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Another solid argument for serious copyright reform. It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of

Another solid argument for serious copyright reform. It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over and over in recent years. I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just an also-ran. Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets then many are deprived of access to the information they contain. I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that price and I know many others can't either. I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing of the country. Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge.

beebeepka 5y ago
Regarding textbook pricing. I once ran into a person that said no one should be able to educate themselves/be educated for free. Guy was American. One of the weirdest things I've heard my entire life. Imagine having people with similar mindset running the show
- anovikov 5y ago
  He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt. Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
  - tester756 5y ago
    >main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
    - anovikov 5y ago
      That's the thing. It has become too common already to give people any actual benefit: it was a way to stand out and it no longer is.
      - nosianu 5y ago
        No benefit? They have a much better education. > it was a way to stand out and it no longer is Education is only good if you stand out? What a discussion.
      - tester756 5y ago
        how about partying whole college, extending childhood?
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I advised a friend to skip the "weeder" classes in college and take the "honors" version. The reason was the profs in the weeders were only there because they had to be there, and the same with the students. In the honors classes, the students were there because they wanted to learn, and the profs were there because they wanted to teach. He tried both, and discovered that while he had to work a lot harder in the honors class, it was a lot more fun being in that environment.
  - bserge 5y ago
    It's not just about the jobs, there are things to learn in anything you choose and the connections you make can be great. There's always going to be people who complain about it, yeah. A small minority, though.
  - 5y ago
- hilbert42 5y ago
  I know. I've heard exactly the same myself. It's a mindset that I think I've figured out after hearing it on multiple occasions but it makes no sense for a society to think this way, nor does it in anyway benefit the country.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think you misunderstand the use of 'free'. In the USA, free can be used to mean free to the consumer, but paid by someone else. The US has uncontrolled education costs, a surplus of irrelevant college degrees, and many object to taxes to pay for others. For example, If someone can't afford to buy a house and support a family, in part due to taxes, they understandably wouldn't want to pay more taxes to so that someone else can enjoy some fanciful degree. There is an abundance of very good low cost colleges, but many advocate that elite colleges with marble walls that cost 1-200k+ should be payed for with public funds
msg3 5y ago
I think there are far more examples of developing countries ignoring copyright - the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights until the 1890s.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "...the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights until the 1890s." That's very true, and it's only in recent decades that the US has been a signatory to the Berne Convention, however that's not true for patents. In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity. BTW, you're right about other countries ignoring copyright but I only mentioned China because of its huge impact, essentially it's the quintessential example.
  - kragen 5y ago
    It's even more true for patents: not only did the US not enforce foreign patents before the 01890s, it didn't enforce them after the 01890s either, and still doesn't today. Neither do any other countries. The PCT doesn't work like the Berne Convention.
    - hilbert42 5y ago
      Those who've signed it are supposedly bound by its framework. Alternatively, they wheel the fact out when it suits them/it's to their advantage in trade negotiations, etc.
      - kragen 5y ago
        Yes, and PCT compliance is actually fairly common, but its framework does not commit them to enforce foreign patents; rather the contrary.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    > In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity. Which probably had more to do with the US officially endorsing patent theft and even paying out premiums to people who brought them stolen technology/knowledge. Not because the US was so respecting of other countries patents, quite the opposite was actually the case [0]. [0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news-theft-international-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news...
agumonkey 5y ago
> to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge. could you give examples, I'd love to read more about that
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Easy to find examples, here one that gained notoriety ad some kindergartens were sued: https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/can-i-sing-happy-birthday-in-public/1974 https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/can-i-sing-happy-birthda...
- kragen 5y ago
  Happy Birthday is probably the best-known example.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  There are many instances and they take many forms. It's a subject too big to do full justice here so I'll give a few instances/headings to start things off. - Treaties between nations that either extended copyright law or force the nation with the most liberal copyright laws into doing a back flip over copyright liberalization. - Changing copyright law as in the US where stuff in the public domain went back into copyright (complicated, read Wiki, etc.) This was the result of corporate lobbying. - The recent scouring of stuff that was effectively in the public domain and clearly reclassifing it into a copyrighted domain. For example manufacturer service manuals that were once made readily available were withdrawn, or restricted to authoritized service personnel only, or were reissued after being heavily redacted. This is part of the Right to Repair argument in that an unstated right to repair had always been in existence but when manufacturers withdrew once freely available information about products we now have to fight for a new right that not long ago no one would ever have thought as a right. - Copyright owners lobbying government to tighten/change the law on ophan works - those ones where there's no known copyright owner so they would have less competition. If I recall about 70% of all works fall into this category. BTW, there's a lot more to this than I'm mentioning here. - Iteas and stuff that's been common practice and thus not documented gatherered up and put into the private (now-copyrighted) domain by unscrupulous carpetbaggers. - Programmers using public domain information, modifying it in trivial ways then claiming copyright over it. Obfuscation through copmliation makes it difficult to unravel these tricks. There's much more, here's a link I've just found that adds a few more: https://blog.kitware.com/stealing-from-the-public-domain/ https://blog.kitware.com/stealing-from-the-public-domain/
FabHK 5y ago
I've first studied in Germany, then later UK and US. The prices of textbooks in the latter two shocked me. In Germany, as a general rule, you didn't need to buy any textbooks. The professor would lecture, the exercises were handed out printed and were fully self-contained (not "Exercise 12.3 on page 114"), and there were any number of relevant books available in the library. If the professor sold his own book, people in class would get a "Hörerschein" and get it at a further discount from the already low price (say $20 instead of $30). Student clubs would sell "scripts" containing the lecture material, summaries, and formulae. A 2006 article [1] suggests US students need to spend around $1000 per annum for text books. (The article compares the text book market to the prescription drug market.) In Germany, $1000 covers tuition including the "Semesterticket" (pass for the entire public transit system, state wide), and probably all the books you need. I mean, if even The Economist complains about textbook prices [2], then you know there's a problem. [1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497025.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497025.pdf [2] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2014/08/16/why-textbooks-cost-so-much https://www.economist.com/united-states/2014/08/16/why-textb...
- hilbert42 5y ago
  Right. The cost of textbooks is outrageous and any scheme that can reduce their cost should be tried. The most objectionable and outrageous trick major publishers do is to regularly bring out new editions wherein they deliberately change the the chapter and exercise numbers, this then almost renders older editions useless for any student who has one cannot easily follow what's going on. When the teacher says go to exercise number '123' and their book says '89' an inordinate amount of time is wasted chasing up fellow students with newer books to help identity it. This not only seriously disadvantages poorer less well off students but also it's wasteful on resources as older books are just dumped as the consequence and become landfill. In my opinion, publishers who are caught doing this ought to be blackballed by universities, educational institutions, etc. in that they not recommend those textbooks for their courses.
- fourtrees 5y ago
  Yeah, textbook prices have risen following tuition prices to absurd levels. I didn't buy a single textbook during my education in Germany (well maybe one for the language exam). Everything given to read seemed like it was taken from the doctor's' notes. My ticket could get me to Berlin from Saxony for free I recall. And the penalty for schwartzfahren in town was more of a joke. I think I had to pay the whole price to visit Czechia though... On topic, I can believe that lax IP laws were a factor in the rise of Germany as an industrial powerhouse. And I'm far from convinced that America's strict laws benefit more than a very few.
jollybean 5y ago
The comparison between a 'catch up' and 'leading economy' isn't very apt. The best thing a 'catch up' economy can do is copy other, better companies from abroad. But once you have to 'lead' in a sector, it's a lot harder if you can't recoup your investments. China is leading in 5G and 6G patents for this reason.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
>In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses. Not only that but there would be incentive for every printer to print everything they could get their hands on, in quantities enough to saturate the markets, with the quickest to act at scale gaining the market share advantage. Knowing people, this could give an exponentially unfair disadvantage to cultures which restricted this type of activity beyond a certain extent. >The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself. Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country. It was like they got the "information superhighway" of the horse-and-buggy era exclusively without parallel, and new scientific data (always controversial in some way) was heavily involved consuming significant bandwidth, plus an ever-increasing multitude of users rapidly consuming information & new sources arising (so things could go viral) like never before. Maybe even allowing for some deeper kind of echo chamber to have more widespread resoundment. It would also seem like any division between the well-informed and the badly-misinformed could be magnified. What could go wrong? Then when copyrights did become established, the flow of new scientific information was badly choked so people just had to make do with the old stuff. Still that might be a more informed (or misinformed as the case may be) position than others who had never had any period of information freedom at all.

beebeepka 5y ago

Regarding textbook pricing. I once ran into a person that said no one should be able to educate themselves/be educated for free. Guy was American. One of the weirdest things I've heard my entire life. Imagine having people with similar mindset running the show

anovikov 5y ago
He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt. Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
- tester756 5y ago
  >main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
  - anovikov 5y ago
    That's the thing. It has become too common already to give people any actual benefit: it was a way to stand out and it no longer is.
    - nosianu 5y ago
      No benefit? They have a much better education. > it was a way to stand out and it no longer is Education is only good if you stand out? What a discussion.
    - tester756 5y ago
      how about partying whole college, extending childhood?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I advised a friend to skip the "weeder" classes in college and take the "honors" version. The reason was the profs in the weeders were only there because they had to be there, and the same with the students. In the honors classes, the students were there because they wanted to learn, and the profs were there because they wanted to teach. He tried both, and discovered that while he had to work a lot harder in the honors class, it was a lot more fun being in that environment.
- bserge 5y ago
  It's not just about the jobs, there are things to learn in anything you choose and the connections you make can be great. There's always going to be people who complain about it, yeah. A small minority, though.
- 5y ago
hilbert42 5y ago
I know. I've heard exactly the same myself. It's a mindset that I think I've figured out after hearing it on multiple occasions but it makes no sense for a society to think this way, nor does it in anyway benefit the country.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I think you misunderstand the use of 'free'. In the USA, free can be used to mean free to the consumer, but paid by someone else. The US has uncontrolled education costs, a surplus of irrelevant college degrees, and many object to taxes to pay for others. For example, If someone can't afford to buy a house and support a family, in part due to taxes, they understandably wouldn't want to pay more taxes to so that someone else can enjoy some fanciful degree. There is an abundance of very good low cost colleges, but many advocate that elite colleges with marble walls that cost 1-200k+ should be payed for with public funds

msg3 5y ago

I think there are far more examples of developing countries ignoring copyright - the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights until the 1890s.

hilbert42 5y ago
"...the US didn't recognise foreign copyrights until the 1890s." That's very true, and it's only in recent decades that the US has been a signatory to the Berne Convention, however that's not true for patents. In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity. BTW, you're right about other countries ignoring copyright but I only mentioned China because of its huge impact, essentially it's the quintessential example.
- kragen 5y ago
  It's even more true for patents: not only did the US not enforce foreign patents before the 01890s, it didn't enforce them after the 01890s either, and still doesn't today. Neither do any other countries. The PCT doesn't work like the Berne Convention.
  - hilbert42 5y ago
    Those who've signed it are supposedly bound by its framework. Alternatively, they wheel the fact out when it suits them/it's to their advantage in trade negotiations, etc.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Yes, and PCT compliance is actually fairly common, but its framework does not commit them to enforce foreign patents; rather the contrary.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > In the late 1800s New Britain, Connecticut was known as the Patent Capital of the world because so many patents were issued to those in the vicinity. Which probably had more to do with the US officially endorsing patent theft and even paying out premiums to people who brought them stolen technology/knowledge. Not because the US was so respecting of other countries patents, quite the opposite was actually the case [0]. [0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news-theft-international-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news...

agumonkey 5y ago

> to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge. could you give examples, I'd love to read more about that

estaseuropano 5y ago
Easy to find examples, here one that gained notoriety ad some kindergartens were sued: https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/can-i-sing-happy-birthday-in-public/1974 https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/can-i-sing-happy-birthda...
kragen 5y ago
Happy Birthday is probably the best-known example.
hilbert42 5y ago
There are many instances and they take many forms. It's a subject too big to do full justice here so I'll give a few instances/headings to start things off. - Treaties between nations that either extended copyright law or force the nation with the most liberal copyright laws into doing a back flip over copyright liberalization. - Changing copyright law as in the US where stuff in the public domain went back into copyright (complicated, read Wiki, etc.) This was the result of corporate lobbying. - The recent scouring of stuff that was effectively in the public domain and clearly reclassifing it into a copyrighted domain. For example manufacturer service manuals that were once made readily available were withdrawn, or restricted to authoritized service personnel only, or were reissued after being heavily redacted. This is part of the Right to Repair argument in that an unstated right to repair had always been in existence but when manufacturers withdrew once freely available information about products we now have to fight for a new right that not long ago no one would ever have thought as a right. - Copyright owners lobbying government to tighten/change the law on ophan works - those ones where there's no known copyright owner so they would have less competition. If I recall about 70% of all works fall into this category. BTW, there's a lot more to this than I'm mentioning here. - Iteas and stuff that's been common practice and thus not documented gatherered up and put into the private (now-copyrighted) domain by unscrupulous carpetbaggers. - Programmers using public domain information, modifying it in trivial ways then claiming copyright over it. Obfuscation through copmliation makes it difficult to unravel these tricks. There's much more, here's a link I've just found that adds a few more: https://blog.kitware.com/stealing-from-the-public-domain/ https://blog.kitware.com/stealing-from-the-public-domain/

FabHK 5y ago

I've first studied in Germany, then later UK and US. The prices of textbooks in the latter two shocked me. In Germany, as a general rule, you didn't need to buy any textbooks. The professor would lecture, the exercises were handed out printed and were fully self-contained (not "Exercise 12.3 on page 114"), and there were any number of relevant books available in the library. If the professor sold his own book, people in class would get a "Hörerschein" and get it at a further discount from the already low price (say $20 instead of $30). Student clubs would sell "scripts" containing the lecture material, summaries, and formulae. A 2006 article [1] suggests US students need to spend around $1000 per annum for text books. (The article compares the text book market to the prescription drug market.) In Germany, $1000 covers tuition including the "Semesterticket" (pass for the entire public transit system, state wide), and probably all the books you need. I mean, if even The Economist complains about textbook prices [2], then you know there's a problem. [1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497025.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497025.pdf [2] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2014/08/16/why-textbooks-cost-so-much https://www.economist.com/united-states/2014/08/16/why-textb...

hilbert42 5y ago
Right. The cost of textbooks is outrageous and any scheme that can reduce their cost should be tried. The most objectionable and outrageous trick major publishers do is to regularly bring out new editions wherein they deliberately change the the chapter and exercise numbers, this then almost renders older editions useless for any student who has one cannot easily follow what's going on. When the teacher says go to exercise number '123' and their book says '89' an inordinate amount of time is wasted chasing up fellow students with newer books to help identity it. This not only seriously disadvantages poorer less well off students but also it's wasteful on resources as older books are just dumped as the consequence and become landfill. In my opinion, publishers who are caught doing this ought to be blackballed by universities, educational institutions, etc. in that they not recommend those textbooks for their courses.
fourtrees 5y ago
Yeah, textbook prices have risen following tuition prices to absurd levels. I didn't buy a single textbook during my education in Germany (well maybe one for the language exam). Everything given to read seemed like it was taken from the doctor's' notes. My ticket could get me to Berlin from Saxony for free I recall. And the penalty for schwartzfahren in town was more of a joke. I think I had to pay the whole price to visit Czechia though... On topic, I can believe that lax IP laws were a factor in the rise of Germany as an industrial powerhouse. And I'm far from convinced that America's strict laws benefit more than a very few.

jollybean 5y ago

The comparison between a 'catch up' and 'leading economy' isn't very apt. The best thing a 'catch up' economy can do is copy other, better companies from abroad. But once you have to 'lead' in a sector, it's a lot harder if you can't recoup your investments. China is leading in 5G and 6G patents for this reason.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

>In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses. Not only that but there would be incentive for every printer to print everything they could get their hands on, in quantities enough to saturate the markets, with the quickest to act at scale gaining the market share advantage. Knowing people, this could give an exponentially unfair disadvantage to cultures which restricted this type of activity beyond a certain extent. >The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself. Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country. It was like they got the "information superhighway" of the horse-and-buggy era exclusively without parallel, and new scientific data (always controversial in some way) was heavily involved consuming significant bandwidth, plus an ever-increasing multitude of users rapidly consuming information & new sources arising (so things could go viral) like never before. Maybe even allowing for some deeper kind of echo chamber to have more widespread resoundment. It would also seem like any division between the well-informed and the badly-misinformed could be magnified. What could go wrong? Then when copyrights did become established, the flow of new scientific information was badly choked so people just had to make do with the old stuff. Still that might be a more informed (or misinformed as the case may be) position than others who had never had any period of information freedom at all.