Nice column in The Oklahoma Daily by Jason Lee Byas (@jasonleebyas). I love that the young people are getting it.
January 31, 2012
Recently, college students and others who visit Wikipedia on a daily basis were met with a 24-hour blackout. The blackout in question was in protest of two pieces of legislation related to the Internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act.
The bills had several draconian punishments that outraged many Americans (Wikipedia clearly included). Many of the bills’ opponents stated that, if passed, the laws would effectively kill the Internet as we know it, potentially prosecuting any companies or sites found to be “facilitating” in copyright infringement.
However, there’s a much more fundamental aspect of this entire issue that needs to be discussed more openly. Hopefully, public outrage over these particularly atrocious laws will provide a platform for the message that really needs to be heard.
The time has come to abolish intellectual property.
To be clear, I’m a firm defender of actual property rights, even to an absolutist point. That’s exactly why I oppose the charade known as intellectual property.
To begin a serious discussion on intellectual property, it’s important to remember what the basis for property in tangible things is in the first place, and that’s scarcity. Not scarcity in the relative sense of being rare, but scarcity in the absolute sense of being limited at all.
For instance, consider the idea of a world where, for whatever reason, cars were relatively abundant and nearly everyone had one. Even in this context, I could still not control the use of your car at the same time that you control the use of your car.
If I take that single physical thing that is your particular car, you no longer have it. Thus, we must have property rights in order to ensure that people can use their own resources without coercion from others.
Now let’s consider a second situation. We’ll say that I “stole” your car, but it was still there in the morning. As in, I, through some magic spell of conjuration, created an exact copy of your car and drove off with that copy.
Have I actually stolen your car? I’d say not. You certainly still have exclusive rights to your particular copy of the car. I’m in no way forcing you to let your property be used in any way that goes against your will.
Furthermore, not only is an invasion of another person’s intellectual property not an invasion of anything remotely similar to their actual property rights, enforcing “intellectual property rights” is an invasion of actual property rights.
It seems hard to see how it could not be an invasion of property rights to tell someone that they aren’t legally allowed to use their own ink to form words on their own paper in a certain way. It also becomes difficult to use different words to describe banning everyone who isn’t Apple from using their own materials to make a product that performs a function judged too similar to the iPhone.
In fact, one could even say that intellectual property laws are, in essence, a government facilitation of property’s conceptual opposite: theft.
As longtime intellectual property lawyer Stephan Kinsella writes in his essay, “Against Intellectual Property,” “if property rights are recognized in non-scarce resources, this necessarily means that property rights in tangible resources are correspondingly diminished. This is because the only way to recognize ideal rights, in our real, scarce world, is to allocate rights in tangible goods. For me to have an effective patent right — a right in an idea or pattern, not in a scarce resource — means that I have some control over everyone else’s scarce resources.”
It is often objected that the purpose of intellectual property is to ensure the profitability of the tech and entertainment industries, given the problem of free-riders. While this is an issue to consider, it hardly seems like a legitimate reason for the government to enforce a monopoly on their products.
Plenty of businesses that are liable to free-rider problems, such as movie theaters, radio and others, are able to either factor in “fencing” costs (methods of excluding free riders) or find revenue streams (like commercials) that make free-riders irrelevant. Why should the entertainment or tech industries be able to put their costs of business on the rest of us by having the government enforce intellectual property law?
Yet, even as it lurks implicitly in the outrage over SOPA and PIPA, the American people have not yet come to realize the fact that intellectual property is not property. They do not see that it is, instead, a warrant for the title-holders of intellectual property claims to infringe on the property rights of everyone else.
We must make that realization. We must take the momentum of SOPA and PIPA outrage and make it consistent.
It’s not only that the penalties in those bills are disproportionate to the crime of using your own property, in a way that conflicts with no one else’s property, to copy music or films. It’s that there is no crime at all behind such action, and therefore absolutely any attempt to forcibly prohibit it would be beyond disproportionate.
Jason Byas is a philosophy junior.
Death by a thousand IP cuts1
The onslaught of IP legislation and international agreements has not abated. Here’s Mike Masnick from Techdirt on the secret negotiations for the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), an “agreement that the entertainment industry is betting on to get SOPA-like laws introduced around the globe.” Here’s the Wikipedia information on the controversial IP aspects of the TPP.
Public Interest Groups Speak Out About Next Week’s Secret Meeting In Hollywood To Negotiate TPP (Think International SOPA)
from the speak-up dept
We’ve been pointing out all week that the anti-SOPA folks who just discovered ACTA shouldn’t stop there, but should pay close attention to what’s happening with the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). That’s the agreement that the entertainment industry is betting on to get SOPA-like laws introduced around the globe. And, if you thought that ACTA was negotiated in secret, you haven’t seen anything. Rather than learn their lesson from the excessive and damaging secrecy around ACTA, it appears that the USTR has decided that the lesson to learn is “we can be as secret as we want… and we still win.” Of course, this seriously underestimates the mood of the public towards backroom deals on IP laws that will benefit a few large industries at the expense of the public (in a big, big way).
To show just how ridiculous this is, it has been leaked out that next week there will be a negotiation over TPP. Unlike ACTA, where at least the negotiators would admit where and when negotiations were happening (though, not always with much time for others to get there in time), the TPP negotiations are kept entirely in the dark from the public. However, it has leaked out that the next negotiation is happening from January 31st through February 4th… in West Hollywood (where else?). A bunch of public interest groups are speaking out against this super secret process, and will be hosting an event in LA the day before these negotiations, to educate people on just how bad TPP is. If you’re in the area, it’ll be worth attending (details at the link above).
For a listing of this and other IP laws, see The Mountain of IP Legislation.
Interesting post by attorney Max Kennerly:
Is Apple’s Dismal iBooks Author Software License Even Enforceable?
It seems Dan Wineman was the first to sound the alarm, with Ed Bott using his soapbox at ZDNet to shout it from the rooftops: Apple’s new “free” iBooks Author program, which allows authors to create their own professional layouts while they write books, includes an astonishingly greedy and overbearing clause in its end-user license agreement (“EULA”):
Piracy and theft by the fedgov, that is, of public information, putting it behind walls:
From The Guardian:
Academic publishers have become the enemies of science
The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls
The free dissemination of lifesaving medical research around the world would be prevented under the Research Works Act. Photograph: LJSphotography/AlamyThis is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.
The USA’s main funding agency for health-related research is the National Institutes of Health, with a $30bn annual budget. The NIH has a public access policy that says taxpayer-funded research must be freely accessible online. This means that members of the public, having paid once to have the research done, don’t have to pay for it again when they read it – a wholly reasonable policy, and one with enormous humanitarian implications because it means the results of medical research are made freely available around the world.
But, due to lobbying by academic publishers, “If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH’s public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls.”
What we have here is a lobbying effort to take work out of the public domain and put it behind a copyright-like wall. In this, it is similar to the recent Supreme Court decision authorizing Congress to re-copyright works long in the public domain.
A new book examining IP is out, and available for free in PDF: Who Owns Broccoli? Intellectual Property Rights in a Liberal Context, Steffen Hentrich and Csilla Hatvany, eds. (Berlin: liberal Verlag, 2011). It’s based on the proceedings of a Colloquium at the Liberal Institute, Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation for Freedom, 13th October 2011, Potsdam, Germany, and contains:
I noted previously that Reason author Cathy Young had written in favor of a fifty-year copyright term. Now, in a recent Reason article,”The Trouble with the Copyright Debate” (subtitle: Does every illegal download represent a lost sale?), she joins the anti-SOPA bandwagon, but is still pro-copyright:
A few days ago, I committed an illegal act.
Instead of watching the latest episode of the British fantasy show Merlin on the SyFy channel and suffer through a hundred commercials and pop-up ads that sometimes deface the screen during the show itself, I got online and watched an illicitly streamed video. What’s more, I intend to continue my crime spree and download the three-episode second season of Sherlock, which aired on the BBC earlier this month, rather than wait until May when it finally gets to PBS.
The point of this true confession is that the current debate about copyright enforcement and piracy on the Web largely misses the boat. Yes, creators and copyright holders have important rights and legitimate interests. And yes, some Internet users display an obnoxious sense of entitlement to “free” intellectual content.
So: Young is anti-SOPA. But she is still pro-copyright: “creators and copyright holders have important rights and legitimate interests”. And yet she admits she herself engages in piracy (while bizarrely taking a superior tone in condemning others who pirate). Say what? If she thinks copyright should last 50 years, and that it is legitimate, then … when she pirates she is violating people’s rights, and should be penalized–perhaps even by imprisonment. Right?1
Young is confused and hypocritical. She favors copyright, and bashes other people who pirate, all the while engaging in piracy herself and then condemning efforts to enforce copyright. She’s trying to have her copyright and eat it, too.
As I argued earlier this week SOPA is the Symptom, Copyright is the Disease. The only solution is to abolish copyright. Wake up and smell the libertarian principles, Young.
[TLS]
From Alex Jones’ Prison Planet:
Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA
White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 26, 2012Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.
The hacktivist group Anonymous attacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today.
See also Mike Masnick, State Of The Union Address Highlights The Dirty Trick Of Hiding More Draconian IP Rules In ‘Trade Agreements’.
More posts on ACTA.
This is almost too ridiculous to read, but … see below. Just confirmation of my view that there are no good arguments for IP.
Author, Sheldon Richman, by his own admission is a Thief
So likewise is any other author who takes money from a publisher while in the same breath arguing against intellectual property.
They’re like the flimflam man selling worthless snakeoil, or the usurer. They exchange nothing for something.
If intellectual property does not exist, then to take money by selling intellectual property is to take money selling that which does not exist. Which is to sell nothing in exchange for some thing which actually does have value.
The publisher is the one who owns the paper, pays for distribution and all other hard costs. The author produces the ordering of the words on the paper, an ordering which is by nature an ‘idea’. And Sheldon Richman writes ideas don’t properly exist as property. And thus Sheldon Richman is taking money from his publisher while giving the publisher nothing he owns in exchange.
Of course, Sheldon Richman is not actually a thief, because intellectual property does exist, but like the man who mistakes a virtuous act for a sinful act and does that act regardless. He is culpable of the act of being a thief.The error Sheldon Richman makes is that he sees the world in black and white. It’s either this or that. But like most of life, truth is found in the mean between the extremes.
Like the issue of torture, justice is not black and white but relative to prudence.
What is known in principle is that a man is due compensation for his labor. And thus in turn an author or a pharmaceutical company is due compensation for the labor they invest in production of their product. No different than I owe a doctor for a consultation where I pay him for his knowledge.
After the doctor has told me what my ailment is, I can’t simply turn around tell him I’m not paying him because I too now possess the same information has he did. As an architect, I don’t sell paper and ink, I sell the information contained on that paper. No one in his right mind pays for random spots of ink on paper; which in turn is why some authors sell well, and others do not sell well, because what people are buying are the ideas conveyed by the paper and ink.
This is also why those who pay big money for modern art do exhibit signs of insanity, because they, for all practical purposes, are paying for nothing more than random ink splotches.
Property is not an absolute ownership, but an ownership relative to the good of society as a whole. Men are not islands, we are by nature social living is society, and it’s society which determines the nature of ownership of property, that is, ownership is subject to prudential judgement of what is just compensation in exchange for invested labor and other incurred expenses.
more to come. This post is currently being written, read at your own risk.
Posted by love the girls at 4:58 AM
4 comments:
Your premise is wrong. I did not get paid for providing intellectual property. I got paid (as you also note) for my labor services, that is, writing. I own my labor because I own my person, so I am free to trade it for money. Intellectual property has nothing to do with it. You seem to think that others should have to pay me (and my estate for 70 years after my demise) repeatedly for work already done. That makes no sense.
You should now say what Rick Perry has become famous for saying: “Oops.”
PS: You beg the question. Through my writing I indeed provide intellectual content, but since you assume this content should be treated like physical property, you assume precisely what is in dispute.
Thank you for your reply.
You are not paid for writing any more than I as architect am paid for drawing. I’m paid for specifically drawing this house to be built on this land.
My clients come to me with a problem, I solve it and and paid for the solution. The paper is the means of the solution. Not the end.
Likewise a writer is paid to solve a problem. The end of his product is not the writing but the information contained within that writing. If he were to write nonsense, he would be writing, but he would not be producing a product which has value which he could ask compensation for.
If I were hired to pick grapes and I picked them and dropped them on the ground as opposed to putting them in a basket, the owner would be within his right not to pay me because my labor did not produce the required end.
_______________________And no I did not write that you or your estate should be paid 70 years. What I wrote is that compensation is subject to prudence and that a man should be compensated for his labor, i.e. productive labor.
For instance, if a writer invests 2500 hours writing a book, then let him be at minimum compensated a living wage equal to those 2500 and after he has earned a reasonable return, the book could be available for distribution without further compensation to the author.
What you have done, which is commonly done is divide the argument into either this or that where the solution is in the mean.
Mr. Sheldon writes : “you assume precisely what is in dispute.”
More precisely, what I do is point out the error of those who argue that intellectual property does not exist, if they in turn accept compensation for the product of their labor.
More copyright absurdity (or do I repeat myself?):
Create a Similarly Composed Photo in the UK, Risk Copyright Infringement
- Michael Zhang · Jan 25, 2012
If you’re a photographer in the UK, you might want to think twice about shooting and selling a photograph that has a similar composition to an existing photo. Souvenir company Temple Island Collection has won a copyright infringement case against tea company New English Teasafter a photo of a red London bus was used on tea packaging. Photo copyright expert and lawyer Charles Swan states,
From a twitter post someone passed on to me (I don’t follow “Twitter”):
@pablodPablo Defendini
LOL self-pub is the new piracy! “@DigiBookWorld: Heard at#dbw12: Self publishing costs publishers $100 million in opportunity”
Imputed income is the accession to wealth that can be attributed, or imputed, to a person when he avoids paying for services by providing the services to himself, or when he avoids paying rent for durable goods by owning the durable goods, as in imputed rent.Most countries, such as the United States, tax imputed income only in certain situations, such as the calculation of domestic partner employee benefits. Imputed income is sometimes difficult to measure, and doing so can have political consequences: for taxpayers, not taxing imputed income creates a tax benefit in favor of owning over renting, and in favor of self-service over hiring; for the economy, not taxing imputed income directs economic activity away from activities associated with extreme and severe division of labor.
From a friend:
Run MegaUpload: 50 years. Rape and kill a woman: 20 years. Murder 24 civilians: demotion.
From DailyDirt: Teaching Technology:
MIT is developing a certification process for its open education projects. MITx students will not receive degrees from MIT, but a yet-to-be-named non-profit organization within MIT will award certificates of completion to students who demonstrate a mastery of MITx subjects made available online. [url]
And, from Marginal Revolution:
Udacity
by Alex Tabarrok on January 25, 2012 at 7:35 am in Education, Web/Tech | Permalink
In The Coming Education Revolution I discussed Sebatian Thurn and Peter Norvig’s online AI class from Stanford that ended up enrolling 160,000 students. Felix Salmon has the remarkable update:
…there were more students in [Thrun’s] course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.
And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.
So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.
But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
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