Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Clay Shirky on America's Proposed Insane Property Rights

Here is Clay Shirky talking about SOPA and PIPA:

How the US Plans to Nuke the Rest of the World

The SOPA/PIPA legislation is in effect a "weapon of mass destruction" that will easily destroy the world as we know it. Here is a very nice description of just how dangerous and "creepy" the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws are:



The above is just one of many, many wonderful instructional videos available from the Khan Academy.

From Wikipedia:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching Mathematics, History, Healthcare & Medicine, Finance, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Economics, Cosmology and Computer Science.

How to be Successful by Being Consistently Wrong

Only the big industries can be consistently wrong and continue to be big and dominate their industry. Here is a post by Steve Blank on his blog that nails how the anti-Internet movie industry has made lots of money on technological innovation in the past and despite its current crusade against the Internet will most likely make a killing off the Internet:

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

The Movie Industry and Technology Progress
The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

• 1920’s – the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.


• 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.


• 1950’s – broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid.


• 1970’s – Video Cassette Recorders (VCR’s) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with “end of the world” hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.


• 1998 – the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.


• 2000 – Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV.


• 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.


• Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology?

There is more. Go read the whole article.

What upsets me is that the luddites in the MPAA and RIAA and other big cartels are only too willing to destroy the Internet in their belief that it will make them more money. They are dead wrong. Worse, they are destroying one of the great advances of the past century all for a quick profit. Tragic.

Go read about SOPA. Follow up the leads that Steve Blank highlights in his article. This insane push to destroy the Internet needs to be stopped.

Dead Hands Reach Out from the Past

Corporate greed has gotten the US Congress to change copyright to make it last longer and longer and longer. Here are some bits from an excellent post by Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1955 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2012.

What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? In this centennial year of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic (April 15, 1912), how about Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember? Lord first published A Night to Remember in 1955. If we were still under the copyright laws that were in effect until 1978, A Night to Remember would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2012 (even assuming that Lord or his publisher had renewed the copyright). Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2051. This is because the copyright term for works published between 1950 and 1963 was extended to 95 years from the date of publication, so long as the works were published with a copyright notice and the term renewed (which is generally the case with famous works such as this). All of these works from 1955 won't enter the public domain until 2051.

...

Most of the works highlighted here are famous — that is why we included them. And if that fame meant that the work was still being exploited commercially 28 years after its publication, the authors would probably renew the copyright. (This is true for many of the works featured on this page, though even a surprising percentage of successful works exhaust their commercial potential very quickly.) But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher — 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

That means that all these examples from 1955 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1983 enter the public domain on January 1, 2012. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research, for future creators. Instead, they will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century. Think of the cultural harm that does. In addition, because most of these works are orphan works — works that are still presumably under copyright, but commercially unavailable and with no identifiable copyright holder — no one is benefiting from continued protection, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. (You can read more about the current costs associated with orphan works here and here.) It seems that The Public Domain Snatchers is not the stuff of fiction.

These "property rights" stolen from the public are just one more example of how the ultra-rich buy politicians to write laws that that enrich the rich at the expense of the 99%. They have literally stolen the cultural patrimony and locked it up and demand big bucks to access what rightfully should belong to everybody.

A Glimpse into the Future

Here is a talk by Cory Doctorow on the future of computers given the impulse by corporations to control "rights" that require them to tie down their "customers" in thousands of ways to ensure maximum profit:



Skip the first 2 minutes of intros to get into the Doctorow talk.

A full transcription of the talk can be found here.

Cory offers up lots of thoughtful points. This video is well worth your time.

The Case Against Copyright

Here is a brief summary of why SOPA and similar copyright laws are bad for people and bad for the economy. This is a bit from a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog:

Standard economic models show that tariffs cost jobs. The reason is that they make consumers pay more money for the protected product. This pulls money away that could be spent in other areas. If the spending took place elsewhere, it would create more jobs than the additional money earned by the protected industry.

The same logic applies to increasingly stringent protections for copyright, except the economic waste and resulting job loss is likely to be much larger. Tariffs rarely raise the price of products by more than 15-20 percent. Copyright can make items very costly that could otherwise be available for free or nearly free. This implies a tariff of several thousand percent or higher.

In addition, there are enormous costs associated with copyright enforcement, with both the public and private sector required to make substantial expenditures to prevent unauthorized copies of copyrighted material from being circulated. This amounts to a waste of resources that could instead go to productive activity.

Copyright and its enforcement can be thought of as being analogous to toll booths, which can be used as a way to finance road construction. If the only way we have to finance road construction is toll booths, then we absolutely need toll booths to pay the road-builders.

However, once we have roads that are financed through other mechanisms (e.g. government funding), then it becomes increasingly difficult to collect money at the tollbooths since people will opt to use the free roads. We could go the route that many in Congress want to take with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which effectively amounts to building toll booths that are harder to get around and imposing tough penalties on those who try to take free roads.

This gets more money for the people who build and operate toll booths, but may not do very much to help the people who build roads. Alternatively, we could try to find ways to get more money directly to the road-builders without spending vast sums erecting bigger more expensive toll booths and being more punitive to those who use free roads.

The Ultimate IP Sleaze from Obama

The "people's" president is supposed to be on the side of the people. Everybody understands that Republican presidents cater to the 1% and those wingnuts who aspire to be the 1%. But for everybody else there is only one choice: the Democratic president.

Obama is pushing his "jobs" agenda, but with great irony, he wants creative graphic designers to labour for free to create him a poster. No job for them. Just the glory of knowing that "they did it for a good cause". Oh yeah...

Here is a bit from a post in Rolling Stone magazine:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

Just like the Obama presidency knows that his job #1 is to bailout banks and make sure billionaire bankers get their humungous bonuses, the Obama presidency knows that intellectual property rights (IP) goes to the sleazeball who can squeeze it out of the dumb proletariat who will sign up for work for free and give up all rights to their ideas. Wow. Isn't capitalism great, or what? Obama is a typical 1% type, you work, he gets the money, the glory, the top job, the babes, the media, the big retirement package. You get to hang on to your warm-and-fuzzy feeling that you "helped". That and $5 will help you buy a hamburger to split with your wife and 3 kids.

Obama wants to create jobs... he wants to create 4 more years for No. 1. For the 99%? This is just a slogan. He is going through the motions, crafting this as a "message with spin and a careful political game of partisanship". Whether you get a job or not? He could care less. That's your problem, not his. He is the president for the 1%.

What the Future Looks Like

Creepy greedy corporations are winning the war. They have bought all the politicians and what you get is something like the following:

Italy's insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia

By Cory Doctorow at 4:21 am Wednesday, Oct 5

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Internet law will make it impossible to have an Italian Wikipedia:

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources...

The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.

My understanding is that Bill Gates has recently bought up all the rights to oxygen and is planning to implement a per-breath access fee. If you want to breathe, you will have to pay because he owns "the rights". Oh, and Apple is tired of waiting for people's eyeballs to wander over their various iEverything devices, so they have bought the copyright to all the world's languages. If you don't want to be illiterate, you will need to license from Apple the right to read. Any peek at a letter or word will cost you!

Canada is Governed by Complete Idiots

The new Canadian copyright law will make it illegal for a person who has copyrighted their own work to "pick the lock" and access their own work! That is complete insanity.

This reminds of the the infamous case of Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. a Harvard professor who was arrested for breaking into his own home! He fought like a wildcat and finally got his rights "acknowledged", i.e. under the law you can break into your own house if you have managed to lose your keys. But it took a lot of wrangling and the famous "beer summit" held by Obama at the White House to cool off the injured parties: the professor and the "aggrieved" Cambridge police force.

But in Canada, the "wise" lawmakers here are going to make it illegal for you to break digital locks to access your own copyrighted property!

From BoingBoing:

under Canada's proposed copyright law, it would be illegal to remove a digital lock from a copyrighted work that you, yourself, have created and own outright.

It is worse. The new law punished innocent third parties who because of disabilities are simply seeking to access the copyrighted material which is in a format inaccessible to them:

Canada's new copyright law punishes blind and visually impaired people

By Cory Doctorow at 1:05 pm Monday, Oct 3

Canada's Conservative government is set to bull through its copyright legislation, Bill C-11, which notoriously includes a special protection for "digital locks," making it illegal to remove such a lock even if you're not doing so for any unlawful purpose. That is, under Canada's proposed copyright law, it would be illegal to remove a digital lock from a copyrighted work that you, yourself, have created and own outright.

Michael Geist is running a blog series highlighting different groups of people who stand to lose from this stupid law. These are culled from the responses to the last consultation the Canadian government ran on the subject, in 2009, when Canadians overwhelming voiced their opposition to the plan. First up is Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) British Columbia, "which works to assist blind and visually impaired students:"

When the political leadership of a country is this stupid... and this sold-out to corporate interests who want their pound of flesh even in the most outrageous situations, then the people need to vote them out of power. The Conservatives must be defeated in the next election.

Update 2011oct4: Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has an excellent blog that looks at all things dealing with digital law including property rights. Here is his post discussing an interview with the Canadian cabinet minister who is driving the idiocy of new digital laws:

Commenting on James Moore's Copyright Comments

Tuesday October 04, 2011

Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore recently granted TVO's Search Engine an interview on Bill C-11 and Canadian copyright reform. The interview demonstrates yet again that Moore is one of the government's most skilled ministers - he knows the copyright file and is able to actively debate its merits. Yet the interview raised several points worth challenging.

At 4:30, host Jesse Brown raises the issue of the "book burning" provision that requires students and teachers to destroy lessons that rely on the exception within 30 days of the conclusion of the course. Moore moves quickly to the departmental talking points that I obtained under Access to Information, which claim that this is simply part of the balance. Yet few teachers will rely on a provision that mandates the destruction of their materials at the conclusion of a course and few students will want to have their materials destroyed. The provision is an illusion - it looks at first glance like it will assist education, yet practically it will be ignored. At 6:00, Moore continues by arguing that it is common for students to encounter "time limited" materials. But this provision does more than just create time limitations for students since it creates matching time limits for teachers, which effectively ensures it will rarely be used.

At 12:00, Brown and Moore engage in a discussion on digital locks, with Moore turning to the claim that the government isn't imposing digital locks, that the free market should work, government should get out of the way, and creators should be able to protect themselves against people who want to hack into their product and steal from them. Brown notes that a better balance is available by linking circumvention to infringment, to which Moore goes right back to the department talking points that simply state the government has the right balance.

Moore's response demands a few comments.

First, no one has suggested that the government is requiring digital locks. However, far from allowing the free market to work, it is proposing interventionist legislation that creates incentives to use digital locks since copyright works enjoy far more rights when a digital lock is present. Without a digital lock, copyright works are subject to the usual copyright balance including the various copyright exceptions or user rights. With digital locks and Bill C-11, the copyright exceptions often disappear. Second, everyone agrees that creators should enjoy protection. That isn't the issue. The issue is why the government is choosing to deny Canadians their user rights/exceptions when a digital lock is used. It could protect against those that "want to hack into their product and steal from them" and retain the exceptions by linking circumvention to copyright infringement, but it is choosing not to do so.

At 15:50, Moore restates something he said at the press conference: "piracy should be illegal in Canada and right now it's not." This is simply false. Leaving aside the fact that "piracy" is not a legal term in the Copyright Act, Canada is currently compliant with its international obligations. People who make unauthorized copies of copyright without an exception violate the law as it stands today. People who authorize infringement of copyright can be found liable under the Copyright Act. The Copyright Act includes some of the largest statutory damages in the world. There are currently lawsuits in Canada against individual file sharers and websites like isoHunt that use existing law. To say that piracy is presently legal in Canada is plainly wrong.

At 18:00, Moore harkens back to his "radical extremist" comment of June 2010 when, after Brown asks about file sharing lawsuits, he says that he has read Brown's stuff and that the one political party that agrees with the idea that "people should be able to hack into other people's software" is the Pirate Party. Moore knows full well that those calling for balance on digital locks include mainstream political parties such as the Liberals and NDP, along with virtually every education group in Canada, library group, consumer groups, and business groups. This is not about a wild west for copyright. It is about retaining the same balance that exists offline in the digital realm.

Finally, at 19:00, Brown raises the issue of U.S. influence over the Canadian copyright reform process. Moore interjects by stating "I have not met with a single American [movie] studio." A review of the lobbyist communication reports indicates that this may not be accurate. The reports reference a meeting with the Motion Picture Association-Canada and Moore in 2010, just weeks before Moore appeared before the C-32 committee. More recently, Moore met with the Canadian Recording Industry Association and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's IP Council, which features both the MPA-Canada and CRIA as members. None of this is surprising or wrong (the only surprise would be if the Canadian Heritage minister didn't meet with these groups). The surprise was Moore's claim to have not had such meetings.

It is pathetic that Canada is ruled by such short-sighted, inflexible people as James Moore. I participated in the "public comments" on digital rights two years ago. Like most "public consultations" this was a kabuki dance pretending to get feedback from the public but simply a maneuver to get past most public objections by claiming "consultation was done". Nothing by James Moore or his commission has been sensible. It is all a front for corporations that want to milk every possible cent out of "their property rights". This is especially odious when you consider that most of the big copyright "holders" of today are corporations that have nothing to do with the original creators or artists. You can read many, many stories of inventors, writers, musicians, etc. who were tricked into signing away their "rights" by slick lawyers working for greedy corporations. James Moore is on the side of the slick lawyers and greedy corporations. He isn't for property "rights". He is for property "wrongs".

Waste & Fraud

The political right in the US loves to rant about "waste and fraud". But as Dean Baker points out in this post in his Beat the Press blog, they overlook the really big cases of waste and fraud in the US:

Patent Monopolies Lead to Enormous Economic Waste

It would have been to include the view of an economist in this article that reports on how China and India are now able to produce low-cost versions of bio-tech cancer drugs. These drugs sell now for several thousand dollars per dose as a result of government granted patent monopolies.

Patent monopolies lead to enormous market distortions in the same way as other barriers to trade. However, the impact of patents is much larger since they have a much bigger effect on prices. It is rare that tariffs raise the price of goods by more than 20-30 percent. By contrast, patents often raise the price of protected drugs by several thousand percent.

The huge profits created by patent rents are the cause of kickbacks to doctors, misleading information on the safety and effectiveness of drugs, and government corruption that extends the length and scope of patent rents. These distortions lower the quality of health care and raise its cost. There are far more efficient mechanisms for supporting medical research.

This article also errs in asserting that countries can only issue compulsory licenses for drugs in cases of emergencies. The terms of the WTO allow for compulsory licensing under fairly general conditions.

But they same kind of double standard applies to criminal acts. A young punk does a stick-up at a corner store and gets $100 goes to jail for 10 years. But a white collar criminal steal $1 billion is lucky to spend a few hours in jail waiting to be bailed out by his lawyer. The judges are "sympathetic" to the white collar criminal. They "understand" that he didn't mean to hurt anybody. But the corner store robber is vermin and must be squished. Funny... the corner store robber is a gnat compared to the white collar criminal elephant. When you steal $1 billion (like the Wall Street criminals), you steal a life's savings from thousands of people. And that isn't a crime? Not according the the "judicial" system.

The Perversion of Technology

Here is a bit from an article by Tim Harford:

I am sympathetic to the general point that many patents, and their potential for abuse, actively discourage innovation. But if we’re to solve the problem, it’s worth pinpointing where it lies – and the rise of the trolls is a symptom, not the cause.

The three pillars that enable patent trolling are: the existence of absurd patents; the forbidding cost of the legal process; and the business model of buying up patents as assets in their own right, rather than building blocks for innovation. National Public Radio’s This American Life recently discussed all three elements but focused on the last: the story is more compelling with a bad guy, after all. One contributor even compared patent trolls to a mafia collecting protection money.

...

The economists Joshua Gans and Scott Stern argue that there are formidable obstacles in the way of setting up a well-functioning “market for ideas”. The basic problem is that patentable ideas are supposed to be unique, and ideas are typically only useful as part of an accumulation of other ideas. As a result, negotiations over patents are vulnerable to “hold-up” as various intellectual assets are acquired. As an analogy, imagine trying to buy land to build a railway line: each property owner has the incentive to hold the entire deal hostage.

The whole system is a mess. I'm in the camp that believes ideas belong to humanity and not "the inventor" because the inventor couldn't invent if he had not had the benefit of a society that educated him and gave him the technological base for his "new idea". Instead, I would simply encourage business competition with business secrets. That worked find for the early stages of the industrial revolution because it was sufficiently leaky to allow innovation on a broad front. If governments want to spur innovation, then offer competitions with a prize.

Here is an example of the idiocy that passes for "patents" in the US system. From an article in New Scientist:

A five-year-old kid from Minnesota has patented a way of swinging on a child's swing. The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a "method of swinging on a swing". Olson's father Peter is a patent attorney.

The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications. The patent covers moving a swing side to side or in an oval pattern. Children can get bored by swinging back and forth, or by twisting the swing to make it spin, the patent says.

"A new method of swinging on a swing would therefore represent an advance of great significance and value," it reads. Olson's alternative is to pull on one chain at a time, so the swing moves towards the side being pulled.

Peter Olson told New Scientist: "I had told him that if he invented something he could file a patent." His son had not seen sideways swinging because the swings at his school are closely spaced, so he asked his father to file the application.

The patent office initially rejected the application for prior art - citing two earlier patents on swings - but Peter Olson appealed, noting that neither was a method for swinging sideways. The patent was then issued.

An effective government would recognize the problem and pass the necessary laws to free up technology and innovation (and include a freeing up of culture from the idiocy of copyright laws to something that is less corporation-friendly and more artist-friendly).

Cory Doctorow on Copyright Law

Here is a talk by Cory Doctorow giving a talk to Siggraph 2011 on copyright law. It is well worth your time to listen carefully to what he tells you about dysfunctional copyright laws. You can skip the intro and jump right into the talk at 2:20:

IP, Public Enemy #1

Here is a report from Planet Money of NPR on the problems with "patent trolls". It starts with:

Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft's chief technology officer, he's discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that "reveals science-inspired tech­niques for prepar­ing food."

Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he's cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls "a company that invests in invention."

But Myhrvold's company has a different image among many Silicon Valley insiders.

The influential blog Techdirt regularly refers to Intellectual Ventures as a patent troll. IPWatchdog, an intellectual property site, called IV "patent troll public enemy #1." These blogs write about how Intellectual Ventures has amassed one of the largest patent portfolios in existence and is going around to technology companies demanding money to license these patents.

Go read the whole article to find out how high tech "patents" are just one way to give unscrupulous people (like Nathan Myhrvold and lawyers) lots of money while allowing them to block technological progress through the bottleneck of the court system. It is thoroughly disgusting. It is a perversion of the original idea of "patents". It is proof that it is time to throw out all the previous IP, Intellectual Property, legislation and start over with a more rational system that won't impede the progress of civilization and won't get greedy SOBs like Myhrvold to enrich himself at the expense of others.

Luckily I worked with a company that built systems mainly for scientists and governments. We never had software patents and as yet haven't fallen into the gunsights of a patent troll. But it is probably only a matter of time. Forget that the company develops all of its own software independently. I won't be surprised that after all the low hanging fruit has been "exploited" by the patent trolls, they will dig down deeper and attack companies like the one I worked for. I view the patent trolls to be a blight on industry and like potato blight, they will leave vulnerable populations, like Ireland in the mid 19th century, starving. They are a disease. They bring nothing to the table. They do nothing for civilization. They are driven purely by greed and a legal system that turns a blind eye to legalized robbery.

And it all adds costs to everything you buy. The NPR report ends with:

In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses. Google said it wanted the patents purely to defend against lawsuits and it was willing to spend over $3 billion to get them. That wasn't enough, though.

The portfolio eventually sold to Apple and a consortium of other tech companies including Microsoft and Ericsson. The price tag: $4.5 billion dollars. Five times the opening bid. More than double what most people involved were expecting. The largest patent auction in history.

That's $4.5 billion on patents that these companies almost certainly don't want for their technical secrets. That $4.5 billion won't build anything new, won't bring new products to the shelves, won't open up new factories that can hire people who need jobs. That's $4.5 billion dollars that adds to the price of every product these companies sell you. That's $4.5 billion dollars buying arms for an ongoing patent war.

The big companies — Google, Apple, Microsoft — will probably survive. The likely casualties are the companies out there now that no one's ever heard of that could one day take their place.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for Nortel. It was a Canadian company that fell under from grace due to bad management. It once represented well over one-third of the Canadian stock exchange. Today it is worth nothing. It left a black hole in many Canadian investors pockets. From Wikipedia:

Nortel's market capitalization fell from C$398 billion in September 2000 to less than C$5 billion in August 2002. Nortel's stock price plunged from C$124 to C$0.47. When Nortel's stock crashed, it took with it a wide swath of Canadian investors and pension funds, and left 60,000 Nortel employees unemployed. Roth was criticized after it was revealed that he cashed in his own stock options for a personal gain of C$135 million in 2000 alone.

But Nortel built good products and had excellent patents. Sadly these are now bought in an "IP war" that does nobody any good and simply raises the prices of products. Shame!

The Majesty of the Law

A company has bought the "rights" to a self-photo which a macaque shot in Sulawesi:


As BoingBoing points out:

Caters News Agency claims to have bought exclusive rights to the iconic self-portrait taken by a macaque that snatched a photographer's camera while the latter was shooting on Sulawesi. Caters has sent copyright threats to some sites that reproduced the image, prompting Techdirt (one of the nastygram recipients) to delve deeply into the question of the copyrightability of works created by non-humans.

Under US law (we'll deal with elsewhere soon), you have to have made the creative contributions (the copyrightable aspects) to the image to have it qualify for any copyright protection (and then, it's only the creative aspects that get the copyright). Thus, you could argue that if the photographer had set up the camera, framed the shot, and simply let the monkey click the shutter, perhaps there is some copyright there (though, even then it would likely be limited to some of the framing, and not much else). But David Slater has already admitted that the monkeys found a camera he had left out by accident and that he did not have anything to do with setting up the shot. He's stated that the monkeys were playing with the shiny objects and when one pushed the shutter, the noise interested them and they kept it up. It would be difficult to argue he made any sort of creative contribution here to warrant copyright.

Can the monkeys get the copyright? No. As Justin Levine kindly pointed out, according to the rules published by the US Copyright Office:

503.03 Works not capable of supporting a copyright claim.

Claims to copyright in the following works cannot be registered in the Copyright Office:
503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.
In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable. Thus, a linoleum floor covering featuring a multicolored pebble design which was produced by a mechanical process in unrepeatable, random patterns, is not registrable. Similarly, a work owing its form to the forces of nature and lacking human authorship is not registrable; thus, for example, a piece of driftwood even if polished and mounted is not registrable

There was no "human authorship" so Caters can't buy the "copyright".

I'm quite unhappy about this situation. The world would be so much more interesting if we could declare property rights on third party (non-human) events. E.g., raindrops falling from the sky. Why can't I patent or copyright or declare "property rights" over that. Seems unfair. Somebody must be responsible for raindrops forming and falling. I'm willing to step up to the plate and declare "I did it, so I own it!" Obviously the religious zealots would declare God has ownership over the rain and when you get right down to it, ownership over everything in the economy and every material thing, so yes, God owns us, so we are his chattel which is a fancy word for slaves! What fun. This would keep the lawyers and judges gainfully employed for decades.

The Brave New World of "Property Rights"

I find it funny and frustrating to live in Canada, right next door to the US, and get bombarded by advertisements and news from the US, but when I attempt to access some of the stuff fired at me, I come up with something like...

Click to Enlarge
Painting is from Paul Mutant, Flickr
Yep... owners of "rights" deny me access to their "property" even though they hound me with ads and information telling me that it is "available" and that I should "access it", or even worse "buy it".

To add insult to injury, the Canadian dollar is now soaring about the US dollar, but to buy US goods in Canada still means to pay about a 10% premium over what people 30 miles south of me would pay for the very same item. I should be getting a 4% discount using my "stronger" dollar, but the owners of "property rights" conspire to ensure that prices are set by them and they like the prices to be 10% higher than what a truly "free" market would imply.

Oh, and of course, all these property "owners" laud the concept of "free enterprise" and "free trade". They just mean it should be free for them and they should be able to stick it to anybody else by putting a surcharge on what they are selling (or, as in the above, simply deny me access to the item). So much for what "free" means.

Hypocrisy and "Property Rights"

During the last few decades lobbyists have pushed harder and harder to "protect" property rights. There is lots of handwringing over artists who create but never get the income from their creations because of "piracy". But the joke is that most of the theft comes from the very institutions that exist because of copyright laws. And some of that loss of income is outright theft. Here is an example from Spain:

Senior officials in Spain's Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), the country's leading collection society for songwriters and composers, face embezzlement charges in the wake of a Friday raid on the organization's offices. (A collecting society collects licensing fees for public performances of music and distributes them to artists and record companies.)

According to Spanish newspaper El País, the investigation is focused on José Luis Rodríguez Neri, the head of an SGAE subsidiary called the Digital Society of Spanish Authors (SDAE). Neri faces charges of "fraud, misappropriation of funds and disloyal administration." On Monday, a High Court judge grilled him for more than four hours over the charges.

Investigators say Neri made payments for non-existent services to a contractor that then paid kickbacks to Neri and his associates. The contractor's books show that it received 5 million euros from SDAE, but only reported 3.7 million euros of those funds to tax authorities.

...

SGAE, the Spanish counterpart to American collecting societies like ASCAP and BMI, is known for its high fees and aggressive enforcement tactics. According to El País, "the society has been often accused of exceeding its remit by going as far as to infiltrate private weddings to check whether fees had been paid for the music being played at the banquet."

The hypocrisy of the "industry" that makes a living off IP (intellectual property) is astounding. They don't create. They are lawyers and bureaucrats who make life miserable for both artists and the public. They sit between the artists and the public supposedly to "protect" the artists income, but in too many cases, these guys become leeches bleeding the system to fill their own pockets. They abuse both the artists and the public to fulfill their own greed.

This is not simply a case of an "isolated crime" in Spain. These IP police seem to like to perpetrate a similar crime everywhere. Here is a post by Michael Geist about IP crime in Canada:

The four major record labels that comprise the Canadian Recording Industry Association - EMI Music Canada Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. - have agreed to pay $45 million to settle one of the largest copyright class action lawsuits in Canadian history. The settlement comes after years of fruitless efforts to get the industry to pay for works it used without permission.

...

The press release indicates that everyone is pleased with the settlement, though it is striking that it took a class action settlement to get the record labels to address their own ongoing copyright infringing practices in paying artists for the use of their works.

Yep, the very guys whose job it is to collect payment for "property rights" on behalf of artists was itself scamming the artists by pocketing the money and not passing it on to the artists.

Hollywood vs. YouTube

Here is Cory Doctorow on the copyright war and what it really means for the culture:



So, Cory Doctorow likes the summer blockbusters, but not enough to give up YouTube.

I enjoy the bit around 2:30 where he looks at the dilemma of "copyright" of sheet music where performers actually played that music without compensating the composer beyond the sale of the sheet music. But once recorded music took off, the pirates of the first decade of the 20th century who actually created another income stream for the music composers. And these recorded artists then complained about radio stations that were "pirating" the recorded music, etc. etc.

The RIAA and MPAA should back off their insane fight over "copyright" and learn the lessons of history and let the next generation build on the past and actually them more money rather than continuing to fight the new digital era.

Strangling Culture with the Red Tape of Copyright

When I was a kid stuff would fall into the public domain every day. But as I get older, things stopped going into public domain as governments around the world extended the length of copyright. As I have lived my life, "public domain" has become a mirage in the desert, with every year I pass, the date at which material will become available recedes further into the future. Now, it is getting worse than that, as law-makers bend to corporate greed and change the very definition of "public domain" so that nothing ever ends up there again.

Here's a bit from an excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on a case going before the US Supreme Court:

The conductor's fight centers on the concept of the public domain, which scholars depend on for teaching and research. When a work enters the public domain, anyone can quote from it, copy it, share it, or republish it without seeking permission or paying royalties.

The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.

"It was a shocking change," Mr. Golan says over dinner at a tacos-and-margaritas dive near the University of Denver's mountain-framed campus. "You used to be able to buy Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. All of a sudden, on one day, you couldn't anymore."

Other works once available but now restricted include books by H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and C.S. Lewis; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso. The U.S. Copyright Office estimated that the works qualifying for copyright restoration "probably number in the millions."

Congress approved the recopyrighting, limited to foreign works, to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty. But the Golan plaintiffs—a group that includes educators, performers, and film archivists—argue that bigger principles are at stake. Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what's stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?

"If you can't rely on the status of something in the public domain today—that is, if you never know whether Congress is going to act again and yank it out—you're going to be a lot more cautious about doing anything with these materials," says Mr. Golan's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. "You really destroy the value and the usefulness of the public domain in a profound way if the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time."

...

The change was surprising from a philosophical point of view: Under copyright law, the Constitution grants authors a limited monopoly over their works as an incentive to promote creativity. Over the years, Congress has often delayed the passage of works into the public domain by lengthening the duration of copyright terms. But removing pieces already there was different, Mr. Golan's lawyers argue, a radical change in what one scholar describes as the basic "physics" of the public domain.

That may sound abstract, but the impact on Mr. Golan was direct. When a work is in the public domain—that Puccini opera, say—an orchestra can buy the sheet music. Symphonies typically cost about $150. And the orchestra can keep those pages forever, preserving the instructions that librarians laboriously pencil into scores. But works under copyright are typically available only for rent. And the cost is significantly higher: about $600 for one performance. With the flip of a switch, the new law restored copyright to thousands of pieces.

For big-city orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, that change is like a "mosquito bite," Mr. Golan says. But Mr. Golan's university ensemble gets only about $4,000 to rent and buy music each year. That means it can perform some copyrighted works but must rely on the public domain for about 80 percent of its repertoire. And $4,000 is relatively generous. Other colleges might have only $500 to spend on music. When the Conductors Guild surveyed its 1,600 members, 70 percent of respondents said they were now priced out of performing pieces previously in the public domain.

Read the whole article.

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing points out that the whole issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is chock full of copyright issues:

New copyright lawsuits and policies have hobbled teaching and research. Now scholars are pushing back. In a special report, the Chronicle of Higher Education covers the copyright wars from several angles:

* A Professor Takes His Fight to the Supreme Court: The ability to teach and research many books, films, and pieces of music may hinge on Lawrence Golan's suit

* Colleges Lock Away Millions of Works: Academic archives are playing it safe, limiting online access to books, images, and artwork

* What You Don't Know About Copyright, But Should

* Pushing Back Against Legal Threats By Putting Fair Use Forward: A dynamic professorial duo leaps to the defense of beleaguered scholars

* Two Universities Under the Legal Gun

Click here to link to BoingBoing and get the embedded links to the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Crazy Corporate Control

From a BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow on how Google has gone crazy:

My latest Guardian column, "Google's YouTube policy for Android users is copyright extremism," examines the theory of copyright behind Google's announcement that it would bar people who unlocked their phones from using the new YouTube video store. This is the latest example of a new kind of copyright emerging in the 21st century, "configuration-right," in which someone who makes a creative work gets a veto over how all the devices that can play or display that work must be configured. It's a novel -- and dangerous -- proposition, akin to record companies telling which furniture you were allowed to move into the same room as your stereo, and to require that you close your window when the record was playing, lest your neighbors get some tunes for free.

Something has got to be done to keep "intellectual property" owners from sucking the air out of the sky and burying us under a blizzard of legal writ. It is crazy. They think they own everything. I'm waiting for somebody to press charges based on "owning" a time clock's seconds and demand that we all give back every second of our life or face charges of "theft". Nutty!

If you read the Doctorow article in the UK's Guardian, you find a jewel such as this:

Viacom is presently appealing a judgment against it in its infamous legal bid to shut down the service. Documents revealed during the previous court proceedings featured Viacom executives vigorously and profanely debating which one of them would get to run YouTube once they'd sued it into oblivion. This potent mixture of fear and lust for YouTube is why Viacom was paying multiple ad agencies to sneak video clips on to YouTube even as it was suing it, even going so far as to "rough up" the video before posting it so that it appeared to come from dodgy pirate sites – presumably, posting studio-fresh clips would have given the game away.

The greed is absurd. One capitalist screaming about the "theft" of another even while it is "roughing up" its own videos and slipping them onto the other's site to get the benefit of "buzz" while claiming that this kind of IP "theft" was harming it! The audacity! The sheer lying deceit of greed without limits!

This comment that ends Doctorow's article is telling. This is the corruption that comes with great money:

Google looked as if it had lain down with the dogs and woken up with fleas. Now it's back in the kennel, having learned nothing. It's come a long way from its early days, when it refused to compete with other search engines by running banners or accepting paid placement – when Google's policy was "don't be evil" and "don't suck".

Google is like those idealistic youth who enter politics to "make a difference" and push out the corrupt older generation. But along they way to getting the reins of power they make the little compromises, then the bigger compromises, and end up being the new "corrupt older generation".