Great letter. The only criticism is that they (and we) should not be using the rent-seekers' phrase "intellectual property". Words matter. "Copyrights and patents" isn't that many more characters to type (and in some cases "copyright" suffices), and we should not cede the rhetorical ground that state-granted monopolies (even state-granted monopolies that succeed in some salutary purpose) constitute "property".
According to your "reasoning" there was no English literature before the Law of Queen Anne, Albrecht Durer didn't make a living selling prints, and Mozilla Firefox doesn't exist.
You can't really expect any business whose business model depends on artificial scarcity created by government intervention (in the form of monopoly grants called "copyrights" and "patents") to wholeheartedly oppose these measures. Microsoft is only doing this so as not to alienate customers: they, like Hollywood, the recording industry and dead-tree publishers, have failed to adopt the CwF + RtB business model and remain a lawsuit factory.
Such businesses would rather infringe civil liberties and destroy the internet than succumb to the law of supply and demand that naturally drives the cost of any good which can be produced in arbitrary quantity at near zero marginal cost (which includes not just digitized text, audio, images, and video, but software) inexorably toward zero. But that law exists and SOPA, PIPA or any other bill of that ilk will not repeal it.
"Piracy" is not theft (since copyrights and patents aren't actually property -- if they were they'd be of infinite duration as actual property doesn't suddenly become public simply by virtue of the passage of time, and copying does not deprive those who had a copy of their copy as theft of property does), but the inevitable black market (in copies of digital goods) created by government intervention in the economy.
Do it: I'd suggest a blackout of six-hours world-wide, 24 hours to the U.S. and a week to all .gov and .mil users, with a single page explaining the reason and issues at hand formatted so most browsers will display the entire message w/o scrolling.
I'm not sure the status of true threat doctrine in the Court of Appeals circuit in which Stout, WI is located, but regardless of whether the standard is based on a reasonable speaker, a reasonable hearer (or in this case reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is addressed, or a reasonable hearer (or reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is not addressed, in no case does either poster meet the notion of a true threat. No reasonable person could conceivably believe that a poster asserting that someone (most obviously the fictional character depicted, but possibly the occupant of the office) will only kill in self-defense or that fascism is associated with beatings and killings constitute threats to anyone.
It is only in the American context that the harmful effects of the present copyright regime contain any irony. After all, the Constitutional basis for American copyright and patent law is provided by
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: 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.
The way Congress has behaved since they passed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", one would think the clause read "To impede the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for indefinitely extendible Times to Commercial Interests and estates the exclusive Right to the Writings and Discoveries of Authors and Inventors."
In America the harmful effects are ironic, since they provide an argument for the unconstitutionality of the law. In Europe, it's just crony capitalism as usual.
Yes, the people have the right to opt out when the government changes the terms of the deal. Unfortunately, the only effective way of doing this is called a revolution (or if the people in a region want to opt out, secession, which tends to involve a war of independence).
Anyone care to go to the barricades (literally) to undo copyright maximalism?
I think this is for me the last straw. The corruption of copyright and patent law that began with the adoption of the name "intellectual property" for what had always been recognized as state-granted monopolies, and continued with the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", and the issuance of patents on algorithms and business plans is now complete.
"Piracy" and willful patent and copyright infringement are now legitimate acts of civil disobedience against tyranny.
I'd come closer and closer to feeling that, but this really takes the proverbial cake.
Hoist the Jolly Roger in cyberspace and on the workroom floor until we go back to the terms of the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1624! Everything else beyond that is fascist, crony-capitalist tyranny.
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.
A small criticism
Great letter. The only criticism is that they (and we) should not be using the rent-seekers' phrase "intellectual property". Words matter. "Copyrights and patents" isn't that many more characters to type (and in some cases "copyright" suffices), and we should not cede the rhetorical ground that state-granted monopolies (even state-granted monopolies that succeed in some salutary purpose) constitute "property".
Re: Anti-Piracy laws unnecessary?
According to your "reasoning" there was no English literature before the Law of Queen Anne, Albrecht Durer didn't make a living selling prints, and Mozilla Firefox doesn't exist.
MS, Supply and Demand and SOPA
You can't really expect any business whose business model depends on artificial scarcity created by government intervention (in the form of monopoly grants called "copyrights" and "patents") to wholeheartedly oppose these measures. Microsoft is only doing this so as not to alienate customers: they, like Hollywood, the recording industry and dead-tree publishers, have failed to adopt the CwF + RtB business model and remain a lawsuit factory.
Such businesses would rather infringe civil liberties and destroy the internet than succumb to the law of supply and demand that naturally drives the cost of any good which can be produced in arbitrary quantity at near zero marginal cost (which includes not just digitized text, audio, images, and video, but software) inexorably toward zero. But that law exists and SOPA, PIPA or any other bill of that ilk will not repeal it.
"Piracy" is not theft (since copyrights and patents aren't actually property -- if they were they'd be of infinite duration as actual property doesn't suddenly become public simply by virtue of the passage of time, and copying does not deprive those who had a copy of their copy as theft of property does), but the inevitable black market (in copies of digital goods) created by government intervention in the economy.
Do it
Do it: I'd suggest a blackout of six-hours world-wide, 24 hours to the U.S. and a week to all .gov and .mil users, with a single page explaining the reason and issues at hand formatted so most browsers will display the entire message w/o scrolling.
Saving SpongeBog. . . NOT!
Actually, I regard the possible non-existence of SpongeBob as yet another argument against copyright maximalism.
True thread doctrine
I'm not sure the status of true threat doctrine in the Court of Appeals circuit in which Stout, WI is located, but regardless of whether the standard is based on a reasonable speaker, a reasonable hearer (or in this case reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is addressed, or a reasonable hearer (or reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is not addressed, in no case does either poster meet the notion of a true threat. No reasonable person could conceivably believe that a poster asserting that someone (most obviously the fictional character depicted, but possibly the occupant of the office) will only kill in self-defense or that fascism is associated with beatings and killings constitute threats to anyone.
irony, or lack thereof
In a European context, there is no irony.
It is only in the American context that the harmful effects of the present copyright regime contain any irony. After all, the Constitutional basis for American copyright and patent law is provided by
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: 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.
The way Congress has behaved since they passed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", one would think the clause read "To impede the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for indefinitely extendible Times to Commercial Interests and estates the exclusive Right to the Writings and Discoveries of Authors and Inventors."
In America the harmful effects are ironic, since they provide an argument for the unconstitutionality of the law. In Europe, it's just crony capitalism as usual.
Opting out when terms change
Yes, the people have the right to opt out when the government changes the terms of the deal. Unfortunately, the only effective way of doing this is called a revolution (or if the people in a region want to opt out, secession, which tends to involve a war of independence).
Anyone care to go to the barricades (literally) to undo copyright maximalism?
Last Straw
I think this is for me the last straw. The corruption of copyright and patent law that began with the adoption of the name "intellectual property" for what had always been recognized as state-granted monopolies, and continued with the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", and the issuance of patents on algorithms and business plans is now complete.
"Piracy" and willful patent and copyright infringement are now legitimate acts of civil disobedience against tyranny.
I'd come closer and closer to feeling that, but this really takes the proverbial cake.
Hoist the Jolly Roger in cyberspace and on the workroom floor until we go back to the terms of the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1624! Everything else beyond that is fascist, crony-capitalist tyranny.
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.
Intellectual "Property"
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.
Incentivizing creativity and "Lady Gaga"
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.
(untitled comment)
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?
Transparency
I think most public officials' idea of transparency in government is modeled on the Romulan cloaking device.
SouthButt
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.
Re: Re: Re: To quote Peter Walker
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.)
The big filter
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.
transparency
Well, I see Breckler of the APA is really in tune with Obama's notion of transparency, the model for which seems to be the Romulan cloaking device.
Too clever by half advertising
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.
ACTA and civil disobedience
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.