Intellectual Property Laws bad for business 293
mshiltonj writes "The NYTimes has a story called "Report Raises Questions About Fighting Online Piracy" that talks about how the stringent enforcement of current Intellectual Property laws (see: RIAA) may acutally be bad for business. It's the not EFF or FSF saying this, it's professors at Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace." and "Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.""
Re:then don't complain (Score:5, Informative)
That's what a lot of large corps do now if you work for them. If you work for a large auto manufacutrer and design something you'll be lucky if you get a thing for it. While the company and execs make a killing on it. This is not something new.
Re:The term IP itself is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Re:then don't complain (Score:5, Informative)
Less obvious ideas are discussed in the public domain long before they are introduced as products. I like to give ADSL as an example - the original idea was that you have to split your band into many (ideally infinite) subbands to send information. The problem was that until the development of fast DSPs it was impossible to do it - and it was certainly impossible to do it when the idea was first mentioned.. since it was the days of analog filtering.
Nevertheless, there are numerous patents on ADSL, which are about very specific parts of the overall ITU-T standard rather than the idea of splitting the band in subbands to send information..
Furthermore, an individual has little or no protection against predatory companies that want to steal his ideas even with the patent system in place. The reason that a patent costs much more than an individual can possibly afford. What people do, is they give the idea to a patent attorney/firm, who agrees to pay for the upfront cost in return for a percentage on any profit made from the patent.
The report itself (Score:5, Informative)
Re:radical rethinking of IP? (Score:5, Informative)
And deliciously ironic. Most people don't realize that Hollywood was LITERALLY founded on piracy. Edison had very strict controls on the equipment that was used to produce and show movies. He formed an organization to enforce his rights. This organization was so onerous that scores of soon-to-be movie producers/directors/etc packed up their lives and moved to the "wild wild west" AKA California. California was so wild and remote that Edison's patents couldn't be enforced, and the movie industry grew and flourished. By the time the law got things settled down, the patents had expired (the patent limit was 17 or 18 years at that time).
Next time you have to sit through those annoying anti-piracy bits before the movie, just remember that it it were't for wholesale disregard for the "Intellectual Property" of others, Hollywood might have never came to be.
Re:wired article (Score:2, Informative)
Re:radical rethinking of IP? (Score:5, Informative)
It was also because it was close to another country so they could occasionally flee to Mexico [stanford.edu] to avoid the law.
Re:wired article (Score:5, Informative)
CED Report [ced.org]
And what happened to Xerox? (Score:3, Informative)
It never managed to commercialize the products it created. The name PARC is known only to a few computer geeks. Xerox itself went into a tailspin during this time, unable to handle competition in the copy industry from companies that copied (heh) and improved Xerox technology and undercut it tremendously in price while at the same time Xerox was wasting billions of dollars trying to compete with IBM.
This is a horrible example of why a company would want Open Source. Xerox got nothing from the huge investments of money, but everyone else got rich.
Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad... (Score:3, Informative)
(Ohh that rymes even)
Patent laws in the past were used pritty much as intended with a few exceptions. Today those laws are being abused left and right and our legeslation hasn't done a thing about it.
IP law was intended to be an evolving thing. It was always known there'd be new kinds of IP and there'd be abuses of IP it was up to congress to address the problems as they came up.
For example: Software copyrights. To me it seams quite reasonable but untill the 1980s it wasn't made clear.
Also refinements in IP law made in the 1990s screwed things up instead of making them better.
The Regan admin extended patents and copyrights when they needed to be shortened.
The Clinton admin changed the laws to sereously break the intent of IP laws.
It seams to me Bush jr will only make things worse.
I have my own ideas as to what IP should be like. I don't intend to clame that IP laws should be eliminated.
When IP laws work you have inventers creating all kinds of things. This is the way it was in the 40's and 50's. Indeed patents meant something back then.
Today IP laws keep people from doing anything. Companys and individuals patenting things they did not invent and worse dose not yet exist.
I can't find it now but I remember reading recently how an inventer was denied a patent on the camcorder becouse it wasn't possable to create one yet (in the patent officers opinion) sadly this was shortly before the first camcorders hit the market so it appears the patent officer was wrong.
What this single situation demonstrates is that at one time patents were in fact issued on merit. The patent officer also had to understand how the technology could be applied.
The solution for me seams reasonably simple and that is requiring that a working prototype already exist. This was a requirment once apon a time. This way you could demonstrate the invention under current technology.
Today patents are being used to patent
Future technology: Obveous or not companys are getting patents for devices they themselfs do not produce sit on those patents and sue decades later when someone else invents it.
(It is known if one person dose not invent someone else will. An invention often passes through at least 5 heads before someone actually bothers to build it. If the first 4 patent it the 5th guy is repaid for his work with lawsutes and the first four are repaid for lazyness with money.)
There is no deffense of public domain today so companys often obtain "defessive" patents of other peoples consepts. As a result todays tech bubble companys may end up suing the original inventors simply becouse the original guy didn't get a patent.
IP laws are the greatest defence against plagerism however todays laws make plagerism easier rather than harder.
I'd use SCO as an example but they are breaking IP laws so badly they are more of an explenation as to why IP laws are broken rather than of how broken they are.
People like Darol McBride have had fingers in the laws. If McBride has his way public domain would be illegal.
world's largest exporter (Score:5, Informative)
1,163,548,552,000 imported and
693,257,300,000 exported and thats a difference of
-470,291,252
how does that help the situation??
cite- http://ese.export.gov/SCRIPTS/hsrun.exe/Distribut
remove spaces as necassary
Re:ivory tower? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:IP is property and downloading is theft. (Score:2, Informative)
In the first case it's breach of contract, not theft at all. The contract was your agreement to pay $$$ for work done, the mechanic did the work so you owe the $$$. I don't know how it is outside of Missouri let alone the US (though I suspect most states are simular), but there exists laws on the books which result in the mechanic being able to put a lean on your car in this case. Pay up or he gets to repo the car and sell it to cover the bill plus the costs of having to grab and sell your car.
The second cas is more problematic. In that case there are likely to be ordnance governing use of civic electricity. There is also the real cost of wear and tear on the system that generates that electricy, including the slow degradation of the solar sells, the transmission lines, even the effect (very very little admitedly) of the added heat to environment from line losses, etc..
Mycroft
Re:My two (euro) cents (Score:3, Informative)
It will be considerably cheap. Because of the right to choose your place of work freely (as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights), the third clause is void anyway. The only legal lever the company could pull is to sue the futural employer for unfair competition if it can prove that said futural employer hired you to gather information about your current employer. They don't have anything to enforce the clause on YOU.
Of course a potential new employer may be afraid to hire you because it may look as if he tries to espionage your current company, but the most famous case in that direction (Ignacio Lopez leaving GM to join Volkswagen) finally ended without conviction of Volkswagen.