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Personally I try to correct this tendency just a little by putting chunks of books up at my blogs, most recently, for example, in the form of this posting, about Sir Christopher Wren's education. The way I see it, this (a) makes available to new readers some of that mountain of work that the author did, and (b) advertises the book to people who might want then to read all of it. I can imagine no circumstances in which me posting such a chunk could reduce sales, unless it's a very stupid chunk and I don't pick those. Here is a guy - thanks to Jackie D for the news - who is giving his whole book away on the Internet. He doesn't think this will harm paper sales, and he is being proved right. And apparently I may have been a small part of persuading him to do this, via an ancient posting of mine that Jackie D sent to him, and reminded me of with her recent posting. But Jackie starts her piece with what is the really big Book/Internet news right now, namely the deal that Google has done with a handful of the world's top libraries to scan in … basically all their books, and make them available, and more to the point searchable, on the Internet. It's the logical next step for libraries. Their mission is to make their stuff available, and this does that. Their only worry about just flinging it all onto the Internet themselves would have been: What's the best way to do it? Google are the perfect people to hook up with to make sure that they don't just do it, but do it right. I'll bet you anything that this project results in a whole stack of hidden literary treasures coming back into print. Quite a few will become best sellers. It will be a mini-renaissance. Books. They have a great
future. (See also earlier postings by me here on these themes, here,
and here. China
IP stories China is a potentially huge market. But more to the point it already has myriad manufacturing companies capable of putting your product together for far less than it would cost you in a rich Western country. Trouble is, the Chinese now have a reputation for stealing the designs they are only supposed to be following. Which is not a reputation calculated to increase in the longer term the amount of business that China does with Western hi-tech companies whose entire futures depend on their treasure troves of intellectual property rights. Thus it is that you often find in these China IP stories references to how China is tightening up, getting better, is signing IP deals with this or that country. As this story, about Western drug companies trying to get Chinese companies to manufacture their drugs without stealing their formulae, so delicately expresses it: "The country has 6,000 drugmakers, many of which are law-abiding companies." The story is further complicated by the fact that Chinese companies are now starting to have their own IP interests to protect. They too are liable to have their IP rights stolen by smaller, less law-abiding companies. Here, for example, is a story about a legal battle between a Chinese telecoms giant and some ex-employees whom it accused of stealing its secrets in order to start up a new small company. The telecoms giant won its case. China has some way to
go before it becomes as well know for respecting IP rights as it
now is for stealing
them. My favourite recent China IP story concerns Bill Clinton's
memoirs, which I wrote about at
Samizdata, and which Colin
Levey also wrote about recently for TCS. Clinton is right, says
Levey, to be miffed about the way his memoirs have been stolen,
but wrong to be allowing his Presidential Foundation to encourage
a similar approach to AIDS treatment drugs created by western drug
companies . Unconvincing
anti-piracy propaganda Two of the arguments they are use have stuck in my mind. First, they are saying that the copies that we wicked people might be tempted to buy from dubious fat men in sweaty T-shirts in the market are likely to be technically bad, filmed with hand-held cameras at the back of the cinema. 95 percent of pirated DVDs are like this, they say. And second, buying these DVDs means that you are putting money into the hands of bad people who will then do other bad things with this money. The first argument doesn't convince me. The word-of-mouth I hear is that David Carr's account immediately below is the one that matters, and that the basic problem originates in Hollywood itself, within the industry itself, with untrustworthy insiders. Maybe 95 percent of the people attempting piracy do it in a technically absurd manner. But the 5 percent who matter do it terrifyingly well, with good originals. After all, those sweaty T-shirt guys have their reputations to think of too. They don't want people saying that all their DVDs are wobbly and have people sitting in front of you on the screen, plus hopeless sound of course. They will seek out the stuff that has been, er, well-pirated. The second argument, that DVD pirates also sell drugs and enslave defenceless women and chop them up for their body parts, etc., is also feeble, because it suggests that these people have lost faith in their ability to convince us of the essential wrongness of DVD piracy itself. Would we say that bank robbery is wrong because bank robbers do other wrong things, or that murder is wrong because murderers also tell lies, steal things, and engage in DVD piracy? DVD Pirates Are White Slavers Don't Put Money In Their Hands, they cry plaintively. They might as well say: We Don't Really Have A Case. If something is illegal,
whether for good or for bad reasons, then only criminals, who are
mostly very bad people, will then do it. This is obvious. But this
is absolutely not a proof that the thing itself was bad in the first
place. Spot
the deliberate similarity Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece is about an apparently fictional character in an apparently fictional play - "Frozen" by Bryony Lavery, a fictional character who turned out to be rather too much like a real person, psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, for that real person's comfort. Friends called Lewis after seeing the play saying that Lewis should see it too, because it was "about her". Lewis saw it, and angrily agreed. Except that, although the not-called-Lewis character used lots of the same working methods and proclaimed similar ideas and philosophies (using similar words to Lewis's), the fictional character differed from the real one in having a love affair with her collaborator. Lewis felt not only that her ideas had been stolen, but that she had also been libelled, so close was the similarity between the rest of the fiction and fact. If Lavery had stuck more closely to her model, Lewis would have been less angry and Lavery would probably have got into less legal trouble. Lavery didn't plagiarise accurately enough, you might say! Gladwell starts by sympathising with Lewis, but ends by feeling that all these plagiarism complaints may be getting out of hand. Sara Rimer makes a similar point in her New York Times piece about a Harvard scholarly plagiarism row. (Two scholars accused of plagiarism say they didn't mean to. Harvard students say: we demand similar latitude!) In the Lewis/Lavery case,
the, er, borrowing, was spotted by the old fashioned method, of
friends spotting it. In Rimer's piece, there occur some interesting
reflections on the particular role of Internet search engines in
these kinds of arguments. Similarities between any piece of writing
and any other piece of writing can now be spotted in seconds. Coincidences,
and generic similarities, perhaps caused merely by the fact that
both writers are members of the same intellectual subculture, can
become the basis of life-ruining accusations. Real plagiarism is
easier to spot nowadays. But it has also become easier to accuse
someone wrongly of plagiarism, or to identify circumstances where
deliberate plagiarism might have occurred, but probably didn't. Not
marvellous This further Tinworth titbit, hardly more than a clutch of links, is about how Marvel Comics are suing the creators of an online game. The problem is that, given the graphic tools they are given and their freedom to choose their protagonists' names, players might dare to trick themselves out as Marvel Comics characters. So, says Tinworth, in his link to another guy who says this at greater length, will Marvel Comics also be suing the makers of paper and pencils? This is no one-off crisis. The problem is generic. What is going on here is a problem of dispersed power, in this case of the dispersed power to infringe copyright. And dispersed power is awfully hard to control. So, what is happening is that someone - anyone - who is big and rich and easily blamed and sued and controlled, who is somehow involved in dispersing that power, is duly being blamed. (Note the similarity to other legal and litigational disputes, where ISPs are being made responsible for what their customers say and do with the mere service that the ISPs provide.) Quite aside from the unjust and excessive meddlesomeness of the Marvel Comics attitude, this seems to me like commercially self-destructive behaviour on their part. By trying to stop gamers from thinking aloud, so to speak, about their characters, are Marvel Comics not interrupting the very process of imagination-capturing that you would think they would want to encourage? Ah, but this is a process that might, one day, in the future, lead to money being made out of Marvel Comics superheroes, but not by Marvel Comics. So, the whole thing must be stopped, now. But in a sane world,
Marvel Comics would stop people from jumping that fence only when
they had actually started jumping it. Are these gamers making money
with their recreations? Maybe a tiny few might, one day. So sue
them, then. Leave the others alone. In fact, feature them in your
adverts. Stealing
ideas from the students We bloggers always acknowledge where we got our ideas! I got to this from Adam Tinworth's blog (Adam has a useful picture of the scheme there), and he got to it from Gothamist, who says that the Ground Zero tower design sucks and that this would be a fine chance for Childs to share some of the blame for it. I was hopeful for this design when Childs was first appointed, but I now think that it looks like a Libeskind design done by a committee. It looks, in other words, like what it is. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out. Notice that if a building is a classical or generic shape, that is to say, a shape shared, potentially or in reality, by many buildings, then the owning of the idea of such a shape makes little sense, because the idea of any one person having originated it makes little sense. In the sixties and seventies, when they built rectangular boxes, architects were in no danger of being sued for plagiarism by the perpetrators of previous and identical boxes. But the present fashion for arbitrary, scrulptural architectural shapes means that there could be more arguments of this sort. In scientific academia
it is an open secret that senior academics often sign their names
to work actually done by subordinates. The question of whether a
senior academic might in such circumstances get sued by some talented
underling is therefore not so much a matter of whether the Top Dog
academic did it, but of whether the Top Dog has continuing power
over that student. As higher education gets to be a bigger and bigger
business (in other words more as architecture already is), as opposed
to a small and hierarchical little side-show, the grip of the academic
Top Dogs over the rest of the pack is bound to loosen, and that
could mean Nobel Laureates getting sued for practices which in earlier
times would have been regarded as academic business as usual. A
patient and a patent The wonder-drug that treats this condition is called, in the USA, Prisolec, and in Europe, Losec. Its effects are amazing, my friend says, the difference between serious grief and complete normality. Between 1999 and 2002 the various patents in different countries for Prisolec/Losec all expired. And then, in 2004, Losec ceased in Britain being a prescription drug, and became available over the counter at chemists. This is not coincidence, says my friend. Drug companies prefer to sell patented products to high spending government health services rather than to price-conscious consumers, and while this drug was still under patent, the company that sold it lobbied for it to remain a prescription drug. But when all those patents expired, and when generic copies started appearing, the originating company stopped caring and my friend and all his fellow sufferers can now buy a generic version of it that works all the same tricks, any time they want, from a chemist. Gouging a prescription out of a British National Health Service doctor can be a nightmare of interrupted work and repetitive persuasiveness. There were times, my friend says, when the impact of nationalised medicine was so painful that he preferred the pain of no medicine at all. Now, those days are gone. This is not a posting about the badness of patents. It is a posting about how even a good idea can turn bad if the free and unfree markets get mixed badly. I am unsure of the need for drugs to be patented, although I quite realise that it would mean a huge upheaval for them not to be, and that there would then have to be a completely different way of devising new drugs, which might not be nearly so effective. But I definitely think that people should be allowed to buy whatever medical treatments they want to. For a less libertarian
discussion of medicine, drugs, patents and pricing, try this New
Yorker piece. A
patent injustice The idea of the law was to stop City of London financial companies dodging income tax. They were doing this by giving their employees, not income (taxed at 40%), but instead shares (taxed at 10%) in specially created spin-off companies, into which money that would have been paid as income was inserted. These were not 'real' companies, if I understand what was going on correctly. So this was a definite tax dodge, although a perfectly legal one. What then happened was that the Inland Revenue was told by the new law to value the assets of any company that employees have been given shares in and send a tax bill based on that valuation to the new shareholders. Good. Problem solved. No. For that got the Revenue involved in valuing the patents of new university spin-off companies in which university employees had also been given shares, despite the fact that no money has yet been made from these patents. So, academics who have made fascinating and very promising inventions are now getting tax bills for millions, despite the fact that no actual money from their inventions had yet been made. I have commented critically about this extraordinary circumstance at Samizdata. Commenter number two at Samizdata notes that what the academics are now demanding is - or so it appears to me - the creation of another loophole, for themselves. No doubt the City of London will take note of that loophole. And so it goes on. What
do I think? Basically: this. Big
Music versus the Internet (again) In the USA, it has just been decided that, for now, unless and until Big Music can get the law changed, it will have to continue individually proving that Downloader Mr Pirate Squealypants really is breaking the law before ISP cooperation is insisted upon by the court, or such is my understanding. (The verdict of the court is "guilty", and your sentence is that it will be revealed who you really are!) This Wired article by Michael Grebb tells the story well. And, in general, Grebb looks like a good steady supplier of electronic IP stories. Here, for example, is another Wired piece about the related issue of Spyware. Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen, at the ever improving Social Affairs Unit blog, writes about this issue with regard to the same Big Musical effort in Europe, and wonders what they are really trying to achieve with all this litigation, given that they will never really stop all free downloading. He surmises that actually, they are using law courts as amplifiers for their press releases, the message of which is not so much that downloading should be illegal as simply: downloading is wrong! Decent people don't do this. Interesting. Cowen further speculates that music-at-a-price versus music-for-free is not the obvious foregone conclusion you might assume. Summary: the trouble with free is that you are all too liable to get what you pay for. Bad files, zero written back-up and commentary, poor sound quality. Personally (but file under "But what does Brian know?") I have always been attracted by the idea of a fixed sum subscription service, which basically gives you any music you want to listen to and all the writing and links to other writing about it that you could possibly want, for a fixed monthly or yearly or decadely fee. A musical broadband connection, you might say. I might buy that. Or,
I might have bought it twenty years ago, if I had not since
then acquired a copy of about ten percent of all the classical CDs
ever issued. Incidentally, classical CDs have got very cheap
lately. Internet downloading has surely had something to do with
that. What
Big Music should do versus what Big Music is legally entitled to
do Take the matter of whether it is right for Big Music companies to try to set the law on people who download CDs onto the Internet so that thousands of other people can then download them in their turn and listen to them for free. This issue has obligingly erupted in Britain, just when I was wondering what to put here this week. Lots of people say that Big Music in Britain is greedy and out of touch, and that instead of raging against the Internet, Big Music should explore a different 'business model' for distributing music. Well, maybe it is and maybe it should. Maybe cheaper CDs and innovative Internet distribution would be smarter ways to do business. And maybe Big Music, by using these fierce legal tactics, is diverting into litigation energy and brainpower that could be used more creatively. (I made a similar point about schoolteacher George Lopez here last week.) I assume that whatever Big Music does, millions of little music musicians are already just shovelling their tunes onto the Internet for free, and hoping to build music careers, including selling lots of CDs, on top of their Internet hit rates. I further assume that this will transform the music business and make Big Music far smaller. But that is an entirely different matter from the question of whether Big Music is exercising its proper legal rights, or, a related matter, whether the legal rights that Big Music does have and is now exercising or seeking to exercise are rights that it ought to have. Should Big Music have those rights? Compelling Internet service providers to part with the names of their customers is an ominous precedent, even though in this case the kind of probable cause that allows police to break down physical front doors does definitely seem to be present. Trouble is, breaking down physical front doors is highly visible, and hence politically controllable. Breaking down electronic doors could become invisibly ubiquitous. (See also: the argument about voting machines.) But at least let people refrain from deducing the law from the mere nastiness, as they think it, of Big Music. Next thing you know,
they'll want to make nasty tunes illegal. Originating
ideas and getting the credit If you do that you tune into an amazing saga of intellectual property theft. The Mail on Sunday simply lifted great gobs of what Millington had written, changed the names, and published it as if they'd thought of it themselves. Millington sued, and obtained satisfaction (i.e. money and a ton of great publicity, and a ton of bad publicity for the MoS.) The story illustrates both the temptations that the Internet places in front of dead tree publishers to simply nick stuff, but also the dangers of doing this. Internet writers have many friends! Phrases like "hornet's nest" spring to mind. The above story makes an interesting contrast with postings by political people, who positively love it when bigger name politicians "steal" their ideas, even word for word, despite the fact that the big guys seldom acknowledge it. But for the smaller time bloggers it is enough that third parties can track the flow (complete with dates) of original thought, and that the bloggers are rewarded reputationally. (Is "reputationally" a word? It is now. Feel free to use it without crediting me.) And here's a story where the central figure would have done well to go the reputational route rather than the legal route. It's Georges Lopez, star of Etre et Avoir, the surprise documentary movie hit, who, afterwards, wanted a slice of the surprise action. That's my idea! And it was. But: no dice, said the French courts. I
say that Lopez would have done better to write a book. Photographing architecture
and photographing art In art galleries, by contrast, photography is severely restricted. You can see why this would be. The whole reason for art galleries is the art, and if people photograph it, that's like stealing. Stealing the Gherkin would mean barging inside it and setting up an office there without paying any rent. "Intellectually" stealing it would mean stealing all the drawings and building another Gherkin in another city, without paying anything. Photographing the Gherkin's views and showing these views to your friends? That's marketing! No photograph of the Gherkin could possible be, or even aspire to being, a "copy" of it. A photograph of a painting, on the other hand, is a copy, maybe bad but maybe very good.. So you can see how different feelings of violation and consequently a whole different set of legal principles would swing into action. But, what of sculpture? A photo of a sculpture isn't a copy of that either. Outdoor sculpture is now treated, photographically, like architecture. But inside art galleries it is treated like paintings. If the argument is that "we own the building - we forbid photography", then fine, I've no quarrel. But what if both the building and the sculpture in it is "publicly" owned? Why forbid me to photograph it then? The most famous and well-liked recent work of British sculpture is the Angel of the North. The many photographs of it, official and freelance, have only added to its appeal. And that argument surely applies also to indoor sculpture. Photography is annoying to other gallery visitors? Well, could there not be particular pre-announced days when galleries (especially publicly owned ones) make a point of positively encouraging photography? Photography used to be a skilled profession and a minority passion. But more recently, and especially since the advent of digital cameras, it has become a mass enthusiasm, which will spark many more arguments like this. (And I haven't even mentioned photographing people.) This
site to start learning what the law (in London anyway) now is
about these matters. Art and architecture are explicitly dealt with. Distributed intelligence
What has this to do with intellectual property? Well, what this episode illustrates is a new and very different way to do collaborative work, and we can now all see how powerful this new way of working might one day become. (We have seen, that is to say, that it doesn't just apply to writing Linux software.) For it is not only in destroying old media deceptions that this new, collaborative but un-hierarchical method of working stands ready to contribute to our world. The same methods could be harnessed to more creative ends, a point I have just elaborated on in a much longer posting than this one, over at Samizdata. Movies, I speculate, could be put together by blogger swarms. Open source movie making. (And see also this earlier Samizdata posting by RC Dean.) I didn't, in that Samizdata posting, deal at any length with the Intellectual Property issues involved in such a process. I merely note that if any money is going to change hands to reward all this creative activity, then deals will have to be done, on the basis of who did what. Keep your eye on the Samizdata comments.
These can sometimes be extremely illuminating. There may even be
some movie ideas in among them. Copyright inflation
- America turns European These latter two pieces are both about what you might call copyright inflation. It started, in the USA, at 28 years. Now it is nearer a century. A temporary monopoly, to encourage inventiveness by rewarding it enough to keep it rolling, has mutated (thanks to political pressure from companies built on these temporary monopolies who dare not face life without them) into the nearly permanent ownership of an idea, whether those monopoly owners fully exploit that idea or not. Both authors hark back to the earlier days of copyright in Europe, against which the writers of the US Constitution were reacting when they fixed on 28 years as a decent interval, that is to say as a decent compromise between the principle that creators should be rewarded and that ideas should be there for others to pick up and run with. In Europe, the purpose of copyright was far more explicitly the suppression of ideas, rather than ensuring that they were properly exploited and that technical progress progressed unimpeded. Copyright inflation, the two authors argue, turns economic dynamism into politically dominated stasis. The original, economic, purpose of copyright is forgotten, and copyright becomes all about the rights of creators to control their creations for longer and longer. And if it is about rights, why do these rights not last for ever, and why may they not be absolute? American copyright law is now being used
to make parodies of songs illegal, if the owners of the original
song don't want parodies and are not willing to permit them, no
matter what they are offered. That's not mere economics. That is
indeed politics. The end of the
cinema as we know it? This problem,caused by the extraordinary amount of photographic and recording power you can now pack into a small package, small enough to insert into any cinema which is not run with airport-like security,is not going to go away. For remember, it only needs one successful filming operation for the digital cat to be out of the bag and for those mega-profits upon which new mega-production depends to slump horribly. Perhaps an unfilmable film projection system will be devised, that makes sense to human eyes but which baffles cameras. But assuming that won't work, maybe Hollywood will eventually have to release films simultaneously in the cinema and on DVD, or rather in the cinema and on some much higher definition successor to DVD, of a sort which can itself be used in a cinema. Regular cinema and home cinema, in other words, will become the same thing. I hold discussion evenings at my home every
month, and the speaker at the next one will be Michael Jennings,
who wrote my previous posting here.
He will be talking about the impact of technology on Hollywood,
and I wonder what he will have to say about this. For me, what it
all goes to show is that the law is one thing, and what people can
actually do is quite another. Michael Jennings
on which bloggers to consult Lawrence Lessig's blog is quite useful. Lessig is a law professor: author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and also Free Culture and is a big fan of the idea of a public domain, and believes that the copyright industry has indulged in massive overreach in recent years. (He was the lawyer who took the Bono case to the supreme court, arguing that it was not constitutional for existing copyrights to be further extended. (The court ruled against him.)) Eugene Volokh talks about intellectual property issues from time to time on the Volokh Conspiracy, and he is very very smart, so what he has to say is often interesting. Other contributors to that blog do so less often (and Volokh talks about lots of other things), so it might be necessary to google something like this. Also, this is quite a famous post, too. These two guys in London run a blog which is sort of a news summary of mostly British and European intellectual property stories. The electronic frontier foundation (EFF) is a sort of electronic civil liberties organisation that is concerned with privacy in a big way as well, but it seems to be constantly fighting the overreach with respect to copyright law coming mainly from the music industry. Jessica
Litman, author of Digital
Copyright and another law professor, this time at Wayne
State University, has some useful links. IBM - not giving
everything away IBM is not run by techno-hippies in an attic having teenage fun. They have a lot of customers, all of whom pay something and many of whom pay a lot. Are you confused about the latest trends in computers? In IBM adverts the problem is always: confusion. And the solution is always: IBM, and this solution is sold to you, not donated. This latest give-away is intended to boost the appeal of the solutions that IBM sells. Confused by all this open source stuff that people (who exactly?) are giving away (how exactly?) to, you know, us? How does that work? Call IBM and they'll sort it all out for you. With IBM so deeply involved in open source
software, I am inching towards the unqualified suspicion that open
source software will never not be confusing. Or to put it another
way, if it isn't confusing, it will cost. TANSTAFS. There ain't
no such thing as free software. Mints and outlaws
On Tuesday it was the front page lead story in the Guardian, with a big picture, that Nestlé had been trying to register the Polo mint as a trademark. So far as I can work out, if Nestlé had succeeded in their application they would then have been able to sue people who made, I don't know, space stations in the shape of Polo mints, even if these were not white, and much, much bigger, and not minty tasting at all. Other sweet makers objected, and the judge threw the case out, declaring that it also had a hole in it. But don't take my word for it. (Seriously, don't.) You can read the Guardian story here, or the Telegraph story here, or the Independent story here. But they, like the judge and like me, were mostly playing the story for laughs. The media outlet that most impressed me in its coverage of this case was Out-law.com. Its story is here , thin on leaden humour, strong on content. Interesting that Out-law.com give their analysis away. The idea, presumably, is to make everyone think good thoughts about Masons, the international law firm under whose wing Out-law.com operates. It worked with me. Yet one more example of people who could keep good stuff to themselves, what with it being theirs, but who instead choose to share it with everyone, for the sake of the honour and glory that they thereby gain. I particularly recommend keeping eye on this stuff. I particularly liked the page at their
website showing where all their offices
are. London, yes. Brussels, yes. Far East, yes. USA, no. When you
consider how googling typically gets you to American sites and American
law analysis, I found this...refreshing. What scientists
say and how they say it Scientists don't usually claim this. They merely squabble about who got there first. Consider the "race" to crack the shape of the DNA molecule, famously won by Crick and Watson. Crick and Watson dreaded that Linus Pauling would crack the puzzle first and win the race, as he well might have. When colleagues and rivals saw the DNA model that Crick and Watson made, they simply said: yes, that's right, that's it. There was no fussing about whether nicer bits of metal might have made things more clear or looked better in the photos. Simply, Crick and Watson had got to the right idea first, and had expressed it well enough to prove it. Or think of the discovery of evolution, arrived at first by Darwin, but only published years later when Wallace also revealed that he too had arrived at the same idea. Darwin and Wallace settled their potentially severe differences by announcing their discovery together. Darwin's case is interesting. Crick and
Watson share the DNA Gold Medal, with the margin of their pre-eminence
over other medalists, such as Rosalind Franklin, now much argued
about. But the evolution race was won outright by Darwin. Fair enough,
he thought of it first, even if he didn't immediately say so. But
it helped Darwin a lot that, when he did finally break his silence,
what he also published was a big
book. In other words, it was not just what Darwin said that
won him the acclaim of posterity. It was the way he said it. How printing
created our argument Before printing, it was all that they could manage to preserve ideas, because it was all they could do to keep certain narratives in existence and not to lose them for ever. Printing made it possible for ideas and knowledge to accumulate and to progress. The relevance of this to our agenda here is that if there is no widespread agreement that an invention has even been made, and made for the first time, then it makes little sense to single out one individual as the one who made that invention, and to accord him special privileges with regard to it, or not as the case may be. This history lesson, from Britain's Patent Office, also makes clear the connection between the technology of copying and subsequent arguments - and in due course laws - about the right to copy. Eisenstein makes this point with self-referencial
elegance by noting that printing was itself one of the first inventions
to spark that most characteristically modern process, an argument
about who invented it first. There's photocopying
- and there's copying Am I breaking the law? If Bryson or his publishers object, I will grovel and take it all down at once, but I'd be amazed if they did. I'm selling the book, not stealing it. Paper remains hugely more convenient and pleasing to read than a computer screen, especially for long screeds. Can it be coincidence that our recommended maximum dose of words per posting here is the amount that will fit onto the average screen without any scrolling down? I do wonder what books would now cost if the photocopier had never been invented. The role of the photocopier in the history of Intellectual Property (and in the stealing of Intellectual Property) is worth a book all to itself, let alone a blog posting. Here is a report of a case in Canada about whether a library which operated a photocopier service was breaking the law. It adds to the fun that the law is what was being copied. The more concentrated the IP is, the more the photocopier changes things. A page of the average book is a pinprick. A photocopied chemical formula or engineering drawing could be the crown jewels. Nevertheless, what gives the argument about
IP a lot of its current extra intensity is that whereas paper remains
paper, a recording is a recording is a recording no matter how or
where it is stored, and it can be copied instantaneously, at no
cost. Copying recordings is a whole new thing and we all know it.
Have you ever photocopied a book? I'm guessing yes, but that your
answer about how often is in single figures - teens or twenties
at the most. Have you ever copied a CD? I'm guessing that your answer
is: er, no comment. Software doesn't
steal intellectual property - people steal intellectual property
The USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act does more than merely forbid people from actually stealing intellectual property. It forbids the mere possession of or trade in many of the means commonly used to carry out such theft. A man was arrested, for example, simply for bringing some Adobe decryption software into the USA. The problem that the DMCA modifiers face is that the benefits of people owning decryption software are harder to demonstrate than the benefits of civilian gun ownership. If civilians own guns, they can use them to resist crime. But widespread decryption software ownership is harder to argue for. I agree with the DMCA's critics that merely possessing the means of committing a crime without actually committing it shouldn't be illegal, but saying that doesn't win the argument. Which might explain why these DMCA modifiers
instead resort to arguing that the very idea of intellectual property
is not as solid as that of the regular sort of property. They may
be right about that, but as I see it this is a somewhat different
argument The BBC gives
it away It's quite a complicated process. We may not be "commercial" in what we do with this material. And there are other rights to be considered, not just those of the BBC. Don't expect to be viewing classic Monty Python episodes for nothing any time soon. They're going to start with wild life stuff. Be still my heart. Also, "giving away" is an exaggeration. The stuff will only be "given" to BBC license payers. Nevertheless, for all the qualifications needed to describe this, it is an interesting event, and I don't (to answer a likely complaint) believe that other similar decisions will be confined to the public sector. I can imagine a future BBC collecting many more, but far smaller, truly voluntary payments from people everywhere, rather than the big lump sums they now extort from their one captive national audience. However, welcoming this development is not the same as demanding that other organisations be obliged to do anything similar if they don't want to. That's a very different argument. I posted about this plan at Samizdata
when the BBC first
announced it. A big subject
Anyway, here are some links that reflect the variety of activities and controversies that we here will be reporting on. First, one of the great personalities of the "blogosphere", Instapundit himself, Prof. Glenn Reynolds, wonders if giving a book away on the internet harms its sales in conventional book form. Further down the blogosphere food chain, here is fellow London blogger Michael Jennings writing about the confusing effects of musical copyright law. And in this Samizdata piece, Jennings writes about the impact of DVD piracy on movie distribution, arguing that blaming piracy for movies being simultaneously released everywhere is to give piracy too much credit, if you'll pardon the expression. Finally, yesterday
afternoon, to prepare myself for my duties here, I wrote this,
and then this.
There are three sides to the intellectual property debate, I assert,
rather than just the two who are for and against. The against team
is divided. Some oppose intellectual property rights because they
oppose all property rights. Others favour property rights generally,
but argue that the principle is inapplicable to the particular matter
of ideas. This final position is worth taking seriously. And this
publication (thank you CNE Director Evans for the email yesterday)
reminds us that this has long been so .
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