Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
locusmag.com
locusmag.com
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
I don’t quite buy the leap that “software companies being exploitative” is at all related to “protecting IP through the use of copyright”. Cory does not link the two successfully in my mind.
Monopolistic practices exist with or without IP laws, terms of service, etc.
Take a look at some other industries: energy companies have protected fossil fuel exploitation and stifled research and adoption of nuclear and green alternatives.
Finance industry have maintained monopoly and avoided regulation despite there being obvious harm to their practice.
These behaviours are related to capitalism... not intellectual property.
- He intros by talking about copyright, DRM, terms of use, etc
- Then jumps to the fact that Opioid companies try to hook you with addiction, just like Facebook. (So what's that got to do with Copyright, DRM, Terms of use?)
- Then hints at network effects of "How can you leave Facebook if all your friends are there?" (What's that got to do with anything?)
- Then he talks about service lock-in which again has nothing to do with Intellectual Property. You are locked in to all sorts of things in your life as a consumer, that is a capitalistic practice the fact that software companies use IP as the way to pull the lock-in lever is kind of secondary to the point isn't it? Isn't the main point: Why do we accept lock-in at all? (Again he's conflated these, not separates them)
- He talks about Copyright like it's just the US... so what about GDPRs "Right to data portability?", that's the beginning of inter-op. Or Countries copyright exceptions for interop purposes? No mention of those. So not only has he conflated Monopolistic tendencies with IP, he then conflates "Global IP laws" with "US IP law"... which misrepresents the vast majority of the world. As I've mentioned in other comments, in the country I live in: there is no such thing as "Fair Use", you are allowed to copy things for certain protected reasons, and people can't even bring a case against you for those reasons (A subtle but important difference).
- Lets take the kindle example where he says (paraphrase) "Amazon have locked you in, and you are breaking the law if you attempt to undo it"... Well what if I live in a country that allows me the right to reverse engineer for the purposes of inter-op? I can (legally) hack that kindle to pieces... Now they might make that really hard, or even impossible... In a similar way that Oil companies have depressed the EV market and made it WAY harder to own an EV to an ICE... But IP isn't getting in the way here.
Huh? If I have a book, I can lend it to a friend, sell it on eBay, or even put it in a library where thousands of people can read it for free. If I "own" a book on a Kindle, I can do none of those things -- and if our corporate overlords decide they don't want me to read that book anymore, then they can remotely remove it from my device, even if I paid for it [0]. The abuse is that DRM is being weaponized to criminalize fair use and other consumer rights that copyright law otherwise would not give corporations authority over -- and because of DMCA 1201, it is illegal to work around DRM even for fair-use purposes.
In fact, DRM does next to nothing to prevent piracy, as evidenced by the thriving piracy "industry" today. Every DRM system can eventually be bypassed, somehow -- there has to be some way to decrypt the content, otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch it. It's akin to putting up a "no stealing" sign outside my house -- sure, it means that thieves are technically trespassing now -- but they were already breaking the law to begin with and no flimsy little sign is going to stop them. It could be argued that DRM only makes piracy more enticing, because consumers can use pirated content in completely normal, fair-use ways that are blocked by DRM.
As Doctorow explains in the article, DRM was never about protecting copyright, it's about protecting monopolies. DRM means I can only watch a movie with an approved web browser on an approved operating system on an approved computer using an approved cable to connect to an approved monitor, and that I can only repair a tractor at an approved tractor dealership.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Software used to be like this too, back when it was distributed as a physical thing (disks).
DRM was about protecting copyright, your book/kindle example was a perfect illustrator of that. But I agree, it has been weaponised and misused.
They are different.
I am unaware of anyone prosecuted for ripping though, only several for developing/spreading the DRM circumvention.
Though, the other poster is right, that's a separate thing to what is being discussed.
You can't rip it, but you can sell, share, or do whatever you want with the original copy you bought and own. That is true everywhere in the world.
Asia-pac countries do not have this provision at all, unless enforced by US-trade agreements.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where I cannot lend my book to whoever the hell I want. Or give it away.
So what do they sell you? Well, legal legitimacy and possibly convenience.
If by "books" you mean "copyright on books, as enforced against people rather than corporations[0]", then yes, yes 'they' are.
0: Nitpick: legal action against a corporation for printing something by request from a particular customer is legal action against that customer, the same as if you'd prosecuted 15'000$ that you stole from their car for being drug money.
Doctorow is referring to IP, which he explicitly claims is a mix of unrelated terms under an arbitrary umbrella, only one of which is copyright. IP also groups trademarks & patents, which are unrelated to copyright.
He also explains how each part of the so-called IP laws used to have an escape hatch, something that was useful to society at large even though the "owner" would prefer it didn't exist. And how, given the trend towards concentration of money and consolidation of monopolistic actors, these escape hatches are being eroded.
> Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
There's copyright for books, sure. But nothing else applies. I can resell books. I can quote them (with some restrictions, such as not quoting the entire book). I can lend them to whomever I choose. I can read them upside down. I can cut them up, I can pick a page and analyze its chemical composition. I can do all sorts of things that, when books turn into digital goods, their publishers make an effort to prevent me from doing -- making it effectively and practically illegal to try to bypass their arbitrary restrictions.
Book publishers certainly can be. Copyright enables them.
Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you. Ordinary property is the right to say how others are allowed to use a physical thing that belongs to you. It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
Big companies manipulate the power we've given over to government or lobby for the extra power to be given to the government for them to exploit. It's so obvious it has to be some sort of group psychosis that means we're all continuely having these same discussions.
These are oligarchies with the veneer of popular voting providing a pretense of democracy.
Also the irony of asking the government to help you from companies that said government gave defacto monopolies to in the form of copyright laws seems to be completely lost on everyone.
But more importantly - can you explain what you mean by a power imbalance?
Don’t all companies have a power imbalance of some kind with their users?
Right, but it's about the level of control. It's not one single entity: instead control is effectively split between a very few megacorporations with an ability to obliterate smaller competition. Their incentive is to control the market, to control both ends of any pipelines they are involved in. Which is the same as any company, sure, but it is the level of power that these companies have that is worrying. It may not be a bad thing with bad effects -- it's really convenient in many ways! The power gives them the ability to produce some really good things! But history would suggest that, as a general rule, it is not a great idea to hand extremely large amounts of power and control to a few entities who are only beholden to (and whose only real aim is to) generate money for investors.
I’d like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors. If you look at the incentive structures for the people involved, that starts to look like an untenable position. For example there are a lot of subject matter s experts whose incentive is to build careers based on their contributions and expertise - e.g. Chris Lattner. This is just one example of how this reductive idea of what a company is simply breaks down. Certainly some companies - usually financial ones - have no other goal, but outside of the financial sector this is just not true.
And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking.
There is no room to compete head to head with them, but plenty of room to innovate and compete in way that they are simply under delivering.
> I'd like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Pick any megacorporation that has reached a point in terms of market cap where they can dictate favourable political/economic conditions for themselves, so from when companies started appearing, so mid-late 1700s. With the caveat that almost all of them have "good" effects from specific perspectives: all huge eastern trading companies (Dutch & British East India), all huge western trading companies (well, sure, they traded slaves but yowza, look at how much they put into the economy!), all huge chemical companies, all large arms manufacturers, all huge oil companies, Japan when split between zaibatsus, etc etc etc. Doesn't seem to matter what sector they are in apart from it involving control of a necessary resource.
> Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.
Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition. It's why a company as a legal/business entity is formed. Hiring subject matter experts -- well, yes, obviously a company will do that, and those experts will have personal reasons for working for the entity that are most often not directly be "enrich this entity". But that is for the most part irrelevant to my point.
> And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking
Their products being lacking from your perspective isn't really relevant here either. Google and AWS control and sell access to physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, cross spectrum products built on that infrastructure, tools to use that infrastructure. They control [a large % of] both ends of the pipe, so to speak. Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in. FB, well as a minor example: "ah well, yes, it was kinda sorta mainly organised on our platform using our infrastructure, but whatcha gonna do?".
And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
> Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition.
It's literally not the definition; now, it's true that the purpose of a public stock offering, or other offering of equity or debt for money is an effort to raise money from investors, but companies (even more narrowly corporations) need not ever engage in those activities, and even if they do that doesn’t make that purpose of the activity the overall purpose of the organization; it's just an instrument by way of which the organizations seeks it's broader goal.
The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).
And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors
The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Money is an incentive, and there are certainly some companies whose sold purpose is to make profit. As I said these are in the financial sector.
But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
That doesn’t mean they don’t want to succeed against competitors, or that they don’t need profits to survive. Of course they do.
But you simply can’t reduce a company to this.
A common theme on HN and of people in general is people asking how they can make a project profitable. This is indicative that the project is the goal and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
A lot of public companies these days don’t give control to the investors. This is also consistent with the company not existing primarily as an investment vehicle.
Well, yes, exactly. Say you are a person. You have a goal to make {thing}. You achieve that goal by selling {thing}. To aid in this task under the economic system you live within, you create a legal entity, called a company. Your aim is still to achieve your goal. The aim of the company is to help with that.
The profit is a necessary condition, as you say. I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree. This is a basic fundamental thing, like 1+1 is 2. If profit is the necessary condition to acheive {goal} and a company is the legal vehicle by which you attempt to achieve {goal}, then the aim of the company has to be increase profit, there isn't a choice.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a thing. There will be other primary and ancillary aims, but the core reason for its existence is for that aim.
> But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
Yes, that's what I said re workers, and sure, it can apply to many smaller business owners. As you go up the ladder in company size from small business I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
> The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
> I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
Granted this is sometimes true, but you are just leaving out the fact that in order to increase profit, the business generally has to offer more value too. There are exceptions to this, but it is generally true.
And when they stop adding value or fall behind, unless there is a true monopoly which none of the tech companies have, they become vulnerable to competition.
> > The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
> Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
Similarly, if you build a machine to assist humans in consuming food you don't say the point of the machine is something other than assisting them in consuming food.
> But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
Right, but that seems to be missing the point. Which is that the business itself, seperate from the personal goals of the owners and employees, as an entity, has to attempt to maximise profit [because of the economic system it exists within] to enable the goals of the owners and employees. And further to that, if (and I've never said that it isn't an if) that becomes a driving factor, it subsumes the personal goals. For a business to grow to the level talked about, maximising profit has to be the driving force.
Edit:
> This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
Nono, these businesses are giant. They have grown giant, that's what this was all primarily regarding.
It's also, obviously, fraud. You can make it less obvious by actually spending the money on a scheme that looks busy and looks like it has potential to generate returns. If I realistically believe that it has the potential to generate the returns I'm promising the investors, then I'm doing the usual thing of trying to generate money for investors. If I'm selling $2 bills for $1, I'll get a lot of customers and build a big business but all the actual value flowing into the system is the cash from the investors and I don't have any real prospect of turning that around.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those.
I agree it was likely a mistake, but I think much of the talking past each other in the comments following comes from others not realizing that you had made that determination and were responding as if it said "to". People attempting to make money from investors is a pretty common topic around here.
Frankly it’s been much less than a decade. Apple (for one) was far less dominant a decade ago, indeed many people were still declaring them to be doomed.
What this means is that we may well be looking at a transient phenomenon. You simply do not know how stable this ‘power’ is. If they had been entrenched for a few decades, the case might be stronger.
Consider how long it took for Apple to develop their iPhone business. Years of theorizing, followed by 5 years of serious R&D work before it was even released, then more than a decade of growth before reaching a market penetration of less than 20% globally.
Why would you expect a competitor to take any less time than that to unseat them?
If we use Apple themselves as the model, we’d expect a competitor to be a product that is two years away release today, and 12 years away from being taken seriously as a threat.
Consider that in 2005 during the rise of the iPod, most consumer electronics manufacturers considered Microsoft to be the dominant force in their space, and ‘does it work with windows’, was what they thought mattered. The cloud was barely relevant, and Apple, was still considered a boutique vendor.
Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This all applies to the others equally. FB in particular already shows obviously signs of losing dominance.
> Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in.
If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
> If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
Eh? You just did that, not me. I've mentioned Apple once, to say that I don't know enough about their rise [financially] to comment re point that parent was making re Google and Amazon. But
> Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This is why I think you're looking at this at the wrong level. "ripe for disruption"? So what? What I'm talking about is a company that can develop their own chips, spend a billion dollars buying a modem business off another company, lobby against regulations on use of forced labour. That's what it can do now, not a decade ago or a decade in the future.
Some amount of power imbalance is okay. Obviously not every entity can have the exact same amount of power nor would this be desirable.
What matters is the scale of the difference. A single entity having several orders of magnitude more power than the average entity. Let's call this a "giant", for ease of reference.
All entities optimize toward the execution of their own agenda (this shouldn't be controversial). This is in essence a good thing since it drives competition, refinement and development.
The trouble starts when giants appear. The giants are few and the non-giants are many. It is unlikely that the giants' agendas will forever be aligned well with the agendas of the non-giants. Yet, due to their sheer size, the giants have the ability not only to compete and cooperate with the non-giants, but to change and warp the very rules of the game to something that doesn't resemble the rules we started out with. In this sense, scale truly makes all the difference.
I think a physics analogy is apt here. Think of a bunch of marbles of roughly comparable masses bouncing around each other. They need not all have exactly the same mass for the overall dynamics of the setting to be retained. They will also have different individual momenta which will change constantly as time progresses.
Now introduce a large stone sphere weighing over a ton into the picture. Can we reasonably say this new system has similar dynamics to the old one? After all, it's just one more marble. Yet now for the first time we have a marble that is practically immoveable but can move any other, which is a strictly new dynamic.
I completely agree it can be extended in that way and it has been done so in the past; There are even countries that have political parties that generally agree with such a statement and work towards (albeit imperfectly) to limit or abolish such monopolies of capital.
(The US on the other hand left their anti-trust laws to rust on the side and let monopolistic entities gain power such as Amazon and Facebook; here is a report on how Amazon has been using sale and review data to launch AmazonBasics products undercutting other brands: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayf... on the "Amazon's Version" section)
No, it isn't, because ordinary physical property can't be copied the way digital "property" can be. And the whole scheme of property rights with regard to ordinary physical property only makes sense because ordinary physical property can't be copied. If I steal your car, you are deprived of the car; that's why it's a crime for me to do it. But if I make a digital copy of some computer file you have, I'm not depriving you of it; you still have your copy and can still use it exactly as you did before. So why should it be a crime for me to make the copy?
The corporations that are pushing "intellectual property" rights over digital "property" would like it to be a crime, of course, but that doesn't mean we, the people, should agree.
Do you think we should? If so, how would you go about enforcing such rights?
Just imagine if that happened to become true one day. Some people would have to come up with secrets they exchange, as to make themselves unique to the other person, because there might be clones running around. And all the art and music would either not exist or be somehow supported by society. Society would have to learn, that we need to support what we like, or else the makers of it could not live from it. Would the system of money still work? Would we have different forms for economies unlike capitalism? How would greed work?
What you're describing is not "scalable" use. It's just an example of physical property whose "use" amounts to some number N of people doing something using it, where N is much larger than 1. But N is still based on, and limited by, the physical nature of the property; it can't be increased arbitrarily by just making more copies, the way it can for digital "property".
I agree with him/her that the enforcement aspect is just an extension of the enforcement rights of regular property. Where i disagree is that intellectual ideas should be owned like physical things in the first place, with the difference being scarcity as you say. Maybe im being pedantic but i feel like its an important distinction to make.
That's true only if you accept intellectual property as a legitimate form of property in the first place. It's not.
> Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you.
How can a number belong to someone? The whole notion is absurd.
And frankly, I think IP should be taxed since holders rely on the government to protect it. If I have a house, it’s at least hypothetically possible that I can defend it myself. That’s not possible with intellectual property. So if holders are relying on that government to uphold its value, they should be expected to contribute proportionally to that value for the service.
edit: Maybe IP can be assigned "shares" in wealth injected into the market?
How come the silly "double taxation" meme is only brought up when we're talking about rich people's money? (ie corporations, rent-seeking structures, etc)
The IP tax would also solve the status of abandonware once and for all — the company is no longer around to pay the tax on its copyright, so the copyright gets terminated and the works become public domain.
I've long had a nagging feeling that there was a deep connection between the current state of our "post truth" society and the continuously widening scope of "IP" (digital monopoly) protections. Cory disentangles some of those connections and shows some of the ways IP has become a tool for restricting freedoms. But there's more: I think that those same mechanics are narrowing the overton window and putting all thinking that's outside on the same level... and we end up in a world where the ordinary person can't distinguish between the credibility of un-approved ideas.
Truth lasts for years, centuries even.
You need to bury truth, so you can keep selling people a stream of "novel" information. Truth doesn't get you monopoly profits, only novelty. Rearrange the truth every couple decades into crappier versions and profit.
Incentives matter.
#ImaginaryProperty is the worst. #IntellectualFreedom YOLO!!!
The real problem with the current IP regime is its use to impose restrictions that go beyond reproduction.
Furthermore, copyright has to go beyond mere reproduction rights, because it's designed to cover creative works. The most lucrative part of copyright is not the monopoly over publication, but the monopoly over sequels. Disney is a multi-billion-dollar corporation not because it happens to own a bunch of old movies and comic books from the 60s, but because it has a monopoly over making sequels and remakes of that material. This is perfectly reasonable for creative works. However, it breaks down completely for software, because software is a mixed work of function and creativity that does not stand on it's own like a book or a movie can.
There's already precedent for how you handle these sorts of mixed function works: you give them a sui generis right. Around the same time software copyright was asserting itself, Intel and several other chip manufacturers lobbied Congress for copyright over IC designs. Congress instead decided to instead create an entirely separate monopoly regime for chips that only lasts 10 years and has explicit exceptions for reverse-engineering. That's what they should have done for software: give it 10 years of protection against duplication, require source code disclosure as a rights formality, and publish that source at the end of the protection term. It would work more like a patent, albeit without the terrible problems most software patents have.
Without it, there would be no punishment for copying the source code, leaking implementation details, reverse engineering software and breaking copyright security mechanisms. People would be free to do these things without fear of retaliation or legal bullying by gigantic corporations with deep pockets and armies of lawyers.
Either copyright goes away or free computing as we know and love will be destroyed.
And that still never works.
I offer WSB-- the assholiest of domains, yet one where that is an interesting question-- whose users are actually doing a better job of showing the world the corruption of their domain.
I shall endeavor to write a weird piece of Gnu fan fiction about this.
Wow! That this even exists blows my mind. It reads almost as evil as surreptitiously inserting a "all your money belongs to us" clause in a EULA in the hope that nobody will read it. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I'm not sure what part of the license is actually this "non-disparagement clause".
https://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license
The closest I could find in the above "restricted font license" is in the "Governing law" section -
"The User and Goldman Sachs hereby waive any right to a trial by jury and consent to exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York or, if federal jurisdiction is lacking, New York Supreme Court, New York County, for the resolution of any dispute regarding this License or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom."
.. which is limited to disputes regarding *this license or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom* .. and which doesn't seem as out of line as the article's wording suggests.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200624213857/https://design.gs...
> c. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.
(emphasis mine)
I was holding off from buying one to get a more open device, but the tendency is to become LESS open and featured, not more. I could buy an old device, but they're by definition not supported.
> Prior to the rise of the “intellectual property” as an umbrella term, the different legal regimes it refers to were customarily referred to by their individual names. When you were talking about patents, you said “patents,” and when you were talking about copyrights, you said “copyrights.” Bunching together copyrights and trademarks and patents and other rules wasn’t particularly useful, since these are all very different legal regimes. On those rare instances in which all of these laws were grouped together, the usual term for them was “creator’s monopolies” or “author’s monopolies.”
> The anti-IP argument leans into the differences between the underlying rationale for each of these rules:
> * US copyrights exist to “promote the useful arts and sciences” (as set out in the US Constitution); that is, to provide an incentive to the creation of new works of art: copyright should offer enough protection to create these incentives, but no more. Copyright does not extend to “ideas” and only protects “expressions of ideas”;
> * Patents exist as incentive for inventors to reveal the workings of their inventions; to receive a patent, you must provide the patent office with a functional description of your invention, which is then published. Even though others may not copy your invention during the patent period, they can study your patent filings and use them to figure out how to do the same thing in different ways, or how to make an interoperable add-on to your invention;
> * Trademarks exist as consumer protection: trademarks empower manufacturers to punish rivals who misleadingly market competing products or services that are like to cause confusion among their customers. It’s not about giving Coca-Cola the exclusive right to use the work “Coke” – it’s about deputizing Coca-Cola to punish crooks who trick Coke drinkers into buying knockoffs. Coke’s trademark rights don’t cover non-deceptive, non-confusing uses of its marks, even if these users harm Coca-Cola, because these do not harm Coke drinkers.
> Seen in this light, “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game?
> When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:
> “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
Now?
Back in the mainframe era, there wasn't really a "software industry" as we know now. And there weren't so many rules about software specifically, because published software wasn't terribly relevant commercially. The question wasn't whether the law would step in to enable software developers to market their work, rather than hoarding it. It was whether they'd get their own software-specific regime, like Japan had, or come under some existing one.
But even before software copyright, it wasn't as though source code wasn't anybody's intellectual property. It was kept as trade secrets. There may not have been any specific public laws preventing you from doing as you liked with source code you had. But it was highly unlikely you would ever get source code you wanted in the first place.
GPL made peace with copyright, chose to depend upon it, to declare war on trade secrecy. To hear RMS tell The Parable of the Printer, the paper causing the problems was nondisclosure agreements---the tools of trade secrecy protection---not copyright statutes. And trade secrecy hasn't gone away. Folks working at software companies these days will have signed legal terms requiring them to keep company code close.
So yeah, maybe kids had their cake with icing back in the day. But they were cupcakes, mostly homemade. Not the 2^n-layer, all-you-can-eat wedding cake bonanza we gorge on now. The appearance of a software industry made that difference.
Similar rose-colored story with "intellectual property". Yes, that's in recent fashion, from about the 1980s. But there were other names before it. The near-neighbors "incorporeal property", "industrial property" (excepting copyright), and especially "intangible property" enjoyed popularity before the World Wars.
I suspect we're on about "intellectual property" because RMS turned hating on it into activist catechism. One of his many, largely failed attempts at Sapir-Whorf manipulation. But he's losing "intellectual property", too. It was and remains useful for lawyers, managers, accountants, and scholars to distinguish bundles of exclusive rights in physical assets from bundles of exclusive rights in ideas and information. "Bundles of exclusive rights" is exactly how we define "property" on the first day in law school.
Arguing that IP protection has gotten stronger because clever Bernays types chose a slippery-slope metaphor, which lawyers at court and in Congress just couldn't help sliding right down, conveniently avoids acknowledging the well organized interests behind stronger IP laws. Which, as a general rule, have knocked "commons" activists out cold in every bout since long before Lessig took up Eldred v. Ashcroft and lost.
"Monopoly", alas, is just another very general way to describe "property". And it's a bad choice here, because it's overloaded, as Cory points out. See also "patents", which didn't mean anything specifically to do with inventions to start, but all manner of government- or monarch-granted rights. There were "land patents". Before just anybody could form a corporation, they had to get a charter from the government, a form of "letters patent".
Playing guilt-by-pun-association, hopping from one meaning of "monopoly" to another, leads to some head-scratchers. Especially the definition of IP as "any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers". In practice, with crafty enough business people, that's nearly all of privately enforceable law. Defamation? Regulatory licenses? Business torts? Contract?
It's important to keep in mind even IP laws aren't weapons just laying around. They only apply to certain voluntary conduct. The nondisparagement clause in Goldman Sachs' font license doesn't entitle it to go back and sue Matt Taibbi for calling them a "vampire squid" in Rolling Stone. No more than RMS can sue Facebook for making non-free software under the copyleft clause of his GPL grant for Emacs. The issue is when "voluntary conduct" doesn't feel so voluntary any more, as when a particular firm totally dominates a market for essential goods or services. Railroads and telegraphs played that hand hard, and not primarily thanks to IP. Those dangers remain real, and Cory's been on about them, very honorably, for a few years now. It's the connection he tries to make between IP and antitrust that's weak.
As for where he ends up, in the end, "rights" and "freedom" are just vacuous generalities, like "community", "liberty", "innovation", and so on. We pour our hopes and dreams into them and feel happy feelings when others invoke them. Others like to hear us use the words, too. But we can't know which hopes or dreams they're swooning over when we do. They could be the same as ours. They could be in direct conflict. During the civil rights movement, "freedom" to some meant the right to live, work, eat, study, and worship free of racial discrimination. To others, it meant the right to enforce segregation in states that wanted it.
It's tempting to paper over conflicts with vague words, to make win-lose scenarios sound like win-wins. If you feel strongly about traditional hacker causes---privacy, autonomy, hackability, transparency---you will be in direct conflict with large, well organized, heavily capitalized chunks of industry. If you want that fight, play to win.
YOLO!
it is not about internet protocol it is intellectual property ! wuh
how can it be that if I know something, this knowledge is not mine?
(If you wanted a 2010s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk sequel book you'd have some far-right militia group arguing for bringing back slavery to protect author's rights or something. Call it Twitterpunk.)
I'm not worried that about an external entity owning my entire mind. I'm worried about a society in which institutions and corporations have ownership over some parts of what I know.
And this is already happening, so many engineers and academics have signed NDAs, essentially giving up ownership (the ability to determine how to use) of certain information they have learned, in some cases even their own original ideas.
We can already read basic images from a brain using AI to reconstruct the image[1]. If that device shows an image which is copyrighted, who is liable, the person with the scanner, or the brain that was scanned?
How about if I create a device which helps people who are physically disabled - or locked in - to communicate by projecting sounds from their brains - but not at will? If the person thinks about a tune ("Happy Birthday"), have they "performed" it?
What happens if they think something which is considered enough to have you banned from popular platforms? What about if the technology is forced to remove their services because the thoughts you're creating are unacceptable?
These things don't seem at all unlikely within the next 10-20 years.
1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/mind-reading-algorit...
I don’t quite follow what you’re worried about...
Even patents which protect an idea, cannot be enforced unless there is a concrete expression of that idea.
If knowlege cannot be legally expressed, it's useless and not really yours.
This kind of stuff happens all the time... Patents, are where this gets frustrating, where I can register a bunch of "expressions" of an idea and they get protected from execution... Then Software-patents are even worse in this realm...
- I have the knowledge of how to integrate a fusion plant and warp motor to form a warp drive. The only purpose of this knowledge is a warp drive, therefore I cannot express it.
- I have the knowledge of the fusion plant, and a warp motor, both of which are claimed. I cannot build the fusion plant even if I intend to integrate it with a terrestial power grid. I cannot build a warp motor even if I intend to integrate it with solar cells. There's no other purpose for any of this, so I am forbidden from expressing it.
I'm not seeing another way to define "knowledge" that would allow me to express it despite it being claimed by someone else, so I conclude IP makes knowledge useless.
From my own observations over recent years, I've come to the conclusion that the IP, copyright, patent and DRM issues that Doctorow discusses in this article are even worse than he has let on about (perhaps he's worried about overly frightening the horses and or is worried that his opponents would attempt to discredit him if he spilled all the beans).
In Western countries and especially the US, the field of software and so-called IP has become so monopolistic and proprietary—and ordinary users so disempowered from the consequences thereof that they're having not only a serious negative effect on productivity and the national economy but also they're dysfunctional to the extent that they even threaten national security.
Much software development is technically moribund (or it's more of the same). Time limits me to cite only one example here—the multiple, never-ending security breaches that we see day-by-day—breaches that we're never able to manage properly or get on top of—or engineer our way out of. (There, too, are dozens more examples.)
Whilst Western corporations maul both one another as well as poor long-suffering users over IP licenses, copyright and patent disputes that are, by nature, intrinsically trivial, China's 'command' economy is able to bypass all that nonsense and move on regardless—for the Chinese, it's IP be damned, and it's patently obvious that that attitude is benefiting them mightily.
China pays lip service to international copyright law but behind the scenes it does the exact opposite despite the fact that everyone knows it. As we've seen over the past 30 or so years, China has stolen more Western IP than would fill many a volume of old-fashioned telephone directories and all that Western countries have ever done in response is to make token complaints and objections which never amount to anything more than a kowtowing whimper. Clearly if you're big and frightening enough, no one's game enough to complain (or do anything) about the fact that one's ideas were stolen). To make matters worse, the West even has the utter damned hypocrisy to buy manufactured product from China that was made using this pirated technology! (It all reminds me a bit of Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Hitler.)
It seems to me that unless the West (and again, especially the US) pulls its collective head in over this IP nonsense and dismisses most of it—all the unfair stuff—then China Inc. will continue to gain an even further technological march upon us.
To catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output, the US and other Western nations need to adopt a capitalist command economy (à la China's and along the lines the US implemented in WWII). Even the Chinese have never equaled the heights the US achieved in manufacturing during WWII:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...
"William S. Knudsen, an automotive industry executive who was made Chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission by the Roosevelt administration to organize war production, said, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
https://civilianmilitaryintelligencegroup.com/8695/us-indust...
In any such scenario, the current unfair and very unreasonable IP/copyright/patent laws (and concomitant wars) wouldn’t be tolerated. Post COVID-19, it'd make sense to implement such a scheme to rebuild the economy.
Right, it's only a pipe dream—we no longer have people of sufficient aptitude, caliber and with solid ethics of the likes of FDR, Harry Hopkins, Vannevar Bush (FDR’s top science advisor), Fredrick Terman, LTG Leslie R. Groves, William S. Knudsen et al to undertake such an ambitious project.
But whichever system of ethics compels us to "catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output" and "smother the 'enemy' in an avalanche of production" (quotes mine) sounds more like a civilizational suicide pact than a vision for the future.
Our smothering of the planet with production is the most immediate existential threat we face.
Even if I had been referring to manufactured hardware type goods - which I wasn't - ramping local production would only replace/reestablish what we lost to China over past decades. It would not be a world net increase in production as we'd be buying less from China (they won't make stuff if we're not buying).
There's many other reasons too for local production: jobs, better quality products, reskilling the workforce, strategic interests, etc.
I'd have thought that would have been obvious.
Two weeks ago the USB socket on my Netgear modem became intermittent and I literally had to smash my way through the plastic case to get inside to gain access to the circuit board. Unfortunately, in doing so I damaged something else which (I think) has rendered it useless (I'll know for sure when I get a chance to take a microscope to the PWA). The fact remains that I haven't been able change a 20 cent socket and to save time I've had to buy a new device!
It seems to me that green and ecological movements should do more in this area to stop the millions of tons of e-waste—and getting behind Right to Repair movements is a good place to start.