What alternatives to IP laws have been proposed?

Great Debates
1

I think copying digital content without permission is approximately as evil as stealing a candy bar. I.e., not very evil, but certainly not a morally upstanding thing to do.

I think the very-minorly-evil nature of the act stems in part from the actual laws that are on the books. Under different laws, of course, the act would have a different evil-measurement.

My question (in GD because I’m sure this will lead to debate) is just this: What alternative approaches to IP law, esp. w.r.t. digital content, have been proposed? In particular, I’m interested in approaches which are supposed to make legal and sustainable the kind of activities engaged in by “pirates”–or alternatively approaches which are supposed to make those activities unnecessary for people who would like access to the content.

2

The obvious is to simply bring the price down to a reasonable level. If pirates can copy and distribute a DVD for free, then there’s no real way for Sony to justify selling it for $50. That’s not to say they can’t do so, but the discrepancy is so damn high that people simply can not see any justification.

Quite frankly the best way these big players can discourage *me *from piracy is not to act like arseholes. As you say, the actual morality of the act is so minor as to be morally neutral. The only person actually acting immorally, rather than illegally, is the person who first cracks the media, since they had an agreement with Sony not to do so. When I download their copy, I am not acting unethically at all, since I never had any agreement with Sony. From a purely moral perspective, Sony relies on me feeling empathy towards them and feeling like I shouldn’t knowingly help someone else lie to them.

The problem is that these big players are corporate arseholes. Sony installs spyware into people’s boot sectors that opens them up to hackers. No permission asked. Disney, who made their fortune interpreting 80 yo literature like the Grimms and Verne into film, extend the copyright laws so their own works can never be interpreted ever again. All of the arseholes force me to sit through bullshit warning before I can even watch a DVD that I legally purchased. CDs that I buy can’t even be played on my computer *until *t I illegally rip them and play them as MP3s. All them go to great lengths to be utterly faceless entities where nobody can be blamed for anything that goes wrong. And the list goes on. They have not just lost the moral high ground, they have lost any sort of goodwill that I might have felt towards them. And so long as I know that they are arseholes who are trying to screw me over, i am not only not going to help them defend their contracts, I am going to actively assist those who do so.

The reforms that are needed are compromises and public relations improvement. Allow Mickey fucking Mouse into the public domain the way that Sherlock Holmes was. Disney has done shit with him in the last 30 years anyway. Stop trying to force people to do what you want by inconveniencing them at every step. Try to produce some loyalty and goodwill towards the brand and I may actually stop and think about the morality of knowingly assisting someone to break their contract with them. But while they act like arseholes with absolutely no respect for my rights or my property or my ability to maximise my profits, I am stuffed if I can see why I should have any respect for theirs.

Ultimately, this shit started at least 30 years ago, when the Big Boys had the upper hand and started treating customers with a total lack of consideration. Now they are losing a little ground, and instead of asking for a ceasefire and a compromise, they keep wheeling out bigger and bigger guns to use against “the enemy”, and they wonder why the war goes on.

Ultimately, until they stop treating me like the enemy, I am not going to stop acting like one. Until they act like respectable corporate citizens, I have no inclination to treat them with respect.

3

It takes money to create the volume and quality of intellectual content the public consumes. That money has to come from somewhere. This is the absolutely key issue in any discussion of this topic.

The current private scheme is too easily circumventable to work well. It has the possibility of a smaller and smaller pool of payers paying ever more while a bigger and bigger group just ride on their backs. Alternatively, and more positively, there are some signs that extremely economical distribution channels will allow the customer base to become so huge that the per person price can be reduced to a level so low it’s not worth pirating (such as is working well for apps).

There may be other private payment schemes possible. Other posters may have better ideas.

The other possibility is that of a public scheme by which, somehow, a tax or levy or something is widely imposed and that is distributed to makers of content. No one will ever be happy with such a scheme however. It runs utterly contrary to capitalist free market ideals. It will never happen.

4

I have not read alternatives to copyright, but I have read a proposal about patents.

Replace granting of a patent, which then hands over a monopoly, to the granting of a patent, which starts an auction. Winner of the auction wins the patent, which is paid to the entity which applied for the patent. Except 80% of the time (or 70% or 93.2% or whatever) the government pays the price the winner would have, and immediately places it in the public domain.

The argument goes: the benefits from decreased monopoly power and spurned innovation will easily cover the costs of the system. Additionally, if the percentage is tweaked right, then there is still significant advantage in competing in the auction for a decent patent.

I do not recall if the applicant could participate in the auction, or if so, how it would work, since the applicant could afford to “pay himself” any amount of money, bit of the old left hand paying the right hand.

5

It looks like the original source for the patent auction idea is from Kremer in a paper titled “Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation.” Of course, this paper lies behind a paywall. Ahem.

6

That is a truly awful idea. It punishes the sort of revolutionary innovation that the patent system should most encourage because unless you can demonstrate to everyone that your idea is awesome before the patent is granted, you’ll lose it for a pittance. Your ability to see opportunities for innovation others cannot should be rewarded, not punished.

7

But **Grumman **wouldn’t that problem be resolved by permitting the applicant to bid? Although I must say I don’t really know how it is proposed to decide when the government buys the patent: is this just a random 80% of the time, or does the government pick and choose? And where do the funds come from for the government to buy 80% of all patents? Effectively they would be supporting 80% of the patentable innovation industry.

8

In terms of patents, there is very little ‘wrong’ with the current system in terms of how it effects John Q Public. That’s not to say that there aren’t many many problems (such as lack of consistency in laws between countries, standards of novelty/inventive step, their strategic use in litigation to form micro-monopolies etc. etc.), but the system usually operates fairly well in terms of promoting innovation in technology which translates to a better life for John Q.

If you want to re-vamp patent law, first identify the real problems and work on solving them rather than tear down the whole system and come up with something new and probably unworkable (like an auction system!).

Copyright though, has become a headache due to digital media. The solution cannot be to sue everyone and their dog, as it seems RIAA would like to do (and has done). I don’t know what the solution is, although I agree with the above posters who say a first step would be for the copyright holders to stop treating everyone like criminals.

9

If you allow the applicant to bid, how is it any different from our current system? Just bid infinity dollars, payable to yourself, and then do whatever you like with it once you win. Is there anything stopping a patent holder auctioning off their IP rights today?

I agree with Isamu - the main problem with patents today is only the granting of patents that do not satisfy an adequate standard of novelty/invention. Fixing copyright law would be my preference. I’d probably go with fifty years or the life of the author, whichever is longer, as a starting point.

10

That seems readily solved by the government offering loans for patents at standard rates.

If you are so sure that you can see that your patent is worth a million, then the government grants you a loan of a million for the sole purpose of bidding on your patent. If someone else thinks it’s worth more than you are willing to go into debt for, it’s because they can see more potential than you can.

Because finance for any amount is automatic, there’s no problem of people being able to compete against corporations. However because it is a loan at standard rates, it discourages people from simply bidding a gazillion dollars if they don’t have faith that the idea is worth that amount. Nobody can simply create patents and hold on to it for the sole purpose of extorting money from independent investors in future, with never any intention to develop. Because a patent is always is a real asset with real value, people will be effectively forced to develop it, or sell it to those who can.

It basically lets the entire market decide how risky the patent is and ensures that patents that others find valuable are developed, rather than sitting idle waiting to catch someone who develops a similar idea independently.

And because the finance is available, a patent creator can bid up her own invention to whatever she thinks it’s worth, and never has to let it go for less than she thinks she can make out of it.

11

Bullshit. You are acting illegally and immorally by knowingly, willfully, and deliberately receiving stolen property. Morality exists independently of an EULA. You have zero right to the content unless you lawfully acquire it. You’re rationalizing theft.

12

There are two other big problems.

There is a problem of patents being filed with no intention to develop, which IMO is at least as big a problem. People file patents for ideas having no intention of ever developing them or selling them. They just sit on them, and as soon as anyone else does the leg work of developing and marketing, they demand compensation. That’s within the letter of patent law, but not the spirit. It doesn’t encourage innovation, it actively discourages it. It’s technically soluble by asking the holders to sell, but when the idea is seems risky and the invention only exists on paper, the reasonable price might be a thousand bucks, but the developers routinely demand ten times that amount because the cost to them of saying no is so low, and the potential profits of holding out are so high.

The other problem is the legal nightmare of patent defence. I have personally been told by lawyers that you are usually better off *not *filing a patent in most cases. The patent just makes your idea public knowledge and allows anybody who wants to to rip it off. The costs of defending the patent are usually higher than any compensation. The advice I received was that I was better off simply notarising the patent and sitting on it. That way if anyone else made the idea commercially successful, I could still muscle in on it legally, but I wouldn’t be giving away intellectual property to the entire planet. Essentially the only time a patent is worth it is if you have the means to begin development immediately and a very high chance of making a lot of money doing so. Patenting a device that a small concern can only sell a couple of dozen units of isn’t worth it. This situation goes against the very intention of patent law.

13

Utter nonsense. Nothing has been stolen whatsoever. Everybody still has *exactly *the same property that they had before my transaction.

The only “property” involved is the nebulous “intellectual property” which is of course not property at all, except in a purely legal context, and you tell us that morality exists independently of law. Downloading information is no more stealing than listening to someone hum a sung.

Indeed it does. And under no morality that I subscribe to is it stealing to make an image of information in a way that neither removes nor diminishes the original.

By your bizarre morality, Google is immoral when they take a photograph of my house, because I created that house, and when they copy it without paying me they are “stealing” the creation from me. Utter nonsense of course. I still have my house, even if they they also have an image of it.

You just told us that morality exists independent of law, and now you are telling us that we have no *moral *right to something unless it is obtained in compliance with the law.

And you honestly don’t see the inconsistency here? :dubious:

Theft: A criminal act in which property belonging to another is taken without that person’s consent.

No property is being taken. At worst property is being duplicated. Downloading a DVD is no more theft of the DVD than making a copy of the Kitty Hawk is theft of the Kitty Hawk. No property is being taken here. Everybody has exactly the same property as they started with and in exactly the same place.

14

Wrong again. Copyright includes the right to control distribution. Whoever holds the copyright on content has the right to decide the terms on which it may lawfully be acquired–including whether to allow sales of physical copies and/or digital downloads.

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law. Doesn’t matter if you don’t feel you’re doing something wrong by stealing content. You can disagree with the law of gravity if you like, but you are not immune to it.

15

…are you seriously using the Free Dictionary to make a legal argument?

“This definition was bought to you by FARLEX, an independent, privately held company based in Huntingdon Valley, PA, offering online reference products.”

If you want to hinge the debate on the definition of the word “theft”, I think it would be more constructive to look at how the taking of intellectual property is actually defined by law, as opposed to googling random dictionaries on the net?

16

If you want to argue about what the law is, you shouldn’t have picked a thread that is explicitly about what the law should be.

17

What’s that based on, aside from law, which you have just told us exists independent of morality?

You boldly declared that what I said is rubbish. Now back it up with something more than baseless and contradictory assertions. “Coz I said so” isn’t going to convince anyone.

What is this drivel you are posting?

Where the hell have I ever claimed that I am immune to the law. Obviously if Sony chooses to pursue me in the courts they are able to do so. What the fuck does that have to do with morality?

If the law declares that it is illegal to be a Jew, do you also think that proves that being a Jew is immoral, because Jews aren’t immune to the law?

18

Since I have explicitly said that this is *not *a legal argument, I am baffled how the hell you came to this conclusion. :confused:

Why would a legal definition be more constructive in an argument that is entirely and solely concerned with *morality *and in which all parties agree that morality exists completely *independently *of law?

I really would like to hear your explanation of this.

19

Sure, the publisher may still have the original copy that they spent millions to produce but it is now worthless because everyone has already copied it for free. The semantics may be different but the final result is the same.

Or from another perspective: You may think it’s morally fine to torrent the occasional film, after all there is no way to say that you would have paid money to see that film anyway. Fair enough. Now let’s say you’re pirating all the films you watch. Are you really saying that if you had to pay for films you would watch none? I doubt it, so clearly the industry is losing money from you. The difference between these scenarios is simply one of degree, and I would argue that if the later is clearly morally wrong then the former must be too.

At the end of the the day you can call it whatever you like, but you are still freeloading off the creativity and hard work of others. Remember that the vast majority of people in the music, film and video game industry are not fat cats or millionaire stars.

I work in a media industry myself and while I purchase lots of content I also torrent my fair share too. What I hate is people kidding themselves about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it: You’re freeloading and you’re doing it because you’re cheap.

20

Utter nonsense. the results are completely different, the most obvious being that nobody is deprived of anything that objectively exists. The product isn’t worthless because of my actions, the product is precisely as useful as it was before my actions.

The market value may have declined because of my actions, but the market value of buggy whips declined because of the actions of Henry Ford. Do you therefore conclude that Henry Ford was stealing buggy whips? After all, the semantics may be different but the final result is the same and that is all that matters according to you.

Right?

Bullshit. I have never made such an argument. Please stop putting words in my mouth so you can construct strawmen.

OK, let’s accept that for the sake of argument. So what? Are you now saying that anybody who “freeloads” is immoral? That you are immoral because you are not a paid member of these broads, and are thus freeloading?

And?

OK, let’s accept that for the sake of argument. So what? Are you contending that being cheap is immoral?

I have no idea what point you thin you are making here, but you are failing completely.