(Strictly speaking this should have been Stephan's post, but he seems to have handed it off to me.) Disagree with my view below that copyright is absurd? Wondering what would happen to the movie industry without copyright? Luckily the marvelous Mike Masnick manage to answer both questions in a single post. If you still don't believe, go take a look at Star Wreck.

Alexandre de Ridder sends along a couple of links. The first is a speech by Eben Moglen Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture. The second is a piece called The Absurdity of Copyright by a fellow named Dr.Godfried-Willem RAES. Now the interesting thing is that while both agree (as do I) that copyright is an absurdity - I think that the Free Software people have it right, and I'm less sure about Dr. Raes...let me quote the part that makes me doubtful. Dr. Raes starts from the following thought:

Information cannot be possessed. It is not property since it cannot be taken away. It is object nor energy, but essentially form.

I don't really want to debate that point; it is true or false depending on what you mean about information. Specifically: it seems to be true of information in the abstract, but not in the concrete. That is, the statement would seem to be true of the fundamental theorem of calculus - and equally false when applied to any specific copy of the fundamental theorem of calculus (embodied in a book, in the head of a specific person, etc.) My point is simply that abstract information is irrelevant - and copies of ideas are pretty ordinary as economic commodities go, subject to quite ordinary profit and loss calculations. And here is where I think the Free Software people have the key point - in the ordinary profit and loss calculation, copies probably aren't that valuable, and in the future it will be the market for services that counts.

Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.

Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.

The Economist is organizing an online debate about Copyright and wrongs. It starts today with opening statements and will continue for about a week. "Comments from the floor" are allowed, too, so there is opportunity to participate.

Check out Prof. Adam Mossoff's recent guest blogging at Volokh.com where he discusses the history of the U.S. patent system via how the sewing machine developed, and the slew of lawsuits it generated in order to try and stifle competition.

Mossoff seems to advance some conclusions that I take issue with (i.e., that legal innovations such as 'patent pools' are solutions worth considering to help help resolve patent troll problems - as opposed to more fundamental reforms of patent law), but its still stimulating reading.

Read it all on one page here:

http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1240849478.shtml

This past week the Office of the United States Trade Representative released its annual 301 report, and once again named Canada for failing to develop more stringent intellectual property laws. This time, however, Canada has been placed on the Priority Watch 301 list along with China, Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Chile, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand, and Venezuela.

Eric H. Smith of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) seems particularly pleased that Canada has been elevated in its disgrace. According to Smith, "Canada remains woefully behind the rest of the developed world (and many countries in the developing world as well) in adopting critical legislation that will facilitate the development of a healthy online marketplace for copyright materials."

The USTR Report states, "The United States continues to have serious concerns with Canada's failure to accede to and implement the WIPO Internet Treaties, which Canada signed in 1997. We urge Canada to enact legislation in the near term to strengthen its copyright laws and implement these treaties."

At the heart of this grievance lies Canada's unwillingness to adopt the measures implemented by the United States in 1998, namely the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That the DMCA exceeds the requirements of the WIPO treaties is left unsaid, along with the inconvenient detail that Canadian law continues to meet its international obligations.

As is always the case, there are many Canadians quite competent to dispute the allegations of the USTR: for example, Howard Knopf and Michael Geist. Yet my favourite rebuttal came two years ago, from Bruce Lehman, chief architect of the DMCA. Speaking at a conference at McGill University in March 2007, he said, "Canada has the benefit of the soon-to-be decade of experience of the U.S. ... in some areas our policies have not worked out too well... Attempts at copyright control have not been successful; at least with regards to music."

Lehman placed the development of the DMCA as, in part, a consequence of President Bill Clinton's campaign promise to capture the economic benefits of the Information Superhighway. The phenomenon that is the Internet has changed considerably over the last decade, and business models previously unimagined have taken root. Current Canadian policy makers would be showing a lack of judgement if they mindlessly patterned Canadian law on the DMCA.

My colleague John Nachbar pointed out the following interesting fact to me.

The big US case right now is the MPAA against RealNetworks

My understanding is that the ability to copy or rip a DVD for own use is a legal grey area. Actually stripping out the drm is supposedly illegal under the law as it now stands (a stupid law, in my view). But the RealNetworks software does *not* strip out the drm. This case is the anti-napster: RealNetworks is not being accused of facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material. They are being accused of giving the owners of DVDs a way to convert them into a more convenient form for their own use.

Nothing to add.

It's all those Northern pirates

The Economist has a startling article this week on China's drive to develop patents as part of its development policy and to put it ahead among the world's leading economic powers link here. " The country's patent office leads the world in patent applications, more than 800,000 of which were filed in 2008. ...Most are for "petty" patents: middling technology that undergoes minimal review and receives only a 10-year term....[But] Chinese firms are increasingly filing "invention" patents that are rigorously scrutinized and receive 20 years of protection, as in the West." "Since 2006 more patent lawsuits have been filed in China than anywhere else, even litigious America. Most pit domestic firms against each other, but in recent years foreigners have found themselves on the receiving end too."

For those of us who regard patents as anti-competitive, leading to monopoly, this can only be seen as unwelcome. When intellectual property becomes an arm of the state in international competition, the world's consumers will lose and fights over IP will become sources of international conflict. Such conflicts need a lot more attention than they have been given to date. But attenuating them, much less resolving them, does not seem likely. What goes around comes around.