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2005 Archive for Brian Micklethwait
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The complete Scarlatti sonatas for fifty quid |
19 DEC 2005 |
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Stephen Soderbergh's new movie business model |
09 DEC 2005 |
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Patent uncertainty |
02 DEC 2005 |
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How the chaos spreads |
25 NOV 2005 |
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Costly books and free chatter |
11 NOV 2005 |
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Breaking the Tamiflu patent |
04 NOV 2005 |
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Heartland arguments |
28 OCT 2005 |
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The library of Babel |
21 OCT 2005 |
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First it gets stolen - then someone wants to pay him |
14 OCT 2005 |
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The right to photograph |
07 OCT 2005 |
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A conflict of visions |
30 SEP 2005 |
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Open Source software as an academic reaction against commerce |
23 SEP 2005 |
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Electronic barbed wire |
16 SEP 2005 |
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Preserving intellectual property during hurricanes |
09 SEP 2005 |
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Samizdata discusses porn copying in particular and IP in
general |
31 AUG 2005 |
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China drags its feet over copying |
15 AUG 2005 |
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Downloading music free from the internet goes respectable |
29 JUL 2005 |
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Pirated DVDs and the rise of semi-pro dramatics |
22 JUL 2005 |
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Joking and faking |
15 JUL 2005 |
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Photographing people in public without their permission |
08 JUL 2005 |
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Big business against the geeks |
01 JUL 2005 |
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How IP theft hurts competitiveness |
24 JUN 2005 |
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New IP customs from which new IP law may emerge |
17 JUN 2005 |
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The right to sell an uncopiable copy |
10 JUN 2005 |
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Free US patent information |
03 JUN 2005 |
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How original is musicology? |
27 MAY 2005 |
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Bikram Yoga versus Open Source Yoga |
19 MAY 2005 |
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A global state of copyright enforcement |
13 MAY 2005 |
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A tale of two governments |
06 MAY 2005 |
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Rothbard on patents and copyright |
03 MAY 2005 |
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Another IP link fest |
22 APR 2005 |
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Extreme law and extreme litigation |
15 APR 2005 |
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Lamont Dozier versus the give-it-all-awayers |
08 APR 2005 |
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On drug-taking and file-sharing |
01 APR 2005 |
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Patent choice theory in India |
25 MAR 2005 |
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Blogging - owning ideas without being paid for them |
18 MAR 2005 |
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IP unites the world |
11 MAR 2005 |
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Private public partnerships |
04 MAR 2005 |
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Confusions |
25 FEB 2005 |
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How dare you link to us! |
18 FEB 2005 |
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Mixed links |
11 FEB 2005 |
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The rise and rise of Naxos |
04 FEB 2005 |
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Rohan Pinto the plagiarist gets blog-mobbed |
28 JAN 2005 |
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India! - animation means IP protection |
21 JAN 2005 |
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Big Business in the age of instant copying |
14 JAN 2005 |
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Edwin Meese III denounces the illegal downloaders |
07 JAN 2005 |
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The complete Scarlatti sonatas for fifty quid
09 DEC 2005 - According to this,
the complete Scarlatti keyboard sonatas - all 555 of them on 34
CDs - will set you back nearly 250 US dollars. But the other day
I encountered a big heap of the boxes in question in HMV Oxford
Street for not a lot more than £50 a pop. A pound may be more than
a dollar, but it's not that much more. And that was only the tip
of the CD box set iceberg. Classical music is now piling itself
high and selling itself cheap.
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.
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Patent uncertainty
02 DEC 2005 - The headline writer for this
piece, by Stephen J. Frank, seems to have invented a new word:
"Cacophy", although maybe he's corrected this by now. Presumably
he would have no trouble getting a US patent for it:
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.
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How the chaos spreads
25 NOV 2005 - On the weekend of November 19th/20th I attended
this Libertarian
Alliance Conference. One of the speakers was an MEP, Syed
Kamall. Here is a picture I took of Syed in
action. At the heart of his talk was a question about the rights
and wrongs of imposed competition and imposed "liberalisation".
Can you force people to be free? It was definite potential subject
matter for me at this
blog.
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?
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Sorry Sony
18 NOV 2005 - I first picked up on the frightful mess that Sony
had got themselves into with a botched attempt to protect their
intellectual property from this link/report at Samizdata.
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.
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Costly books and free chatter
11 NOV 2005 - Comment is free but facts are sacred. So goes
the common journalistic maxim. Something similar happens with books.
For "comment", read: reviews and reactions. For "facts" read: books.
For "free": costing nothing. And for "sacred" read: they'll still
cost you.
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?
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Breaking the Tamiflu patent
04 NOV 2005 - Type the words "patent" and "Tamiflu" into Google
just now, and you get that the world's health politicians are all
talking about breaking the former of the latter. Sorry, loosening
it:
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.
Some countries are saying that if necessary, "they will defy
patent restrictions,'' Dosanjh said at the Global Pandemic Influenza
Readiness conference today in Ottawa. "We couldn't be judgmental
if people are dying."
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.
First, the raw ingredients for Tamiflu come from a Chinese herb
which is in short supply. Unless production of the herb is increased,
it will be impossible to increase production of Tamiflu. In this
case, breaking the patent would have no impact on availability
of the drug.
Second, Tamiflu is difficult to manufacture. Since Roche has
developed the manufacturing expertise, it seems sensible to encourage
Roche to increase production and/or to help other companies produce
the drug under a voluntary licence.
Breaking the patent through a compulsory licence would actively
discourage Roche from either producing the drug or lending its
expertise, which would be directly counter-productive. Third,
given that scientists have only a vague idea of what a human strain
of H5N1 might look like, there is no certainty that Tamiflu will
be effective. And even if Tamiflu does work on some people, widespread
use would inevitably result in the development of resistant strains.
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.
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Heartland arguments
28 OCT 2005 - Intellectual
Property Rights Are Human Rights is the title of the latest
publication, due out on November 1st, of the Heartland Institute.
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.
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The library of Babel
21 OCT 2005 - The big IP story in Europe right now is Google's
attempt to become the global book
catalogue of choice. Europe's politicians seem to be responding
to this exercise in cultural imperialism rather as the old USSR
responded to Star Wars (SDI): It's terrible, wicked, impossible,
stupid, illegal, it'll never work, and we're
going to do it too.
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.
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First it gets stolen - then someone wants
to pay him
14 OCT 2005 - Tim
Worstall denounces Britain's Mail on Sunday for reproducing
a big piece from The Policeman's Blog, without payment or permission
to the Policeman himself. Says the Policeman: bastards.
Tim Worstall is not so polite.
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.
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The right to photograph
07 OCT 2005 - I have become so fascinated by the process of
blogging during the last two or three years that I have somewhat
forgotten to say anything. Oh sure, I do lots of blogging, here
and there,
and sometimes I take photos
that I am very proud of. But have I ever told any real stories that
no one else has told? Have I ever gone beyond linking to stories
that others have told, and just adding: How About That Then. Not
much, is how I now feel.
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?
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A conflict of visions
30 SEP 2005 - The more I ponder intellectual property and all
that, the more I find the phrase "conflict of visions" rattling
around in my head. Thomas Sowell wrote about book called exactly
that, A
Conflict of Visions, nearly twenty years ago. In this book,
Sowell contrasts what he calls the "constrained" and the "unconstrained"
vision. The constrained version of the world is cautiously pessimistic
about human nature, and expects conflict and trade-off between these
and those human purposes. The unconstrained view holds out the hope
of a perfect world and of a perfectible people living in it.
It seems to me that those who argue for and against intellectual property
rights often do so because they have different visions, and not just
because they differ on certain superficial matters such as the mere
consequences of this or that copyright regime, or the mere realities
of whether patents do or do not stimulate inventiveness and if so
in what ways and how much.
I further suspect that my somewhat "unconstrained" inclinations, at
any rate compared to most believers in free markets and in the usual
kinds of property rights, in stuff - my "vision" being that if you
have free markets and property rights in stuff, you get unlimited
stuff! - are all part of what make me want to speculate about how
the world would be if intellectual property rights as we now know
them did not exist, and to the effect that things might not be so
very bad if they didn't. Maybe there is another way! Maybe ideas could
just be, you know, had! And used by whoever needs them! From each
according to his ability, to each according to his need! (The exclamation
marks being to signal that my unconstrained vision is here operating
in overdrive.)
But my own visioneering makes me skeptical of the determinedly unvisionary
thinking claimed by others.
For instance, James Boyle, in this Financial
Times article, implies that his dislike of the extensions to IP
law now being proposed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation
are rooted only in a lack of factual proof that such extensions are
necessary or justified. It's all just clever lobbying, he says, and
maybe he is right. But I note that at the bottom of his piece Boyle
is described as "a board member of Creative Commons and the co-founder
of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain", and this makes
me suspect that there is more going on here than merely some cunning
lobbyists with one lot of facts, and a doubting professor waving different
facts. I suspect that, underneath all this, there lurks a conflict
of visions.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just, as they say in
America, saying.
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Open Source software as an academic reaction
against commerce
23 SEP 2005 - I have just finished reading an essay called The
Unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access and open
science by John Willinsky. Willinsky's central argument is that
the emergence of the Open Source software movement is not as new
as brand new a phenomenon as some of its protagonists like to argue.
Rather did it arise as a reaction by software experts steeped in
the academic ethic of open publication and shared research work
- in which everyone out there knows what you are doing and everyone
chips in with suggestions, criticisms and improvements - to the
commercialisation of software. Software started out open, he argues,
then it got commercially owned.
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.
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Electronic barbed wire
16 SEP 2005 - The great Are-they-or-aren't-they-protecting-it?
argument about the intellectual property rights of foreign multinations
in developing countries like India
and China
continues. This,
meanwhile, sounds somewhat more promising.
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.
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Preserving intellectual property during
hurricanes
09 SEP 2005 - Should a specialist blog like this pay any attention
to something like Hurricane Katrina? Maybe it's none of our business,
but I went looking for a Hurricane Katrina IP angle anyway. And
the oddest thing I found was to be read right at the tail end of
this
posting, which is based on an email that this IP
law blog (itself worth a regular look for the more usual IP
reasons) received just after disaster struck. The posting is about
what Eagle
Eye Forensics, LLC is doing to help Katrina's victims:
Hard Drive Recovery Offer to Victims of Hurricanes
We are offering special, reduced-rate services to victims of hurricanes
to recover the data from their hard drives.
Eagle Eye's Jack Moore continues:
Special handling of hard drives is required to enable
data to remain recoverable!
Even if you are not ready for recovery of your data, contact
us ASAP for instructions about how to prevent permanent destruction
of the data on your hard drives.
We want to help you recover as easily and as soon as possible.
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.
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Samizdata discusses porn copying in
particular and IP in general
31 AUG 2005 - I recommend this Samizdata posting by Philip
Chaston. It is about how Google
is allegedly hurting the profits of internet
porn mongers:
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?
In fact, hey every time I view any web page, my browser makes
a local copy of the entire contents on that page - so are browser
manufacturers like Microsoft making money from unauthorised copying
of copyright 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.
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China drags its feet over copying
15 AUG 2005 - Right near the end of this
article, about the severe difficulties that multinationals face
in defending their intellectual property when they do business in
China, comes the bit that really matters:
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.
The Daily quoted him as saying MIPS and the CAS built two different
flats with two bedrooms each facing in the same direction. That
didn't mean one building was copying another.
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?
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Downloading music free from the internet
goes respectable
29 JUL 2005 - Downloading music free from the internet.
The phrase reeks of subcultural disreputability. Policemen and lawyers
chase geeky teenagers into their bedrooms and slap huge fines on
them. The distraught parents cry: "But we had no idea he was breaking
the law!"
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.
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Pirated DVDs and the rise of semi-pro
dramatics
22 JUL 2005 - This
article, about what to do about IP piracy in China, contains
a link to this
article, where the whole question of slashing the cost of legitimate
DVDs is gone into. Basic story: it will start in poor countries,
and then spread everywhere. The internet is now awash with talk
of how Hollywood
is in crisis, and this is all part of that.
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?
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Joking and faking
15 JUL 2005 - Harry Hutton is one of the funnier bloggers out
there, and here
is what he has to say about copyright:
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.
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Photographing people in public without
their permission
08 JUL 2005 - In London on the day I write this, travelling
is difficult and discouraged, because of bombs. But when London
is its usual self I like to go out and photograph those tourists
who are themselves taking photographs. They adopt delightful poses.
They stand very still. They are so busy with their own photography
that they don't realise I'm doing it to them. And since they are
taking photos it seems only fair for me to take photos of them.
The big photography story nowadays is not who are the best photographers,
but how many of us now have these gadgets.
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.
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Big business against the geeks
01 JUL 2005 - Two weeks ago I inadvertently
linked to the same story that David
Carr had already written about. This time I also refer to the
story David wrote about a
day or two ago, but this time knowing what he has said, and
knowing also that the recent Grokster decision is way big enough
to stand more than one reference to it here. And once again, I am
intrigued by the way that this legal decision will have huge impact
on the money-making, big offices, fancy lawyers (David is a lawyer)
part of the economy, while probably having far less impact lower
down the file sharing food chain.
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.
But the court did not give the movie and recording businesses
much ammunition to attack the Robin Hoods of the Internet: those
software geeks and culture fans who really just want to share."
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.
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How IP theft hurts competitiveness
24 JUN 2005 - In addition to supplying weekly postings here,
I also supply them to the CNE
Competition Blog, and my posting there of last
Monday is worth mentioning here also. Interviewee William
W. Lewis, author of The
Power of Productivity, itemises a number of reasons why nations
compete successfully. Let me here in particular draw your attention
to what Lewis says about the impact of lawlessness generally, and
of IP theft in particular:
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.
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New IP customs from which new IP law
may emerge
17 JUN 2005 - My thanks to blogger and internet guru Adriana
for sending me the link to this
American piece, about digital photographers whose pictures are
so good that the printing shops refuse to print them. The professional
printers think that the photos are really the work of professional
photographers, and fear that they may be violating the copyrights
of fellow professionals.
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 |