Unemployment might be high overall, but some areas are booming. I received this mail flyer from William K. McLaughlin Associates, a well-known patent headhunter. Make of this what you will.

Costa Rican libertarian Juan Sebastian Ortiz, who produces short libertarian-related videos (see his YouTube channel), has come out with one on IP: First Principles 8 – Intellectual Property and Copyright

Later today I’ll be a guest on Adam Kokesh’s show Adam vs. The Man (at 3pm CDT, but not sure if it’s streaming live). We’ll be discussing this article, U.S. Copyright Czar Cozied Up to Content Industry, E-Mails Show, and related issues such as neo-mercantilist aspects of modern patent and copyright law (Rothbard on Mercantilism and State “Patents of Monopoly”).

This is the new, 3.0 version of Adam’s show. The previous version was carried by RT (Russia Today). I appeared a couple times on the 2.0 show–On Adam vs. The Man re Drug Patents and Adam the Man vs. IP. Adam’s new format permits longer interviews for more in-depth discussion.

Mark Friedman, a purported “natural rights” libertarian with an apparently religious grounding (he quotes the Talmud), has graced us with an incoherent defense of IP in the form of an attack on IP abolitionist libertarian Tom Palmer’s writings, in his post “Natural Rights Libertarianism and IP: A Reply to Tom Palmer“. It is no argument at all. Typical incoherent combination of amateur religious-influenced newbie theorizing and unprincipled and implicit and hidden utilitarianism.

Just to note a few obvious confusions and flaws:

• “I ultimately found the author’s reasons for rejecting a rights-based justification for IP to be less than compelling.” Note how this subtly puts the burden of proof on the IP abolitionist, instead of on the defender of statist positive law. The burden should be on him, not us. A so-called advocate of natural law is here giving presumptive legitimacy to existing state positive law. Lon Fuller weeps.
• “I will pause here just long enough to clarify that while I do not subscribe to the self-ownership thesis, which seems to be Palmer’s primary target, I believe that his argument, if successful, would also be telling against Nozick-style libertarianism, i.e. one grounded in respect for persons as rational (moral) agents.” So this religious “natural rights libertarian” does not respect self-ownership. There are a few possible explanations why a self-styled libertarian would make such claims.  First, pure inconsistency and amateurishness. Second, the believe that God “owns” us so we are not self-owners. I.e., we are God’s property, his slaves. Soi-disant religionists are free to propound such nonsense, but if they do, it is no wonder that they rebel against principled libertarianism. Yet I would point out that even if “God” “owns” us, that does not mean that in the real world of inter-personal and political relations, the normal Lockean-libertarian property rights and self-ownership rights don’t apply. That is, even if you think God has some ultimate claim and authority over us, his flock, his slaves, any one of us God-slaves has no right to commit aggression against the other. Third, if you reject self-ownership this means not merely God-ownership (whatever such ravings really mean) but other-ownership, i.e. chattel slavery. And I can think of nothing more libertarian than a rejection of chattel slavery–that is, of upholding self-ownership. Any so-called libertarian who expresses problems with self-ownership: in my view, they are either stupid, or confused/amateur-newbs, or statists in libertarian clothing. In this respect I am reminded of Francisco D’Anconia’s “Money Speech” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” Likewise, anyone who opposes self-ownership is either a fool or an advocate of slavery. In neither case is he a libertarian. (See Against the Non-Aggression Principle and Self-Ownership? Run!)
• His criticisms of Palmer’s IP views rests on arguments like “I believe it should be apparent that patent rights actually represent a fairly trivial restriction on self-ownership” and “It is true that copyrights enjoy a much longer period of exclusivity (life of the author, plus 70 years), but this does not seem to constitute an undue burden on the freedom of others to write, compose, paint, etc.” Ah, I see: patents violate rights, but it’s fairly trivial (even though patent trolls cost the economy $80B a year), so hey, everyone, stop yer belly-achin’! And copyrights may be a tad “too long,” but hey, it’s not an  “undue burden”. It’s a due burden! Patents are a justified restriction since it’s only trivial! Don’t worry, be happy!

[Update: See also Confused Reason writer Cathy Young Anti-SOPA but still pro-copyright]

My LRC post from 2009:

Reason: Copyright Should Last Half A Century

Posted by Stephan Kinsella on June 25, 2009 07:05 PM

You would think libertarians would be unambiguously for freedom of speech. In Intellectual Property vs. Creative Freedom, Cathy Young discusses a literal book banning by a federal judge: he has temporarily enjoined “publication of a novel called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” based on copyright claims by “J. D. Salinger, author of the 1951 classic Catcher in the Rye.” The judge is expected to decide soon whether to make the ban permanent. Yes, this is all because of copyright.

Copyright now lasts well over 100 years, due to continual copyright extension over the years–as Young notes, “When copyright legislation was first passed in the United States in 1790, the term of copyright lasted for 14 years, with the option of renewal for another 14.”

Does Ms. Young want to abolish copyright, this obvious threat to freedom of press? Or at least return to the 14 + 14 year system? Why, no. She has figured out the optimal way to handle this: “Personally, I would support a term of 50 years, with a portion of revenues from any derivative work published thereafter going to the original author.” Fifty years. Where she gets this number is anybody’s guess.

This is libertarianism?

Update: Confused Reason writer Cathy Young Anti-SOPA but still pro-copyright

From QuestionCopyright.org. This is indeed very good use of a CC license that does not prohibit commercial use or derivative works (the NC and ND clauses) is fairly rare; rarer still is one that does not even require imposition of a similar license (copyleft, or the SA clause). The most open CC clause that is easy to use and (hopefully) enforceable is the CC-BY license, that requires only attribution but that permits derivative works and commercial uses, without imposing a restrictive share-alike provision (see my post Copyright is very sticky!). This is why I, C4SIF, and the Mises Institute use CC-BY where possible instead of the more restrictive CC-BY-SA. Glad people are moving in an increasingly open direction.

A good sign: Blackboard.com bucks the trend and promotes a truly free license.

by Karl Fogel on 19 Oct 2011

A very interesting announcement from Blackboard.com:

… Blackboard will now support publishing, sharing and consumption of open educational resources (OER) across its platforms. […] Support for OER enables instructors to publish and share their courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) so that anyone can easily preview and download the course content in Blackboard and Common Cartridge formats…

What makes this big news is that these kinds of initiatives usually use one of the non-free Creative Commons licenses: one containing either no-derivatives (“ND”) or non-commercial (“NC”) clauses or both.  Instead, Blackboard.com bucked the trend and opted for full freedom: by offering CC-BY, they’re encouraging users to choose a truly Free Culture license.  Let’s hope others follow their fine example!

Kudos to Blackboard.com.  And congratulations to the educators and students who will now be able to share, translate, re-use, and transform educational materials for any purpose, without having to ask permission first.

 .. read the rest of this article »

I’m here at the amazing Computer History Museum in Mountain View, to speak on a panel at the Open Science Summit. My panel is on intellectual property and science, and starts at 10:00 a.m. PST. The panels are streaming live here.

As I noted in previous posts (Open Science versus Intellectual Property and Kinsella on Panel at Open Science Summit), this is a fascinating and promising movement/group that is devoting a great deal of attention to how IP affects science (for more on the OSS, see The Open Science Shift, Xconomy; Open science: a future shaped by shared experience, The Guardian; footage from last year’s summit is available on the OSS Youtube channel).

In fact a good deal of the Opening Session of the 2010 Open Science Summit was devoted to IP horror stories and ways in which it interferes with science and the spread of knowledge (go to about 8:20 for the beginning of this discussion).

For a related talk, “Science is a Private Good – Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful” (video; audio; and below) delivered at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey,¹ by Terence Kealey, a biochemist at the University of Buckingham and author of Sex, Science and Profits and The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.

1. See my Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report. [↩]

Great post by Mike Masnick on Techdirt:

Wyden: PROTECT IP Act Is About Letting The Content Sector Attack The Innovation Sector

from the don’t-let-that-happen dept

For years we’ve seen Silicon Valley basically ignore what’s happening in Washington DC, and this has allowed certain other industries to take advantage of that policy. Hopefully, more people are beginning to realize that this is a problem and that speaking out and doing something may have an impact. Thankfully, some in Congress are helping to spread that word as well. Senator Wyden, who we’ve obviously mentioned a bunch due to his willingness to actually fight against attacks on free speech and innovation, showed up in San Francisco earlier this week to speak at the Web 2.0 conference, where he laid out the issues behind PROTECT IP clearly. You can see the full interview below:

Around the five minute mark, he lays out the realissue behind the PROTECT IP Act, rather than the BS claims of those supporting it:

Let me go right to the question of the PROTECT IP Act… What this is, at its heart, is a question of whether one part of our economy — the content sector — can use government as a club to go after another part of our economy — which is the innovation sector and everything that the internet represents.

My only issue with this characterization is that it’s a little broad. For example, Techdirt is, very much, a part of “the content sector.” But we’re quite worried about PROTECT IP. I recognize that the Senator was using shorthand, but it’s helpful to distinguish the legacycontent sector from the next generation content players who don’t want to rely on the government to prop up our business models. Either way, the overall point is absolutely true, and it’s too bad that almost no one else in Congress is willing to address the reality of the situation. It has everything to do with a small group of companies — who are unwilling to adapt — trying to lash out at the industries they need most.

The PROTECT IP, when you really strip it down, is about whether or not you’re going to have arbitrary seizure of domains. Whether or not you’re going to have these vague standards for going in and seizing a domain. And then, and something I think is particularly ominous, ceding a significant portion of the authority over the internet to private companies, in effect, allowing them to bring private rights of action…. This legislation, in its current form, would take a significant toll on both freedom and innovation. And particularly now, when the digital space is one of the most exciting parts of an economy, where we’ve had some tough times.

The rest of the interview is equally interesting as well, touching on his efforts to make sure the 4th Amendment applies to the GPS info associated with your mobile phone, his efforts to press the Obama administration to reveal its secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, and a variety of other subjects that we talk about here all the time — including the idea that people here need to pay attention to what our government is doing and speak out when lobbyists and politicians are trying to hold back civil liberties or innovation.

I know it feels like we mention Senator Wyden pretty frequently, but there are two reasons for that: (1) So much of the things he gets involved in are the issues that we normally discuss here and (2) he’s one of the only people in Congress who seems to really be interested in these things. It’s good to see him come to Silicon Valley and spread that message directly to folks here.

From Words in Posts:

tags: Copyrights, Patents

by Chuck Baggett

The Adam Smith Institute continues to impress–from previous articles criticizing IP (see Intellectual property: an unnecessary evil) to excellent pro-liberty books released in free PDF form pursuant to their admirable, progressive open access policy (see my post The Condensed Wealth of Nations).

And yesterday they published an excellent piece by their Research Director, Sam Bowman, which is clear, concise, principled, and hard-hitting attack not only on patent “abuse” but on the entire institution of patents (h/t Wendy McElroy):

Do not feed the patent troll
Written by Sam Bowman
Tuesday, 18 October 2011 05:42

Apple iPad vs. Samsung Galaxy

Samsung’s move to have iPhone 4S sales banned in Australia and J

Samsung’s move to have iPhone 4S sales banned in Australia and Japan is just the latest battle in the patent war between Apple and Samsung. It follows the EU’s banning of the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (on hold for now). The war highlights the sorry state of the world’s patent laws.

The typical argument for patents is that they encourage innovation. By protecting a person’s potential invention from being copied, they increase the reward for coming up with an invention. But the other side of this coin is that they discourage innovation too, by increasing the cost of improving on or incorporating other innovations into your own work. If you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, you’ll have to cough up.

The Apple/Samsung patent war is an example of patents at their worst. There’s a big deadweight loss associated with lawsuits and restrictions on commerce. And most of the challenges are completely spurious – should Apple really “own” the pattern of a four-column grid of apps on a tablet home screen, or the concept of a rectangular tablet computer? Apple and Samsung have created enormous value to a huge number of people, but in this case they’re acting against consumer choice. Like blaming gravity for plane crashes or greed for financial crises, it’s silly to blame the firms themselves. Fundamentally, it’s the patent system that’s at fault.

Patents are anathema to private property rights. A pattern or idea is non-rivalrous and non-excludable – unlike property, there is no opportunity cost to someone’s use of an idea or pattern. An individual idea is not scarce unless we make it so through patent laws. …

Read more>>

As reported on Findlaw: “Europe’s top court says patents cannot be filed on stem-cell research using cells from human embryos, a move many scientists say will harm future advances in medicine. In a decision issued on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg wrote that a process that involves taking a stem cell from a human embryo, resulting in its destruction, cannot be patented.”

Will the state’s courts save us from the state’s laws. Will they. No.

From Findlaw:

A copyright and trademark battle is brewing, and it involves the Steve Jobs tribute logo.

Three individuals claim to have independently created the popular image, which replaces the bite mark on the Apple logo with a profile of Steve Jobs.

One claims to have created his logo in May. Another says he created his in August. And a third says he designed the logo on the day of Jobs’ death.

The last one, Farzin Adeli, has since filed for copyright and trademark protection.

Adeli is going to have a difficult time obtaining exclusive rights to his image, but not because two others created it before him.

Read more>>

Are any comments needed?

Last week I was a Guest panelist on This Week in Law, Episode 133, entitled “Beyonce, Bad Laws, and Breastaurants.” The two hosts and fellow guest panelist were all lawyers. We had a wide-ranging two-hour discussion about a variety of legal and policy matters, including a number of IP problems covering patent, copyright, trademark, and even trade secret. We also discussed the Occupy Wall Street movement, Apple’s use of IP to squelch clones and competition, copyright threats against Beyonce for her dance moves, and many others as indicated by the links on the episode’s show notes.

The video is below; it’s also on the TWiL page for this episode; you can also subscribe to the audio or video podcast for this show; here’s their FaceBook page.

A few more backup links and points below about some of the issues discussed.

• At one point we got into a discussion of Obama’s use of a signing statement to approve ACTA as an “executive agreement” (see ACTA, Executive Agreements, and the Bricker Amendment), I noted that under international law, violation by a host state of the citizen of another state gave rise to a right for the violated citizen’s home state to use military force against the host state. I remarked that one danger of internationalizing intellectual property by means of executive agreements and treaties is that it could give western nations an excuse to military force against countries that allow piracy. However, this was a bit of an overstatement since, as I explain in International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (see this excerpt), this type of “gunboat diplomacy” is ostensibly no longer permitted since the founding of the UN in 1945: “Today, some investors hailing from militarily and politically powerful States might favor the threat or use of force to obtain restitution or compensation for expropriated property. Such an option is no longer available, however, due to fundamental changes in international law and politics. In particular, the United Nations Charter has since 1945 prohibited the use of force to resolve disputes, except in the case of self-defence. Today, it is generally accepted that a State may not use force against another State in response to a taking of the property of one of its nationals.”
• The quote I mentioned about the problem with making law by legislation is by James Carter, who wrote, in 1884, in opposing the attempt to codify New York’s common law:
  

  At present, when any doubt arises in any particular case as to what the true rule of the unwritten [i.e., judge-found, common-law developed] law is, it is at once assumed that the rule most in accordance with justice and sound policy is the one which must be declared to be the law. The search is for that rule. The appeal is squarely made to the highest considerations of morality and justice. These are the rallying points of the struggle. The contention is ennobling and beneficial to the advocates, to the judges, to the parties, to the auditors, and so indirectly to the whole community. The decision then made records another step in the advance of human reason towards that perfection after which it forever aspires. But when the law is conceded to be written down in a statute, and the only question is what the statute means, a contention unspeakably inferior is substituted. The dispute is about words. The question of what is right or wrong, just or unjust, is irrelevant and out of place. The only question is what has been written. What a wretched exchange for the manly encounter upon the elevated plane of principle!

• I mentioned the tension between antitrust and patent/copyright law; more discussion of this issue can be found in endnote 1 here;
• We discussed the America Invents Act; I’ve since completed a detailed writeup about this: The American Invents Act and Patent Reform: The Good, the Meh, and the Ugly;
• Concerning our discussion of the copyright lawsuit against Beyonce based on her dance moves in a music video, see also my posts: Copyrights and Dancing, Copyrighting Dance Steps–The Death of Choreography, and others at The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files. On the show we briefly discussed also Pro wrestler sues rapper over hand gesture: Yet Another Example of how Intellectual Property is Partial Enslavement.

[Mises]

[podcast]