In Slate’s Farhad Manjoo: Use Crowdsourcing to Improve Patents and Kill Patent Trolls, I explained why the focus on patent trolls is misguided; and why using crowdsourcing and incentives to increase the quality of prior art brought to the patent office’s attention, to improve patent “quality” by weeding out “bad patents”–is also misguided. And that improving patent quality will address the patent troll problem. And that improving patent “quality” is not a desired solution since the low quality of patents and the patent examination process has little to do with the threat patents pose to innovation and the economy.

Derrick Harris’s Gigaom post, Can big data fix a broken system for software patents?, is also on the wrong track. The post explores various proposals to use “data analytics” to improve prior art searches for fields like software patents.

Big data won’t solve all the complaints people have about patents, but it could make life a lot easier for the inventors, attorneys and examiners tasked with determining whether a patent infringes a previous patent, or is even patent-worthy in the first place. The question now is whether the USPTO wants to leave simplification of the process in the hands of private parties like IP Street, or if the agency wants to bring a few big data experts on board and improve what it’s able to offer those who rely on it.

For the same reasons as I laid out in the Manjoo post, this ain’t gonna do the trick. Improving prior  Even if every software patent that issues is 100% “valid” (that is, non-obvious and novel in view of all prior art), they are still a threat to property, liberty, innovation, and the economy. They are still anti-competitive; the very  purpose of patents is to protect favored companies from competition. (See EU newsflash: patents are anticompetitive!; Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition; IP Rights as Monopolistic Grants to Overcome the Public Goods Problem; Ayn Rand’s Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule and Intellectual Property.)

Improving prior art databases or search methods will not do much good. Nor will addressing the “patent troll” problem. The problem is not trolls, overbroad patents, junk patents, inept patent examiners, software patents, etc. The problem is the very idea of patents.

And why do we want to “make life a lot easier for the inventors, attorneys and examiners tasked with determining whether a patent infringes a previous patent, or is even patent-worthy in the first place”–? Why make it easier for a patent examiner to issue a patent? Why make it easier for the attorney for a patent aggressor to determine that a competitor is infringing the patent? Why improve the overall impression that patents are legitimate by improving patent quality? The truth is nothing is “patent-worthy”. Why pretend that any invention “really” “deserves” a grant of monopoly privilege from the criminal-protectionist state?

As for real reforms: I laid out some suggested incremental patent and copyright reforms in Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way and How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law. In the case of patents, significant reform would include things like:

• Reducing the Patent Term
• Removing Patent Injunctions/Providing Compulsory Royalties
• Adding a Royalty Cap/Safe Harbor
• Reducing the Scope of Patentable Subject Matter
• Providing for Prior-Use and Independent-Inventor Defenses

I was a guest on TWiL (This Week in Law) yesterday (Mar. 9, 2012), Episode 152, “Second Springtime For Hitler,” discussing copyright reform and constitutionality, first monkey pictures now bird songs?, sneaking stuff through backscatter scanners, and more. Host: Denise Howell; Guests: Stephan Kinsella and Adam Dachis of LifeHacker.com.

Nice overview of the case against IP by Chase Voluntaryist Rachels.

From Roderick Long at the AAEBlog:

The Girl With the Xeroxed Tattoo

Mar 06

By Roderick

Warner Bros. is “ditching its drama pilot about a crime-solving girl hacker who teams up with a male police detective,” because Sony Pictures is “threatening legal action over similarities” with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Attempts to decrease the similarities by “turning the white male cop into a black female lawyer and giving the loner hacker a boyfriend” apparently weren’t good enough, because “the series is based around [sic] a hacker.”

Wtf? Sony claims ownership of the mere concept of having a hacker as a main character?

Or is it just that it’s a female hacker? Maybe DC comics should be suing Sony then.

In related news, the Moffat-Vertue axis is still sabre-rattling against CBS for daring to imitate the idea of an updated Sherlock Holmes series.

Now I love the hell out of Sherlock, and I doubt that CBS’s effort will even remotely measure up. But before the BCC folks decide to resort to violence over this, they might remember that the idea of Holmes-in-the-present-day is not exactly one they invented.

From Slashdot (h/t Peter Surda):

Patent blogger Dennis Crouch writes on Patently-O of a catch-22 for attorneys. Patent attorneys are required to submit all prior art that they know of to the patent office. Failing to do so is an ethical violation, and can result in a patent being invalidated. But now the Hoboken Publishing Company and the American Institute of Physics are suing a major patent firm for copyright infringement, because they submit articles to the patent office without paying a separate royalty.

What’s this world coming to when one state granted of monopoly privilege interferes with the process for obtaining another state grant of monopoly privilege? They’re supposed to complement each other!¹

1. See “Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies”; Microsoft Copyrights –> Patent Dominance. [↩]

See “Copyright is Unconstitutional” for an update:

Jason Beesinger called to my attention an interesting post by Terry Hart, “Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 2.”Hart makes the intriguing observation that until a few decades ago there was virtually no  “scholarship concerning a potential conflict between the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution and the free speech and press protections of the First Amendment.” As he notes:

Eldred devoted only two sentences to the history of the two clauses: “The Copyright Clause and First Amendment were adopted close in time. This proximity indicates that, in the Framers’ view, copyright’s limited monopolies are compatible with free speech principles.”

Hart then takes up my argument in this post, that copyright is unconstitutional because the First Amendment came after, and thus partially overrides the copyright clause, and observes:

Kinsella is not the first to say this. For example, this is from a 1986 law review article: “Arguably, then, the [Copyright] Act is unconstitutional, since the free speech guarantee is an amendment which supersedes prior inconsistent constitutional text.”

The quoted article is David E. Shipley, Conflicts Between Copyright and the First Amendment After Harper & Row, Publishers v. Nation Enterprises, 1986 BYU Law Review 983, 985 (1986). However, Shipley ultimately rejects the argument:

Notwithstanding these arguments, … the copyright law is constitutional.

After all, we can’t have an “absolutist” view of the First Amendment. Why, that “would mean that perjury, obscenity and mail fraud were constitutionally protected.” Heavens to Betsy! We can’t have that, now can we? Ergo, because “we” “need” to outlaw … obscenity … copyright law must be okay even though it seems to fly in the face of the First Amendment. Whatever.

Hart, who elsewhere on his blog frequently and positively cites the work of pro-IP Objectivist Adam Mossoff, unsurprisingly rejects my  argument, and correctly noting that it is a “minority” position. The majority position is, by contrast: “The view of the First Amendment entirely displacing the earlier text is universally rejected, I think properly, as to copyright.” (C. Edwin Baker, First Amendment Limits on Copyright, 55 Vanderbilt Law Review 891, 893 (2002).)

Hart then finds another problem with my argument:

But there’s an even more compelling reason why the subsequent adoption of the First Amendment wouldn’t have or wasn’t intended to impact Congress’s copyright authority at the time.

Twelve of the original thirteen US states (Delaware was the lone exception) adopted copyright acts between 1783 and 1786 — before the current Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation.

Of those twelve colonies, five of them provided for the freedom of the press in either their state constitutions or separate bills of rights before passing their own copyright laws: Virginia,⁸ Pennsylvania,⁹ Georgia,¹⁰ South Carolina,¹¹ and Massachusetts.¹²

Two of the colonies did not enact freedom of the press clauses until after passing their own copyright acts¹³ while the remaining five did not include “bill of rights” style provisions in their constitutions prior to the ratification of the US Constitution.¹⁴

So by the time delegates arrived to draft the US Constitution, over one third of the states had enacted copyright legislation after providing for freedom of the press. This lends solid support to the idea that early US copyright law was perceived as being wholly consistent with the guarantee of a free press.

I don’t find this wholly persuasive. The fact is that copyright does cause censorship and thus infringes freedom of press and speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. Since the latter came later, it supersedes the former. The fact that some people did not “perceive” there to be a conflict does not mean there is not. (Lysander Spooner, whom Hart cites approvingly on the one issue Spooner was bad on—IP (see Hart’s post 15 Objections to Copyright from 1855)—also argued that even slavery was originally unconstitutional even though it was contemplated by the text (see n.3 and text at n. 3 above). The First Amendment-vs-copyright argument is not nearly as much a stretch as Spooner’s argument re slavery.) If some state legislators felt copyright and free speech were compatible, they were simply wrong. Their error does not change the incompatibility between two conflicting provisions of the federal Constitution. The question is whether copyright law is incompatible with the First Amendment, not whether state legislators around the same time thought they were compatible.

I’ll also say that the Bill of Rights, in my view, only affected the federal government’s power to enact copyright law. This is because the Bill of Rights limits federal, not state power—e.g. there were established state religions in some of the States in 1791, such as Congregationalism in Massachusetts. So even if some states had copyright law that was held by them to be compatible with their own constitutions, and even if the First Amendment would not affect those state laws, this does not mean the fedgov had the authority to enact copyright, if it is prohibited by the First Amendment.

Consider also that in Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to James Madison, August 28, 1789 (On the liberty to write, speak, and publish and its limits), he proposes to James Madison, then in the process of drafting the Bill of Rights, that the following be incorporated into the Bill of Rights:

Art. 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding — years but for no longer term and no other purpose.⁷

If such a provision had been included, then there could be no argument that copyright is unconstitutional (though copyright longer than X years would be, unlike now). The courts would have to find a “balance” between the conflicting free speech rights and the copyright clause. But the new copyright-monopoly amendment was not added to the Bill of Rights. The old 1789 copyright clause was left alone. That means, to my mind, that the 1791 First Amendment supersedes the copyright clause to the extent they are incompatible.

Finally, let me say that I agree with John Hasnas that statutory law—and the Constitution is a statute—is often vague and ambiguous. There is not always an “objective meaning” to “find.”⁸ Given this, there is nothing wrong with interpreting ambiguous provisions in favor of liberty and justice.⁹ Since copyright is unjust and violates rights, and since it conflicts with free speech rights (which can be justified as a type of property rights and/or as a prophylactic limitation on dangerous state power), and since there is a decent argument against the copyright law, this is the construction we should favor—just as we ought to favor a construction of the Constitution that prohibits slavery than one that permits it or establishes it. The goal is justice, not finding the “right” interpretation of a statist document that often has no objective interpretation anyway.

This is especially so in the case of copyright, which is coming to be one of the greatest threats to liberty and the most dangerous weapons in the state’s arsenal.¹⁰ It is especially important to defeat copyright, and to use all the arguments at our disposal to combat it.

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As I have discussed before, the state is schizophrenic. It grants monopolies aimed at limiting competition (patents and copyright), and then penalizes companies for using (“abusing”) them, in contravention of state antitrust law–so that there is a “tension” between these state laws. Then courts have to “balance” these against each other. Each state law gives the state an excuse to ratchet up its power. Here’s an idea: get rid of both antitrust and patent law.¹ (Likewise, there is also a “tension” between copyright censorship, and the right to free speech.)²

A recent illustration of this can be seen in the Engadget post FTC: Western Digital and Hitachi must give assets and IP rights to Toshiba:

Thought everything was looking rosy for the hard drive hitch of the year? Well, it looks like Federal Trade Commission reckons the union of Hitachi and Western Digital isn’t quite there just yet, ordering that the new company would have to shed some of its assets to Toshiba. The FTC wants to ensure a competitive climate in the 3.5-inch hard drive market and avoid Western Digital and Seagate — the two largest HDD manufacturers — carving up the whole sector between them. According to the FTC’s proposals, Toshiba has to receive the production assets needed to equal Hitachi’s current HDD market share, alongside access to Western Digital’s research and development resources and licenses to its intellectual property. Regulators had previously stated that WD could expect to sell on some of its production assets in order to get the tie-up okayed. Western Digital now has 15 days to hand over these assets to Toshiba — who, presumably, aren’t complaining — once the deal with Hitachi is finally inked.

1. See EU newsflash: patents are anticompetitive!; State Antitrust (anti-monopoly) law versus state IP (pro-monopoly) law; The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC; see also When Antitrust and Patents Collide (Rambus v. FTC); Antitrust vs. Trademark Law; Price Controls, Antitrust, and Patents; IP vs. Antitrust; The Schizophrenic State; Intel v. AMD: More patent and antitrust waste. [↩]
2. Should Copyright Be Allowed to Override Speech Rights? [↩]
3. State Antitrust (anti-monopoly) law versus state IP (pro-monopoly) law; Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition; IP Rights as Monopolistic Grants to Overcome the Public Goods Problem. [↩]
4. The Microsoft-Apple Gesture Oligopoly; Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies; The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling; Are Patents Needed to Make Up for FDA Kneecapping?; Nortel Patents Sold for $4.5 Billion to Consortium Which Includes Apple; Apple vs. Microsoft: Which Benefits more from Intellectual Property?; Patent Cross-Licensing Creates Barriers to Entry. [↩]
5. See Abolish antitrust law and the real monopoly: the state. [↩]

From the Mail online:

Families face having their internet cut off after laws to curb ‘piracy’ are upheld in court

By Sean Poulter

Last updated at 6:09 PM on 6th March 2012

• Comments (57)
• Share

 

Families who illegally download movies, music or books will appear on a blacklist and might – in future – have their internet services cut off.

The tough new regime, which is included in the Digital Economy Act, was upheld by the Court of Appeal  today after judges threw out a legal challenge.

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Nice post by Masnick on a growing resistance in Europe to database rights: EU Court Ruling Saying Sports Schedules May Not Covered By Copyright Pushes Back On Dangerous Database Copyrights. The US years ago rejected the sweat of the brow doctrine and thus made it harder to use copyright for mere collections of information like phone books, maps, and the like.

See also Peter Klein’s post Can Prices be Owned?, where I made the following comment:

My personal view is obvious here–prices are not scarce resources, but just facts, or information about facts; they of course are not property. (See my Against Intellectual Property article for elaboration.)

As to what the law actually is … I think it would be governed by cases like the Feist case, which said there is no copyright in mere collections of data, like a map… since it’s not original. It’s just facts. The Court said that the old idea of “sweat of the brow” is not enough. Just because you put work into assembling the information does not mean it’s original. This is why Congress tried to pass a database rights act a few years back, but never did.

For more on Feist see the Wikipedia entry.

I’ve appeared before as a guest panelist on This Week in Law (TWiL), and will be on again this coming Friday, March 9, at 1pm CST. Should be fun. The hosts, Denise Howell and Evan Brown, are always excellent and fun.

My 2008 monograph Against Intellectual Property has long been available online for free. PDF, epub, audio, even various translations. And the epub is like 196k. Sooooo why would anyone …. pirate via torrent? E.g., Demonoid, Bitsnoop, Torrentcrazy… Hey, the more the merrier. I don’t mind people hosting and serving up my ideas as a backup…

This is one of my posts from 2009:

The Arbitrariness of Patent Law

by Stephan Kinsella on August 10, 2009

in AgainstMonopoly.org Blog Posts,Intellectual Property

As noted on Patently-O, the Supreme Court is set to address a question about the patentability of certain “processes”–whether the process has to be “tied” to a particular machine or apparatus, or transform a particular article into a different state or thing (“machine-or-transformation” test), to be eligible for patenting.

Now, I append below a summary of the various positions taken by various briefs filed in this case. The recommendations are all over the place. Examples like this should be considered by those libertarians who advocate IP and who think that “the courts” could just figure out the gray areas easily. They do not seem to realize this is purely artificial law, giving rise to insoluble questions–when the goal of the court is not to do justice, but to construe a decree of a legislature, you cannot expect just, or predictable, results. (For more on this, see my Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, pp. 151 et seq.) As Kafka wrote, “Justice must stand quite still, or else the scales will waver and a just verdict will become impossible.”

• • Yahoo (Bilski – Yahoo! Amicus Brief (S.Ct) (as filed) (8-6-09).pdf) The focus on physicality does not make sense in today’s technology.
  • strong>IBM (08-964 IBM.pdf) The proper test looks for a “technological contribution.”
  • Regulatory Data Corp (08-964 Regulatory Datacorp et al..pdf) Brief by John Duffy focuses directly on the historical importance of the statutory test. “The government is now asking this Court to impose a formalistic restriction on definition of “process” that would create an unprecedented and uncertain judicial limitation on patentable subject matter. This Court should reject that invitation just as it did more than a third of a century ago, when the government unsuccessfully advanced the very same argument. See Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63, 71 (1972).”

• Accenture (08-964 tsac Accenture and Pitney Bowes, Inc.pdf) Machine or transformation test is not a reliable indicator of anything relevant.
  
• Austin IP Law Ass’n ( 08-964 Austin Intellectual Property Law Association.pdf) The patent statute explicitly defines process quite broadly in Section 100(b). The Federal Circuit’s version of “process” in 35 U.S.C. § 101 is far narrower than the broad definition of “process” in 35 U.S.C. § 100(b) (2008).
• Double Rock and other IP entities (08-964tsacdoublerockcorporation.pdf) The Federal Circuit test conflicts with Supreme Court precedent and Congressional intent.
• Law Professors [Lemley et al.] (08-964ac20lawandbusinessprofessors.pdf) The distinction on patentable subject matter should be based on the distinction between applied and abstract inventions. Bilski’s claims fail this test.
• Chakrabarty (08-964 Chakrabarty.pdf) Brief by Scott Kieff and Richard Epstein argue that patent rights operate “like a beacon in the dark” to start conversations between innovative entities and potential users.
• Franklin Pierce Law Center (Bilski.pdf) Court should adopt the “useful, concrete, and tangible result” test.
• TeleCommunication Systems (08-964nsactelecommunicationsystemsinc.pdf) Subject matter eligibility should be predictably broad.
• BIO, AdvaMed, WARF and U of Calif (08-964 tsac Biotechnology Industry Organization et al..pdf) Any decision should be clear that biotechnology is patentable.
• Conejo Valley Bar Ass’n (08-964.ac.Conejo Valley Bar Association.pdf) The substantive elements of the patent act (102, 103, and 112) do all the necessary work.
• Novartis (08-964tsacNovartisCorporation.pdf) A process of diagnosis should be patentable.
• Dr. McDonough (08-964_PetitionerAmCuTMcDounough.pdf) “American innovation is not confined to Industrial Age mousetraps and other cleverly contrived gadgets. The modern economic agent is more likely to encounter innovation today in the services they consume than in the contraptions they use. The present amicus curiae suggests that the decision of the Federal Circuit in this case is an attempt to apply an Industrial Age standard to address a perceived Services Age problem, a problem that the present amicus curiae suggests does not exist.”
• State of Oregon (08-964_NeutralAmCuOregon.pdf) (The Patent Hawk filed this brief on behalf of all Oregonians – although apparently without any official state approval) The brief makes an important point: Although Section 101 comes first in the statute, it does not make sense to use it as a screening tool at the PTO. Rather, the PTO’s skills are in comparisons of prior art and ensuring that the elements of Section 112 have been satisfied.
• Chicago IP Law Ass’n (08-964 ac Intellectual Property Association of Chicago.pdf) There are strong parallels here with KSR; CAFC rule is too rigid.
• Borland (Amicus Curiae Brief (Borland Software Corporation).pdf) The CAFC test does not properly follow Supreme Court precedent.
• Time Systems (08-964 ac On Time Systems.pdf) Some abstract ideas should be patentable.
• Monogram BioSciences and Genomic Health (08-964 ac Monogram Biosciences Inc.pdf) Patentable processes can be non-physical.
• Sachs and Brownstone (08-964 ac Robert R. Sachs.pdf) The CAFC test is limits the patenting of software, and a bad result.
• Boston Patent Law Association (08-964tsacbostonpatentlaw.pdf) A broad scope of patentable subject matter better preserves the health of an innovative culture; many landmark inventions fail the Federal Circuit’s Bilski test.
• Georgia Biomedical Partnership, Inc. (08-964 Georgia Biomedical Partnership Inc.pdf) The Supreme Court has consistently refused to offer a “rigid” test.
• Dolby Labs (08-964 Dolby Laboratories et al..pdf) The important thing is to settle expectations.
• Teles AG ( 08-964 Teles AG.pdf) Subject matter eligibility should be “dynamic.” “Further, the global nature of today’s economy strongly recommends that the United States patent system be harmonized with robust patent systems of other nations wherever possible.”
• Medtronic (08-964 Medtronic.pdf) Provides specific examples of medical innovations that may be unpatentable under the Federal Circuit test
• Houston IPLA (08-964 Houston IP Law Assoc..pdf) The test negatively impacts Dell’s “build-to-order” patent (5,963,743) ; AT&T’s linear programming patent (4,744,028); and Sperry Corporation’s LZW compression patent (4,558,302).
• Intellectual Property Owners (08-964acintellectualproperty.pdf) Machine or transformation test is not the only test; In its transformation test for signals, the CAFC “unduly focuses on the contents of the data . . . rather than the manner in which those signals are generated;” a general purpose computer should be considered a “particular machine.”
• AIPLA ( 08-964 American Intellectual Property Law Association.pdf) A new exclusionary test is not needed.
• Houston IPLA (08-964 Houston IP Law Assoc..pdf) The test negatively impacts Dell’s “build-to-order” patent (5,963,743) ; AT&T’s linear programming patent (4,744,028); and Sperry Corporation’s LZW compression patent (4,558,302).
• Armanta, Asentinel, Cybersource, and Hooked Wireless (08-964 Entrepreneurial Software Companies.pdf) Questions of patentability are causing software companies to lose value.
• Mr. Meiers ( 08-964 Raymond C. Meiers.pdf) A patentable invention “applies manifestations of nature and achieves a useful result.” This is the tripartite system.
• Univ. South Florida ( 08-964 University of South Florida.pdf)
• Awaken IP ( 08-964 AwakenIP.pdf) The CAFC test is unworkable and is as bad as the vague idea/expression dichotomy of copyright.
• BSA ( 08-964 Business Software Alliance.pdf) Section 101 has been consistently and correctly interpreted to cover software innovations.
• PhRMA, etc. ( 08-964 PhRMA et al..pdf) Medical processes should be patentable.”
• Caris Diagnostics ( 08-964 Caris Diagnostics, Inc.pdf) Diagnostic method patents are important and have been called into question by Bilski.
• AIPPI (TooBig) A flexible test is better, and TRIPS requires a flexible standard.
• FICPI ( 08-964 FICPI.pdf) “The § 101 analysis should focus on the section’s substantive utilitarian requirement, rather than retrospectively attempting to rigidly define the categories of patentable subject matter without the foresight of the particular form technological innovations may take in the future.

[Against Monopoly crosspost]

From the Techdirt post Josef Anvil’s Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week:

… So where does all of this lead? To Glyn Moody’s article about the “We, the Web Kids” manifesto, my FAVORITE post of the week and possibly my favorite post EVER on Techdirt. This one article encapsulates almost everything that is discussed in this forum. Whether the debate is about SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP or TSA or RIAA/MPAA or WIPO or Google or Facebook, we have to accept the fact that we are all far more connected than ever before, some of us are even hyperconnected, and it has changed us. We no longer just accept the opinions of “authority,” we want FACTS, we want data, we want the truth (or close as possible). This article details a fundamental shift in the way people THINK, and it’s not just the “web kids.” Personally, I didn’t grow up with the web, but I’m certainly not so blind as to miss how integrated into my life it is. Before the web, I didn’t talk to people all over the world on a daily basis, now I do. How I consume media is completely different, as I get to choose what, when, how, and why. In other words, the way things are done has CHANGED because of the internet.

This manifesto is a wake up call to politicians and corporations around the world. Your citizens and consumers have changed. They are becoming or have become a part of the digital era. They Skype, Tweet, FB, and IM their ideas, opinions, and comments without giving much thought about the process. They Google everything, they shop on their phones, they record video and post it before the “real news” can, they text while in meetings, they create with Gimp and NVU, they work with OpenOffice, and they consume media thru Netflix, HULU, Spotify, Grooveshark, HuffPo, and YouTube. They want to throw away physical storage and move stuff into the “cloud,” if you let them. They don’t want to hear that consumers shouldn’t dictate the market, because they know how to write reviews and share information. They don’t want to hear about laws being bought, and are willing to speak out and challenge the “old ways.”

One last point I would like to focus on, in the manifesto, which I found particularly engaging is the awareness of CwF + RtB, albeit heavily focused on RtB. In the digital world, we realize there isn’t much of a cost for packaging or distribution and so naturally we don’t see any reason to pay for those things. “But…but…but… the content is so valuable.” NO, it’s not. Charge me $9.99 for an ebook, and see how fast I discover new authors who will charge me $.99 or $.10 for content that is just as good. For $9.99, I want more than just pages of content that I can’t resell.

Sadly, because the content industry controls the broadcast medium, the digital revolution was not televised.

Here’s an excerpt from the post itself:

‘We, The Web Kids’: Manifesto For An Anti-ACTA Generation

from the future-in-safe-hands dept

One of the striking features of the demonstrations against ACTA that took place across Europe over the last few weeks was the youth of the participants. That’s not to say that only young people are concerned about ACTA, but it’s an indication that they take its assault on the Internet very personally — unlike, perhaps, older and more dispassionate critics.

As sometimes happens, a text has been floating around that captures rather well the spirit of that generation. It was originally written in Polish, and released under a liberal cc-by license; there are now a number of translations. As its author, Piotr Czerski, wrote in an email to Techdirt, its origins were quite humble:

I was asked by the journalist from local newspaper to write a text explaining difference between “analog” and “digital” generations. I thought that I should write something more: text, which can offer some kind of self-identity for all this different people protesting against ACTA. So I used the poetics of manifesto.

The whole piece is really well-written and perceptive. Here’s the key self-definition of those “Web kids” in the English translation by Marta Szreder:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

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