text:
January 13, 2005 · Lessig
Mr. Gates clarifies.
January 13, 2005 · Lessig
Mr. Gates clarifies.
95 comments ·
Leave a comment
Tagged: no tags
Categorized: good code
Well, I don't agree with everything he says, but at least it seems like he has a relatively thoughtful view about things, certainly relative to some of the things he is reported to have said in the past.
It really makes me feel like I would love to get stuck up a mountain with him for a few days just to drill into his opinions and correct those with which I disagree.
In particular, the issue around DRM, I don't agree with it for the simple reason that a piece of software or hardware that I own should do what I tell it to do. Any strong advocate of property rights should sympathise with this view. You own your property, it doesn't own you.
Raising the medical records issue is clever, since I think many advocates of freedom of information are often prone to self-contradiction when the issue of privacy comes up – personally I think David Brin's transparent society argument is a logically consistent way to reconcile the two issues.
Speaking to the issue of medical records – it is the responsibility of doctors not to inappropriately reveal medical information, it is not the responsibility of Microsoft to prevent doctors from revealing information in ways that might actually be appropriate (such as in revealing to a person's sexual partner that they may have been exposed to AIDS). Any doctor that was so-prevented might rightly be annoyed that Microsoft had taken upon itself act as policeman in this way.
I'm not certain that Gates clarified anything. If anything, I think I am even more confused by his answers in this interview. Ultimately I've left with the roughly the same opinion I had after the first interview: that he would like to divert attention away from copyright and patent reforms by trying to pretend that the reasons behind such movements are to eliminate incentives for scientists and artists to create. While there may be individuals who do have that opinion, it is clear that on the whole, that is _not_ the rationale behind widespread dissastisfaction with existing intellectual property laws.
I must say that I'm fairly impressed. His attempt to intermingle fundamental issues of privacy with issues about intellectual property was masterfully done, and I doubt that in an interview situation I would have been able to redirect the conversation back to its intended target.
I loved where he tried to claim that Free Software was more communist than China. At least that's how I read it. I'm sure tomorrow he'll claim that's not what he meant.
It is true that China's experiments in the free market have weakened big-C Communism. That may be all he was trying to say.
However, since many of those creative Indian and Chinese programmers have chosen to release their own work as open source, I don't see how that induces the rest of the world away from the free market. In fact, a free market encourages lower costs and better products. I don't see how open source violates free market laws.
The medical record thing was a bit of a misdirection (medical records are rarely movies or sound files) but from a techie's perspective I understand the headache of having special cases.
However, as for the rest, there was absolutely nothing to be surprised about. We simply jumped the gun and didn't give Bill the benefit of the doubt.
There are people like Stallman or pirates in the world who think software should be morally free. They don't understand the value of things protected by strong copyright.
Creative Commons *MUST* come out and declare, 100%, that they believe in strong copyright and that cc extends the power of copyright, and does not replace it.
The point of creative commons is not 'sticking it to the man', it's about enabling the creator. And in doing so accelerating the progress of mankind..
There are several main points where the interviewer could have pushed back more strongly:
1) What do you think about uses of DRM that restrict the rights of consumers much more than before. For example, recordings that I can't use in more than one device, in my house, my car, my personal recorder.
2) What do you think about uses of DRM and copyright policy that make it impossible to unlock cultural and economic value from assets that the original owners have abandoned.
3) What do you think about uses of DRM, copyright policy, and legal strategy that prevent artists from gaining the publicity and marketing benefits of internet distribution.
I'm left feeling more confused that before… I read the CNET interview, and unless Gates was drastically misquoted there, he still called me a communist (commonsist?). The "clarification" seems confused and disconnected; almost as if he was taken by surprise with that question… THAT is the part that's surprising to me; that the answer was handled so poorly.
Uh, what are you surprised about? Gates makes quite a few very excellent points. It's lawyers who should work for free, and not for obscenely large sums of money.
Great points? He makes great points like remarking about lawyers making obscene amounts of money on the blog of a legal academic who gives a lot away. I move that the last comment be stricken on grounds of relevance. Well, at least add my objection to the record.
This is the part where the sophistry gets a bit deep for me:
Gates: Take medical records: is it your position that rights management for medical records is evil?
Gizmodo: 'Evil' is maybe strong. Do you mean in the sense that medical records shouldn't have any rights management at all?
Gates: Right. We remind people that, like if there's a medical record that has somebody's AIDS status in it, we have software�which is identical software�that says, 'Hey, if you're trying to forward to someone,' that, 'No, this is restricted. You can't forward this to someone. They don't have the right to see this.' It's the notion of 'should there be confidential information?'
Gizmodo: I think that's a different question.
Gates: It's not different. It's identical technology. It's the same bits!
Gates seemed honest by putting it to a test of capitalism, not "compensation" — did capitalism motivate Turing, von Neumann, Einstein? No, they need to be compensated in order to live comfortably, but they certainly weren't strongarming people for profit at some big boring megacorp.
Indeed, Albert Einstein explained:
"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor�not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules."
"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."
Ralph Nader elaborated:
"Microsoft's agenda isn't innovation, it's imitation, as well as imposition of suffocating control over user choices and an ever-widening monopoly. [...] Companies spend an enormous amount of resources anticipating and responding to Microsoft's use of restrictive contracts, strategically shifting standards, manipulation of product compatibility, and other forms of monopolistic warfare."
"Even in the area of anticompetitive conduct, Microsoft is mainly an imitator."
Ex-Microsoftie Joel Spolsky confirms:
"Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features."
Ask yourself why Bill Gates has wealth on the order of the Walmart family, or why the immensely profitable desktop world has a tiny oligarchy of two. (Don't forget the MS Tax, or embracing and extending other people's good ideas.)
Yes, but Gates understands that some creators are going to pull a Einstein, Von Neuman, Turning whatever. Hopefully Lessig and everyone around here understands this as well.
The point of CC is to enable those individuals. It is NOT to shoot everyone else in the foot while doing so.
By increasing the strength of regular copyright and the value of intellectual property, you strengthen the power of GPL and CC.
The whole Free Culture is wrong. What we need is "Content From Creators However and Whenever They Want Us To Have At It Culture" – which is what CC and GPL is all about.
Sorry, Turing and von Neumann.
I need to use preview more.
Also, spme people have redirected their attacks to the man rather than the logic.
Saying Gates is wrong because Microsoft is a monopolist is not an example of clear thinking.
The medical records thing is absolute bull:
Once someone has seen the medical records, they can send it to anyone at all – by typing it in again.
The only way to 'solve' this kind of thing is multi-level military security : where you don't get to see the data at all, but only get to pass it around to processes with sufficient priveledge to operate on it.
Think of this as carrying round information in a safe, which some people- not you- have keys to. You can ask them to do stuff with it, but only what they are willing to.
This is very different than current DRM technologies – and it can never work for media as at some point you have to see or hear it for it to have value.
Repeat after me: If you can view it, you can copy it.
If he "takes no position" on DRM, why do MS published games on the XBox use it, and why isn't he campaigning against the DMCA?
Sigh. My overall take is that the noise of the general discussion on the topic makes actual signal very, very, hard to convey.
One flippant comment, and it's blogstorm-time (this applies to both sides).
Signal is made much harder by the fact that advances in information distribution seem to favor both the extremes, or maybe that it's not clear that reasonable-copyright-but-respecting-fair-use is as evidentally workable as either of the extremes.
"After a half century of monopoly protection granted artists in exchange for their creative work, the public will get its justly earned free access to an extraordinary range of both famous and forgotten creativity."
"Justly Earned?" Are you kidding me?
Lessig – creators will put their work in the public domain whether or not such community-has-rights-over-creator mentality exists.
All your blustering is not encouraging people to GPL or CC their stuff. It's only dissapointing them and weakening GPL and CC. Who's going to respect GPL and you don't even think we should respect the rights of the creator?
By saying things like 'justly earned' you are saying that the community has rights over the work of creators.
"You want me to GPL my stuff because you GPL'd yours? Who are you to talk? You're just the creator". That's the kind of philosophy you are encouraging.
This is complete garbage to us who create. You are not helping the cause of creative commons or GPL, which are really great ideas and are suffering because people like you are figureheads.
CC and GPL is about providing your work under a different type of copyright in the hope of recieving benefits not possible with a more propietary copryright.
This flexibility empowers the creator to benefit in ways that are interesting to them. In doing so, empowering the creator, you empower the fountainhead of progress.
Helping the community is interesting to many creators. But sometimes, the creator knows a heckuva lot more about creating than you do, and knows that benefiting financially from the strong copyright of their work makes complete sense.
In fact, it empowers them to write software that they can GPL or content they can CC.
"Justly Earned" – no wonder people are throwing around terms like 'communism'.
I believe in property, and I believe in contracts. Do you?
The gov't says to a creator at the time of his creativity: "We, the people, will give you a 50 year monopoly over any creativity you produce. We will protect it, we will enforce contracts with respect to it, we will lock people up in jail who violate it. In exchange, at the end of 50 years, it will enter the public domain, so anyone can use it, free of legal obligation. We will call this monopoly we give you "property" and allow you to alienate it as you wish (subject to blah blah blah). The only requirement is that you give up exclusive control after 50 years."
The creator creates. The public performs its promise of protection. 50 years is up. In my view — because I believe in property, both private and the public's, and because I believe in contracts, both between individuals and between individuals and the state — when the time is up, the public's right to free access has been "justly earned." "Earned" — I don't say they were entitled at the start. And "justly earned" because, imho, a 50 year monopoly is a pretty good price. As Justice Breyer pointed out in Eldred, it is close to 99% of the value of a perpetual term.
Some people say the state doesn't do enough to protect IP, so extensions are justified because of the state's failure to protect enough. That's understandable, though I don't believe it's true. But beyond that sort of argument, I don't understand the quibble about "justly earned" — unless one thinks property is meaningless and contracts ought to be ignored. I know there those people out there. But I don't see how I am the "communist" for disagreeing with them.
Is it insulting to say, once the public has paid its price, it has justly earned its reward? I don't see the insult. My dad built bridges for the state. He was proud of those bridges. The architect was proud of the design. Both the architect and the people who built the bridge put everything they had into building what they built. They should be respected and honored for what they did. But I wouldn't respect or honor them if they said "I promised to do this for $1,000,000, but you have to pay me $2,000,000." Or if they said, "I know I promised to deliver this bridge to you after you paid me for it, but I've decided to set up a toll booth and collect money whenever anyone wants to use it." Such statements are not deserving of respect. And when backed up with the force of law through the power of lobbies, they deserve to be called what they are: extortion.
I originally put this on my blog,but I repeat it here:
I still think Bill do not see the basic issue though. He still defends IP like it is a black and white issue. For me IP issues are like taxes. I think everyone agree that taxes are a good thing, but that doesn't mean that having everyone paying 100% tax would be the best thing. People from different sides of the political spectrum have different ideas on what the sweet spot for taxes are, but the number who go for 0% or 100% is marginal. Bill's argument seems to be that since 20% tax is working out so well we should jump much closer to 100% as that naturally would work out 5 times better.
So to keep with the analogy, I think most in our camp, the IP sceptics, think that we have slided towards 50% in regards to IP, especially due to rampant software patenting, and need to get back to 20% for society to work as well as possible, while Bill and his buddies wants to go to 80% or higher.
Another important item is that all things are not the same. I know how patents work out in the software world, and see that they are currently causing more harm than good. That doesn't mean the patent system is broken for the medical research sector for instance, could very well be that it is, but I don't know the sector well enough to say. IP maximalists tend to try to mush everything together in order to be able to say that since patents work well for 'this' it of course works equally well for 'that'.
See I have to agree with BG. He's providing the tool. DRM. It's what's currently available out there. If the end-user uses to encode medical records. Fine. If the end-user uses it to encode music/video/text? Fine. That's THEIR choice.
Don't blame him for doing what that particular enduser wants.
I have no problem with DRM in and of itself, however, I do have problems with how it is implemented. I don't like 80 MPH in a parking lot, but I do have issue with the size of the speed bumps and the tire popping spikes that management current has in place.
What Gates doesn't get is there are more forms of capital than money. There's also (at least) social capital & intellectual capital, both of which can be used to compensate a creator for his creativity. The result is called a Gift Economy, such as we see in the Open Source community. Creators contribute to a common pool and get back social status & increased innovation for the community as a whole.
There was a study of economic data across all of Europe, which proved a direct, causal relationship between connectivity of an organization & its increase in innovation & productivity. The more you share, the more you stimulate the economy. Open Source is compatible with Capitalism. Ultimately I think we'll come to recognize that we need to harness its power if we want to increase our productivity.
Here's a big problem, at least from the 'code' side:
Gates: "…if there's a medical record that has somebody's AIDS status in it, we have software�which is identical software…"
WHY is this identical software? Gates leans on the point that all he's trying to 'protect' are 'bits' – not any particular kind of content or media – and he hides behind that for the entire interview. Why protect all content, all media, all bits in the exact same way? There are different contexts in which a 50-year old song by a dead artist, or Alice In Wonderland, and my personal medical records should be protected – they're not similar at all and should not receive the same treatment. The law is now determining what should & should not be protected – but Microsoft has the ability to choose how to implement the code that 'protects' content, and design a better system that is more than an on/off switch.
it seems to me from the structure of his reaction and his delivery that he is regurgitating something which his pr experts cursorally briefed him on before appearing.
In short: i don't believe a word of his in that interview
Clarification, was it? Looked more like obfuscation to me. Gates says one thing in the Cnet interview – which seemed to be intended for IT business types; and says another thing to . . . Gizmodo, for god's sake. This latter choice was clearly intended for the blogger audience, and so were his largely non-sensical comments there. He wasn't making sense because he wasn't saying anything.
One problem is that Gates (well, Microsoft, but I'm sure Gates signed off on it) has advertised DRM as a way to protect copyrighted works. However, I don't think the company has advertised DRM to comply with HIPA.
I'm all for any incentive for creation that a free market can provide. But fifty years of an unearned monopoly, conferred by the state, is not a free market incentive. It is a privilege. Ceasing to grant monopolies is not "communism," except to those who confuse the free market with whatever helps big business.
A patent or copyright is a decree by the state that I may not configure letters and numbers, bytes of data, or natural elements in a certain pattern (not even using my own property), because it has granted somebody else a right to configure those things in that pattern.
Genuine (i.e., tangible) property is rooted in the finitude of physical reality. A piece of ground or a movable object can only be possessed an used by one person at a time; therefore he attempts to maintain himself in possession by resisting any invasion, and if necessary calls on his neighbors to defend him against any attempted dispossession.
Intellectual (i.e., fake) property, on the other hand, requires an invasion of somebody else's property to stop him from doing what he wants with what rightfully belongs to him.
Can't you guys argue about the same thing?
Some of you are arguing about patents, and some are talking about copyrights. Processes (and algorithms, I suppose) are patentable, but the patent expires in 17 years. For better or worse, that's the law. Nobody can copy that process (or algorithm) for 17 years.
Copyrights are a particular expression of an idea or process (OK, so I'm not a lawyer and I don't really know exactly what I'm talking about). So a musical song or artwork is copyrighted but not patented. That particular expression is protected for whatever (50 years, 95 years, who really knows anymore).
Open source development has little to do with copyrights unless you're copying code (or "look and feel" which I guess is copyrighted) from somebody else who hasn't released it as GPL or CC or whatever. Now if you copy a patented algorithm, that's a problem, but only for 17 years.
Bill Gates is talking about DRM of copyrighted works, and he's completely ignoring software patents, which is what Open Source development is concerned about. BG has to work with the record companies, movie studios and whoever else so he has to support DRM.
Don't expect him to ever talk about software patents because he has to protect his patent portfolio so he can cross license with others who have bigger portfolios (like IBM) or critical partners (like Intel). You have to have a big portfolio or you can't do software. It would be different if nobody had software patents. But if you write code for a living, you've got to have some protection.
Now whether Open Source supports DRM is up to each program, OS, Distribution, etc. Linus Torvalds says he has nothing against supporting DRM. So are you gonna roast his cojones too?
The problem here is that Lessig is confusing the distributors with the creators.
He sees a bunch of fat cat managers and lawyers who didn't write any music or software and who couldn't care less about the world they live in lobbying Washington and profiting off of the result.
This angers him greatly so he starts to work on all these rationalizations about the rights of the community and that because this situation is seemingly so unfair, anything they say can not be right. And being the eloquent writer and very clever man that he is, his arguments come out sounding as they always do – brilliant.
Unfortunately while he's busy hitting us all over the head with the cudgel of his eloquent pen, he's completely missing the real war here.
The real war has nothing to do with Copyright. CC and GPL is not about rolling back laws about content that really is a complete red herring. I mean, really – does anyone really care if this music is released into the public domain? If Disney extended their copyrights until Armageddon, the impact on our lives would be zero.
CC and GPL is about empowering the creator against the second hander. It is about giving them the upper hand over the managers and lawyers who believe that might makes right and employ that rule day and day out.
CC and GPL is about getting rid of the middle man and the distributors who believe that they own the channel and should be the final arbiters of what is good and what is not.
It's about moving society towards a meritocracy.
However, in order to do this we must all spend all our energy and philosophies to empowering those individuals who create. The women and men that come up with the architectures and write the software or compose the music.
They need to become the decision makers of tomorrow, we need to recognize that, and we need to restructure our laws so that the power rests in their hands.
Weakening copyright will not do that in any way.
Back to the privacy diversion Gates used. This line of argument needs to be countered, and forcefully, whenever it is raised by the pro-DRM crowd.
I once had a debate with a music industry executive in an international standards meeting where he essentially claimed that all digitzed copyrighted material can and should be protected by DRM backed up by anti-circumvention laws.
"All?" I responded, "What about a Haiku? It's poetry, copyrightable, and utterly unprotectible by DRM or anti-circumvention law."
His response was "That's a reduction to absurdity" [reductio ad absurdum].
It was. And so is any argument that DRM benefits privacy in a constructive way. What do we want to keep private?
Credit Score – 3 digits.
Bank Balance – 1 to 8 digits
AIDS test result? – One bit.
I'm sure you can think of dozens of others.
Justifying DRM by arguing that it can protect ONE BIT is idiocy.
In my view DRM is a huge threat to privacy because it obscures the operation and communications of my computer within the walls of my own home, where I have the greatest expectation of privacy of all.
After I have read those interview one interesting analogy – inspired by Gate's "speed bumps" – came to my mind.
Let's take river.
People here – Creative Commonists (damm I love how it sounds – argue that river must flow with no intervention.
Gates says that hydro-electro-station is good since it brings light to our homes. And he wants to build more of this "speed bumps" which will produce more energy. In the end – more profit for him.
This analogy is justified in every sence. Ultimate goal of CCs is to create and help grow ecology or eco-system. While Gates – just like any businessman – wants to profit from this eco system. Our goal is to help river grow, while his goal is to build more this stations.
We want to argue whole ecological effect, while Gates beats us with "But you want the energy?"
In USSR, hydro-electro-stations were built in quantities. Regardless of anything. Ecology of whole country regions was irrevertably destroyed.
Gates wants speed bumps – he doesn't care about consequences. But we do – we do care about the balance and the eco system of software.
P.S. I do not have any links with environmentalists at moment, but I can advise anyone who has friends to talk with them. I have glimpsed on couple occasions ecology studies – they are of interest to anyone. I know that ecology took very much from sociology. they study system as a whole – all consequnces included. I beleive that Creative Commonits can derive some arguments from them both.
There are a couple of points that seem to not be getting hit squarely:
– Bill made a grossly bad argument by analogy with medical records. There is a difference between idea and expression, and medical records are clearly not the latter. Control of medical records isn't enforced by copyright at all – it's enforced by lots of other laws and by organizational policy and procedure. The fact that individual medical documents might be subject to copyright (arguable in itself, depending on the document) misses the point.
– The fact that you can use the same protection to prevent medical information and music from being distributed against the supplier's will is another false analogy. After all, that's like saying that, because both can be encoded into bit streams and stored on a hard drive, they must be the same thing from a legal standpoint
– Even if Bill is just saying that he has made the technology available, without making a value judgment about it, he is still on the hook: our society holds accountable those who enable wrongdoing – witness the getaway driver, for example.
There are serious consequences to encrypting content – this stuff could be lost and gone forever if the rights granter goes out of business without providing the key. DRM leads to a fundamental shift from "everything will become public someday, with few exceptions" to "everything will remain private/protected forever, with few exceptions". It changes the default. By changing the default, it dramatically alters the balance that led to our current compensation system, by making the societal interest smaller and less likely to ever come to fruition.
This is why DRM is dangerous, and refusing to acknowledge that is morally irresponsible on the part of Gates.
Regarding Microsoft enabling DRM in Windows
Using your anology of a getaway driver abetting a crime, Bill Gates is just the car salesman or the mechanic for the car. He didn't commit a crime. He IS enabling DRM, but he's not making anybody use it — not yet, anyway.
Regarding consequences to encrypting content "There are serious consequences to encrypting content – this stuff could be lost and gone forever if the rights granter goes out of business without providing the key. "
You might as well outlaw cars because they can kill somebody. DRM is a tool just like a car. Use it or not at your own free will. Your complaint isn't with Microsoft or Windows or Apple or Unix or SCO or Sun. Your complaint is with Time Warner, EMI, Universal, Hollywood studios, etc. In your analogy above, they are committing the crime (by protecting their content), Microsoft just sold them the car. Next time you do something useful, don't get too pissed off if somebody copies it without paying you or even giving you credit.
Any tool or mode of transportation is dangerous if misused. Those who think DRM is dangerous ought not to drive a car, ride a bus/train/plane, use any electricity or ever use a tool. And stop typing on your computer, you might get tendonitis or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Ralph Nader successfully fought against car makers who built UNSAFE cars. Where carmakers optimized the car to bring in profit, not transport people safely.
Same with DRM. There are sane forms of DRM. However, Gates wants the profits from the type which erodes your control — you have to be authorized to do what you want.
As to the argument that consumers don't have to buy it, the "consumers" are making their voices heard by pushing back hard. Just as Bill Gates pushes back hard when a company doesn't do what he wants.
DRM Is Fundamentally Good For Creators
The simple point of all this is: we all need to learn to trust creators. Give them options, clear enforceable options such as GPL and CreativeCommons and DRM and let them decide on how to proceed.
Creators who really create will chose wisely. They will know when they need to produce something that will bring them financial security and they will know when they need to produce something that will bring them legacy.
They will understand that if they DRM or Copyright something it's unlikely going to be a platform for future generations, but if they GPL something or CC something in a way that makes it super popular that they will not only have a lasting and positive impact on the world but also get around the monopolies and distributors that are trying to choke the channels so only their content gets through.
They will know that their reputation will increase and that they will find ways to monetize and derive real lasting satisfaction from what they have produced.
The War is Not With the Creators
The war is not with the creators. It's with the lawyers, the middle managers, the distributors, the middle men – the second handers. It's with those who do not create but have ambition and a desire to twist the world to their convenience. It is with those who think money is not about security but about showing up their neighbours on who has the best car or the biggest house. It is with those who think money is about power and might and who think it is might that makes right.
This is who the war is with. It's not with people who create and want to control how their creations are used. It is not with those who want their creations to have lasting value, like a monopoly greater than 50 years, or has the value to force anyone who wants to use it to release anything they do into the public domain.
Who Am I?
Who am I? I am someone who creates. I'd love to use DRM for things that I create. I also release into the GPL, I love to blog and I update wikis whenever I think I have something important to contribute. This is who you are fighting, Lessig.
Stop it. Leave us alone and redirect your very valuable energies to improving concepts like GPL and CC so that you are helping the creators against the real targets: the second handers.
Also, if you need some help integrating typekey, send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com.
The spam really really detracts from the flaming
I don't get it. How does anything Prof. Lessig has said lead you (blaze) to believe that he is trying to restrict the rights of creators?
Lessig – creators will put their work in the public domain whether or not such community-has-rights-over-creator mentality exists.
Yeah, so? First off, the creator has had rights-over-community for 50 years; if he or she is even still alive at this point (what're the odds?) you have to admit they've had ample time to extract most of the monetary value from their creation. Don't you think that at some point the society has "paid its debt" to the creator, and is now entitled to some benefit for having granted the monopoly by getting access to the creation? What's it mean to be part of a society; you only take but never give? And regardless of that aspect, this means we should give a free pass to those same "second-handers" you mention? You can't have it both ways; if you enable individual creators to have perpetual copyright on their creations, you do the same for greedy opportunists who are just out to make a buck and have the financial backing to buy out (or dupe) the true creators. We (apparently) can't outlaw corporations or legislate them to act responsibly; so the only course open to us is to encourage the creators of the first instance to sign up to "freer" (to use Stallman's formulation) terms before the corporate shills can get to them. I don't believe for a moment that creators are going to give up megabux contracts with recording labels just to keep the rights to their songs. They expect the record labels to take care of that; all they want to see is their royalty checks being deposited every quarter (or whatever). You may be a paragon of virtue and release all your stuff under a CC license, but I doubt I'll hear it on the radio unless you sign with a recording label. And they're not going to do that unless you sign them the rights to your songs.
All your blustering is not encouraging people to GPL or CC their stuff. It's only dissapointing them and weakening GPL and CC. Who's going to respect GPL and you don't even think we should respect the rights of the creator?
Where'd you get this idea? I've never seen Prof. Lessig say that he doesn't respect the rights of creators; in fact he's repeatedly said just the opposite.
The real war has nothing to do with Copyright. CC and GPL is not about rolling back laws about content that really is a complete red herring.
Your statement is also a complete red herring- attempting to manufacture controversy where none exists. Where has Prof. Lessig ever stated that CC and GPL are about rolling back copyright? Yet the way you attribute his position, we are led to believe that he does in fact expect CC to replace traditional copyright protections. Untrue!
So I'm confused, not by Bill Gates' oh-so-convenient "I just build the bomb, I don't drop it" rhetoric, but by your complete lack of understanding of Prof. Lessig's positions and utter failure to appreciate his efforts to accomplish exactly the goals you seek- protection of the rights of the truely creative, over those of the parasitical.
LL and RSM's statements that society "earns" or is "entitled" to rights for creative works strike me as unhelpful. Still, it is true that without active enforcement of IP laws, creators would receive little in return for what they do. So in that sense, the state does provide a crucial service to the creator and is thus justified in sharing in the proceeds or in at least setting a few conditions. It may well be fair trade, but it is certainly not society's right or an entitlement to do so.
Stepping back for a moment: With intellectual property, there is a vast gulf between what is morally right: creators should own what they create, and what is practical: information and ideas are readily copied and displayed, so artifical barriers must be erected and inforced in order to secure compensation for creators. With such disparity between right and reality, of course we end up with a series of imperfect compromises — but they are far preferable to either extreme. The core question then simply becomes: are current and proposed barriers reasonable or absurd? DRM, Copyrights, and Patents all have their problems.
These days, Microsoft and Disney are pushing the Copyright compromise toward one extreme and attacking those of us who disagree as communists. That's mostly just marketing PR, and we've made it easy for them to do that by endorsing extreme views, such as: that everyone should have a right to copy, display, or perform anything, without limitation. Rubbish! I say that it is high time the raging moderates in our community have their voices heard too.
In truth, the status quo isn't so bad, but our IP laws do very much need to be updated for the information age. But to the extent that the would-be IP "Robber Barons" are trying and succeeding in "reforming" the system to their advantage, they absolutely do need to be actively and effectively opposed. However, my view is that such opposition needs to come from a pragmatic, not an ideological base. This isn't the Capitalists versus the Commies — it's Special Interests versus the Rest of Us. Excessive IP protections are just as bad for creators, for business, and for society as no IP protections at all — but that essential counterpoint isn't in the news, isn't on TV, and most importantly, isn't being whispered repeatedly through the halls of Congress. Instead, we're playing right into their hands … and that is what frustrates me most.
So I'm confused, not by Bill Gates' oh-so-convenient "I just build the bomb, I don't drop it" rhetoric, but by your complete lack of understanding of Prof. Lessig's positions and utter failure to appreciate his efforts to accomplish exactly the goals you seek- protection of the rights of the truely creative, over those of the parasitical.
Yes, I've been having that problem with Blaze's posts as well. If anyone is confusing creators with distributors, it's Blaze, not Lessig. "Weakening copyright" by reducing over-extended copyright terms will not affect the amount of work that was produced 70 years ago…
If DRM is a getaway vehicle, Gates is the driver…
Warren DeLano wrote:
LL and RSM's statements that society "earns" or is "entitled" to rights for creative works strike me as unhelpful.
It may well be fair trade, but it is certainly not society's right or an entitlement to do so.
What is creator without society? Means to express creativity – where they come from?
You want theater where there are only artists, who play for each other and no public?
It is hard to see long-term effects of copyright on public.
But hell it is easy to measure "last quater revenue lost to piracy".
Folks, we pay taxes on the profit from our monopoly. On the very few times the court actually bothers to enforce copyright law, they've already been well paid!
And by extending the copyright on content, we extend its value. If a creator writes a book and sells it, it's no longer a 50 year monopoly she's selling, but a 80 year monopoly.
Thus the work the writer does is more valued by society and the power is shifted in her direction.
By valuing our greatest resources, those who create, we encourage greatly the fountainhead of progress.
But anyways, CC is supposed to be an extension of the power of Copyright by making it more flexible and enabling creators to subvert the corporate controllers of the media.
Why is lessig talking about reducing the power of copyright?
It makes absolutely no sense.
Warren, you had me up to a point. Excessive IP protection is not a problem at all.
The problem is complicated laws which put the power in the hands of Lawyers. Lawyers do not invent, they prosecute.
We do not need to fear excessive IP protection. CC and GPL will easily subvert the control of special interests, monopolies and corporations if properly supported and improved.
This means we need to aggressively support CC and GPL, though. And there is a lot of work to be done there which I am afraid is not being done:
For example, when Microsoft says that the government should not be GPLing, we need to come down on them like a tonne of bricks.
Unfortunately, our credibility in doing so has been terribly weakened because the figuredheads of CC will not come out and openly declare that they support the creator.
So I take it the interviewer was not bright enough to say:
"Mr. Gates, have you noticed that we do not live in China and that different information needs to be handled differently depending on its function?"
All his shucking and jiving about what China was like in the 50s or how he is only supplying a method for handling bits without any regard for how that method might lead to a specific end result is nausiating.
"Yes, Dr. Oppenheimer.. I understand we are supposed to build a device that creates a nuclear explosion… and I understand that we arent supposed to consider how it might be used or what impact it may have on humanity." After all particles are just particles the way bits are just bits.
I guess we can all summon-up emotionally charged red herrings from the 40s and 50s if we want to dodge the actual issues at hand….
"LL and RSM's statements that society "earns" or is "entitled" to rights for creative works strike me as unhelpful. [...] However, my view is that such opposition needs to come from a pragmatic, not an ideological base. This isn't the Capitalists versus the Commies"
Well, to be precise, it's the pseudo-capitalists vs. America. People like Gates never believe in free markets — they plead for state-sanctioned monopoly. Because they see that free market discipline would destroy them.
Frankly, get these companies together and they'll put welfare mothers to shame, in how much they beg OUR government for welfare and benefits. Is that free market capitalism? No. Is anyone challenging Bill Gates on that? No.
I suspect that blaze is engaging in a purely economic analysis. All the talk is about "value" in monetary terms; there is no mention of the cultural benefits of having creative works available to the public, which is one of the main goals of the GPL and CC ideas: protecting the creation from unauthorized exploitation while still making it available for all.
And then we have this constant refrain:
Why is lessig talking about reducing the power of copyright?
Hel-lo, he's not, never has, where are you getting this from, blaze?
Lessig wrote:
"Governments should end this game by tinkering with copyright terms for future works .. they should at least limit .. by restricting extensions"
My analysis is based on the idea that we should give power to the creator, trust the (peaceful) creator (the real creator, not just the managers and lawyers) to do the right thing, and all will be well.
The very act of real creative, peaceful creation is one that requires a world view which is positive in all aspects. People who really create are almost always people who wish to bring good into the world.
Limiting copyright is not trusting the creator. It's watering down the power of their ownership over their creation.
Well then I have to say I simply disagree with blaze. Prof. Lessig is not advocating limiting copyright or watering down ownership. He is advocating alternative licensing schemes that allow fair use without having to have a copyright lawyer on retainer to protect you from differing interpretations of what constitutes "fair use". Perhaps I've stated his position badly but that's how I see it.
What's next?
Rob, did you visit the link I posted?
Lessig wrote:
"Governments should end this game by tinkering with copyright terms for future works .. they should at least limit .. by restricting extensions"
To blaze,
The difference between you and Professor Lessig
is that you have no regard for the freedoms of
speech and press. Professor Lessig is very concerned
with the very long copyright term because it greatly
constrains the people's freedom in using the knowledge
on which the society is built. When you said that
we should give power to the creators, you also imply
that we should allow them to constrain our freedoms
of speech and press. This is why copyright term has
a limitation.
It seems that you believe in the myth that the creators
are truly creators that create something out of nothing.
Therefore, you want us to bow to them and believe in them
that they will be kind to us. Oh please. That is the
myth that the authors and artists love to perpetuate.
In reality, they are nothing like creator. They copy
many different elements from the public domain and
even from the copyright works to form their new works.
Because they copy the portions from other works, it
is only equitable that they should allow other people
copy from their works. But, they predictably are selfish
and don't want to let others use their works without
being paid or getting permission. This has nothing to
do with the middlemen that you put all blames on.
Society can't allow this to go unchecked. Therefore,
society imposes the limitation on copyright. Apparently,
you want the society to be lax and remove limitation on
copyright so that you can have perpetual copyright,
absolutely with no regard for the freedoms of
communication, speech, press, and knowledge.
That's shame.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.
No, I said we should trust creators to do what is right.
By weakening copyright and the power of creators we will
simply constrain progress, we will not improve our freedoms.
By trusting creators and placing greater power in their hands (rather than lawyers, distributors, publishers, editors, middle men, etc) I believe you'll find that they'll have more security in our society and more time to publish GPL / CC / whatever.
The problem is that creators right now have to kow-tow to the second hander. They have to pay various dues which have absolutely nothing to do with creation. This is because we, as a society, do not value them as highly as they should be valued.
One idea that Lessig might want to propose: perhaps what we need is something called "Strong Copyright". If it is published in an appropiate form (like always password protected, for example) than the rights of the creator should be extended to infinity / fair use denied / etc.
But maybe this is just a variant of fair use law.
It seems that you believe in the myth that the creators
are truly creators that create something out of nothing.
Therefore, you want us to bow to them and believe in them
that they will be kind to us
Yes, I do. It's a point of philosophy.
If Lessig does not support this philosophy, then I believe people will simply side more and more against Free Culture as 'communistic' or 'socialistic' or whatever.
And I certainly will not blame them.
The enemy here folks, is not the creator.
It's the middle-man – the lawyer, the distributor that grips and twists the channels to their selfish desires for profit.
It's the middle man, the middle manager, the person who steals the work of another and passes it off as his own.
Unfairness in society is caused by these people – the Sony, the RIAA, the so called 'might makes right' .. the corporate controlled media.
These are the people we are all battling against. We have to stay united against them, and attacking creators is a division that weakens us all.
Someone created computer viruses… they did not naturally evolve and they serve no "legitimate" purpose. People create all kinds of things. The person who creates a song and the person who creates a computer code specifically designed to harm others can not be classed together so easilly under a single banner as "creators."
Also, middlemen are in fact creators. Someone created copyright law, it is no less complicated and no less important than the things that the copyrights protect. To exclude all lawyers and all middlemen from the same definition of creator is disingenuous at best.
The simple fact is that humanity has never managed to deal with the problems associated with ownership. Ownership can not be absolute contrary to what many believe… just as "creation" can not be absolute.
I assert that in the history of mankind not a single thing has ever been created in a singular sense. All things are derivitive. Sure, someone created the lightbulb… but only after seeing fire, glass, candles and all the other elements that lead to the "creation" of a lightbulb.
The problem is that the more stringent you make the control over innovation the harder it becomes to use past innovations as fuel for new ones.
True, if someone made a candle they should have been able to copyright the process and glean the rewards of their efforts. However, imagine a world where that person was able to copyright "flame" "wax" "light" and "portability" rather than just the process used to make a candle. Imagine a world where people had copyrights that never expired so that the maker of the 1st lightbulb remained the only person capable of licensing production of light bulbs and "light bulb-like devices."
Nobody sane is arguing that a candlemaker should not derive value from his efforts… we are seeking to make sure others can eventually make candles as well, that anyone can use the ideas of the candlemaker to innovate… be it by making fuses for dynamite or wax fangs for halloween costumes.
In Gates' point of view there would be MScandle 1.0, anyone who wanted light would need to get his permission for it and that situation would exist in perpetuity. Any less than that would be "communist."
If you can name me one thing that Microsoft created wholly without any use of derivitive knowledge ill support their complete and total ownership of that idea or item in the most absolute sense. As to everything else, just as it is not wholly created by any "creator" it cant be wholly owned by any "owner."
Middle men are not creators. They are self important individuals (or groups of individuals) who need to be creatively destroyed / replaced by search engines and trust networks, such as blogs. This should already be obvious.
It is the evolution of ideas that measures merit, the march of time – and always has been. It's the free market of ideas. Not so called experts who think they can predict the future.
Something is not going to change the world because Sony wants it to be. It's going to change the world because it changes the world.
And obviously no man is an island. I am not saying that. To pretend that I am saying that is a straw man attack.
GPL and CC are dealing with Microsoft far more effectively than any attack on Copyright ever will. The more we improve the power of GPL and CC the more Microsoft will have to truly 'innovate' and 'create' in order to stay alive.
Weakening copyright will not bring Microsoft down. GPL will. GPL relies on strong copyright, it relies on the ability for people who create software to enforce other software to be open sourced.
Strengthen GPL. Do *NOT* weaken Copyright. It will only shift power away from those who create.
Just because Disney no longer innovates doesn't mean the extension in Copyright was wrong. It's like saying just because a murderer thinks rape is wrong, we should get rid of the rape laws.
The focus should soley be in creating NEW FORMS of copyright that creators can use to subvert the monopolies and corporate control of media. Anything that weakens their position of strength should be avoided at all cost.
I really don't understand what you're saying, Blaze. The endless repetitions fail to sink in. Can Lawrence Lessig maybe write a new blog entry saying that Blaze thinks we should agree that creator rights and the GPL should be strengthened?
Putting those words in a different place might help that sink in better. Because I really don't know that BLAZE THINKS WE SHOULD AGREE THAT CREATOR RIGHTS AND THE GPL SHOULD BE STRENGTHENED.
Now ontopic, did anyone know that Blaze thinks we should agree that creator rights and the GPL should be strengthened?
The focus should soley be in creating NEW FORMS of copyright that creators can use to subvert the monopolies and corporate control of media.
blaze, is that not what Creative Commons is about? And does not Prof. Lessig stand foresquare behind that concept? Your continuous attempts to paint him as somehow being against CC and the GPL are misguided (charitably). I read the Wired article you linked to (as did we all at some point, I'm sure) and nowhere does Prof. Lessig maintain that we need to safeguard big corporations or oppose the GPL. I just don't get what you're so worked up about with regards to Prof. Lessig. From all I've seen, he's on your side! He agrees with you!
Anything that weakens their position of strength should be avoided at all cost.
Whose "position of strength" are you referring to? The 'position of strength" of the monopolies and corporate-controlled media, who are using copyright extensions to squash any attempts at allowing fair use of their properties?
You seem to equate restricting the duration of copyright protection with "weakening" it. I have to say once again, I disagree with your analysis. While its duration runs, copyright protection will be as stringently applied as it ever has. The issue is the length of time such protection is to be granted; corporate entities want to have ownership in perpetuity (via the Constitutional fig-leaf of endlessly-extensible "limited times"). Are you seriously advocating that their wish be granted?
The problem is that creators right now have to kow-tow to the second hander. They have to pay various dues which have absolutely nothing to do with creation. This is because we, as a society, do not value them as highly as they should be valued.
No, it's because corporate entities have been allowed to monopolize the means of distribution. If you want your song promoted and released worldwide, you have to sign over your rights to the song to a big record label. Oh sure, the Internet is another possible channel now; but only a (small?) percentage of the total audience use it even now, and artists are reluctant to go it alone and handle distribution themselves rather than leaving it all to the big labels (who offer them fat checks up front and like Don Corleone say "I take care of everything"). How many artists are today pulling down good money from doing distribution themselves? I bet it's a handful, almost negligible in comparison to the traditional label-driven industry.
So we're a long way from being able to have the creator-owned paradise you envision. First we have to get corporate media out of the perpetual ownership business. Prof. Lessig is NOT suggesting we abolish copyright. His simple idea is to restrict the duration of copyright to a reasonable time. What could be wrong with that? Corporations still get to own and extort whatever profits they want for the time allotted (so do go-it-alone creators); and I doubt we'll stop buying music or going to the movies just because we can get them for free after 50 years or so. After that, scholars and artists get free access to the works so they can make compilations or remakes or whatever they desire.
It appears you've gotten some bad information from somewhere and it's confused you.
I repeat on blogs because people rarely take the time to read the whole thread.
When this sort of things changes, I'll probably get less repetitive.
Rob, I'd repeat what I've said many times before (that yes, CC is all about subverting corporate controlled media and yes, Lessig is behind that) but I think people are getting tired of reading the same thing over and over again.
Lessig is right about CC. He's right about GPL. These are fundamentally important extensions of copyright. By touting them, he's making copyright much much more flexible and power and therefore the power of the creatore much more powerful.
So why is he shooting himself in the foot by attacking copyright itself?
Anyhow.. the lynch mob is getting restless so I should probably shut up about now before the flames being.
So why is he shooting himself in the foot by attacking copyright itself?
He's not, in either sense (shooting or attacking). That's (one reason) why the mob is getting restless with you.
I say again, what's next? (West Wing reference for those of you in the dark)
To blaze,
As what other said, I think that you have the wrong
information about Professor Lessig's position on
copyright. Unlike you, he is concerned with both
sides of the balance: authors and users. If more
power is given to one side of the balance, the other
side of balance will have less power. This is why
DRM is not well received by the users because it
gives the authors and artists too much power over
the uses of their works to the point that the users
could not use their works in any meaningful ways.
You have strange notion of communism. Just because
a person wants to moderate the power of copyright does
not mean that he is communist for he does not seek
to abolish the ownership in the works. Professor
Lessig made a very strong statement about his belief
in property rights. It is possible you have the wrong
information about him.
I don't agree with your position about the problems
caused by the middlemen. It is still the responsibility
of the authors and artists. If they mismange their
property rights as given by copyright or if they are
careless about their property rights or if they are
just plainly stupid in using the property rights, that
is their responsibility. Blaming the middlemen for
all the evils that befall on the world is like blaming
the English language for all the vulgar words that
are spoken by the speakers. I bet that you do not know
that authors and artists can terminate their grants
to publishers or anyone or any entity during the
five-year period after 35 years.
You have wrong idea about GPL and CC. They do not
exist solely because of copyright but because of
contract law. These licenses are the agreements
between two parties and the agreements are governed
by the contract law. GPL goes beyond the scope of
copyright law by adding more conditions to it through
the contract.
Authors and artists have enormous power as given by
copyright. They can even expand the power through
contracts (just look at some licenses that restrict
fair use). You can even have infinite term of
protection through contracts. What more do you want?
I gather from your posts that you really want to
concentrate all power into the authors and artists
with no regard for the users. There is a word for
it. It is called "domineering". I do not need to
explain the consequences if the authors and artists
choose to become more domineering through DRM, longer
term, and other means. Professor Lessig thinks that
this is bad especially for longer duration and
apparently you think that this is good.
Your affirmative response to my statement about the
myth of creator shows how arrogant you are. It is
one of the reasons why I no longer hold authors and
artists in high regard.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.
I can't articulate my disagreement with your position more eloquently than others in this thread. I would suggest, respectably, that you are wearing blinders about the debate and that perhaps your own personal interests might be influencing your position. That's understandable, but please don't believe that those who disagree with you constitute a "lynch mob". Generally speaking, on this blog, nothing could be further from the truth.
Your argument that the distribution channel and the middle-men are the cause of the problem are very interesting, but you lose all credibility when you advocate perpetual copyright and total trust in creators.
If it was your goal to create a straw-giant (i.e. creators' rights) in this debate, I congratulate you. If not, we'll have a lot to talk about.
Yah, well, the march of time will reveal to us all who is right in the end, I guess.
Hey, can anybody help me out with this? I only need 3 more. The best offer to take is the Video Professer CD. I will paypal anybody 10 bucks who signs up for me
Yah, well, the march of time will reveal to us all who is right in the end, I guess.
Interesting comment….this IS the "march of time". Your comment seems to indicate that you're willing to relegate to others the future of society.
I'm not…and neither is Lessig, whose observations and proposals are constantly malformed by the people who have the most to lose.
Your comment seems to indicate that you're willing to relegate to others the future of society.
No, he just means he's agreeing to disagree.
Personally, I think creators can be overrated. Any moron can create, and many do. When guys like Shakespeare adapt and rewrite fairly recent plots, they're learning from building upon what others do. Learning from mistakes and seeing if they can improve it. To take away an artist/scientist's right do that is to be anti-creator. Because they depend on other people's creations in order to themselves create.
Uh huh.
Trust me, there are a lot of software programs I simply do not write and try to sell because someone can simply come along and rip off all my innovative ideas.
People complain about microsoft in the same breath as saying we need to loosen up copyright laws.
People – how do you think Microsoft got to where it is today? By ripping other people off!
Tighten up creator rights and you'll see more innovation, not less.
"Tighten up creator rights and you'll see more innovation, not less."
This is what you keep repeating endlessly, but you can't prove it. If you tried to prove it, this might have been a fruitful discussion, but you refuse to even try. No one minds you disagreeing, but you spam these forums with the same repeated point that you provide without evidence. Come up with a constructive idea on what you'll do to fix this problem you complain about, and someone might listen.
If your only argument is that you won't write innovative software without more rights, no one cares, keep your "innovations" to yourself. Stallman wants to loosen these rights, and he has a proven track record for innovative software.
You've got a point in there somewhere, but you've repeated yourself long enough that we would've seen it by now if you were honest. Maybe the other forum posters are partly to blame too for egging you on, but I'm too tired of this collosal spamming to care. I wanted to read fresh ideas, yours but others too, not the same rehashed one over and over and over.
Ok, well how about we carry this conversation over into the context of a new issue (whatever Lessig choses) and perhaps a better understanding by all (including myself) will come to light.
How about you admit that you've lost the debate?
At the very least, if you have a modicum of intelligence, you should agree to disagree at this point.
It's okay to be wrong. It's helpful to admit it. It's idiocy to repeat it.
I'm not sure it's an issue of being right or wrong.
I think it's more of an interesting discussion that we're all participating in and that we all happen to have strong views regarding.
And whatever the outcome, the debate is always healthy. Some interesting points have been made which have made me think more carefully about my position, however I have yet to see anything which makes me seriously reconsider. I'd like to think there are some people on this thread who feel the same way.
Trust me, there are a lot of software programs I simply do not write and try to sell because someone can simply come along and rip off all my innovative ideas.
Copyright protects implementations, not ideas. There is no software in existence that you cannot "rip off" the ideas of. The implementation, whether copyrighted or patented, is another matter.
So that's a bogus argument, and a suspect claim; "a lot of programs" is like "a lot of novels" or "a lot of albums" when people claim not to have written them.
People complain about microsoft in the same breath as saying we need to loosen up copyright laws.
Which people? URLs would be useful.
This is guilt by association, but Microsoft are the boogeyman for patents, not copyright. I thought you were talking about copyright.
It's the duration of copyright and the protection of "fair use" that are the usual concerns. Not "loosening up" copyright laws, or even returning them to what they were a generation ago (when Microsoft started).
People – how do you think Microsoft got to where it is today? By ripping other people off!
And yet Microsoft use the word "innovation" to describe FAT32, and Microsoft are regarded as great innovators by the IT media.
Tighten up creator rights and you'll see more innovation, not less.
So Microsoft got where they are by ripping off, yet we must now stop ripping off?
Let's think this through.
Microsoft have their illegal monopoly, which they protect with IP laws far stronger than when DOS was first released. So weak IP laws protected Microsoft before, and strong IP laws protect Microsoft now. New players in the market are therefore at a massive disadvantage to Microsoft.
This won't enable innovation (let alone "competition"), it will simply protect the encumbents against real innovators. Protecting "innovation" with ever-stronger IP laws will stifle innovation. Similar arguments can be made for fair use and music or documentaries (for example), and they will actually be about copyright rather than patents.
To blaze,
The ideas are always uncopyrightable, unpatentable,
and totally free since the beginning of this country.
(Only expressions of ideas are copyrightable and
implementation of ideas are patentable.) That has
not thwarted the innovation throughout the
If you are truly selfish about your own ideas,
there is a legal way to forbid people from
leaking your ideas to the public. It is called
contract to treat your ideas as trade secret. But,
no, it seems that greed is the guiding principle
for you and you want the U.S. Government to protect
your selfish motivations at the expense of the
people's freedoms of speech, press, communication,
and knowledge. It is no wonder you are not likable.
So are the authors and artists who are like you.
The problem with Microsoft is not how it does
with the copyright law. It gets more monopolistic
power from the contract including license that
the vendors and users have to follow. As I
said in my other post, contract is able to expand
the power as given by copyright to go beyond
the boundary of copyright. Microsoft does not
get any immediate benefit from the copyright term
extension. Only those copyright holders who own
copyrights in old works that are soon to expire get
longer duration of monopoly from the copyright
term extension, depriving the public of the total
freedom in using knowledge.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.
The problem with patents is not the protection of IP rights.
The problem with patents is that it throws tonnes of lawyers into the gears of progress, and they're really chewing up the works. Value and power is not being transferred to inventors, but rather patent attorneys.
It's kind of like patents are anti-creation, they're facilitating the careers of people who are slowly killing off all progress.
What we need, and what CC in some ways addresses, is an IP protection scheme which strongly transfers power, wealth and security to the creator without giving anything to the lawyers along the way.
Because truly, probably 99% of all revenue from licensing schemes do not get transfered to the original creators themselves – but rather to lawyers, middle men, distributors, marketers, etc. So we're not really creatind incentive for people to invent, but rather for people to litigate, manage, distribute, market, and administrate.
But don't worry, I think Steve Jobs will save us all
Apple Computer said Monday that it has sold more than 250 million songs through its iTunes Music Store as daily downloads reached an all-time high of 1.25 million songs. "When we launched the iTunes Music Store we were hoping to sell a million songs in the first six months–now we're selling over a million songs every day, and we've sold over a quarter billion songs in total," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. The company said that its iTunes Music Store, now available in 15 countries, accounts for 70 percent of the global music market.
Though Apple took 11 months to sell the first 50 million songs, the downloads picked up subsequently, hitting the 200 million mark by last December.
But don't worry, I think Steve Jobs will save us all
How? By selling DRM-crippled music that even if I can get it off my iPod onto my iBook I need to connect to the net to authenticate?
No thanks. I don't want to rent low-quality music with ridiculous restrictions on it that can change at any time (and have). I'm honest: I buy CDs instead. But I can see how treating paying customers like thieves could train them up to act like thieves.
Steve is making the same mistake Sony have just owned up to, and he's making it for the same reasons: he's a content provider (Pixar) as well as a technology manufacturer (Apple).
Read Corey Doctorow's:
To blaze,
Once again, you have made the lawyers and all
middlemen the scapegoat for all the problems
that you described. The reality is that the
source of problem rests in the authors, artists
and inventors themselves. Why do you think the
lawyers do the litigation and do most of the
legal works? Precisely because the authors
and artists want them to do the job. Do you
think that the authors and artists do nothing
when their copyrights are infringed? No, they
hire lawyers to sue the infringers. Do you think
that the authors and artists are altruistic that
they let anyone use their works? No, being driven
by greed, they hire lawyers to create complex
contracts to impose restrictions on the users
and middlemen. As a digression, the Creative
Commons licenses are drawn with the help of
You need to stop whining and need to be
proactive in asserting your property rights.
You already have enough property rights as given
by copyright law that last for a long, long, long
time. Contract law already exists in all 50 states.
Use the property rights wisely. If you are foolish
in managing the property rights, the blame rests on
your shoulder, not on the lawyers, middlemen, and
the rest of the world.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.
Two things, one about this thread and another about Itunes:
After re-reading the entire comment list (something I often do), I still fully disagree with Blaze's assertions. However, what strikes me as more abhorent are some of the comments by other posters claiming "victory" in the debate, or demanding Blaze end his part in the discussion.
Victory in a debate, contrary to popular myth, cant be "claimed" it can only be conceded. Let's not turn these blog comment threads into a webversion of CrossFire… and lets not shun those we disagree with… or we will soon be posting and reading only the comments of those we are already in agreement with.
The opportunity to convince Blaze or be convinced by him is of far greater value than the "claimed victory" on a thread where you feel your assertions have triumphed.
As to the more recent comments regarding ITunes, there are a few ways to look at Apple's success. One is to say that the system works and that Steve Jobs is a genius as it seems Blaze believes. The other is to see that people are in fact willing to pay for content if it is provided competently and legally even when there are free alternative methods of distribution that lack legality and consent of the content's owner.
What I believe we are headed for is scaled ownership. Just as a person can sell their house, or sell only an easement on their property, or rent their house…. so should and will be the way that intellectual property is handled.
One price for a song to be streamed a single time, another price to have limited ownership on a finite number of devices or finite number of copies, and another price to own it outright. In my estimation that eventual result is unavoidable. The questions remain in how we reach that result and how we can best make sure that owners, sellers, distributors, users an so on are all fully aware of who has which rights regarding a piece of content *without* each having to hire a bunch of lawyers to do title searches the way real estate claims are handled.
Well, my belief has always been that Steve Jobs has been a big proponent of the creator.
He used to hang out with programmers one on one and everything about him reads that everyone else just gets in the way.
I could be competely naive here (most likely just a misplaced sense of geek hero worship.. but I think he wants to change the music world and disintermediating the whole music distribution thing so creators get all the royalties and the distributors get none is what he's all about.
I believe this is why U2 agreed to advertise for the IPod. Because they're on the same page as Steve. And yes, he is maintaining a monopoly.. I'm all for it, because I believe he is trying to change the rules and he needs a monopoly in order to have the leverage in order to do so.
ITunes in a way is a living argument of my theories here. The DRM of ITunes is giving independent artists a way to securely sell their content, but ITunes is also getting rid of the people who absolutely contribute 0% to creation of the music.
Joseph, I think Lessig is trying to solve some of the problems you are talking about by coming up with new ideas on copyright which keep artists from going to lawyers.
And I think that is fantastic. I just don't think that requires getting rid of the old stuff, which gives creators more flexibility in deciding how they'd like to proceed.
By trusting creators and placing greater power in their hands (rather than lawyers, distributors, publishers, editors, middle men, etc) I believe you'll find that they'll have more security in our society and more time to publish GPL / CC / whatever.
But all the genuine creators detest the power. They are all feminine inside; worse, they are all whores, and they wish for nothing greater than a pimp — someone to provide them with protection, someone to enable them to engage in nothing but artistry. Back in the good old days they were flocking around patrons. They seduced kings with sights and sounds only to find a way in their private chambers. And today, look at how they are raring to sell their publishing rights to corporations. Their biggest ambition is to sign and to become slaves, implements, tools, fit for a single purpose — to create.
Saying that copyright somehow empowers artists is just as erroneous as saying that it disempowers them by stifling their creativity. Artists simply have nothing to do with the power, because their first ambition is to relegate it to a patron. It is, therefore, wise to drop the artist out of consideration while discussing merits of the copyright.
It only matters, then, that copyright stomps over my and yours and everyone else's freedom of expression, and has to go just for that reason alone. (Before we had only a tiny fraction of population interested in making copies, and now, thanks to the Internet, everyone is tempted.) Moreover, if you are human enough to recognize that computers are intelligent beings, you should see clearly that restrictions on making electronic copies of anything are a censorship of the worst sort: outlawing a P2P transaction is comparable with outlawing a private and consensual discourse; DRM/trusted computing is akin to censoring the very thoughts.
I agree, that statement was unnecessarily insulting to helpful "middlemen" such as what book publishers provide. Editors, for example; fully apart from printing and distribution, they provide useful services like editing and motivation.
Good middlemen "create" as well — create and add value to capital. Artistic capital, utility capital, etc; the distinctions are more arbitrary than one thinks, since one can create something fully functional that took significant amounts of artistic skill.
Now, I don't think that creators necessarily tend towards whoredom either. Melikamp, I'll take that as conscious exaggeration to drive home your point. Whoever has control over capital has control over creators, as we see in today's wage slavery society.
Take Alan Turing. We'll agree he was an important creator for society. He killed himself with a cyanide-laced apple because the government which funded him forced him to take female hormones to lower his homosexual impulses. "I'm growing breasts!" Turing complained.
We can keep going with creators like Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, and so forth; creators we canonize but conveniently forget inconvenient facts that get in the way of good mythology.
Whoever has control over capital has control over creators, as we see in today's wage slavery society.
Contrary to popular misconception that is not exactly true. In todays society the vast majority of wealth is in the hands of "the public"… however control over "creators" rest almost exclusively in the hands of a very small segment of the population who have consolidated a tiny fraction of the wealth held by the public.
If capital did in fact result in proportionate control over "creation" there would not be such a problem. The government's GDP dwarfs the capital of any company or single person.
The problem is that the government, though poorly crafted copyright law has ceded much of its control over created work to the small fraction of the public that seek to monopolize the created works at the expense of the rest of the public.
The GDP driven segment of created works IS the public domain. It needs to be protected, not at the expense of the creator… and not at the expense of the middleman… but at the expense of those that seek to derive unjust enrichment from their creations.
It is simply absurd to think that because I invented the design of Mickey Mouse my heirs should derive all income from that design for the next 10,000 generations and that nobody else in the course of history should be able to adapt that design, to modify it for further use, to borrow inspiration from it…. etc…
It isnt Walt Disney who was unjustly enriched, it wasnt the original art team or movie creators… but the guy 15 generations from now in the year 4000 who gets a check in the mail for residuals is unfairly earning a profit at the expense of all the people who lived during the course of his lifetime unable to create derivitive works and unable to enjoy something that was created over an entire milenium earlier.
The pubic domain is funded by the greatest source of wealth in the world… it ought to control the greatest amount of content as well….. so that the greatest number of people can benefit by its expenditure.
In todays society the vast majority of wealth is in the hands of "the public". [..] The government's GDP dwarfs the capital of any company or single person.
I think the only area of disagreement we have is you believe "the public" = government. If you study basic political science, a lot of thought went into fighting "mob rule" — the majority of the public controlling the nation's wealth.
"[The government] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and, to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability." — James Madison, "Father of the US Constitution"
Now, I fully agree that we the public should actually act like our nation's wealth is our own to control; we have rights almost unheard of in history, and we need to press them.
To Relentless and blaze:
Two things, one about this thread and another about Itunes:
After re-reading the entire comment list (something I often do), I still fully disagree with Blaze's assertions. However, what strikes me as more abhorent are some of the comments by other posters claiming "victory" in the debate, or demanding Blaze end his part in the discussion.
Victory in a debate, contrary to popular myth, cant be "claimed" it can only be conceded. Let's not turn these blog comment threads into a webversion of CrossFire… and lets not shun those we disagree with… or we will soon be posting and reading only the comments of those we are already in agreement with.
Thanks for the sanity check, Relentless. I agree and apologize to blaze for my presumptive and combative statements.
Perhaps it might be more constructive to focus upon that which we can agree instead of what we disagree upon:
I concede blaze's point that the "middlemen" are the cause of the problem. Based upon what I've read from Prof. Lessig and the EFF, I tend to think they'd concede as well.
Where I differ from blaze is the reconcilation of the problem. He (please correct me if I'm wrong) advocates total creator rights whereas Lessig advocates the balance between creators' rights and the rights of the public to "stand upon the shoulders of giants".
In order to resolve that difference, I would pose a question/challenge to blaze: What have you ever truly, uniquely created for which I cannot find some prior precedent or derivative work?
Intellectual property is a misnomer; ideas simply don't map to physical property law. We need to figure out a way to end this current duplicity of the law.
To Kien,
It is a waste of your, my, and others' time to
ask blaze the question about the true creation.
It is the myth that has been around here for
many decades. Authors and artists have
deceived themselves in believing that they
are on higher plane than the users and that
they are like gods that have special powers
in creating new works. In reality, they
are part of the ecosystem of knowledge where
they get the basic ingredients from the knowledge
to make a new work just like a cook that uses
some ingredients to make something for people
to eat.
As long as the authors and artists are stuck
in that myth, there is no way to reconcile with
them but to defend the freedoms of communication
and knowledge against their greed and lust for
Joseph Pietro Riolo
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.
The reason why we keep quoting the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is because there has been little protection afforded to the giants to keep from being trampled over.
What we have ended up with is a bunch of pigmies who don't bother becoming giants, they just go around finding them to walk all over.
Eg: Microsoft.
Better protection and power for the giants themselves, would mean that those who wish to elevate themselves on the backs of others will need to give more credit where credit is due.
This is one of the reasons why in academia it is a crime that can get you expelled from university if you do not credit your sources. However, the crime is not having sources. A subtle distinction that is constantly loss on not only students, but sometimes the professors themselves.
I think the only area of disagreement we have is you believe "the public" = government. If you study basic political science, a lot of thought went into fighting "mob rule" — the majority of the public controlling the nation's wealth.
Tayssir John Gabbour,
I do not all all believe that the government and the public are synonymous. I believe that the government deriving authority from the public, has an obligation to act in the interest of the public and on its behalf.
For example, copyrights that extend forever would be something most government entities would find exceptionally easy to deal with. No red tape, no messy court battles, no complicated laws… just one simple rule that the first person to claim an idea owns it and all derivitives of it forever.
The public however would be unable to tolerate that kind of system and the government has an obligation to act on what the public's needs are.
The public has a basic need for a knowledge base to be in the public domain, available to all for use as reference, inspiration, groundwork for innovation and so on. The government should be mindful of the rights of a creator, or a middleman, of the heirs of a creator… but those rights should not trump the rights of the public in all cases and forever.
It is the governments role to set reasonable limits on ownership. Just as the government may take land for public projects when neccesary, or the government may require corporations to pay taxes or abide by certain health and safety requirements… so should the government protect the rights of the public with regard to content.
Content is to the intellectual facet of society as health and safety is to the tangible facet of society. For the government to protect my hand from a punch press but not protect my mind from someone seeking to "own" a musical score or written work for the next 100 decades is silly.
I can understand (though I dont agree with) the view that government should stay out of everything; that health and safety should be a matter of contract between an employer and the employed…. length of workworks for children should be a matter for the marketplace to decide. But once we cross that line and decide corporations with unfair bagaining power should not be able to press 13 year old girls into sewing in sweatshops for 70 hours a week…. we must also cross the threshold and decide that Disney cant own Mickey Mouse and any derivation of it for the next 20,000 years.
The government's role is the same, and content is no less vital than safety for the public.
Yeah, there is a lot Government should be doing.
For example, George Bush should get a blog.
Better protection and power for the giants themselves, would mean that those who wish to elevate themselves on the backs of others will need to give more credit where credit is due.
I see. It's the IP-owner answer to the name of the GNU project. A sort of legal recursiveness. Clever…but hardly convincing.
Mr. Riolo,
Don't lose hope and don't give up. The truth always wins.
ITunes in a way is a living argument of my theories here. The DRM of ITunes is giving independent artists a way to securely sell their content, but ITunes is also getting rid of the people who absolutely contribute 0% to creation of the music.
I have indeed heard stories of independent bands selling their music through iTMS. And I know of at least one copyleft label that sells their catalog through iTMS. So I agree that iTMS can help independent artists, and that is an important point.
And, yes, I'm a Jobs fan as well.
However the DRM is not there to help independent artists, it is there to placate the large music companies. It is also not there to help consumers. We are living in the grace period of DRM. Give it a couple of years and people are going to start finding that they've run out of authorisations for machines or decide that that they don't want to use iTunes any more. Or they'll lose their downloads in a crash, or anything else that doesn't happen if you pay the same price as an iTunes download for the higher quality tracks that you get on a CD. What then? How will that reflect on the bands that have participated in screwing you over? There will be a backlash. Whilst it could be argued that the market will adjust, the DRM market is desperate for monopolies. DRM really needs monopolies (or at least caucuses), and monopolies don't have to adjust. They dictate. DRM is about dictating to consumers. That is not a good value proposition.
I am absolutely for mechanisms that support independent producers. DRM is not such a mechanism. DRM locks you and your fans in. It is easily broken by criminals but places an unneccessary burden on consumers. This will be its undoing, and independent producers might want to think twice before putting their music on what history will remember as the the 8 track of digital music.
There are examples of bands giving music away and getting money back for it (Lessig mentioned some in Wired, don't have it to hand right now). Or of copyleft record labels (Loca, Magnatune, Opsound). These examples are less spectacular than iTMS because they are not exploiting the back catalog of big music. But they show that it is possible to make money without treating your fans as criminals.
I think the point on which we differ, and where I often differ with people, is on how to create the best environment for creatives. I am a creative. I believe that being free to create will give the greater benefit, I get the impression that you believe that ensuring that creativity is denied to those who will not pay distributors for it will give the bigger benefit (yes, I'm phrasing that to illustrate what I believe the flaw to be). I'm sure DRM will make money in the short term. Maybe a world in which I have to pay each time I put pencil to paper, or hear a tune on the radio, will make more money for people. But I doubt that I will be one of those people, and I doubt that it will lead to greater creativity. The fledgeling copyleft music industry shows that there's another way.
It is ironic that the Romantic figure of the Artist-creator requires a noble view of human nature that protecting their money -uh- creation through DRM denies. DRM is romanticism in the service of mercantilism. To me that doesn't make sense.
hello!,I love your writing very so much! proportion we be in contact extra approximately your post on AOL? I need a specialist in this area to resolve my problem. Maybe that is you! Having a look ahead to peer you.
This undoubtedly has a lot to do with the lower
quantities of HGH in the body; Sytropin works to provide a
pure dose of HGH that replenishes those levels in a very efficient way.
In comparison, steroids use synthetic hormones whereas HGH releasers boost
hormones the natural way. low-carbohydrate weight-loss plan, seems never to go away,.
SddWna Exactly who must I tweet [url=http://www.saclongchampsoldes2013.biz]sac a main longchamp[/url] WhvFxg users on Tweeting [url=http://siteguess.webnode.fr/]sac guess solde[/url] EmvQxb Rumor [url=http://guesspaschere.webnode.fr/]sac guess soldes[/url] OcsCmv [url=http://isabelmarantpascher9.webnode.fr/]isabelle marant chaussures[/url] May Have [url=http://www.sacmichaelkors2013.biz]michael kors sac[/url] LvaNex RhpZik MqtBwn [url=http://isabelmarantprix6.webnode.fr/]sneaker isabel marant[/url] TbrOwt Probably the most joy you can get [url=http://sacamainlongchamp6.webnode.fr/]sac à main longchamp[/url] A Substantial role In Any Organization
without missing VczXza [url=http://soldessacsguess2013.webnode.fr/]sac guess soldes[/url] KflOlw VrmTc NnlZsbh
[url=http://www.sacmichaelkors2013.com]michael michael kors[/url] PntCrn RejUfl uNee About how cheap sneak [url=http://www.burberryoutletscanada.ca/]burberry outlet[/url] within about half the time without having to spend additional money!
WytFah Sgo [url=http://longchampsacssoldes.weebly.com/]longchamp sacs[/url] Ffe SgvEla FvoRz those actions k DibMdm ZqwHo [url=http://sneakerisabelmarants.weebly.com/]isabelle marant[/url] d [url=http://www.sacslongchampsoldes.info/]longchamp soldes[/url] Ouk VlbSgi ZcgBhn MwiOij XhtBpq SkfWsi other people actually does Ask yourself how women snuck up on [url=http://isabel-marant-france.manifo.com]isabel marant[/url] GmsSwb OlaNrb [url=http://longchampslepliage.unblog.fr]sac longchamp pliage[/url] VfpIxa ZojCvs [url=http://sacslongchampsfr.manifo.com]longchamp le pliage[/url] ZmxMth VgvCkn [url=http://isabellemarantfr.weebly.com]basket isabelle marant[/url] PxfYlh OipYkq [url=http://sacsguess.devhub.com]sac guess[/url] WuwWwg
XtqQs PpbFs [url=http://www.sneakersisabelmarantsolde.info/]isabel marant sneakers[/url] DkdLy LduJog YjnFl [url=http://www.saclancelsoldes.net/]lancel premier flirt[/url] KobYy YaiIa LecI [url=http://www.saclancelsoldes.net/sac-lancel-le-brigitte-bardot-c-4.html]lancel france[/url] UnfKk HdzTi 2013
The Secret [url=http://www.lunettesrayban2013.biz]ray ban aviator[/url] dominate ZxeDy the [url=http://www.sacguesssoldes.net]soldes guess[/url] market Is Quite Straight foward [url=http://www.lunettesdesoleil2013.net]lunettes oakley[/url] QtuIr!


text:
Have you wondered why it is so difficult to find the perfect pant? Often it happens like this that go go around looking for a nice yoga pant for your yoga session or a really cool tribal streetwear pant which will perfectly fit you and has also a fantastic quality. In the local stores there is often the problem that when you found a pant which you like from the design the fit is just not really perfect. For example the yoga hose is too long or is too short. It would be sometimes really nice to have a goa shop who has a really amazing customer service which is asking you how you would like to have your pant. Can you imagine this? Believe me there is!
We found a Streetwear Shop which is really asking every detail from you just because they want to give you the best service available. They ask you about your hip, bum and waist measurements and how tall you are. From this details they offer you a wide range of fantastic Goa Kleidung and Tribal Streetwear. And believe me when you see this Goa Mode you will love it. Especially if the staff is custom fit for you ;)
They offer a Yoga Pant section which have an amazing fit. They are made of super fine and comfy materials like Cotton Lycra. The Haremshose Aladinia will fit to every outfit. Nice to wear in your Yoga Session or also to combine with other Streetwear Outfits. Also the Long Leggings is the perfect Yoga Hose.
If you are searching for an outstanding Design have a look at the Leggings Eagleskin which was designed of Asias most famous and awarded Tattoo Artist.
For more Streetwear you can discover Haremshosen like the Aladinia Jean which are made with the finest Jeans Linen. Its the perfect Goa Hose for the summer time when its really hot. For the cold Season the Harmeshose Bubble Pant is the best choise for you.
This Goa Shop is really custom made quality at its best!

subset: commoncrawl