My Internet-friend and fellow Louisianan Nickie Abshire has designed a nice-looking anti-IP bracelet for her Etsy store. Take a look:

Against Intellectual Property bracelet

Intellectual property (also known as IP) is a controversial topic. Some believe that it is a genuine property right, but others disagree on the grounds that you can only have property in scarce resources and that it actually prevents people from using their property in legitimate ways. It’s a relevant subject, because the outcome (pro or con) will determine our future in many important ways.

This bracelet started from a sheet of nickel silver, which I cut into a rectangle shape. The lettering was hand stamped onto smaller pieces, and I used my torch to solder them onto the bracelet.

Next, I scratched and sanded the metal, then hammered the edges and blackened the recessed areas to create an antique industrial look. For added interest, I punched holes into the top and added tiny sterling silver rings.

The chain is metal-plated copper, and I like using this particular chain because over time the outer layer will wear away in some areas, showing the copper underneath and completing the antique look of the bracelet. I made the clasp by cutting a piece of nickel silver wire into a little hook shape and attached it to the chain.

Update:

IP shill Dale Halling:

 Dale B. Halling October 3rd, 2012 4:24 pm

This anti-patent attitude by the press should not be viewed in isolation, they are also anti-property, anti-free enterprise, and anti-reason. It has been shown over and over again that they have no interest in the truth.

Mr. Computer Science does not understand Free Enterprise, property rights, or history. Computer science took off when patent protection was strengthened for software. As for Patents being a monopoly, CS has no idea what he/she is talking about. First of all the patent statute states that patents are personal property. Second of all, a monopoly is a right to a market. All property rights give you the right to exclude. A patent does not even give you the right to make or sell something, so it cannot be a monopoly. Third, patents are granted for the reason all property rights exists, because the owner created something.

There is absolutely no empirical evidence that countries are better off without a patent system. If you look at the Fraser Institute or the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation surveys of economic freedom, you will see the richest countries and the most economically free countries have the strongest patent systems. Those countries in the lowest 20% do not innovate, and do not have a wide dispersion of technology and live on the edge of starvation. The fact is the most innovative countries and those with the widest dispersion of new technologies and the wealthiest are those countries with strong patent systems. None of this would be possible if there was even a shred of logic behind the anti-patent arguments. The reason this occurs is that property rights encourage the creation, investment, and dispersion of new technologies.

Update: My assumptions in the post below appear to be in error, or at least not sufficiently provable. Communication from one of the authors of the study has told me that the property  rights component the study has used for a decade has nothing explicitly referring to IP.  Apparently for years, the previous wording has been replaced  with a general survey question on “property rights.”  Apparently, depending on how respondents feel about IP, it may or not not influence their answers. The author assures me that there are survey questions in the same source explicitly about IP that the study does not not use.  He further points me to the data Appendix to Chapter 1 which explains precisely how each component in the index is calculated, and that this is true for all  42 of the components. The component on property rights is 2-C  and the section below is directly from that Appendix:

C  Protection of property rights

This component is from the Global Competitiveness Report question: “Property rights, including over financial assets, are poorly defined and not protected by law (=1) or are clearly defined and well protected by law (=7).”  Note: This replaces previous Global Competitiveness Report question on protection of intellectual property.

Source: World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report (various issues), http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/index.htm.

Thus, this says that the general question about property rights replaces an earlier one that did refer to IP; but that question has not been used for at least a decade, according to the author I discussed this with.

It appears that the current study does not explicitly emphasize IP. I still suspect that the stronger a country protects IP, the more it will give it a stronger property rights rating in surveys since most people surveyed no doubt think IP is a legitimate type of property right. But given the information noted above, it’s hard to be certain. In my view, a country should receive strong negative marks against economic freedom, for having strong patent and copyright protections, just as it should receive demerits for having other forms of state-granted monopolies and anticompetitive, protectionist measures like tariffs and the like.

***

My original post:
As reported on Economic Freedom, the US has fallen in economic freedom rankings “from second in 2000 to eighth in 2005 and 19th  in 2010 (unadjusted ranking of 18th)”.

Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report

Earlier today, the Fraser Institute released its “Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report.” Analyzing data from 144 countries based on 42 distinct variables, the study’s authors rank countries according to their relative level of economic freedom.

After ranking 2^nd in 2000, the U.S. falls to 18^th in this year’s report. As the authors explain:

“[T]he United States has fallen precipitously from second in 2000 to eighth in 2005 and 19th  in 2010 (unadjusted ranking of 18th). By 2009, the United States had fallen behind Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Chile, and Mauritius, countries that chose not to follow the path of massive growth in government financed by borrowing that is now the most prominent characteristic of US fiscal policy. By 2010, the United States had also fallen behind Finland and Denmark, two European welfare states. Moreover, it now trails Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Taiwan, and Qatar, countries that are not usually perceived of as bastions of economic freedom.”

The Fraser Institute’s full report is available below and on the Economic Freedom Network website.

(See also Michael Tanner, America’s Vanishing Economic Freedom.)

The United States has the worlds most draconian patent and copyright regimes. Since these forms of so-called “intellectual property” are counted as types of “property” (see, e.g., the Fraser Institute, “Country Audits,” which indicates that “[e]conomic freedom measures” include “the impartiality of legal systems to protection of intellectual property”), the US no doubt is ranked higher than it ought to be since it is getting points for its aggressive IP system, rather than being dinged for it, as it should be. In other words, the US is really lower than 19th.

The Fraser Institute ought to recognize that intellectual “property” is not a legitimate type of property, and that its enforcement makes legitimate property rights more insecure. The stronger a given IP system, the more the country should be moved down the ranking system. No doubt Fraser thinks it’s being neutral by just accepting whatever state legislative schemes are labeled “property”, but it is impossible to be neutral. Accepting a given law as a type of property right takes a normative and economic position about it: by including IP in the measure of a country’s protection of property rights for this study is to say that IP is a good thing, is a legitimate property rights, and contributes to “economic freedom.” Imagine if some country still had chattel slavery in place, with human slaves recognized as property. Should its strong enforcement of runaway slave laws be counted as a positive in terms of its having economic freedom and a strong property rights system? I think not. And the same with IP. IP restricts economic freedom and competition, and violates property rights.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Printing Evolves: An Inkjet for Living Tissue,” notes the promise of 3D printing for the creation of human organs or tissue:

Need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee?

Hit print.

Need a new knee? What about an artery for bypass surgery? Some researchers are experimenting with techniques that build human tissue using patients’ own cells. WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports.

In about a dozen major university and corporate laboratories, biomedical engineers are working on ways to print living human tissue, in the hope of one day producing personalized body parts and implants on demand. Still far from clinical use, these tissue-engineering experiments represent the next step in a process known as computerized adaptive manufacturing, in which industrial designers turn out custom prototypes and finished parts using inexpensive 3-D computer printers.

Instead of extruding plastic, metal or ceramics, these medical printers squirt an ink of living cells. Researchers call it by the shorthand bioprinting.

Read more>>

Of course, the patent and copyright interests will fight this tooth and nail, and maybe kill it. Or seek to regulate and control it.¹ Imagine if IP really takes hold here: you could literally have IP in control of life and death. You cannot print out a replacement organ or tissue without some patent troll corporation’s permission. Unbelievable. The madness that is IP has to stop.

1. Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization; Pharmaceutical “Printers” and Patents; The IP War on 3D Printing Begins; Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation. [↩]

On the latest This Week in Law, TWiL #179: Judges of Unspecified Gender (which I’ve been a guest on a couple of times), hosts Denise Howell and Evan Brown and guest hosts Terry Hart and Jeff Orduno discuss  the French HADOPI “three strikes” copyright law—where you can get banned from the Internet for piracy—and how it’s being applied. They also discuss a similar “six strikes” provision coming soon to the US. In recent stories, e.g. BBC News – Pirated Rihanna songs land Frenchman in court and Hart’s own HADOPI and Copyright Hypochondria, it’s reported that the initial results of HADOPI enforcement were less draconian than some have feared. As Hart writes in his piece:

HADOPI has identified 3 million IP addresses connected with downloading infringing works. Of those, it sent out 1.15 million initial warnings. 102,854 users received a second warning. Of these, 340 received a third warning. Thirty of these cases resulted in repeated infringement after a third warning and were reviewed by a commission within HADOPI, though only 14 of those 30 have been referred to a court for judicial review.

In other words, from first identification, only .00047% French internet users face punitive measures for repeated infringement.

… Since its inception, HADOPI has been describe as ”repressive” and ”draconian“, with dire predictions that ”already overworked courts risk being overwhelmed by piracy cases.”

The EFF, no stranger to hyperbole, described the HADOPI agency as an “executioner” and the law like a “guilliotine.” It warned of other country’s following France’s lead and ”pressuring ISPs to throw their customers offline.” Even as recently as a month ago, the organization continued to call it “ham-fisted,” saying the process “runs contrary to principles of due process, innovation, and free expression.”

Would you believe Techdirt has also chimed in over the past 20 months? The site has said of HADOPI: ”Due process? It’s dead.” The law, according to Techdirt, was ”designed to kick accused (not convicted) file sharers off the internet“, it “suggests a huge percentage of French citizens at risk of losing internet access“, and “has effectively criminalized vast swathes of that country.”

This type of rhetoric is all too common from copyright skeptics whenever any effort is made to protect creators’ rights. One could call this “copyright hypochondria,” where every minor change in copyright law or enforcement is surely a symptom of a life-threatening disease. Far more often, it’s not, as this story demonstrates.

So basically here we have a French copyright law that potentially could impact over three million French residents, potentially banning them from the Internet, with measly due process provisions (email warnings that might go to a defunct email account, and so forth). Hart calls those alarmed at state power to punish people this way in the name of copyright infringement “copyright hypochondriacs”—after all, the initial application of the law “only” led to 30 people (out of three million initially warned) repeatedly infringing after the third warning, and “only 14 of those 30 have been referred to a court for judicial review.” And of course this included one man who “was fined even though he did not download the Rihanna songs”—his soon-to-be ex-wife did. But no matter—you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.

The people alarmed at this state power to censor people, punish and fine them for what are innocuous actions are denigrated as “copyright hypochondriacs.” After all, the state has not “abused” this power too much so far—so what’s to worry?

Co-host Evan Brown (around 9:20-) mentions me by name saying I’m the only person he’s ever heard that thinks we should get rid of IP altogether, but that basically everyone else thinks there is some reason to have IP protection. (Though I am of course not alone in IP abolitionism; historically, there have been thinkers like Benjamin Tucker and others;¹ Mike Masnick, mentioned in Hart’s piece, is close to being an IP abolitionist, as are many others, such as Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians,² as well as tech and artistic types like Rick Falkvinge and Nina Paley, a former TWiL guest. The even some other patent lawyers who oppose patent law.)  So, according to this reasoning, if we are going to have IP rights, we have to enforce it. The implication being that people who support IP should not be too alarmed when we enact laws and policies designed to enforce IP rights. Denise Howell, who seems to lean libertarian, is not so quick to join in with the critics of copyright “hypochondriacs.” She recognizes the danger of giving state agencies discretionary power to enforce these provision and the potential chilling and other negative effects of such policies.

1. See my The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism and The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism. [↩]
2. The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism. [↩]

So argues Matt Ridley in a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal, Don’t Look for Inventions Before Their Time.

Bill Moggridge, who invented the laptop computer in 1982, died last week. His idea of using a hinge to attach a screen to a keyboard certainly caught on big, even if the first model was heavy, pricey and equipped with just 340 kilobytes of memory. But if Mr. Moggridge had never lived, there is little doubt that somebody else would have come up with the idea.

The phenomenon of multiple discovery is well known in science. Innovations famously occur to different people in different places at the same time. Whether it is calculus (Newton and Leibniz), or the planet Neptune (Adams and Le Verrier), or the theory of natural selection (Darwin and Wallace), or the light bulb (Edison, Swan and others), the history of science is littered with disputes over bragging rights caused by acts of simultaneous discovery.

… Just as it made little sense to invent the wheelie-case before the great expansion of air travel, so it made little sense to invent the laptop before 1982, when computers had begin to shrink, or the bicycle before the emergence of the motorcar had resulted in the appearance of smooth roads and pneumatic tires.

The more you examine the history of technology, the more evolutionary it looks. Invention is incremental rather than revolutionary, inevitable rather than idiosyncratic, and it emerges unplanned from the cross-fertilization of ideas. Once the Internet exists, the search engine will not be far behind. Even something that seems unique to one culture, such as the boomerang in Australia, turns out not to be. There are 3,300-year-old returning boomerangs in Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt.

Read more>>

Yet another reason why the patent system—which grants roughly 17-year monopolies to the first inventor to file for a patent application on his idea—is unjust.

As noted on Yahoo, in Canadian Mint taxing musician for using image of penny in protest, a Canadian musician named “Dave Gunning says he wanted to pay tribute to the Canadian penny, which will cease production at the end of 2012, on his upcoming album, “No More Pennies.” So his “album cover shows a person at a lunch counter attempting to come up with enough change to pay for a cup of coffee.”

When the Royal Canadian Mint found out about this, “it told Dave Gunning that for every 2,000 albums sold, he must fill out an application asking for permission to continue using the image, then pay $1,200 in fees.” After all,

“The Mint has an Intellectual Property Policy in place to protect its IP assets, which includes coin images, and ensure their appropriate use,” a Mint spokeswoman told the CBC. “In instances where an approved use is being made for commercial gain (as would be the case with an ad campaign or selling music CDs), royalty fees are applied.”

The alleged purpose of copyright law is to help artists. Here we have a fascist central state, claiming not only the monopoly right to print money, but a copyright in images associated with the money; and when a local artist tries to pay tribute to the money, even though it’s being discontinued, the state shakes him down for more. Sad. Sad.

From Inside Counsel:

Woman to pay $9,250 per song in file-sharing case

8th Circuit approves damages, declines to say file-sharing violates Copyright Act

BY JULIE BECK

September 12, 2012

“One song costs 99 cents on iTunes, and $9,250 in the courts.”

In a memo to “Candidates, Interested Parties,” subject line: “Public Policy and the Entertainment Community: Five Important Things to Know About the Impact of the American Film and Television Industry on the US Economy” (available at MPAA Tells Candidates That Anti-Piracy Legislation Remains A “Critical” Priority; h/t Skip Oliva), the MPAA repeats a confusing mishmash of propaganda to keep the fascist copyright system strong.

First, the memo tells us of all the money the television and film indusry pours into the national and local economies:

Film and TV production takes place in all 50 states across the country. … The American film and television industry is a massive contributor to the US economy, generating $42.1 billion in wages from direct industry jobs and distributing $37.4 billion in payments to nearly 278,000 businesses around the country in 2010. … When shooting on location, major motion pictures contribute an average of $225,000 daily to the local economy.

Fine. But this doesn’t justify copyright law!

… Now, take $300m CGI summer blockbuster films: if the producers of these things are to be believed, the ongoing capacity to produce glitzy, big budget productions demands that services like YouTube be shut off (see, for example, Viacom’s lawsuit against Google over YouTube).If this is true – I’m no movie exec, maybe it is – then we need to ask ourselves the “balance” question: YouTube’s users produce 29 hours of video every minute and the vast majority of it is not infringing TV and movie clips, it is independently produced material that accounts for more viewer-minutes than television. So, the big studios’ demand amounts to this: “You must shut down the system that delivers billions of hours of enjoyment to hundreds of millions of people so that we can go on delivering about 20 hours’ worth of big budget film every summer.”

To me, this is a no brainer. I mean, I love sitting in an air-conditioned cave watching Bruce Willis beat up a fighter jet with his bare hands as much as the next guy, but if I have to choose between that and all of YouTube, well, sorry Bruce.

A recent Economist article, Apple v Samsung: iPhone, uCopy, iSue (“Not every innovation deserves a patent. Not every copycat deserves a punishment”) exemplifies today’s widespread unprincipled approach to policy. Few people want to abolish IP, even though they can find no good arguments for it and can see only damage. They only want to “reform” it. The Economist buys into the romanticized propaganda in favor of the patent system:

It is useful to recall why patents exist. The system was established as a trade-off that provides a public benefit: the state agrees to grant a limited monopoly to an inventor in return for disclosing how the technology works. To qualify, an innovation must be novel, useful and non-obvious, which earns the inventor 20 years of exclusivity.

But there is no evidence that there is a “public benefit” (see Boldrin and Levine: The Case Against Patents). Ah, wel, who cares? We can’t be “extreme” now, can we?

Then the “newspaper” (i.e., magazine) recognizes the problems of patents:

A proliferation of patents harms the public in three ways. First, it means that technology companies will compete more at the courtroom than in the marketplace—precisely what seems to be happening. Second, it hampers follow-on improvements by firms that implement an existing technology but build upon it as well. Third, it fuels many of the American patent system’s broader problems, such as patent trolls (speculative lawsuits by patent-holders who have no intention of actually making anything); defensive patenting (acquiring patents mainly to pre-empt the risk of litigation, which raises business costs); and “innovation gridlock” (the difficulty of combining multiple technologies to create a single new product because too many small patents are spread among too many players).

So: there are obvious costs and harms of the patent system. And no apparent benefits. Yet we should not abolish this abomination; we should “reform” it:

Some basic reforms would alleviate many of the problems exemplified by the iPhone lawsuit. The existing criteria for a patent should be applied with greater vigour. Specialised courts for patent disputes should be established, with technically minded judges in charge: the inflated patent-damage awards of recent years are largely the result of jury trials. And if patents are infringed, judges should favour monetary penalties over injunctions that ban the sale of offending products and thereby reduce consumer choice.

They conclude:

A world of fewer but more robust patents, combined with a more efficient method of settling disputes, would not just serve the interests of the public but also help innovators like Apple.

The assumption here is that if we get rid of the “bad” patents, the “junk” patents, and patent trolls, and software patents, etc, and somehow make the “system” more “just” and “serve the interests” of the “public” and “innovators”—like Apple, ha!—then all would be better. They do not realize that even if you get rid of patent trolls, “low quality” patents, and have only “robust” patents left: this is still anti-competitive and anti-free market. It still allows “robust” patent owners to use these state-granted patent monopolies to squelch competition, reduce innovation, increase prices to consumers. We do not want to reform the patent system so that we only have “high quality” or “robust” patents left; robust patents are the problem, just like an efficient and effective DEA or IRS is a bad thing, not a good thing.

Here are the first few lines from the Introduction to The Case Against Patents, a draft paper [now published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives] by Michele Boldrin & David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly:

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. This is at the root of the “patent puzzle”: in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of R&D expenditure – in addition to the discussion in this paper, see Lerner [2009] and literature therein. As we shall see, there is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.

We can only conclude, at this point, that people who favor patents on “utilitarian” grounds are either ignorant or dishonest. They are much like the leftists in Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, or those derided by Charles Murray in Losing Ground, or an analog of Isabel Paterson’s humanitarian with a guillotine. Or maybe they are just misanthropes or Luddites.

Update: See more posts on Internet freedom.

As noted in ars technica, For Dems, “Internet freedom” means “vigorously” protecting copyrights:

Both major US party platforms endorse “Internet freedom”—but for both parties the phrase comes with important caveats. Last week, the Republicans called for “vigorous enforcement of current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity,” as well as the preservation of the ban on online gambling. The Democrats are silent on pornography and gambling, but they make the case for “vigorous” copyright enforcement efforts.

… “The administration is vigorously protecting US intellectual property,” the new Democratic platform declares, through “better enforcement and innovative approaches such as voluntary efforts by all parties to minimize infringement while supporting the free flow of information.” That’s a reference to things like the “graduated response” system in which ISPs would penalize their users if they were accused of copyright infringement six times. (The White House helped brokered the deal between major ISPs and Hollywood.)

Another policy that fits the theme of “vigorous” enforcement (though it isn’t named specifically) is Operation In Our Sites. Under that program, the federal government has seized hundreds of allegedly infringing domain names before the site owners had a chance to be heard.

President Obama also has his party’s backing on the use of trade negotiations as a lever to pressure other countries to adopt American-style copyright and patent laws. While it doesn’t mention the controversial ACTA treaty, the Democratic platform promotes the Trans-Pacific Partnershipagreement and praises “free trade” agreements with Panama and Colombia for “protecting labor rights, the environment, and intellectual property.”

So… the Republicrats and Demopublicans want to restrict Internet Freedom, to stop gambling, pornography, copyright infringement, … in the name of Internet Freedom. Talk about obscenity! As Cory Doctorow has noted (2), the Internet is the world’s biggest copying machine … of course, it facilitates copying. If you have a war on copying, this is a war on the Internet.

See also: Down with Gatekeepers: Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration vs. Internet Freedom, discussing the hypocrisy and ludicrousness of the people who are attacking the Internet claiming to be for Internet Freedom.

PetaPixel reports: Patent Shows That Nokia is Working on Graphene-Based Camera Sensors. But a company need not ever make a working model or ever sell a product embodying patented inventions. (See How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law for a suggestion to add such requirements.) Quite often companies file patents on ideas they will never pursue; an engineer might come up with it during a brainstorming session, and file it to get the patent bonus; the company files it to add to their stack of patents that they might be able to use defensively or for licensing purposes someday. (The “Productivity” of Patent Brainstorming; The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling.)

I get that people don’t understand patent law. Not many people do. Not the engineer jury foreman in the Apple v. Samsung patent trial recently, apparently (Apple/Samsung Jurors Admit They Finished Quickly By Ignoring Prior Art & Other Key Factors). All the more reason that they should not be in favor of IP law—never favor a state law or policy that you don’t understand. At least be skeptical.