Re: [OS:N:] Intellectual monopolies and ethics and Muidallap

Les Bell wrote:
> and they want to take away my current right to control my own intellectual
> products. That's what a world without IP would look like, as far as I can
> see.

One issue here is what do "my own intellectual products" extend to? 
Also, how do they interrelate to or build upon other people's 
intellectual products?

For example, should you not pay royalties on using the alphabet (perhaps 
to someone who purchased those rights from the government itself, like 
telecoms purchase spectrum licenses)? If not, why not? Or why not pay 
royalties on using the word "my"? Or perhaps why not pay royalties 
whenever you remember a certain spelling adage ("i before e except after 
c")?  Where do we draw the line on what is a common heritage and what is 
owned? Where do your products begin and others' leave off? I'm not sure 
in the end that this will ever be an easy question to answer. As beings, 
we swim in an ocean of information memes, and take items from this ocean 
and recombine them and let them go again.

True, copyrights are supposed to cover fixed tangible representatins, 
and patents are supposed to cover novel physical techniques. Yet, 
copyright seems to be continually extended in the US to cover more and 
more idea-like aspects of tangible representations (structure, 
characters, inspired derivatives in the same universe, look and feel, 
derivative works using samples, contibutory infringement, etc.) and for 
longer and longer times.  And likewise patents are being used to cover 
more and more things (patenting old ideas like "auctions" when using a 
computer to do them, patenting business models, patenting prior art, 
patenting software algorithms, patenting obvious extensions, patenting 
genes found in nature, etc.) So perhaps this is what a world of 
copyright and patents will someday look like -- where rights to patents 
and copyrights are owned forever and every possible thought or action is 
covered.

Be careful that in advocating a position built to maximize your benefits 
(for selling finished products), you do not also maximize your costs 
(for raw material). I think the open source and free software movements 
are in part in reaction to these trends. For me, I think the reasonable 
course of minimizing my costs by advocating myself and others share is 
the better route than maximizing my gains by playing the proprietary 
licensing game and gettign others to play it too. But then, my 
philosophy of life economics these days is geared more towards 
"voluntary simplicity" (e.g. "a penny saved is three penies earned after 
taxes and credit card interest") than it once was. Also, on a practical 
basis, I just don't see how there will be room for independent creative 
people in a world dominated by lawsuits over patents and copyrights (Not 
just monetarily, but also emotionally). I already see the difficulties 
as a professional programmer (especially from software patents, but also 
from creeping contamination of seeing copyrighted code... [it always 
irks me when you can't tell what the licenses for a software package is 
before downloading it.]).

I'm willing to agree that on a practical basis, there is an ethics that 
governs a reasonable use of digital materials (copyrighted or not). Here 
was one open source license I proposed a few years ago, which I called a 
"moral license":
   http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/license.htm

"Key to the success of [the project] is a license that encourages people 
to contribute information as well as use it. We believe contributions 
should be gifts. So we put no legal restrictions on the use of this 
information or its redistribution or repackaging. However, we do impose 
non-binding moral code of use, and we urge you to follow it. For reasons 
of law and ethics, we do require submitters to agree that their 
contributions are original and do not infringe on other people's 
intellectual property rights, and that the submissions can be 
redistributed under the terms of this license. The moral code of use:
     * Any substantial use of this material or repackaging will 
acknowledge [the project] as the source.
     * Any substantial changes to the code will be clearly noted, with 
the intent on preserving a trail of credit and responsibility.
     * Individual submitter's names, email, and other information will 
not be used for promotional purposes, nor will be removed without good 
cause.
     * This material will not be used for unethical or illegal purposes.
     * Users of the system will also police it for low quality or 
offensive or dangerous information.
     * Substantial users of this material will also give something back 
to the project."

I think those are a sort of reasonable moral expectations. Some of them 
are similar to "moral rights" which Authors have more formally in 
European countries. Note that several of the points are to an extent 
already backed up by US laws related to defamation and restricting 
illegal use. What might be an alternative eventually to the GPL etc. is 
a sort of best ethical practices guidelines for handlng public domain 
digital works, where shunning companies or individuals who break the 
rules often enough is enough to keep everyone playing by the ethical rules.

Unfortunately there is always the problem that one person's claimed 
moral use of information, say, a musket design, or say, guerilla 
tactics, (e.g. resulting in American Minute Men using such muskets to 
shoot British Red Coats in the back to help stop taxation without 
representation) is another person's immoral use (e.g. Britian saying if 
they supressed the American Revolution they would free all the slaves in 
the colonies). By extension, there is the ethical question of who might 
ethically be given free information of various sorts.

To some extent a lot of this comes down to the politics to power -- and 
the concept of an emerging notion of morality and justice that rides on 
top of power, where such ideas gain power by broad support from broad 
perceived value. Right now, ideas of ownership of intellectual products 
have broad support in many vocal and otherwise powerful circles -- 
driven in part by hope of winning the patent or copyright lottery, where 
each creative work is a lottery ticket. I feel that creativity funded on 
such a gambling basis is a flawed system. Look at how beign a winner 
suckss -- I'd imagine both Bill Gates and J.K. Rowling have had their 
social lives ruined by winning that lottery (granted, Bill Gates was 
able to buy more tickets than most...) Yet, the US is also a culture 
that seems to glorify a rich-poor divide as the basis for motivation.

> But I don't confuse a flawed implementation - the US legal system - with a
> flaw in the underlying algorithm - the ethical concepts which underpin
> copyright, registered designs, etc. As I say, let's not throw out the baby
> with the bath-water.

Well put. I guess one of the questions is: to what extent does a free 
society need the legal system to step in to enforce copyrights or the 
RIAA's current business model? Do currently financially succesful 
companies have a moral right to buy laws to stay financially succesful 
whenever the technical or social climate changes? Because that is what 
much of the current trend over the last couple of decades has been: to 
make copyright violation and ever more punishable offence, both in civil 
suits and now criminal suits. Be careful of crafting a legal code where 
only those who work for big media companies (signing over all rights) 
can be creative -- and even then, only in ways the big media companies 
allow.

--Paul Fernhout

This email is placed into the public domain (except where noted, e.g. 
inclusions that are presumed fair use). Note however that law and morals 
related to identity theft, slander, etc. means you can't say you wrote 
it or alter it in such a way as to indicate I wrote the altered version.



_______________________________________________
Subscription and Archive: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-source-now-list/
-
For K12OS technical help join K12OSN:
<https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn>