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The boss keeps his costs down. He scrounges studio space for nothing at weekends. He pays his actors, as I say, nothing, and seems ready to put up with second-rate results or worse, probably (or such is my suspicion) because he is doing cultural quota fulfilment for a radio station rather than making real shows. The radio station can say they've done some posh radio plays, and that helps them to get their license renewed, even though nobody listens to the plays, except a few Third World students who know no better, or defenceless people in hospitals, ditto. But although the bad news is that the boss doesn't seem to mind how bad these radio productions are, the good news is that he doesn't mind how good they are, and the actors definitely don't want to be in crap. The first one I was in was awful. But most recent one which we've just recorded (my second), which was properly directed, showed distinct glimmerings of adequacy, and the next one could be pretty good. Meanwhile, since there are no other costs involved in this enterprise other than the time of people eager to show off their various talents, copyright costs, if the boss was willing to incur them, would loom very large. Which means that he isn't. As a result, the whole enterprise is biased towards ancient. He insists that we do very antique, "out of copyright" plays, basically from more than a century ago, rather than more recent ones. That suits me, because English Literature is ancient, and it probably suits the radio station, because ancient appears more cultural. But, it definitely cramps our style. It's an odd effect. And I suspect that we are absolutely not the only ones doing radio productions of this approximate kind, and thus affected by this bias towards the ancient. I surmise that amateur play-reading circles and clubs of all kinds are now thinking along similar lines, not just wanting to read plays to one another of an evening, but to record them and to "internet" them, much as people already internet their nicer holiday snaps. And, their cash costs are just like ours, minimal. So, we're talking about a rather pervasive bias in the midst of our culture, as truly understood. In another part of the culture, an opposite effect might soon
apply itself. The Gowers
Report (which I wrote
about last week) is recommending that we be allowed to copy
our new CDs into mp3s for listening to on the train, but that this
should only apply to CDs issued after the law changes. That could
cause a bias towards the recent, with people preferring to concentrate
on music that they can legally copy. Gowers blurs the line The study, by Andrew Gowers, the former editor of the Financial Times, called for new powers against infringement of copyright but also advocated some new rights to consumers - which provoked criticism from the record industry.Although the report recommends all kinds of gruesome increases in the penalties for copying stuff and selling it, and in the funding for the policemen whose duty it is to chase such people, it simultaneously says: make copying for personal purposes easier. At the root of this is the brute fact of digital copying. Digital copying is not like copying used to be, where quality suffers with every copy. When, in the old days of analog tape, people made their own compilation tapes to play in their Sony Walkmen, the industry stayed relaxed, because copies of copies of copies would just be gushes of white noise. But now, in the digital age, the industry wants to say that even copying tunes that you already own on CD should stay illegal. Gowers wants to relax this prohibition, which as far as the industry is concerned is like pricking holes in condoms and simultaneously saying you are against unwanted pregnancies. Is Gowers right? Can the line be drawn anywhere but between the official copy that you buy, and the first unofficial copy you make of it, for anyone, including for yourself? It's a hard line to draw, but where else can it be drawn? I mean, suppose I make a copy for my personal use in my mp3 player of a CD I've bought, and suppose then I give my original CD to a friend, as a present? And suppose he makes a personal copy of it, and then passes the CD on to another friend? Like the dishonourably discharged Marine at the end of A Few Good Men, we will say: "What did we do wrong?" We all obeyed orders. We made our copies for purely personal use. Are we suddenly not allowed to give away our own CDs? At that point, must we destroy all those personal copies that we've made? And if we must, how on earth are the cops supposed to catch us if we somehow neglect to do this? And of course, what if we make further copies of our copies, and pass them on? Yes, I can see why the industry wants the line to stay right where it is. It reminds me, as has been said here before many times, of drugs.
Because there too, the feeling is that drugs as such are okay on
a small scale, and that it is only drug "dealing" that is the evil.
But if dealing in copied CDs and DVDs is evil, then making such
copies has to be regarded as evil too, no matter how tiny the scale
of such copying and no matter how little money may be changing hands,
if copying is to be prevented. If you aren't prepared to be this
nasty about any kind of copying, then you are not serious about
stopping it. Who? Whom? When Sean told me about this, he said: "I'm going to have to rethink my attitude towards copyright." Sean has hitherto been rather opposed to copyright laws, because he has regarded the typical copyright holder as a member of what in 2001 he termed the enemy class. But now he himself will benefit from copyright law. Clearly he, Sean Gabb, is not a member of the hated enemy class, so maybe copyright law is not so bad. He reminded me, when he said this, and I daresay he reminded himself, of those radical spirits who unswervingly refuse honours and titles, until offered them. Seriously, this is terrific news, and I warmly congratulate Sean on this success. However, even if Sean spoke only in jest, I think his aside does throw light on the intellectual property debate. How many people, as a proportion of the population as a whole in a country like Britain, actually own intellectual property of the sort that is economically significant, the way that Sean Gabb now does? Not many. Most people don't now make big money from intellectual property, but neither does it cost them big money, or seem to. Physical property is very different and used to be much more so. Physical property used to impinge upon the people who didn't have any of it in a big way, in the form of rent, to the one mean landlord. Such people got their one small wage, from one mean employer. Landlords and factory-owners had lots of physical property, and they really did feel like an enemy class, to millions. Now, in extreme contrast, millions own physical property, and would be appalled at the idea of doing away with it. Intellectual property, on the other hand, never seems to dish out that kind of pain, nor to attract that kind of support. Very few people suffer because of intellectual property, or to feel that they do. Nor do most people feel that they gain much from physical property. The result is a world in which most people just don't care very much about intellectual property one way the other. Who? Whom? There's not that many in either camp, when it comes to intellectual property. Note that the one huge exception to all of the above is pharmaceutical
drugs. Which explains a lot, doesn't it? Opposing good things because of the bad things
that they might lead to I made many arguments, not all of which ended up being very audible. But one in particular impressed me, which is that one might (a) be in favour of a particular arrangement that someone is proposing, but (b) nevertheless oppose it, not because one was a hypocrite or being self-contradictory, but because of what it might lead to. Thus, for instance, one might agree that an abundance of CCTV cameras in public places might indeed lead to an immediate reduction in crime, but nevertheless oppose more CCTV cameras in public places because of what they might lead to, in the form of a totalitarian state or some such dystopia. The example I cited in York was favouring a particular privatisation, of the Post Office say, but nevertheless opposing it, out of a fear that privatisation might as a result get out of hand. Although helpful to postal services, postal privatisation might cause privatisation in general to acquire political momentum and to go on to do harm in other areas. I know. What has this to do with IP? Well, consider the following argument, made last Sunday at the CNE Competition Blog by Gabriel Calzada: However, beneath the surface of blatant demagoguery lies a plain truth: the real battle of our time is the one between political unification that ends in a world government, and a world society with competing governmental jurisdictions and economic freedom. If we want to live in the second one, we have to oppose every step in the process of political unification.A very big reason to oppose the solidification, so to speak, of intellectual property rights is that such solification will eventually result in something a lot like a world government. In a world in which economic enterprises can bounce work from country to country, and sell the results of their endeavours everywhere on earth where that's allowed, intellectual property rights mean very little if they are not protected all over the world. Maybe to start with this will merely mean reciprocal treaties, but the idea is that IP rights will coagulate into a global system. In short, a world government. And if a world government forms to protect intellectual property rights, which else might it do? Even if you entirely support the idea of intellectual property
rights being protected, and protected globally, you might still
rationally oppose such protection, because of what else it might
lead to. Art versus the artist Her latest recording includes Paganini's First Violin Concerto, and the latest Gramophone magazine cover CD includes an interview with Hahn, in which she tells how Paganini used to choose his lodgings carefully, to stop prying ears hearing him play and then writing it down, thereby allowing other violinists also to play Paganini's music, and to profit from it. Whose side are you on here? Art? Or the artist? Art wants, so to speak, for the music to be accurately recorded, which in Paganini's time meant written out in musical notation, and then printed and distributed in a way that maximises its chances of surviving, so that it could be played (and recorded) from then on by the likes of Hilary Hahn. But the less his music was copied the better, as far as the artist, Paganini, was concerned. If that stopped posterity hearing it, too bad. What had posterity ever done for him? A somewhat similar argument about copying and profiting from music rages now, in the form of a dispute about how long copyright for a recording artist should last. I long ago said here that I thought that Cliff Richard is wrong to expect his copyright to last a period of years that is determined by how long he himself lasts. Where, I asked, is the logic in that? Since then, the British Library has raised another objection, which is that if their right to copy stuff is further postponed, much stuff may be lost for ever. The library's Sound Archive cannot copy audio from fragile or obsolete formats for posterity until copyright runs out.I say that, with the application of whatever blunt legal instrument is required to get the job done, the British Library should be allowed to make their copies, onto whatever new media they like. And if unofficial amateurs also make satisfactory copies from old and perishable media onto new and more secure media, good for them also. The law should find a way to smile on them too. As a classical fan I have lost count of the number of times I've heard of recordings of ancient classical music radio broadcasts, often operatic broadcasts, being illegally copied at the time by some evil member of the public with a then state-of-the-art tape recorder just shoved up against the radio, only for that same illegal recording to be issued decades later to a grateful world, on gramophone records, tapes or (now) CDs, on account of it being the only record that anyone could find of this or that unique and wonderful occasion. And thank goodness that somebody managed to write down at least
some of what Paganini only played at his concerts. Patent confusion My confusion is not accidental, since confusion is the weapon being used by all those now locked in debate. Microsoft and Novell want everyone to believe that their deal offers a non-confusing way of using both Microsoft software and Linux, free from the threat from Microsoft of patent infringement suits. Red Hat is doing all it can to explain that Microsoft and Novell have themselves entered a legal minefield, and are violating Novell's contractual obligations as a Linux distributor. But the most controversial component of the deal is a patent cooperation agreement under which Microsoft has promised not to launch patent lawsuits against Novell customers. In a note published Tuesday, Novell said this agreement amounts to a "covenant" between Microsoft and Novell's customers, but Linux advocates maintain that it is effectively a patent cross-licensing agreement between Novell and Microsoft. Such an agreement would be in violation of Linux's software license, the GNU General Public License, (GPL) which does not allow distributors to enter into exclusive agreements with patent holders.Follow the above link, and you get to Novell's version of all this. This guy thinks that Red Hat could be in real trouble, and that Microsoft just might crush them like a bug, or crush them and buy up the bits at a bargain basement price: Will the sky fall on Red Hat? No one can say for sure. But the stage is set, the audience is in place, and the orchestra is unquestionably in the ready position, . . .My understanding of that being that the war between Microsoft and Linux is not over. Reports of Microsoft's defeat by Linux are premature. But the war has just taken a slightly different form. Competition is what this is all about, but IP law is the ammunition. In my earlier posting I said this: Microsoft seem to have decided that, for the time being anyway, they can't beat all this, and are instead joining it."All this" being Linux. But now it looks to me more as if Microsoft has joined Linux in order to beat it. But, like the man said, no one can say for sure. back to top permalink feedback Viral marketing versus the IP department The story that has caused all the current rowing is that, following a very successful viral marketing exercise to sell their movie Serenity, involving the fans of Firefly (the TV show it is based on), Universal Studios, the makers of Serenity, are now suing some of the fans involved, for stealing their intellectual property . A firm called Cafepress printed and distributed some Serenity T-shirts. Stealing our stuff, said Universal. No, selling your stuff, said Cafepress. Some fans - they're known as "Browncoats" - have responded by submitting their own invoice to Universal, for their marketing services. A lot of the comments on this Slashdot report of this argument echo that first report, which simply says that Universal is right and the Browncoats wrong. However, one of the Slashdot commenters has this to say: However this is missing the point of how viral marketing campaigns are supposed to work. Viral marketing can be scary particularly for large control-freak companies, as the essential point behind viral marketing is to give away control of the brand to the fans/early adopters and let them be a mouthpiece for your product, a voice that other fans and their less fanish friends, family and acquaintances will trust when they wouldn't even notice a conventional marketing campaign via TV, radio, print and billboards.Universal may have the law on their side in this one, but what they have done, as many of the other Slashdot commenters argue, could turn out to be very bad for their future business. I mean, do Universal really want to be known for their fans-versus-studio fights, rather than for their movies? My thanks to the Blowing
Smoke blog for telling me about this intriguing little ruckus. Patents reduce secrecy If I can't be sure myself about Intellectual Property, I can at least link to people who are, and here is a defence of the idea of patents, which I came across while digging around for quite other stuff, from Hillary Johnson, on my mother-blog Samizdata, way back in March of this year. But the argument won't have changed in the intervening months: Before we blithely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more ... By offering a proprietary position on a piece of work, for a fixed period of time, we gain permanent open access to the idea and the process that led to it. The granting of patent rights is a collective cultural and financial investment we all make - and if you're a libertarian, this is the kind of tax you want to pay. For the applicant, the filing of a patent is a form of open intellectual engagement with the world of ideas, a bit like the exercise of free speech. You can also call it opportunism if you like, but it's a functional question at root, not a moral one. Like them or not, patents and the culture of open exchange surround them foster more innovation than they retard.Hillary Johnson's point is that far from being in opposition to the Open Source ethos, of public discussion and public debate, patents facilitate such a culture. Without patents, inventors and the enterprises they work for would be far more secretive. How else would they keep control of their work and ensure that they profited from it, rather than others? But then again, there's Terence Kealey, here attacking similar ideas to those of Hillary Johnson. Oh dear. What to think?!? Quick Brian, more links. Check this
out, about the patenting of food recipes, with further links to
similar IP arguments in the fashion industry. As for more up to
date IP news, the story that is now all over the mainstream British
media is that the iPod has been hacked. I'm not the only one who is confused One moment I think that fellow blogger here David Carr is right and that IP rights are simple, and should simply be enforced. Then I read some piece at, say, Techdirt, like this, or this, or something at Lessig, like this, and I become a devotee of Open Source Culture, like some aging hippy. What to think! What to believe! Should the EU do away with its levy on copying technology? Or will that mean that Pedro Almodovar and Bertrand Tavernier will starve to death? Now consider this: Yesterday I went to the Big Fresno Fair. At the fair, I was astounded to find copyright law being used to prevent me from taking pictures of my daughter with a bird! Specifically, at a booth where your child can pose with some colorful birds, there was a sign that said "PLEASE NO CAMERAS. THANK YOU. THIS IS A COPYRIGHT-PROTECTED AREA." I also noted the sign right above it selling a single 8x10 photo for $15 plus tax. Obviously, this is more of a "don't take your own pictures, instead order a second print for another $15 protected area".Gary Shuster argues that there has been such a furore about copyright law and copyright violation, boiled up by the big entertainment corporations, that people now think that copyright applies to everything. (His further point is that in a lot of bizarre cases, it does!) It seems I'm not the only one who is confused. In this case, no great harm is being done. All that this particular fairground entrepreneur is doing is describe how things must be in his property in a legally imperfect manner. If he just said "my gaff my rules - no photo-ing of the birds with your own camera", the effect would be no different. But such confusions are a symptom of how there exists no commonsense notion of intellectual property that we all share. Old fashioned physical property has never been universally believed in either, but it is pretty much universally understood, as a concept. This is my house. This is your car. I own this food, would you like to pay me for it, and become the owner of it, instead of me? And so on. Not all of us like all this. But most of us get it. No such unanimity of understanding now applies to intellectual
property. Whether or not the idea of "copyright" applies to this
or that thing - this DVD, that pop song on a CD that you already
own but apparently may not copy to another CD (even though you own
that too), this bird in a fairground, that thing you wrote on a
blog - is a matter not of anything resembling commonsense, but of
mere legal knowledge. The law is whatever it happens to be, but
it could equally well be quite different. In such a world, nonsense
spoken in a confident tone can have a lot of influence. One law for the rich So I really do not want Google to have made a mistake in buying YouTube. However, some very clever people are saying that they have: Until now most copyright holders had little incentive to sue YouTube. The company was young and rapidly burning through its venture capital.This BBC report goes on to suggests that maybe Google do know what they are doing and that there will be money enough for everyone. We shall see. I, meanwhile, have also been taking a chance with the law of copyright. I have just copied onto a my personal blog a quite large chunk, with very little in the way of introductory comment or criticism (so it doesn't really count as "fair use") of a book which I hugely admire, which is about the war between the ancient Greeks and the Persians. I will shortly be posting a very positive review of this book on Samizdata. I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which this will damage the interests either of the publishers of this book or of its author, but if either of them tell me that they think otherwise I'll immediately take the posting down. This is surely the worst that could happen to me, given that my blog makes no money. I would be amazed if it got even that nasty. But if Google copied the same gob of the same book . . . The phrase "One law for the rich" springs to mind, only this time,
the rich are the losers. The internet is like that festival day
that the Romans used to have - Saturnalia? (yes
- like I say: I love Google) - where the slaves lorded it over their
masters and escaped all punishment for it. Only, on the internet,
it's Saturnalia all the year round. When stealing the message is spreading the
message The parody video on webcameron.info has already been viewed more than 7,000 times while the authentic Cameron website on WebCameron.org.uk had received 160,000 hits, according to a spokesman.On the face of it Cameron ought to be very angry, and now to be a supporter of Digital Rights Management laws which would have prevented any satyrical rearrangements of his original video material. He might even favour laws against "stealing" the names of celebrity websites. But as so often when it comes to "stealing" a message, what is actually happening here is that the original message is being circulated in another form. Cameron loves it when people compare him (now) to Blair (then). He's been doing this himself for ages. "You used to be the future once", he memorably taunted Blair, on the floor of the House of Commons. In other words, Cameron is in the same position as I would be in if someone launched a very cleverly done attack on me using something I'd blogged, and thereby spread the message of . . . me! I should be so lucky. All of which reminds me of a conversation I recall with Perry
de Havilland of Samizdata.
Perry said, several years ago, that lawyers stopping people downloading
free and "unauthorised" pictures of movie stars from the Internet
was stopping the exact sort of behaviour that movie stars also hire
publicists to encourage. Stealing? No. Just amplifying the original
message. Control versus fakery Here, on the other hand, is a story where the word "fake" is all too accurate. Three times in the past year, fake versions of Pfizer's heart drug Lipitor have found their way into the NHS supply chain, putting patients at risk.Fake Lipitor is rather like a knock-off DVD where the only thing they definitely got right was the cover graphics. And whereas watching a bad copy of the latest James Bond movie can't kill you, badly copied drugs, where only the packaging is copied exactly, could be deadly. But Pfizer's power to control its own medicines is limited. Under European law, it is legal to import medicines from the EU, repackage them and distribute them. This parallel trade, as it is called, will continue.At the risk of being labelled a grovelling catspaw flunkey minion of Big Pharma, I think Pfizer are pretty much completely right about all this. They should certainly be allowed to distribute their drugs direct to pharmacists and hospitals, and it would seem that they are. Good. But what is more, they should also be allowed to control the way their products are distributed by others by simply not selling their drugs to anyone who distributes them in a way they don't approve of, e.g. by selling them on to someone Pfizer disapproves of. (And yes, if you are asking, I do oppose laws against "Retail Price Maintenance".) If you think that Pfizer do not actually own the drugs they produce, on the grounds that it was merely their idea to produce drugs like that, and ideas shouldn't or can't be owned, well, that's a different argument. But if you concede that they do own them, then that ought also to mean that you think they should be allowed to attach any conditions they like to parting with them. As with quite a lot of arguments about intellectual property,
faking, copying and so on, what appears to be an argument about
the rights and wrongs of IP is better understood as an argument
about the rights and wrongs of buying, selling, and contracting.
And traders should be allowed, when buying and selling, to make
whatever contracts they like. The Swedish Pirates are doing very well Was it naïve to think that a populist movement galvanised by a call of 'downloads for all!' could sweep into political power? This rueful question is on the minds of many young Swedes this week after national elections.However, if you are a devoted supporter of the right of record companies to be protected against all forms of piracy with the Full Majesty of the Law, do not deceive yourself that the case for "piracy" has now collapsed, merely because the Piracy Party didn't do get as many Swedish votes last week as it hoped it would. No single issue party ever has much of a chance. Answering questions about, say, tax cuts (which the victorious Moderate Party is in favour of - good for them) merely by saying, after an embarrassed pause, Hurrah for Piracy is no answer at all. Who is going to vote for a mere pressure group? But, judged as a pressure group, the Piracy Party is doing very well. All those hopeful activists! Spreading to other countries! This is a world-wide propaganda movement, for goodness sake, not a bunch of mere loser politicians. If they have good arguments, and they do, they can take them straight to the real politicians. No need for a giant detour via public opinion. Put it this way. The quotes above that I just copied and pasted come from a British Times article, and no group that has only been going a few months which gets foreign press coverage like that should be dismissed as insignificant. And if you follow that link, you will find links to more Times pieces, the gist of which is that if Big Music thinks it can carry on with business as usual, charging nearly a quid to everyone for each of its precious pop tunes, Big Music is deluding itself. There is no future in suing your customers, and Big Music is realising this fast. It can supply its product a lot more cheaply now, and the punters reckon that it should. The Piracy Party will never form a government, in Sweden or anywhere
else. But it is doing very well. Patents as taxation? Microsoft has promised not to enforce patents for technology in Web services specifications, which are used in connecting applications in service-oriented architectures and other forms of standards-based distributed computing.Microsoft is going Open Source! But Mike of Techdirt is not impressed: Part of the value of web services are in the network effects of having them more widely used. However, what benefit was the patent system in this case? Did it incent Microsoft to create the specifications? Nope. Did it help Microsoft earn any money? Nope. Did it keep some developers afraid for a while about whether or not they'd have to pay a toll to Microsoft? Sure. The only thing this really did was cost Microsoft money in terms of lawyers and patent filing fees - as well as slow down the ecosystem they are now trying to promote. The reason certainly wasn't to stop others from patenting the technology. If that were the case, they could have just published the info early on and had all the prior art they needed.But commenters contradicted the idea that "prior art" would have provided a sufficient defence for Microsoft against other would-be patenters. The reason was indeed, said commenters, precisely to stop others from patenting stuff that Microsoft had thought of. Which leads me to wonder if the patent system in the USA is starting to mutate into a tax system, encouraging all those who can afford to think like this to follow an "if in doubt patent it" policy, and then waive their rights to get paid in their turn, because that would be bad business in a business where the trick is to persuade others to use your standards. Patent fees become a kind of tax on open source software and on open standards. For if, maybe some casual passer by can swoop in and patent everything, then someone wanting to develop whatever system it is intelligently, in an Open Source manner, had better get their patenting in first. If the patent people in the USA were indeed starting to think
like this, they wouldn't be the first government agency in the world
so to behave. (Britain has become blighted with this in recent years.)
One of the most malign perversions of the idea of privatisation
is government departments charging huge fees for the "service" of
allowing something that should have been none of their business
in the first place. Free but at a price Apple's iTunes music store will face a challenge to its dominance of legitimate music downloads when a service offering free, legal songs is launched in December.As the article goes on to explain, iTunes may not be the biggest victim of this project. Those who have already acquired the iTunes habit are unlikely to want the bother of switching. However, anyone looking for a cheap-but-legal way of getting hold of music from the internet who hasn't yet been bothering with this will surely want to investigate this. In other words, I agree with the SpiralFrog exec who said this ... "Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling."... provided that SpiralFrog live up to the boast that follows: "SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site."But will it? When I first heard about this scheme, I thought, hurrah, they've slashed the price of music on the internet. But this "service" is going to be interrupted with adverts, both visual and audio, the audio adverts being an especially annoying prospect. A non-SpiralFrogger said: "They'll have to get the balance right," he said. "If people have to click on too many adverts before they get to the download then they'll give up."Quite so. And this sounds really off-putting. SpiralFrog users would be able to download music and videos for free and could be transferred to one portable device but not onto a CD. The downloaded music would have digital rights management (DRM) technology on it, however, meaning that SpiralFrog can apply restrictions to its use. For instance, users would have to visit the site once a month to view the advertising in order to continue to use previously downloaded songs. Otherwise, those songs won't be playable.The logic of the internet is unimpeded information flow. The logic of Big Music is to impede, until they get their cut, and SpiralFrog doesn't change this logic. Illegal downloading won't be going away any time soon. back to top permalink feedback James Dyson on on patent renewal fees James Dyson holds strong views on the patent system: "I believe that patent renewal fees are an infringement of human rights. They are also, essentially, anti-competitive in that large companies can afford to pay but small companies or individuals cannot. I'm glad to say that the UK has halved the cost of renewals following our earlier campaign, but patent offices in other European countries have not; they do not want to loose [sic] their income or power."I find that rather persuasive. I mean, either it is right that someone should hold a patent, in which case he ought not to have to pay for what should be his right. Or, it is not right, in which case a willingness to pay for it shouldn't make any difference. This makes less sense: So far James Dyson has taken two cases to the European Court of Human Rights. Both have been rejected on the grounds that patent renewal fees are 'reasonable', even though the fees are not related to the patent owner's ability to pay.Most prices aren't. If patent fees are reasonable, then they should surely be the same for everyone. This is in stark contrast to composers of music, for example, who enjoy copyright protection of their work for free, for their entire lifetime plus 80 years.I guess big patent renewal fees, besides making things easier for big businesses and harder for small ones, reflect unease about the idea of a major invention not being exploited properly, and merely sat on by the person who invented it, perhaps because his enterprise is too small to do his invention justice. If an original inventor is unable or unwilling to continue making the most of his invention, but if someone else wants to, a big patent renewal fee will scare off the timid originator and clear the way for others. I can imagine no equivalent problem with music that a big copyright renewal fee would solve. And anyway, if a symphony is not performed as much as it might be, so what? It's only a symphony. [When I came across this article it said August 11th 2006 at the
top, but that was just the date when I read it. It was actually
written a couple of years ago. I don't suppose Dyson thinks any
differently now.] Why no open source drugs? Competition ordinarily pushes price down to marginal cost, paying no heed at all to costs that were sunk years ago. The problem is especially acute with drugs, where so much cost lies in the original chemical design. The pioneer also shoulders the considerable financial burden of persuading the FDA that the drug is safe and effective, while me-too applicants can, in principle, just photocopy what the pioneer has already filed. It is not impossible for the pioneering company to end up as the only player that fails to profit from its discovery.Sounds a lot like computer software, doesn't it? Damnably complicated to write it for the first time, but then copyable by any moron with a disc drive. The answer to patent obsessed Microsoft has been the Open Source software movement, where people give away small or not so small increments of invention, and make a living by understanding the software they have contributed to the creation of, rather than because they own any of it. To cut the long version of this blog posting down to the a bit less long version, Open Source software has done . . . quite well. So, why hasn't there been a comparable Open Source drugs movement? Well, actually there has, in the sense that people have talked about it and blogged about it, etc. But it doesn't seem to have taken off, or not yet, to anything like even the limited extent that Open Source Software has. If it has, I missed it. I just tried googling "Open Source Drugs", and what I got (although I admit that I didn't follow up every lead) was just quite a lot people saying: Hey what a great idea! I can think of quite a few reasons why drugs are not the same as software, even if there are also big similarities, and I expect you can too. That's not my point. My point is that, whatever may be the reasons, there is not now much of an Open Source Drugs movement. Yet the attack on "Big Pharma" implies that there should be, and that there will be, in a big way, in fact in a way that is bigger than what the hated Pharmaceutical Companies manage to achieve now. Irony watch: Bill Gates, who is one of the supposed paymasters
for all this Open Source drug development, insists on everyone sharing
their ideas. Predictable use of copyright law - and unpredictable Kazaa and the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) have settled out of court in a deal which will see the P2P operation hand over $100m to the industry. It'll now join fellow former industry pariah Napster as a fully paid-up digital music distributor.We here have been flagging up stories like that for months if not years, about how Big Music does not like P2P file sharers, and about how they want to hold P2P websites responsible for the illegal use made of them by file copiers. The next phase in the story is equally predictable. Another big P2P website will emerge as the website of choice among free downloaders. And that too will be legally set upon. Meanwhile, Kazaa will grapple with its new culture of law-abidingness more or less successfully, and the price of legitimate music files will drift downwards. This story, however, is quite a surprise, or it was to me. Governments frequently quarrel with whistle-blowing former public officials who take action against some aspect of the policies of the government they formerly served, and who write books publicising their alternative views concerning what should or should not have been done by their government. So far so familiar. What is new, however, is that in the latest British version of this drama, the British government is trying to use copyright law to suppress the revelations in question. Despite claiming to Mr Murray that "disclosure undermines trust maintained with intelligence sources", the Foreign Office has proved unwilling to bring official secrets charges against the former ambassador, who says he was forced out of his job for raising moral objections to torture.But presumably there are too many defence lawyers who know their way around litigation like that. But tactical use of copyright in the Murray case seems unlikely to succeed. Copyright law is designed to protect the commercial interests of writers and artists, not alleged state secrets.Seems. The uncertainty is surely the point here. Maybe such a legal attack won't "succeed", i.e. win this particular case, but remember that the purpose of such litigation is to deter as well as just to destroy, to punish as well as to prevent, and to signal willingness to punish again in similar future cases. Even if a particular story the British government wants silenced gets out, the principle is maintained that you will still have your nerves frazzled and your bank balance destroyed by legal fees if you defy the British government in this kind of way. So a different line of attack, merely because it is different, does make sense. back to top permalink feedback Stealing photos? You can see a hand in motion on the left side of the photo; that's a shop assistant at Les Galeries Lafayette freaking out at me for taking a picture. It seems that, with this photograph, I could steal the innovative designs (a plain t-shirt with Hello Kitty's face in the middle) on display. Do they make their customers sign a vow not to take pictures of themselves wearing the things? As you may have guessed, I think most 'intellectual property' hoo-ha is irrational and useless. So I was somewhat unyielding when the shop assistant demanded I show her the photo I had taken. I also refused to delete it. I think she could tell that I meant it, and so 'let' me walk away without calling security.Antoine agreed. Meanwhile, I had some good news with regard to my Billion Monkeys project, the purpose of which is to create a vast archive of digital photographs of digital photographers in action, singly and in packs, digitally photographed by me at the various tourist traps of London, and by others everywhere. Digital photographs like these. The way I see it, these photos are nothing much now. But imagine a similar collection of photos of people applying those vast early semi-mobile phones the size of shoe boxes to their ears. Digital cameras are going to be like this. Very soon, that is to say in a decade or two, the current generation of digital cameras will look absurdly bulky and dated. Jackie D will be able to roam the shops, clicking away as easily - and as invisibly - as blinking. Digital camera making will be a branch of the jewelry business. And I'll have nothing more to photograph. This afternoon, as I write this, I was conferring at length with
a potential hosting supplier. He stressed the importance of obeying
the law, which means that he can't allow himself to be hosting illegal
content. And my good news is that he was adamant that my Billion
Monkey photos are not illegal. Impolite maybe, but definitely allowed. Following the money I didn't mean this: Freelance photographer Kelly Fajack claims in a lawsuit that one of his photos was reproduced without his permission on a currency note circulating in the central African nation of Burundi.Does Mr Farjack want money from Burundi? He says he probably would have granted Burundi officials permission to use his picture on their money if they had asked. "Like I said in my lawsuit, I'm not out to take money from a poor African nation," he says. "In a way I'm honored that my image is on a little piece of African history.So that's a no, no money from Burundi, not directly. However, Mr Farjack is behaving quite rationally. By litigating, or by threatening to, or by trying to, once he has found someone he wants to ligitage all over, he achieves a number of things. He proclaims himself to be a nice guy, who is not out to screw the impoverished people of Burundi, but who is simultaneously eager to gouge whatever money he can out of an evil, white, western currency manufacturer. He reminds coffee table book publishers that it is not okay for them to steal his photos, just because Burundi has done it, which was okay. Plus, he gets lots and lots of publicity. It's a weird story. (Why do you think I'm using it?) It has two great pictures to illustrate it, for one of which, and maybe for both of which, he presumably gets paid every time they appear. He knows this. And he is out to milk it for all the media chit-chat he can extract from it. My further guess is: he is already very, very grateful to the
government of Burundi. The IP orthodoxy of the blogosphere About a week ago, I saw a particularly beautiful photograph at The Corridor of Uncertainty, a cricket blog that I occasionally read. It was of young cricketers viewed from a distance through the morning mist of Delhi, with imperial architecture to be seen more dimly in the background. The Corridor of Uncertainty reproduced it, in a somewhat miniaturised version. And I thought, well, if they can reproduce it, so can I. At the flickr site where the original was to be found it said "all rights reserved", but that hadn't worried The Corridor of Uncertainty, so why should it worry me? Then a fellow British blogger, Clive Davis, saw this photo at my blog, and he emailed me to ask if it would be okay by me if he used it also. I said, well, you'd only be doing what I did. So he displayed it too. Neither Clive Davis nor I knew for sure if we were doing anything wrong, but I don't think we were. First, we didn't steal the picture, in the sense of preventing the person who originally displayed it, and who presumably took it, "dragonunit", from displaying it at his flickr site. Second, we were drawing a little blogosphere attention to this beautiful picture, and to all the other beautiful pictures that dragonunit has up on his flickr site. It would have been an entirely different matter if either I or Clive Davis had implied that we had taken this picture, or if either of us had failed to link to where the photo was first displayed. If either of us were making money at our blogs, for instance with adverts, that would change things. If either of us included the photo in a glossily printed coffee table type book and sold the book at twenty quid a go, that would certainly change things. And it is my guess that when dragonunit put "all rights reserved" it was the right to do things like this that he was concerned about, rather than just me and Clive Davis using one of his pictures to decorate our blogs. On the contrary, I think that Clive Davis and I both behaved impeccably in accordance with the IP orthodoxy of the blogosphere. By all means copy, but always link to the original and acknowledge the originator. If, on the other hand, dragonunit hears about this and he says
to Clive Davis and me: take it down at once, I for one will do so
immediately. But I'd be amazed if that happened. Fair use of video? India seems to be willing to go to the mat over yoga.But hang on a minute. Never mind Choudhury stealing centuries old Yoga traditions. What about me stealing those sentences? Did I not violate the intellectual property rights of USA Today, who published this story? Well, no. There's such a thing as "fair use". You're allowed to copy snippets from other people's writings within reasonable limits. Without such a right, written debate and discussion - even referring people to other good stories and reports - would become well nigh impossible. In this video conversation that French (but talking in English) blogger Loic Le Meur has with Joe Ito, they touch on the idea of something similar becoming established in the world of video. I meant to do a detailed timings-and-topics report on this podcast, the way I do for the conversations I have with Antoine Clarke, but this is very laborious, and I never got around to that for this Le Meur/Ito conversation. Suffice it to say that they get to the issue of video copyrighting during the second half of the conversation, the first half having been about a computer game that Ito is involved with. So, how about fair use of video material? At present, if you pick out a few seconds of a Hollywood movie and use that in your own movie, without asking for or paying for permission to do this, in the same casual way that I quoted the Yoga copyrighting news story . . . well, you mustn't do that. And I can't see that changing any time soon. After all, a still photo - just one single solitary frame - from a movie packs a whole lot more of a creative punch than one single word taken from a piece of writing. Isolated words are by their nature utterly unoriginal, and communicate almost nothing. But every frame in a newly created movie is itself an act of creation. Fair usage of video material, then, becomes more like a little light shop-lifting. (But I took hardly any of your stuff!) However, if some other video-blogger were to use a snippet of
that Le Meur/Ito conversation, I'm sure that neither of them would
object. (Likewise, Antoine and I would have no objection to anyone
recycling our audio-wisdom.) An explosion of amateur, open source
video material is now occurring, and in due course the conventions
established in this new realm will surely influence movies and mainstream
broadcasting. Blurring the vital distinction It was not a pretty sight or a pleasing sound. The most enduring recollection I have of those shows was that most members of the public seemed to make no distinctions between something being nice, and therefore needing to be encouraged by the government, or something being nasty, and therefore needing to be banned by the government. The idea that something might be nice or nasty but no business of the government's either way did not seem to impinge upon the collective cranium of Britain. I doubt if things have changed much since then, or that things are very different in other countries. From where I sit, this piece, about the glories of freely shared internet creations, and the hope-stroke-prophecy that this kind of thing will gradually rise up and supplant the electronic culture of expensively sold Big Media products, is a world away from the notion that the Big Media should be compelled by the politicians to do things differently to the way they want to. But you can't help thinking that political innovators like the Swedish Pirate Party, and like the US Pirate Party who have presumably been inspired by the Swedish Pirates, won't want to leave it at merely curbing the impositions of Big Media on innocent third parties and blameless computer hard discs. Small political parties like these ones seldom get anywhere themselves, but they do have a way of influencing the agendas of the real political parties before they implode. The big parties steal their ideas. Which these Pirate guys could hardly object to. |
