I've seen an awful lot of people who DON'T make their living off of intellectual content they create who oppose the concept of intellectual property. They AREN'T song writers, novelists, self employed software engineers, etc. But, what I don't hear too much of are people who DO make their living off of intellectual content they create and who oppose the concept of intellectual property.
That's always made me very suspicious of people who are against intellectual property. They remind me of a pair of wolves trying to get a lamb (the information worker) to agree to a vote on what's for dinner.
Thus, the question for this thread. Who here is an information worker (eg. a novelist, songwriter, self employed software engineer, or some other person whose primary means of financial support comes from their intellectual property) AND opposes the concept of intellectual property?
You have put forward a binary for/against in an area where it is possible to have quite a complicated stance - for instance software patents are quite contentious and you can find a lot of IT folks who don't like how the have been implemented - but you can think software patents are a bad idea but still agree with a policy of having patents.
Stuart Banner has a good book out called American Property that you might like. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674058057
It is a pretty good read.
I'm on my phone so linking and such is hard but you can find a lot of discussion of IP by it folks over on groklaw - especially in the articles about the EU
Or approve of limited copyright terms, but not of a century or more.
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If it really was a simple yes or no type of situation copyright law would not be the morass it's evolved to. It's complicated just as the ownership and management of IP is frequently complicated.
It also varies from country to country - until recently (cant remember if our new copyright law passed yet ) downloading music was legal in Canada and we paid a levy on blank media as a result.
I think the biggest issue with IP law ATM is the fact that you don't actually have to invent anything in order to patent it. On top of that, you don't even have to produce anything, even if you "invented" something.
A good example is a local company here in Oklahoma...they've somehow managed to patent the process of electronically producing a survey, administering it, and reporting the results? Sound familiar? I'd imagine it does considering it's used by almost everything. Will it hold up? Maybe, maybe not, but it will cause the 30 or so companies that have been sued a financial and legal nightmare in the meantime.
As an INTP, I'm prone to think of things in black and white, but most Internet arguments tend to have black and white arguments (see the recent 'religion is bad' arguements here).
Is it fair to say that you all support IP laws, just not some of the current features of those laws
A.) Xpltvdeleted's example of the company in his home town. I think that's a great example of IP laws going horribly wrong.
B.) thejeff's point about IP needing limited terms. I think the patent/copy write should expire at the death of the inventor (or the death of a surviving spouse or when the inventor's children reach 21 - or until the children die if the children are medically disabled).
Darkwing Duck wrote: As an INTP, I'm prone to think of things in black and white, but most Internet arguments tend to have black and white arguments (see the recent 'religion is bad' arguements here).
Is it fair to say that you all support IP laws, just not some of the current features of those laws
A.) Xpltvdeleted's example of the company in his home town. I think that's a great example of IP laws going horribly wrong.
Pretty much all software and business practice patent law is about that screwed up. There are some valid patents, some of the early sound compression algorithms are a classic example, but there's also a whole lot of stuff like Xpltvdeleted's example or Amazon's One-click shopping patent. Basic simple ideas, common practice with the words "on a computer" added.
Part of the problem is lack of expertise of patent examiners and the common practice of allowing the patent and letting it be litigated, which is too expensive for all but the big companies. All the major computer companies have their own patent libraries that they cross license to each other to avoid law suits, but an upstart can be sued into the ground.
Darkwing Duck wrote: B.) thejeff's point about IP needing limited terms. I think the patent/copy write should expire at the death of the inventor (or the death of a surviving spouse or when the inventor's children reach 21 - or until the children die if the children are medically disabled). Oh, the medically disabled bit is sketchy. I can think of horrible ways to exploit that.
The original purpose of both copyright and patents was not to profit the creator indefinitely. It was to give enough protection to provide the creator with a financial incentive to create. In the US the original copyright terms were 14 years with an possible extension of another 14 years. Now it's life + 75 years or 95/120 if the creator is a corporation. I don't know about you, but the writers and programmers I know are thinking about what they're going to get in the next few years not whether their estate will still be paid 75 years after they die. That doesn't help decide whether I write the novel or get a job at Walmart.
The vast majority of work will be worth absolutely nothing 95 years from now. A tiny handful of books/music/movies from that long ago make any kind of revenue today. Software even less so. Nobody makes money on 5 year old software.
It would be an interesting approach to figure for every copyrightable medium how long it took for 95% of the revenue to come in, then set that as the base copyright term, extendable once for a fee.
Patents currently last 20 years. Copyright
All becomes rather academic once China gets a hold of it anyhow.
I don't think using the original patent and copywrite terms are a good idea. Most inventors want financial security for their families. The best way to do that is to work for a corporation. Their employers are where they, inventors, get everything from health care to disability (beyond the meager offerings of social security). Patent earnings need to be the as long as I mentioned earlier - elsewise, you're really discouraging small business. Discouraging small business is a SUPER bad idea.
Darkwing Duck wrote: I don't think using the original patent and copywrite terms are a good idea. Most inventors want financial security for their families. The best way to do that is to work for a corporation. Their employers are where they, inventors, get everything from health care to disability (beyond the meager offerings of social security). Patent earnings need to be the as long as I mentioned earlier - elsewise, you're really discouraging small business. Discouraging small business is a SUPER bad idea. I don't buy this. You don't get financial security for their families in the long term by working for a corp. You get cash up front and money to invest if you do well. You do get health care and SS. But it's not long term. They could can you tomorrow.
And even if you did get a long term monopoly for patents, there's no guarantee it'll be worth anything that far in the future. If anything's going to be that popular and that fundamental, you'll most likely have made a ton of money off it in the near term. Invest that to provide for the family.
No one starts up a small business worrying about decades down the line. It's hard enough to get through the first few years. Is someone really going to not market a good idea because it'll only bring profits for 20 years? The real value of expected gains 70 years down the line is almost nil.
And there is a benefit to society in knowledge becoming free. Patents are obvious, think generic drugs. If patent terms were as long as copyright, we'd have almost no generics. Copyright is less obvious, but the benefits still exist.
I think that IP laws have gotten to the point that they RESTRICT the creative process rather than help to incentivize creativity. Life of the patent/copyright holder should be the ABSOLUTE limit of IP laws, and they should be a lot more lenient when it comes to fair use and derivative works.
The funny, ironic thing to me is that small companies/independent artists etc. can only compete when they give their product away. Free music downloads, creative commons agreements, etc. Because these people want to do what gives them joy and make a respectable living, NOT strike it rich. They know that fandom and loyalty has been transformed by the internet, and musicians especially know that MOST of the music they're going to make is going to be for performances. The album becomes a free advertisment for their tour.
Check this out. The rest of it flows from there. Share your ideas and it will come back to you.
Are the patents of others not prohibitively costly to certain small businesses?
Copyright laws have changed drastically in just the last 20 years. They've gone from requiring creators to take steps protecting their product to assuming that product should be protected long after the creator's death. A whole new class of protected material has been created, "orphan copyrights": Works whose creators (or their heirs) can't be found.
It's a travesty.
meatrace wrote: I think that IP laws have gotten to the point that they RESTRICT the creative process rather than help to incentivize creativity. Life of the patent/copyright holder should be the ABSOLUTE limit of IP laws, and they should be a lot more lenient when it comes to fair use and derivative works. How about short fixed terms? Life of the creator could be far too short or much too long depending on circumstances. Also creates all sorts of weird incentives, up to murder to free up ideas.
Ideally, patent and copyright terms should be of different lengths in different fields. A drug, for example, might require years to test and bring to market, so more time might be needed to justify the investment, while software will be outdated long before its protection expires.
Some patents, like the little pull top lever on the tops of soda cans or the "Hercules hook" picture hanger probably draw in a small amount each year for many years.
It's just not true that parents don't think about financial security for their kids. Since some small business owners (including inventors) are parents, this means that inventors are thinking about financial security for their children. In some cases, inventions require an inventor to dig into retirement funds, college education funds (for their kids), home equity, etc. as well as spend significant amounts of time away from their family. Patent earnings lasting as long as I mentioned earlier are a fair return on investment.
The time a patent will actually get used is irrelevant. Some patents will be used for a long time, some won't. A lot of that depends on how revolutionary the patent (or copy write) is. So, the inventor's ROI is, too an extent, based on his labor.
It should be up to the inventor, not the pirate, as to whether or not he wants to give his stuff away for free to drum up a following.
Small businesses attempting to make a profit by not paying for the labor of the information worker (without the information worker's consent) is theft. My statement that laws shouldn't inhibit small business wasn't mean to include small crime business.
An example of software being used 75 years after it's creation is likely to be the data encryption standard (DES). It was created in 1979. It's derivitive, Triple DES, is expected to be secure until 1930 and is being used in MS Outlook. That's 61 years. A further derivative, extending the key length, will probably be created before then which will extend use of the algorithm.
Maybe another example will be the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Another example is likely to be the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) architecture.
It's hard to say which software patents will still be used in 75 years since computers haven't even been in widespread use for 75 years.
Darkwing Duck wrote: An example of software being used 75 years after it's creation is likely to be the data encryption standard (DES). It was created in 1979. It's derivitive, Triple DES, is expected to be secure until 1930 and is being used in MS Outlook. That's 61 years. A further derivative, extending the key length, will probably be created before then which will extend use of the algorithm.
Maybe another example will be the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Another example is likely to be the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) architecture.
It's hard to say which software patents will still be used in 75 years since computers haven't even been in widespread use for 75 years.
All of the versions of these in current use are derivatives or extension of the originals, which would get their own protection. Also, I don't think any of these were patented. Patents can actually be a handicap in the software business, since widespread adoption as a standard is usually critical.
We also should distinguish between patents and copyrights. Current law has patents around 20 years and copyright at life+75 or 95 for corps. In the computer world, patents may be useful for more than 20 years, though as I said above they'll usually be superseded before that, possibly by derivatives. Unless the software world changes dramatically, actual copyrightable implementations will be useless 95 years after the source code was written.
Darkwing Duck wrote: Some patents, like the little pull top lever on the tops of soda cans or the "Hercules hook" picture hanger probably draw in a small amount each year for many years.
It's just not true that parents don't think about financial security for their kids. Since some small business owners (including inventors) are parents, this means that inventors are thinking about financial security for their children. In some cases, inventions require an inventor to dig into retirement funds, college education funds (for their kids), home equity, etc. as well as spend significant amounts of time away from their family. Patent earnings lasting as long as I mentioned earlier are a fair return on investment.
The time a patent will actually get used is irrelevant. Some patents will be used for a long time, some won't. A lot of that depends on how revolutionary the patent (or copy write) is. So, the inventor's ROI is, too an extent, based on his labor.
It should be up to the inventor, not the pirate, as to whether or not he wants to give his stuff away for free to drum up a following.
Small businesses attempting to make a profit by not paying for the labor of the information worker (without the information worker's consent) is theft. My statement that laws shouldn't inhibit small business wasn't mean to include small crime business.
Of course people think about financial security for their kids. I never claimed otherwise.
It's just that the income from a creative work or an invention 60 years from now is a stupid thing to base that on. Regardless of patent or copyright law, you can have no idea what the distant future value of that work will be. You have to base your decisions on what you expect to be able to realize in the short term. Particularly for a small business, you have to be able to recoup your investment in a few years or you'll go out of business.
Building up the business or investing the profits and leaving them to your kids is far more effective than relying on the original idea to support them.
Again, the purpose of copyright is to give creators a financial incentive to create. Protection should last long enough to give that incentive, but not longer. Incentives based on distant future value are negligible. No one makes these kinds of business decisions based on expectations of returns decades after they die.
Patents are slightly different, since they protect the basic idea and prevent anyone else from using it, even if they develop it independently. Without patent protection, inventors would have to rely on keeping the details secret. In return for short term protection, they make those details public. There is, as I said previously, significant value in making the scientific knowledge public, so that others can build off of it. If you don't want that, keep it a trade secret.
thejeff wrote: Regardless of patent or copyright law, you can have no idea what the distant future value of that work will be. That's true of any investment. Yet, people build their retirements on investments.
thejeff wrote:
Again, the purpose of copyright is to give creators a financial incentive to create. Protection should last long enough to give that incentive, but not longer.
We agree on that. We just disagree on how long is long enough.
thejeff wrote:
Incentives based on distant future value are negligible. No one makes these kinds of business decisions based on expectations of returns decades after they die.
You assume that's true, but you don't know it to be true.
thejeff wrote:
There is, as I said previously, significant value in making the scientific knowledge public, so that others can build off of it. If you don't want that, keep it a trade secret.
The information worker who discovered that scientific knowledge should be the one to decide what happens to that scientific knowledge - whether it becomes a trade secret, a patent, a copyleft, or whatever.
thejeff wrote: All of the versions of these in current use are derivatives or extension of the originals, which would get their own protection. derivitives are protected by patents (at least by the letter of the law). Patents are for novel ideas/implementations. Derived work is not novel.
thejeff wrote: Also, I don't think any of these were patented. Patents can actually be a handicap in the software business, since widespread adoption as a standard is usually critical. RDBMS architecture is patented. DES doesn't appear to be. I have no idea about LDAP and am still seeking answers on that one.
thejeff wrote: Unless the software world changes dramatically, actual copyrightable implementations will be useless 95 years after the source code was written. We don't know that to be true. I'm researching to see if C or Assembly are patented. Both of those may end up lasting 95 years. HTML may, also, last 95 years (though I'm pretty sure HTML isn't patented).
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