Thanks to Mr. Wilson for putting up decent counterarguments regarding the
validity, or lack thereof, or IP laws. It doesn't surprise me that there
would be a Web site dedicated to this subject, as there is a significant
libertarian minority in cyberspace for whom "information wants to be
free" etc. That's one of the reasons I have perhaps pressed the issue,
because it's a topic of direct relevance to post-industrial society.
That said, the "myths" largely amount to strawmen. No one that I am aware
of ever said IP laws were eternal. Whether or not IP laws existed before
the Statute of Anne is irrelevant. Before the Gutenberg printing press a
book was literally worth its weight in gold because it took immense labor
to copy it. We are talking about a preindustrial society here. They did
lots of things back then that we don't do now--and a good thing it is
that we don't, too, as far as I'm concerned.
The same goes for the argument that, because software allegedly
flourished before it came under copyright protection, it would continue
to do so today without it. As a point of fact, the only reason it didn't
come under protection sooner was that courts couldn't decide whether
software fell under copyright or patent laws, and as a result it fell
through the cracks. But who do you think lobbied to fix THAT problem? The
garage programmers that "Myths" claims to champion. Beyond a certain
point, most inventors (and their investors) want assurance that their
time and investment of capital will be protected before they undertake a
process that might not even yield a product, let alone a profit. As
software gets more and more expensive to develop, intellectual property
laws are a foregone conclusion. If you think that, say, Netscape would
exist without copyright protection, you will have to prove it to me.
As for alternative incentives to create, I acknowledged that myself in an
early post. But try telling Martin Scorsese (or his backers!) that it's
OK for you to copy "Taxi Driver" and sell it as your own property. (For a
real world example, see Mark Twain's hilarious 1872 letter to the London
Spectator, reagarding a plagiarist who was reprinting Twain's books under
his own name abroad, reprinted in the June 97 Harpers.) There is
something more than slightly dishonest about an argument that preaches
altruism at a person as a prelude to ripping him off.
This goes for the pious allusion to the contrary copyright attitudes of
other nations. China?? If someone wants to tell me what benefit to US
workers is offered by letting China pirate Windows 95, by all means go
ahead and try. Those areas where, as I said early on, IP laws are hurting
legitimate interests of Third World cultures mean only that those
countries have a different idea of the *scope* of IP, not of its
importance. I would favor extending patent protection to "products of
nature", for example, which is where one such dispute arises.
Moreover no one requires the creator of an original work to assert
copyright, so if Mr. Leon writes something and doesn't feel he deserves
protection, he is free to let others pirate his work. But why should
others be required to submit to his own personal views of property
rights? As for patent law, it might surprise a few people on this list to
learn that a patent offers no automatic protection against encroachment.
Ever wonder what "patent pending" means? It means that until the patent's
validity is litigated in court--where the patent holder must prove the
invention's novelty, originality, utility and non-obviousness against the
claim of someone else whose own product conflicts with his patent--he has
no absolute security that his invention is secure. If IP laws were
nothing more than a clever class ripoff, why bother with all this red
tape and just grant the legal monopoly?
The Myths piece at most amounts to the rather obvious statement that
people would continue inventing... something.... with or without IP laws,
coupled with some anecdotes about little innocent software engineers
having their labors stolen away from them by big bad corporations
swooping in and asserting a patent on some aspect of their program. This
last argument in itself shows a complete ignorance of copyright and
patent law. Copyright law only protects copying, nothing else, so it
doesn't apply here. As for patent law, it only protects an idea, not its
expression. If it were otherwise, there would only be ONE spreadsheet
program, ONE word processing program, etc. If a programmer "lives in
fear" of whether there's a patent on a "scroll buffer," he can... LOOK IT
UP! Patents are matters of public record. Then, if it looks dodgy
legally, he can design something else that does the same thing. Sure,
patent law can be abused, but so can any law. That doesn't make the law
itself invalid.
So, to me this piece amounts to the argument that people got around
without cars at one time, and there was less air pollution (and NO drunk
drivers), so we'd be better off bringing back the horse and buggy.
Amusing, but not very persuasive.
----------------
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA
"The world makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is
identical with the discovery of the truth--that the error and truth are
simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to
when it has been cured of one error is usually simply another error, and
maybe one worse than the first one." -- H.L. Mencken
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