UK Government Order Review of IP Rights 159
quaker5567 writes "The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has ordered an independent review of intellectual property rights in the UK. The review will be led by Andrew Gowers, formerly the editor of London newspaper The Financial Times. The review will look into the awarding of IP rights to business, the complexity of current laws and the extent of "fair use" in the current law. Importantly, the review will also examine whether the current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death) is appropriate. Andrew Gowers recently criticised the print industry for not realising the true power of the digital platform, comparing them to a record company which specialises in vinyl."
Can we guess the outcome? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily... (Score:3, Insightful)
Things might not actually go so badly.
Gordon Brown has been playing to the people a lot lately. Blair has said he will not be seeking a fourth term, and so will probably step down in a couple of years' time; Brown is the heir apparent, and has been plotting to become Prime Minister for a long time.
So, Brown's been doing popular things wherever possible. He was very big on the whole debt-cancellation move during the summer, for instance. He's trying to look as good as possible to voters. He's not likely to endorse law changes along the lines of 'hey, people I'd like to have vote for me at the next election: you're not allowed to copy CDs to your iPods!'
There's every chance that we might actually get some sane policy out of this. Of course, I'm not holding my breath...
Re:From the article: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Review of IP rights" (Score:5, Insightful)
To the people of the UK -- be afraid. In fact, be very afraid:
In other words it is the legal scheme (IP) and not the ideas, creativity or innovation which what lies at the heart of Britain's success. an environment for innovation usually means an environment rewarding past innovation with infinite monopoly reducing the motivation for future innovation (consider US copyright law).
This sentence is usually a sign that the public, the largest stakeholder in the business, is about to be excluded.
Re:From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this is fair. Many us of here are software authors, and I think you'll find that something like 10 to 1 subscribe to the "programming is art" as opposed to the "programming is science" school of thought. Having said that, we know that programmers and authors and artists and musicians are the least likely to profit greatly from the hoardes of money that our products bring. I write a great program, a great song, a great boook, and I make a days pay from the suits who will still be making piles of money on my work long after I'm dead. Clearly there is a great inequity built into the system, which is only aggravated by the zero-cost, zero-effort rquired to make copies of a work. The lesson of Open Source products is that there is no great need for large permanent distribution networks, nor for large marketing campaigns. People will find and use products that are worth finding.
Intellectual Property is a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.K. isn't going to make any changes to their laws. In a country with increasing inflation, increasing unemployment and increasing debt, the powers-the-be will more likely collude with megacorps than shun them. There is a mistaken belief that employment is a creation of government fiat and that the market won't provide unless government sets up regulations and restrictions. IP is one of those restrictions. IP also creates unemployment, as companies that could otherwise compete with the IP holder are not allowed entry into the market.
Kinsella wrote a decent [mises.org] article (PDF warning) about Intellectual Property and how anti-freedom/pro-force the idea is. I don't believe we can "fix" the laws, and I don't think we can even roll them back. The slippery slope has shown its ugly face, and the only hope we have is to completely toss the rules and find a better way, maybe a non-government way. Kinsella's 53 page article has more footnotes and links that I could ever place in a slashdot article, but he hits the nail on the head in reaching the same conclusion: don't offer protection for non-physical property.
If you post it, expect it to get copied. If you create it, expect cheap knock-offs to appear. If you don't want either thing to happen, don't put your idea into the public eye. If you want to profit from your creation, you have to add in the cost of knock-offs and copying into the equation, and offer value added options in order to attract customers to your first-to-market creation.
Re:Not necessarily... (Score:4, Insightful)
As soon as anything can be "owned" and has "value" in the eyes of the law, then the right to use and transfer of ownership can be taxed.
The biggest danger as always is that the large multinational companies will squeeze out the small software developers, especially when government contracts are concerned.
Re:From the article: (Score:4, Insightful)
And?
Here's a little secret to the free market: it requires dozens of people or groups to bring anything to the mass public. Idea makers, content producers, content directors, content creators, sales and marketing, packaging, shipping, distribution, retail and the end customer.
Just because you can come up with a great idea doesn't mean you have the best version of it. Just because you can code the best version doesn't mean you have the best interface. Just because you have the best interface doesn't mean you have access to the best distribution. Just because you have the best distribution doesn't mean you have an in-road to the customers' minds. Just because you have good advertising doesn't mean the sales staff will understand how to sell the product.
This is my problem with IP -- it disregards everything after creation. Creation is not enough, in fact, it is worthless. So much of creation is based on previous inventions -- how fast would we have new inventions if the old investions didn't have decades of protection?
There are those who say that creation will stop without protections, but I think this is stupid. Companies for hundreds of years have hired "invention wings" of thinkers who come up with new ideas. Before IP laws became so protective, companies continued to invent, create and distribute. The IP laws that help your company protect one idea are the same laws that prevent your company from perfecting the ideas of millions of others.
IP does not protect freedom or creation, it hampers both. Monopolies are bad -- and can only be protected in the long run by government force.
Cynic (Score:1, Insightful)
For my own peace of mind, I am going to try to write to Mr Gowers and ask hime whether IP laws are there for the benefit of business or society? Being ex-editor of the FT makes me think that this question has already been answered in Mr. Gower's mind.
The fact the Gordo is playing to the public will not make one jot of difference, because the majority of people will never come up against an extension to copyright as a problem and the spin on this will be:
"Britain needs to be a super power in the global knowledge economy and this can only be realised through the introduction of increasingly draconian laws surrounding your precious and flavoursome IP".
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what about extending ideas? They're locking up our common culture - I still can't legally link to a copy of steamboat willy (Micky Mouse precursor) for the readers in the US can I? Could this mean that in some future dystopia everyone will have to pay simply to participate? Sorry Bob, I can't talk to you about last nights episode of Friends as you don't have a license....
Damnit. [gnu.org]
Re:Can we guess the outcome? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no... that would grant legitimacy to the idea that you can give something away for free and still hold copyright on it.
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be to create perpetual copyright for commercial, proprietary products, while anything given away for no or negligible financial cost will be declared to enter the public domain automatically, to prevent unfair competition from F/OSS harming the software industry.
Not that I'm at all cynical or anything.
Re:'Review' means 'extend' (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes -- we wouldn't want more artists to expand [bannedmusic.org] on their work. This would take away, diminish, undermine and otherwise dammage the Beatles.
Afterall, it couldn't possibly bring a whole new generation to listen to their work?
Re:Not necessarily... (Score:1, Insightful)
Well they're already doing that, thanks to the utterly ridiculous accounting and regulatory procedures required to even bid on most UK government contracts. Even many large multi-nationals don't even bother these days; any given contract of any worth will, almost without fail, fall into the lap of a useless shower of bastards such as EDS.
Somebody has to say it (Score:3, Insightful)
IP is obsolete
therefore
DESTROY IP
Somebody had to say it
UK rules need an overhaul anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
The two aren't really equivalent.
Several uses that I think most of us would consider reasonable are actually illegal in the UK, or legal only on a technicality under some circumstances. Making back-ups, format shifting, and making music compilations are all somewhat dodgy, for example, even where only legitimately bought content is involved and it's strictly for personal use by the person who bought it.
To give an example of how daft this is, a local dancing club I help to run would like to make compilation CDs of the music we have legitimately paid for, since we have a large library and carrying all the CDs everywhere is awkward. We also pay an additional fee for the right to play this music at public classes and events, so our use of the music itself is entirely legit. We have concluded that none of the standard licensing agencies can authorise the simple compilations we'd like to produce, so we have made efforts to contact the copyright holders directly.
Interestingly enough, the specialist dancing music companies from which we buy most of our CDs (we're talking about things like ballroom, rock 'n' roll, salsa and swing here, rather than clubbing stuff) tend to be helpful, slightly surprised that we've even bothered to ask, and happy to grant permission for reasonable uses. The big names, which we actually don't buy as much from, have also been slightly surprised to hear from us, but we get strange things like permission for the mechanical copyright, but not for the actual recording because the publisher doesn't actually hold that copyright, and doesn't seem to know who does.
In other words, we have a reasonable use, we're paying properly for the music itself and the right to play it at public events, when asked the publishers generally haven't objected to our request or asked for any extra consideration in exchange, but legal technicalities mean that strictly speaking we still can't make the compilations because some unknown copyright holder hasn't given permission and there's no way for us to seek it. That seems a bit daft to me.
Personally, I'm not sure US-style fair use is the best way to go in a digital world; it's just too easy to argue that activities which could -- not necessarily are in practice today -- be seriously damaging to copyright holders are authorised. I'm thinking in particular of distribution to "friends", and thence to their "friends" and so on, until a new track/e-book/game/whatever has suddenly spread across the whole Internet.
However, it seems about time that paying to buy content should guarantee certain inalienable consumer rights, such as the right to make a back-up copy, to shift to a different media format, and the right to make compilations composed only of legitimately purchased content. In particular, those should be rights rather than exemptions, so that the media industries can't simply add DRM that makes it technically difficult for an average consumer to do these things (or to criminalise the behaviour under alternative laws such as the EUCD or DMCA as a back door).
Hopefully, the guy they've put in charge of this review has his head screwed on the right way, and a reasonable balance between the legitimate interests of the consumer and the legitimate interests of the copyright holder and content creators will be found. I'm a bit worried about some of the language, as no doubt mentioned by others in this discussion by the time I post this, but I'm far more interested in how the review actually goes than in any guesses based on government weasel words before they've even started.
Re:From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
Give us protection, or there won't be any innovation!
Of course for that to be true, there couldn't have been any innovation or creation before IP ... and yet...?
To be human is to be creative.
You're as likely to stop human creativity as to stop the tides, the winds or this little rock spinning 'round the sun.
Even these IP laws won't stop creativity: Creativity will just move to where it can be free. America was the destination for scientists and artists in the last hundred years because in America they were free to create. IP strips that freedom, and will cause the creative to seek refuge elsewhere.
Re:Intellectual Property is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)
There has to be reward for work.
Metaphors (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude! What did you expect from a member of Tony Blair's government? As far as I know that group contains no sentient life-forms.
Straight Talk About Copyrights (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, this is actually a repost from a week or so back, but it seems like not so many have read it .....
The theory that we've all been taught is that copyrights are "intellectual property" rights that protect creators, and give them an incentive to make creative works that provide personal and public benefit. The truth is that property rights exist to allocate finite resources, not to artificially choke supply for the sake of incentive. Rather than protection, or a free market property, copyrights are more like a regulation that micromanages how people can use information. In practice, they are dangerous to rely on and lock out more opportunity then they promote.
History has shown that just protection of property rights leads to strong incentives, but coercion of incentive does not necessarily lead to just property rights. Simply because an institution calls something a property right, doesn't mean that it is. If, for example, an industry used the government to artificially restrict the natural supply of food and called shares of that monopoly a "property right", it would be very easy to see how the artificial distortion of markets would not only cause opportunity loss, but harm to society. Copyrights are a way for some industries to use government to artificially restrict the natural supply of information and force the market to center around information control rather than service value. That causes opportunity loss, harm to society, and a burden of enforcement that is too heavy to bear in the information age.
Normally copyright concerns would not be so eminent as they have been effectively used for hundreds of years without failure. However, things are different this time and faith in the copyright system is rather dangerous. Just as the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor market and the ugly death of the plantation system. The information age is forcing the commoditisation of information and the ugly death of the copyright system. It is not a coincidence that the speculative stock market crash around 1857, regarding industrial technology is very similar to the speculative stock market crash in 2001 regarding information technology. It is not a coincidence that the slavery issue created a raging debate about artificial "property rights" as copyrights have today. It is not a coincidence the disproportional prosperity of the plantation system then and the disproportional prosperity of the copyright industries today (That is, unless one thinks hollywood is underpaid). Things like the harsh punishments for merely teaching a person of color to read, vs copyright crimes having punishments worse than rape today. These are all symptoms of drastically changing markets and entrenched dying industries trying to prevent change. As for those industries that thought that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit - they were deadly wrong in spite of all the money and intellect behind them. Those industries today whom believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the information age is to leverage inventions like the Internet to expand the influence of copyright controls for vast growth and profit, well?
Well, over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be changed, it will become effectively dead. All industries that center on them will change or die a protracted death, and all institutions that rely on a proprietary information infrastructure will be stuck in the mud as they suffer numerous opportunity costs. The information age is doing for information services what the industrial revolution did for production. However, the copyright system doesn't center around the supply and demand of service, but an artificial supply restrictions on information that services bring about. Over the coming years as information becomes commoditized and service value becomes more important than the content val
Re:From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intellectual Property is a scam (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a libertarian really, but that's not important
First, the ability to defraud the public was much more accessible in the past -- which is why I understand the reason for laws. Now, we have the Internet, the instant access to information shared by the masses. Moderation of products is happening real time, in fact, we're receiving information about test products before they come to market. If you are an uneducated consumer even with all the reviews and moderations available, you're at fault for making bad decisions. Ebay and slashdot are good examples of market anarchism: there really isn't any force being used against consumers or producers, and both consumers and producers are able to rate the transactions made. Is it perfect? No, but it is becoming more perfect as time goes on, thanks to the market's ability to change at an instant.
but I shouldn't be rewarded for creating new music, movies, and novels.
Of course you do -- get a job with a company that makes those things. You're guaranteed a paycheck that way. If you want to be independent (just like an IT consultant or an independent hair stylist), you are accepting a much bigger risk in exchange for the chance of a much bigger reward. I became an independent consultant at 14 and for 3 years I made less than $0.50 per hour. At 17 I was making over $60 an hour and at 20 I was making over $150 per hour. At 21 I was bad to making less than $0.25 per hour for 2 years while I watched my old profession fall apart. Risks/rewards!
Much as I generally agree that personal liberty should be maximized, I can't get my head around the notion of a world being a better place because dishonesty and crookedness are rewarded, but creativity is for losers.
Dishonest and crooked producers will be judged by the market's moderation system in place. Look at Sony. Look at Enron. Look at http://www.fuckedcompany.com/ [fuckedcompany.com] for a list of producers who screwed their customers and ended up with what they deserved. I'm losing one of my companies right now because we didn't focus on our customers, and in April that business was one of the top 100 in the nation. 8 months later and its bankrupt. I continue to learn lessons. If I didn't want such a big reward, I know I could go get a job for someone else and do very well, but I don't want that. My businesses that treat the customers with respect and concern grow -- slowly but surely. My business that took advantage of customers and lied grew VERY fast but crashed even faster.
This really is not flamebait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
On reviewing policies... (Score:3, Insightful)
When he talks about balance between right-holders and consumers, he clearly misses the fact the distinction between the two is getting at least very vague. When he talks about enforcement of IP, he doesn't seem to see enforcement of IP will be futile in the very near future.
What happens now with music and movies, will happen with physical products soon. Right now metal parts can be custom machined by sending a drawing over the internet to a metal shop. It's done almost fully automated, noone checks on patent infringement. A metal shop could be manufacturing patented machines on a large scale without being noticed by the owners of the shop. The drawings could be torrented all around the internet. (it's probably happening already). It will happen with chemicals in less than five years, and with DNA in probably less than ten years.
Not to mention the 2.5 billion of people living in China and India alone, who will be very hard to convince they have to pay for using certain knowledge freely available on the internet.
As attempts to enforce copyright on music never fail to fail, so will other forms of IP as we know it fail. A study which does not recognise the fact that the very concept of IP is under pressure and likely to collapse, is therefore doomed to fail too.
On the other hand, if the review does recognise this, and studies IP at a conceptual level, it's also doomed, because it will be ignored.
Re:Intellectual Property is a scam (Score:3, Insightful)
Your other responses thus far are not particularly illuminating either. Getting paid a salary (as you suggest) would stifle many writers, not free them. Corporations expect product on a timely scale, so you'll have the next Steinbeck or Joyce writing filler crap instead of their next masterpiece.
Is IP law horribly fouled up? Most certainly. Are the primary beneficiaries the distributors, middle-men, and corporations instead of the authors and inventors? Yup. Is that wrong? Definitely. But your suggestions amount to no more than throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We need a major reformation of IP law across the board, with more reasonable limits (esp. for copyright) and fair use rights. Patents need less obfusication and more requirements on actively defending the patent (submarine patents are bad!). Trademarks aren't too bad off, although there's certainly some absurdity going on there (not nearly as much though).
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)