2011: The Year Intellectual Property Trumped Civil Liberties | Hacker News Reader

2011: The Year Intellectual Property Trumped Civil Liberties

wired.com

93 pointsantoviaque17 comments

When I look back over the sea of boots that have stomped the sea of necks over the past year, I'm not really overwhelmed by all the IP lawyers I see doing the neck stomping.

Maybe in next month's issue of Wired:

2011: The Year a Campus Police Officer's Desire to Pepper Spray a Kid in the Fucking Face Trumped Civil Liberties

2011: Another Year a Federal Government's Tantrum Over Thwarted Desire to Hide Information from Its Citizenry Trumped Bradley Manning's Civil Liberties

2011: The Year Cops Shot Some More Family Dogs in the Process of Systematically Violating Large Swaths of the Population's Civil Liberties

2011: The Year the U.S. Military Finally Sort of Withdrew from Iraq After Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqi Civilians in the Process of Nominally Protecting Their Civil LIberties (and Mine!)

While I appreciate the debate over the article's thesis, as the editor of that piece and of Wired's Threat Level blog, I'm going to quibble with you about Wired's coverage.

Threat Level has been all over Occupy: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/occupy from Scott Olsen in Oakland, to Boston to D.C., to the NYPD refusing press passes to reporters. Quinn Norton and Sean Captain have done great work.

As for Bradley Manning, Threat Level's Kim Zetter did an outstanding job covering the Manning hearings. It was so good she was accused by a commenter of having insider sources at the open hearing. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/bradley-manning

Cops shooting dogs. Well, we didn't really cover this.

Military leaving Iraq - Well, Threat Level didn't cover this, but our excellent sister blog Danger Room was, when it wasn't documenting the FBI's anti-muslim training program.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/iraq

And finally, the essay you take issue with was written by David Kravets, whose beats are civil liberties and copyright issues. I think his end of the year piece is really strong, juxtaposing two bills from Sen. Patrick Leahy as a way to talk about a year full of security/privacy/protest/copyright news.

Or, should have I just said, read more Threat Level. http://wired.com/threatlevel

The tone of my comment probably did not deserve such a gentlemanly response, and to the extent that I unfairly dug at Wired's coverage priorities in my effort to be a funny bastard, I apologize.

Nevertheless, the construction "YYYY: The Year That X" is a prelude to almost certain under-delivery, and (worse) sounds like a claim that X is The Thing About YYYY we should care the most about.

Ah, no problem. Plus you gave me the opportunity to give a shout-out to my writers.

And, I'll cop to your criticism. I assigned the story to Kravets, saying I didn't want a typical year end in review story and instead wanted to pick one theme. (That said, the Verge did a very nice year end wrap-up with a cool design).

It's inevitable in the world of journalism and blogging to overpromise in headlines and we'll always get heat for it -- probably rightly so. But I do promise that while I'm running Threat Level, we won't stoop to Business Insider's tactic of turning on the CAPS lock key.

Well, Wired is kind of a technology-related publication so it makes some sense that they would focus on that. But it would be nice to have some kind of comprehensive write-up somewhere that goes something like

2011: Another Year of Civil Liberties Getting Pummeled By The "War" on Drugs, The "War" on Piracy, and The "War" on Terrorism

(Civil liberties are quickly becoming my most important political issue, more than jobs, the economy, the deficit, etc...)

Intellectual property trumps civil liberties every year.

There's a myth that limited intellecutal property rights are consistent with civil liberties. They're not.

Patents cause one person's actions to limit the permitted actions of another. Not through some form of real scarcity, but by an arbitrary rule of the state. It's inconsistent with the principle of live and let live.

Anybody seriously believe that this is about someone downloading or updating mp3s on their sites?

This is only the excuse for putting the system in place in order to block what American people could view on Internet. It is about creating an infrastructure of government control on private companies(great firewall of USA).

The reason? We are getting closer to the biggest transfer of wealth of History, the system does not support itself, America could not pay back their debt, either UK, Europe.. the default on debt or hyperinflation is getting closer and closer.

People is not going to be happy when this happens and their savings are gone, remember that it already happened in the 30s. When so many people are angry, bad things happen.

Internet is so powerful for communicating and coordinating people,this is dangerous for politicians and all status quo so they need a way of controlling it.

Wyden is a legend:

Wyden has promised to wage a one-man filibuster if necessary.

Love it.

“By ceding control of the internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives,” Wyden said.

This is just absolutely insane:

A hip-hop music site’s domain name was seized for a year and given back three weeks ago ... The site’s lawyer says the MP3s listed in the seizure order had been sent to the site by the labels themselves, seeking publicity.

Yes. The Wired article doesn't give many details, but TechDirt did a big angry write-up about the event, making it seem even more insane: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaki...

There was actually another Wired article a few weeks ago with more details about the site and events as well: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wyden-domain-seizur... (It mentions that some of the files were legitimate, which implies by omission that some of the files were illegitimate, but that doesn't negate the fact that due process was severely abused, among other things, and that even if there had been no illegitimate files the exact same thing still could have and probably would have happened. And this is all without SOPA or PIPA...)

Copyright law needs serious revision. It's important to note the historical context of copyright. Before copyright, circa 1700, distributing written material was prohibitively expensive and it was common for writers' inventions to be stolen by rich, powerful publishers who would sell their material (without payment to author) at large, at a price the writer couldn't possibly beat. This not only left artists in poverty, but it also reduced the quality of artistic work. Copyright law evolved in the era of nation-forming (1650 to 1850) because countries realized it was in their national interest to have notable artists and scientists, and that they wouldn't have this if the rich and powerful (being the only people who could publish) could steal their work.

Before copyright, an author (or, for the best modern analogue, a musician) would make almost nothing on his first book (it'd just be stolen by a publisher) and the only way he could make a decent living would be to negotiate an arrangement over his future work with publishers, who nonetheless held most of the cards. Does this evil system sound familiar? It should, because it's exactly what we have now, under corporate copyright provisions that are far too permissive of the law being used for purposes exactly opposite to what was intended. Copyright was designed to protect "the little guy" against the rich and powerful, not vice versa.

Also, the people in power (responsible for SOPA) don't actually give a shit about Hollywood. Not in the least. This is about control for them. Copyright (like drugs) has become a selling point evil men use not because they care about the issue (they don't) but because they want an excuse to centralize power and practice some good-ol'-fashioned fuckin'-with-people. The real goal of SOPA is not to destroy the Internet. For most people (but not those who need it) the Internet will work just fine. It's to exert control by bringing into question the legality of its components. When something essential (such as private business, as observed in Soviet "communism" and post-Soviet ochlocracy) is made illegal or extremely difficult to do legally, it doesn't disappear outright-- it becomes beholden to officials who enforce these absurd laws selectively.

> Does this evil system sound familiar? It should, because it's exactly what we have now

I disagree. Our situation is very different to back then. If the situation was the same as back then we wouldn't need any copyright reform.

The little guy is protected from publishers legally. The problem that the little guy has with publishers now is that serious brand development, marketing and production investment is needed to make consumers buy books/music/film/games these days, at least in numbers that can provide a decent, sustainable income. The publishers, of course, are looking for a ROI on their investment (and they will try and negotiate the best rates from the artist, as any investor will - including copyrights if necessary).

Then, as competition in the high-investment high-return music business increases, risk-aversion also increases and publishers tend towards sure bets and artists who are most likely to sell well (constructing them to fit a market if necessary). This is what makes it harder for the little guy today, not large publishers copying their work indiscriminately.

An argument could be made that intellectual property is in fact a civil liberty itself; the right to own private property is a common and well-established civil liberty. Proponents of intellectual property argue that while obviously intellectual property is different in nature than other types, it is property none the less.

What mechanism is there to observe who 'owns' a piece of information? An abstract notion of mechanism?

What does private property mean in the domain of bit strings? Why don't 'intellectual property owners' treat their bit strings like other private property and keep it private?

What birthright grants private citizens or their incorporations state-enforced control of combinations of cultural or technical ideas? Do 'intellectual property owners' create their 'property' from nothing? From where do they source their input material? Have they stood on the shoulders of giants, on the broken backs of thousands of generations of ancestors, or are they special, unique snowflakes creating 'intellectual property' in a vacuum from the godhead?

Please keep in mind that it's not solely IP law that is the problem. It is how the law is being used. And who is (and is not) using it.

By and large, those who hold the lion's share of the world's enforceble IPR and are doing the lion's share of enforcement of that IP are not indviduals of average income.

If we talk about "civil liberties" maybe we should talk about every individual's rights to register IP and to enforce their IPR. Under the current systems, ownership and enforement of IP is concentrated in the hands of the few, not the many.

As you might guess, most of the world's IP is under corporate control by large corporations.

Why can't the average individual own and enforce IP with the same effectiveness? Examine the systems for registering and enforcing IP and see why.

Anyone know what the latest maximum penalty in USA to send three wedding photos from grandmother without a copyright release from the wedding photographer? In other words, the penalties for sharing memories with your family.

tl;dr: USA's Penalty of non-commercial infringement.

In Australia, it's $93,500 per infringement and up to 5 years jail time. So all up, $280,500 and 15 years jail for the grandmother here.

This is another great nugget: It was just forgotten ... [by] the same industry that tried to ban the VCR and MP3 players.

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