> Now, free software advocates – and free culture advocates – hate the term “intellectual property.” The argument against IP rails against its imprecision and its rhetorical dishonesty.
Now?
Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
71–80 of 126 posts
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
A single company owning and having their fingers in everything from search engines, operating systems, phone and laptop hardware, self-driving cars, payment platforms, online shopping platforms, cloud computing platforms and a myriad of other things. I'm of the opinion no single entity should be allowed to be in control of so many things.
No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search. 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?
> No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search.
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.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither the government nor the State function like a company nor do they have the same incentives or goals.
Yes they are worse, they're practically untouchable. The delusion is that we've all convinced ourselves that some 4-5 yearly cycle popular voting system actually gives us any control whatsoever. 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…
An alternative explanation for the these discussions is that not everyone agrees with your position, nor thinks that a small(er) government would be helpful for society.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples of where it is not?
Can't speak to other countries but I know in NZ you're not allowed legally to rip DVDs or blurays you own (even just for private use, no distribution intended). The copyright act is structured with a whitelist of permissible format shifts, and while CDs made it onto that list, movie discs didn't.
Surely you can still resell and loan the physical CD/DVD though, which is what's being discussed here as universally legal? I think ripping DVDs would be seen as equivalent to photocopying a book.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search. 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?
> No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search. 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 co…
> 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.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#76The "paradise lost" story of a "free state of nature" in software prior to 1980 only seems to come up in writings of free software people. The more I read other sources, the more that seems romantic, even nostalgic. And frankly academic, as in "endemic to college students".
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.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're willing to connect the dots in this way, where anything that gives you legal authority to control the conduct of others (competitors, critics, customers) in specific ways is "abusive", then you should realize that this sort of argument is very easily extended, because that's exactly what all property does. Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs…
> It's effectively the same concept, just extended. 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 co…
It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable. For example, many people can hunt in a large forest at the same time or fish the same giant lake, and enjoy its outputs in an effectively non-rivalrous way. (This changes if we shift from rod-and-reel fishing to nets and boats, of course.)
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#78This is an excellent article; as always, Cory Doctorow succinctly and perceptively cuts to the core of the matter. 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 attemp…
I was with you for the first few paragraphs. 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.
Oh dear, one has to so literal on posts these days. We were talking IP/software here - so 'poduction' here refers to software/organization. The WWII analogy/link has to do with what's possible if the country really tries - or has its back to the wall as it does now!
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.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're willing to connect the dots in this way, where anything that gives you legal authority to control the conduct of others (competitors, critics, customers) in specific ways is "abusive", then you should realize that this sort of argument is very easily extended, because that's exactly what all property does. Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs…
> It's effectively the same concept, just extended. 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 co…
Well i agree generally, the parent did not make reference to the scarcity of physical 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.
Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's effectively the same concept, just extended. 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 co…
It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable. For example, many people can hunt in a large forest at the same time or fish the same giant lake, and enjoy its outputs in an effectively non-rivalrous way. (This changes if we shift from rod-and-reel fishing to nets and boats, of course.)
> It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable.
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".