Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

locusmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 126 posts

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#81

Post by fabianhjr »

breck wrote: post #41
bscphil wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

If you believe that #ImaginaryProperty makes any sense at all I've got some "Dry Water" to sell you.

> Dry water, an unusual form of "powdered liquid", is a water–air emulsion in which tiny water droplets, each the size of a grain of sand, are surrounded by a sandy silica coating.[1] Dry water actually consists of 95% liquid water, but the silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a bulk liquid.[2] The result is a white powder that looks very similar to table salt. It is also more commonly known among researchers as empty water. ~ https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dry_water

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#82

Post by pdonis »

LexGray wrote: post #62
pdonis wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

So any information... Say human DNA, is free to copy if you shed your hair somewhere?

In our current legal system, yes, you don't have any property rights over pieces of your DNA that you unavoidably leave all over the place as you go about your life.

Do you think we should? If so, how would you go about enforcing such rights?

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#83

Post by dnautics »

bawolff wrote: post #79
pdonis wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

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 di…

Just fyi- I think you mean rivalrousness, not scarcity, they're not exactly the same, and edge cases where they are similar but one is mistreated as the other have historically had serious consequences.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#84

Post by kmeisthax »

II2II wrote: post #17
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

Software copyright was an absolute mistake that fundamentally misunderstood the delicate balances between copyright owners, the market for creative works, and the public at large. I have no faith in Congress to fix it.

Keep in mind that copyright also enables free software. Without it, there would be no incentive to share source code since there would be no mechanism to stipulate that modified versions must be shared. That would significantly diminish the role of collaboration and significantly increase the role of opportunism. It is also worth noting that copyright increases the financial incentive to progress the state of the art…

Yes, you can use software copyright to prohibit object-only releases, but that doesn't necessarily mean that software copyright is helping. In fact, once software copyright became the norm, there was a huge disincentive to publish source. After all, why would you do that when you can withhold the source to prevent unauthorized modification of your work? Effectively, using a compiler is the software equivalent of encoding your movie with DRM.

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#85

Post by b0rsuk »

eReaders seem to be dying as a hardware device and becoming merely a form of DRM. Newest models, inluding all Kobo readers, have a soldered SD memory card. And it's not just cutting costs. They're deeply bothered by your ability to copy books and various text files to the device you paid for. Memory cards fail. eReaders are now essentially hardware Steam browsers, or book consoles. You can only load books from a store.

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#86

Post by rhn_mk1 »

onethought wrote: post #56
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Th point of knowledge is being able to make use of it - express it. If knowlege cannot be legally expressed, it's useless and not really yours.

It's not useless, knowledge grows with related knowledge, I take your company's top secret spaceship fusion warp drive knowledge and build a terrestrial power plant that uses that technology to create free electricity... I expressed it differently so I didn't breach any IP rights you had. This kind of stuff happens all the time... Patents, are where this gets frustrating, where I can register a bunch of "expressions"…

I think that argument gets stuck on language. "Knowledge" is not a single, atomic thing. If I have warp drive "knowledge" that has been claimed by someone else, then there are two non-mutually-exclusive options:

- 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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#87

Post by sriku »

> """ It’s not just DRM. Take “Goldman Sans,” a free font released by the finance giant and global supervil­lain Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sans is a copyrighted work, and it comes with a copyright license that you “agree” to when you download the font. Among the license terms for Goldman Sans is a non-disparage­ment clause – that is, a clause that prohibits you from criticizing Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs doesn’t need copyright law to prevent people from copying its font. It gives the font away for free. Goldman Sachs needs copyright law so it can boss people around – so it can tell them what they may (and may not) say."""

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.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#88

Post by Qwertious »

NobodyNada wrote: post #19
onethought wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well? 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.

> Books do the same thing 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 be…

Fun fact: the Kindle Store doesn't sell the actual ability to access the books, as piracy does that just fine. They don't sell the ability to pay the author, as you can mail the author $20 just fine (and perfectly legally).

So what do they sell you? Well, legal legitimacy and possibly convenience.

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#89

Post by sriku »

kstrauser wrote: post #52

I think intellectual property should be taxed as are other properties and assets. This would seem to have the nice side effect of setting a monetary value in IP lawsuits. If you declare that your property is worth $X when you file taxes, you couldn’t really argue that it’s worth $10X when suing over violations of it. And frankly, I think IP should be taxed since holders rely on the government to protect it. If I have…

Isn't it the case that the use of IP generates wealth which is taxed anyway? So wouldn't that amount to a kind of double taxation?

Re: Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

#90

Post by Proven »

> To make your software “free” is to promise that its users will have freedom – as the saying goes, code is “free as in speech” even if it’s not necessarily “free as in beer.”

That's simply untrue. Everyone knows that copyleft licenses disallow certain forms of free speech (with code), for example the GPL 3.0. In fact the GPL 3.0 was designed specifically with the intent to constrain the "excessive" liberties allowed by the GPL 2.0 (which isn't very permissive to begin with).

If you want to make your code free, release it to Public Domain. Copyleft proponents pretend they're above the detested capitalists and IP enforcement but in reality they use "IP" to enforce their agenda just like all other people who license their IP under non-permissive licenses.

Post reply on HN