“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
If you're willing to connect the dots in this way, where anything that gives you legal authority to control the conduct of others (competitors, critics, customers) in specific ways is "abusive", then you should realize that this sort of argument is very easily extended, because that's exactly what all property does.
Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you. Ordinary property is the right to say how others are allowed to use a physical thing that belongs to you. It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
I don’t quite buy the leap that “software companies being exploitative” is at all related to “protecting IP through the use of copyright”. Cory does not link the two successfully in my mind.
I think intellectual property should be taxed as are other properties and assets. This would seem to have the nice side effect of setting a monetary value in IP lawsuits. If you declare that your property is worth $X when you file taxes, you couldn’t really argue that it’s worth $10X when suing over violations of it.
And frankly, I think IP should be taxed since holders rely on the government to protect it. If I have a house, it’s at least hypothetically possible that I can defend it myself. That’s not possible with intellectual property. So if holders are relying on that government to uphold its value, they should be expected to contribute proportionally to that value for the service.
And make that taxation progressive so it would be unprofitable to hold on to copyrights for decades. This feels even better than my idea about making copyright very short, on the order of several years — technically it would be indefinite, but only if you can pay the ever-increasing cost to maintain it.
The IP tax would also solve the status of abandonware once and for all — the company is no longer around to pay the tax on its copyright, so the copyright gets terminated and the works become public domain.
That's really clever to tie taxes to the declared scope of IP rights. Would be good to get this idea seen by Sanders. RIAA would do just about anything to stop this law. Right now they claim that a downloaded song (without their permission) or a movie makes them lose 10k usd a some fantasy amount in that range. But then IRS could multiply this amount by the number of songs they own and demand 2% - in line with property taxes. Better 3%, since IP rights, unlike houses, are active assets that bring royalties.
I've long had a nagging feeling that there was a deep connection between the current state of our "post truth" society and the continuously widening scope of "IP" (digital monopoly) protections. Cory disentangles some of those connections and shows some of the ways IP has become a tool for restricting freedoms. But there's more: I think that those same mechanics are narrowing the overton window and putting all thinking that's outside on the same level... and we end up in a world where the ordinary person can't distinguish between the credibility of un-approved ideas.
You need to bury truth, so you can keep selling people a stream of "novel" information. Truth doesn't get you monopoly profits, only novelty. Rearrange the truth every couple decades into crappier versions and profit.
Incentives matter.
#ImaginaryProperty is the worst. #IntellectualFreedom YOLO!!!
Software copyright was an absolute mistake that fundamentally misunderstood the delicate balances between copyright owners, the market for creative works, and the public at large. I have no faith in Congress to fix it.
Copyright itself is a mistake. It made sense in an era where you needed to own a printing press in order to copy works at scale. In the 21st century, anyone can easily copy anything. Stopping it requires tyrannical laws and enforcement mechanisms.
Either copyright goes away or free computing as we know and love will be destroyed.
Keep in mind that copyright also enables free software. Without it, there would be no incentive to share source code since there would be no mechanism to stipulate that modified versions must be shared. That would significantly diminish the role of collaboration and significantly increase the role of opportunism. It is also worth noting that copyright increases the financial incentive to progress the state of the art.
The real problem with the current IP regime is its use to impose restrictions that go beyond reproduction.
"Forty years ago, we had cake and asked for icing on top of it. Today, all we have left is the icing, and we’ve forgotten that the cake was ever there. If code isn’t licensed as “free,” you’d best leave it alone."
It’s also worth pointing out that different countries have nuanced interpretations and applications of Copyright Law. The US is only one. For instance “Fair Use” is a US inspired thing that other countries don’t have. Rather than having a “defence” (when prosecuted) some countries actually give permission to copy things (as a right, not a defence)
The US is known for forcing other countries to adopt laws similar to its own via trade agreements. If they don't do what the US wants, its trade office will put them in a naughty list which results in political and economic pressure being applied.
I feel like we're passively reading a piece about this rather than doing anything about it because Stallman never thought, "How ya gonna pay the bills," was an interesting question.
I offer WSB-- the assholiest of domains, yet one where that is an interesting question-- whose users are actually doing a better job of showing the world the corruption of their domain.
I shall endeavor to write a weird piece of Gnu fan fiction about this.
> """ It’s not just DRM. Take “Goldman Sans,” a free font released by the finance giant and global supervillain Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sans is a copyrighted work, and it comes with a copyright license that you “agree” to when you download the font. Among the license terms for Goldman Sans is a non-disparagement clause – that is, a clause that prohibits you from criticizing Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs doesn’t need copyright law to prevent people from copying its font. It gives the font away for free. Goldman Sachs needs copyright law so it can boss people around – so it can tell them what they may (and may not) say."""
Wow! That this even exists blows my mind. It reads almost as evil as surreptitiously inserting a "all your money belongs to us" clause in a EULA in the hope that nobody will read it. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I'm not sure what part of the license is actually this "non-disparagement clause".
The closest I could find in the above "restricted font license" is in the "Governing law" section -
"The User and Goldman Sachs hereby waive any right to a trial by jury and consent to exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York or, if federal jurisdiction is lacking, New York Supreme Court, New York County, for the resolution of any dispute regarding this License or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom."
.. which is limited to disputes regarding *this license or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom* .. and which doesn't seem as out of line as the article's wording suggests.
The author makes a point about interoperability, and I wholly agree. But it must be balanced with diversity, we don't care just about being interoperable, we want a thousand flowers to bloom.
eReaders seem to be dying as a hardware device and becoming merely a form of DRM. Newest models, inluding all Kobo readers, have a soldered SD memory card. And it's not just cutting costs. They're deeply bothered by your ability to copy books and various text files to the device you paid for. Memory cards fail. eReaders are now essentially hardware Steam browsers, or book consoles. You can only load books from a store.
I was holding off from buying one to get a more open device, but the tendency is to become LESS open and featured, not more. I could buy an old device, but they're by definition not supported.
A very good article. A section that really spoke to me:
> Prior to the rise of the “intellectual property” as an umbrella term, the different legal regimes it refers to were customarily referred to by their individual names. When you were talking about patents, you said “patents,” and when you were talking about copyrights, you said “copyrights.” Bunching together copyrights and trademarks and patents and other rules wasn’t particularly useful, since these are all very different legal regimes. On those rare instances in which all of these laws were grouped together, the usual term for them was “creator’s monopolies” or “author’s monopolies.”
> The anti-IP argument leans into the differences between the underlying rationale for each of these rules:
> * US copyrights exist to “promote the useful arts and sciences” (as set out in the US Constitution); that is, to provide an incentive to the creation of new works of art: copyright should offer enough protection to create these incentives, but no more. Copyright does not extend to “ideas” and only protects “expressions of ideas”;
> * Patents exist as incentive for inventors to reveal the workings of their inventions; to receive a patent, you must provide the patent office with a functional description of your invention, which is then published. Even though others may not copy your invention during the patent period, they can study your patent filings and use them to figure out how to do the same thing in different ways, or how to make an interoperable add-on to your invention;
> * Trademarks exist as consumer protection: trademarks empower manufacturers to punish rivals who misleadingly market competing products or services that are like to cause confusion among their customers. It’s not about giving Coca-Cola the exclusive right to use the work “Coke” – it’s about deputizing Coca-Cola to punish crooks who trick Coke drinkers into buying knockoffs. Coke’s trademark rights don’t cover non-deceptive, non-confusing uses of its marks, even if these users harm Coca-Cola, because these do not harm Coke drinkers.
> Seen in this light, “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game?
> When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:
> “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
> Now, free software advocates – and free culture advocates – hate the term “intellectual property.” The argument against IP rails against its imprecision and its rhetorical dishonesty.
I get an unpleasant feeling that Free Software was never really popular. It was somewhat popular early on, because it formalised the way things were done at the time. This is why it received relatively little friction. So it wasn't really accepted. It was ignored.
The "paradise lost" story of a "free state of nature" in software prior to 1980 only seems to come up in writings of free software people. The more I read other sources, the more that seems romantic, even nostalgic. And frankly academic, as in "endemic to college students".
Back in the mainframe era, there wasn't really a "software industry" as we know now. And there weren't so many rules about software specifically, because published software wasn't terribly relevant commercially. The question wasn't whether the law would step in to enable software developers to market their work, rather than hoarding it. It was whether they'd get their own software-specific regime, like Japan had, or come under some existing one.
But even before software copyright, it wasn't as though source code wasn't anybody's intellectual property. It was kept as trade secrets. There may not have been any specific public laws preventing you from doing as you liked with source code you had. But it was highly unlikely you would ever get source code you wanted in the first place.
GPL made peace with copyright, chose to depend upon it, to declare war on trade secrecy. To hear RMS tell The Parable of the Printer, the paper causing the problems was nondisclosure agreements---the tools of trade secrecy protection---not copyright statutes. And trade secrecy hasn't gone away. Folks working at software companies these days will have signed legal terms requiring them to keep company code close.
So yeah, maybe kids had their cake with icing back in the day. But they were cupcakes, mostly homemade. Not the 2^n-layer, all-you-can-eat wedding cake bonanza we gorge on now. The appearance of a software industry made that difference.
Similar rose-colored story with "intellectual property". Yes, that's in recent fashion, from about the 1980s. But there were other names before it. The near-neighbors "incorporeal property", "industrial property" (excepting copyright), and especially "intangible property" enjoyed popularity before the World Wars.
I suspect we're on about "intellectual property" because RMS turned hating on it into activist catechism. One of his many, largely failed attempts at Sapir-Whorf manipulation. But he's losing "intellectual property", too. It was and remains useful for lawyers, managers, accountants, and scholars to distinguish bundles of exclusive rights in physical assets from bundles of exclusive rights in ideas and information. "Bundles of exclusive rights" is exactly how we define "property" on the first day in law school.
Arguing that IP protection has gotten stronger because clever Bernays types chose a slippery-slope metaphor, which lawyers at court and in Congress just couldn't help sliding right down, conveniently avoids acknowledging the well organized interests behind stronger IP laws. Which, as a general rule, have knocked "commons" activists out cold in every bout since long before Lessig took up Eldred v. Ashcroft and lost.
"Monopoly", alas, is just another very general way to describe "property". And it's a bad choice here, because it's overloaded, as Cory points out. See also "patents", which didn't mean anything specifically to do with inventions to start, but all manner of government- or monarch-granted rights. There were "land patents". Before just anybody could form a corporation, they had to get a charter from the government, a form of "letters patent".
Playing guilt-by-pun-association, hopping from one meaning of "monopoly" to another, leads to some head-scratchers. Especially the definition of IP as "any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers". In practice, with crafty enough business people, that's nearly all of privately enforceable law. Defamation? Regulatory licenses? Business torts? Contract?
It's important to keep in mind even IP laws aren't weapons just laying around. They only apply to certain voluntary conduct. The nondisparagement clause in Goldman Sachs' font license doesn't entitle it to go back and sue Matt Taibbi for calling them a "vampire squid" in Rolling Stone. No more than RMS can sue Facebook for making non-free software under the copyleft clause of his GPL grant for Emacs. The issue is when "voluntary conduct" doesn't feel so voluntary any more, as when a particular firm totally dominates a market for essential goods or services. Railroads and telegraphs played that hand hard, and not primarily thanks to IP. Those dangers remain real, and Cory's been on about them, very honorably, for a few years now. It's the connection he tries to make between IP and antitrust that's weak.
As for where he ends up, in the end, "rights" and "freedom" are just vacuous generalities, like "community", "liberty", "innovation", and so on. We pour our hopes and dreams into them and feel happy feelings when others invoke them. Others like to hear us use the words, too. But we can't know which hopes or dreams they're swooning over when we do. They could be the same as ours. They could be in direct conflict. During the civil rights movement, "freedom" to some meant the right to live, work, eat, study, and worship free of racial discrimination. To others, it meant the right to enforce segregation in states that wanted it.
It's tempting to paper over conflicts with vague words, to make win-lose scenarios sound like win-wins. If you feel strongly about traditional hacker causes---privacy, autonomy, hackability, transparency---you will be in direct conflict with large, well organized, heavily capitalized chunks of industry. If you want that fight, play to win.
what worries me is that our mind (at the very least mine and all like it) are ultimately intellectual constructions. thus intellectual property leads the way to mind property.
how can it be that if I know something, this knowledge is not mine?
Agreed. For example, a device which augments my memory by allowing me to replay and record my own experiences, would invariably violate copyright. Which is offensive to me.
What you're talking about isn't a problem until and unless whole-brain emulation becomes a thing. You cannot assert copyright over a human brain because you cannot copy a human brain; and insamuch that brain is capable of copying other works, that's already covered by standard copyright law. It would be a good plot for a 2000s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk book (P2Ppunk?) but I suspect the Supreme Court would rule that the 14th Amendment overrides copyright interest in human brains were that to become a problem.
(If you wanted a 2010s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk sequel book you'd have some far-right militia group arguing for bringing back slavery to protect author's rights or something. Call it Twitterpunk.)
Someday Disney will develop technology to delete copies of their movies from people's memories due to copyright infringement. People should not be able to simply remember the movie without paying for it after all.
This is an excellent article; as always, Cory Doctorow succinctly and perceptively cuts to the core of the matter.
From my own observations over recent years, I've come to the conclusion that the IP, copyright, patent and DRM issues that Doctorow discusses in this article are even worse than he has let on about (perhaps he's worried about overly frightening the horses and or is worried that his opponents would attempt to discredit him if he spilled all the beans).
In Western countries and especially the US, the field of software and so-called IP has become so monopolistic and proprietary—and ordinary users so disempowered from the consequences thereof that they're having not only a serious negative effect on productivity and the national economy but also they're dysfunctional to the extent that they even threaten national security.
Much software development is technically moribund (or it's more of the same). Time limits me to cite only one example here—the multiple, never-ending security breaches that we see day-by-day—breaches that we're never able to manage properly or get on top of—or engineer our way out of. (There, too, are dozens more examples.)
Whilst Western corporations maul both one another as well as poor long-suffering users over IP licenses, copyright and patent disputes that are, by nature, intrinsically trivial, China's 'command' economy is able to bypass all that nonsense and move on regardless—for the Chinese, it's IP be damned, and it's patently obvious that that attitude is benefiting them mightily.
China pays lip service to international copyright law but behind the scenes it does the exact opposite despite the fact that everyone knows it. As we've seen over the past 30 or so years, China has stolen more Western IP than would fill many a volume of old-fashioned telephone directories and all that Western countries have ever done in response is to make token complaints and objections which never amount to anything more than a kowtowing whimper. Clearly if you're big and frightening enough, no one's game enough to complain (or do anything) about the fact that one's ideas were stolen). To make matters worse, the West even has the utter damned hypocrisy to buy manufactured product from China that was made using this pirated technology! (It all reminds me a bit of Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Hitler.)
It seems to me that unless the West (and again, especially the US) pulls its collective head in over this IP nonsense and dismisses most of it—all the unfair stuff—then China Inc. will continue to gain an even further technological march upon us.
To catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output, the US and other Western nations need to adopt a capitalist command economy (à la China's and along the lines the US implemented in WWII). Even the Chinese have never equaled the heights the US achieved in manufacturing during WWII:
"William S. Knudsen, an automotive industry executive who was made Chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission by the Roosevelt administration to organize war production, said, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
In any such scenario, the current unfair and very unreasonable IP/copyright/patent laws (and concomitant wars) wouldn’t be tolerated. Post COVID-19, it'd make sense to implement such a scheme to rebuild the economy.
Right, it's only a pipe dream—we no longer have people of sufficient aptitude, caliber and with solid ethics of the likes of FDR, Harry Hopkins, Vannevar Bush (FDR’s top science advisor), Fredrick Terman, LTG Leslie R. Groves, William S. Knudsen et al to undertake such an ambitious project.
But whichever system of ethics compels us to "catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output" and "smother the 'enemy' in an avalanche of production" (quotes mine) sounds more like a civilizational suicide pact than a vision for the future.
Our smothering of the planet with production is the most immediate existential threat we face.
[+] [-] stonecraftwolf|5 years ago|reply
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
[+] [-] bscphil|5 years ago|reply
Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you. Ordinary property is the right to say how others are allowed to use a physical thing that belongs to you. It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onethought|5 years ago|reply
I don’t quite buy the leap that “software companies being exploitative” is at all related to “protecting IP through the use of copyright”. Cory does not link the two successfully in my mind.
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
And frankly, I think IP should be taxed since holders rely on the government to protect it. If I have a house, it’s at least hypothetically possible that I can defend it myself. That’s not possible with intellectual property. So if holders are relying on that government to uphold its value, they should be expected to contribute proportionally to that value for the service.
[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
The IP tax would also solve the status of abandonware once and for all — the company is no longer around to pay the tax on its copyright, so the copyright gets terminated and the works become public domain.
[+] [-] frongpik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilgulecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbotz|5 years ago|reply
I've long had a nagging feeling that there was a deep connection between the current state of our "post truth" society and the continuously widening scope of "IP" (digital monopoly) protections. Cory disentangles some of those connections and shows some of the ways IP has become a tool for restricting freedoms. But there's more: I think that those same mechanics are narrowing the overton window and putting all thinking that's outside on the same level... and we end up in a world where the ordinary person can't distinguish between the credibility of un-approved ideas.
[+] [-] breck|5 years ago|reply
Truth lasts for years, centuries even.
You need to bury truth, so you can keep selling people a stream of "novel" information. Truth doesn't get you monopoly profits, only novelty. Rearrange the truth every couple decades into crappier versions and profit.
Incentives matter.
#ImaginaryProperty is the worst. #IntellectualFreedom YOLO!!!
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
Either copyright goes away or free computing as we know and love will be destroyed.
[+] [-] II2II|5 years ago|reply
The real problem with the current IP regime is its use to impose restrictions that go beyond reproduction.
[+] [-] akkartik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onethought|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sircastor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
I offer WSB-- the assholiest of domains, yet one where that is an interesting question-- whose users are actually doing a better job of showing the world the corruption of their domain.
I shall endeavor to write a weird piece of Gnu fan fiction about this.
[+] [-] frongpik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octostone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
Wow! That this even exists blows my mind. It reads almost as evil as surreptitiously inserting a "all your money belongs to us" clause in a EULA in the hope that nobody will read it. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I'm not sure what part of the license is actually this "non-disparagement clause".
https://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license
The closest I could find in the above "restricted font license" is in the "Governing law" section -
"The User and Goldman Sachs hereby waive any right to a trial by jury and consent to exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York or, if federal jurisdiction is lacking, New York Supreme Court, New York County, for the resolution of any dispute regarding this License or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom."
.. which is limited to disputes regarding *this license or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom* .. and which doesn't seem as out of line as the article's wording suggests.
[+] [-] alphazino|5 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20200624213857/https://design.gs...
> c. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.
(emphasis mine)
[+] [-] visarga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
I was holding off from buying one to get a more open device, but the tendency is to become LESS open and featured, not more. I could buy an old device, but they're by definition not supported.
[+] [-] lazulicurio|5 years ago|reply
> Prior to the rise of the “intellectual property” as an umbrella term, the different legal regimes it refers to were customarily referred to by their individual names. When you were talking about patents, you said “patents,” and when you were talking about copyrights, you said “copyrights.” Bunching together copyrights and trademarks and patents and other rules wasn’t particularly useful, since these are all very different legal regimes. On those rare instances in which all of these laws were grouped together, the usual term for them was “creator’s monopolies” or “author’s monopolies.”
> The anti-IP argument leans into the differences between the underlying rationale for each of these rules:
> * US copyrights exist to “promote the useful arts and sciences” (as set out in the US Constitution); that is, to provide an incentive to the creation of new works of art: copyright should offer enough protection to create these incentives, but no more. Copyright does not extend to “ideas” and only protects “expressions of ideas”;
> * Patents exist as incentive for inventors to reveal the workings of their inventions; to receive a patent, you must provide the patent office with a functional description of your invention, which is then published. Even though others may not copy your invention during the patent period, they can study your patent filings and use them to figure out how to do the same thing in different ways, or how to make an interoperable add-on to your invention;
> * Trademarks exist as consumer protection: trademarks empower manufacturers to punish rivals who misleadingly market competing products or services that are like to cause confusion among their customers. It’s not about giving Coca-Cola the exclusive right to use the work “Coke” – it’s about deputizing Coca-Cola to punish crooks who trick Coke drinkers into buying knockoffs. Coke’s trademark rights don’t cover non-deceptive, non-confusing uses of its marks, even if these users harm Coca-Cola, because these do not harm Coke drinkers.
> Seen in this light, “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game?
> When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:
> “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
[+] [-] billsix|5 years ago|reply
Now?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemitchell|5 years ago|reply
Back in the mainframe era, there wasn't really a "software industry" as we know now. And there weren't so many rules about software specifically, because published software wasn't terribly relevant commercially. The question wasn't whether the law would step in to enable software developers to market their work, rather than hoarding it. It was whether they'd get their own software-specific regime, like Japan had, or come under some existing one.
But even before software copyright, it wasn't as though source code wasn't anybody's intellectual property. It was kept as trade secrets. There may not have been any specific public laws preventing you from doing as you liked with source code you had. But it was highly unlikely you would ever get source code you wanted in the first place.
GPL made peace with copyright, chose to depend upon it, to declare war on trade secrecy. To hear RMS tell The Parable of the Printer, the paper causing the problems was nondisclosure agreements---the tools of trade secrecy protection---not copyright statutes. And trade secrecy hasn't gone away. Folks working at software companies these days will have signed legal terms requiring them to keep company code close.
So yeah, maybe kids had their cake with icing back in the day. But they were cupcakes, mostly homemade. Not the 2^n-layer, all-you-can-eat wedding cake bonanza we gorge on now. The appearance of a software industry made that difference.
Similar rose-colored story with "intellectual property". Yes, that's in recent fashion, from about the 1980s. But there were other names before it. The near-neighbors "incorporeal property", "industrial property" (excepting copyright), and especially "intangible property" enjoyed popularity before the World Wars.
I suspect we're on about "intellectual property" because RMS turned hating on it into activist catechism. One of his many, largely failed attempts at Sapir-Whorf manipulation. But he's losing "intellectual property", too. It was and remains useful for lawyers, managers, accountants, and scholars to distinguish bundles of exclusive rights in physical assets from bundles of exclusive rights in ideas and information. "Bundles of exclusive rights" is exactly how we define "property" on the first day in law school.
Arguing that IP protection has gotten stronger because clever Bernays types chose a slippery-slope metaphor, which lawyers at court and in Congress just couldn't help sliding right down, conveniently avoids acknowledging the well organized interests behind stronger IP laws. Which, as a general rule, have knocked "commons" activists out cold in every bout since long before Lessig took up Eldred v. Ashcroft and lost.
"Monopoly", alas, is just another very general way to describe "property". And it's a bad choice here, because it's overloaded, as Cory points out. See also "patents", which didn't mean anything specifically to do with inventions to start, but all manner of government- or monarch-granted rights. There were "land patents". Before just anybody could form a corporation, they had to get a charter from the government, a form of "letters patent".
Playing guilt-by-pun-association, hopping from one meaning of "monopoly" to another, leads to some head-scratchers. Especially the definition of IP as "any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers". In practice, with crafty enough business people, that's nearly all of privately enforceable law. Defamation? Regulatory licenses? Business torts? Contract?
It's important to keep in mind even IP laws aren't weapons just laying around. They only apply to certain voluntary conduct. The nondisparagement clause in Goldman Sachs' font license doesn't entitle it to go back and sue Matt Taibbi for calling them a "vampire squid" in Rolling Stone. No more than RMS can sue Facebook for making non-free software under the copyleft clause of his GPL grant for Emacs. The issue is when "voluntary conduct" doesn't feel so voluntary any more, as when a particular firm totally dominates a market for essential goods or services. Railroads and telegraphs played that hand hard, and not primarily thanks to IP. Those dangers remain real, and Cory's been on about them, very honorably, for a few years now. It's the connection he tries to make between IP and antitrust that's weak.
As for where he ends up, in the end, "rights" and "freedom" are just vacuous generalities, like "community", "liberty", "innovation", and so on. We pour our hopes and dreams into them and feel happy feelings when others invoke them. Others like to hear us use the words, too. But we can't know which hopes or dreams they're swooning over when we do. They could be the same as ours. They could be in direct conflict. During the civil rights movement, "freedom" to some meant the right to live, work, eat, study, and worship free of racial discrimination. To others, it meant the right to enforce segregation in states that wanted it.
It's tempting to paper over conflicts with vague words, to make win-lose scenarios sound like win-wins. If you feel strongly about traditional hacker causes---privacy, autonomy, hackability, transparency---you will be in direct conflict with large, well organized, heavily capitalized chunks of industry. If you want that fight, play to win.
[+] [-] breck|5 years ago|reply
YOLO!
[+] [-] ylkdhruei|5 years ago|reply
it is not about internet protocol it is intellectual property ! wuh
[+] [-] naringas|5 years ago|reply
how can it be that if I know something, this knowledge is not mine?
[+] [-] nfoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
(If you wanted a 2010s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk sequel book you'd have some far-right militia group arguing for bringing back slavery to protect author's rights or something. Call it Twitterpunk.)
[+] [-] onethought|5 years ago|reply
I don’t quite follow what you’re worried about...
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilbert42|5 years ago|reply
From my own observations over recent years, I've come to the conclusion that the IP, copyright, patent and DRM issues that Doctorow discusses in this article are even worse than he has let on about (perhaps he's worried about overly frightening the horses and or is worried that his opponents would attempt to discredit him if he spilled all the beans).
In Western countries and especially the US, the field of software and so-called IP has become so monopolistic and proprietary—and ordinary users so disempowered from the consequences thereof that they're having not only a serious negative effect on productivity and the national economy but also they're dysfunctional to the extent that they even threaten national security.
Much software development is technically moribund (or it's more of the same). Time limits me to cite only one example here—the multiple, never-ending security breaches that we see day-by-day—breaches that we're never able to manage properly or get on top of—or engineer our way out of. (There, too, are dozens more examples.)
Whilst Western corporations maul both one another as well as poor long-suffering users over IP licenses, copyright and patent disputes that are, by nature, intrinsically trivial, China's 'command' economy is able to bypass all that nonsense and move on regardless—for the Chinese, it's IP be damned, and it's patently obvious that that attitude is benefiting them mightily.
China pays lip service to international copyright law but behind the scenes it does the exact opposite despite the fact that everyone knows it. As we've seen over the past 30 or so years, China has stolen more Western IP than would fill many a volume of old-fashioned telephone directories and all that Western countries have ever done in response is to make token complaints and objections which never amount to anything more than a kowtowing whimper. Clearly if you're big and frightening enough, no one's game enough to complain (or do anything) about the fact that one's ideas were stolen). To make matters worse, the West even has the utter damned hypocrisy to buy manufactured product from China that was made using this pirated technology! (It all reminds me a bit of Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Hitler.)
It seems to me that unless the West (and again, especially the US) pulls its collective head in over this IP nonsense and dismisses most of it—all the unfair stuff—then China Inc. will continue to gain an even further technological march upon us.
To catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output, the US and other Western nations need to adopt a capitalist command economy (à la China's and along the lines the US implemented in WWII). Even the Chinese have never equaled the heights the US achieved in manufacturing during WWII:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...
"William S. Knudsen, an automotive industry executive who was made Chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission by the Roosevelt administration to organize war production, said, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
https://civilianmilitaryintelligencegroup.com/8695/us-indust...
In any such scenario, the current unfair and very unreasonable IP/copyright/patent laws (and concomitant wars) wouldn’t be tolerated. Post COVID-19, it'd make sense to implement such a scheme to rebuild the economy.
Right, it's only a pipe dream—we no longer have people of sufficient aptitude, caliber and with solid ethics of the likes of FDR, Harry Hopkins, Vannevar Bush (FDR’s top science advisor), Fredrick Terman, LTG Leslie R. Groves, William S. Knudsen et al to undertake such an ambitious project.
[+] [-] walleeee|5 years ago|reply
But whichever system of ethics compels us to "catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output" and "smother the 'enemy' in an avalanche of production" (quotes mine) sounds more like a civilizational suicide pact than a vision for the future.
Our smothering of the planet with production is the most immediate existential threat we face.
[+] [-] Proven|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] frEdmbx|5 years ago|reply
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