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Information Liberation 80

Posted by Hemos from the more-to-read-on-xmas-day dept.
Thanks to danny of danny's reviews for pointing that the full text of Against Intellectual Property (which we ran a chapter of back in July is online in full now.
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Information Liberation More

Information Liberation

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  • An awful lot of human progress over the last (pick a big number) years has been a process of creating abstractions. Those abstractions, if sharable, create economies. Economies then provide motivation for people to do things.

    The most obvious and simple is the abstration of value - and out of that falls the concept of money. A lot of things would not have happened were it not for that. Unless you believe human beings should still be living in caves, whatever you think of money, it's hard to argue that it isn't a very useful abstraction.

    Don't get me wrong, I think the notion of "owning" an idea is patently ridiculous (pardon the pun!). Rather like, oh, buying a piece of sky.

    But this is what human beings do - create "wrappers" (okay, I'm a programmer :-) around abstractions or sets of abstractions, and build economies of these abstractions.

    Is there a bad mapping here, taking a concept of posession that assumes only one owner can exist at a time, and applying it to a one-to-many relationship of replicable information? Sure (and that doesn't touch modifying or improving that information). But probably the only thing that will work to improve the situation is finding a way to wrap the concept of IP in some larger context (i.e. embrace and extend).

    There is another point to make here: By attaching value to information (IP), a purpose is served: Those who can benefit from useful information are motivated to filter for useful information, as well as (and perhaps more importantly) to generate information.

    Furthermore, witholding IP is useless in the long term. The oft cited example of the 100MPG engine is an example. Have there been technologies that were supressed because they would damage someone's business? I don't doubt it - the system has that perverse incentive built into it. But it is also counterproductive to do this indefinitely - at some point, either you will use it and derive an advantage, or someone else will route around you and accomplish the same end by other means.

    So I wonder if IP doesn't mostly increase latency between development and implementation. Sure that's not desirable, but it could be worse.

    If we would replace the concept of IP with [something/nothing], we would do well to consider how to preserve the incentives to create quality information (and please, don't tell me it will happen due to altruism! Altrusim is very real, but inherently unreliable). Show me a system that preserves the incentives to create valuable information in the first place, and I'll sign up!

  • "Against Intellectual Property" is actually only one chapter of Information Liberation. Others cover privacy [uow.edu.au], defamation [uow.edu.au], whistleblowing [uow.edu.au], and more...

    Danny.

  • All art is motivated by personal need.

  • Okay, so they observe that copyright and patent laws are being exploited by their Evil Corporation stereotype, that the laws are badly worded and that their intent is gone. Plus they can write a lot of rhetoric.

    But is the solution really to abolish copyright and patents? You won't prevent the Evil Corporation from making and profiting from the product, either manufacturing the formerly-patentable thing or printing the formerly copyrighted novel. All you "gain" is that the originator loses any compensation for spending their time thinking out whatever no longer is protected.

    They come off as a bunch of political quacks who prefer their utopian fantasy to dealing with reality.

  • I guess the "artists" that are left would be those pure artists who create for the joy of creating.

    Who live off the handouts of the rich and idle... Ah, to be back in medieval times!

  • Did those Renaissance cats need platoons of lawyers to protect their IP rights to keep the wolf from the door?

    Of course not: They created the art for the aristocrats and merchants which commisioned them. The aristocrats, in turn, got the money they paid the artists from their underlings who did manual labour.

    "Free" intellectual property is thus a child of oppression and exploitation. It saddens me that "liberals" promote this evil curse on the masses. 'Yes, you are starving, but look at the nice painting which resulted from the taxes I levied on you!'

    No one ever makes a living writing software if they allow it to be copied freely?

    Well, sure: You can just find someone willing to pay for it, like IBM or Microsoft, who make money in other markets. I believe a lot of insanely rich Colombian drug lords are in need of good PR, perhaps funding some open source efforts would be right up their alley?

  • Any system has flaws, the best ones tend to recognise it and provide for alternatives and outlets. Many of the problems described (information monopoly) exist because the law/structures passed were intended for a less sophisticated age (e.g. patent laws for when the US was entering an industrialised phase). The fact that we've advanced to the stage where there's a surplus of ideas means that we need to apply other checks/balances to maintain an equilibrium (e.g. anti-competitive laws overrides patent law). However, to point out the excesses exclusively without pointing out the benefits seems to be a little unfair. Without constant regeneration, even ideas and professional qualifications are effected by bit rot. That is why organisations/institutions wrre formed to persist ideas/property rights beyond any individual lifespan.

    Some of the thoughts are worth investigating IMHO. The concept of property laws come about because it was more efficient to separate beneficial ownership from control from operation (e.g. reflected in maritime law which followed owner-master-captain chain of authority/delegation). Intellectual property rights are merely a codification of the business practices that exist at the time (e.g. copyright with publishing). In practice the system generally works as the division of labor leads to specialisation and a much more professional conduct (e.g. many publishers will only work through an agent on the assumption that the quality/schedule is at least above a certain level). Writers (and musicians) may decry the heartless editor or music critic as self-appointed gate-keepers of public taste but they do serve a purpose in the appropriate context. History shows that given a relatively undistorted and open market, systems tend to self-correct whenever one group (whether studios or guilds) capture capital beyond a fair share relative to their value/specialisation (e.g. Napster). The answer is not the elimination of property rights but more careful thinking of how they can be expanded to consider new business models and practices in an electronic age. For example, many of the principles governing economics (e.g. negative externalities) have assumed that property rights led to resources which were excludable and rivalable. Perhaps new theories need to be developed for the other 3 possible combinations. Even OpenSource proponents (as ESR noted) hesitate to take over a project unless the previous author has shown it to be abandoned (squatter's rights?).

    LL
  • You would be perfectly right, weren't it for the fact that the DNA of these plants are being patented by Western corporations, who in turn try to enforce their patents in the Thirld World. And now you have taken away their plants.
  • Your logic is slightly flawed. You can be using freely available genetic material without even being able to spell your own name properly. It is called farming. You are suggesting that farmers in the Third World didn't farm indigeneous rice races before the generous Western seed producers dropped by to supply them the genetically modified rice races with exactly those traits only those indigeneous races posessed previously. What do you think those people ate before? Hot air or something?
  • I liked the section in Ch. 2 on participatory networked media. Slashdot doesn't fit the bill because of the centralized control and the fact that the moderation system tends to filter out content that is slightly outside the slashdot mainstream.

    However, slash-like technology could be adapted to give the type of functionality described in the IRG section (IRG means "information routing groups"). Imagine individual subscribers to slashdot being able to "pick" from among editors and moderators or use their personal scoring system for weighting the moderators' ratings. To be really cool, though, it would all have to be peer-to-peer. :)
  • Please people. If you don't allow for intellectual property and spesifically the ability to profit from that property, what is the alternative? Academia? gnu* and emacs are great for us, but my mom isn't going to use them. Do you really think Microsoft and Macintosh would have developed their software for free? While I agree that some of these patents are outrageous, that doesn't invalidate the principle of intellectual property outright. Free software serves the interest of the people who work on the software. Proprietary software serves the interest of the guy who pays for it.
  • The greatest talents have never needed money to motivate them...

    Ada Augusta

    Let's fill out Ada Augusta's name, shall we? Full name: Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace. Notice the Byron in there? The Countess? She was a member of the aristocracy, rich from birth.

    That's the problem. This argument is only valid for those with enough money to live comfortably without work. And I have to disagree about the programmers; people who hack away for hours without pay tend overwhelmingly to be students, either at private schools (they're funded by their parents, hardly a plausible foundation for a culture) or at public/state ones (funded by the government; virtually all those who argue against IP are in favour of smaller government, so I won't even argue this one).

  • Actually, this sort of thing is precisely the problem with intellectual property. The arguments /against/ intellectual property are usually the sort like: authors need it for protection, etc. But the fact is that authors rarely hold copyright; it is *publishers* & their ilk who hold it. Intellectual property is *theft*. Ideas are *stolen* from people who *created* them & who *use* them & they are then forced to license these ideas that are theirs to begin with.
  • Oh *really*? The scrutiny that you apply is, without a doubt, some of the most careful I have ever seen. Why is this absurd on the face of it? Is this really scrutiny? It is absurd precisely because it does not fit into your world view. Face the facts: the 1st world STEALS from the 3rd world. Products, life, & ideas. The 1st world IS, & there is NO doubt of this, trying to steal the strains of plants which have been bred through thousands of years by the people of third world countries, throw a patent on them, & call them their own. Then they will use the police & other state apparatus to ENFORCE their so-called ownership, their so-called rights, to these plants which they have STOLEN. It is pure theft, & the intention is as it has always been: another way to re-direct wealth from the 3rd world to the 1st.

  • Actually, it is you who need to do some clear thinking.

    The system that we have has not worked for the past 200 years. It has not worked for the last 200 years. It has been created in the last 200 years. It has been a gradual process by which the rich have stolen away our ideas & our work from us. It is much like the way in which peasants lands were inclosed in the 1500s & 1600s (or so) in England to create a capitalist system. Up until 200 years ago, people basically copied whatever they liked, copyrights did not exist. Great works were then created.

    Just last year, or so, Disney expanded the length of copyright. The process of turning ideas into property is still continuing, & it will continue, unless we reverse it. & we can.

  • That's a good point.

    Copyright, therefore, has another purpose besides encouraging people to create great ideas, right?

    I'm not saying that you have to agree with me; I merely posit the idea: perhaps copyright is just another way for the ruling class to create the idea that they `own' the things that we produce. Things like: cars, tvs, and ideas. They steal away from us the things we create; & then sell them back to us. Thanks.

  • You could make the same case that Honda Civics "want to be free" because they remain the most-stolen car year after year.

    But information has long been recognized by our culture as something unique. What happens when we try to substitute a material object?
    • "The cat's out of the bag." - "The Honda's out of the garage."
    • "The morsel of gossip spread from house to house like wildfire." - "The Honda spread from driveway to driveway like wildfire."
    • "The catchy tune was on everyone's lips" - "The Honda was in everyone's driveway"
    I think I could come up with better examples, but the point is clear: in common usage we recognize the spreading, expansionist nature of information.
  • Without some protection for the creators of information there will be no incentive to create any information.

    You just created some information: your post. What "protection" does that post enjoy? Yes, I know "Comments (C) the poster" but in practice are you expecting any compensation for it?
    Really, you didn't post to make money; you posted to make your opinion heard.
    Information does not want to be free; information is not conscious and is not capable of wanting anything.

    Information wants to be free in the same sense in which a compressed spring wants to extend and water seeks its own level. The statement is not a value judgement, but an observation of a constant force. All objects on Earth want to move towards the center of the planet - that movement can be prevented by tables, floors, dirt - but gravity is an ever-present force.
  • Unfortunately, the thinking in this book is a bit muddled, terribly one-sided, and quite vindictive. Throughout the book, the author spends many words decrying "corruption" without ever stating what he believes the word to mean. Likewise, the author appears to believe that all control -- even of one's own situation -- is inherently evil, to the extent that he does not believe that authors should have any rights to, or be able to control the use of, their own work. Nor does he propose any mechanism whereby creativity should be rewarded. Because he advocates the abolition of existing institutions (which have worked for hundreds of years) without suggesting viable alternatives, the author is promoting wholesale destruction rather than a better world.
  • >I'm going to guess that it's a mathematical necessity that you must have a fairly abundant material comfort before any serious full-time artwork gets done.

    You are quite right. It's pretty clear looking back through history.

    The Greeks and Romans kept rather peaceful empires, and we can see the fruits of their artists to this day. In the 500 or so years after the Roman Empire fell, very little artistic or intellectual progress occured in the western world (except in the Mideast, with the rise of the Muslims). Nuthin much happened until the late Middle Ages, as people were to busy farming and being oppresed to write great works of literature. Though, from the Renaissance until now, it's been pretty much constant progress. Progress doesn't happen without relative peace, because people are too busy with basic necessities to engage in idle intellectual pursuits.
  • > Very likely he needed a wheel for his own use/purposes, and when someone else said, "Hey, cool!" then he showed his neighbour how to carve one too.
    Did he just show it to them? Did he get something in return? How will we ever know?

    > Intellectual property or no intellectual property, the only way that you get to hear HIM singing HIS songs, is to buy a ticket to his concert. Seems obvious to me...
    Then I would never hear him. I don't go to concerts; I do not find them enjoyable. I listen to radio only when in the car. Thus, except for the VIVA Hits Collection I get every Christmas, the only time I hear something new is when I'm in the car.

    > I don't (personally) know any professional programmers. I know a lot of talented amateurs.
    I'm the exact opposite. I know lots of professionals, but no amateurs.
  • Ignoring the obvious 'Why?' and the ad hominim attack upon the previous poster, I'd just like to say that in the past X (where X is an arbitrary number) years, great works were created, and prior to X (where X is the same number), great works were created as well. The point? Well, I don't really have one, except to say that neither did you. Great works were created before the introduction of copyrights and great works were created after. Therefor, copyright has no effect on great works.
  • The only time I ever listen to the radio is when I'm driving in my car. At home, I have CDs and MP3s. That is all I listen to. I suppose I could listen to something else, but I don't have much inclination to. Thus, the only way for me to hear something new is for (a) a friend to send it to me or (b) to hear it on the radio. I'd rather not waste my bandwidth on something which I won't like. It's a gamble, but I'm happy to take it.
  • Perhaps the first wheelmaker, the first farmers, DIDN'T let others know how it's done. Perhaps the others reverse-engineered the process after examining things. Or perhaps the process was licensed out. It'd be great if we could find out, eh? :)
  • Would he have created the wheel in the first place if there was not some material incentive for doing so? ---> Very likely he needed a wheel for his own use/purposes, and when someone else said, "Hey, cool!" then he showed his neighbour how to carve one too.

    The "fame and glory" motivation is the only thing that gets them to perform in front of the rest of us. Otherwise they'd be jamming in their room, which does those of us who would like to hear some music no good. ---> A friend of mine does music. (I'm not the least bit creative.) He sells tickets to occasional concerts, and asks me, "Hey, listen to this and tell me what you think" if we have a drink together in the evening. Intellectual property or no intellectual property, the only way that you get to hear HIM singing HIS songs, is to buy a ticket to his concert. Seems obvious to me...

    It seems to me that if you take out the influence of material compensation for researchers we wouldn't even have computers today, much less the people who program them. ---> I don't (personally) know any professional programmers. I know a lot of talented amateurs. Everyone does it for the love of doing it. Hardware? Well, the example that comes to mind right away is the folks who work up clever methods for creating cabinets for Mame. Nobody makes money, everyone does it for the love of doing it.
  • It is tiresome to hear folks suggesting that artists and other creative folks should prove that they really do love what they to do by not deriving any income from their favored activity. Perhaps these are facetious suggestions, but they are, nonetheless, quite tiresome. It is, in fact, a great delight to be able to make a living by doing something you love to do. Everyone has to earn a living unless they are born to wealth. I recall with longing the period of my life when my wife would tell me, "They are paying you to play." I was an engineer-programmer at the time. So, quit sounding like idiots by claiming that if someone loves to do something, they should not be reimbursed for their efforts.
  • So the quality of a movie only depends on its budget? I've seen lots of good low budget films. In fact these tend to consentrate more on plot, and less on special effects. In addition. What are the main cost in the movie business? My guess is actor salaries. If movie budgets go down, so will these salaries. The audience wont suffer. Only the rich investors and overpaid actors. And still, the quality argument goes here. You want to see movies at the hitech cinemas right? You'll have to pay the studios to get access to these.

    In _my_ country almost no movie will earn huge amounts of money. But movies are still being produced. Go figure that one out. I'll give you a clue. Some people like to make movies. (where others like to make lots of money)
  • Do you think that people should work for free??? Because, that is the main implication of the article...
  • Did those Renaissance cats need platoons of lawyers to protect their IP rights to keep the wolf from the door?

    If we threw out every seemingly simple task that has been complicated by the presence of lawyers and intricate laws, would anything be left????

  • A much better fix for this problem would be to make it illegal to patent a naturally-ocurring product like the Arabica bean (this is probably going to end up happening, btw). Citing this type of IP *abuse* as evidence for throwing out the whole system is like trying to ban computer programs because they sometimes have bugs.
  • I thought Ani made most of her money off of her album sales, not her live shows. She plays some pretty small venues. And the only reason I bought a ticket for one of her live shows was because I had heard her records.

    Courtney Love fails to mention that no one would have bought a ticket for her show if they hadn't heard it on the radio first.

  • Most authors and composers have a day job, a relatively small number make enough money at it to make it their full-time profession.

    "Most people who play basketball do it in their spare time. Therefore, if we abolished the NBA, the quality of basketball players overall would not be affected. Michael Jordan would be just as good a player if he was only able to practice in his free time, between waiting tables for a living."

  • . Paying to get past this bottlneck between the artist and their (potential) fans is one of the things that putting your music on the Internet eliminates.

    Except that it doesn't eliminate it, it just puts it into the hands of the people who control Internet content rather than radio content.

    More to the point, what law are they going to be able to pass to prevent the inevitable?

    This actually is a solid point that you make: Theoretically I believe in gun control, in practice I know better. Same thing with copying, and I'm not sure what the solution is here. Gotta run.

  • The greatest talents......have never needed money to motivate them to create.

    The earliest artwork made by human beings, all those cave drawings, were made for the explicit purpose of gaining material wealth by influencing magical forces. The first written language, the first numbers that appear in history, were for tax purposes. I'm going to guess that it's a mathematical necessity that you must have a fairly abundant material comfort before any serious full-time artwork gets done. Ironically, you cite Lady Lovelace, an independantly wealthy aristocrat, as evidence that monetary compensation is not needed for quality intellectual work! In the meantime Shakespeare, Beethoven, and most of those Renaissance cats were workin' mainly to put food on the table and not just for the sheer love of creation.

    The best programmers today are no different; they would be hacking away whether someone was paying them to or not.

    1) Those 10 hours a day spent programming professionally now becomes two hours in my spare time at the end of the night after working 10 hours at a car wash. For those with families, programming becomes "something I did when I was a kid." 2) The only things that get programmed would tend to be the things geeks enjoyed programming, rather than the not-fun-to-make-but-necessary tools that non-computerati can't make for themselves.

  • If the man who had first created the wheel refused to let other people use it or know of it,

    Would he have created the wheel in the first place if there was not some material incentive for doing so?

    If fact, this is the right time to know how many musicians actually do it for the love of music, and how many for fame and glory

    The "fame and glory" motivation is the only thing that gets them to perform in front of the rest of us. Otherwise they'd be jamming in their room, which does those of us who would like to hear some music no good.

    but it is the work of programmers who did it for the sheer love of it rather than for money that has got computing to where it is today.

    It seems to me that if you take out the influence of material compensation for researchers we wouldn't even have computers today, much less the people who program them.

  • I guess the "artists" that are left would be those pure artists who create for the joy of creating. All the professional applied artists would disappear.

  • I didn't feel like reading that article/book (it is Xmas after all) but I wonder if these neo-libertarians are using too broad a term when saying ``intellectual property''. Some intellectual property is valuable to society, such as trade and service marks. Regardless of what you think of copyright, trademarks are extremely useful, even though they are abused somewhat by the occasional big company.

    Imagine that every time you had to purchase a good or service you had to make sure that what you were getting was the genuine article from a trusted source. The ``information gathering'' would be a huge waste of time and what if you made a mistake?

    I think whatever utopian ``new copyright'' we discuss (and it will probably never be more than discussion but still good to think about) must include some kind of ``trademark'' or ``attribution'' as an important component. For instance, Napster should discourage trading songs that are labelled incorrectly. A Metallica song should be attributed to Metallica, etc. In other words copying is copying, but plagerism is more like theft. If you were paying for your music, wouldn't you want it to go to the people who wrote it rather than someone claiming to be them? And if you were a musician, wouldn't you like to know that it was YOU people were praising (or paying, if you're into that :-) and not someone else?

    Also, we know software and business method patents are useless and stifle innovation, but what about patents on drugs? Is there any motivation for drug companies besides money? A single person may be philanthropic and want everyone to be healthy, but a profit-maximizing company doesn't want everyone to be healthy and thus put them out of business. I can't imagine someone in their bedroom inventing a drug the way I can imagine them inventing a crypto algorithm or a ``one click shopping'' method. Then again I know little about biology and medicine..another option is to have the government do drug research but something tells me this wouldn't work.

    Anyway whenever I hear someone who wants to end all ``intellectual property'' I wince because some is better for society than others. I think the founding fathers intended IP to advance society as a whole.

  • Its all very well saying "information wants to be free" and going along with all the open-source rhetoric, but at the end of the day unless someone pays the producer of the information to create it, the information won't get created.

    How do we know this is true? What if, as we reduce the amount of original information being created, there comes a point when people are willing to pay a little for some better information. I'm thinking of supply and demand, etc.

    What if, instead of waking up and declaring that all information was free, we simply took the world we have now and allowed digital copying. Would people really suddenly stop buying CDs entirely? I think we would just find a new equilibrium point and I bet it would leave everyone better off than the point we're at now. Or maybe it wouldn't, but anything is better than lawsuits and 70 year + life copyright terms that create monopolies in a supposedly free market.

    • the only way for me to hear something new is for (a) a friend to send it to me or (b) to hear it on the radio

      Do you really think Microsoft and Macintosh would have developed their software for free?

      for people like me with relatively mainstream tastes (WWF, Britney Spears etc) its all good.
    If you are really happy with what the corporations are giving you, I don't really know what to say to you. Good for you, I guess.

    I would never dream of violating the copyright of a Stephen King novel, or a Microsoft product, or a WWF pay-per-view. They can keep it all. Just don't expect me to go to the mat defending the "rights" of these corporations. These are people who make their living selling games to children where they get to play at ripping people's bodies apart, and they have total contempt for their customers. They see them only as components in a profit machine. Naturally the kids who are used like this have no qualms about stealing from the suppliers of this crap.

    Pointing out that Ada Augusta Milhous Nixon Herbert Walker Bush Couger Mellencamp Byron, Lady of Lovelace And Not A Bad Looker Either pursued a mathematics education and sought difficult problems is not a defense of aristocracy. It is just one colorful example of someone who did good work without needing greed as a motive. But if for you only the carrot and stick will make you take on challenges, and you are pleased with the quality of things created to maximize market return, then more power to you. You make an excellent consumer and an ideal employee.

  • I don't think Ani DiFranco [columbia.edu] spends a whole lot of time suing people for copying her music, and the link will give you a little more detail about how to make a living as a musician outside the mainstream. If you want you can sift through this list of bands [ram.org] who oppose copyrighting and see if any are making any money. My guess is that none own their own jet, I'll grant you that.

    You've defined your question in a somewhat difficult way, though, by insisting on an exception for "hippie musicians." You can take any example you are given and label them a hippie and therefore they don't count. The fact that they don't go around demanding royalties for their music can be taken as proof that they are hippies. So you want, what, like a Christian country western singer with a buzz cut who never sells recordings and only collects the ticket recipts? I'll go look; stay right there 'til I get back...

  • ...are so quick to wrap themselves in the flag and sing hymns to capitalism and the free market economy. Government protection of IP is a form of regulation over the market. In a completely free market, you could rip off all the IP you wanted and your victims would have no recourse except hiring thugs or a private army. Look at what China said when Microsoft tried to get them to pay licensing fees: "How many warheads does Microsoft have?" (Just think of all the differnt kinds of irony involved here!) If you are a proponent of laws to protect IP, you are a supporter of a mixed economy, and possibly even a socialist, because you recognize that laissez faire leads to undesirable outcomes and so the government must intervene. You pinoks make me sick! ;)

  • It's not entirely about the end of album sales, but the end of royalties. While it may be free to just download the music, there are advantages to buying the CD, such as convenience and sound quality, especially if you eliminate all the record company overhead. But mostly I mentioned DiFranco because of the sketch she draws of how her business runs, and the sweet way she feigns dismay over making all that money.

    Courtney Love does not fail to mention the importanance of radio airplay. Its right there on the first page, about halfway down. She points out that one of the expenses a corporate band pays is to have their songs put on the radio. Paying to get past this bottlneck between the artist and their (potential) fans is one of the things that putting your music on the Internet eliminates.

    More to the point, what law are they going to be able to pass to prevent the inevitable? No matter what the the artists want, or whether information wants to be free or not, people will be free to copy it. They can attempt all the bozo copy protection schemes they want; it will barely slow the rate of copying. Better to accept it, and learn to enjoy the advantages.

  • I'm on the Internet right now! Whee! Look at me world!!! I'm FAMOUS!

    I'm nobody. I don't know anybody who isn't also nobody. I certainly didn't pay anybody anything for the privlidge of making my voice heard. That sure beats giving bribes to The End (aka The Edge aka The Peak aka The Mountain) to acquire the status of the next "underground" hit.

    Now if only I could play something. Or at least hack...

  • Nowhere in the mainstream, corporate-owned infotainment media, software industry and legal establishment can you find an argument in favor of intellectual property?

  • There are musicians everywhere who demonstrate every day that you can make a perfectly respectable living doing nothing but selling tickets to live shows. Most corporate-owned bands don't make anything off their record sales any way, as you can find explained in places like Courtney Love's kooky rant [salon.com] in Salon. We already know that you can make money writing free software, though you probably will never make so much that your old friends no longer know you.

    It is certainly necessary to prevent unlicensed copying if movie studios are to recoup the costs of $125 million-plus special effects blockbusters like "Dante's Peak" or "Titanic," or for record companies to finance Keith Richard's drug habit. The console video games that 13-year olds can't get enough of would take quite at hit as well if the games could be easily copied. The world's most popular PC operating system is another example of one of our civilization's achievements that might not exist without intellectual property protection.

    I don't see what difference the laws will make. The only hope they have to continue centralized control of information is to build copy prevention into every kind of storage device in the world, which seems impractical at best.

  • Did those Renaissance cats need platoons of lawyers to protect their IP rights to keep the wolf from the door?

    No one ever makes a living writing software if they allow it to be copied freely?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You missed the analogy. You're dealing in both cases with information, algorithms, be it for unfolding of a plant from a seed or for writing and calculating. Even if the evil western male copied them from Africans, plants or culture, that doesn't take them away from Africans. If I save this thread on my hard disk, /. site doesn't lose it.

    For example, why would 3rd world have to buy those 'stolen' plants if they had them already? They buy them either because it is an improved variant (better yield, better resitance to pests, etc) or because their governments get bribed to switch over. If Chinese military can buy Clinton administration, why shouldn't American companies be allowed to buy Chinese or other countries agriculture or health ministers?

  • ... transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials that have been freely available to them for centuries.

    It is absurd. This "logic" sounds exactly like the "multiculturally enriched history" they teach kids these days, where Greeks "stole" the culture, math and science from Africans, which somehow made Africans forget all they created (including wheel, alphabet, numbers beyond 3,...), and that is why they are now importing Western culture, which they had way back.

    It is probably the same far left think-tanks behind both pieces of "wisdom."

  • Where are we coming to? If the man who had first created the wheel refused to let other people use it or know of it, or if all the farmers of so many cultures refused to let their fellow farmers not know their discoveries and techniques, humanity as a civilization would have been nowhere today. All those people who say that they do their work for the love of it, should refuse to take any patents or any other kind of materialistic ownership. If fact, this is the right time to know how many musicians actually do it for the love of music, and how many for fame and glory. I'm glad that this is not the case in the computer industry. It's true that most programmers do more for the money than for the job, but it is the work of programmers who did it for the sheer love of it rather than for money that has got computing to where it is today.

    "...Fear the people who fear your computer"
  • The article says nothing of the sort. The only thing the article implies is about how unfair credit, or excess patents and other such things come in the way of creativity. Eitherways, people who really love what they do would not do it for money...

    "...Fear the people who fear your computer"
  • With the decline in corporate control of information and content, musicians, writers and programmers will have direct access to a worldwide audiance, but no more of the exclusive access that the media empires of the past enjoyed. It means that more artists than ever will be able to quit their day jobs and make a moderate living doing what they love, but hardly any will become the kind of intergalactic superstars that can afford to buy private islands and professional football teams.

    How, exactly, will they quit their day jobs and make a moderate living if nobody pays them? The examples of Napster and Warez in general make it pretty clear how often people will pay when it is simple, safe, and anonymous to steal instead.

    While I would be the first to admit that copyright, patent, and libel laws are regularly abused by corporations, the free-information crowd are wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Without some protection for the creators of information there will be no incentive to create any information. This is a point which is regularly glossed over with happy-feelgood words in anticopyright tirades.

    Information does not want to be free; information is not conscious and is not capable of wanting anything. Some people want it to be free, just as others want absolute control over all of it. Neither extreme makes much sense. While patent laws may be in need of reform, you will not get change for the better by shouting for their complete abolition. Nobody with any sense wants that.

  • You just created some information: your post. What "protection" does that post enjoy?

    As you point out, it is protected, but no, I don't expect to be compensated. This is mostly because creating the post is very easy for me and I do it for entertainment. There are, however, a lot of useful things I do which I certainly wouldn't if I wasn't paid. While it is true that some content would still be created, much that is useful and desirable would not.

    There are software applications, novels, works of music, and movies which would not get created without copyright protection, yet which honest recipients are willing to pay for so that they will be created. This is why copyright protection exists.

    Information wants to be free in the same sense in which a compressed spring wants to extend and water seeks its own level. The statement is not a value judgement, but an observation of a constant force.

    This is simply balderdash. You could make the same case that Honda Civics "want to be free" because they remain the most-stolen car year after year. This doesn't mean we should make it legal to steal Honda Civics because they're going to get stolen anyway. It means your "constant force" is really created by certain people who are willing to circumvent morality and the law when it suits them -- a force which the law was erected to oppose, whether or not it always manages to succeed.

  • I guess the point about high production costs is valid:

    When I pay my $10 to see a movie that cost $25000000 to produce, I am benefiting from the fact that my taste is very similar to many many others. I am leveraging my $10, by the fact that I find the same thing entertaining that "joe average" does.

    For art this is a bad thing, because of the lowest common denominator effect. But for people like me with relatively mainstream tastes (WWF, Britney Spears etc) its all good. I get expensively produced movies at a reasonable price.

    Capitalism at its finest !!!

  • Its all very well saying "information wants to be free" and going along with all the open-source rhetoric, but at the end of the day unless someone pays the producer of the information to create it, the information won't get created.

    Metallica would not bother recording their CDs if they knew that in 10 minutes from its release it would be in Napster.

    Maybe thats a good thing :-) but slashdotters should think of the artists need to earn a living when they are busy ripping off everything into MP3 format.

    Just a thought for Christmas.

  • There are musicians everywhere who demonstrate every day that you can make a perfectly respectable living doing nothing but selling tickets to live shows

    Please cite some examples. I've heard people say stuff like this over and over. Nobody ever cites any examples.

    Except, of course, a very few hippie musicians.
  • Actually, yes, those 'Renaissance cats' did. Not lawyers in the sense we have them today, but actual soldiers to keep the other side from hauling away their creative output.

    Same as it ever was.
  • I stopped reading halfway through the first chapter--right after the author explained that eliminating technology is a good solution to the corruption of power. Of course, he justified it by bringing up nuclear weaponry. Always a good idea to debate through incitement.

    I thoroughly loathe the concept of IP, but on "this is not property" grounds, not through "property or not, let's be rid of it for it is eeevil" societal engineering.

    Robert Hutchinson
  • Hate to nitpick, but...

    This is the way nobody gets anywhere. Power and corruption are both finally analytical tools (as are, interestingly, feminism and racial analysis).

    This strikes me as the entire problem with this discussion of IP: It's asking the wrong question.

    Lets take a simple case: Marxism. Analyze any set of relationships, and use as your mental knife, the sorting factor for these relationships, the concept of power. What do you get? Inequity.

    Well, gosh, if there's inequity present, that's bad! Problem: That's the only thing that sort of analysis will get you. So, you can shift the weights around. The workers of the world can unite, whatever. Analyze that using the same tools. What do you get? Inequity.

    Oh no! It's still broke! Let's fix it again...

    But finally, that nice surgical knife of who has power and who doesn't makes a cut that has a fractal boundary. You can never be finished examining things and say "now we have an equitable solution."

    If we're lucky, we get a set of successive approximations that don't result in excessive suffering.

    So what it comes down to is that power/corruption is an interesting analytical tool - but it is not one that results in useful solutions. What we need is a better way of thinking about information, if we want to solve the IP issue.

    We need better memes.

    -tdb

  • You betcha. Here:

    besonic.com/chrisj [besonic.com] ...so pay me!

    Or, acknowledge that in some fields the competition is so completely brutal that authors, musicians, artists customarily need to prove their dedication and tenacity by continuing to produce, spending their own money on their art and working and working until they are good enough that they _deserve_ to be paid anything.

    Or, indeed, consider that 'listen to me' is in some ways even a more powerful call than 'pay me'. Note that both phrases end with ME! A lot of art is about Me, Me... it's "look at the art _I_ did! Listen to the song about _my_ feelings!" Is it any wonder that, for example, musicians in the brutally competitive music market of LA customarily PAY to play gigs? Does this free-market development fit nicely with your notion that under capitalism artists get paid to make art- if it wasn't for those dastardly intellectual property criminals- and those pesky kids! ;P

    Let me put it this way. (the same link [besonic.com]) Is that free music? Just because you can download it?

    I prefer to see it as over 100M of web hosting for which I pay nothing. Priced out well-connected web hosting of that size lately?

    The bottom line is, people who really love what they do will do it for not-money. This does not mean the same people will turn down money if it's offered- hey, I wouldn't! *g* Do please throw money! Or book studio time with me and travel to Vermont and cut a killer album. It's not just about the artistic expression. But that artistic expression is going to be there whether the money is or not...

    And that's what I am not seeing in so many of these arguments- people who have no idea from 'pay to play', no clue what the entertainment business is _really_ like, are rabid to defend the 'rights' of a few 'winners' who are milking the hell out of the system. Rather than saying "OK, you're not signed so you don't _deserve_ to have money, but Britney is a great artist because she's signed so she deserves to earn fifty billion times what you could possibly earn, and keep a millionth of that if she has a smart manager!", what is so wrong with asking "What could happen to even the odds a bit? What could technology bring that would make artists compete more on the merits, rather than politics, money and the ability to be chosen by a power elite which controls the mass media completely?"

    I would humbly suggest that 'cutting back intellectual property rights' would go quite a ways toward accomplishing the latter. I don't think it would be necessary to obliterate it so much that, for example, I could claim I wrote "Oops I Did It Again" (pop quiz: who _did_ write that? Prove it wasn't me. Were they paid? As much as Britney? As much as the producer? Did they get points? A royalty?). However, it is reasonable to expect I could sing "Oops I Did It Again" while walking down the street and suffer no worse than physical attacks by music lovers. I could tell a friend the words to it, or hum them the tune. In a digital world I could beam the digital audio to their wristband mp3 player so they could hear what I was talking about. I could make a "I Love Britney Spears!" page at ilovebritneyspears.com and put the digital audio and lyrics on the webpage, at as high a quality as possible since I love it so much and want everyone to agree how wonderful it is. And everyone who visits the page would have a chance for me to do everything I possibly could do to _persuade_ them that "Oops I Did It Again" was the most phenomenal audio art the world has ever known...

    Intellectual property, as it's currently practiced, is tremendously biased against this behavior, in a frankly classist sense. I cannot be the scout, the evangelist, the fanatic- it isn't my place. That which I am so passionate about is not 'my property': I must keep my place, I must be subservient. "Um, I know this wonderful song- I can't give it to you, I'm not allowed to, in fact I wasn't allowed to make a web domain about it either, but you should go to BigRecordCompany.com and search for 'Britney'..."

    That's obscene. It's behavior like the art, the product, is some sort of oxygen indispensable to life. The Merry Pranksters of the 60s had a catchphrase that remains relevant to this day: Art is not eternal!

    I don't think Britney's 'right' to snatch a tiny percentage of unthinkable sums of CD gross sales is any more important than any other artist's 'right' to produce some income, no matter how small, just for having tried to produce art. I don't see this as a right at all. If you have something to say, say it- if you have a sound you want to make, make it- the way things are, it's virtually impossible for you to earn any sort of money on that anyhow, and although this is the result of a very sick business, intrinsically that's not wrong.

    What is wrong is stepping on the fans, the enthusiasts and evangelists who give that _praise_ and appreciation that is _really_ the coin of the artist's realm. What's wrong is shutting those people off, making them go "Um, I could give you a copy of this art I really love (without me having to go without) but I'm not allowed to...", stifling them, damping their fires. Their place is not 'subservient passive consumers'. They are the freaking _lifeblood_ of any entertainment industry, and the only reason they can be so lightly suppressed and stamped on and trodden into the dirt is that the music industry genuinely does not believe in them anymore- it's all 'push' media now. Except for the Net, and the rest of the world- except for the same 'consumers' who are thought to be nothing more than passive buckets into which you can dump any old slop, given a hot mix and a big marketing budget.

    That's where money has led: do the homework, work it out for yourself. That has been the result of intellectual property, in practice.

    There have been examples, in history, of un-IP: situations where there was great artistic work being done without it being primarily considered intellectual property. An example would be: blues. What did blues produce? Rock and roll, R+B, the Beatles etc. The 'floating phrases' of blues, too general to belong to anyone, became a universal language open to anyone with a voice and a personality to express. Access to this pool of ideas allowed new forms of music to burgeon and arise.

    I more than suspect that if we wish to ever have another artistic reinassance as significant as the birth of rock and roll, we will have to do it in _spite_ of Intellectual Property: or as if IP did not exist.

    But the most important prerequisite would be a feeling from the people that they too can create, rap, sample, whatever: that they are not subservient consumer nonentities, that they have a voice. And we may get it.

    The revolution is not Napster. The revolution is 1,000,000 people making their _own_ music getting _ideas_ from Napster. Getting total access to all forms of music as freely as breathing. Stifling access to culture and putting up toll booths is akin to stifling art.

  • Actually, very bad example. Even a cursory investigation into Metallica's history reveals that they clawed their way to the top in a viciously competitive local music market, sold their own records until their success _forced_ the Big Labels to take notice and step in, and in general fought like rabid wolverines to pursue their 'art' at all costs no matter what stood in the way.

    You couldn't stop Metallica recording their CDs (especially in the early days!) if you formed a freaking shield wall and hit at them with riot clubs. You'd end up flat on your back with teeth marks all over you and Metallica would be recording their CDs anyway.

    That's what you have to do if you want a place in a very ruthless business. Priority One is you get what you want- at all costs- and Metallica wants, or wanted, to make CDs and very loud aggressive heavy metal music: if they'd wanted money there are far better ways and they surely knew that the whole time.

    What they've been so upset about is simply an extension of their whole attitude so far- Napster and Napster users appeared to be just more obstacles, this time to getting paid. I wonder if they were just as rabid and fanatic about attacking things like the customary music industry 90% charge for media breakage (basically artists are given X% royalty- but after all other subtractions are done, the artist then is docked another 10% for breakage, a charge dating back to the days of shellac records. I'm not making this up) I think Metallica might well have been just as frenzied in their attack on inequities of that sort- we'd just never hear about it, it is contract business between the band and their label. At any rate, it's not Metallica being exclusively centered on money: it's more Metallica being Metallica. Anyone could have seen that coming.

    Anybody seriously worrying about an artist's need to earn a living could do much more good by trying to attack the RIAA and the labels by any means necessary: heck, you could leave the RIAA and labels alone and just attack the independent promoters! (i.e. payola, which never died and now makes up roughly a third to half of your retail CD price) That's if you trust the labels to go "Yay! We don't have to dump billions to these mafialike creeps anymore! Let's lower prices!" which I don't.

    The point is, going after peer-to-peer and the _fans_ is the most asinine way to try to help the artists earn a living that could be imagined. Yes, there are major things wrong with the situation, but attacking the natural adaptation to an increasingly monopolized, unfree industry is not the way to fix it- or even to help artists be paid.

  • Its all very well saying "information wants to be free" and going along with all the open-source rhetoric, but at the end of the day unless someone pays the producer of the information to create it, the information won't get created.

    Some information wouldn't be created. There would still be a great deal of literature, music and software. It would mainly hurt the creation of information that involves large production costs, such as television shows and movies. Most authors and composers have a day job, a relatively small number make enough money at it to make it their full-time profession.

  • Biological information can now be claimed as intellectual property. US courts have ruled that genetic sequences can be patented, even when the sequences are found "in nature," so long as some artificial means are involved in isolating them. This has led companies to race to take out patents on numerous genetic codes. In some cases, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, such as soybeans or cotton, causing enormous controversy and sometimes reversals on appeal. One consequence is that transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
    that have been freely available to them for centuries.

    This article is intellectually corrupt. It is full of factual assertions that do not hold up under any sort of scrutiny. For example the statement "some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
    that have been freely available to them for centuries" is absurd on the face of it. The cases where "third world organisms" have become subject of patents have resulted in the sale of IMPROVED versions of the plant materials, not the native forms.

    It would seem to me that slashdot's editors have gone over the deep end on this issue by posting this sort of manifesto repeatedly. At the very least we should see some articles allowed that make the case FOR IP.

  • Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe)

    I'll have to challenge the factual veracity of this - as far as I can tell through performing patent searches there is no such US Patent. Please cite the patent number.

    As far as I can see there are only two genetic engineering patents covering Arabica coffee - one a tissue culture method for reproducing clones, and the other a method of introducing new genetic material. Nothing regarding a patent on a gene conferring disease resistance.

  • Eitherways, people who really love what they do would not do it for money...

    This theory is absolute, total nonsense. If you want to encourage creative works, compensation is required.

    You cannot obtain the tools necessary for modern research and development without spending considerable sums of money. A good electron microscope may cost a million dollars. Other tools are equally costly. Lab space is not rent free, nor are the test tubes, vacuum ovens or the benches within. The computers required for data analysis, or the electricity requred to run them are likewise not free.

    People may well choose a profession based on what they enjoy doing, but the fact is that you need a roof over your head, and food on the table. Savings for retirement, and a college education for your children are nice too. Not to mention being able to pay for medical care.

    If I am faced with a choice between a profession that I love that pays nothing, and a profession that I merely like, but will provide well for my children surely I will choose the latter for I love my family very well indeed.

    Perhaps you will get some works - those which can be performed by an individual working in his spare time in an unheated cave. But surely you will NOT get the benefits of works that require any significant investment.

  • There's a big step in this direction that could be feasible politically under the next administration. I propose the following:
    • Visual pornography and depictions of violence shall not be copyrightable.
    • The use of technological measures or contractual terms to prevent the copying of noncopyrightable material shall be illegal.

    This provides a way to regulate images of pornography and violence without raising First Amendment objections. You can make it and sell it, but you can't prevent it from being copied, even in bulk. This makes it far less profitable. It would put a big dent in the commercial porno industry without restricting freedom of expression at all. It also carves out an area where copy protection isn't allowed, a good thing to have in law.

    This is a good way to try out "Against Intellectual Property" in an area where, if it doesn't work out, there's no great harm.

    Remember, Bush doesn't owe Hollywood, let alone Simi Valley, home of the porno industry, any favors. This is within political reach.

  • . .

    The review at Danny Yee's [dannyreviews.com] beings with a famous misquotation.

    "Starting with Acton's dictum that power corrupts, Information Liberation explores the corruptions and abuses of information power . . ."

    Lord Acton's quote was : "power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"

    This is precisely the same difference (from the mis quotation, in meaning and effect) between those I see who take copyright and trademark laws and use them for tactical gain (please note, all you trendy IP lawyers, I see no bill or statute headed "Intellectual Property", which are words I think created to make this sound the birth right of anyone who merely posesses a brain and uses it), and those who, on the other side say that rights such as copyright should be abandoned because bully boy tactics hurt a number of the innocent.

    I ended up arguing this point at length last night in this post [slashdot.org] (which is very long so I'll excerpt the relevant bit here) :

    Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response.

    Having just read Chapter 3, "Against intellectual property". I'm fear that Slashdotters who read this book hoping to arm themselves with a credible arsenal against abusers of "IP concepts" (ugh, sorry but that jargonism just slipped in there and covers the relevant sins :), may be disappointed.

  • From Chapter 3, "Against Intellectual Property" [uow.edu.au] in the book :

    Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.

    A full text of this article, from Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1997, is available here [ibiblio.org]

    From it, you will note that "Random House, which published Mr. Brinkley's book, paid him $1,000 for the rights without agreeing to or contesting Mr. Brilliant's claims.

    Copyright subsists - exists within, and does not have to be claimed by any author, of an original artistic or literary work. In UK and US code, titles, epithets and bon mots do *not* gain protection as they are not of themselves considered artistic works.

    You cannot copyright things as simple as this. But you can, apparently get the occasional (stupid)publisher to pay up to stop you wasting their time.

    Personally, I would have contested in court if necessary this man's claims over ownership of title to a book with which he had no connection. (his this sort of claim which might easily be thown out, or at least loose quickly on case law)

    Moreover, in the UK there is the concept of a "vexatious claim" in which it can in certain cases become a criminal offence to attempt in bad faith to extract payment not due by means of coercion, including by means of jumped up legal threat. Also in the UK I could apply to the court that any claimant post bond for costs (including mine) in the event he looses and this application usually scares the harassers away :-)

    The author of "Information liberation" uses this example as supposedly one of the more egregious happenings in copyright abuse. Awww, come on Mr Brian Martin, it was a simple thing for the publisher to work out that their lawyer's time even in typing a proper response could cost more than the thousand bucks they paid. But I find, from experience, that people who make claims such as Mr Brilliant did do not usually press these in court, as they _know_ how weak they are. I would have acted differently from Random House, especially how you see now how these decisions become grist to the misinformed mill of people working against fair rights in works (Mr Martin)

  • 1. Power tends to corrupt, and information power is no exception

    So, should we eliminate power, or should we eliminate corruption. Which is more practical? Which is more beneficial?

    2. Mass media are inherently corrupting

    So, you published a BOOK and posted this on the INTERNET. Irony anyone?

    3. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience

    Yeah!!! You gotta fight for your right to party. Give me MP3s or give me death?

    4. Surveillance and 5. beurocracy

    OK, I'll give you that. Nobody likes beurocracy or invasion of privacy. OTOH, what are you going to do with middle managers after they are let go? Put them on welfare? But wait... welfare is a... well, you know.

    6. Defamation law and free speech

    Certainly he can't be defending those who *lie* about other people. How can you defend a lie? The issue of defamation where the facts are murky, OTOH, is also likely to be murky. This one is a judgement call. Throwing all defamation laws out doesn't seem like a well balanced solution.

    7. The work of professional researchers is strongly influenced by funding, disciplines, hierarchy and competition

    No argument here.

    8. Simple ideas have a bad reputation. People often think simple ideas are simplistic: wrong, incomplete, inaccurate, misleading. I agree that many simple ideas are no good, but many are quite useful...

    So, some simple ideas are good and some aren't. What does this tell us? Not a whole lot. A brick is a simple idea. So is a lump of s%@#. A computer is a complicated idea. So is an H-bomb. So, by defending simple ideas, what is he defending here? It would appear to be nothing.

    9. It's better to think for oneself and to assess ideas on their own merits than to worry about whether they came from a famous intellectual or an unknown.

    Good in theory, but in practice who has time to sift through all the ideas? Fame exists in part because it's a convenient filter. Or, fame wouldn't exist if it didn't have some value.

    10. Information seems like the ideal basis for a cooperative society. It can be made available to everyone at low cost, and a person can give away information and still retain use of it.

    If you only made the information for your own consumption, then this is a valid statement. It's a pity to think that future information output might slide down to the level of production motivated only by personal need. After all, how many people have a personal need for a movie, play, or computer program and are able to devote sufficient resources just to satisfy their personal need?

  • Remember, Bush doesn't owe Hollywood (...) any favors. This is within political reach.

    Are you implying there might be hope against the DMCA? Gee, I feel... Republican! Gawd!

  • Its been said before but aperantly not enough.

    They actually know that their records will be on napster within release time + encode time of the fastest buyers computer. And they still continue to make music? Why? 'Cause they also know that lots of people like to buy records. Like to have a neat cover. Like to spend their free time on other things than downloading stuff from napster. Like their music to play at best possible sound quality.

    There will allways be someone there to create great music for us. We will lose our Brittney Spears, Boyzones and Spice Girls etc. But do we really need those? Now adays, anyone and their dog can create good music with a average computer or a plain old guitar. And if releasing it on napster will make them famous. Then they will release their music on napster. They need to earn some extra bucks? They can go on tour. Sell merchandise, or even record a CD.

    Everyone is happy, and the strongest (best) will survive and go pro. Everyone else will have to support them selves with a real job. Like helping out elders..

    I like the sound of this.
  • If the man who had first created the wheel refused to let other people use it or know of it, or if all the farmers of so many cultures refused to let their fellow farmers not know their discoveries and techniques, humanity as a civilization would have been nowhere today.

    Had patents existed then, the man who invented the wheel would have cashed in big for a few years until the rights passed into the public domain. At worst, transportation technology would have been set back 14 years and dot-com millionaires would have traded in their '89 Gremlins for '98 DeLoreans. (Car nuts, please don't flame any anachronisms.) And we'd have had 14 more blessedly SUV-free years. At best, the wheel would have passed into common usage far ealier and we'd have hovercars today.

    See, the point of patents is that they remove the incentive to keep knowledge secret. The inventor receives a short-term monopoly in exchange for making the knowledge public.

  • ...have never needed money to motivate them to create. They pursued their vocation because they couldn't stop themselves if they had wanted to. Ada Augusta merley heard about the idea of a computer that didn't even exist and she couldn't help trying to program it. The best programmers today are no different; they would be hacking away whether someone was paying them to or not. Rock stars are always telling interviewers that they practice their art out of love and consider themselves lucky that they get paid to do do what they love. Now they will get the chance to prove it.

    With the decline in corporate control of information and content, musicians, writers and programmers will have direct access to a worldwide audiance, but no more of the exclusive access that the media empires of the past enjoyed. It means that more artists than ever will be able to quit their day jobs and make a moderate living doing what they love, but hardly any will become the kind of intergalactic superstars that can afford to buy private islands and professional football teams. I don't have a problem with that.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Visual pornography and depictions of violence shall not be copyrightable.

    I don't think this would fly under the Constitution. Copyright is not supposed to be content-aware -- for example, you can publish a book full of hoaxes and outright lies and receive copyright protection because the marketplace of ideas is what distinguishes a good idea from a bad idea, not some censor who creates an artificial category.

    The use of technological measures or contractual terms to prevent the copying of noncopyrightable material shall be illegal.

    A better step might be to move to the German model, where you have the right to make personal-use backup copies of anything and it is in fact illegal to use copy-protection to prevent this. There is a tax on blank recording media which is used to compensate copyright holders for their losses due to such use.

    This provides a way to regulate images of pornography and violence without raising First Amendment objections. You can make it and sell it, but you can't prevent it from being copied, even in bulk. This makes it far less profitable.

    Since copyright is seen as a form of protection meant to encourage the production of new content, this differential treatment certainly would raise 1st Amendment objections. At least, with a real Supreme Court it would -- not sure about these guys any more.

    Remember, Bush doesn't owe Hollywood, let alone Simi Valley, home of the porno industry, any favors.

    This is the most hopelessly naive thing I have ever seen anybody write about the pr0n industry. That it is either limited to Simi or that nobody would object to this is ridiculous. Last I looked, the print and internet pr0n industries were scattered all over, with a high concentration in New York. I know of one editor who lives in Florida. Had Dubya been elected legitimately he might be able to push something like your proposeal through (to all our detriments, since such wedges never stop with clear-cut examples like pr0n), after the election fiasco he would be a fool to try it.

    Oh, wait, he is a fool. Well, trust me, it won't succeed.

    These people [counterpunch.com] believe they can put together a case that Katherine Harris has been playing hide-the-salami with both Jeb and Dubya for years. Do you think Dubya would want to encourage Larry Flynt to put his resources behind this effort? There are many reasons not to open this can of worms.

    But the best reason, of course, is that things like this never stop with dat evil ol pr0n. If you think this is such a great idea I respectfully submit that you might find the legal climate in other places more congenial. Canada, for example, has been seizing books left and right for years. Unsurprisingly, not all of them are the gay pr0n being "targeted" by the censors.

  • You are wrong. (Score:3)

    by gaijin_ ( 134592 ) on Monday December 25, 2000 @08:07AM (#540713)
    The most known example of this is the Arabica coffee bean in the eastern parts of Africa. Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe) The reason is that this company has isolated the gene that makes this plant resistant to a very widespread coffee disiese that kills cromps in the entire region. The arabica coffee is the only one resistant. This company hasn't made any changes, they have only found the gene, but still they get to collect royalties.

  • Japanese Patent Law, etc. (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Monday December 25, 2000 @07:21AM (#540714) Journal
    Disclaimer: IANAL

    but I seen to recall that in Japan the patent laws are more liberal in some regards than in the USA.

    (Of course, if you are expert in Japanese Patent law, please feel free to correct any errors, and make me look like a complete fool) ;-)

    Japaness law has changed recently, but this is the way it has been for many years. Here is a link to a specific case [washington.edu] that is easy enough to follow, and illustrates the point well enough. It also reveals recent shifts in Japanese law:

    The Epoch case is truly an "epoch" making decision in Japanese case law.

    First, the court's analysis in the case shows a stark contrast with Japanese courts' analyses in early decisions on claim interpretation.

    These decisions relied on the inventor's recognition theory and limited the protection scope to cover only embodiments expressly disclosed in the specification.

    This rule applied to both functionally defined claims and structurally defined claims.

    However, the Tokyo District Court clearly rejected this view by refusing to use embodiments to limit the claim scope.

    Further, the addition of functions or steps did not prevent the court from finding infringement in Epoch case. This contrasts highly with some early cases.

    It goes something like this. Minor variations qualified the unit as a separate patent.

    The upshot probably is not as serious as needing to have patents on green cars vs blue cars (for example), but patents had to be on specific implementations of things. I am not enough of a lawyer to know how much of this is still the case.

    But Reverse engineering so that there are some marginal performance differances was common, and there are a lot of copycats that did exactly that. (Sometime old habits die hard.) You build something, say a car engine. They reverse engineer it, find out all of the really important stuff like your design tricks, and them implement them in their own designs.

    This situation is really similar to learning code by reading code. The problem is in the setup costs to get production ramped up.

    In the USA it is a little more liberal, in that patent can cover more general principles. Things, for example, like the integrated circuit. They did not have to patent all possible circuit implementations of that technology. And their Patent ran out after the usual length of time.

    But this is where we get into trouble, because this is where patents get applied to software. A possible incorrect analogy is made between something that involves a manufacturing process (an engine, for example) compared to something that does not.

    Quick research reveals that Japans' Patent law was revised in 1998 to correct some of the problems inherent in this. Here is a link to a quick summary [rim.or.jp]The important section in this has to do with Design law.

    This is all interesting in that it provides a practical example to the problems in different implementations of Patent Law. It has interesting parallels to the the discussions regarding software design, etc.

  • Re:Japanese Patent Law, etc. (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Monday December 25, 2000 @07:32AM (#540715) Journal
    There is a reasonable summary of current Japanese Law here [shinjyu.com].

    To Clarify a change in the Japanese design law. Previously you could only patent a design for a complete item. Patents on the separate parts were not permitted, so it seems

  • Re:You are wrong. (Score:3)

    by update() ( 217397 ) on Monday December 25, 2000 @11:29AM (#540716) Homepage
    If farmers are being barred from growing existing crops because of new patents, I would consider that appalling and disgraceful.

    Now convince me that such a thing exists.

    I've read assertions like that before and a web search turns up more [enviroweb.org]. But can you show me anything convincing that it's true? There is a patent on a disease resistance gene in Arabica, and fungicides or new variants based on that gene could be included under its protection. But telling farmers "We've patented your plant. Pay us to keep growing it?" I'm not convinced.

    There are issues like when a company identifies a therapeutic compound from a plant grown in a foreign country. How do you sort out the conflicting claims of the country to which the plant is native, the culture which told the researchers their knowledge of which plants are valuable for health and the drug company that sorted through thousands of candidates, identified promising ones, isolated the active agent, created a less toxic and more effective variant and paid for the clinical trials? That's a tough question but it shouldn't be mixed up in what strikes me as FUD about telling the people they can no longer use the plant to treat their ulcers.

    By the way, as I spend yet another Christmas Day in the lab, I invite all the people who are going to be yapping at me about how my work belongs to humanity and how I should be content with whatever bone they condescend to throw me to come over and run a few gels so I can eat lunch.

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