Intellectual Property

... how about the opinion of an actual musician who is trying to get his stuff heard?

First, a link to Digital Copyright Canada on the Music in Canada Coalition.

The recent media coverage of the Canadian music industry's attempts (and apparent success) to have Canada's "archaic" copyright laws overhauled had got me thinking about what it really means when I buy a CD. Or what does it mean when I buy software, either by downloading it through a service like Steam or buying a box at a store. Recent /. discussion on what exactly you are paying for when you buy software was quite interesting, with respect to Valve denying access to some people with pirated steam accounts, which apparently got a few (a lot?) of valid accounts as well. Should a software company be allowed to remotely disable your game if they think you have not paid for your copy?

The recording industry in Canada has convinced otherwise respectable musicians such as Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo (2 CDs in my collection) and Tom Cochrane (3 CDs) to do press conferences about how downloading is killing the industry and how the Canadian government has to step in and update the copyright laws to stop it.

From BoingBoing, here is an article on how intellectual property policy is made. The gist of it is that the people who want more rights go begging to policy makers with weak economic models and anecdotes, expecting increased legal rights which are supposed to lead to more creativity and innovation, and that policy makers in general simply capitulate. The lack of investigation and empirical data on the impacts of creating artificial monopolies in the form of intellectual property rights is lamented. Empirical evidence regarding the impact of "database rights" in the EU is presented.

It's an interesting article, more so than the practice abstract above might suggest. Another interesting article, from an IEEE newsletter via Marli: IP Fundamentals. The IEEE Spectrum Intellectual Property archive has other interesting articles. Engineering is all about the intellectual property. Oh my yes.

Did you know that in Canada, photographers do not automatically own copyright for photographs they take under commission? So if you hire someone to take pictures at your wedding, you own the copyright on any photographs taken unless you specifically agree to assign the copyright to the photographer in a contract (I think, contracts can be tricky, and IANAL).

This makes sense. If you think of taking photographs as a service, it makes sense to pay a hourly rate plus expenses (film, in the old days), and have the expectation of owning the results at the end. If you commission a painter to paint your portrait, it's not unreasonable to expect that you own the painting when it has been finished. Things get a little more cloudy when you ask who has the right to sell prints of that painting. It's even more difficult with photos, since they are infinitely reproducible, especially in digital form.

After reading Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry defending software patents (he is the COO of Sun), I decided to check and see what exactly was patentable in Canada. In particular, whether software is patentable.

So, from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website, a description of what is patentable in Canada:

A patent is granted only for the physical embodiment of an idea—e.g., the description of a plausible door lock—or for a process that produces something saleable or tangible. You cannot patent a scientific principle, an abstract theorem, an idea, a method of doing business, a computer program, or a medical treatment.

I am pleased to see computer program specifically listed under things that cannot be patented.

Another nice thing about Canadian patents is that there is a possibility of applying for a compulsory licence to remedy patent abuse:

Compulsory licences may be granted to remedy what is called "abuse of patent rights." Such abuse can be considered only three years after grant. Hindering trade and industry is considered as an abuse. Abuse situations include:

• not meeting demand in Canada;
• hindering trade or industry in Canada by refusing to grant a licence (if such a licence is in the public interest), or by attaching unreasonable conditions to such a licence;
• using a process patent to unfairly prejudice production of a non-patented product, or allowing the patent on such a product to unfairly prejudice its manufacture, use or sale.

This probably means (IANAL) that things like the Eolas plugin patent problem which Mircosoft had would not have been an issue here. But then again, all that I know of the Eolas - Microsoft thing can be summed up thusly: "Eolas has a patent related to browser plugins; Microsoft makes a browser which support plugins; Eolas wants licence fees."

The following rant has been brought to you by a Groklaw story of the same subject matter. Read that and this League for Programming Freedom page for information and arguments that are more well thought out than mine.

Software patents are a BAD idea. Tamara's Mom tried to defend software patents by say that if people invent something they should get credit for it. Ok, great. The problem is that so often patents are traded around by corporations in the same way kids trade baseball cards or pogs or whatever the hell the new hotness to trade is these days. So some company, oh say, Kodak, can buy some company, or it's holdings or whatever. Maybe Wang Laboratories? And then they have some patents sitting around, and business is kind of going downhill, so they look at the patents and say, hmmm, who can we sue?

Oh, I know, how about Sun! So the long and the short of it is that Kodak sues Sun and wins, because Kodak holds a patent describing how software can ask other software for help. That seems like a natural extension of interprocess communication to me. Once you have sockets or shared memory or whatever, of course software is going to start talking to each other. So in the end, Sun spends huge money and time developing Java, and now they have a huge patent royalty burden looming. And Kodak gets a whole bunch of free money! Yay!

Patents were intended to encourage innovation by guaranteeing a temporary monopoly on an invention. An inventor should be able to market a product for enough time that they are able to recover development costs and make enough of a profit so that more research and development can be funded to make more inventions. That drives a market forward; progress.

Now instead there are companies that buy patent rights and sit on them, some times long enough that other companies start developing products or technology that use the patented "invention." I'm willing to bet that these other companies aren't even aware of the patent they may be infringing upon, since different people can arrive at the same idea at approximately the same time (Newton vs. Leibniz for example). The patent holder might now pounce on its unsuspecting victim, demanding patent royalties for a product that they had no hand in inventing, producing, or marketing. Free Money (except for lawyering costs).

This behavior is a problem with patents on things that are real too, not just software. IBM holds hundreds or thousands of patents which they can use to crush competition if they wish. The result is that people developing new products must do extensive patent research to make sure they won't be infringing, or to find the patent holder to arrange a licensing deal. The alternative is to simply not to anything grand that might infringe on some patent. The question is, is it worth doing a whole bunch of work and spending a bunch of money to get some new product to market, which may or not succeed on its own merits, but which may also be subject to attack by patent profiteers?

If I have to stand on a soapbox, it will be about intellectual property. There is currently a petition going around to petition parliment to consider the rights of, and to consult with, users and consumers of intellectual property. Normally those with the loudest voices (i.e. people hired by industry groups to be professional complainers) and the most money are those which have the ears of the policy makers. Average people need to yell a little bit on issues they care about, or pretty soon there won't be anything to care about.

The petition site is http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/. Links to english and french versions of the petition form are there, as are addresses of the people to mail it to once you have collected signatures.

This is not your average internet petition to save a TV show or whatever. Submitting electronically is not possible. This is an actual real life, dead tree, meat space petition which is to be submitted to Parliment. The people organizing this want to get this in before parliment tables a bill, as promised, to re-jigger copyright law in Canada as per the request of SOCAN and others. As such, it is necessary to print out the form and sign it, then mail it to one of the people listed on the web page. Since there is lots of room for signatures, it's probably a good idea to hit your friends up for their signatures too. If you are really outgoing (or even just average), ask you neighbours, co-workers, and random people on the street too (I admittedly will not be doing this).

Most people won't care until they have to pay a licence fee to take a book out of the library. So try to convince them not to let that happen.

One of freenet's big things was that it help political dissidents communicate. Their example at the time was China. Now I see that things the American government doesn't want you to see, such as flag draped coffins and prison abuse photos are being shared on P2P networks like Kazaa.

Slashdot has an article about how some guy is pulling stuff on Gnutella and putting it on his blog, purportedly to show the US Military how P2P networks are security leaks.

If anything, this points to the power of the internet as a communication medium for political purposes, such as fighting an unjust regime by exposing its fallacies. If the military wants to keep secrets, fine, that's their prerogative, but if some random guy is able to take pictures, then they are not working hard enough at security.

As some guy on ./ points out, what is this guy trying to acomplish? Ban P2P networks? Ban the internet? Will constructive political discourse (think Howard Dean's blog and meetup.com thing) be affected?

Is it prime time for a highly anonymous, highly encrypted, P2P system like Freenet?

Something to add to my reading list... it's about "the fight between open systems for exchanging knowledge and closed systems that see knowledge as a marketable commodity" -

Sounds like it could be interesting...

I came across an interesting article about copyright on someone's blog, or possible slashdot, the other day. It is at http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/writings/copyright.html.

I personally would prefer to see a system where culture is improved by cross-pollination, where people can freely create derived works, and knickers don't get overly twisted with regards to modern forms of mental-product distribution. I'm not sure of the statistics, but I think that most artists generally make more money from merchandising and playing concerts than from album sales. There's a good chance that some of my favorite music is almost impossible to play live, in which case the artist probably does derive most of their income from album sales.

With more draconian copy-"right" laws, is the time far off when we have to pay a license fee to get a book out of a public library? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

This recent slashdot thread has a significant number of insightful comments on it. The story is about a woman who is suing the RIAA under rackateering laws. People are mostly debating how downloading music is theft, or not, that it is copyright infringement and not theft at all. It was noted that a judge in the Grokster case told the lawyer for the plaintiff to stop using words like piracy and theft when he was framing the case, because in the legal sense, neither is true in relation to downloading music.

These sort of discussions get me thinking about intellectual property (which is actually a misnomer that I should stop using), since as an engineer my career is to provide others with intellectual products as a service. Unless I have a patent personally, my work usually automatically belongs to my employer. My work is a service, as is the work of the guys (and gals) who write big commercial software like Oracle. This owner of this output can sell as many copies as possible, which sort of breaks the service relation ship between the corporation and the consumer. Its sort of a guessing game; how much money can I pump into my developers (or musicians, in the case of the music industry) assuming that I think I can sell N copies at M bucks a pop? Anything above that is almost free money.

Software, music, whatever, isn't a physical product which can be stolen, in that it can't be taken such that the rightful owner is deprived. It is produced by someone doing a service, yet can persist after the service has been complete. Like a plumber that continues to unclog your drain after he has gone home. So how much is the right amount to pay for the presence of the ghost plumber?

Tricky business.

I came across a link to whatacrappypresent.org on some guy's blog. It's pretty funny. The sort of parent site, downhillbattle.org has info about fighting back against the RIAA etc. Now the Canadian version is getting involved and SOCAN want to levy ISP's too. It's getting kind of ridiculous.

The funny thing is, according to the Canadian copyright board, downloading is legal in Canada, because we pay a levy on media, and now, mp3 players. Uploading is still not legal, but if SOCAN gets its way with the ISP levy, we all might as well upload and download to our hearts content, since they assume we are all criminals and tax us for it anyway. I doubt it will actually go through though, because ISPs will probably end up having common carrier status, like telephone companies. AFAIK, that means they aren't responsible for content.