WIPO Committee Presentations Show Nuanced View of Copyright 84
AtomicJake writes "As the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is known for a very rigid course combating counterfeiting and piracy in general, it comes as a surprise that during a meeting of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement, several presenters have shown nuanced views on the economics of enforcing intellectual property rights. Combating clothing piracy might not be beneficial for the welfare of a developing country. Most surprising is the presentation of WIPO Chief Economist (PDF) Carsten Fink, which says that illegal copies of software may actually be beneficial even for consumers of the original goods. Also the piracy of audio-visual goods creates not only losses but also benefits for e.g. hardware manufacturers. Maybe this is because Mr. Fink wrote the presentation before joining WIPO?"
WIPO hasn't taken its multiple personality meds (Score:3, Insightful)
These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder results in a paradox so vast that the only way the Universe will be able to resolve it is implode. LHC eat your heart out. WIPOs got your black holes beat!
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These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
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These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
Lately they have been displaying a hive-mind over at WIPO... this story is a refreshing break from that nonsense.
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I don't know what it is with you Americans and your preference of group-thinking... They ARE, as a matter of fact, multiple people. To everything OTHER than having different views, depending on who is speaking, is perverse and sick.
Fink (Score:2)
...is a great name.
Rights-holder bears costs (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the most interesting suggestions was that rights holders should expect to bear enforcement costs for violations.
At first it would seem to make the rights holder a double victim, once by the infringer, and again by the state. However, rights holders are usually the only group that clearly benefits from suppression of counterfeit goods, and government costs of tracking down every back-ally sneaker salesman could be better spent in other areas.
The suggestion was also raised to make it the mission of government to actively enforce only those infringements that have a public welfare aspect, (bogus medicines, dangerous shoddy rip offs of patented products).
However, there is this old saw thrown in:
If firms cannot prevent third parties from copying the fruits of their inventive and creative activities, they have little incentive to invest financial resources into such activities. Arguably, inventive and creative would not grind to a halt without government intervention. Artists may be motivated by prestige or inherent self-interest in pursuing their profession. Firms may have other means of profiting from new technologies, such as benefiting from a first-mover advantage. Nonetheless, governments have historically opted to supplement these “natural” incentives with exclusive rights to intellectual property.
Which of course is at best a stretch and at worst simply untrue. There is no evidence that invention did not exist prior to patents and copyrights, or would cease without it. Its clear our current system goes way beyond protecting first movers, to the clear detriment of society as a whole and an unwarranted power shift to rights holders.
All in all, a far more balanced report than you would expect from this organization.
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I am an American, and I got rid of my car and instead I walk, take public transit, ride a bike, and use cars that are available to me as a member of a car-sharing organization. It works very well, in fact, and it saves me quite a lot of money.
I think that it would be very appropriate to re-engineer our urban and suburban areas so that cars are generally unnecessary and undesirable, and to encourage various car sharing arrangements rather than to have so many individually owned cars, which, as you point out,
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Nice troll turnaround.
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Your analogy is valid if, when you say "by the same token" you actually mean "by a totally different token bearing no resemblance to the one in discussion and making no sense anyway".
I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
However, rights holders are usually the only group that clearly benefits from suppression of counterfeit goods
I disagree. Look at China. Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media). Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff (down to the same name/logo) driving the quality producer out of business. Now everything becomes a low quality product competing over price. This makes it hard to compete globally.
I realize this post will get a lot of heat for saying China has trouble exporting, but when is the last time you purchased something that had the name of a Chinese company on the box. They have the low end covered and their factories can make products for multinationals that oversee the quality, but it will be very difficult for them to sell a car in the US or to compete with a company like Caterpillar. They even have trouble selling major appliances, even though most of the name brands are made over there to begin with.
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But this practice assumes no intelligence on the part of the buyer, which is increasingly not true.
China is not mud huts and peasant farmers anymore, and the sophistication of the local consumers should not be underestimated. They can tell a counterfeit iPhone from a real one, and even a real one with wifi disabled from a real gray market one from Hong Kong with working Wifi. (Which is why the Official China iPhone roll out is flopping big time).
As for China brand names on products, it would appear they p
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funny enough, lenovo was a no-name outside of china, tho a big name computer brand there, until it grabbed the PC division of IBM!
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I've had my original sweat-of-the-brow work counterfeited and copied, and it fucking
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I wish trademarks and copyrights weren't mixed so much. Trademarks can certainly be abused, but their purpose for being and the way they are abused is not consistent with copyrights. Also the opinion of anti-copyright folks is certainly not always anti-trademark. Trademark infringement is closer to fraud than it is to copyright infringement.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan was in the same boat 50 years ago. Now look. And with the public access to information about products that the internet has brought, I would bet China could change perception about their brands in a decade easily.
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Japan was in the same boat 50 years ago. Now look.
The difference being that China has:
1. an enormous industrial base which is almost impossible to police
2. an corrupt government and police force which make a token effort to stop commercial-scale counterfeiting of goods
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And with the public access to information about products that the internet has brought, I would bet China could change perception about their brands in a decade easily.
Let me tell you about quality versus price: if you need to get dressed and ensure you can actually eat something tonight, you don't buy the more expensive clothes, not even if they'll pay off in not having to buy new in the next 10 years.
OTOH, many of these knockoff factories produce quality products, too.
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It sounds like you're making more of an argument for trademarks than copyright. Modeling after US law, Nike keeping it's logo's off of other manufacturer's products is a matter of trademark, not copyright.
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One example of the top of my head. Huawei. Telecom and networking equipment.
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China has high quality products that are being imitated by knockoff artists?
Citation needed.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media)
Because no one has heard of Leveno? The main reason why no company can make a name for themselves in a US market is A) Their name sounds distinctly foreign (I'd rather drink an English-sounding drink than a drink from Kweichow Moutai Company) B) They are tailored to a specific market. China doesn't have the mass media that the US and Europe does, almost all the media in China is state-run or sponsored. Because of this the advertising needs to be changed, where in the US, individuality and uniqueness is appreciated, in China it is not. So a lot of ads that are successful in the US because of that (such as the Think Different Mac ads) would fail in China. C) in China -a lot- of companies either have government control or influence. Cherry Automobile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery_Automobile) is the largest independent Chinese auto maker and it is run by the Chinese government. Such things don't export well and D) A significant amount of Americans avoid things that are Chinese. There are a lot of Americans who think that China is going to nuke the US or other crazy theories, but nonetheless some people do believe them and so that keeps a lot of Chinese-sounding goods from American shores.
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individuality and uniqueness is appreciated
while agreeing with your other points, which US is this that you're living in?
certainly wasn't the one I lived in.
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"D) A significant amount of Americans avoid things that are Chinese. There are a lot of Americans who think that China is going to nuke the US or other crazy theories, but nonetheless some people do believe them and so that keeps a lot of Chinese-sounding goods from American shores."
I'm not in the US, but, yes, I try to avoid products made in China when there is a choice. The reasons have nothing to do with crazy theories or prejudice, but simply: A) I do not want to (indirectly) support a non-democratic g
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Have you worked with Lenovo?
All of their websites that have any important (ie, not marketing) information, including drivers, SPM, and maintenance stuff are all hosted on IBM's servers. All my parts I order (I'm a certified lenovo tech) come from IBM. Most of the people that do R&D are at IBM. Seriously, put down your thinkpad, and go pickup an "Ideapad" laptop. Completely different, and completely crap. (My wife has a Y510). All lenovo actually does, it would appear, is Assemble the machines in Chi
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Why would they nuke you? They already own you. ;)
What is the point in destroying your own property?
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Thank you for your excellent argument in favour of trademarks. That is why we have trademarks.
Now, can you please explain how this is relevant to copyright?
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It's not fair at all to make that comparisons. Intellectual property such as a trademark works on a different fundamental level than something like copyright. Knockoff products could exist under their own name as a blatant imitation of a premium product without sharing the premium products name. This is, in fact, quite often the case in the USA. You can often buy generic clothing or food which has a striking resemblance to a premium product, but under a store's own brand name. It's cheaper and usually
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I wouldn't label it stealing, its closer to fraud or identity theft.
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I think you're mixing up trademark infringement with copyright infringement (which some people call piracy). Trademark infringement is when someone makes a cheap knockoff good with your logo on it, Copyright infringement is when someone redistributes your media.
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Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff
Except there are very few companies ever competing on specific quality. Usually it's about the perception of quality rather than any actual quality, so the only 'quality' may be the actual label, the rest is from the same production lines as those 'low quality knockoffs'. After all, profits are made by selling cheap stuff for a lot more than it's worth.
If quality is what you want out of branding, you should try
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However, rights holders are usually the only group that clearly benefits from suppression of counterfeit goods
I disagree. Look at China. Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media). Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff (down to the same name/logo) driving the quality producer out of business. Now everything becomes a low quality product competing over price. This makes it hard to compete globally.
I realize this post will get a lot of heat for saying China has trouble exporting, but when is the last time you purchased something that had the name of a Chinese company on the box. They have the low end covered and their factories can make products for multinationals that oversee the quality, but it will be very difficult for them to sell a car in the US or to compete with a company like Caterpillar. They even have trouble selling major appliances, even though most of the name brands are made over there to begin with.
Let me turn this around. What if the rest of the world were like China in this matter? Isn't that more ideal? Companies fighting over pennies and adopting eachothers ideas constantly, and consumers that just keep getting better and cheaper products. With this in mind, is it so easy to say that the model in China is flawed? Rather than the artificial scarcity which the rest of the world has accepted.
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When I bought my most recent Thinkpad which says: Lenovo. A product that has worse fashion-design and higher prices than their competitors, but is favored because they still have the highest build quality in the industry,
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Except for the first sentence, the paragraph you quote appears to mostly discuss the idea that invention and creativity would continue without intellectual property.
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It does, but dismissively.
I did not want to quote the entire section.
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Its in paragraph 78 if you care to read the rest.
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You mean paragraph 13?
Having read the whole thing, it actually seems refreshingly balanced to me. The beginning of the part you quoted is really kind of a summary of the consequences pointed out by Kenneth Arrow. I'm willing to believe that, in a world with instant communication, the rate of invention might slow down somewhat if there was no IP.
In the next paragraph the author points out that IP rights are detrimental to consumers and that governments have to strike a balance between encouraging investmen
Re:Rights-holder bears costs (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to have only read the first sentance of that paragraph, because it goes on to give additional incentives besides money, and also admit that companies can potentially profit from new technologies in ways other than the monopoly that copyright provides. Then they state that governments have chosen to suppliment the natural incentives.
It is completely accurate.
A lot of the current extreme backlash against copyright stems from a misunderstanding of what copyright is, and what it is intended to do. The goal of copyright is not to allow content producers to profit from their product - that's simply the vehicle for achieving its goal. The goal of copyright is to produce as much new creative content (art, literature, music, etc) as possible for the overall benefit of the public, and it sounds like at least one person at the WIPO understands this.
You see, copyright is really an exception to an individual's right to use of any property they own for any purpose except directly harming another individual or their property. It is an exception to your natural rights, and as such it has limitations. This doctrine basically says there are some situations where copying all or part of a work for certain purposes like analysis, review, commentary, etc, are fair and the copyright monopoly does not affect those uses. Because fair use is determined by deciding what copyright does not apply to, rather than what fair use applies to, it tends to be fuzzy and subjective.
Now, the companies who profit the most off of copyrighted works couldn't give a rat's ass about producing new content for the enhancement of society as a whole, all they care about is how much their content can be consumed. Obviously if copyrights they own go away after 20-30 years, they can't keep milking that cash cow, so they push for extensions. As soon as they get one they push for more, and more. It doesn't help that half the time congressmen don't have a clue (or sometimes even want to have a clue) about things like copyright and what it is for. So we end up with cartoons that have been copyrighted for 100 years with no end in sight, books that won't come into the public domain until they are largely irrelivant, and music that is copyrighted virtually indefinitely.
Sane copyright is a good thing, however insane copyright really just encourages piracy. Piracy has gotten so prevalent that I'm not even sure copyright is having that much of a detrimental effect on society. The funny thing is, people are generally happy to pay for this stuff if it is priced reasonably. What does it cost a record label to cut the price of a digital download in half and sell three times as many copies? If you can't do that math, you suck at business.
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While the stated goal of copyright is to promote creativity, in practice copyright primarily creates a commercial system that has little practical relevance when applied to modern technology.
If the laws were actually intended to promote creativity, copyright systems wouldn't provide rights for Life + 70 years (AU).
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It's just playing with words. Saying the goal of copyright is to promote creativity and prodution of useful content is exactly equivalent to saying that the goal of the free market is to encourage the betterment of society and creation of wealth we can all share. I happen to agree with both statements but you'll find significant numbers of people who don't, especially the last one.
The problem isn't that copyright length is too long or too short - any reasonable person can debate this. The problem is that th
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iirc, it started out with a limit of 14 years, no more, no less.
the current life + 70 years was pushed into existence by lobbyists over decades afterwards.
i think there is a saying that when the mouse is about to go public domain, the lobbyists come out in force...
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Actually, I'm not so sure if insane copyright encourages piracy because of what it does. It just gives a good justification. I obviously could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most copyright infringement occurs with materials that wouldn't come out of copyright even in a relatively conservative system. Short of being more convenient and comfortably priced, I don't see how eliminating mass copyright infringement is even possible. That said, the current system certainly is insane and needs t
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Society produced lots of good art before copyright was thought up.
As far as some forms of art go (music, for example), I think the output was better quality before copyright.
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Without pat
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Without patents, only corporations would ever invent anything.
That's almost certainly untrue in general. Some people invent stuff because that's what sort of people they are, irrespective of the economic incentives (or not) for them to be like that. However, without patents you'd probably see the rise of guilds again as groups of inventors grouped together to share know-how and defend themselves against the rest of the world. Given the experience of the middle ages, patents are probably better for society overall. (Of course, one of the best things about patents is th
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not short enough on some topic, 24 years is a lot of time in the computing field for instance...
and hell, even with patents, some things are not researched by big corps, as the they cant get a return on investment before the invention is obsolete (see pharma and flu).
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Can you produce some evidence. Software manage to progress very rapidly for a few decades before it became patentable. There is no correlation between strong patent law and development at a national scale. Academic studies have generally concluded that something other than patents was the main driver of R & D (e.g. the need to get new products out before the competition).
ON the other hand, we know that patents impose costs on both producers and consumers.
Uncertain, unquantified, probably slight benefits
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iirc, more and more research are done at universities and similar, in a system where different corps sponsor new equipment, and gains the benefits of any results.
this means they have no standing labs of their own, do not have to pay dedicated staff, yet gets a whole lot of R&D done.
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It sounds like you didn't notice the "NOT" in the second sentence. It says "Inventive and creative [sic] would *NOT* ground to a halt without government intervention". The article introduced the old saw solely to knock it down. That appears to be exactly your position too.
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Which of course is at best a stretch and at worst simply untrue. There is no evidence that invention did not exist prior to patents and copyrights, or would cease without it. Its clear our current system goes way beyond protecting first movers, to the clear detriment of society as a whole and an unwarranted power shift to rights holders.
I agree that government should not get involved in petty copyright infringement. I do think there is a "happy medium" that could benefit both consumers and investors.
For example, trademark enforcement where a knock-off handbag manufacturer is allowed to manufacture as long as their bags don't display someone else's trademark could work. (Think of CVS's generic brands that obviously come from the same manufacturer that holds a trademark.) Likewise, government assistance in blocking piracy of new works of
"nuanced" is just an excuse for a power-grab (Score:3, Insightful)
--we're elitist snobs, and of course we know better than you what's good for you.
--whatever shade of meaning applies is the one we want at any given moment.
--dictatorships and Communist nations will get a pass.
--a person's freedom to create, innovate, and distribute must be hindered at all turns.
I defy this bogus organization to prove me wrong.
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I don't understand why you're being modded a troll. You really aren't far off the mark on how these organizations view themselves and others, and aptly calls out their behavior.
They force 3rd-World nations to sign WIPO treaties in order to get any disaster/poverty relief aid from the World Bank/IMF, for instance. The only 3rd-World nations that get away with not signing them and still get the money are nations like Venezuela and Columbia (or any other 3rd World nation that has an abundance of A) drug/narco-
mighty broad brush there (Score:2)
Words have meaning. "Don't steal," "don't lie," and the like, have meaning. There is no "nuance" to them. Only a lawyer or a paid shill (like the
ACTA (Score:5, Insightful)
This explains why ACTA is not going though the WIPO and instead it's own little path.
This is right on the mark - mod it up. (Score:5, Insightful)
This AC is absolutely right. WIPO has actually been taking a much more moderate approach to a lot of IP policy lately, with its development agenda and the increased influence of developing countries there. There has been so much relative moderation that some people feel WIPO is gridlocked
So, US, EU, Japan, et al. know that they will make no progress in pushing ACTA through WIPO (which would be the appropriate forum). As a result, they've pursued ACTA by itself, in a completely non-transparent manner.
Wipo has been sidelined (Score:2)
Why do you think the Acta bullshit is being negotiated outside of the Wipo or WTO? That's because those entities, having been founded upon principles such as fairness and equity, cannot be brought to come up with such bullshit. What you're seeing here is not surprising. It's precisely why those motherfuckers in power avoid it.
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And also why those mofos are tickled pink they get to use state secrets to shut out criticism.
What about the free piracy that Antigua gets (Score:2)
What about the free piracy that Antigua gets under Online Gambling ruling? And I they can view the ACTA as a way to for the us to get out of paying up and what can the us cut the WIPO off the internet? That may become a big thing and I don't think that others will want to go against the WIPO.
Re:IP Enforcement waste of resources (Score:4, Interesting)
No, quite a lot of stuff from China is not counterfeit. A lot of those products are manufactured by Chinese companies under their own names or under other made-up names, which by definition makes them not counterfeit because they aren't claiming to be something they're not. A lot of it is the result of manufacturing overruns, which while not authorized by the manufacturer and thus in a strict legal sense counterfeit, are in fact identical to the actual products, and thus not counterfeit by most sane definitions. And so on. Don't overgeneralize.
Not so" new-ance" (Score:1)
From TFA: "Fink cited a study by Maffioletti and Ramello (2004) which concluded that . . . increased copyright enforcement would not expand sales of legitimate copies on a one-for-one basis."
The study did not say this, but anecdotally it seems to me that if not for "piracy" the audience penetration for a lot of movies and music would be a lot less, and I often wonder if it's "pirates" who posted Iron Man to youtube or put up a torrent of Wolverine, or Paramount and Marvel (maybe even Audi?).
Copyright enf't-
well (Score:4, Interesting)
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Adult Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
I think for a real distilled view of the impact of piracy, we should ask the adult entertainment industry. They don't do concerts like musicians, or have big cinema releases like regular movies, so pretty much the only income of a porn studio comes from overpriced DVDs and licensed sex toys (as in ones made to mimic stars' body parts). My (obviously anecdotal) experience suggests that most of the pirates causing hollywood headaches are pretty avid consumers of porn, and given that they already pirate normal movies and music, I dare say they don't usually buy their porn either. If we could get some figures from the porn industry on just what impact piracy has had on them, then we could probably extrapolate that to the regular entertainment industry. Given that porn is still both plentiful and expensive, and I've actually seen the number of adult stores increase in the past few years, suggesting proffitability, I think the results of such a survey would be interesting to people on both sides of the copyright fence.
Let's Make a Deal! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ars recently had a story about how Paramount was using Star Trek as an example of how piracy is out of control.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/11/paramount-pictures-over-five-million-copies-of-star-trek-stolen.ars [arstechnica.com]
Poor darlings. They only grossed $400M... at the box office alone.
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=startrek11.htm [boxofficemojo.com]
But Paramount cry poor. Their executives must be living out of dumpsters on their own lot. Well, let's we the public make a deal:
1. The public shall stop downloading torrents so long as
2. The studios make them available online immediately without DRM for a reasonable price AND I MEAN REASONABLE.. $400M suggests you're milking it *
3. The public backlash is being fueled by hatred at the erosion of fair use rights. Like the Sono Bono Copyright Extension act which has stopped works owned by filthy rich corporations from entering the public domain. So if Congress repeals that glutinous piece of legislation (and Disney cedes the rights to Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh to the public domain) then we'll have a deal. **
4. And stop bribing politicians too. Lobbyists who exchange cash or favours or "donations" should go to jail as the people who receive them.
* = and don't pull any of your Hollywood Accounting scams to try and "tell us you made a loss" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting [wikipedia.org] )
** = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act [wikipedia.org]
Free trade is just like socialism (Score:2)
Free trade is just like socialism:
a) Proponents say that free trade has never been tried enough, just like socialism.
b) Proponents say that once we get past all the economic disasters from free trade, everyone will be happy, just like socialism.
c) Proponents say that free trade is an international thing and there will be no countries any more, just like socialists.
d) Proponents say that old cultures will get altered, just like socialists.
e) At the end, you'll lose your job, have to work more, to get less, j
real counterfeiting crimes (Score:1)
Unfortunately while WIPO and others argue about counterfeiting watches and designer accessories and other fripperies which affect rich companies there is real and dangerous counterfeiting going on which really does kill people.
China has a huge number of operations counterfeiting medical drugs. These are sold inside China and exported, mainly to third world countries. They are often very good fakes and very difficult to tell from the real product and often contain very little of the active beneficial drug.
When the US was developing... (Score:2)
There was no copyright or other IP protection of foreign material in the early days of the US, and this was deliberate, to help the US economy to grow to be the juggernaut that it is today. Now that the US is the big kid, it's time to make sure no-one else uses that trick.