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What is happening? It has to be copying. Illegal copying no doubt, but copying nevertheless. We old classical geezers fell upon CDs like Huns arriving in Rome. We love them. But when we can't get them by regular means, or at a price that we don't fancy, we borrow them and we copy them. Oh, there may also be Young People downloading classical music from the internet, in among their hip hop rock and roll boogie woogie smash bang wallop music that Young People listen to nowadays, but while the Baby Boom lives and five percent of us prefer Scarlatti, who needs to worry about that? Book pricing has long followed the "how much does it cost to copy?" rule. Hardbacks still cost a lot. But soon the paperback emerges, and at a price that is uncannily similar to the cost, when you add it all up, of photocopying the hardback. That's now happening with classical CDs, with the bargain reissue coming out only months after the lavishly packaged "hardback". With cheap books, you lose the cardboard covers. With cheap CDs you get no documentation. But even we classical geezers know how to download mere words from the internet. So, if you want Scarlatti sonatas, get them by doing two more hours of your own work, not by faffing about for three hours with your CD drive. When I can get new CDs at that price, why do I need to bother with downloading, with all the worries about legality and sound quality and the surrendering of credit card details that this would involve? And if a million Chinese classical kids also scrounge themselves some free or nearly free Scarlatti that may be all very illegal and wicked, but for the Western music industry, nothing changes, economically speaking. They merely lose out on money that they were never going to get in the first place. Even as the music industry screams about its inviolable copyright
rights, and about the vast sums of money that their vile customers
are not handing over enough of for all the music they now insist
on having on tap, the music industry is quietly adapting to the
new world of easily copied music, and CDs are steadily being priced
more like postcards and less like shoes. Capitalism adapts. It always
does. Patent uncertainty Congress is now debating and amending the Patent Reform Act of 2005 - the most significant package of changes to patent law in half a century. The aim is to redress a perceived imbalance between promoting innovation and protecting the rights of patent holders. While representing diverse constituencies, the critics and reformers largely agree on the problem: overly broad or obvious, unchallengeable patents hobble legitimate innovators. The cause is twofold. First, patents are much cheaper to obtain than to invalidate. The legal presumption of patent validity erects a high bar against a challenge, so even an idiotic patent can present a potent threat, not least because patent lawsuits can be fearsomely expensive to defend or prosecute.It gets worse: Second, the system places the initiative in the hands of the patent owner. Suppose someone comes up with an innovation, and then stumbles across a bad patent on which the invention might infringe. Even if the inventor is willing to resort to litigation to invalidate the patent, the courtroom doors remain closed.I, of course, cynical soul that I am, immediately thought to myself, ah, but what's the betting they merely replace one injustice with another. What if, in the process of making patents less easy for the wrong people to get, they make them even harder for the right people to get? So I was not amazed to read this: But in fact, it's a proposal that illustrates how efforts to improve the system may, in the end, merely contribute another layer of cost, delay, and uncertainty.Robert Millman, chief intellectual property counsel of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, says that getting a patent already takes too long, and this change will make that problem even worse. There then follow several more paragraphs which can be summarised as follows: it's complicated. Frank ends his piece thus: Rest assured, however, that whatever patent reform is enacted, we lawyers will rise to the challenge gladly, energetically, and for a reasonable fee.But of course. I'm tempted to add that any system as complicated as this one must
be inherently flawed and should be done away with. But all laws
including the very best can get complicated. A truer conclusion
might be a favourite dictum of the South African libertarian lawyer
Leon
Louw, who is fond of saying - I first heard him say it here
- that the system of government where everyone's rights are taken
seriously is by its nature the most difficult one of all to contrive. How the chaos spreads But before he got stuck into that, Syed talked more generally about what it feels like to be a new MEP. The voting system has a very peculiar feel to it, the way he told it. You have debates, but often the actual votes come weeks later. Worse, the votes come in batches. Syed confessed that often he did not know what he was voting about, or even, given the complicatedly electronic nature of the system, which way he had voted, even on an issue he had managed to think about. The way he told it, the EU legislative system is not so much a sober deliberative assembly as a kind of legislative combine harvester running amok. What then, if anything, will Syed now be making of the latest exercise in what its critics are calling legislative trickery? The EU is fretting about terrorism, and various EU governments (including that of my own Britain) has cooked up a scheme to allow the EU to track everyone's internet business to see if they are behaving terroristically. But the accusation is that having established that electronic privacy may be violated in order to stop terrorism, the EU is now being lobbied into a system where privacy may be violated for any crime-related reason of any kind. Ian Brown, of the Open Rights Group (not the Stone Roses), said: "The British government claimed that Data Retention was essential in the fight against terrorism and serious crime, but it has now become clear that groups with commercial interests have their eye on the same data. . . ."And who exactly are those "commercial interests"? Music industry body, the Creative and Media Business Alliance (CMBA), wants data-snooping legislation aimed at the prevention of terrorism to be made available for the prosecution of any crime, such as copyright infringement.Hey, I've just thought of a new conspiracy theory. International Terrorism is funded by the music industry, to create a demand for governmental snooping all over the internet, so that illegal file sharing and copyright violation can be stopped. This is not really a posting about intellectual property. Intellectual property, in this case the attempt to protect it, was merely what got me looking at what really concerns me here. Which is that legal principles, once conceded in one area, have consequences in other areas, but the organisations urging the principle in one area seem oblivious to those wider consequences, even when they themselves will perhaps be severely affected further down the line. And so the chaos spreads. The combine harvester crashes onwards. In the cab, the driver doesn't even know which buttons he is supposed to be pressing. What next? Yet more laws, this time to preserve the privacy of
internet users? If so, what further portentous concessions of principle
will those laws enshrine? Sorry Sony I'll try to describe it in non-techy English. Sony sells CDs and doesn't like it when people put these CDs into computers and copy them. So, Sony put some software on some of their music CDs to stop people doing this. But, the way Sony did this meant that they installed a programme inside everyone's computers, which had the effect of making everyone's computers vulnerable to attack by similar programmes with even more malevolent intentions, by protecting not only Sony's own sneaky little programme, but lots of other such sneaky programmes. A clever man worked all this out and published the story. Big eruption of anger against Sony. Sony decided that they had, at the minimum, a public relations catastrophe on their hands. (If I were in the habit of listening to CDs via my computer, which I am not, I would steer clear of Sony from now on.) So, they decided to stop attaching this software to their music CDs from now on. But it had already got worse. The programme Sony issued to uninstall all this wicked software itself did further damage, and made computers even more vulnerable to third party attacks from similar software with straightforwardly evil intentions. Nightmare. The key point to understand here is that people whose only "crime" was to stick a Sony CD into a computer, with no intention of copying it illegally, merely that of listening to it from their hard discs, are having their computers bent out of shape. This is like defending yourself against an anonymous gang of pickpockets operating in a crowded town square, by shooting at the entire crowd with a machine gun. Sony is using the computer version of unreasonable force. Electronically, what has happened is - to switch the metaphor from contemporary urban thieving to nineteenth century cattle thieving - the disinvention of barbed wire. And a big rancher has gone around hobbling horses, no matter who owned them or what they were using them for. And then the big rancher supplied a quack horse doctor to mend the damage. Double nightmare. It may very well be immoral to argue that Big Music should simply give up trying to insist on its legal right to sell its recordings for whatever rather big price it likes, and that instead Big Music should make its recordings so cheap to buy legally that the illegal copying of them just fades away and ceases to matter, the way that photocopying books hardly now impinges upon book publishers. But you can see why people are saying this. And you can also see that Big Music will surely end up doing just this. First it will only be lots of Little Music operations selling their tunes at three pence a pop, or whatever, and saying of the free downloaders: "Oh, those guys are our PR department, and we don't pay them anything at all!" And then those Little Musics will coagulate into the new Big Music. Capitalism will, as always, advance by co-opting its enemies. Costly books and free chatter Getting hold of books has become cheaper and easier, thanks to the internet. But what has happened to reviews of and reactions to books has been a transformation, a change in kind, as is true of reviews and reactions to all mass produced products that will cost you anything. There is now a global hubbub of more or less well-informed internet conversation about these products where before there was only an obscure chatter of review articles, the booming forth of advertisements, or silence. Review articles have exploded out of the review sections of magazines and specialist journals to become one of the dominant literary forms of our time. Why? Because, unlike with books, most of them cost absolutely nothing to read. This effect is especially potent for people who have plenty of discretionary time, but, because of not using their time to earn any more money than they need to avoid starvation and to remain internetted, do not have much spare money. I can think of two big effects of all this, one good, the other bad. The good news is that we internetted semi-slacker semi-paupers can find our way to a few books that we will really like and find interesting, without wasting our scarce cash on books that we won't like. But the bad news is that gossip, just as in the newspapers, can overwhelm truth. My favourite recent example of this effect is Samuel T. Huntingdon's book, The Clash of Civilizations. Quite a few people have read this book, and reviewed it with approximate accuracy. But because this book, unlike a mowing machine or a digital camera, is ideologically very controversial, many reviewers of and commentators on it have ground their own axes ferociously, and the upshot is that the world is now full of people who imagine that this Huntingdon bloke is actually recommending a "clash of civilisations". Nothing could be further from the truth. His book is about how to live in a world of clashing civilisations, about how to manage such clashes and minimise the damage they might do. It is absolutely not a call to battle. This happens because all this reaction and gossip is free and easy for all internetters, while books still cost. I can't help wondering how things would be if books could be read
on the internet with the same ease that all this chatter about books
now can be. This isn't
going to happen any time soon, but what if it did? Would books
be better understood? Or would most books just stop being written
at all and would it all be chitchat, uninformed even by the occasional
accurate book review? Breaking the Tamiflu patent Health ministers from 30 countries, concerned about a possible human version of bird flu, will look at loosening the patent on Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu to boost production, Canadian Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said.Not everyone agrees. Alec Van Gelder at the Bangkok Post: While it makes sense to build government stockpiles of Tamiflu, in preparation for a possible outbreak of H5N1, it is far from clear that breaking the patent would be helpful _ indeed, the opposite is more likely to be the case for several reasons.However, going back to that first Bloomberg story, it would appear that things have moved on: Roche said last week it would consider licensing four generic drugmakers to produce Tamiflu, to boost supplies of the treatment that governments are stockpiling in case of a feared worldwide outbreak of lethal avian flu. At least 118 people have contracted bird flu in Asia since the current outbreak began in 2003 in South Korea, and 61 have died.So Roche are bending in the wind, to avoid breakage. But breakage seems to be happening anyway. Taiwan is ready to produce its own Tamiflu, the antiviral avian flu drug, and will not let patent talks with Swiss drug maker Roche AG stand in the way, officials said.Are you willing to be judgmental? I'm not. The definition of an emergency
is that things which would in the absence of emergency be wrong
become not just excusable, but necessary, and even maybe inexcusable
not to do. Heartland arguments And if you type "intellectual property" into their search box, you get plenty more stuff. I like this, which is a summary of Cato Institute publication: The Constitution gives Congress the power to protect intellectual property. Yet the Internet invites new perspectives on the old models of IP protection. File sharing technology clearly creates a problem, but an arguably transitory one involving the existing body of copyrighted work. In the post-Napster world, every musician and songwriter realizes there exist new methods for distributing and pricing products. Technology can increasingly serve as a partial replacement for copyright law for the artists of tomorrow - and today - if they embrace it.As this story, which I have already written about here, illustrates. But that's pop songs. A huge Hollywood movie is something else again. As is said here: How many movie studios would be willing to spend multiple-millions of dollars on a blockbuster film if other studios could copy it upon release and send it to the video rental stores under their own label?The answer to that is that blockbusters, presumably involving lots of special effects to enable them to bust the block but not the bank, will more and more tend to come out in cinemas and on DVD simultaneously, worldwide, and at a price which causes many more to pay gladly, and that on that basis plenty of blockbusters may still get made. But perhaps not so blockbustingly, I do agree. I say "will" because, in an illegal way, this is already the problem for the big studios, and already the answer that they are being forced towards. If I have a criticism of the Heartland Institute's approach to IP issues it is that, they tend - I'm especially thinking of this - already quoted from above - to lump together different kinds of intellectual property. This is, I am learning, a complaint shared by others, who argue that the very willingness regularly to use the phrase "intellectual property" is a warning sign. For them, it flags up that, for instance, strong arguments about copyright for artistic creations and weaker ones about patents for inventions may be muddled together. So I guess those critics would be suspicious about this entire blog. Also, intellectual property rights are spoken of at the Heartland Institute as if they are all, in the USA, being legally eroded, as well as illegally violated. But although the argument against intellectual property rights of various kinds may be spreading, the law of copyright in particular is surely moving in the direction of strength and prolongation rather than of erosion. However, those criticisms are not based on an exhaustive read through
of all the Heartland Institutes IP material, of which there is,
as I say, an abundance. The beauty of the internet is that you can
follow the links, and decide for yourself. The library of Babel Meanwhile Europe's publishers face a quandary. On the one hand, Google is promising to increase their book sales beyond their wildest dreams, by drawing people towards those books with key words, and contents pages, and Buy The Book links. Great! Infinite sales! No advertising costs! However, you do not have to be a publisher - in fact it may even help not to be a publisher - to see the gold at the end of the rainbow here. All the world's writings, in their entirety, available to all of us, on our iPod/mobile-phone/computer/cameras, at (next to) no cost (i.e. paid for like electricity or gas and costing about the same). All the world's a library! Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story entitled The Library of Babel? It is a very European, basically saying that the Library of Babel is unregulated and hence bad. I just found this story, and read it. Via Google. So the publishers are gripped by greed, but also by fear. Will Google make them, or break them? Further metaphors suggest themselves, concerning publishers supping with the Devil while using a long spoon, trying to have their cake and to eat it too, to retain possession of their books but to go on selling them in new ways. Librarians face similar dilemmas. Will this new world make them Internet Kings, or lonely warehouse drudges? In this connection, the latest iPod news is interesting also. Steve Jobs has persuaded Hollywood to let iPodders download new TV shows at a mere two dollars a go. So far hardly any such deals have been signed, but you could once have said that about iTunes. However, none of this will stop free downloading by teenagers. A new generation of kids is coming on stream who may be willing to pay attention to something if they can download if for free, but if not not. Legally? Illegally? That's not the distinction that matters to them. I can't prove it, but here's what I think is happening. Existing businesses which now have a ton of copyright rights are now making and will for a few more years yet go on making a ton of money, from all the people who, like me, are used to paying to read, to watch and to listen to things and are pathetically grateful for the chance. But this bounty is temporary. Beyond all this is a new and bigger and freer world, where you can attend to anything you want for a tiny trickle of rent that covers everything. Vast fortunes will still be made and creative stars will still shine, but differently. And if "Europe" thinks that's wrong and tries to stop it, this
new world will simply pass Europe by. First it gets stolen - then someone wants
to pay him But the interesting thing is that the effect of this act of intellectual property theft, if that is what you think it was, seems to be that the Policeman is being offered some kind of writing job. I always thought I'd be able to type in my own brand of nonsense and nobody would take the slightest bit of notice, like what happens at work. Anyway, to my surprise, this hasn't happened and I'm faced with a few choices I never thought would come my way: despite it all, I actually like being a policeman.The clear implication being that someone wants to pay him enough for him not to have to be a policeman any more. Whether the Mail on Sunday nicking the Policeman's stuff had anything directly to do with such alternative job offers I do not know. (The Policeman has also had stuff borrowed by the Guardian, by the Sunday Times and by the Telegraph.) But I doubt if it did any harm. So, after giving away lots of free samples, and after the Big Old Media have flashed these free samples around yet more, now the Policeman has the option of writing for a living. Result. The bad news is we can't read the Policeman's Blog any more, because it has all been taken down. I now wish I had read more of it while it was up there. If you do want to know the kind of thing he wrote about, there are only the 150 or so comments on the one rather cryptic posting that is still there now, to give you the rough idea. Crime-fighting getting drowned in paperwork is the basic story. Of course, it could be that Someone Somewhere found what the Policeman was writing to be awkward and embarrassing, and decided that the simplest way to shut him up was to buy him off. But I prefer the obvious. He writes well, about an interesting subject, and now someone wants to pay him for it. Meanwhile, Bill Quick is giving away chapter one of his latest book, on purpose, and has published the book himself. And these nanotechnology guys are giving away the whole thing. They presumably figure that giving it away in the form of a unwieldy computer print-out will encourage rather than discourage sales of the book (at $150), and I bet they're right. Tim Worstall also has his own book
coming out soon, also of stuff that was originally given away for
nothing. The right to photograph Well, the other day, I think I may have walked into a real story, of my own. Briefly, I was told to stop photographing, from the public pavement outside it, something in Victoria Street, London, called the Department of Constitutional Affairs (Subtitle: "Justice, rights and democracy"). I did stop, but then I blogged about it on Samizdata, making use of the one photo I did take. As did someone else called Carol, who got the exact same result as I did. Will anyone else besides me and Carol care about this story? A few Samizdata commenters, and also another commenter here, have expressed mild interest, but it remains to be seen if this particular story has legs, as they say, or will die within days amidst small shrugs of indifference. Will there, as has been suggested by some bold souls, be a moment of mass photography outside the dca? (I will attend this if only to photograph the photographers.) Or will nothing further be heard of this? Meanwhile, two things to say here. First, because of blogs, the New Media, etc., even though I have not patented it or copyrighted it, this story, if story it be, will nevertheless be mine! Even though I was paid nothing for that original Samizdata posting, any headway it makes will nevertheless boost my reputation as an interesting writer, a little. Second, probably because of the fact that I have finally found a way to dramatise the matter a little bit interestingly, I have learned (thanks to one of the Samizdata commenters) of the best answer I have found so far to the question of just what are photographers in the UK legally entitled to do and legally prohibited from doing. Oh, the piece - "Photographers' Rights in the UK" (pdf only) - comes with the usual legally watertight disclaimer, and it only refers to the state of play until August 31st 2004, but it exudes completeness and accuracy in a way that nothing else I have so far read on this subject has done. The disclaimer only reinforces that impression. That same commenter also provided a link to this,
which is about the rights of photographers in the USA. I have not
yet read this, but who says you have to have read stuff before you
link to it? A conflict of visions back to top permalink feedback Open Source software as an academic reaction
against commerce Once the commercialization of software had begun in the 1980s, a turning point was quickly reached, when Richard Stallman resigned his professorship from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT in 1984. He left MIT essentially over its decision to license computer code developed there to commercial interests, which would restrict access to the source code. At some level, it can be said that the open source movement arose out of a rejection of this approach to higher education.But would Open Source software have been - would it now be - as vigorously motivated as the commercial kind? The dilemma is captured nicely in this quote (footnote 24): One exception to note is Johns Hopkins University, established as the first research university in the United States in 1876, which refuses to turn away from the public sphere, judging by the stance taken by Hopkins' president, William Brody: "When Hopkins scientists discovered restriction enzymes, one of the bases of the biotechnology industry, we put the discovery in the public domain - losing millions and millions in potential royalties. Foolish? Perhaps. But I know that we didn't slow science down or diminish the leading role [that] American industry plays in this field".This also makes it clear that not only software, but academia itself - Johns Hopkins is an "exception" - is being commercialised, with those commercial licenses, and in the form of such things as commercially run (and priced) academic journals. The argument between the academic ethic and the commercial impulse is an old one, says Willinsky, going back at least as far as the Middle Ages. His point is that the Open Source software people and the open access scientists and academics need to understand how completely they are all on the same side against commerce. But I like commerce. And I like to think that there is a creative synthesis to be contrived here, combining open access intellectual activity with the dynamism and animal spirits of commerce. After all, as Willinsky notes, Open Source software is a lucrative business as well as a noble crusade. Why could that not apply to the academic endeavour as a whole? Johns Hopkins justifies its open access stance on the grounds of its wider benefits to commerce as a whole. It won't cost you anything to read the whole thing. And it is no
surprise that Lawrence
Lessig, to whom thanks for the link, liked it too. Electronic barbed wire MISSISSAUGA, Ontario - (September 12, 2005) - A new product from Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC) will give producers of devices, such as set-top boxes, mobile handsets and printers, more control over their outsourced manufacturing process and help to prevent the cloning of devices and replacement parts. Certicom KeyInject is a trusted key injection platform for anti-cloning. It enables device producers to track production by contract manufacturers by controlling access to keying information, metering the use of this information and generating reports on key usage.Now I have no idea how well that works. But if all it does is give you a better idea of where the leaks are in your organisation, it must be some help. Whatever certainty I feel about the idea of intellectual property is rooted in the idea of contract. If you do business with another business, on the clear understanding that their employees must not copy your cherished ideas, and if they agree to that, then something a lot like a right to intellectual property has been created, even if, according to someone like Murray Rothbard, it never existed before. But, it is an elementary principle of making deals that you don't do a deal which is such that if the other fellow breaks it, you can't tell until it is way too late. If the kind of kit described above at least tells you if a deal concerning manufacturing but not information-copying is maybe being broken, then you have established some kind of control over your intellectual property, even if lots of other people dispute that this is what it is. The law on its own, even if it is completely on your side about the theoretical reality of intellectual property, may be next to useless. You can't prosecute people if you don't even know who they are. You can't plug a hole the existence of which you only know of because your entire ship is sinking. But the law combined with immediate knowledge of the details of what exactly is going wrong and who exactly may be making it go wrong could really get you somewhere. Here is another link to news of what seems to be a similar system to the one described above, at any rate in what it attempts to achieve. It's interesting that the process of protecting product information against cloners is all mixed up with the process of protecting personal data, in response to laws demanding such protection. And here is another interesting
link for the historically minded amongst you. Preserving intellectual property during
hurricanes Hard Drive Recovery Offer to Victims of HurricanesEagle Eye's Jack Moore continues: Special handling of hard drives is required to enable data to remain recoverable!So far so predictable. Is a "reduced rate" helping out or profiteering out of disaster? Take your pick. But then Moore added this, presumably reckoning that the more good advice he could get out there quickly, the better: Jack adds, "Tell people that if the drives are under water, keep them wet under water, clean water if possible."That I did not know. Keep them wet. Who would have thought it? The basic point here is that the IP debate usually proceeds against a background of infinitely copyable and - once you've copied it - permanently storable data, but that during a really big hurricane such as this one, for many people, and as in so many other ways, things are liable to change. I wonder how many people had not only their hard discs but also all their back-ups soaked by Katrina. Meanwhile, that other hurricane, the economic transformation of
China, continues apace. As we regularly ask here, is intellectual
property going to be preserved during that? Now as always, the internet
is awash with news of conferences and announcements organised and
emitted by big Chinese cheeses saying that yes it is, it
really is. News like this about China's biggest
privatisation drive ever, linked to admiringly from the ASI
blog, makes me just that little bit more optimistic. This all
adds to the feeling that China sincerely wants its economy to develop
impressively. And if it wants that, it will also have to make it
less risky for foreign companies to invest in China. And that means
protecting foreign IP rights better. Samizdata discusses porn copying in
particular and IP in general Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, "from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue."I also recommend the comments. There is something about the comments on technological issues at Samizdata which makes them extremely useful to non-experts on whatever the subject is. I think it is the combination of a general enthusiasm for technological progress, and hence a readership eager to have such things explained, combined with the realisation that not everyone who reads Samizdata has much of a clue about any particular techno-issue. Or for that matter any specialist issue of any kind, such as the nuances of IP law. The first comment of all, from Julian Morrison, struck me as particularly apt: Sounds very much to me like water-sellers complaining that someone has invented an aqueduct.And, responding to something "Jason" said, "J" replies thus: Jason - except Google isn't doing anything illegal (yet). There is only a grey area between copying material for mechanical reasons and copying it for profit reasons. For instance, almost every large ISP copies hundreds of gigabytes of copyrighted material from the web, which are then stored in proxy servers. This is done to reduce bandwidth load on certain lines, and to speed up service. But ISP's then charge a premium for providing this faster service - so are they too profiting from the illegal copying of other people's material?The comments later veer off into a general discussion of the rights and wrongs of the whole idea of intellectual property. Intellectual property is bullshit, original ideas are overrated! Ever had one mate? Etc. Many readers here will like this comment in particular: Whenever someone pronounces a property right unwarranted, it generally means they think they are entitled to get it for free.I would prefer "often" there to "generally", but I take the point. Read the whole thing, as we bloggers say. There is further and rather more genteel discussion of IP issues
- by the likes of economists Harold Demsetz and David Friedman -
to be found here
(scroll down a bit), in a report about the recent Mont Pelerin Society
gathering in Reykjavik. China drags its feet over copying Multinational corporations in China recognize that the protection of manufacturing processes is often more effective than legal remedies or human resources incentives. Currently, high employee turnover limits the potential of HR incentives, and legal remedies lack both a culture of compliance and consistent enforcement.Don't place any hope in the Chinese legal system. Don't trust people not to steal stuff. Just don't put people in a position where they can steal things in the first place. Which is surely a whole lot easier said than done. Granted, copying a spare car part if you don't know how it was originally made or exactly what it is made of, may be rather harder than copying a DVD. But it can still be done reasonably easily - especially if all you require is for the part to work, after a fashion, and to look the part, and are not too bothered about how well it will last. In the longer run, China will probably become more law-abiding in IP matters, but the reason for that is that Chinese businesses will themselves have ever more IP rights of their own to lose. But for now, protestations of legal virtue are mostly window-dressing. To get a further feel for what these arguments are like now, while China has most to gain by dragging its feet over IP law, try reading this report, and this one, concerning a row about computer chip copying. I particularly enjoyed this little item of argumentation, from the second of these reports, the one in which the accusation of IP stealing is being not so much argued against as muddied and obfuscated: Analyst firm In-Stat had said that the chip was 95 per cent compatible with MIPS products, but Hu used an interesting argument to resist the suggestion.Which is such a lame argument that Hu might as well have said: Yes they copied it. What are you going to do about it? back to top permalink feedback Downloading music free from the internet
goes respectable But now, downloading music free from the internet has gone respectable. People have been downloading free Beethoven symphonies, courtesy of the BBC. Since the BBC is financed with a TV broadcasting tax, which you have to pay if you want to watch any television in Britain at all even if you never watch anything put out by the BBC, the morals of this free Beethoven bonanza and of people cadging illegal dowloads don't seem to me so very different. But that's me. For most people the BBC giving away Beethoven is the pure essence of high cultural respectability. Economically, what the BBC has demonstrated yet again is that price cuts make a huge difference, in this case a cut down to zero. The "demand" for Beethoven symphonies at twenty pounds a pop has dried up. Anyone willing to pay that much has paid it long ago. But there is a huge potential audience out there willing to pay a few pence for music of all kinds, and clearly this is the wave of the future. I am of the generation that is still entranced by those lovely little silver discs. What I see is the difference between them and the older media, like vinyl records and cassettes. But choose as young people choose now, between these discs and downloading, when you haven't been in love with discs for two decades, and the discs now look as absurdly antiquated as the people who still love them. Why trudge round a shop, buying things, or send off to someone to deliver things to you in parcels, when entertainment can be whistled up on the internet in a few seconds? This BBC Beethoven symphony episode is important, I think, not because it alerts consumers to these obvious truths - the pennies are dropping for them anyway - but because it will help to convince the respectable, governing, lawmaking classes that extremely cheap and/or free downloading is clearly the wave of the future. After all, free downloading is really just free broadcasting only more so, and the BBC has been doing that for the better part of a century. Meanwhile, I strongly agree with what Mike
Mastick says at his Techdirt site, that the reason the music
industry objects to free downloading is not that free downloading
reduces overall spending on music. On the contrary, free downloading
encourages
music spending. The problem is that now anyone can make music and
shove it up on the internet, and so the music "industry" - i.e.
the bit of the music industry that used to make a lavish living
selling lavishly packaged silver discs in shops to the likes of
me - isn't getting all this money, and is instead having to fight
like hell for even a share of it. Pirated DVDs and the rise of semi-pro
dramatics In the fast vanishing era when movie studios completely controlled who got to see their products, their axiom was: there's nothing as cheap as a hit. But if anyone who wants it can now scrounge a copy for next to nothing, Hollywood will have to follow suit to stay in business, and keep its cash flow up by making lots of small movies instead of a few big ones. "Special" effects will be used to make the same effects more cheaply, rather than ever more specially and expensively. But more profoundly, what this means is that what the internet is already doing to writing, it is now poised to do also to showbiz. A whole new generation of performers is going to come on stream who served their apprenticeships not by playing small parts in big productions, but by playing much bigger parts in (now far more numerous) smaller productions. In a tiny way, I have become personally involved in this blurring of the lines between serious showbiz and amateur dramatics, just as I am already involved in the already blurred new world of semi-pro writing. I have just joined a group which does radio plays, every other Sunday, for things like hospital radio, and, of course - what else? - the internet. The interesting thing about this group is that we aren't all amateurs. Most of those involved have ambitions to become real actors, and the people doing the recording are already real broadcasters, this being a way for them to get ahead of their pack. For me this is just a fun way to brush up my Shakespeare, but even I might get swept up in semi-pro showbiz if I exert myself and if I get lucky. At the very least I am in a nice place to see this story unfold, if unfold is what it is about to do. Maybe I'll find myself blogging about a movie, and combining that with being in it. We can all dream, can't we? Joking and faking I steal stuff all the time, and so should you. If someone has already expressed the thought better than I could, it seems to me that there's no point rearranging the words. It would be good if the interweb were a common pool, where everyone could take what he wanted without people bitching about who thought of what first. Those mean little copyright signs always remind me of the kid at school who covers the test paper with his arm to stop you seeing his answers.No one's going to get rich stealing blog entries, says Hutton. But Drug faking is very different matter. So, if you think that intellectual property is too important a subject to joke about (however profoundly), then why not depress yourself by reading this: It could be described as the perfect crime.Fake drugs kill vulnerable people: the weak, the old, and the sick. And once consumed, the evidence is destroyed.This story was featured on BBC2 TV last Tuesday, in a show entitled "Bad Medicine", as part of the This World series. Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of patented drugs, fake drugs are a very, very bad thing. We can surely all agree about that. Apparently India is the leader in this evil industry. The heroine of the story, as the BBC told it, was Dr Dora Akunyili, of Nigeria's Food and Drug Agency. Thanks to her, the problem of fake drugs in Nigerian hospitals is abating, even though the flood of fakery flows outwards from India as strongly as ever. Drug faking is now rife in Britain:In the UK, counterfeits have been found in high street chemists, and a fake Diazepam and Viagra factory was recently discovered in North London.The really dangerous thing about many of the fake drugs is that they tend to be weak drugs, and weak drugs are the perfect way to enable the bugs, that would be killed outright by the genuine and strong drugs, to learn to resist the strong drugs. Fake drugs don't just kill the unlucky patient by not being strong enough to cure him. They kill others by also making the illnesses stronger. back to top permalink feedback Photographing people in public without
their permission A few weeks ago, a "Heritage Warden" or some such - he wore a uniform - saw me snapping tourists in Trafalgar Square and informed me severely that photographing people in a public place without their permission is illegal. Was he telling the truth? Or did he merely disapprove, and invent a law just to make me stop? Not even the lawyers or the professional photographers whom I have asked about this seem able to agree about it. So you can imagine with what interest I greeted the news that in the USA, a man who was photographed, without permission, in a public street in New York, and whose resulting likeness was then featured, again without his permission, in a photography book, is suing the photographer. Erno Nussenzweig is angry, or at any rate he wants money. The original New York Post story requires you to register, but a number of blogs have commented on this story. It was Adam Tinworth from whom I first learned of this. However, I found this blog the most useful, although more for the comments it attracted than for the posting itself. That Mr Nussenzweig's likeness is being used to make money looms large in this case. But what if I stick a photo of a tourist on my blog, and it then wizzes around the internet and gives millions a good chuckle, but without me making a dime? If the tourist then complains, what happens to me then, if anything? Several of the bloggers who have written about his case have reproduced Mr Nussenzweig's likeness themselves, thus giving it massively greater viewing figures. Another commenter makes it clear that in other parts of the world, notably France, they do things very differently. And in continental Europe generally, I think. If I tried to photo Parisians the way I did those Trafalgar Square tourists, they would apparently make me stop, never mind the gendarmes. I already sort of knew about this, but it was good to have it confirmed. Is Britain still Anglo-Saxon for these purposes, or part of Europe? My understanding is that we are now moving from the Anglo- system to the Euro- system. But how fast? And how far have we already gone? When sorting out the link to Adam Tinworth, I found that he's been
taking photos too, and that, like me, he regards photographers as
fair
game. Big business against the geeks The suppliers of programmes like Grokster can now be sued if they have "encouraged" people to use them illegally. But for the geeks, encouragement is unnecessary. Popular, teenage culture needs no encouragement. It consists of young tearaways grabbing hold of stuff and making it their own, often to the consternation of those who originally made it. So it is with file sharing. The kind of file sharing organisations that depend on "encouragement" (i.e. advertising bombardments) will now be sued into near extinction. But way below them, below the big business radar, the geeks and the freaks will carry on copying, with programmes of their own devising. This Wired article says that in the long run the Grokster decision could mean even bigger trouble for the traditional entertainment industry, by temporarily rewarding it for vigorously defending its existing business model at a time when it ought to be devising new business models. And this excellent Herald Tribune piece explains in greater detail why the long run future of file sharing is secure, however illegal the Supreme Court of the USA, or any other court, may now decide it to be: "The court found that the file-sharing companies Grokster and StreamCast could be sued for copyright infringement because they offered marketing and technical advice that clearly induced their customers to share files illegally so that the companies could attract larger numbers of users and thus more advertising.Other key quotes from this piece: "Copyright holders seem determined to shut down the buzz that builds stars."My favourite quote is about another of the file sharing programmes involved in all this, and about the stripped down, geek adapted, unencouraging version of it that was getting around: "In a charming move, Kazaa tried to stop distribution of Kazaa Lite, charging that it was a copyright violation."As David Carr is fond of saying, file sharers do not like it nearly so much when it is their files being shared. back to top permalink feedback How IP theft hurts competitiveness Imports were flooding into Russia and many of the local domestic producers in Russia were selling smuggled goods, on which they had not paid the import tariffs, and they also were selling counterfeit goods. McKinsey did a study of the vodka industry in Russia and found that 40 percent of the Vodka sold in Russia was not made by the company whose label appeared on the bottle - so much for the value of the brand. Lewis' central point is that competitiveness is all about productivity, and that means productivity in service industries like retailing, not just in manufacturing. The way for an economy to achieve these productivity gains is to allow in global corporations, rather than to protect more inefficient local enterprises against them. Global corporations prefer to face a clear set of legal rules and to obey them, along with their local competitors also obeying them. They want that level playing field that they all talk about. Without a level legal playing field, they face costs that their local competitors do not, and they can't make money. So, they give up trying, move out, and the productivity gains that they would have introduced are lost. The biggest problem is the straight non-payment of taxes by local enterprises, but the importing and selling on of counterfeit goods are definitely all part of the pattern of lawlessness. It is not so much that their own IP rights are in danger, although I am sure that this is also a worry. The bigger problem for the global corporations is that to make money in a country like Russia (see also: Brazil), they would be obliged to trample all over the IP rights of others. And this, unlike the locals, they are reluctant to do. Nor, by the way, does this mean that existing IP laws are necessarily
right. It is just that, if you are a global corporation, you want
whatever local laws do exist to be obeyed, by everyone, and not
just by you. New IP customs from which new IP law
may emerge If someone doesn't want to copy something, he shouldn't have to. If you are frustrated by that, get yourself a printer of your own, which is what the frustrated customers in this story did. Home printing is now v |
