From ars technica:

G8 summit: laws apply on Internet just like “everywhere else”

By Nate Anderson | Published a day ago

The G8 group of countries—France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Japan, Canada, Russia, and the US—met this week in Deauville, France to talk about a huge list of issues, including the Internet. In a lengthy statement released at the end of Friday’s meeting, the countries agreed on a 22-paragraph communiqué in which they lay out their view of the Internet—and make clear that laws apply in cyberspace exactly as they do in the real world.

The document says plenty of good things about free expression, the democratizing power of the Internet, and the need for “non-discrimination and fair competition.” It also notes that these goods “must be included in a broader framework” of respect for the law and of protection for intellectual property.

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What a horrific distortion of what capitalism should be about. Consider: “the need for “non-discrimination” — this is simply a justification for state laws like net neutrality to let the state regulate the internet.

“and fair competition.” I suppose this justifies antitrust law and other state regulation.

“It also notes that these goods “must be included in a broader framework” of respect for the law and of protection for intellectual property.”

IP, yet another way to censor and control thought and the Internet.

From Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Singer’s Ex-Boyfriend Demands Royalties For Inspiring Songs About Their Relationship & Breakup

From Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Maori Angry About Mike Tyson’s Tattoo Artist Claiming To Own Maori-Inspired Design

Well, here’s an interesting twist on the lawsuit from Victor Whitmill over the copyright on Mike Tyson’s face tattoo. Many people have pointed out that the design appears to be inspired by the Maori, and it appears that Maori tattoo experts think Whitmill doesn’t deserve anything at all:

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Update: Will WB Digitally Remove The Tattoo From THE HANGOVER PART II Video Release?; EXCLUSIVE: ‘Hangover II’ Tattoo Lawsuit: Warner Bros. Will Alter DVDs If Case Doesn’t Settle Soon (h/t Roderick Long).

(See The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files for other examples of IP outrages and absurdities including other tattoo cases.)

“BookBaby president Brian Felsen sat down with Cory at the London Book Fair to discuss digital rights management, creativity, eBook distribution, and why all the current shifts in the publishing industry should matter to you. There are a lot of different ways you may’ve heard of Cory Doctorow by now: blogger, journalist, editor of Boing Boing, activist, panelist, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

“How Intellectual Property Hampers the Free Market,” The Freeman (May 25, 2011), republished as “How to Slow Economic Progress,” Mises Daily (June 1, 2011) (archived comments below).

This article was based on my talk “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism,” Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010: “The Economic Recovery:  Washington’s Big Lie” (Oct. 9 2010, Auburn Alabama). The talk is available at KOL061 | “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism” (Mises Institute 2010).

Youtube:

Archived comments:

Tony Fernandez May 25, 2011 at 2:26 pm

coturnix May 26, 2011 at 10:19 am

What is the point of doing science, if science can’t be privatized in principle, just by the way of its own nature?

REPLY

Tony Fernandez May 26, 2011 at 2:35 pm

I was being sarcastic, if you couldn’t tell.

My article How Intellectual Property Hampers the Free Market, just appeared in the latest Freeman (June 2011; pdf). It is based on my talk “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism,” Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010: “The Economic Recovery: Washington’s Big Lie” (Oct. 9 2010, Auburn Alabama), video below.

Update: republished as “How to Slow Economic Progress,” Mises Daily (June 1, 2011)

[Mises]

From Rob Wicks at The Libertarian Standard:

Interesting post on Mises blog by Skip Oliva. Note that Canadian Sen. Jean-Charles Chapais, the agriculture minister, in introducing legislation for a Canadian patent law in 1869, readily admitted the monopoly nature of patents:

It must be remembered that a patent is a kind of monopoly, though he did not mean to say that the word monopoly should be taken in its fullest sense, but nevertheless it is a monopoly, because it gives to a man the right of manufacturing or vending alone, an article useful to the public; certainly there was great reason for granting this monopoly.

 

Today I was perusing the historical debates of the Parliament of Canada and I found a spirited argument took place during the 1869 session over the creation of a uniform patent system. (Prior to the confederation of Canada two years earlier, the separate colonies had their own patent laws, which varied as to terms and eligibility.) Conservative Prime Minister John A. MacDonald’s government proposed a broad patent law allowing any Canadian resident to obtain a patent for a term of up to 15 years — three five-year terms, renewable at the patent-holder’s option.

There was no confusion among Canadian leaders that patents were a state-granted monopoly privilege. Sen. Jean-Charles Chapais, MacDonald’s agriculture minister, introduced the 1869 legislation on the government’s behalf:

It must be remembered that a patent is a kind of monopoly, though he did not mean to say that the word monopoly should be taken in its fullest sense, but nevertheless it is a monopoly, because it gives to a man the right of manufacturing or vending alone, an article useful to the public; certainly there was great reason for granting this monopoly. It was to encourage men of genius to work for the benefit of the public by rewarding them for their labour. But when once such discoveries are made, he did not see what right a person who has made the discoveries has to come and ask to have that exclusive right extended. When he got his patent for a particular place or province he was circumscribed, and considered himself sufficiently rewarded.

Sen. Jonathan McCully, an opposition Liberal who was one of the drafters of Canada’s constitution, challenged Chapais’s claim that patents were ever in the “public interest”:

He believed the true interest of the country would be best subserved by no Patent Law at all. (Hear, hear.) He believed that patents were always in the interest of inventors and not in the interest of the public. If [Chapais’s] position was sound that a Patent Law is for the interest of the public, then why limit the period for granting a patent to fifteen years? Why not give the inventor the right for life? It is said the man who invents a thing has the same right to that invention, as the man who has created a thing. To carry out this theory, they might limit the time a man is to use his property.

To limit the time of holding a patent is suicidal to the argument that patents of invention are in the interest of the public. He would ask what position we would be in if Patent Laws had existed, and inventions on patents were in full force in all parts of the world. Why, all inventions in connection with steamboats and railroads could not be used at all, because every man would have a patent for a different application of steam for industrial pursuits. That was one of the reasons why he doubted the soundness of the principle, that Patent Laws were in the interest of the public. It was well known that the people of this Dominion were in the enjoyment of the inventions of other countries free from all restrictions.

There was considerable opposition to allowing foreigners to claim patents. The final bill only required “residency” within Canada but not citizenship. In 1866 the United States had abandoned a longstanding reciprocity treaty with Canada, and even the MacDonald government acknowledged unrestricted patent rights would serve as a weapon of international trade. As one member of the House of Commons noted during debate: “If the privilege of getting patents were granted to American citizens we would in many cases have to pay a higher price for articles than we now did; he knew of one machine which could be got here for $450 which, if covered by a patent, would cost $1,000.”

(My thanks to Kady O’Malley of the CBC for sharing the link to the Parliament of Canada’s Reconstituted Debates web archive.)

Update: See also Fritz Machlup & Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” J. Econ. History 10, no. 1 (May 1950): 1–29 and Fritz Machlup, U.S. Senate Subcommittee On Patents, Trademarks & Copyrights, An Economic Review of the Patent System (85th Cong., 2nd Session, 1958, Study No. 15; https://mises.org/library/economic-review-patent-system), Part IID, “The victory of the patent advocates (1873–1910).

At the same time the vested interests try to ratchet up and expand IP,¹ anti-IP awareness is spreading. Jeff Tucker emailed me about an anti-IP post from the Adam Smith Institute, which was then itself carried on the Christian Science Monitor, exclaiming “This is what a revolution looks like!” And just today I had this post from the Black Agenda Report called to my attention, Who You Callin’ A Pirate?!?! (alternate link). There’s also a growing internet furor over the RIAA’s attempts to obliterate the Fourth Amendment by seeking legislation to permit the po-po to conduct warrantless searches of suspected copyright infringers. The RIAA has become an agent of the state.

Just tonight I appeared on Adam vs. the Man (Episode #28), a great show hosted by Adam Kokesh on the RT network. He has a great segment arguing for IP abolitionism, and had me on as a guest near the end. The video is below.

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[Mises]

1. See Son of COICA: New Copyright Bill Introduced; The Mountain of IP Legislation. [↩]

Jeff Tucker has a great commentary on the new movie Tangled (based on the Rapunzel story) at Mises.org, and has this nice insight:

Of course the original is in the public domain by now, just as with all the great Disney blockbusters. Not all are improvements on the original, but this film certainly is. Sometimes 2.0 is just much better than 1.0, and here we see the big problem with intellectual-property protection. It freezes the first release as the only release for up to several generations. Improving and adapting are made against the law. This is not a problem if you use a story that is old enough. But why should society have to wait 100 years to get a better version of the original? Why should we have laws that artificially slow the pace of progress?

Interesting post from Mike Masnick at Techdirt (this case and others also discussed in the most recent This Week in Law; for another ridiculous tattoo case, see Tattoo Artist Sues NBA Star for Copyright Infringement). Consider a variation on this case: Tyson hires a guy to tattoo him, and the tattooist uses someone else’s design. Is it so hard to imagine that original artist suing Tyson and asking the court to force Tyson to undergo a procedure to remove the tattoo?  IP is indeed slavery. (See The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files for other examples of IP outrages and absurdities including other tattoo cases.)

Guy Who Did Mike Tyson’s Tattoo Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Infringement

from the well-that-was-quick dept

It really was just a couple of weeks ago that we asked the (we thought) hypothetical question of who owns the copyright on a tattoo, and noted it would be a good question for a law school exam. We did mention one case, but it was settled out of court. Now we may have another. Apparently the artist who designed the tattoo on Mike Tyson’s face is suing Warner Bros. and seeking an injunction to block the studio from releasing the upcoming movie The Hangover 2. In that movie, Ed Helms apparently ends up with a tattoo quite similar to Tyson’s (Tyson appeared in the first Hangover movie).

The tattoo artist, S. Victor Whitmill, did in fact register the design with the Copyright Office, and even got Mike Tyson to sign a release making it clear that Whitmill retained the copyright on the work. I would think that Warner Bros. has a number of potential defenses here, including parody fair use. It’s certainly difficult to claim that this movie in any way diminishes the market for the original tattoo. My guess is that there may be some sort of quick settlement with Warner Bros. paying off Whitmill to make this go away, which is exactly what Whitmill wants. However, if it does go to court, we can see how good all of you were at answering that law school exam question we posited…

Lew Rockwell has a fantastic article on Mises.org today, The Google Pharm Case. Rockwell observes that the pharmaceutical industry is a cartel, not a free market:

The only way to maintain a cartel is through government regulations, and this is what the pharmacy industry has long relied upon, much to the detriment of consumer well-being. The attempt to crack down on free-market advertising of prescription drugs is all about protecting an industry from competition, and has nothing at all to do with protecting the consumer.

He also makes the extremely insightful point that patents, and the FDA process, in inflating the price of prescription drugs and restricting access to them, are a major cause of much email spam, such as the barrage of ads for V**gra and so on (the name of which I make to avoid spam filters!):

It is not a coincidence that so much Internet spam comes from companies that purport to be selling drugs that people do not necessarily want to get from their doctor. There are privacy concerns. There’s also a perfectly normal desire to avoid embarrassment. But the government will have none of it: you must confess to a doctor; you must look the drugstore clerk in the eye.

People commonly blame the markets for all this spam, but they really should have been fingering the government for having created the black and grey markets for these drugs in the first place! This is what creates the incentives to dump trillions of unsolicited emails on the world. The spammers knew that their product was valued, but without normal markets they resorted to globalized promotions.

In fact, this is why Congress made spam illegal. The antispam law had absolutely nothing to do with keeping your inbox clean. It was all about protecting the medical monopoly against competition.

Geoffrey Allan Plauché called to my attention this letter from back in 2007 from sci-fi author Howard V. Hendrix, the then VP of  the SFWA, explaining why he wasn’t going to run for President. The letter is an unintentionally funny, jaw-droppingly ludditish rant against technology and the Internet, in which he disparages authors who put their work online for free as “webscabs” (obviously, no one paid him to write his letter–oh, the irony). As Plauché mentioned to me, author Michael Stackpole eviscerates Hendrix’s screed episode of his “The Secrets” podcast “for serious writers”. Here’s an excerpt of Hendrix’s letter:

In another way too, though, I feel that the organization and I are moving apart at the moment. More and more of SFWA’s business is internet mediated. I’ve spent several thousands of hours doing SFWA business online during my Western Regional Director and Vice President years. As a result I’ve developed an almost allergic aversion toward all things nettish, including what I’m doing right now.

I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious. For that reason I don’t much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net. A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you “go along to get along” for too long, there’s a danger you’ll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.

I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the “net time” they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.