Understanding Anonymous: The Culture Of Lulz

from the it's-not-an-organization dept

We've written a number of times about the not-really-a-group Anonymous, and just how little those who position themselves "against" Anonyomous understand what it is they're fighting against. But even for those who are "of internet culture," explaining just what Anonymous really is certainly can be difficult. Either you live it and you get it, or you don't. That doesn't mean that everyone who "gets" Anonymous agrees with Anonymous. Hell, even Anonymous doesn't agree with Anonymous much of the time -- which is part of the point. But for those who are used to arguing against a group or those with an established position, the entire concept of Anonymous is completely alien.

Quinn Norton is putting together what looks to be a brilliant exploration of Anonymous and related efforts. The initial piece is the best I've seen to date in encapsulating what Anonymous is. The key point? It’s a culture. And, it's a culture with a long heritage of similar efforts that many people didn't get at the time, but there's definitely a (rather non-linear, of course) relationship:

The birthplace of Anonymous is a website called 4chan founded in 2003, that developed an “anything goes” random section known as the /b/ board. 4chan itself comes from a Japanese-language predecessor called 2chan, founded in 2001. Before that, the lulz and hacker pranking was alive and well in old-school IRC chat rooms, EFnet, and the 1990s hacker scene.

But if you’re going back that far, add as influences Mondo 2000, and publications like RE/Search, and a billion shitty zines that were dead by 1996. But those all came from something, too.

Hacker culture, and almost all of computer culture back in the day is shot through with the Discordian edge of 1960/1970s counter-culture and Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus. So from there it’s the yippies, Andy Kaufmann, and the Situationists we need to first comprehend. Or do we head back to early 20th century absurdists of Dada? Or maybe we venture all the way to that olde booke of epic trolling lulze, Tristram Shandy?

We’re all the way to 1759 now.

Perhaps this means the 1960s Discordians are right, and there’s a Ha Ha Only Serious giggle that is cosmic in nature. That there is a part of reality, a force of physics, that is actually a Fundamental Sense of Humor. But the gravity we deal with can only be explained to an even larger amount of Dark Humor, woven into the fabric of the universe.

Of course, those who don't get Anonymous still won't get Anonymous after this article. In fact, they're likely to be more confused, or more sure than ever that it's "just a bunch of bratty kids" or something along those lines. And thinking that works exactly to Anonymous' favor, which is part of the joke, in which everyone is the punchline.

Filed Under: anonymous, culture, history, lulz

The First Recorded Evidence Of A Prank Phone Call: 1884 Phone Calls Summoning Undertakers

from the i'm-not-dead-yet dept

This is kind of awesome. Paul Collins, know as The Literary Detective, recently noted that he had unearthed what he believed might be the first recorded evidence of a prank phone call... made in 1884. Here's the newspaper report: If you can't read it, the important part says:

A GRAVE JOKE ON UNDERTAKERS -- Some malicious wag at Providence R.I. has been playing a grave practical joke on the undertakers there, by summoning them over the telephone to bring freezers, candlesticks and coffin for persons alleged to be dead. In each case the denoument was highly farcical, and the reputed corpses are now hunting in a lively manner for that telephonist.

Ah, the kids those days...

Filed Under: history, prank calls

Email Is 40 Years Old

from the 40-years-young dept

For a few years now, we've been joking about how email is for old people. Studies have increasingly been showing that the younger generation prefers text messaging, instant messaging and various social networking private message systems to good old fashioned email. So it's worth noting that sometime this month, email apparently turned 40 years old. So perhaps it's showing its age, which is why the kids today don't bother with it.

Filed Under: email, history

Radio Is Killing Music

from the by-special-permission-of-the-copyright-owner dept

Someone going by the name of "quickbrownfox" sent over a link to a delightful rendition of the song "By Special Permission of the Copyright Owner," by Smith Ballew, which you can listen to below: I'd never heard the song, but the specificity of the phrase, and the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with copyright -- other than mentioning that phrase -- immediately sent me searching for more info on the phrase and the song. It turns out that it's from the Broadway show, "The Gang's All Here," which was apparently a total flop (23 performances). According to the notes on another rendition of the song the show tanked in part because the star of the show would come out and warn the audience that the script was horrible, and the show should have been a revue, rather than a "book show." That version of the song has a few more lyrics at the beginning, which provide another clue to the oddity of the lyrics. It starts out saying:

Every time a radio is playing
they're saying...
"and next... you will hear us play
something with the publisher's okay."
Listening to this great announcer trilling
this thrilling...
new text!
Told me what to do
Try this very notion out on you...

And from there it breaks into the same lyrics in the first version above. So we're a step closer to understanding the details of the phrase. And then... I found this fantastic Time Magazine article from August of 1932 that explains how the music industry was dying because of radio, and that our friends at ASCAP required radio stations to not just get permission to play any song on radio, but also to make the statement that was the title of that song, with "no facetious trifling":

The American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers is Tin Pan Alley's clearing house. Its 800 composer & publisher-members own the copyrights to nearly all the music composed in the U. S. since 1914. It is affiliated with similar societies abroad. To many radio listeners and broadcasters the phrase "by special permission of the copyright owners" has been irksome. A. S. C. A. & P. used to insist upon it, permitting no facetious trifling with the announcement. Lately, however, it lifted this requirement. Most of its songs may be performed without special permission, but a number are restricted, for example musical comedy songs which the producers do not wish to be too soon familiarized.

That's ASCAP. Pissing people off for nearly a century. But what was a lot more entertaining about the article was the paragraph above this, in which it seemed to suggest that radio was absolutely killing music. Stop me if you've heard this before, but the refrain may be familiar:

Tin Pan Alley is sadly aware that Radio has virtually plugged up its oldtime outlets, sheet music and gramophone discs. The average music publisher used to get $175,000 a year from disc sales. He now gets about 10% of this. No longer does a song hit sell a million copies. The copious stream of music poured out by Radio puts a song quickly to death. The average song's life has dwindled from 18 months to 90 days; composers are forced to turn out a dozen songs a year instead of the oldtime two or three.

Has there ever been a time, ever, in which the music industry's established players weren't complaining about the industry dying?

Filed Under: history, music, radio

New UK Banknote Celebrates James Watt, Patent Bully and Monopolist

from the litigation-is-easier-than-innovation dept

As do many nations, England likes to put images of its great and good on banknotes. In a somewhat quixotic attempt to stem the decline of what little manufacturing remains in the country, the governor of the Bank of England has come up with the following idea:

Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has often voiced his yearning for a "rebalancing" of the economy towards neglected manufacturing, and he will put the nation's money where his mouth is next month when the Bank produces a new £50 note celebrating two pioneers of the industrial revolution.

The Bank will evoke the memory of the inventor James Watt and his Birmingham business partner, Matthew Boulton on the new note.

Here's the orthodoxy regarding Watt and Boulton's contribution to innovation and the industrial revolution, as retold by the Guardian piece about the new banknotes:

[Boulton] later went into partnership with James Watt, who took the Newcomen steam engine, then the latest design, and made a series of crucial improvements, improving its efficiency and making it more commercial.

By 1800, Watt's version [of the Newcomen steam engine] was outselling its predecessor, and they were shipping it across the world. Boulton and Watt worked together to pioneer the use of the steam engine in the cotton spinning industry; and Boulton also used Watt's engine to power minting machines, pressing coins at his Soho Mint in Birmingham, to boost the supply provided by the Royal Mint.

What's missing from this rosy picture of jolly engineers and entrepreneurs working together to apply technology for the benefit of humanity is that Watt was one of the first to exploit the monopoly power of patents to stymie innovation by others:

Once Watt's patents were secured and production started, a substantial portion of his energy was devoted to fending off rival inventors. In 1782, Watt secured an additional patent, made "necessary in consequence of ... having been so unfairly anticipated, by [Matthew] Wasborough in the crank motion". More dramatically, in the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after him with the full force of the legal system.

During the period of Watt's patents the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt's patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt's patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.

After the expiration of Watt's patents, not only was there an explosion in the production and efficiency of engines, but steam power came into its own as the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. Over a thirty year period steam engines were modified and improved as crucial innovations such as the steam train, the steamboat and the steam jenny came into wide usage. The key innovation was the high-pressure steam engine — development of which had been blocked by Watt's strategic use of his patent. Many new improvements to the steam engine, such as those of William Bull, Richard Trevithick, and Arthur Woolf, became available by 1804: although developed earlier these innovations were kept idle until the Boulton and Watt patent expired.

So rather than representing all that is best about invention and industrial innovation, the story of Watt and Boulton turns out to be one of how the nascent patent system was abused to prevent progress in this field. Indeed, it offers one of the best demonstrations that patents often harm everyone – even patent-holders:

Ironically, not only did Watt use the patent system as a legal cudgel with which to smash competition, but his own efforts at developing a superior steam engine were hindered by the very same patent system he used to keep competitors at bay. An important limitation of the original Newcomen engine was its inability to deliver a steady rotary motion. The most convenient solution, involving the combined use of the crank and a flywheel, relied on a method patented by James Pickard, which prevented Watt from using it. Watt also made various attempts at efficiently transforming reciprocating into rotary motion, reaching, apparently, the same solution as Pickard. But the existence of a patent forced him to contrive an alternative less-efficient mechanical device, the "sun and planet" gear. It was only in 1794, after the expiration of Pickard's patent that Boulton and Watt adopted the economically and technically superior crank.

As such, Watt and Boulton's appearance on the new £50 banknote is not so much a celebration of engineering excellence, as a timely reminder of the harm that patents and their thickets continue to wreak on true innovators today.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: currency, history, james watt, patents, steam engine, uk

Article About 'The Menace Of The Software Pirates' From 1985

from the and-that's-why-there's-no-UK-software-industry dept

ChurchHatesTucker points us to an article from Electronic Games Magazine from 1985, available via Archive.org, entitled Menace of the Software Pirates. You might notice that much of the article sounds familiar. My favorite part is where they explain that there's no software coming out of the UK, because of the fact that "piracy has flourished unchecked" in the UK and now "no company wants to spend time and money creating an innovative program knowing full well that the better it turns out, the greater the likelihood that the vultures will rip it off." Uh huh. In the meantime, special thanks to the folks who violated certain copyrights to help preserve this article for posterity...

This kind of article really does demonstrate the old adage, "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Though it's also quite noteworthy that the article highlights some software companies who believe that there are better ways to fight infringement than using DRM. It highlights two alternative strategies: the first is adding additional bells and whistles to the packaging, including various scarcities. The second is by being nice: actively resisting DRM, letting consumers know that, having a really strong replacement policy and keeping prices reasonable. Of course, these are the kinds of strategies that folks are suggesting again today, but which most software firms still seem resistant to embrace. Those who don't understand history may be condemned to repeat it... and without a little copyright infringement to preserve this piece, perhaps we wouldn't even know about that history.

Filed Under: history, software, software piracy

The Many Killers Of The Music Industry: The Digital Era

from the the-bigger-they-are-the-louder-they-bitch dept

Welcome to the second half of our rather longwinded look at the attempted industriacide committed by various music formats over the years. Part two concerns itself with the Digital Era, an era that started with the introduction of the CD, which was hailed by the industry as the "savior of the music business," right up until someone had the bright idea of "releasing" CDs with nothing on them. Read on... 

Compact Discs
If LPs and cassettes were the show ponies of the media race, the “CD” (or “See Dee”) was Manowar, Secretariat and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s horses rolled into one.

Popular, cheap to produce and yet another format to gouge completists with, the CD had it all. Distribution cost? $0. Paid out of the artists’ royalties. Production costs? Studio time? Blow? Free. All paid for by the artists. Plastic, paper, ink – all cheap. Lots and lots and lots of profit.

The music industry responded to their incredible fortune the way any short-sighted leviathan would: by steadily increasing prices. Soon customers were paying $19 for one good song and 11 shitty ones. On top of that, the new format ran 20-25 minutes longer than the LP, leading many bands to pack their albums with filler their drummer wrote. Finally, after so many other formats repeatedly “killing the music industry,” they had found a savior in a nice, cheap plastic disc.

But there was trouble on the horizon. The twin specters of “used CDs” and “blank CDs” soon cast a shadow over the hookers and blow purchased with its ill-gotten gains.

The first, “used CDs,” was decried by artists as disparate and incredibly wealthy as Garth Brooks (68 million albums sold) and Chris Gaines (1.1 million albums traded in at used CD stores). They now demanded to be reimbursed every time the album changed hands, claiming that purchasing music in this format subjected you to a vague and ever-shifting contract, filled with more rule changes than a drinking game.

The other, “blank CDs,” when combined with affordable CD writers, shoved a slightly-battered industry towards the edge of a long flight of stairs. The industry responded with more built-in fees and cries of “Home burning is killing music.” This cry was misinterpreted by various local fire departments and indie-leaning arsonists, who both quickly sprung into counterproductive action.

MiniDisc
Having learned nothing from its “Betamax” experiment, Sony forged ahead with a boldly miscalculated attempt to corner a non-existent market with the MiniDisc. Like a CD, only smaller, more easily lost/damaged and handcuffed to Sony hardware, the MiniDisc never had a chance.

Sony once again walked away empty-handed from the R&D roulette table, having shown only that early adopters will buy anything as long as it’s shiny and prohibitively expensive. Its ability to record music onto the midget-sized discs threatened to destroy the music industry, or at least kick it a little when it was safely down. The music industry responded to this pint-sized miscreant with “Awwww. The little guy’s trying to say something” and slapped it with some punitive fees.

mp3
Not content to be merely a threat to the entire music industry, the mp3′s storage-friendly compression rate and ultra-portability did what no other medium had, and actually destroyed the music industry. The music industry was now truly “fuckt,” as Mozart had so aptly put it millions of years ago. Its Rasputin-like longevity was threatened as was its Rasputin-like propensity for evil behavior. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry with an eMachine could download and dump hundreds of pirated songs onto jump drives, mp3 players and CDs with absolutely no physical effort. And, thanks to the major labels and their years of price gouging, no one was troubled in the least to see them limping into port covered in pirate wounds.

Soon the good ship “Outdated Industry” was leaking money from a million tiny holes. So-called “experts”, in the guise of lawyers and yes-men, were consulted. They all agreed on two things:

1. Something should be done at some vague point in the future.
2. Someone should be sued.

It summoned Dark Elf Lars Ulrich to attack the face of international music piracy: a certain Shawn Fanning. Coming off their most successful album to date, Metallica forged ahead in (self-)righteous indignation, alienating an entire generation of potential fans. With Napster on the ropes, the recording industry went from barn to barn to verify that all the horses were indeed missing and methodically began slamming shut door after door.

A nation of tweens and octogenarians were summoned to court and threatened with usurious fines for downloading/uploading “Happy Birthday” and other such top 40 songs. Kazaa watched in horror as its user base (which numbered in the dozens) was swept into lawsuit after lawsuit. Meanwhile, malware creators watched in horror as their remaining victims lost their internet privileges and a great deal of money, both being very key components of their continued success.

Other high-dollar performers got into the act. Madonna seeded file sharers with mp3s of her asking, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Most pirates found this immensely preferable to her second-rate electronica and occasional British accent. Alicia Silverstone hastened her irrelevance by appearing in magazine ads reminding people that stealing mp3s was exactly like stealing cars, a move that upped the “cool” factor of file sharing to the Nth degree. The youth of the world, properly chastened, switched from P2P to torrents, in essence moving from joyriding to Gone in 60 Seconds.

As the industry bled out, it summoned its archangel, Bono, to appear in the “paper of record,” flatly stating that America needed to follow the lead of Communist China and track every piece of information travelling the internet. This was met with sneers of derision and cries of “Fuck you, Bono! Find some other way to finance your malfunctioning electro-lemons!”

Panicked lawsuits filled countless courtrooms and lined countless corporate lawyers’ pockets. Bills for "lost revenue" were presented to anyone who acknowledged that “music” existed. Everyone and anyone was asked to “give until it hurts,” in order to prop up a sagging multi-billion dollar industry. No one was spared. YouTube, bloggers, Girl Scouts, mom & pop stores, animal shelters, cop shops, hotels, bars and nightclubs all became notches on rent-seeking industry’s bedpost.

Nothing stopped the bleeding. The mighty mp3, victorious over King Music(k), waved its variable bit rate triumphantly, zipped itself into a compacted file and hid itself amongst the overstuffed shelves of Mediafire, RapidShare and Megaupload.

The "Cloud"
The industry wasn't done being killed yet, despite the best efforts of a new compression format. The latest and greatest thing to change the music scene was something referred to euphemistically as "the cloud." Now this "the cloud" wasn't so much "little" and "fluffy" like the clouds Rickie Lee Jones sued about so many years ago, but rather an unpicturesque rack of redundant servers. With Amazon taking the lead and Google following shortly thereafter, music fans now had a new and ultra-portable way to enjoy their music. 

The labels and various rights groups were none too pleased as these new "clouds" rolled out. The performance rights groups indicated that it was really only interested in one kind of "streaming": that of money into their pockets. The major labels declared this to be a violation of its unwritten end-user agreement, which didn't allow for music that could be accessed anywhere at any time. "Music wasn't meant to be portable," it bitched. "After all, it never has been before," it said as it looked back fondly on the heady days of cassettes, CDs, 8-tracks and MiniDiscs.

While no lawsuits have been filed yet, it can only be a matter of time before the shambling, corpse-like music industry attempts to sue Amazon, Google, et al into the Stone Age, musically speaking. Its only hope now is to return to the days before music could be carried around like so many photos on an SD card, a golden era when listening to music meant purchasing an ultra-expensive, hand-cranked phonograph, whose incredible heft required a team of child laborers to install.

So, as Big Music limps into the future, cursing the whole way, unsteadily clutching its Congressional life support system, music lovers can be sure of one thing: behind every technological step forward, there's an irate record exec dying (not literally, of course) to take everyone two steps back.

Filed Under: history, music industry

The Many Killers Of The Music Industry: The Analog Era

from the all-industry-killer,-no-filler dept

The music industry has been around for as long as anyone cares to remember, and not for a lack of trying. Industry killer after industry killer has taken a shot at bringing down this mighty foe, but it still continues to limp along, bitterly writing most of the internet community out of its will. With this two-part post, separated between the Analog Era (or "Golden Age") and the digital era (or "the Apocalypse"), we take a closer look at this rogue's gallery of stone cold killers, each one less successful than the last.

Formative Years
Ever since the early cavemen looked for ways to “punch up” their stories of the Coelacanth that “got away,” man (and occasionally, woman) has expressed himself through music.

Progress was minimal during the next several thousand to several million years (depending on religious beliefs). It wasn't until a young composer named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart burst on to the scene that music was finally invented.

No sooner had Mozart invented music than he began to reinvent it through inappropriate hairstyles, setting his harpsichord on fire during live performances and marrying various 13-year-old cousins. His wild behavior and manic giggling led to him being credited with “singlehandedly destroying the music industry,” thus undoing all of the groundwork laid by him just earlier that afternoon.

After destroying the music industry, Mozart began to rebuild it, this time with him safely on the inside. After another manic, flaming performance, Mozart gazed into his piles of money and made an eerily prescient remark — “If ever there doth become an effortless way to perform these musicks at home, I am truly fuckt.”

Mozart relentlessly campaigned for protection of his musical ideas, which led to sheet music being horded by royalty, in order to protect their patronized income stream. However, as the price of paper, ink and quills continued to drop, an underground group of transcriptionists began distributing “copied” sheet music. A legislative effort to build so-called "royalty" fees into the price of these items had little effect on early "pirates" and Mozart was often seen hawking waistcoats embroidered with the inscription, “Verily, home transcribing is killing the musick industry.”

Fun fact: Emperor Joseph II was an avid home transcriptionist. His famous remark that Mozart’s music had “too many notes” was not a critique of the piece but rather a complaint about the pending transcription, as he was suffering from a case of “pirate’s elbow.”

Bedroom Composers
Flash forward 50 years: innovations in mass production make musical instruments more affordable than ever. Soon every saloon, bawdy house and tenement has a minimum of one piano. And it’s not just piano companies that see a boost. Manufacturers of harpsichords, claviers, pipe organs and fiddles see exponential growth.

Advances in movable press technology allow sheets of music to be reproduced faster than ever. Early ASCAP pioneers bemoan these developments and attempt to collect performance royalties from bar owners and burlesque house pimps. Even homeowners are subjected to handwritten missives declaring them responsible for “rights and royalties for performance of popular musicks.” The singing telegram industry folds thanks to the crippling fees levied against them.

The Player Piano
As the 19th century wound itself down, another breakthrough in musical entertainment surfaced in the form of the Player Piano (or Auto Pianist), a piano that amazingly “played” itself using perforated paper. (This form of “musick” would later resurface rather noisily in dot-matrix printers.)

Bawdy house proprietors and saloon owners benefited greatly from this invention, firing their drunken, incompetent piano players and replacing them with slightly less drunken and dimwitted paper-loaders (usually an unattended child). The tireless tones of the Mechano-Piano were the soundtrack of the “Gay ’90s” and the less-unfortunately named “Nondescript Aughts.” As usual, this new invention, with its user-friendliness and low-cost, was saddled with the burden of “destroying the musick industry, starting with the extraneous ‘k’.”

Records
The invention of the phonograph by multiple people (and its resulting patent suits) proved to be the “death blow” for the music industry, with its ability to reproduce the sound of a miniature, tinny band playing in your anteroom. No longer could people be expected to leave the house to simply hear music and the resulting struggle for market share saw tours bloom into full-blown juggernauts of light, sound and outdoor toilets.

The record brought music to the masses in a handy 12″ or smaller package, which most men found non-threatening and women found non-overwhelming. These flat discs could hold more than 20 minutes of music per “side” and were played via a “stylus” or “needle” when not being used to sort seeds and stems.

Due to its multiple formats and speeds, the record had something for everyone, from Jethro Tull 4-disc opuses to Flexi-discs from local punk bands whom no one other than the band members ever cared about. The record seemed to be the zenith of home audio. However, a change was coming, much like the prophet Bob Dylan warned, and the musical media landscape would never be the same.

Fun fact: Audiophiles still cite the medium’s “warmth” and “crackliness” as preferable to those formats that don’t make your music sound like it’s being performed in a fireplace.

8-Track
During the mid-’60s, the music industry added another “horse” (and possible "industry killer") to the race: a three-legged Clydesdale called the 8-Track. Its peculiar formatting and general hideousness did nothing to endear it to the general population and its reputation was further harmed by its performance in auto-reverse decks, where changing from Side A to Side B resulted in a violent action that registered in the low 5′s on the Richter Scale and frequently left small children and pets dazed and bleeding.

Perhaps sensing that this format would never achieve the success of vinyl or sheet musick, the music labels altered their distribution scheme and began shipping 8-tracks directly to swap meet vendors and pawn shop owners.

Cassettes
Highly touted by everyone (but audiophiles) as more “portable” than records, if slightly less useful, the cassette soon proved to be the “medium of the people.” Blank cassettes, in particular, had universal appeal as even novices could record their bulky records or capture “streaming audio” via the radio. They could then give these “tapes” to anybody, including friends, family and that chick they were trying to score with.

Widely hailed as the “death of the music industry,” cassettes soon became a ubiquitous feature of shoulder-mounted boomboxes, which were replaced with slightly less spine-maiming Walkmans. The Walkman also added a headphone jack, thus allowing the user to keep their shitty music to themselves while blocking out your stream of obscenities as they repeatedly roller-skated over your foot.

Despite cassettes and home taping having been fingered for “killing the music industry,” (usually in the form of t-shirts, bumper stickers and PSAs), the music industry enjoyed the monetary reward of having three “horses” in the race, not to mention the royalty fee levied on blank cassettes (aka, The Hissing Killer).

Stay tuned (ha! that's probably some sort of radio joke!) for the thrilling conclusion of this breathtaking series, overdramatically titled "Part 2".

Filed Under: history, music industry

The Anachronism Of Today's Patent And Copyright Laws

from the time-to-rethink-them dept

Glyn Moody points us to an interesting post from South African lawyer Andrew Rens discussing how copyright and patent laws are strange legal anachronisms, with little actual basis, similar to the tradition of lawyers in British Commonwealth countries having to wear black robes to court:

In an important but too often overlooked essay entitled 'Intellectual Property Institutions and Panda's Thumbs' economist Paul David likened intellectual property arrangements to the thumb of the Giant Panda. The "thumb" is not a digit at all but an enlarged sesamoid bone which does enable panda’s to grasp but is mechanically limited and inefficient. David explains that copyright and patent are not carefully calibrated mechanisms for encouraging innovation in modern economies but as ill-suited contraptions. Patents and copyright have been developed from the privilegi granted by mercantilist cities in Renaissance Italy, and letters-patent wielded in patronage politics by putative absolute monarchs. The result David notes is that copyright and patent are “a mixture of the intended and unintended consequences of an undirected historical process on which the the varied interests of many parties, acting at different points (some widely separated in time and space) have left an enduring mark.”

Contemporary discourse on the "Knowledge Economy" often suggests that patent and copyright are unquestioningly appropriate amongst Moore’s Law, network effects, cDNA and nanobots. Its worth asking though whether they make any more sense than African lawyers sweltering in black robes, suits and ties in stifling (non air conditioned) court rooms.

I'd never heard of the Paul David essay, so I looked it up and you can download a copy online (unfortunately, it's a Microsoft Word doc). It's a worthwhile read:

In short, with regard to the major structural features of the institutions of intellectual property protection, one might as well accept that modern economic analysis offers little basis for resisting the conclusion that the industrial societies of the West remain "prisoners" of our particular history. It is all too easy to miss that main message by allowing oneself to be carried away with the style of intricate economic analysis characteristic of the modern literature devoted to the problem of the optimum length and scope of patent protection, or the optimum degree to which copyright should be enforced; and especially with the efforts to be more conclusive, and construct "positive" theories exposing the economic rationales of this or that particular aspect of present-day legal institutions. By focusing selectively upon specific and arresting features of the structure of protections afforded to intellectual property, and pointing to their putatively favorable consequences for social efficiency in resource allocation, a misleading impression can be conveyed that the law in this area is susceptible to easy and rapid reshaping for the purposes of enhancing economic welfare.

The paper goes into the history of patent laws, and how they were initially driven for a very different purpose -- mainly for certain countries to get access to the knowledge of other countries. That is, they would entice people with knowledge of certain industries in other countries to move, and in exchange they'd give them a monopoly. It also explains that the whole claim that early patents were about "disclosing" ideas is a "social contrivance" by modern patent system supporters -- not realizing any of the early efforts at "disclosure" were solely for countries to get inventions from other countries "disclosed" so local industries could be built up. But the key point is that our modern patent system is really just a continuation and modification of those earlier systems, with the claims that it's about encouraging innovation also being a later whitewashing of history to make them acceptable in modern society. The lack of any economic evidence that these laws actually encourage innovation is pretty problematic for patent system supporters.

Both the blog post above and the original paper it's based on are excellent reads.

Of course, when you then put it into context with this other article, by Stefan Larsson noting that copyright suffers from a path dependency, wherein historical choices lock us into future paths, it makes things even clearer. Choices made hundreds of years ago for very different reasons have more or less "locked" us into today's laws, even though nearly all of the economic research refutes the idea that either of the laws as put in place today function to serve the official purposes behind them. Yet, all of the legacy infrastructure built up around them -- and the massive industries that benefit greatly from the laws -- means that getting out of that path dependency is seen as a non-starter to many, despite the massive social and economic costs.

Filed Under: anachronism, copyright, history, patents