A proposal for harmonizing copyright and patent law
I've decided that the phrase "intellectual property" is an example of Newspeak, and except in quoting others or casting scorn on the notion that state-granted monopolies constitute "property", will not use the phrase henceforth.
As to harmonizing copyright and patent law, I have a simple proposal: let the whole world adopt as a uniform standard the Law of Queen Anne (14 years copyright, extendable at the request of the author, not the author's publisher, not a literary estate, the author, period, for another 14 years), and an update of the original modern patent law, the Statute on Monopolies of 1624.
Maybe Techdirt and those of us who post comments, except when quoting others, should stop using the phrase "intellectual property" entirely, or at least always include scorn quotes. The phrase has always been Newspeak, a phrase the very utterance of which is a lie in service of those on power.
What is called "intellectual property" is not property, but a government-granted monopoly. Yes, there is, perhaps, social utility in granting such a monopoly (the American Founders thought so, for a limited time, to authors and inventors), but it is still a government-granted monopoly.
Odd though it seems, to the extent that "Lady Gaga" can be said to have participated in artistic creation, it is primarily her image -- very much a work of artifice if not of art -- that she has created. That said, I think she is right in her intent to use copyright to grant herself exclusive rights to her image. This would not be the case for celebrities or persons in general whose image is not in itself a creative work.
Can anyone explain to us why there is not already a high-profile 4th Amendment lawsuit lodged by any of the ACLU, a right-of-center pro bono legal organization, the Airline Pilots Association or some trade or industry group representing either business travelers or tourism, seeking an immediate injunction against these procedures as unreasonable searches without probable cause?
Alas, the SouthButt precedent in which American trademark judges proved the don't know neither the difference between a face and a butt nor the directions of the compass suggests that evil may triumph in this case as well.
Thor? Too cute by half. I hope you realize that while some folks who call themselves monotheists may be one-god pagans, the ones you really have to engage in debate agree with you that there are no beings of the sort pagans called "gods" (we Christians were persecuted by the Romans on the charge of atheism), rather, we are firmly convinced that the ground-of-all-being, while absolutely transcendent, and properly unlike anything in our ordinary experience, is in some improper way more like a person than any other sort of thing, and ought be related to personally.
If you want evidence for our position aside from the testimony of ancient texts, I would suggest that fact that the world is most well-described by mathematics suggests a kinship between the reason for existence and a mind.
Now, some of us are also firmly convinced on the basis of events in the ancient Near East, that the ground-of-all-being (the Existing-One as he named Himself in the ancient texts you so scorn) transcends the distinction between unity and multiplicity, being at once the One God and the All-Holy Trinity, went to the trouble of assuming our nature in the person of the Son to fix the rather wretched relationship we'd vis-a-vis that same ground-of-all-being we'd gotten ourselves into (the technical name for which is "sin"), and so forth. But that is neither here nor there in considering the proposition "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
(Incidentally, I know you're not a Thor-worshipper. If you were you'd attribute the creation to Odin, Vili and Ve, who slew Ymir and fashioned the world out of his body. It's all there in the Eddas.)
Oh,dear I'm so depressed! We find an earthlike planet and then it's not there. The inhabitants must have blown the planet to smithereens with nukes just in time for us to see the planet before it was gone. The big filter is in the future, not the past, and we're all doomed!
I'm not actually serious. The real point is that the "100% certainty of life" on a planet is as silly a position as the one I feigned in the previous paragraph.
It seems to me that the urge to put up paywalls was created by content providers having tried to be too clever by half in selling online advertising, resulting in online advertising becoming if not worthless, at least worth less as a revenue source. The urge to get more revenue by having ads be adaptive (before installing AdBlockPlus, I'd get ads for Kansas businesses when reading The Times, since I'm reading it in Kansas, not London), in fact, had the opposite effed: it allows ad blocking software to easily detect and suppress advertising, since it's being inserted dynamically. So, online advertising is less valuable than paper advertising, since you can't be sure the reader will see it, and advertisers expect to pay less for it as a result.
If news sites just "typeset" the advertisements as part of the html for the page, they will be seen--and advertisers will in short order realize this. No, The Times won't get revenue from Kansas advertisers, but it would get more from British advertisers who know that when the page loads, their ad will load and be seen by readers.
Of course, a paywall for premium content, esp. coupled with the return to old-style advertising I advocated above, probably works as a business model. If the online version of the newspaper were available for free, but extra, say multimedia or super-indepth, news content were behind a reasonably priced paywall (cf. The Wall Street Journal), esp. if besides subscribing, one could get the content on a pay-per-view, or better pay-per-download, basis, people would pay.
It is becoming increasingly clear that if ACTA is adopted and ratified in anything like the form we hear coming out of the negotiations, "piracy" in the digital sense will become a morally legitimate act of civil disobedience against tyranny, at least for those of us in the U.S., where the Constitutional justification for patent and copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Deliberately flouting the chop-logic distinction between parody and satire in derivative works (as reported in another of TechDirt's stories today) already strikes me as morally legitimate civil disobedience.
As The Economist recently called for, it's time to take intellectual property law back to its roots in the Law of Queen Anne: 14 years, extendable for another 14 at the request of the author/artist/inventor if he or she is alive when it expires, and that's it. And, while we're at it, top it off with a dose of explicit fair-use protection for a broad class of derivative works, and provisions to make it impossible for the creator of a work to completely alienate his own control of his work by signing rights over to a commercial entity.
I suspect the real root of the difference is that astronomers are scientists, and as such have an actual commitment to objective truth, while journalists aren't, and probably went through some postmodern critique of objective truth that asserted all truth claims are based on power relations while getting the Journalism or English degrees.
Journalism is about controlling access to information--always has been from the days when newspapers with names ending in "Democrat" or "Republican" were telling you which party they were controlling access to information on behalf of. Participatory journalism makes such control impossible.
Of course, we can bet that the balance-the-budget simulation will be based on the bogus assumption that tax-rate increases do not stifle economic activity and tax-rate decreases do not stimulate economic activity (despite evidence that they in fact do in the form of the effects of the post-WW II tax-rate cut, the Kennedy tax-rate cut and the Reagan tax-rate cut).
Do professional journalists do investigative reporting anymore?
In the past year or so, we've had the Wikileaks revelation of atrocities in Iraq and the Giles/O'Keefe investigation of ACORN, but I can't recall a single investigative piece coming from the staff of a major daily or network news organization in the same time frame.
Obama is right that Fox isn't a real news organization, but for the wrong reason. If they were a real news organization they wouldn't necessarily drop their right-wing editorial line (back in the day newspapers were identifiably partisan), but they'd have reporters out hunting for all the facts about Obama's life between 1961 and his election that he is assiduously hiding. Of course, by that measure, there aren't any real news organizations.
I see no real distinction between the two and will mostly comment on the latter.
There have been many times when anonymity, or pseudonymity, has been a clear social good. The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms. St. Raphael of Brooklyn (the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in America) wrote under a pseudonym when criticizing the Greek dominance of the Patriarchate of Antioch. Authors for a variety of reasons have used noms de plume, as spies and guerilla leaders use noms de guerre.
Attacking anonymity and pseudonymity only seems to serve the interests of those who would threaten writers for what they write. It is far better to allow freedom loving people to hide behind a nom de plume (even using a blank space as such) than force them to adopt noms de guerre.
yuck, yuck, yuck: the trouble is only Stevens' dissent refered to the theory that corporations are persons
Very funny.
The problem is that the majority opinion repeatedly referred to "corporations or other associations" and no where referred to the legal theory that corporations are legal persons.
The only reason the ruling is obnoxious is that the management of corporations has stopped working for their shareholders and started working for themselves (oh, for a generation of Jay Goulds, "The public be d*mned, I work for my shareholders"!), and without some reform, it would be the management of corporations using their shareholders' resources (remember corporations belong to their shareholders, folks saving for pensions, and so forth) to engage in political speech.
I suggest that Campaign Finance Reform v 2.0, besides requiring a heavy dose of transparency, require that expenditures by corporations or unions that either 1) explicitly or implicitly endorse or oppose a candidate running for public office or 2) engage in advocacy on an issue in contention during any election campaign be approved in terms of their purpose, their amount, and the venues of publication by a majority vote of the shareholders or members.
The majority opinion vindicates the free speech rights of corporations and unions as associations, meaning derivative from the rights of those associated, meaning the shareholders and members, not corporate managers or union bosses, who are, in the eyes of the law, fiduciaries for the shareholders or members, even if they all think of themselves as bosses and de facto owners.
The issue is broader than the arts. The most obnoxious feature of the current copyright regime is (from an American perspective) that it has ceased to serve its Constitutional purpose. It should be impossible for an artist, musician or scientist to alienate the right to grant permission to use their work in derivative works. If they want to sign away the right to make copies of a certain track, picture, scholarly paper to some commercial interest, all well and good.
And, at least for purposes of use in derivative works music, art, scientific papers and the like should pass into public domain on the death of the artist or author.
I suspect the shade of Robert Frost is not pleased that Henry Holt & Co. prevented Unto Ashes from releasing a beautiful track with his poem "Fire and Ice" as lyrics in his native United States. (Of course a "pirated" version of the European release is still available to their fans.)
" . . . to promote the useful arts and sciences. . ."
My own favorite example of how far from its Constitutional intent copyright (and patent) law has strayed doesn't involve programs, digital music, or video, but a poem.
The goth band Unto Ashes recorded a beautiful song with Robert Frost's 1928 poem "Fire and Ice" as the lyrics. Only "pirated" copies are available to their U.S. fans because, even though the poem was over 60 years old, and its author had died more than 20 years ago, Henry Holt & Co. has a state-granted monopoly on Frost's literary estate, and wouldn't release the rights for a price the band was willing to pay.
Now whether poetry or goth music count as 'useful arts' may be disputed (if not, what business does Congress have in granting copyrights on them?). Personally, I think a sound enough case for the utility of the beautiful can be made. But what this example shows is that copyright no longer fulfills its Constitutional purpose.
Perhaps the RIAA and like groups should be militating to amend the Constitution to give Congress the power to impede the arts and sciences by securing to commercial interests exclusive use of authors', artists', scientists' and inventors' works for an indefinite term. That would set the issue in high relief and make it clear why defense of copyright as currently instantiated in law is not the defense of artists and scientists, but often works against them.
It has almost come to the point that "piracy" might be seen as a legitimate act of civil disobedience against the corruption of intellectual property law.
Not necessarily: if i4i lets XML be used under GPL license
terms or anything similar, and credit is given by OpenOffice, a freeware distribution using XML would not violate their patent, while its use in proprietary software sold for a profit would.
On the post: New Report: IP Laws Are Crippling The EU Economy
A proposal for harmonizing copyright and patent law
As to harmonizing copyright and patent law, I have a simple proposal: let the whole world adopt as a uniform standard the Law of Queen Anne (14 years copyright, extendable at the request of the author, not the author's publisher, not a literary estate, the author, period, for another 14 years), and an update of the original modern patent law, the Statute on Monopolies of 1624.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Intellectual "Property"
What is called "intellectual property" is not property, but a government-granted monopoly. Yes, there is, perhaps, social utility in granting such a monopoly (the American Founders thought so, for a limited time, to authors and inventors), but it is still a government-granted monopoly.
On the post: For Lady Gaga, Copyright Not About Music, But Her Image
Incentivizing creativity and "Lady Gaga"
On the post: Man Strips Down For TSA, Told He Still Needed To Be Groped; Arrested For Failing To Complete Security Process
On the post: Michael Robertson Facing Resistance To New Gov't Transparency Project
Transparency
On the post: Is There Anything Lamer Than Facebook Threatening Lamebook With Trademark Infringement?
SouthButt
On the post: Planet Declared As 100% Likely To Have Life... Now Can't Even Be Found
Re: Re: Re: To quote Peter Walker
If you want evidence for our position aside from the testimony of ancient texts, I would suggest that fact that the world is most well-described by mathematics suggests a kinship between the reason for existence and a mind.
Now, some of us are also firmly convinced on the basis of events in the ancient Near East, that the ground-of-all-being (the Existing-One as he named Himself in the ancient texts you so scorn) transcends the distinction between unity and multiplicity, being at once the One God and the All-Holy Trinity, went to the trouble of assuming our nature in the person of the Son to fix the rather wretched relationship we'd vis-a-vis that same ground-of-all-being we'd gotten ourselves into (the technical name for which is "sin"), and so forth. But that is neither here nor there in considering the proposition "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
(Incidentally, I know you're not a Thor-worshipper. If you were you'd attribute the creation to Odin, Vili and Ve, who slew Ymir and fashioned the world out of his body. It's all there in the Eddas.)
On the post: Planet Declared As 100% Likely To Have Life... Now Can't Even Be Found
The big filter
I'm not actually serious. The real point is that the "100% certainty of life" on a planet is as silly a position as the one I feigned in the previous paragraph.
On the post: The Intellectually Dishonest Claims Of Those Fighting Against Open Access To Federally Funded Research
transparency
On the post: Debunking The Logic In Favor Of Paywalls
Too clever by half advertising
If news sites just "typeset" the advertisements as part of the html for the page, they will be seen--and advertisers will in short order realize this. No, The Times won't get revenue from Kansas advertisers, but it would get more from British advertisers who know that when the page loads, their ad will load and be seen by readers.
Of course, a paywall for premium content, esp. coupled with the return to old-style advertising I advocated above, probably works as a business model. If the online version of the newspaper were available for free, but extra, say multimedia or super-indepth, news content were behind a reasonably priced paywall (cf. The Wall Street Journal), esp. if besides subscribing, one could get the content on a pay-per-view, or better pay-per-download, basis, people would pay.
On the post: EU Pushing For Criminalizing Non-Commercial Infringement In ACTA
ACTA and civil disobedience
Deliberately flouting the chop-logic distinction between parody and satire in derivative works (as reported in another of TechDirt's stories today) already strikes me as morally legitimate civil disobedience.
As The Economist recently called for, it's time to take intellectual property law back to its roots in the Law of Queen Anne: 14 years, extendable for another 14 at the request of the author/artist/inventor if he or she is alive when it expires, and that's it. And, while we're at it, top it off with a dose of explicit fair-use protection for a broad class of derivative works, and provisions to make it impossible for the creator of a work to completely alienate his own control of his work by signing rights over to a commercial entity.
On the post: If Astronomers Can Happily Share The Business With Amateurs, Why Do Some Journalists Get So Upset?
Science v. ideology
Journalism is about controlling access to information--always has been from the days when newspapers with names ending in "Democrat" or "Republican" were telling you which party they were controlling access to information on behalf of. Participatory journalism makes such control impossible.
On the post: Steve Ballmer Tasked With Fixing The Deficit -- With A Video Game
Budget games
On the post: But How Could Wikileaks Break A Story Without Traditional Newspaper Backing?
Do professional journalists do investigative reporting anymore?
Obama is right that Fox isn't a real news organization, but for the wrong reason. If they were a real news organization they wouldn't necessarily drop their right-wing editorial line (back in the day newspapers were identifiably partisan), but they'd have reporters out hunting for all the facts about Obama's life between 1961 and his election that he is assiduously hiding. Of course, by that measure, there aren't any real news organizations.
On the post: Are Anonymous Comments Evil?
anonymity and pseudonymity
There have been many times when anonymity, or pseudonymity, has been a clear social good. The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms. St. Raphael of Brooklyn (the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in America) wrote under a pseudonym when criticizing the Greek dominance of the Patriarchate of Antioch. Authors for a variety of reasons have used noms de plume, as spies and guerilla leaders use noms de guerre.
Attacking anonymity and pseudonymity only seems to serve the interests of those who would threaten writers for what they write. It is far better to allow freedom loving people to hide behind a nom de plume (even using a blank space as such) than force them to adopt noms de guerre.
On the post: Company Decides To Run For Congress
yuck, yuck, yuck: the trouble is only Stevens' dissent refered to the theory that corporations are persons
The problem is that the majority opinion repeatedly referred to "corporations or other associations" and no where referred to the legal theory that corporations are legal persons.
The only reason the ruling is obnoxious is that the management of corporations has stopped working for their shareholders and started working for themselves (oh, for a generation of Jay Goulds, "The public be d*mned, I work for my shareholders"!), and without some reform, it would be the management of corporations using their shareholders' resources (remember corporations belong to their shareholders, folks saving for pensions, and so forth) to engage in political speech.
I suggest that Campaign Finance Reform v 2.0, besides requiring a heavy dose of transparency, require that expenditures by corporations or unions that either 1) explicitly or implicitly endorse or oppose a candidate running for public office or 2) engage in advocacy on an issue in contention during any election campaign be approved in terms of their purpose, their amount, and the venues of publication by a majority vote of the shareholders or members.
The majority opinion vindicates the free speech rights of corporations and unions as associations, meaning derivative from the rights of those associated, meaning the shareholders and members, not corporate managers or union bosses, who are, in the eyes of the law, fiduciaries for the shareholders or members, even if they all think of themselves as bosses and de facto owners.
On the post: Artist Thinking vs. Lawyer Thinking
It's not just musicians and artists
And, at least for purposes of use in derivative works music, art, scientific papers and the like should pass into public domain on the death of the artist or author.
I suspect the shade of Robert Frost is not pleased that Henry Holt & Co. prevented Unto Ashes from releasing a beautiful track with his poem "Fire and Ice" as lyrics in his native United States. (Of course a "pirated" version of the European release is still available to their fans.)
On the post: Interview With William Patry: Understanding How The Copyright Debate Got Twisted
" . . . to promote the useful arts and sciences. . ."
The goth band Unto Ashes recorded a beautiful song with Robert Frost's 1928 poem "Fire and Ice" as the lyrics. Only "pirated" copies are available to their U.S. fans because, even though the poem was over 60 years old, and its author had died more than 20 years ago, Henry Holt & Co. has a state-granted monopoly on Frost's literary estate, and wouldn't release the rights for a price the band was willing to pay.
Now whether poetry or goth music count as 'useful arts' may be disputed (if not, what business does Congress have in granting copyrights on them?). Personally, I think a sound enough case for the utility of the beautiful can be made. But what this example shows is that copyright no longer fulfills its Constitutional purpose.
Perhaps the RIAA and like groups should be militating to amend the Constitution to give Congress the power to impede the arts and sciences by securing to commercial interests exclusive use of authors', artists', scientists' and inventors' works for an indefinite term. That would set the issue in high relief and make it clear why defense of copyright as currently instantiated in law is not the defense of artists and scientists, but often works against them.
It has almost come to the point that "piracy" might be seen as a legitimate act of civil disobedience against the corruption of intellectual property law.
On the post: Judge Bars Sale Of Microsoft Word For Patent Infringement (Though It Won't Stick)
Re: Hey guys! Newsflash!
terms or anything similar, and credit is given by OpenOffice, a freeware distribution using XML would not violate their patent, while its use in proprietary software sold for a profit would.
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