What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright
falkvinge.net
falkvinge.net
Please take into account the following:
1. The studies usually cited saying that piracy does not reduce the income of content creators are studies of the current system, where there are legal barriers to the kind of commercial support of file sharing your proposal advocates. They are irrelevant to the question of what would happen under the proposed system.
2. Sites like TPB are completely legal under the proposal. It seems likely that the legalization of commercialization of file sharing (only the actual file sharing itself must be non-commercial under the proposal) will cause many other competitors to TPB to appear. Why wouldn't Google get in on it--integrate sharing of commercial movies with YouTube, for instance.
I would expect this to make file sharing become the main way most people get their content. Even those who prefer physical media and aren't technologically sophisticated enough to deal with burning discs will likely find someone serving them commercially.
E.g., I'd expect something like Red Box to appear that instead of dispensing pressed DVDs for rental downloads the movie the customer wants via file sharing, burns it to a DVD-R, and dispenses the disc. I have no doubt the operator of such a daevice could structure things in such a way that the customer is not paying for the shared file itself but rather just for the costs and service of retrieving the file and burning it, and so would be commercial support of file sharing, not commercial file sharing.
Kickstarter-like model? This has been shown to work.
Donate and get your name in the credits, get included in the production process, get a vote, etc., or some other perks.
People who donate to kickstarter will do so at least partly to get a copy of whatever at a (possibly) reduced cost.
The costs of kickstarter pre-orders are also partly dictated by the market value of other similar products, $20 for an indie game or whatever.
Under this system that incentive goes away since there will be no personal advantage in making the lower end pledges especially since the perceived cost is now free.
I'm sure someone will jump on and say "but I will do it just to support the project!" , congratulations but you are probably in a minority.
It's always cute when people have knee-jerk responses without reading the article. The "proposed system" is... the current system. "We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use" is the exact quote.
Having lots of patents and stuff produces economic growth and jobs, just not for inventors, creators, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and salespeople. Instead it creates economic growth for lawyers, para-legals, judges, courts and patent trolls.
Recently it was reported that Apple and Google both spend more on intellectual property related activities than on research and development, and they spend a lot on research and development. This shows that there is economic growth, but it is not desirable economic growth the same way a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Andrew created after they destroy entire regions and contributed to those economies via recovery activities.
Instead the argument needs to focus on growth that is maximally beneficial for society at large. IP strong and IP weak regimes both produce economic growth, but in different vectors, but only a weak IP regime produces an economic environment where the availability and quality of the goods and services available improves while the price drops of those same goods and services drops. That is maximally beneficial.
I hope this particular bit of FUD doesn't take off. The study that reported this accounted for e.g. the Motorola Mobility purchase as being a "intellectual property related activity." While IP was surely some part of the Motorola purchase, it also came with products, engineers, physical plant, etc. It's ridiculous to chalk up the $12 billion spent on the purchase to "intellectual property related activities" but that's exactly what the study did.
All the study says is that Apple/Google spend as much money buying technology as they do developing in house. Which is not news to anyone. Heck, many (most?) startups are driven by the prospect of an eventual exit in the form of an acquisition, and intellectual property is part of every such acquisition. Should you count all startups acquisitions as part of this supposedly undesirable Katrina-like expenditures on "intellectual property related activities?"
What happens when the supply of existing patents runs out? i.e. consider it globally, not nationally. I can only guess that people wanting to develop inventions for commercialization would try to keep them secret - and people wishing to invest in commercializing inventions would prefer those that can be protected (by keeping them secret). This, apparently, was the situation before patents.
But this is Sweden (not the USA), which I hazard is a net-importer of patented products, so Sweden doesn't gain from patents. In fact, the Netherlands did abolish patents, and Switzerland delayed enacting them - and that was good for their economic development. I understand that they were compelled to, by powerful countries who did benefit from patents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_views_on_patents#Histo...
It seems logical to me that patents and copyright encourage investment in inventive and creative work, by enabling the value of the work to be captured. As a researcher, I also feel that the work of inventors and artists should be rewarded. But I agree the present system doesn't seem to be working very well.
In countries where healthcare is also paid by the Government, that might work, but I doubt many of them would take on it eventually. I don't think any of this would be implemented in US in the short to medium term, though, as that kind of proposal would be immediately considered communist by half the country (especially if Fox News has anything to say about it).
I'm also not sure if I would let the Government be 100% responsible for the pharmaceutical R&D, but maybe it could use taxpayer money for some R&D anyway, and any drug that comes out of it, would be patent-free. Think of it as the open source Linux to Microsoft's Windows, or Firefox to IE. Companies would still be free to patent drugs and sell them for whatever they want, but the Government would be able to reverse engineer or create very similar alternatives that are patent-free, and much cheaper.
You're quite right in this analysis - especially with your followup about this being the most applicable where healthcare is also paid by the government.
In Europe, 83% of the pharma revenue - on average - comes from taxpayer money, mostly through drug subsidies. Yet, only 15% of their revenue total is used for R&D (and another 30% of the total is used for manufacturing), according to the pharma industry's own numbers.
So if we pay all of those 30 percent units for manufacturing from the tax coffers, another 15 percent units is needed to bring research on par. That takes us to 45 percent units - but we're paying for 83 percent units today. We can afford to double the research and still save a significant chunk of taxpayer money.
This doesn't even begin to take into account that 70% of today's new pharmaceuticals are so-called copycat drugs with no other purpose than to circumvent another company's patent monopoly. If we assume that these resources will be spent researching new drugs instead, as nothing is patent-encumbered, we have tripled the research just in forcing drugs to be generic, before taking actual increases or decreases in research funds into account.
The loser here is the pharma industry's "marketing" account, which has been overly well-fed with taxpayer money.
Cheers, Rick
So I've worked in government-sponsored defense R&D. If you think all the patent litigation creates inefficiency in the system, you can't even imagine how much inefficiency is created by government funding of research.
Government funded research is absolutely necessary. There are tons of things the free market would not naturally invest in without government funding. Government funding is necessary to create products, like the internet, that the market doesn't necessarily know it wants yet. But that comes at the cost of monstrous inefficiency. It's not often the case that the politically-important subjects of research are the same as the economically-important subjects of research. You see this in medical R&D, which is heavily funded in the US by NIH grants and the like. Tremendous funding goes to researching end-of-life diseases like cancer and alzheimer's (probably because they affect old people and old people vote), and relatively little goes to research to improve the health and quality of life for working-age people.
So the Swedish Pirate Party are asking the wrong questions. They should be asking how can we continue to support innovators and inventors, even if they don't have the means to be producers, while not decreasing demand.
A good solution is to provide an alternative to the monopoly model with something more like a tax. A business can elect to pay a certain fixed percentage of their profits before IP costs, IP revenue, and tax to a pool of money which is distributed to creators / inventers. In exchange the business is exempt from IP laws (excl trademarks) as long as it only trades with individual consumers and similarly exempt businesses. Each participating business is legally required to declare what content / inventions they used to create their product / services, and the participating businesses that supplied them, or face penalties; copies of content or inventions made by anyone must be labelled with the reporting code. The pool of funds is distributed based on a formula taking into account the direct (used by business making profit) and indirect (i.e. used to create something in the supply chain of participating businesses) use of content / ideas that contributed to the profits.
Under this system, participating businesses would want to read and apply as many relevant patent documents as possible, and use as much outside content as possible, since they don't pay any more, meaning that there is much more reuse of ideas, but the creators of that content would still be rewarded.
It really just detracts from the better arguments made. Do you want to shorten copyright and reform patents, or do you want to legalize very commercial file sharing?
But as long as the main activity is legal, then of course it's also legal to commercially aid somebody in doing so. Entire industries are built on that fundamental logic.
Cheers, Rick
Somebody making money off of aiding a legal noncommercial sharing doesn't make the original sharing commercial and illegal. Again, compare dating.
And if you can make money off of people wanting to share culture and knowledge, all the better for you.
Everyone benefits from patent reform, copyright reform, the cost of drugs being reduced, DRM being abolished etc. Why derail those arguments with "and legalize piracy!" when TPB etc's perhaps illicit business models are of no lasting consequence to anyone but the few whose pockets they line?
Also, it's pretty easy to judge when file-sharing is commercial - whenever it is done by a commercial entity, e.g. a for-profit radio station that would otherwise have to pay public-performance fees.
The analogy with the postal service made earlier was actually quite apt.
Cheers, Rick
The line between "aiding file sharing" and "file sharing is their business model" is also very, very questionable. We all saw what happened to Mininova when they stopped "aiding".
TPB could easily run without ads. In my mind adding ads to something should generally not affect legality.
A guy who prints DVDs with movies on them and sells them on the street is a commercial pirate. A guy that takes DVDs someone else made and brings them to people is a courier. It's not a very complicated distinction.
If it is legal for you to download a file and burn it, it should be legal for you to hire someone else to do that for you.
On one hand, it might be legal, deciding the agency is in the person submitting the link and the other person is only automatically shoving some bits around.
On the other hand, you might decide that that's not a service that can legitimately be paid for. Some things can't be outsourced. I think right now that it's legal to 3d print a rifle but it's not legal to have someone else print it for you (but I'm having trouble finding references).
Either way, the intent of the law matters, and it's possible to outlaw commercial enterprises based around piracy but not individuals' actions. One method might be to limit the number of 'uploads' to a number like 10.
The commercial nature of the site affects whether it falls under non-commercial file sharing the OP would like to see legalized of course, in which case it changes the argument from "legalize non-commercial file sharing" to "legalize commercial piracy".
You can't simply abolish a system like copyright because it protects the people who create original work. Otherwise people will sell their work. IE. If TPB created a premium offering, wouldn't everybody pay for that instead of offerings which actually paid the content creators?
Why don't we work on building a system which allows a consumer to reliably identify and pay the creator of a work? This way content can still be freely distributed, but the consumer can easily support/finance the creator if they want.
Now, we can argue that the temporary monopoly is too long now, but to suggest that we go back to square one is silly. Why throw away hundreds of years of progress on this issue?
I think patronage and reorganization of artistic groups is coming inherently. The only question is will we decide to stick them, and ourselves, with laws made for completely different technology.
Copyright in the US started at what, 14, 21 years? I forget offhand. Then you had to write a book, sell all rights to a publisher, deliver it to the publisher by horse then train then horse, have them print it, deliver it to sales people by train then wagon then horse, who delivered them to purchasers by train or wagon or horse. And throw some boats in there.
That was plenty enough copyright, our founders said. Other nations did not heavily disagree in copyright length. After that time, the work should go to the public good.
Remember, the public good is the only reason for copyright; to entice people to create for the public domain.
Today? You finish a work, upload it, and it's available for purchase from you, the creator. Nothing created in your lifetime will lapse into the public domain naturally.
This is not progress. This is perversion.
I don't see how banning DRM entirely would ever be a good idea. Lots of code could be misconstrued as DRM, and there are a number of free speech concerns that remind me of bans on encryption up to certain key lengths. What about building DRM for research purposes, code analysis, etc? Why exactly would DRM need to be banned when it has always been so easy to work around?