Some people have asked me why I am so hostile to the whole idea of "intellectual property". Other people have asked why do I easily "give my book away" providing free downloads while at the same time selling it. If I am not worried about my "intellectual property" rights? The answer is "no, I'm not".
First of all, let us look at this "intellectual property" phrase. You'll see some pages on the Internet about "the history of intellectual property", when in reality they are explaining the history of Copyright, or they are explaining the history of Patents. They never say anything about "intellectual property", they only say about Copyright or Patents as "intellectual property".
In reality the phrase "intellectual property" is an artificial term made up officially in 1967 with the creation of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the United Nations. Its role is to place artificially completely disparate legal concepts (Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets, etc.) under one artificial concept of "intellectual property". Why? Because if there is anything in common about Copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets is that they are monopolies which multinational and transnational corporations are using to monopolize expressions, ideas, logos, and other kinds of documents.
The similarities apparently end there. When you examine the concepts covered by the legal term "intellectual property", they have little else in common. To illustrate how different are these concepts, let me give you a comparison between Copyright and Patents:
1. A work has a Copyright in the moment that work is created. In fact, the work does not need to be registered in the Library of Congress for it to have a Copyright. Patents are only issued as a result of a patent application and only if the idea for an invention qualifies according to certain guidelines.
2. Copyright covers expressions of works, they never cover ideas. Patents, on the other hand, do cover ideas. To give an example of the difference, if you are a computer programmer, and you want to create a chat room, you can create it using C++, and another programmer can use Java. Even when you both use the same idea, the way they are expressed in different computer languages is different. Therefore, you have Copyright on your work, and the other programmer has a different Copyright on his or her work. Now, if a third person is granted a patent on the idea of "chat rooms", then he or she can sue both of you.
3. Patents only last 20 years, and after that, the ideas they cover can be used by the public. In the case of Copyright, works last (outrageously) longer, a lifetime of an author plus 70 years.
4. Since Copyright covers only ways of expressing an idea, if there is only one way of expressing an idea, then everyone can copy exactly what is expressed. In the simplest of examples, no one can have a copyright on the equation 3²+4²=5², in the most complex of examples, everyone can copy the whole phone book data exactly in the same order. Why? Think about it ... how else is a phone book organized except using first last names in alphabetical order? This is not theoretical, the Supreme Court of the US determined this was the case in Feist Publications, Inc v. Rural Tel. Service Co., 449 US 350 (1991). A patent, on the other hand, is an absolute monopoly, no one else can use it unless it is licensed by the patent owner.
5. Copyright uses the notion of "fair use" of copyrighted material: educational purposes, copying certain copyrighted material (not copying it completely), copying books out of print, re-selling book to another person, etc. This is not the case of patents. Again, patents are an absolute monopoly. Even users of these patented ideas can be sued if they do not use the idea as determined by the licensor.
6. Copyright began as a means to pay authors for the stationaries' commercial use of their works. Patents began in the Republic of Venice in 1474 as a grant of patent over inventions.
I could continue the great list of differences between Copyright and Patents. If we compare both concepts with Trademarks, we could even have a much greater list. For example, trademarks can last indefinitely just as long as the logo in question is being used to identify products. Even some trademarks enter into the public domain because the products in question are identified by the public with the name of the logo. This gives permission to many companies to use the same name. "Pampers" and "Elevator" are examples of names we use in every-day life which were originally trademarks, but later entered into the public domain because of public ordinary use. So, "intellectual property" is an artificial name that puts together many areas of law which are totally different, whose history is completely different, which cover completely different things, which have different effects on society, which behave in very different ways, and so on.
So, why did corporations create the notion of "intellectual property"? First, since they are all monopolies, and wanted to expand that monopoly globally, corporations have used these notions to make these monopolies to work for every country in the world. Secondly, it gives the public the illusion that these different concepts (copyright, patents, trademarks) are very similar, when, in reality, they are not. That would lead the public to misunderstand completely these concepts, and we see this constantly when people always talk about "intellectual property". Third, it gives the public the impression that, since copyright, patents and trademarks, are "properties", then people who have these "properties" have a natural right to them. Of course, this is not true, expressions and ideas are not "ownable". The fact that one wrote a book, or composed music, or created a computer program, does not give anyone a natural right over expressions. The fact that we had an idea of an invention does not give anyone a natural right over ideas. The natural right of expressions and ideas is to be shared with the public, so the public can use those expressions or ideas to promote culture.
If that is the case, why do Copyright, Patents, Trademarks exist? Copyright and Patents exist not as a natural right, not as ends in themselves, but as means to promote arts and sciences. In the case of Trademarks, they exist to identify the products in question so that people do not confuse one product made by one company with another product.
One of the big problems with the "intellectual property" ideology, as I stated before, is that people believe that Copyright, Patents and Trademarks are all alike. So, when, for instance, in the free software movement, we say we are against software patents, people use the term "intellectual property" to say that we are against "intellectual property" in software. And then it appears that we are against Copyright and Trademarks in the case of software. This is not the case. We are against all forms of software patenting (or in more precise terms, we oppose to patenting ideas which are applied to programs), but we do use Copyright in a different way than usual, and we have no problem with trademarks. On the contrary, trademarks should be used to identify different free programs (for example to identify Amarok and not confuse it with XMMS, or not to confuse Debian GNU/Linux with Ubuntu Linux). As we can see, the use of the term "intellectual property" is an invitation to confuse the issues, and have given people a hard time thinking clearly about the different concepts that are being called under the term "intellectual property". I'm almost reaching Richard Stallman's own conclusions that any talk about "intellectual property" make people reach foolish conclusions. So, if you want to think clearly, do not talk about "intellectual property": talk about Copyright, talk about Patents, talk about Trademarks, or talk about trade secrets.
Another problem that I have with the term "intellectual property" is that, again, people see expressions and ideas as being owned as a natural right by "someone". Of course, when we think about Copyright, we think about authors. When we think about Patents, we think about inventors. In theory, this would be true; in the real world, however, most of those taking huge advantage of these concepts are big corporations. Most corporations assume control of the Copyrights of authors and artists, and in the case of Patents, the amount of patents that corporations have is enough to keep a monopoly over products in the marketplace, and to displace any single inventor who wants to make something useful with his or her individual patented ideas over their inventions. To make matters worse, patents are supposed to cover genuine new ideas, but that is not the case the majority of the cases. Many patents cover insignificant ideas, or small changes made to products in order to keep monopolizing the ideas in the market. Worse still, patents cover lots of areas that were not originally intended to be patented (living things), and cover other areas which are socially harmful (software patents, patents over ideas applied to medicine ... the latter I consider to be a crime against humanity).
There is another aspect of thinking expressions as being "property". Copyright was originally created as a bargain where the public gives away their natural right to make copies and in exchange they receive the benefit of having authors writing more works. In the beginnings of the printing press, where only stationaries and publishers could copy and not the public in general, this kind of bargain was an advantageous bargain, since the net result was that the public was gaining. After technologies appeared that made copying by the public much easier, then copyright was seen as a way to keep a balance among three sectors: the authors, the publishers, and the public.
Of course the point that I'm making here, is that Copyright reserves some rights for the author, but it also reserves some rights for the public. The concept of "fair use" exists precisely because of this, because the public has a right to use copyrighted material in many legitimate ways without asking the authors' permission. The authors have, under Copyright, a limited and temporal monopoly over copying their works.
The ideology of "intellectual property" obscures this very important fact, because conceiving expressions as "property", and Copyright as "intellectual property", they are regarded by the public as a property of the author, and that the author has an absolute say over their works. If that was the case, there would not be any fair use rights, and Copyright would be perpetual. The destiny of all copyrighted works is to enter into the public domain, and rightly so.
But generally, authors do not receive the real benefits of Copyright. They usually enter into contracts unfavorable to them for the benefit of corporations. As a result, corporations benefit from the conception of Copyright as "intellectual property" and use this argument to control the public. Notice that originally Copyright was created to control publishers, it was an industrial regulation. Now the current Copyright laws make the publishers and record labels control the public.
This has harmed society tremendously. One of the harms people experience concerning this way of controlling the public can be seen with Digital Restriction Management (DRM). When you buy a book, you can take it wherever you want to, re-read it whenever you want, and even take it anywhere in the world to read it again and again. However, in the case of CDs and DVDs it is different. John Buckman had the hard experience of having his wife not being able to play her music when she went from Europe to the US. She thought that the whole thing of DRM was just a geeky issue that deserved little attention. When she moved to the US she found out that she could not listen to her music. If you buy a DVD in Europe, and you want to watch it in the United States, you will not be able, since DRM restricts you from watching DVD bought in one continent to be watched in another continent. Sometimes, if you play a game in one state of the Union, you won't be able to play from that same CD or DVD in another state. This is one of the reasons John Buckman made the music sold in Magnatune.com completely DRM free.
A case close to home comes to mind. The whole ideology of "intellectual property" has prevented knowledge from being available to the public, hence making academic work much harm. There are lots and lots of documents in Puerto Rico which should be digitally available to the public. Much of them could be scanned or transcribed to a digital page to make them available to the public. Yet, the idea that "maybe" the concept of "intellectual property" would apply to such documents (when most of these are in the public domain) have made people who have these documents restrict people of very valuable information. The jealousy and "protective" behavior over documents which should be freely available to the public online is irrational at best.
I take as a good example of freedom of information what the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango is doing in Colombia. They are transcribing to the net books that are out of circulation and making them freely available to the public as long as no commercial use of them is made. This made my life so very easy when I had to make historical research about black slavery resistance and the establishment of free community of former slaves in Colombia. Take for instance the two books written by Nina S. de Friedemann:
*La saga del negro
*Ma Ngombe, guerreros y ganaderos en Palenque
Also, the "intellectual property" mentality has harmed students big time, because many of them here in Puerto Rico cannot afford to buy many textbooks which cost over $60.00. Sometimes, they even cost over $100.00 to buy. To buy three textbooks for three courses alone means spending from $150.00 to $300.00. We are here being very conservative. Most students have to buy more than one book for their courses. We could say: "Well ... but this is covered by Pell Grants." But the majority of the times, in Puerto Rico, the check does not exceed $120.00. One time, I even heard that a student received $4.90 in check to be able to buy the books he needed (of course, he couldn't buy any with that check). This means that for students, most of them have to rely on photocopying from someone who has bought the book. However, the publishers punish institutions, colleges, universities, and specially students, if they engage in this kind of practice. But we ask, why do textbook need to be hardcover, have shiny pages, be printed in color (except in some justifiable circumstances), etc.? Why do textbooks have to be that expensive? And to make matters even worse, there is a scam involved in all of this: a Biology textbook sold today can cost about $70.00, but the new edition of the textbook has some minor revisions while the text keeps being fundamentally the same, and then they sell it for $75.00.
Another harm is produced to teachers when the texts are not available to the public. In fields like philosophy, having the texts, essays, books, are essential to our field. Yet, because students are not able to photocopy without some restrictions, and libraries are constantly threatened by corporations to avoid making the copies of documents available. and bookstores do not have all the texts needed to all students, then academics in the Philosophy field are screwed.
But forget about Philosophy, what about programming? Because of legal gems like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), programmers cannot do legitimate academic works on network security. As everyone in the field knows, contrary to common sense, the best way to make a software secure is to make its vulnerabilities as available to the public as they can. Free software and open source software are famous in this aspect: because the source code is free for everyone to see, everyone can see its flaws; and because everyone is free to modify it, everyone can suggest ways to repair the security flaws. That's why studies have shown that most free programs check fix their security flaws more rapidly than in proprietary closed source software. But in the case of proprietary software, any attempt to uncover its flaws, even for academic purposes, would be a crime. If programmers are not allowed to do this, the software vendors and their clients would live in a fools' paradise where the cracker has already exploited the security flaws ages ago, and by then it would be too late to fix such a problem.
Which leads us to the fact that free software, software which people are free to copy, modify, and re-distribute is best for educational purposes than proprietary software, since it makes it easier for people to learn programming, or to create programs that let people use them in different fields (biology, physics, statistics, computer animation (Pixar uses Blender, which is free software, and also GNU/Linux OS), office suites, etc.) according to people's needs, and not corporate needs. Proprietary software generally create an environment of spying, or controlling the public, of limiting and monopolizing market and services. This is also harmful to society.
I could go on forever about the harms of current Copyright laws and Patent laws, but it is clear how the original intent of these areas of law have been perverted with their treatment as "intellectual property".
To Clear Up ....
With the war against "Intellectual Property", I'm not declaring war on Copyright, Patents and Trademark. I'm having a war against that phrase, that concept that distorts all the original intentions of these areas of law. It is an invitation to clear thinking on these matters in order to try to avoid in the best way all the harm done to society.
Copyright, Patents and Trademarks make sense, and I'm not against these legal concepts as such. But there should be serious reforms.
In the case of Trademarks, there is no much problem, except the excessive intrusion of the logos of big business in our lives. For more on this subject, I suggest the reading of Naomi Klein's No Logo and visit her site NoLogo.org.
In the case of patents, all forms of software patents should be eliminated. For more on why this should be the case, read Richard Stallman's speech titled "Software Patents - Obstacles to Software Development". There have been thorough studies which have shown that software patents are a very serious obstacle to areas of increasing innovation, such as in the field of software. Look at this paper written by James Bessen and Eric Maskin of the Department of Economics in MIT titled Sequential Innovation, Patents and Imitation, a study which served to support the Deutche Bank's conclusion that Europe should avoid software patents. Patents on ideas applied to medicine should be eliminated also, as I said before, it is a crime against humanity. And last, but not least, the elimination of patents on ideas applied to living things should be eliminated too, it has harmed society tremendously.
However, in the case of Copyright, we must reach again a balance between the authors, the publishers and the public, even if it means less money for companies. The Internet is a fabulous tool for this and it is not being exploited as it should be. For example, instead of making students buy books, and sue the asses of photocopying small companies, the state should provide each of these small companies with the resources to provide a server with a database of the texts being photocopied. If a student wishes to photocopy a chapter of a book, perhaps they could go to these small companies, ask for the photocopy, and they would provide it to the student. Meanwhile, this would be recorded in the database, and a portion of the profit of that business would go to the publisher and the author.
Another way of dealing with the problems concerning copying material is to not prevent people from using non-commercial copies of works, just limit it to commercial ones, so that Copyright becomes an industrial regulation again, much easier to enforce than in the case of public regulation. I'm not stating this theorically, this is something that I'm currently practicing. For those of you who don't know, my book is under a Creative Commons License which lets people copy my book non-commercially.
Out of print works should be available on the Internet, just as all works which are now in the public domain. We should also limit the time span of Copyright, and return to a policy that values the public domain, because it is necessary for the development of culture. As I have argued before, all our culture builds on the past: works of art, music, literature, ideas ... they are all based from works of the past, and even corporations have benefited greatly with the public domain.
Finally, we should explore alternative models to substitute the archaic way of trying to deliver information and music to the public. I do favor musicians and I am an author of a book, and places like Magnatune.com among other models that let people share music non-commercially have shown that it is perfectly possible to let people copy and share music, and still have a business. Specifically it has to be a model that lets people pay for musicians to keep creating works, while developing licensing schemes for all those who wish to use music commercially. The same with DVDs and movies. The free software movement has also shown that business models based on code freely available to the public and be allowed to copy it and modify it, can be successful and promote far more global competition than in the case of proprietary software. It can even stimulate small businesses based on service, where people are not restricted by software vendors to solve their problems, but they can also go to the "programmer down the street" and pay him to solve the problem.
Even if people do not want to see this becoming reality, technology is moving towards that direction. Sooner or later, more people are going to ask for their rights to use copyrighted works, the rights to use certain ideas, the right to copy a software or an information to help our neighbor, among others. And all of this will not be incompatible with business. The RIAA thought that the VCR was to the movie industry, just as the Boston Strangler was to a woman home alone. As soon as the Supreme Court validated the public's right to copy movies to be used in homes, and for legitimate uses, the music and movie industries found new business models. In fact, the VCR helped them scale their business better. The same could happen here.
About making my book downloadable for free to the public? I suggest you read Cory Doctorow's speech called E-Books: Neither E nor Books where he shows that e-books are intensely complementary with printed version of books. That freely available e-books, DRM free, can help scale better the availability of knowledge about the book, and make many people buy the book, even when some people read it for free out of the Internet.
So, please, without any remorse whatsoever feel free to download my book Underdetermination of Science - Part I: The Relation Between Formal Science and Natural Science and invite others you know may be interested to do the same.
First of all, let us look at this "intellectual property" phrase. You'll see some pages on the Internet about "the history of intellectual property", when in reality they are explaining the history of Copyright, or they are explaining the history of Patents. They never say anything about "intellectual property", they only say about Copyright or Patents as "intellectual property".
In reality the phrase "intellectual property" is an artificial term made up officially in 1967 with the creation of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the United Nations. Its role is to place artificially completely disparate legal concepts (Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets, etc.) under one artificial concept of "intellectual property". Why? Because if there is anything in common about Copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets is that they are monopolies which multinational and transnational corporations are using to monopolize expressions, ideas, logos, and other kinds of documents.
The similarities apparently end there. When you examine the concepts covered by the legal term "intellectual property", they have little else in common. To illustrate how different are these concepts, let me give you a comparison between Copyright and Patents:
1. A work has a Copyright in the moment that work is created. In fact, the work does not need to be registered in the Library of Congress for it to have a Copyright. Patents are only issued as a result of a patent application and only if the idea for an invention qualifies according to certain guidelines.
2. Copyright covers expressions of works, they never cover ideas. Patents, on the other hand, do cover ideas. To give an example of the difference, if you are a computer programmer, and you want to create a chat room, you can create it using C++, and another programmer can use Java. Even when you both use the same idea, the way they are expressed in different computer languages is different. Therefore, you have Copyright on your work, and the other programmer has a different Copyright on his or her work. Now, if a third person is granted a patent on the idea of "chat rooms", then he or she can sue both of you.
3. Patents only last 20 years, and after that, the ideas they cover can be used by the public. In the case of Copyright, works last (outrageously) longer, a lifetime of an author plus 70 years.
4. Since Copyright covers only ways of expressing an idea, if there is only one way of expressing an idea, then everyone can copy exactly what is expressed. In the simplest of examples, no one can have a copyright on the equation 3²+4²=5², in the most complex of examples, everyone can copy the whole phone book data exactly in the same order. Why? Think about it ... how else is a phone book organized except using first last names in alphabetical order? This is not theoretical, the Supreme Court of the US determined this was the case in Feist Publications, Inc v. Rural Tel. Service Co., 449 US 350 (1991). A patent, on the other hand, is an absolute monopoly, no one else can use it unless it is licensed by the patent owner.
5. Copyright uses the notion of "fair use" of copyrighted material: educational purposes, copying certain copyrighted material (not copying it completely), copying books out of print, re-selling book to another person, etc. This is not the case of patents. Again, patents are an absolute monopoly. Even users of these patented ideas can be sued if they do not use the idea as determined by the licensor.
6. Copyright began as a means to pay authors for the stationaries' commercial use of their works. Patents began in the Republic of Venice in 1474 as a grant of patent over inventions.
I could continue the great list of differences between Copyright and Patents. If we compare both concepts with Trademarks, we could even have a much greater list. For example, trademarks can last indefinitely just as long as the logo in question is being used to identify products. Even some trademarks enter into the public domain because the products in question are identified by the public with the name of the logo. This gives permission to many companies to use the same name. "Pampers" and "Elevator" are examples of names we use in every-day life which were originally trademarks, but later entered into the public domain because of public ordinary use. So, "intellectual property" is an artificial name that puts together many areas of law which are totally different, whose history is completely different, which cover completely different things, which have different effects on society, which behave in very different ways, and so on.
So, why did corporations create the notion of "intellectual property"? First, since they are all monopolies, and wanted to expand that monopoly globally, corporations have used these notions to make these monopolies to work for every country in the world. Secondly, it gives the public the illusion that these different concepts (copyright, patents, trademarks) are very similar, when, in reality, they are not. That would lead the public to misunderstand completely these concepts, and we see this constantly when people always talk about "intellectual property". Third, it gives the public the impression that, since copyright, patents and trademarks, are "properties", then people who have these "properties" have a natural right to them. Of course, this is not true, expressions and ideas are not "ownable". The fact that one wrote a book, or composed music, or created a computer program, does not give anyone a natural right over expressions. The fact that we had an idea of an invention does not give anyone a natural right over ideas. The natural right of expressions and ideas is to be shared with the public, so the public can use those expressions or ideas to promote culture.
If that is the case, why do Copyright, Patents, Trademarks exist? Copyright and Patents exist not as a natural right, not as ends in themselves, but as means to promote arts and sciences. In the case of Trademarks, they exist to identify the products in question so that people do not confuse one product made by one company with another product.
One of the big problems with the "intellectual property" ideology, as I stated before, is that people believe that Copyright, Patents and Trademarks are all alike. So, when, for instance, in the free software movement, we say we are against software patents, people use the term "intellectual property" to say that we are against "intellectual property" in software. And then it appears that we are against Copyright and Trademarks in the case of software. This is not the case. We are against all forms of software patenting (or in more precise terms, we oppose to patenting ideas which are applied to programs), but we do use Copyright in a different way than usual, and we have no problem with trademarks. On the contrary, trademarks should be used to identify different free programs (for example to identify Amarok and not confuse it with XMMS, or not to confuse Debian GNU/Linux with Ubuntu Linux). As we can see, the use of the term "intellectual property" is an invitation to confuse the issues, and have given people a hard time thinking clearly about the different concepts that are being called under the term "intellectual property". I'm almost reaching Richard Stallman's own conclusions that any talk about "intellectual property" make people reach foolish conclusions. So, if you want to think clearly, do not talk about "intellectual property": talk about Copyright, talk about Patents, talk about Trademarks, or talk about trade secrets.
Another problem that I have with the term "intellectual property" is that, again, people see expressions and ideas as being owned as a natural right by "someone". Of course, when we think about Copyright, we think about authors. When we think about Patents, we think about inventors. In theory, this would be true; in the real world, however, most of those taking huge advantage of these concepts are big corporations. Most corporations assume control of the Copyrights of authors and artists, and in the case of Patents, the amount of patents that corporations have is enough to keep a monopoly over products in the marketplace, and to displace any single inventor who wants to make something useful with his or her individual patented ideas over their inventions. To make matters worse, patents are supposed to cover genuine new ideas, but that is not the case the majority of the cases. Many patents cover insignificant ideas, or small changes made to products in order to keep monopolizing the ideas in the market. Worse still, patents cover lots of areas that were not originally intended to be patented (living things), and cover other areas which are socially harmful (software patents, patents over ideas applied to medicine ... the latter I consider to be a crime against humanity).
There is another aspect of thinking expressions as being "property". Copyright was originally created as a bargain where the public gives away their natural right to make copies and in exchange they receive the benefit of having authors writing more works. In the beginnings of the printing press, where only stationaries and publishers could copy and not the public in general, this kind of bargain was an advantageous bargain, since the net result was that the public was gaining. After technologies appeared that made copying by the public much easier, then copyright was seen as a way to keep a balance among three sectors: the authors, the publishers, and the public.
Of course the point that I'm making here, is that Copyright reserves some rights for the author, but it also reserves some rights for the public. The concept of "fair use" exists precisely because of this, because the public has a right to use copyrighted material in many legitimate ways without asking the authors' permission. The authors have, under Copyright, a limited and temporal monopoly over copying their works.
The ideology of "intellectual property" obscures this very important fact, because conceiving expressions as "property", and Copyright as "intellectual property", they are regarded by the public as a property of the author, and that the author has an absolute say over their works. If that was the case, there would not be any fair use rights, and Copyright would be perpetual. The destiny of all copyrighted works is to enter into the public domain, and rightly so.
But generally, authors do not receive the real benefits of Copyright. They usually enter into contracts unfavorable to them for the benefit of corporations. As a result, corporations benefit from the conception of Copyright as "intellectual property" and use this argument to control the public. Notice that originally Copyright was created to control publishers, it was an industrial regulation. Now the current Copyright laws make the publishers and record labels control the public.
This has harmed society tremendously. One of the harms people experience concerning this way of controlling the public can be seen with Digital Restriction Management (DRM). When you buy a book, you can take it wherever you want to, re-read it whenever you want, and even take it anywhere in the world to read it again and again. However, in the case of CDs and DVDs it is different. John Buckman had the hard experience of having his wife not being able to play her music when she went from Europe to the US. She thought that the whole thing of DRM was just a geeky issue that deserved little attention. When she moved to the US she found out that she could not listen to her music. If you buy a DVD in Europe, and you want to watch it in the United States, you will not be able, since DRM restricts you from watching DVD bought in one continent to be watched in another continent. Sometimes, if you play a game in one state of the Union, you won't be able to play from that same CD or DVD in another state. This is one of the reasons John Buckman made the music sold in Magnatune.com completely DRM free.
A case close to home comes to mind. The whole ideology of "intellectual property" has prevented knowledge from being available to the public, hence making academic work much harm. There are lots and lots of documents in Puerto Rico which should be digitally available to the public. Much of them could be scanned or transcribed to a digital page to make them available to the public. Yet, the idea that "maybe" the concept of "intellectual property" would apply to such documents (when most of these are in the public domain) have made people who have these documents restrict people of very valuable information. The jealousy and "protective" behavior over documents which should be freely available to the public online is irrational at best.
I take as a good example of freedom of information what the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango is doing in Colombia. They are transcribing to the net books that are out of circulation and making them freely available to the public as long as no commercial use of them is made. This made my life so very easy when I had to make historical research about black slavery resistance and the establishment of free community of former slaves in Colombia. Take for instance the two books written by Nina S. de Friedemann:
*La saga del negro
*Ma Ngombe, guerreros y ganaderos en Palenque
Also, the "intellectual property" mentality has harmed students big time, because many of them here in Puerto Rico cannot afford to buy many textbooks which cost over $60.00. Sometimes, they even cost over $100.00 to buy. To buy three textbooks for three courses alone means spending from $150.00 to $300.00. We are here being very conservative. Most students have to buy more than one book for their courses. We could say: "Well ... but this is covered by Pell Grants." But the majority of the times, in Puerto Rico, the check does not exceed $120.00. One time, I even heard that a student received $4.90 in check to be able to buy the books he needed (of course, he couldn't buy any with that check). This means that for students, most of them have to rely on photocopying from someone who has bought the book. However, the publishers punish institutions, colleges, universities, and specially students, if they engage in this kind of practice. But we ask, why do textbook need to be hardcover, have shiny pages, be printed in color (except in some justifiable circumstances), etc.? Why do textbooks have to be that expensive? And to make matters even worse, there is a scam involved in all of this: a Biology textbook sold today can cost about $70.00, but the new edition of the textbook has some minor revisions while the text keeps being fundamentally the same, and then they sell it for $75.00.
Another harm is produced to teachers when the texts are not available to the public. In fields like philosophy, having the texts, essays, books, are essential to our field. Yet, because students are not able to photocopy without some restrictions, and libraries are constantly threatened by corporations to avoid making the copies of documents available. and bookstores do not have all the texts needed to all students, then academics in the Philosophy field are screwed.
But forget about Philosophy, what about programming? Because of legal gems like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), programmers cannot do legitimate academic works on network security. As everyone in the field knows, contrary to common sense, the best way to make a software secure is to make its vulnerabilities as available to the public as they can. Free software and open source software are famous in this aspect: because the source code is free for everyone to see, everyone can see its flaws; and because everyone is free to modify it, everyone can suggest ways to repair the security flaws. That's why studies have shown that most free programs check fix their security flaws more rapidly than in proprietary closed source software. But in the case of proprietary software, any attempt to uncover its flaws, even for academic purposes, would be a crime. If programmers are not allowed to do this, the software vendors and their clients would live in a fools' paradise where the cracker has already exploited the security flaws ages ago, and by then it would be too late to fix such a problem.
Which leads us to the fact that free software, software which people are free to copy, modify, and re-distribute is best for educational purposes than proprietary software, since it makes it easier for people to learn programming, or to create programs that let people use them in different fields (biology, physics, statistics, computer animation (Pixar uses Blender, which is free software, and also GNU/Linux OS), office suites, etc.) according to people's needs, and not corporate needs. Proprietary software generally create an environment of spying, or controlling the public, of limiting and monopolizing market and services. This is also harmful to society.
I could go on forever about the harms of current Copyright laws and Patent laws, but it is clear how the original intent of these areas of law have been perverted with their treatment as "intellectual property".
To Clear Up ....
With the war against "Intellectual Property", I'm not declaring war on Copyright, Patents and Trademark. I'm having a war against that phrase, that concept that distorts all the original intentions of these areas of law. It is an invitation to clear thinking on these matters in order to try to avoid in the best way all the harm done to society.
Copyright, Patents and Trademarks make sense, and I'm not against these legal concepts as such. But there should be serious reforms.
In the case of Trademarks, there is no much problem, except the excessive intrusion of the logos of big business in our lives. For more on this subject, I suggest the reading of Naomi Klein's No Logo and visit her site NoLogo.org.
In the case of patents, all forms of software patents should be eliminated. For more on why this should be the case, read Richard Stallman's speech titled "Software Patents - Obstacles to Software Development". There have been thorough studies which have shown that software patents are a very serious obstacle to areas of increasing innovation, such as in the field of software. Look at this paper written by James Bessen and Eric Maskin of the Department of Economics in MIT titled Sequential Innovation, Patents and Imitation, a study which served to support the Deutche Bank's conclusion that Europe should avoid software patents. Patents on ideas applied to medicine should be eliminated also, as I said before, it is a crime against humanity. And last, but not least, the elimination of patents on ideas applied to living things should be eliminated too, it has harmed society tremendously.
However, in the case of Copyright, we must reach again a balance between the authors, the publishers and the public, even if it means less money for companies. The Internet is a fabulous tool for this and it is not being exploited as it should be. For example, instead of making students buy books, and sue the asses of photocopying small companies, the state should provide each of these small companies with the resources to provide a server with a database of the texts being photocopied. If a student wishes to photocopy a chapter of a book, perhaps they could go to these small companies, ask for the photocopy, and they would provide it to the student. Meanwhile, this would be recorded in the database, and a portion of the profit of that business would go to the publisher and the author.
Another way of dealing with the problems concerning copying material is to not prevent people from using non-commercial copies of works, just limit it to commercial ones, so that Copyright becomes an industrial regulation again, much easier to enforce than in the case of public regulation. I'm not stating this theorically, this is something that I'm currently practicing. For those of you who don't know, my book is under a Creative Commons License which lets people copy my book non-commercially.
Out of print works should be available on the Internet, just as all works which are now in the public domain. We should also limit the time span of Copyright, and return to a policy that values the public domain, because it is necessary for the development of culture. As I have argued before, all our culture builds on the past: works of art, music, literature, ideas ... they are all based from works of the past, and even corporations have benefited greatly with the public domain.
Finally, we should explore alternative models to substitute the archaic way of trying to deliver information and music to the public. I do favor musicians and I am an author of a book, and places like Magnatune.com among other models that let people share music non-commercially have shown that it is perfectly possible to let people copy and share music, and still have a business. Specifically it has to be a model that lets people pay for musicians to keep creating works, while developing licensing schemes for all those who wish to use music commercially. The same with DVDs and movies. The free software movement has also shown that business models based on code freely available to the public and be allowed to copy it and modify it, can be successful and promote far more global competition than in the case of proprietary software. It can even stimulate small businesses based on service, where people are not restricted by software vendors to solve their problems, but they can also go to the "programmer down the street" and pay him to solve the problem.
Even if people do not want to see this becoming reality, technology is moving towards that direction. Sooner or later, more people are going to ask for their rights to use copyrighted works, the rights to use certain ideas, the right to copy a software or an information to help our neighbor, among others. And all of this will not be incompatible with business. The RIAA thought that the VCR was to the movie industry, just as the Boston Strangler was to a woman home alone. As soon as the Supreme Court validated the public's right to copy movies to be used in homes, and for legitimate uses, the music and movie industries found new business models. In fact, the VCR helped them scale their business better. The same could happen here.
About making my book downloadable for free to the public? I suggest you read Cory Doctorow's speech called E-Books: Neither E nor Books where he shows that e-books are intensely complementary with printed version of books. That freely available e-books, DRM free, can help scale better the availability of knowledge about the book, and make many people buy the book, even when some people read it for free out of the Internet.
So, please, without any remorse whatsoever feel free to download my book Underdetermination of Science - Part I: The Relation Between Formal Science and Natural Science and invite others you know may be interested to do the same.
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