IPcentral Weblog: April 2006 Archives

April 2006 Archives

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04.28.2006

Property Rights as Human Rights

Professor and Academic Advisory Council member Mark Schultz reacts to the argument in Sins of Omission that property rights are crucial to human liberty::

Nice post on IP and its importance to liberty. I'll be talking about that topic at the Federalist Society event next month. My basic point, which echoes yours, is that property rights, whether tangible or intangible, support liberty by fostering independence, among other things. People draw the line from property rights to autonomy more easily with respect to copyright--it enables artists, writers, and journalists to make a living without relying on patrons or the government. People don't see the connection so clearly with respect to patents, but I think its just as important. Patents enable innovators to set their own research agendas and give them the means and clout to withstand pressure from competitors who want to use government to preserve the status quo.

posted by James DeLong @ 2:51 PM | Big Tent , International , Physical Property

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Do the Math

At the Cato conference this week, one of the participants made the familiar comment that the open source business model is to give away the software and sell the surrounding services. And I had a familiar reaction -- I, and most other consumers, don't want to buy any services; I want software to work immediately and without input from expensive humanware.

Continue reading Do the Math . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 10:12 AM | Software

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IP, Massachusetts & Microsoft

Continuing the discussion of Massachusetts' open document intitiative, George Ou asks "Does the open document religion make sense?" and points out a glitch:: the OASIS format does not seem to work as well as Microsoft's alternative.

Continue reading IP, Massachusetts & Microsoft . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 9:59 AM | Software

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IP, the EU & Microsoft

Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute looks at the IP implications of the EU-Microsoft battle:

If Eurocrats can force Microsoft to give up significant chunks of its valuable IP, there's no stopping them from doing likewise to other successful American companies. The next target may be Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple, which recently got in a spat with French legislators when they passed a bill to force the sharing of iTunes code. And the problems don't end in Europe.
Continue reading IP, the EU & Microsoft . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 9:45 AM | International

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Deserved Tribute

Jonathan Schwartz, new CEO of Sun, pays warm tribute to Scott McNealy, innovator:

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And unlike Henry Ford and some of the industrialists that preceded you, not all of those folks just work for Sun - I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.
Continue reading Deserved Tribute . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 8:45 AM | General

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04.27.2006

Satellite Radio & Music Downloads

I love my XM -- but sorry, guys, you are wrong on the music distribution issue. XM is radio, and charges its customers and pays fees to the content creators accordingly. If it is going to become a mechanism for transferring music to customers to keep in permanent storage, then both its payment and its fee schedules must reflect this.

For ex.: while in Montana last week, XM played a pleasant piece with which I was unfamiliar -- George Chadwick's Symphony No. 3. I recorded it to my 5-hour cache, played it a couple of times, and then ordered the CD from Amazon when I wanted to record other stuff. Would I have bought it if my storage capacity was in the Gigabytes, and permitted easy search? Of course not.

As technology changes, IP law must change with it, to fulfill the need to compensate those who furhish the content, and to provide a mechanism by which consumers can creative a collective system got sharing the costs of the system, with each doing his or her share and no one free riding.

posted by James DeLong @ 3:16 PM | Radio

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PFF Rocks CATO

Yesterday, to show some support for three participating PFF Fellows, I attended "Copyright Controversies, Freedom, Property, Content Creation, and the DMCA," a lovely event held at CATO. Jim and Patrick have already blogged about their impressions here, here and here but, a few comments made my ears perk up. Here's one that had me thinking about the future of the music industry.

Continue reading PFF Rocks CATO . . .

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 1:44 PM | Art , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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04.26.2006

Smith Has it Right

Lamar Smith spoke words of wisdom at today's Cato conference, frankly saying far better than I could have some of the things I myself planned to say. The chairman of the House Judiciary IP Subcommittee (who was overly modest in his claim that he knows little about IP, he probably knows more than almost any member of Congress) lamented that the DMCA "is blamed for everything under the sun." He said instead it was "the foundation of our nation's digital economy." His points in defense of both the DMCA and DRM, protected under the Act:

Continue reading Smith Has it Right . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:35 PM | Access: Commons, Fair Use, Orphan Works, Public Domain , DMCA , DRM & Watermarks, etc. , Legislation and Legislators

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Whither Cato?

I am very grateful to the Cato Institute and Jim Harper for having me as a panelist at today's conference on intellectual property. I have always admired how Cato has walked that delicate line of libertarianism -- a belief in markets and a resistance to government action -- regarding intellectual property. It is a line I myself walk as a "practical" libertarian. I wonder how some of the Cato fellows and alums in the audience felt, then, when twice Cato was welcomed into the fold as a copyfighter. Rep. Zoe Lofgren and the CEA's Gary Shapiro both did so. Lofgren said she didn't recall ever stepping foot into Cato before, but "this might be one area where Cato and I form a working partnership." Shapiro urged Cato to take the issue to the Hill.

What Lofgren and Shapiro are referring to is a recent paper published by Cato that calls for, essentially, a repeal of the DMCA. The paper takes a very cynical view toward intellectual property rights and creators. At Cato, like at PFF, its papers don't speak for the institution. But several individuals at the luncheon after the conference said that Cato is now perceived as having chosen a side. If they have, I am at least grateful that they designated a minority of their seats at today's conference for defenders of IP rights and artists.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:15 PM | Academia , Free Culture Movement , Liberty and IP

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Will Somebody Just Answer the Question?

At the Cato conference today, a movie industry attendee kept asking the copyleftists who favor the abolition of copyright the question: "If we cannot protect the product, then how can we invest $200 million in a movie like King Kong?"

The responses he got were, more or less:

+ The open source software industry gives away its product and sells services;
+ The pornography industry functions without real copyright protection;
+ Much of that money goes to overpaid stars;
+ Differentiate the product -- seeing a movie in a theater is a different experience than seeing it on DVD, and DVDs can include extra features [N.B. Both are true, but so what? Without CR protection, anyone can show it in a theater without paying the studio, or can copy the extra features];
+ Perhaps such movies will not be made in the future.
+ Money can be made by ancillary products other than the movie itself. [N.B. $200 million worth?]

What he did not get was an anwer.

posted by James DeLong @ 2:20 PM | General

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04.26.2006

Why China Gets It

posted by James DeLong @ 1:36 PM | International

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04.25.2006

"Save the Internet"

posted by James DeLong @ 12:18 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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