Cory Doctorow tweeted this BoingBoing post, saying: “This is, hands-down, the most batshit insane copyright proposal of the decade“. Now if he would only come out against copyright instead of merely copyright “reform”. Copyright is the disease. ACTA, SOPA, TPP are merely symptoms. Strike at the root, Cory!
Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson takes a good look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the secret copyright treaty whose latest negotiation round just took place in Hollywood (see last night’s post about the scandalous abuse of authority by the US Trade Rep in bullying the hotel to keep out civil society groups).
Now, this is a secret treaty, so we don’t know most of what’s going on in the room, but one jaw-dropping leak is that that the treaty contemplates requiring licenses for ephemeral copies made in a computer’s buffer. That means that every buffer in your machine would need a separate, negotiated license for every playback of copyrighted works, and buffer designs that the entertainment industry doesn’t like — core technical architectures — would become legally fraught because they’d require millions of license negotiations or they’d put users in danger of lawsuits.
This isn’t the first time that buffer licensing was proposed. Way back in 1995, the Lehman white paper, proposed by Clinton’s copyright czar to Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure committee, made the same demand. It was roundly rejected then, because the process was transparent and the people who would be adversely affected by it (that is, everyone) could see and object to it.
This is about legislating chip designs and software architecture, and the only people allowed in the room are entertainment execs. The future of silicon itself hangs in the balance. Will Intel and other giants demand a fair, transparent, equitable negotiation process?
Last year, versions of the TPP’s US-written IP chapter leaked; its provisions went well beyond even ACTA, which was already the new high-water mark for IP enforcement. Where do things stand now? Are the other TPP countries on board with the US approach? Who knows! It’s all secret.
While ACTA at least claimed not to exceed US law, Flynn and other professors allege that the leaked TPP IP chapter does go beyond what’s in US law, doing things like extending copyright protection even to temporary “buffer” copies so crucial to digital devices.
As for USTR, it claims to be conducting “an unprecedented fifty-state domestic outreach strategy for TPP,” and it’s even hosting a largely worthless TPP blog. People can send comments to USTR through a special Web form, and negotiators do take in presentations from civil society groups on some occasions.
I previously wrote about An Objectivist Recants on IP. This is just part of the overall phenomenon of growing libertarian rejection of intellectual property (The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism). I get notes quite often from people who have changed their minds on IP. And the latest is Gary Gibson, who in writing against SOPA and copyright, says:
This is still fairly new territory we’re exploring. A couple of years ago, we were far more in the Ayn Rand/Objectivist camp when it came to intellectual property (though not as far as the entertainingly pro-IP libertarian Andrew Joseph Galambos, who reportedly changed his name from Joseph Andrew Galambos so as not to infringe on his father’s claim to the specific name and who dropped a nickel in a box every time he used the word “liberty” to pay the estate of the reputed coiner of the word, Thomas Paine). It’s only recently that our friend Jeffrey Tucker got us thinking — and rethinking — the issue.
Selfish John is an anti-state and anti-IP Objectivist: “I’m an Objectivist and Anarcho-Capitalist: I integrate reality through reason for sovereign celebration. If I haven’t responded, they blocked me. No matter how annoying they are, I don’t block anyone who adheres to NAP: I accept they do exist.” On IP, see these posts:
“Religion vs. Human Nature,” subsection “The Monopolization of Thought: The War on Creation and Communication”
The Monopolization of Thought: The War on Creation and Communication
It is essential to recognize that copyright and patent law—collectively known as “intellectual property” or, more accurately, intellectual monopoly—are not separate battles but the same war waged on a different front. They represent the secular, legalistic extension of the consciousness-primary assault on human independence, applying the same corrosive logic to the realm of production and creativity.
If the war on sexuality, ambition, and doubt targets the individual’s internal faculties, the war waged by copyright targets their externalized output. It is an attempt to control the consequences of a free mind operating in the world. Human cognition is inherently generative and integrative; we learn, we build upon existing knowledge, we transform and combine ideas to create new value. This process is the engine of material and cultural progress. To claim a monopoly over an idea or a pattern is to claim a right to dictate how other minds may use their own property and their own cognitive processes. It is a declaration that the creator’s consciousness has primacy over the existential reality of others.
The Conceptual Corruption:
The system corrupts the concept of property itself. In a reality-based framework, property rights are conflict-avoidance protocols for scarce resources. My use of my hammer excludes your simultaneous use of it. This protocol is necessary for peaceful coexistence and social cooperation.
Copyright attempts to apply this framework to non-scarce goods: ideas, patterns, melodies, narratives. The use of an idea by one person does not exclude its use by another. You reading a book I wrote does not prevent me from reading it. You building a mousetrap based on my design does not stop me from building another. There is no conflict to avoid. Therefore, the very concept of “property” in an idea is a stolen concept—it attempts to use the ethical and legal weight of a principle designed for one context (scarce goods) in a context where its foundational justification is absent.
This creates a floating abstraction: “intellectual property.” It has no perceptual referent in reality. You cannot point to “a copyright.” You can only point to a state-enforced legal claim that threatens people who arrange their own property (paper, ink, computers, raw materials) in a pattern similar to one a monopolist has registered. This is punishment for learning and reasoning.
The Mechanism of Enforcement:
This conceptual corruption is enforced with the full violence of the state, mirroring theocratic punishment for heresy.
Theocratic Parallel: A theocracy arrests you for blasphemy—for using your mind and voice to express ideas that contradict divine dogma.
Copyright Enforcement: A corporation, through the state, can seize your property, bankrupt you with lawsuits, or have you imprisoned for infringement—for using your mind and property to express or replicate patterns that contradict their state-granted monopoly.
In both cases, the “crime” is a thought-crime. The theocrat punishes you for wrong belief. The copyright holder punishes you for wrong arrangement—using your property in a way they have decreed, through the state, is their exclusive domain. The mechanism is identical: the use of initiated force to make reality conform to a consciousness-derived decree.
The result is a deliberate stifling of human creativity and communication. It creates a culture of permission, where every act of creation must be pre-approved by existing rights-holders, a logical and practical impossibility that leads to a perpetual state of guilt and legal peril for creators. The filmmaker, the writer, the musician, and the inventor must operate in constant fear that their independent, value-creating mind might unconsciously replicate a pattern already claimed by a monopolist.
This system does not protect the “little guy”; it protects the established and the litigious. It creates a modern priesthood of lawyers and corporate executives who derive their power not from productive genius but from the ability to navigate and weaponize a byzantine system of state-granted privileges. It encourages rent-seeking and legal warfare over innovation and production, precisely as the Watt patent stifled the development of steam engine technology for a generation.
Furthermore, it severs the causal connection between value creation and reward. In a free market, an artist profits by producing a value that others voluntarily choose to purchase. Under copyright, a corporation can profit primarily by preventing others from producing values people clearly want (e.g., fan edits, adaptations, competing implementations). The business model shifts from creation to control, from production to prohibition.
Copyright is the ultimate expression of the war against human nature because it attacks the bridge between the mind and the world. It says: You may think, but you may not act on your thoughts if they resemble ours. You may learn, but you may not build upon what you have learned without our permission. You may be inspired, but you’re not going anywhere from the patent holder. It is a tax on inspiration, a fine for integration, and a prison for the creative process.
It is a perfect example of a consciousness-primary system: it places the alleged “rights” of a consciousness (the original creator) above the existential reality of all other individuals, forbidding them from acting with their own property according to their own judgment. It creates a manufactured guilt around the very act of learning and building, ensuring that creators are made to feel like criminals for the crime of being human. The abolition of intellectual monopoly is therefore not merely a legal or economic imperative; it is a moral one, essential for freeing the human mind from its final shackles and securing the individual’s sovereignty over their thoughts, their actions, and their property.
This document and all my works are governed by a principle more fundamental than any man-made law: the Primacy of Existence.
Property rights are objective, conflict-avoidance protocols derived from the nature of scarce resources. A right to a thing means the right to use it without physical interference. Ideas are not scarce. My use of an idea—a pattern of information—in no way excludes you from perceiving it, analyzing it, or using it to guide your own actions. There can be no conflict over a non-scarce resource.
Therefore, the concept of “Intellectual Property” is a metaphysical error. It is an attempt to claim a right not to a specific physical object, but to a concept itself—and by extension, to control the actions of others who would use their own property (their minds, their computers, their paper and ink) to replicate that pattern. This is not the protection of property; it is the initiation of force and the foundation of a state-granted monopoly.
In accordance with reason and the objective nature of reality, I make the following declarations:
Renunciation of Monopoly Claims: I explicitly renounce all legal claims, past, present, and future, to the patterns of information contained within my work that are falsely known as “copyright,” “trademark,” “moral rights,” or any other form of intellectual monopoly. These claims are invalid and I will not initiate force to enforce them.
Grant of Absolute Permission: I grant to any person an absolute, perpetual, and unconditional right to use this work for any purpose whatsoever. This includes the rights to copy, distribute, modify, create derivative works, and use it commercially. This is not a license from me; it is a recognition of a pre-existing right you possess. I am merely formally waiving my own false claim to stop you.
Attribution as Choice, Not Duty: The requirement of attribution is a subtle demand for a non-material royalty—a tax on credit. It sustains the romantic notion of the “creator-owner” that underpins the intellectual monopoly ethic.
Therefore, attribution is expressly waived. You may use this work anonymously, pseudonymously, or attribute it to me. The choice is yours, based on your context and values—whether for honesty, humor, or strategy. The truth of the idea exists independent of its source.
The Freedom Clause (Anti-Monopoly Defense): To prevent anyone from using the state’s monopoly machinery to privatize and restrict this work—to turn a free pattern into their own captive property—any derivative work you create must be released under these same terms.
This is not a restriction on your freedom, but a defense of it. It is a logical extension of the Non-Aggression Principle applied to information. It ensures that the chain of freedom remains unbroken, creating a ever-expanding territory of thought that is permanently liberated from the aggression of intellectual monopoly. It makes the freedom viral, and the aggression impotent.
This is more than a license. It is an anti-monopoly declaration. It is a commitment to the principle that ideas are for using, testing, improving, and building upon—not for fencing in. You have my word, my reason, and my unwavering commitment to this principle. You do not need, nor should you seek, the state’s permission slip to use it.
Nice column in the North Carolina State University paper, the Technician, from a student who understands that copying is not theft, and that to oppose SOPA you must oppose copyright:
I was happy to see Technician release an editorial two weeks ago in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While I agree with the editorial board’s view on SOPA, though, I cannot help but worry about its view on piracy.
For example, the editorial summarized Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian’s depiction of SOPA, writing, “…its treatment of piracy is liken to a robbery being committed in a neighborhood, and then the neighborhood being demolished to prevent future robberies.”
I do not agree with this context for the clear reason piracy should not be a crime. And I would change Ohanian’s story to a version reading, “A man takes a photograph of a house and magically creates a new house out of thin air based on the original image. Then homebuilders lobby Congress to throw him in jail for teaching others how to do it.”
Indeed, if you were able to download a free Lamborghini without stealing anyone else’s Lamborghini, would you do it?
The reason it is vitally important to discuss the illegitimacy of intellectual property as opposed to the legal failures, i.e., guilty-by-accidental-association provisions, of SOPA is because the former feeds the latter. SOPA is a natural extension of stances in favor of intellectual property, which, contrary to real property, is simply a monopoly granted to corporations by governments that will later fine or imprison individuals who do the same.
After all, the original intention of copyright legislation was purposeful censorship, not some kind of incentive allowing musicians and other artists to make money. We shouldn’t be surprised copyright has finally returned to its maker. A more modern example of intellectual property-fueled censorship is the Church of Scientology’s usage of Digital Millennium Copyright Act-required takedown notices against its critics.
Many insist people would have no incentive to produce new entertainment, or particularly important in our technologically-advanced age, new software. Yet a quick look at Linux and Apache demonstrates even open source companies—those without a reliance on intellectual property—can thrive in the free market. You’ll be surprised how often you can find Linux’s source coding used around your house, e.g., in your TiVo.
As for entertainment, we can look back to the 1909 revision of the U.S. Copyright Act, which extended the copyright renewal period to 28 years. One would think that a major extension like this would surely give artists incentive to create newer pieces of work, but, from that time until 1999, the world saw no increase in artistic productions.
And thus Napster began. In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America—yes, the same organization patting SOPA on the back—sued Napster. Not only did this lawsuit fail in stopping downloads, but the trial’s publicity turned Napster’s less than 500,000 user base into a huge peer-to-peer file-sharing community of 38 million people by mid-2000.
No matter what any government does, decentralized individuals will always find new ways to download these commodities for free. It is time that musicians, artists and other Los Angeles suit-and-ties realize we’re entering a new economy filled with non-scarce resources for which we would have only been able to dream a few decades ago.
Musicians should feel lucky to have their content displayed so frequently on websites like YouTube. Few people these days will even consider buying a song without hearing it at least once, and even fewer will attend a concert without such an experience. If nothing else, it is amazing advertising for established and upcoming musicians.
Interesting talk by Ed Lopez, given last fall as one of the SJSU Econ Department’s Provocative Lectures on the topic of intellectual property and the fashion industry. According to Jeff Hummel: “It was a truly outstanding presentation, and is now available for viewing online in a very professionally edited video. I cannot recommend it too highly”.
Note: The talk is very informative, but near the end Lopez does seem to endorse some form of copyright in fashion, which I completely oppose. This is the problem with the empirical approach.
I received the email below from the Federalist Societyabout a Teleforum its Intellectual Property Practice Group is putting on tomorrow on “Stopping Online Piracy: Where Should We Draw the Line?”. It’s free and no registration is necessary. To attend just dial 888-752-3232 at 1:00 p.m. (EST), Thursday, February 2, 2012.
The speakers are Larry Downes, “Consultant and Author, Technology, Strategy and the Law,” and Steve Tepp, “Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Global Intellectual Property Center, U.S. Chamber of Commerce”. Now which one do you think will be the IP shill, eh? Not hard to guess, is it. Hint: Tepp. The US Chamber of Commerce is horrible on this. Here’s what their site is promoting:
U.S. Chamber Calls for Immediate Action on Rogue Sites Legislation
We all agree—theft of American jobs and innovation is not a business model we can continue to allow. Congress cannot ignore this massive loophole in enforcement of intellectual property online. Foreign e-criminals are bleeding our most creative industries in this critical time of economic recovery. A vote for rogue sites legislation is a vote for American jobs and American consumers.
If even Tepp comes out against SOPA and in favor of more “reasonable” anti-piracy laws, I’d be surprised. And I’d be even more surprised if Downes comes out against copyright or for a radical scaling back of copyright. He’ll probably say we need more “balance” and while piracy is a “real problem” and while intellectual property is “important” laws “like SOPA” “go too far.” Wow, what a debate.
No one is calling for the real reform we need. Let’s hope Downes surprises me and attacks the disease (copyright), not merely the SOPA-censorship-police state symptom. But I’m not betting on it.
Don’t believe me? Tune in and see for yourself. Here’s the FedSoc email:
Stopping Online Piracy: Where Should We Draw the Line?
A Teleforum Sponsored by the
Intellectual Property Practice Group
Featuring
Mr. Larry Downes, Consultant and Author, Technology, Strategy and the Law*
Mr. Steve Tepp, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Global Intellectual Property Center, U.S. Chamber of Commerce**
To participate in this practice group Teleforum, please dial 888-752-3232
on Thursday at 1:00 p.m. (EST) via telephone.
SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill before the U.S. Congress that is designed to expand the authority of U.S. law enforcement to police and stop online trafficking in copyrighted material. But what are the exact contours of the government’s authority under the proposed legislation? Under what circumstances can the government shut down, or order the shut down, of a website? Why has the bill produced so much controversy? Who are the winners and losers if the bill is enacted? These and other questions will be discussed on our Teleforum.
*Larry Downes is a consultant and speaker on developing business strategies in an age of constant disruption caused by information technology. Downes is author of the Business Week and New York Times business bestseller, “Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance” (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), which has sold nearly 200,000 copies and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology. His new book, “The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Business and Life in the Digital Age” (Basic Books 2009) offers nine strategies for success in the emerging world of information law. It combines Downes’s unique perspective on economics, law, and innovation in the digital age. Downes is also a Partner with the Bell-Mason Group, which works with Global 1000 corporations, providing corporate venturing methodologies, tools, techniques and support that accelerate corporate innovation and venturing programs. He has written for a variety of publications, including USA Today, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, CNet, Strategy & Leadership, CIO, The American Scholarr and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a columnist for both The Industry Standard and CIO Insight. He writes regularly for both Forbes and CNET, covering the intersection of technology, politics and business. Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he taught courses on corporate strategy and technology law. From 2006-2010, he was a nonresident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He is currently a Senior Fellow with TechFreedom, a non-profit, non-partisan technology policy think tank.
**Steve Tepp is the chief intellectual property counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Tepp, who joined the Chamber in July 2010, provides expert legal counsel across the GIPC at the strategic and operational levels. He is also responsible for leading the GIPC’s efforts, long term and short term, foreign and domestic, to reduce trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy, especially in the digital and online environments. Previously, Tepp served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office, where he negotiated numerous free trade agreements and played a major role in drafting and negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Tepp had principal responsibility for all copyright matters in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions and litigated the U.S.-China IPR dispute before the World Trade Organization. He also worked on domestic legislative matters and litigated many federal court cases. Tepp co-authored the Copyright Office’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 104 Report to Congress (2001), as well as its 2003 and 2006 Section 1201 Rulemakings. Earlier in his career, Tepp was an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on the staff of the chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), specializing in intellectual property. Collectively, Tepp has been in or around every copyright-related matters before the U.S. Congress since the mid-1990s. Tepp taught copyright law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the George Mason University Law School. He is a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law and received his undergraduate degree from Colgate University. He resides in Virginia with his wife and children.
Remember CreativeAmerica? This is the slickly produced operation that claims to be a “grassroots” organization in favor of SOPA and PIPA… but which is actually funded by the major studios, staffed by former MPAA employees, and has had all the major studios directly pushing employees and partners to sign up for the program — even to the point of threatening to take away business if they don’t sign.
This is also the group that was caught copying an anti-SOPA activism letter, and using the exact same words as if it was written by themselves (I guess they’re fine with plagiarism). It’s also been caught using funny math to pump up its tiny number of supporters.
In December, we joked that CreativeAmerica had resorted to buying support, after it released a big (and expensive) advertising campaign all over TV and on some big screens in Times Square. Not exactly a “grass roots” operation.
Either way, it appears the group has gone more direct now: to the point that it’s literally paying people for signatures. I’ve received very credible evidence, that a consulting firm hired by CreativeAmerica is now offering to pay people to get signatures on CreativeAmerica’s petition. The following email was forwarded to me, with some details redacted to protect privacy:
the organization I am doing work for is Creative America, which is a grassroots organization that is working to stop foreign rogue websites from illegally distributing American content such as books, music, films, etc…. These specific websites costs the U.S. and the 2.2 million middle class industry workers $5.5 billion in wages and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Your job would be just collecting signatures from whoever is interested in signing up for updates. A newsletter may come once a month and anyone can unsubscribe if they don’t want it. We don’t care if they do; all I care about is getting initial signups.
The hours are flexible and we will pay you $1/signature, so if you collect 100 signatures a week, we would pay you $100/week. We will also pay for you to go to local film festivals in the area (SXSW, Austin Film Festival, etc.). We are also taking as many people as possible, so if you have some friends who are interested in doing it we can take them as well. Let me know your thoughts….
This raises even more questions about the already anemic number of people supporting CreativeAmerica and its pro-SOPA, pro-PIPA, MPAA-driven agenda. As the email makes clear, they’re willing to pay as many people as possible to get signatures to make the group look larger than it is. That’s pretty crazy. I think we can be pretty sure that the millions of people who spoke out against SOPA/PIPA did so without someone paying them $1 per call or email.
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.
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.
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).
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/Alamy
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:
“Who Owns Broccoli? Intellectual Property Rights in a Liberal Context,” by Steffen Hentrich and Csilla Hatvany
“The History of Intellectual Property,” by Terence Kealey
“Should We Be Concerned About the Weakening of Copyright?,” Stan J. Liebowitz
“Product Piracy and Counterfeiting—Empirical Evidence from Germany,” Knut Blind
“Economic Activity in Spite of Intellectual Property,” Bernd Klein
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.
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.
We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.
© 2012 N.C. State Student Media
Mr. Larry Downes, Consultant and Author, Technology, Strategy and the Law*
Mr. Steve Tepp, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Global Intellectual Property Center, U.S. Chamber of Commerce**
Follow Us!