Intellectual Property Laws bad for business

mshiltonj writes "The NYTimes has a story called "Report Raises Questions About Fighting Online Piracy" that talks about how the stringent enforcement of current Intellectual Property laws (see: RIAA) may acutally be bad for business. It's the not EFF or FSF saying this, it's professors at Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace." and "Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.""

bad for economy too

Intellectual Property Laws bad for business
not just that, but they dad for economy too. All the major corporations are moving their operations to overseas, and the only leftover jobs will be for Lawyers and other PR personnel. Which cant be too good.

Re:bad for economy too

All that realy needs done is to provide value. I bought a program to make lables with barcodes on them. It's called Lables Unlimited. It was less than $15 off the shelf. Before I found it, I found fonts for $200, Label programs from $50-600. Needless to say most stuff was way overpriced as they were trying to sell automation solutions instead of a simple version of Printshop. When the choices were part with lots of money or do without, I did without. When a reasonable priced program came out, I bought 2 copies. One for home and one for work. (It can be registered either way. I did both.) After that with word of mouth advertising, (the best kind) I bought and re-sold 5 more to coworkers.

Trying to own and sell automation using barcodes (the concept, not the product) is viewed by most as open seas type piracy. One of the major bar code manufactures was sued for patent infringement for providing factory automation solutions which used barcodes with a workflow database. Somehow someone thought the concept of tracking with a database and barcodes instead of hand entry was a violation of IP. It got thrown out (thank goodness). Unfortunately more and more stuff is being tyed up in a concept as IP rights, not product rights. This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.

Imagine if the concept were copied to the building industry. Someone makes nails. Someone else makes screws. Someone else makes glue. Someone makes 2X4's. They all patent the idea. Do you know the problems this would create for the building industry. Screws and screwdrivers only from International Fastener, Nails only from National Wire, 2X4's only from Georga Pacific.. etc. Some in the fastener industry have already done some of this. Posi-drive screws, Torx tm., etc.

Building materials are much cheaper if there is not a single vendor choice. Market forces set prices.

I see Open Source, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and the internet as a great equalizer. We just have to wean ourselves off the **AA licensed stuff. Tonight I was downloading free Public Domain radio programs. Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee, and Jack Benny are great alternitves to much of the high priced stuff. Don't pirate. Shop for the deals. They are out there.

There are lots of sites dedicated to collecting the material, selling or trading for very reasonable prices. Why can't BMI, Capitol, etc. sell MP3 CD's full of over 20 year old stuff for $5 each? You just can't tell me it's the cost of production and distribution. They would rather sell a couple of copies of $100 CD collections of old stuff than sell thousands at $5. They are also unwilling to use MP3's. Funny but the competion is using MP3's. All the radio programms I downloaded tonight are unencumbered MP3's. They will work in my MP3 CD player unlike what they are selling.

Do a search of Old Time Radio MP3's. You can literaly get days worth of material on MP3 CD's for under $10. Hey RIAA, are you listening? Want to sell from your old catalog? Naw, they would rather sit on their archive while I shop the competion. Their artificaly scarce material is being diluted by the competion. Piracy isn't their only competion. Games, movies, Public domain, Creative Commons, and freebies are their competion. Killing piracy won't make it go away.

Re:bad for economy too

If you don't want to pay simply because you can copy it, you are engaging in theft- it's no different than any other good in the marketplace.

Wrong. It _is_ different, because patent law is not property law. Perhaps you are arguing that ideas _should_ be no different than any other physical good in the marketplace, but not spreading misconceptions while presenting your opinion would be preferable.

Also, consider the possibility that the same process was independently developed. Is it still "theft"? It doesn't map as easily onto property law now, does it? Yet independently developing a process which happens to be covered by a patent is still a breach of patent law.

Not FUD, You're Just On A Different Subject

Egads, you people can be really bizarre.

Why is the grandparent FUD? Because you decided to start a different argument? Just because there are jobs NOW - which is what you said - doesn't mean there will be the same types of jobs in the FUTURE - which is what the grandparent said.

No, the grandparent is making a prediction. Perhaps it's a weak one, but you didn't argue that. You didn't argue with the poster at all. In fact, you started a whole different subject. Please, if you're going to try and refute someone's predictions, think through the post before you do it and make sure you're at least talking about the same thing the person you're trying to refute was.

Re:bad for economy too

I don't know for sure, but it seems quite likely to me that the US is the world's largest exporter of intellectual property, the export stats might even include that.

In any case, it seems to me that IP laws are "good" for the movie and recording industries in the US, and that is why the US is so hell-bent on enforcing their IP laws on other countries. I think it was Marx that said Capitalism is Imperialism. In my books, IP laws are just another weapon on that front.

world's largest exporter

and also the largest IMPORTER, in dollars in 2002
1,163,548,552,000 imported and
693,257,300,000 exported and thats a difference of
-470,291,252

how does that help the situation??

cite- http://ese.export.gov/SCRIPTS/hsrun.exe/Distribute d/ITA2003_NATIONAL/MapXtreme.htx;start=HS_newMap
remove spaces as necassary

wired article

There's an article like this in this month's Wired too.
It is pretty clear that an idea is not something that someone can "own", because it doesn't exist in space and time. Property laws were developed because there is only a limited amount of material objects in the universe, but everyone can "own" ideas without "taking" anything from anybody else. In fact, it is better to spread good ideas around, for the same reason that it is better to live in a good neighborhood than a bad one.

Re:wired article

• should be noted that communism / socialism hasn't exactly done a great job of feeding everyone either.

I hate to be be a bitch and point it out, but it works fine in Norway. And I believe that Sweden, Denmark and other socialistic democarcys are doing rather fine as well.

You guys just got to realise socialism is an idea, and a not a totalerian system. Socialism is about that the wealthy/resourcefull in society is obligated to help the less fortunate.

It might not be obvious, but this actually saves society money. Say, for example, if people aren't left to starve (actual, working social security), they won't have to steal or resort to crime in order to survive. And thus, less police is needed. Money saved.

I guess I can go on, but this post is probably offtopic enough allready.

So for a practical (and working) socialistic system, Norway and it's democracy is a good example.

Re:wired article

Indeed. Copyright and patent were created to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" to quote the U.S. Constitution, but how can censorship do that? It doesn't. If I can't express an idea that has been expressed bfore without getting permission, and/or paying a royalty, then I don't have freedom of speech, or freedom of the press.

Re:wired article

I think a lot of this has to do with the continuious copyright extensions. If copyright were left alone and implemented as it was originally, it wouldn't seem like such an oppressive system.

Basically the copyright extension lobbyists are killing themselves slowly by stretching out copyright terms longer and longer. Each time they stretch it, the thinner it's importance becomes to the general population who see it as unfair to the common good.

Re:wired article

Personally, I would love to get rid of the "life" part of life+70 years in copyright law.

Just make it a fixed amount of time, preferably no more than 30 years (this is, after all, for *copyright* not patents), then it all goes into the public domain.

Yes, I'm well aware of how the record companies would hate to lose some of their classic hits from the 60s and 70s, but I doubt they sell much from there but a small selection of the very best albums and whatnot.

This would also make it MUCH easier to determine when the copyright was over, rather than having to figure out when the author died, figure out if it was a joint work, or a company owned one, etc. Might also allow them to have an unpublished period of five years or something, too, and other bits like that.

But still, making copyright last forever is rediculous. I'm kinda glad that the 'freezing' of Walt Disney was mythical, because I'd hate to see them argue that since he's still "alive" (theoretically, at any rate), his copyright will live as long as he stays frozen... (e.g. forever, because it would cut into profits to bring him back, even if it were thought possible to in the far future...)

While we're at it, ditch software & business process patents entirely, make normal ones a bit more narrow, and possibly cut the time on them a bit.

One other thing we need to address, though, is the "IP vampire" companies with no actual products who buy up "IP" from dead companies and use it to extort normal companies, making them the living dead of the business world, since they can't be stopped with defensive patents... I'd like to think that open source/free software ideals can help fend them off, if applied more broadly. They are within the current laws, but they certainly don't advance the original purposes of those laws at all... (This, ironically, is one "business method" that I wish had been patented defensively... alas, it is probably too late...)

Re:wired article

Copyright extension and legislation is nothing but a mechanism for the brokering of power and influence. Period.

There IS a fundamentally valid reason for both copyright and patents (and trademarks) to exist. But the scope has been blown way out of proportion by the power brokers, who are only in government to make a buck.

Re:wired article

Actually, Copyright law is designed so that artists, inventors, etc.. have some kind of incentive for creating. The idea is that if you take that protection away artists won't bother creating because they can't sell their product without someone stealing it and selling it. Or that you invent something and someone else copies your idea thus taking away some or all of your ability to make money. Since we (at least here in the US) live in a capitalist society the idea is that people work to gain, in our case they work or create to gain money. Copyright law has nothing to do with protecting matter. However this is not to say I do not agree that music and art should be copyrighted for a hundred years either. A reasonable amount of time to profit from your work is all that is needed to give artists a reason to create, not what is likely to be longer than their lifetime so that greedy leeches can continue to sell their creations indefinately.

incentive

This IS the point, and the whole point. IMHO, read the constitution and THIS is what you come to.

Let's phrase it a different way:

A person can be supporting his/her self and family OR advancing the Arts and Sciences. The purpose of Copyrights and Patents as put forth in the Constitution is to remove the devilment behind that 'OR' decision. Even if it's not enough incentive to enable and Artist/Scientist/Engineer to make a life wholly supported that way, it's got to be worthwhile, as opposed to putting in a few more hours at a day job.

The other side comes from the phrase, "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Patents and Copyrights are SUPPOSED to release that stuff into the Public Domain, so others can use it as a basis for further works. THIS is the single most broken aspect of current IP law, IMHO.

Re:wired article

Here is the link to the full report (101 page .pdf) if anyone is interested:
CED Report [ced.org]

Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

Yes, stringent enforcement is bad, but so is blatant infringement. Companies should allow some latitude with infringing properties of their works, and some basic trading between friends. However, I also believe, both as a creator and a reseller of intellectual property, that placing your 300 CD Collection on Kazaa is going way too far as well.

Copyright should always be a balance. Promotion should be allowed, but only on an intimate level with people you know, not the entire world, unless the creator or publisher says it's all right. Region codes on DVDs, encryptions, copy prevention methods, etc., are all just profits and ineffective in what they're named to do.

I love libraries, borrow from friends and let them borrow from me, and will take DVDs over to parties so we can watch movies. Some publishers, studios and organizations will call me a pirate, but I would like to think that I'm a consumer and a citizen of the USA who prefers to share what he rightfully paid for with those who would also enjoy it.

Just my opinion and observations.

Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

>Companies should allow some latitude with infringing properties of their works, and some basic trading between friends. However, I also believe, both as a creator and a reseller of intellectual property, that placing your 300 CD Collection on Kazaa is going way too far as well.

what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.

Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend [for the purposes of sharing copyrighted materials via p2p] (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.

Great! Friends, I need to "borrow" $20.

Unfortunately, this time you'll have to share your own money, not an evil record company's money, and I don't actually plan to give it back to you.

I mean, as long as you can re-define "friends" to mean "people I've never met who share my musical tastes and my ethical blind spots", can't I be as intellectually (dis)honest and re-define "borrow" too?

(I am reminded of the Cowbirds in Walt Kelly's Pogo, socialist agitators whose motto was "To share! To share what others' have!")

Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

Let's follow this analogy to its conclusion. If I have $20 dollars, let you "borrow" $20, but still have my original $20, well... Yes. I would have no problem with you "borrowing" my $20. I wouldn't need it back, because I still had the one $20 I started with.

Not that I necessarily agree with the parent, but if you are going to pick an analogy, at least pick one that makes sense.

Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.

I've heard arguments like this before and, I have to say, it's one of the weakest one's I've heard used to try to justify copyright infringment.

I think that most *rational* people would agree on a common definition of the term "friend". Additionally, I think most people would agree that someone you've never met, never chatted with, and never had any type of contact with except to trade stuff is *not* a "friend". That is why we have the term "stranger".

When people try to use the argument "I am willing to view/treat anyone as a friend so really when I share my stuff on Kazaa I am sharing with friends" they really don't mean it. Take it to the next level. Since I'm your friend, would you please lend me $5,000? Can I come stay at your house for a few months? Can I borrow your credit card to go buy some computer stuff? I promise, I'll stick to a limit you set. No? Why? I thought we were friends?

Insightful? Please...

what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.

That's not insightful, it's just manipulation of words to thinly veil a support of wholesale piracy. In no meaningful way is a person whom you have never met--and with whom your only interaction ever is the trading of a song file--your "friend". Saying "I'm a friend to the world" doesn't change the fact that wholesale piracy is fundamentally different than sharing music with a close circle of actual friends.

It's pathetic when people try to make this defense of massive online filesharing (as opposed to, say, sharing within an actual, meaningful, community of people, be it online or in the real world). If you are for piracy, say so. Don't try to defend your position using meaningless redefinition of terms. There are grey areas in file swapping--calling everyone your friend is not one of them, and weakens much more legitimate arguments (such as calling a smallish online music discussion group a group of friends with whom sharing should be permissible).

Any crime can be "defended" by relabeling:

• I didn't steal the car: I was borrowing it from my "friend"
• I didn't murder him: I was helping my friend with an assisted suicide
• He wasn't bribing me: I was just listening to the wisdom of my "friend", and he happened to be helping me out of a financial tight spot at the same time
• I'm not a pimp, I just help my "friends" meet when I think they have interests in common

but the relabeling itself doesn't make the defense valid.

Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad...

Companies should allow some latitude with infringing properties of their works
I whole-heartedly and utterly DISAGREE. This is why we have the stupid ass laws in rural states like "It's illegal to have sex with a dead kitten" or "you may not wash your hand on a Wednesday after sundown."

We don't need MORE laws, we need LESS, but ENFORCEABLE laws. Otherwise, this happens. We have billions of laws and it's up to the whim of the controlling body to decide which one they want to enforce that day.

then don't complain

when [large corp] comes along and just takes your idea to market without giving you a bean, they make billions all the execs get to live in bliss and you can eat dirt out of the sidewalk

sounds fair to me, yeah "do away with copyright ! say already financially secure professors and stock trading buisness tutors"

of course you can just watch [large corp] spend billions on developing widget X then just steal it saving $$$$!
yeah sounds fair to me !!

A>S

Re:then don't complain

"when [large corp] comes along and just takes your idea to market without giving you a bean"

That's what a lot of large corps do now if you work for them. If you work for a large auto manufacutrer and design something you'll be lucky if you get a thing for it. While the company and execs make a killing on it. This is not something new.

Re:then don't complain

Remember that when you work for a company and make something for them they are paying you for your work and time. It is known that your work for them is owned by the company and not owned by you.

This is far from the same thing as a company taking work from you when you are not affiliated with them.

My two (euro) cents

...known that your work for them is owned by the company and not owned by you

Things are not always that simple. My own employer recently presented me with a new contract. It included among many other things the three following points:

1) A clause about 'any software/hardware/idea/invention... etc' of mine being the property of the company'. It was so loosely worded that they could theoretically have laid claim to things I 'coded/designed/invented' in my spare time even if this had nothing to do with the business the company is in was likely to cause the company loss of revenue.
2) Forbid me to code in my own time for an Open Source project even if the project is in no way related to the business the company and is completely unlikely to cause them loss of revenue.
3) They also tried to insert what they called a "competition protection" clause in the new contract where they reserrve the right to place an injunction on me, forcing me to remain unemployed for a period of upto 6 months, if I should happen to quit working for them and begin working for somebody they feel is a competitor or if I might be using knowledge obtained in my old job at my new place of work.

All but the third clause were shot down after intense negotiations (read: most of the empoyees staged a small scale mutiny). The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract. Fortunately I was able to avoid swapping my old contract for the new model.
Now, I will agree that a comany owns what I code/design/invent on company time. I also think that a company is no worse off rewarding employees for valuable innovations in some way. But when the company starts trying to dictate whether or not I can innovate in my own spare time in a way that does not undermine the company I work for I think the company has gone too far.

Re:then don't complain

Ideas deployment is usually incremental - and the ideas that are newly deployed are pretty obvious.

Less obvious ideas are discussed in the public domain long before they are introduced as products. I like to give ADSL as an example - the original idea was that you have to split your band into many (ideally infinite) subbands to send information. The problem was that until the development of fast DSPs it was impossible to do it - and it was certainly impossible to do it when the idea was first mentioned.. since it was the days of analog filtering.

Nevertheless, there are numerous patents on ADSL, which are about very specific parts of the overall ITU-T standard rather than the idea of splitting the band in subbands to send information..

Furthermore, an individual has little or no protection against predatory companies that want to steal his ideas even with the patent system in place. The reason that a patent costs much more than an individual can possibly afford. What people do, is they give the idea to a patent attorney/firm, who agrees to pay for the upfront cost in return for a percentage on any profit made from the patent.

ivory tower?

If it's now being said by the Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School, you might say that it's no longer just being said by the long-haired hackers, but now it is also coming from the ivory tower.

Re:ivory tower?

"...being said by the Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School...."

These two schools tend to be on the more liberal side of things and tend to be closer to "long-haired hackers" than a majority of the "ivory tower". What they say doesn't necessairly match what most business believes at all.

Re:ivory tower?

Maybe, but a lot more "regular" business people read the Harvard Business Review than read EFF publications or RMS' stuff.

The term IP itself is misleading

The use of the word "property" in "intellectual property" is itself misleading. It is similar to the common lie of calling copyright infringement "theft". I prefer the term "copyrighted material".

It is just hard to apply the term "property" to something that is so easily duplicated and propagates so easily.

Re:The term IP itself is misleading

from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# IntellectualProperty [gnu.org]

``Intellectual property''
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill-advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''

The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.

When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)

If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.

``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.

Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.

If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.

According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ [wipout.net] for a counter-WIPO campaign.

The hypocrisy of calling these powers "rights" is starting to make WIPO embarassed [gnu.org].

Re:IP is property and downloading is theft.

Did you just steal from him or did you just violate his right to collect the money you owe him. What is he no longer in possession of in this example?

Steal means "to take, and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another." You haven't stolen anything from the mechanic, but you have breached your contract to pay for his work. You've probably also trespassed in his shop or yard while collecting your vehicle. He can sue, and if the state agrees it will use its monopoly on violence to compel you to pay. He may also be able to press criminal charges for your trespass.

Since many people claim that theft can only occur when a physical object is taken then how about electricity.

Electricity is an interesting thing if you try to think of it as a physical object, since the act of consuming it actually involves flowing electrons through a device and then back to the producer. Of course I'm no more entitled to use the city's electrons in my cellphone (even if I send them right back) than the city is entitled to go using random stuff in my home - even if they put it back right away.

Electricity makes a bit more sense if you think of it as a service, like auto repair, but the same principles apply. If you're obtaining electricity without the provider's consent, it's probably through trespass, fraud, or similar unlawful means.

DMCA aside..

Existing copyright laws are not the major problem. It's the 'over-enforcement' of copyrights, and the ridiculous nature of the patent system that are really the major problems with IP laws in the US.

Re:DMCA aside..

Existing copyright laws are not the major problem. It's the 'over-enforcement' of copyrights

While I agree with the spirit of what I understand you to be saying here, I think it's important to note that a law which is only good when marginally enforced is a lousy law.

I certainly do not expect that framing a better law will be easy, but I think it's clear that settling for ones that are pretty-not-too-bad has largely contributed to the mess we're in right now. The blood, sweat, and tears should go into the framing of appropriate laws, not the decision of whether to enforce them.

Dan

too complex

The issues here are too complex for one to argue either for or against IP laws. The simple matter of fact is that it does benefit some businesses and it hurts others. I could find cases of both and this kind of arguing over if it is really fruitless and only serves to deepen the pockets of the media which distributes such articles.

in the end, the free market will decide.

radical rethinking of IP?

From the article,

"Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way."

The current P2P swapping debacle that RIAA is facing was inevitable. Back in the day (i.e., when the printing press was invented), people funded their own printings of books on the theory that ideas were for disseminating. Nowadays, people ask readers to fund "printings" of various media on the theory that ideas are for making money. Nonsense! How can you "copyright" an algorithm? An idea? A mathematical theorem? Only by creating an unstable system of "intellectual property" which will inevitably collapse under its own weight. Consider: every theorem (including algorithms) in existence today was already contained implicitly in the fundamental axioms and definitions by which it was proved. So who gets the credit?

Jeff Cagle

Re:radical rethinking of IP?

P2P swapping debacle that RIAA is facing was inevitable

And deliciously ironic. Most people don't realize that Hollywood was LITERALLY founded on piracy. Edison had very strict controls on the equipment that was used to produce and show movies. He formed an organization to enforce his rights. This organization was so onerous that scores of soon-to-be movie producers/directors/etc packed up their lives and moved to the "wild wild west" AKA California. California was so wild and remote that Edison's patents couldn't be enforced, and the movie industry grew and flourished. By the time the law got things settled down, the patents had expired (the patent limit was 17 or 18 years at that time).

Next time you have to sit through those annoying anti-piracy bits before the movie, just remember that it it were't for wholesale disregard for the "Intellectual Property" of others, Hollywood might have never came to be.

Re:radical rethinking of IP?

California was so wild and remote that Edison's patents couldn't be enforced

It was also because it was close to another country so they could occasionally flee to Mexico [stanford.edu] to avoid the law.

Re:radical rethinking of IP?

This was one of the many reasons the movie industry moved to California. Other reasosn were the dry conditions (early film was affected by humidity), the natural light (early lights were not as strong as the sun), and the year round 'mild' weather (no snow). It also helped that land was cheap at the time.

Re:radical rethinking of IP?

While these acedemics may be doing the hero's task of rethinking IP, I'm also concerned about this comment by a copyright professor who read the report:

Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University and a copyright expert, had a more mixed view of the report.....it "makes unsubstantiated, misleading, or misinformed statements about copyright law." In fact, she said, "A little less preaching to the technologist 'choir' might have made this a better 'sell' to copyright owners and, perhaps, to lawmakers."

Sloppy scholarship helps no one. Given how much bad research, lack of fact-checking, and fabricated hearsay (Jane Fonda and John Kerry photos anyone?) floats around on the net, the moment I encounter anything that I know is untrue or wrong in any piece, I stop reading and file the whole thing in the Intellectually Suspect folder.

The Committee for Economic Development has a spotty track record. Marshall Plan: Good. World Bank and IMF: iffy. Setting standards for public schools through testing: bad (and, yes, I am a parent).

no way!

You mean threatening people into agreeing with your absurd ideals isn't a successful business model?

Over and over

It's been said umpteen times but these folks at RIAA just don't seem to get it.

Its good that these reports are coming from schools that might have a louder voice in getting the point through.

When Joe Sixpack buys the CD, there is no ulterior motive behind that buy. He is not thinking about ripping the songs and sharing it for free. The DRM/copy protection/encryption/blah and all other technologies only make the experience of listening to music bittersweet when you put the CD into the player and it refuses to recognize it. And no digital protection is good enough for the Black Hats who would get around it, no matter what.

I will say it one more time. I have bought MORE music after I listen to it online before buying it. ARE YOU LISTENING RIAA?
BR 10 years down the line, I am sure we will all look back and laugh at RIAA tactics.

It is Just Logical

The virtual, computer, software world is just too malleable and flexible to be treated the same as real-world stuff (that is why computers get used in the first place), although with TCG/TCPA/Trusted Computing some people are having a really good go at trying to make this happen by building 'rules' into hardware.

Some people will need to learn this the hard way, and there is going to be a lot of kicking and screaming.

Fear for the future

The mainstream press and acedemics are now saying what /. has been ranting about for years. This is not necessarily a good thing. I believe IP should be reformed, but great care should be taken lest we shoot ourselves in the foot. There are a lot of programmers as well as artists here that could stand to lose their livlihood. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

No kidding? People prefer free?

The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support

Really? What a surprising finding. I would never have guessed that the vast majority of people, who happen to be the consumers of copyrighted material, would actually prefer the copy-left concept where that material was available to them free.

All sarcasm aside, people have always preferred free to paying for something but, the creators of the copyrighted material do deserve to make a living off of their work. The RIAA may be going to extremes with draconian practices but, the presently unspoken idea that "music wants to be free" is not justifiable. When I create a work, what ever it may be, I should have the right to determine how and by whom it may be used. The fact that someone else would rather have it for free is not an adequate reason for me to give it away if I choose not to.

Re:No kidding? People prefer free?

Yes, people prefer free. And the people are who the laws are here for.

the creators of the copyrighted material do deserve to make a living off of their work

Yes. The creators. The RIAA does not create music - it finds, harvests, markets , controls and charges for music, giving the slightest hint of what it makes (wastes) back to the original artist.

Courtney Love herself said that the average artist would do a lot better working for tips. That's what copylefting music does - it allows the artists to survive very well on tips, not on hoarding. This is the way artists have survived since the dawn of humanity.

Re:No kidding? People prefer free?

Courtney Love herself said that the average artist would do a lot better working for tips. That's what copylefting music does - it allows the artists to survive very well on tips, not on hoarding.

The added bonus of course is that the good artists get paid and the crap artists have to find something else to do. It's more efficient (in an economic sense) than the current system which can drive sales for groups with no musical talent.

Re:No kidding? People prefer free?

"This is the way artists have survived since the dawn of humanity"

And this is exactly the point. The very concept of coyright goes against thousands of years of humanity copying and using whatever they find useful to better their lives.

While the Greeks did not invent writing, they copied the concept from somewhere else and their society benefitted greatly from it. The Romans used pumps that were invented elsewhere and without which their aquaducts would have been useless.

I believe that every invention and improvement made in the modern era is a direct result of the education and knowledge that our ancestors invented for us. Seriously, sdo you think Bill Gates could have written Windows without all of the work others had done before him? Without the ability to read and write or do complex mathematic calculations if those ideas and principals had been copyrighted throughout all this time? Of course not, we take what knowledge we can and we build upon it. The end result is the result of work done by thousands (if not millions) of individuals throughout time and it took all of our learning and knowledge to get where we are today. IP laws never helped humanity then and they are not helping humanity now.

I believe that people should be compensated for their intellectual work, but IP laws as they are now don't benefit people, they benefit nobody but companies. IMO IP laws are not natural, they do not add to society and they certainly do not encourage the sharing of knowledge which, in turn would increase research times...

Well I'm at work and in a hurry. I'll stop my rant, sorry if it makes no sense. But all we have, we have because of the collective works of humanity - IP laws bastardise the right of the public to learn and research whatever they like which is a fundamental right our ancestors have always had.

John the Kiwi

Re:No kidding? People prefer free?

The RIAA may be going to extremes with draconian practices but, the presently unspoken idea that "music wants to be free" is not justifiable

Music wants to be free is not justifiable. It never was. Although, the tactics are being criticized because there is no alternative provided to the 'buy the whole cd or don't buy it'. I DO NOT want to spend 14/15/16/17 dollars on a CD if there is only a couple of songs that I would like to listen. iTunes is an example that Apple got this sentiment right and its a small step in right direction.

I am not defending people who want the music for free or who are sharing/downloading for free. All I am saying that beating up with a stick without giving an alternative is not right. This is only going to alienate customers and push them to do the wrong thing.

The distribution methods have changed with the P2P technologies and its time to build a business model around it.

ARE YOU READING THIS RIAA???

Freedom from the RIAA

Is what the music needs. The RIAA is about as useful to recording artists as Stalin was to the prisoners in the gulags. The RIAA has taken the freedoms of manufacturing cost management, shipping and storage managment, promotion management, distrobution pricing management, etc. away from the artist. The artist may be much more gifted in any or all of these areas, but the RIAA sees a single vision; which clearly places their own survival well ahead of that of the artist.

For over a year I've been suggesting that artists stick a PayPal button on their sites and offer amnesty for downloaders. Paying the artists 2 or 3 times what they actually profit for these crappy CD deals that the RIAA companies force artists to sign, is peanuts compared to CD prices.

Amnesty is the answer!

Not bad for business...

...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.

This isn't a post about how good patents are. On the contrary, it's a post about how patents can be misused or abused to give one company an unfair advantage over its rivals.

I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.

Re:Not bad for business...

On the contrary, it's a post about how patents can be misused or abused to give one company an [unfair] advantage over its rivals.

That was the whole idea behind them. It might be just that a 20 year term of protection is too stringent for things like computer science innovations. However, withness the revolution in textiles when the original Gore patent rant our on Gore-Tex a few years back. Radical improvement in the quality of the 'competeing' fabrics, many of which were simply Teflon-laminate membranes made by someone other than Gore.

You could build an argument that Gore deserved to earn significant revenues for their pioneering work in the textiles field. That's what the patent process is supposed to look like. Since the innovation is clearly documented, at the end of the term, everyone benefits. It's definately a double edged sword.

Patents might have problems, especially when someone is granted a patent for non-novel techniques, or worse, something with demonstrable prior-art. This is when the system starts to break down. Combined with the Bog Business technique of cross licensing you can really lock out the little guys. Those practises are more a problem that the underlying concept.

Re:Not bad for business...

...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.

But everyone else gets screwed. That's fine as long as it encourages people to come up with new stuff, but it's bad in the long term; which is exactly why patents and copyrights should be for a limited time only. Your comment is like saying that inflation is good, because some people benefit from inflation (e.g. borrowers with a fixed interest rate, etc.) at the same rate that other people suffer. But in the long run, you don't want runaway inflation or runaway intellectual monopolies; because it destabalizes the economy, and breaks the fundamental quid-pro-quo of copyright/patent/trademark law.

Just to give an example; if you want to make an album full of samples (like the Beasty Boys' second album) these days.. well.. you can't! Because it would be too expensive to license all those 1 second samples, even though they have questionable artistic merit per se, and combining them into a new work is an artistic endeavor which results in a holistic new work. And that holds true even for those with pretty sweet record deals; record companies won't even crosslicense between their own artists. This is an enormous barrier-to-entry for sampling artists, which the established rightsholders don't care about because it's not their model of either business or art. And you can count on none of those copyrights expiring any time soon, because they're retroactively being renewed by paid-for laws.

I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.

The fees themselves, and the costs of contesting bad patents, and their running time, are as much of a problem as the USPTO's whoring for dimes.
If applying for patents was really cheap, the FSF would hold hundreds of them; if contesting them was cheap and easy (just mail the USPTO some prior art or explain why it's trivial), most of the patents that come up on /. would be invalidated in a day. If e-online.intarweb patents had a running time of a year, we'd all pony up some one-click cash just fine, or we'd wait for it to expire.

None of this is true though; applying for a patent is costly, contesting one (either through the USPTO or the courts) is fiendishly complicated and costly, and patents run for years and years. The rubberstamping is little more than aiding and abetting.

RIAA

Copy-left software is conceptually different from the intellectual property that RIAA so stingily guards. I don't see what one has to do with the other. To associate the two categories weakens by association the legitimacy of copy-left (since "file trading" is legally actionable, if not altogether wrong).

IPR isnt a problem in itself...

Its a double edged sword this one...

A startup requires some kind of protection from companies that are bigger and more established from taking their idea and using their extra resources to get the product to market first. The IPR laws were orginally designed to protect the small guy and give him a fighting chance... in this case they add competition to the market.

The problem is that they are being used as bargining chips by huge global-hyper-mega corps as the corperate equivilant of a nuclear deterant (You sue me for this and i'll sue you for that!). This is absolutely NOT what they are designed for.

It would be great to come up with some hard and fast rule that prevents this abuse, but I cant think of one. Perhaps some kind of patent lifespan restriction based on company net worth (to prevent a company with ample resources to develop a patented technology from just sitting on the idea).

Any other suggestions?

Re:IPR isnt a problem in itself...

It would be great to come up with some hard and fast rule that prevents this abuse, but I cant think of one. Perhaps some kind of patent lifespan restriction based on company net worth (to prevent a company with ample resources to develop a patented technology from just sitting on the idea).

Wouldn't work. Any big company with significant resources would have little trouble spinning off a subsidiary company with very little net worth whose entire purpose was to hold all the patents and license them and/or hammer competitors with lawsuits. And if you say "any company a big company has controlling interest in" as a caveat to get around this, you run into a catch-22 for small startups: their patents are gone if they get too much investment, but without investment their patents are useless....

A matter of simple economics

Once a person decides that a price of $15 is not a good price for a CD, or that $150 is not a good price for Windows XP, the economy as a whole is better off with that person downloading said program. Sure, the RIAA or Microsoft are happy with it, and would fight to the death over it, but that sale would never have been made in the first place.

The access to the infinitely duplicable material destroys the notion of scarcity of the product itself - whereupon the obvious price for such a product is no more than the cost of transport - usage of an Internet account.

We're seeing the destruction of an entire industry; its old guard will cry foul every step of the way, until the market eventually drags it into this new age. Observe the American car industry in the '70s, or of US Steel.

Re: the "worth" of bits.

The access to the infinitely duplicable material destroys the notion of scarcity of the product itself

Currently when assessing the "damage" when a copyright violation has taken place, the retail cost of the item is used. However, this doesn't make sense - when a 14 year old kid pirates a movie industry standard $40,000 dollar 3D rendering package - is the damage really $40,000? Of course not, it is really $0. (I'm not saying the kid should go unpunished - that's a different argument).

But...

Intellectual property laws may be bad for business in general, but they are invaluable to big business. How else could they ensure that upstarts don't come in, undercut them, and take over the market? Yet, as anyone who's taken Economics 101 should know, monopolies are hopelessly inefficient - they restrict output leading to high prices for the consumer, whereas a competive market produces more and can only charge around their cost to produce the product. It's hard to be optimistic that big business interests and their lobbyists will ever allow the status quo to change.

Re:But...

Intellectual property laws may be bad for business in general, but they are invaluable to big business. How else could they ensure that upstarts don't come in, undercut them, and take over the market?

Three words: Economies of scale

I think there's an interesting change happening around us, where folks are starting to rediscover that ideas aren't the be-all, end-all of a successful business. The key in business has always been in the execution. If you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc. you win. You don't get a guaranteed billion just for coming up with an idea and ambushing somebody with your patent 10 years after they make the business model work.

I'm drawing a bit from my artistic background here, and looking at it from a slightly different perspective. As an artist (dancer), I don't get paid if I don't work. That work can be teaching, it can be choreography, it can be performing. The simple fact is, however, that if I'm not constantly working, I don't get paid. I don't tell my students that they can't use the knowledge I've passed on to them. They can use it however they please.

The key works out to this: If you don't work, you don't eat. You can have all the inspiration you want, but if you can't translate that into something someone else wants, and do it consistently, you're going to be hurting. I'm not sure yet whether I like that idea or not, but it certainly seems fair enough.

Then again, I may just be hallucinating.... ;)

Dan

C|Net News.Com.com Mirror

http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5167121.html [com.com]

Correct term is Intellectual Monopoly

The term Intellectual Property is a misnomer, a more correct term would be intellectual monopoly
Adam Smith and *Intellectual monopoly* (Score:5, Interesting)
by NZheretic (23872) on Fri 18 Oct 12:11AM (#4467943 [slashdot.org])

From

The Relevance of Adam Smith [frb.org] by Robert L. Hetzel.
With added commentary by yours truly...

MONOPOLY AND GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES: The principal theme set forth in The Wealth of Nations is that a country most effectively promotes its own wealth by providing a framework of laws that leaves individuals free to pursue the interest they have in their own economic betterment. This self-interest motivates individuals? propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another and thereby leads them to meet the needs of others through voluntary cooperation in the market place:

...man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (p. 14)

Everyone realises and acknowledges that Microsoft is a business, there to make a profit to share with it's marjor stakeholders, from it's shareholders to it's employees. However ...

Smith also argues that the harmony between private goals and larger socially desirable goals promoted by voluntary cooperation between individuals in the market place is interfered with by monopoly and government subsidies. In contrast to competition, monopoly and government subsidies cause individuals to devote either too few or too many resources to particular markets:

....the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stock towards the employments which in ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society. But if from this natural preference they should turn too much of it towards those employments, the fall of profit in them and the rise of it in all others immediately dispose them to alter this faulty distribution. Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private interests and passions of men naturally lead to divide and distribute the stock of every society, among all the different employments carried on in it, as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society.

All the different regulations of the mercantile system, necessarily derange more or less this natural and most advantageous distribution of stock. (pp. 594-5)
Every derangement of the natural distribution of stock is necessarily hurtful to the society in which it takes place; whether it be by repelling from a particular trade the stock which would otherwise go to it, or by attracting towards a particular trade that which would not otherwise come to it. (p. 597)

.... sometimes, because of the overiding profit motive, the end consumer can be put at a disadvantage, and the natural model can become unbal

If there were no copyright ...

I estimate that the iTunes music store holds around 500.000 songs, which requires about 2TB storage. At the moment, it costs only around $1300 in harddisks for consumers to store the entire iTunes collection. It is likely that in a few years, it will only costs about, say $300 bucks. Another few years and it will be affordable (in terms of storage) for consumers to have the entire library of songs ever published in their pocket. Does having copyright on music still make sense then?

The primary motivation for copyright is to stimulate more output by giving creators limited-time protection of their work. But do we really need stimulation for more musical output if you can a million songs with you at anytime? If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether. The benefits is that everybody can, for little costs, enjoy about the complete published musical output of the past with them. Is this a good tradeoff?

Re:If there were no copyright ...

I'm sure not the first to say this, but that would lead to a situation I'm fully in favor of: musicians making a living by PLAYING live music for people.

Re:If there were no copyright ...

But not all forms of music are cundusive to live performance. Dance music, for example, is really intended to be played in clubs, so pay-by-live-performance may not work for them.

Re:If there were no copyright ...

If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether.

As a working songwriter, I can tell you: there is simply no money to be made in the current system. The authors of the creative works simply aren't making any money now... so where's the value of the monopoly?

The "industry" is using their monopoly protection not to increase creative output, but to reduce it. There are hundreds of thousands of performing musicians in this country... how many are represented by "industry" labels? Almost none. Meanwhile the most prolific songwriter I know works at Guitar Center selling knockoff Fenders to teenagers in order to pay the rent.

A scene on campus...

1. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace."

Man-on-the-street: "But, aren't you a member of that group of ivory tower theorists?"

Profs: [runs off] "AAHAHAHA! Man the battlements! Back, I say to thee, BACK!"

So you want MORE coercion through force...

Copyrights and Intellectual Property are protected through the use of force by the only monopoly legally allowed to use force: our government.

Copyright makes sense in some ways, but if you look at copyright historically, much of the greatest art and music was produced with no protection for the author. Great literary works and poetry also had no protection under copyright until recently.

In the past 300 years, we decided in order to protect the "rights" of a creator, we need government to step in and threaten anyone who wanted to steal such creations and use them without compensating the artist. Fine.

Our Constitution gave very limited protection (7 years, extendable for another 7 years maximum). To many free thinkers, copyright was a great concern, as it now gave government a new power it didn't have before. As many of the free marketeers here know, every new government power is a slippery slope towards ultimate government power.

Copyright has been made into a monopolizing power for corporations, and now capitalism and the free market is blamed! Capitalism would never allow copyright -- if you create something, don't release it until you have the best way to market or distribute it. Should I have a better tactic, I should be able to move it too. Creating a product or art is only part of the profitability -- marketing, distribution, and other parts of selling the item are just as important.

Copyleft is no better. In the end, you still need some entity to enforce it. If its a free market entity, people will have no reason to support your copyleft as they aren't forced to. If you allow government the ability to enforce it, they will only use coecion through force to protect it, and that again creates a monopoly.

When it boils down to software, there might not be any reason to copyright or copyleft or protect the software through the monopoly of force. There are free market protections in place already!

If you were the author of Windows, and someone wanted to promote the product without your consent, you could submit to the buying public that they should buy your product as they'd get your support. They'd get your updates (as you have the source code) quicker than through your competitor. They'd get the support of knowing they can submit new ideas to you that might get into the code (your competitor wouldn't have that ability, no source code). Your customers would also have the knowledge that they'd be supporting you to continue to make better products.

Where does copyright fit into this? Is copyright preventing rampant piracy? Not a chance. If you want to protect your software from getting copied, force your software to register itself online at every use. Fixed. No pirating.

If you want to protect your software from getting copied, how about hardware locks like in the past? Sure, some have been worked around, but in the end, the pirates would have to work extra hard to do so. If you price it properly, business would have no incentive to pirate.

Copyright and copyleft are both automations created that can only work through force. Only government has the legal mandate to initiate force. And once we allow that power, we have no power to restrain it should it get out of hand.

The report itself

Don't download this unless you have some free time... the 617 KB, 101 page PDF can be found here [ced.org] on the CED website [ced.org].

Science Friday

I was recently listening to the NPR archive of a recent Science Friday. The guests were some folks from Xerox PARC who were there are the beginnings of it all. Some happened to be working for Microsoft now and their viewpoints were in line with that. One person (don't remember his name, unfortunately) did mention that Open Source ideals, though it was not called that then, was what allowed all those emerging companies that sprang from the Xerox research to blossom. It was the freedom that created this little industry of the Internet.

So I'd definitely agree that this travesty of laws that have sprung up at the behest of media companies is indeed harming the economy.

Yes

If you look back, the entire motivation for IP laws was to promote the greater creation of those works.

There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the current system of IP laws produces the greatest benefit for the least cost to society.

If not optimized, the laws just preserve some artificial revenue stream protection scheme.

Having invented a patentable idea, I can say that the term of the patent had absolutely nothing to do with my creation of that idea. It might have something to do with how much money the patent is worth to a company that wanted to buy it, but it had nothing to do with the creation of the idea.

Unamerican!

This is unamerican and illegal thought!!! Whether it be atoms or bits, everything needs to be owned and properly licensed for use! The idea that something can be free for all borders on communism and treason! Here in the U$A we must ensure that authors and inventors rule the use of their work with an iron fist! Write your senators and the FBI, these traitorous academics must be silenced and jailed, in order to preserve their freedom!

Cheap

I don't know why the labels and studios cannot just realize the obvious:

1 - Sell each song on the internet for $1,
they will probably get more money than
trying to sell CDs with 12 songs for $15.
If for no other resason than because you
don't have to leave your house.

iTunes proves that a lot of people prefer
this to just swapping files.

2 - The same goes for movies -- if you could
"order" a high quality copy for $5,
you wouldn't have to go out to the
movie theater, but you will watch at least
4 times the number of movies.
When the networks get faster, to download a
high quality 4GB mpeg for $5 beats
downloading a crappy version for 0

Re:Cheap

I don't know why the labels and studios cannot just realize the obvious

I'm not sure that they don't realize it. For all the twaddle that is spouted about destroying economic incentives, there is one thing that somehow goes unmentioned (although Eben Moglem did touch on it in his recent speech at Harvard). The core of what's going on with all this (and you can add proprietary software companies to the labels and studios) is perfectly explicable from Economics 101: specifically, microeconomics, which says that in an efficient market, price = marginal cost. (Marginal cost is the incremental cost of adding one unit of output; note this is different from average cost!)

Given today's technology, the marginal cost of producing one more CD or DVD or copy of a program is very close to zero. Also, there is no particular benefit to having the physical object (e.g., a CD) for itself, unlike, for example, a beautifully printed, illustrated book.

So I'm not sure that lack of realization or understanding is the problem -- studios, labels, and software companies may well realize it. They just don't like the answer, because it means their business model is broken beyond repair.

"Bits are not the same as atoms."

Right! A bit is 8 electrons.

CEOs and children under five...

CEOs and children under five prefer a whole cupcake to a piece of pie, regardless of the comparative amounts. But isn't it nice to know that corporations are not ruled solely by the desire to increase profits? It seems, at some level of affluence, the desire for more control exceeds the desire for mere gain. And some people claim idealism is dead!

My Take

My take on it is this.. We shouldn't make a blanket statement about all IP laws. They initially do what they're supposed to: Give the creator control over his property in order to recoup costs of creation. It's also good to let the creator make a profit as well. Pharmaceuticals have a high research and development cost, especially considering the time it takes for FDA approval in the US. Entirely removing IP protections from the area would likely make the industry not want to invest their time.

I feel that tuning the amount of IP protection for different types of industries is helpful for business. Long-term or indefinite-term copyright just doesn't make sense, especially when the original creator is long gone, or the current owner isn't the original creator. Fifty years should really be the maximum, or should be the maximum if the property has been sold by the original owner (thinking of printed materials here). There are some other issues that need to be addressed with the sale of specific types of rights. One example that comes to mind is that of the works of Philip K. Dick. Hollywood basically gave him the "we'll call you later" line while buying movie rights at bargain-basement prices. Now that he is deceased, we've got three big-budget screen adaptations of his work that raked in the dough. There's also the issue of studios which review a script, reject it, then make a movie based on that script (without proper credit) years later. Occasionally a couple of studios will do this, producing similar movies at about the same time. Weakening IP laws in this situation will only hurt the "little guy" even more.

The area that definitely needs the most tuning is IP with regard to technology. There should be some type of orphan clause, if the creator goes bankrupt (or the author dies), and no one had previously made claim to the IP. I'm thinking primarily about software source code lost in limbo. In specialty sofware areas where there isn't a high profit margin this is a major concern when picking the right package: Will this company still be in business 10 years from now? And, of course, (everyone's favorite) tech patents on methods really need an overhaul. Seven years seems to be a bit to long. We really need a new way of reviewing patents. It's not that all of them are overly broad, but a problem that exists because changing a few key words makes something patentable. The "pausing live broadcast" patent should be tossed. The concept has existed and has been implemented since probably the late 1950s for the purposes of "instant replay" during sporting events. Throwing in the words "digital" and "disc", or the amount of time that can be "shifted" shouldn't have a bearing on the validity of the patent. Likewise, the concept of recording in the background shouldn't be patentable either, even if it uses the buzzword "buffer".

SlipHead.com Idea Exchange

In light of the exceptional (and continued) success of the Open-Source Software model [gnu.org] as well as the proliferation of peer-to-peer networks, I would like to get Slashdot readers' opinions on how a similar fledgling model is being applied to ideas, inventions, and patents. Particularly, I am interested in how advances in 3D and circuit board printers could lead to the 'Napsterization' of commercial products.

We have all had our own version of the Jump to Conclusions [eccentrix.com] mat which never saw the light of day due to our own time and resource commitments. What if implementing that idea were as easy as contributing to an open source project. Ok, what if it were almost that easy?

My reasoning is this: I have noticed a recent rise in "open idea" sites such as Half Bakery [halfbakery.com], SlipHead [sliphead.com], and Should Exist [shouldexist.org]. These sites all have one common theme: put your idea out in a public discussion forum for others to enjoy, contemplate, and critique. My thoughts are that this methodology, coupled with the growing ease of desktop manufacturing [zcorp.com], has a potential to revolutionize the way new concepts are created and developed. It also has potentially profound effects on procuring patents, business practices, and intellectual property in general. The question then is: How can these open ideologies and development processes excel within a predominately capitalistic society?

What are your thoughts?

d'oh!

well, if that correlation comes as a surprise, i'm no longer surprised! just look what prohibition did to the alcohol business! ;)

patents are a monopoly

THey are used to protects ones work from being copied but at the same time with enough patents start turning major patent holders into global monopolies. New ideas usually come mixed with old ones and you have to liberate this process as much as possible unless you want to bottle neck it for the sake of $$$ which is what pattents do.

Compare with 19th C England

During the 19th century, England tightened its patent laws to the point that reverse engineering was disallowed (cf. DMCA and some EULAs).
The main result was the decline of new invention and improvement originating out of England and a surge of advancement of invention in the US.
(England continued to 'coast' as a world power by expending its capitol (i.e.: the empire) for another 50 - 100 years before precipitous decline was obviously evident.)

IP could stifle the Theory Of Everything

If Calabi and Yau had gotten a copyright on their spaces, where would string theory be today, huh?

"mickey mouse"-right

I think the fact that Disney keeps lobbying/bribing to push copyright length into the future to keep Mickey Mouse from the public domain coincides nicely with their current financial, business, and haven't-made-a-decent-movie-in-how-long woes. But remember, correlation does not denote causation, but...

The major problem is

The major problem is that copyright should not be transferable.

The person who created the work should retain all rights to the work. Not some global megacorp that can monopolize on the giant mass of copyrights they have bought or taken from employees.

If you can only monopolize what you have actually created then the power and wealth would be spread much more evenly. An individual is normally much more likely to license or sell a product at a reasonable price.

The idea that a corporation has the rights of a person but no way to be held accountable for its actions was not taken into account when these laws were passed or when the US Constitution was originally written to grant copyright.

IMHO, returning a corporation to its original status of a group of accountabe individuals with individual rights and copyrights, rather than the current status of an untouchable person, would correct many of our current problems.

Where did "atoms" come from?

Copyright, patent, and trademark laws have nothing to do with protecting atoms. The protect ideas and expression. The medium in which the ideas are set forth may be composed of atoms, or even of the states of electrons; but it is the idea, not the medium, that is protected.

A solution to the "IP question"

I think that IP laws are fundamentally broken, and here's why:

The root of out difficulties with IP is that ideas don't have natural scarcity in the economic sense; that is, any number of people can consume them without diminishing others' aiblity to do so. This means that the "invisible hand" of supply and demand will not work on ideas, unless we artificially induce scarcity -- exactly what IP laws are designed to do.

The problem with this is that it doesn't work. In practice, IP laws are failing miserably (in my opinion doing more harm than good at this point -- see the DMCA, for example); but even in theory, I believe IP laws are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

What can we do about it? Scrap all of our current IP laws and start over.

And then what? Some would argue that we don't need IP laws or their equivalent at all -- for example, Slashdot featured an essay by an economist arguing exactly that not too long ago -- but I am not entirely convinced of that yet, and in any case that would certainly bring about a vastly different order of things, which is certain to induce very large amounts of resistance from those with vested interests in the current IP system.

My proposed solution, then: subsidize the production of ideas. The basic idea is to subsidize the creator of a given idea proportionally to society's use of that idea. This will not necessarily result in overconsumption (as is the case with most subsidies), since the subsidy would exist not on top of but instead of the market.

Of course, there are rather large practical hurdles to overcome in implementing such a system, but I don't believe any of them is intractable, certainly not more so than some of the problems we already face with our current IP system.

What I seek, then, is some feedback for this idea -- point out anything that seems like an intrinsic flaw in the idea, or a practical problem that you believe to be truly unsolvable; or perhaps suggest some ways this plan could be implemented. (I have some ideas on that front, of course, but they are too large to fit in the margin of ths post!)

Mike

IP policing == offshoring has precedents

I can't help but be reminded of why Hollywood is in Calfornia rather than New York. All the early movie studios were in New Jersey. Edison, who owned patents on the movie camera charged royalties on every foot of film shot, and send thugs out to (in some cases) smash the cameras of those who didn't cough up.

Eventually people got sick of it and moved to the other side of the country & got on with it unmolested.

Current US IP laws are a significant incentive to move any business involved in the creation of IP offshore.

I suspect in a hundred yeasr noone other thana few historians will know why it is that the biotech or IT industry is centered on, say, Australia or India or Marituis and that it once was centered in the US.

Pioneers vs Settlers vs Citizens

Pioneers who blaze trails into the wilderness, the settlers who follow them to establish communities, and the civilians who later live in the settled areas all need different things from a legal system. You couldn't tame a continent if you had teams of safety inspectors and liability lawyers riding along in the wagons.

The Internet is in the Settlement phase. What we're seeing now is a lot of bickering between vested interests, mostly over who gets what. Like when the railroads were buying up land. I don't think today's legislators are in a position to dictate restrictions that will affect people fifty years from now. But that's their job.

Legal minds seem to be waking up to the fact that information exchange, and to some extent information itself, is cheap now. Copyright artificially imposes value on it. We continue to maintain the copyright system because 1) it's traditional and 2) we're afraid not to.

Paradigms have short lifespans. Jack Valenti can whine all day about movies costing $50-60 million. But some of those movies would have cost a billion without digital technology. When he's able to make an equivalent movie for $1 million using synthesized sets, music and actors, he'll be as sympathetic to the complaints of all the defunct show business unions as someone downloading a LOTR torrent.

Everything looks different from every point of view, including those of one person at different points in time. Anyway, just a lot of blabbing, I don't really have anything constructive to suggest.

Ivory Tower? Try the Mud Hut

The notion of community property is not something that originated in the hallowed halls of academia. The notion of proprietary intellectual property is a uniquely 21st century western idea. Copyleft, Creative Commons, OSS, "Free as in Beer", and other notions are simply reassertions of the long-time notion of common property being that which no one individual can reasonably control.

NY Times registration NOT required?

I notice that the linked NY Times article did NOT ask for registration. And it doesn't seem to have any "affiliate" or other workaround tag either.

Have they dropped the registration requirement?

If so, did they do it because they actually READ their own article and take it to heart? (If not, it's still a nice coincidence. B-) )

Innovation

" "If all of this digital property is free, who is going to invest 50 to 60 million dollars to make a movie?" he (Jack Valenti) asked.

Exactally my point. 50-60 million dollars blown on just-another-movie instead of innovating and coming up with innovative new entertainment. What he said actually has nothing to do with innovation but instead it is about a product that (without extensive government intervention in the market) is no longer profitable to make. (50-60 million dollar movies!) So sad. In another 10-25 years teenagers will be creating similar movies in their basement for 500-600 dollars. Such is technology.

Re:Academia ....

Yeah, but how much longer until the Gov't figures it out?

Re:Academia ....

Well since Stallman has been part of "academia" at MIT for longer you've known about the concept of free software, and probably for longer than you've been alive, you're kind of wrong.

Or did you think all free software has been developed by a bunch of teenage hackers?

Re:In a hypothetical world

"no more new music for you!"

It'd be funny if it happened, even as a marketing ploy.

You mean it hasn't happened already ?, all i can hear on the big radio stations and tv are "professional kareoke people" aka "manufactured pop" singing a bad cover of a song that another band from 1980 wrote (inspired by a 1970's band) because the record company can't be bothered to nurture real talent because they now deem its too financially "risky" better to go with what we know right ?

now as a result you have the odd phenomonon of "manufactured garage bands" as in bands that are designed to look like "real" bands (like in the pub/club variety) but really they are completly assembled by a marketing team and dont usually write/play their music (meaning covers) or subcontract it out to "real" songwriters all because "real talent" is too risky

so yep im pretty convinced thats it !, you have heard it all, for the rest of your life you are going to listen to basically the same songs from the same 60-90 eras repeaded ad infinitum, until you end up hating that song and can no longer tolerate it, if its a bad song tough shit, it will be played to you regardless until you do like/buy it (if you play something enough for long enough they will like it MTV method)

same goes for movies too, have all the tales really all been told ? i could go on but i won't, looking at the this centuries film output and what they are planning in the future, i don't hold a lot of confidence.

marketing is clever at being stupid

Copyright

I thought of it, I wrote it down, I recorded it, it's mine. If you want to listen to it, read it, than you must agree to my terms. If you don't with do agree to my terms, you're out of luck. Move on.