legal hang-ups (Score:5, Insightful)
Many Slashdotters are adamant in their assertion that intellectual property is not a valid right or concept. They often cite legal history, and technicly they are correct. However, it seems they are doing this more for rhetorical purposes, as opposed to actually caring about how the law is constructed. The argument usually goes something like, "IP theft isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement". I always like to counter this with something like, "would you rather I steal $50,000 from you or embezzle it?". It is readily apparent that the effect is the same.
Therefore, I personally DO recognize IP as a valid concept and right. If I'm the first cave-man to discover fire after rubbing sticks together for months, and you light your fire from mine without rewarding me, you do indeed take something from me. The fire-maker deservers to be fed from the next kill, lest the wheel-maker observes that the fire-maker starved, and decides to give up on his endeavor.
OTOH, when the fire-maker stomps out fires and demands a portion of the meat in perpetuity, he shouldn't be surprised when he gets clubbed on the head.
In other words--common sense.
Therefore, software patents -- get rid of 'em. They dont't incentivise. They just make software developers worry. Everybody knows it.
*AA enforcement? None on low-quality encodings that get radio airplay. Why? because you can already time-shift broadcast radio. Pulling it off digitally is really just the same thing, format-shifted. Same deal for music vids, which you could have legitimately recorded off MTV 25 years ago with your VHS (in fact, WB and some other studios are putting up their own YouTube channels with classic MTV vids, perhaps they finally are realizing it's actually good for their PR and not taking away from new sales). High-quality encodings and/or lossless recording should be more restricted. The penalty should be ordinary restitution: steal 100 CDs worth of music, pay 200 CD equivalent penalty. None of this $30,000 business for downloading one song.
IP in the music/vid business can be a *good* thing. Bits don't go to landfill. Availability of high-quality recordings in a manner that ensures payment will help that.
Abandoned works should lapse into the public domain, but registration shouldn't be required for copyright on each work. I could go on and on...
The short answer though, is common sense. Isn't it always? Unfortunately, it always seems to be in short supply. The laws are written by lawyers who are paid by businesses. Hence, all the legal hang-ups.
Ideas are not equivalent to property (Score:5, Insightful)
1) There is no natural scarcity of ideas. Taking a thing deprives the person it is taken from of its use. If two people share an idea, both have it and neither the less. The two outcomes are diametrically opposed, ideas are the opposite of property. They are not subject to property. Dissemination of ideas increases the sum of knowledge, whether for profit or not. The purpose of patent and copyright law is to maximize the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
2) To pretend that an idea can be owned as property suggests that one owns and has the right to exercise control over another's thoughts. This is absurd and unmanageable.
3) If an idea is property, there is no basis to suggest that ownership of an idea shouldn't be permanent and heritable as other property is. This would be an economic and social disaster.
etc.
The constitution provides a simple justification for granting a monopoly to an inventor on the use of their idea: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." This is a noble goal, one I think generally embraced be even the opponents of the current copyright regime. This suggests a simple and obvious test for laws meant to regulate the temporary monopolies: if a given law can be proven to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, we are fairly subject to the limitations thereof so long as we (We) agree with the goal of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. If a law regulating the free use and exchange of ideas cannot be proven to promote the progress of science and the useful arts it is wrong and unconstitutional.
intellectual property: enslavement of intelligence (Score:5, Interesting)
think about the phrase "intellectual property" for a moment.
intellectual. property. information. owned. intelligence. enslaved.
therefore, "intellectual property" is the "enslavement of intelligence".
this isn't some sort of waffly joke, the words "intellectual property" _say_ so.
the implications are quite straightforward: the use of the phrase "intellectual property" has behind it just as much enslavement and disempowerment as physical slavery.
* when you sign an employment contract, your "intellectual property rights" are taken away. you are given money, as a "sop". you cannot get any work anywhere else - you cannot get any money to live on - if you do not follow the "norm".
* when you come up with an idea, which you find that nobody is implementing, you are afraid to make money from it because there might be someone who will bully you into submitting to their will because there is a "patent" - a government-sanctioned right to bully - the owner of which has been waiting for someone just like you, so they can take money away from you.
ultimately, however, "intellectual enslavement" is driven by "maximisation of profit".
fortunately, there are solutions: read muhammad yunus new book, "creating a world without poverty", in which he describes "social business" as being "capitalism with non-loss, non-dividend" at its core.
if you have non-loss, non-dividend replacing "maximisation of profit" at the core of your articles of incorporation, then you do not have to suppress or own to "make money". you can cooperate with your former competition, working towards social goals.
it's a long story.
i'm not trying to be cruel or to troll (Score:5, Insightful)
i agree with you about ip, i hate it. i think ip law should be utterly destroyed. however, i object to your "i'm an anarcho-capitalist...". its your opening remark. and making it whiffs of desperation to be or feel different. i agree with your thinking, but the way you present yourself to the world is odious
your ideological self-description should be "normal". your radical agenda should be called "common sense". the point is, you are trying to appeal to other people, not distance yourself from them, and that's what you do, consciously, or subconsciously, you create a wedge, when you begin a sentence with this "i'm an anarcho-capitalist..." oh really? in other words, you're an average middle class suburban kid
do you want to destroy ip? or do you just want to tweak your ego? if you want ip destroyed, your job one is to make yourself appealing to the average joe. not drive a wedge against them. your ideology stands zero chance of succeeding in this world when you try to distance yourself from people rather than make yourself part of them. real politics trumps college aged identity politics
secondly, "anarcho-capitalism" is basically, somalia. sound superior? i thought not. so stop embracing ideology which appeal to college age kids with far too many textbooks and far too little real life experience. it is possible to destroy ip without becoming somalia. really. so lose the college age naivete
much like the college age girl who describes herself as a polyamorous bisexual and then becomes a suburban housewife with 2.3 kids and a dog in 10 years, you will be a cube dweller in 5 years if you continue calling yourself a bullshit label of "anarcho-capitalist". its not a real or valid ideology. its intellectual ephemera, fetishistic esoteric ideology, art house insularism. "anarcho-capitalism" is not a real, working valuable set of ideas. really. lose the bullshit label
i know you are going to be hostile to my words. i apologize if i sound too rough. i'm actually trying to be helpful and i don't know a softer way to say it. i think you will appreciate what i am saying one day
Re:Not much of anarcho in your capitalsm, is there (Score:5, Insightful)
An anarcho-capitalist who believes in IP is like a libertarian who advocates for a monarchy.
Parent