5 ms·

It's quite interesting to see a successful political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.

by iwwr 15y ago

muuh-gnu 15y ago
This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it". The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers. > not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it. And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI
davidw 15y ago
Hopefully if they actually stay in power for any length of time they'll figure out that there's a baby in the bathwater.
- davidw 15y ago
  If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a compromise, a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer worse off due to the lack of these goods. Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob... Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
  - toyg 15y ago
    When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory. If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win. At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome. (Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
    - davidw 15y ago
      In terms of debate tactics, you're probably right.
  - hxa7241 15y ago
    It is by no means well proven that having IP at all is overall beneficial. So rather than saying we definitely need it, it is quite possible we would be better off with none. What do Landes and Posner say? (in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.) "Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare." and: "It is a reasonable surmise [as well] that some core patent and copyright protection is welfare-improving." ('surmise' meaning of course: 'a supposition that something is true without having evidence to confirm it')
    - davidw 15y ago
      One of the things I like about economics is 'revealed preferences' - how people act rather than what they say. Via 'look inside this book' on Amazon, the book's copyright is Copyright 2003, "all rights reserved". Apparently they didn't feel strongly enough about laxer IP to fight their publisher for publishing it under different terms. http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Structure-Intellectual-Property-Law/dp/0674012046#reader_0674012046 http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Structure-Intellectual-Proper... I don't think the current situation is ideal, but without IP, how would people be compensated for creating? One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way. You couldn't create a lot of things that require a big payback without some form of IP. This is presumably why they "surmise" that we're better off with it than without it. It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods", although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal. That it's difficult is without a doubt; in part because it becomes a question of what the ideal level of production of various "IP goods" is. I would reaffirm my point that the simplistic answer of throwing the whole thing out, though, risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It's quite interesting to see a successful political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.

by iwwr 15y ago

It's quite interesting to see a successful political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.

muuh-gnu 15y ago

This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it". The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers. > not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it. And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI

davidw 15y ago

Hopefully if they actually stay in power for any length of time they'll figure out that there's a baby in the bathwater.

davidw 15y ago
If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a compromise, a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer worse off due to the lack of these goods. Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob... Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
- toyg 15y ago
  When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory. If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win. At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome. (Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
  - davidw 15y ago
    In terms of debate tactics, you're probably right.
- hxa7241 15y ago
  It is by no means well proven that having IP at all is overall beneficial. So rather than saying we definitely need it, it is quite possible we would be better off with none. What do Landes and Posner say? (in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.) "Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare." and: "It is a reasonable surmise [as well] that some core patent and copyright protection is welfare-improving." ('surmise' meaning of course: 'a supposition that something is true without having evidence to confirm it')
  - davidw 15y ago
    One of the things I like about economics is 'revealed preferences' - how people act rather than what they say. Via 'look inside this book' on Amazon, the book's copyright is Copyright 2003, "all rights reserved". Apparently they didn't feel strongly enough about laxer IP to fight their publisher for publishing it under different terms. http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Structure-Intellectual-Property-Law/dp/0674012046#reader_0674012046 http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Structure-Intellectual-Proper... I don't think the current situation is ideal, but without IP, how would people be compensated for creating? One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way. You couldn't create a lot of things that require a big payback without some form of IP. This is presumably why they "surmise" that we're better off with it than without it. It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods", although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal. That it's difficult is without a doubt; in part because it becomes a question of what the ideal level of production of various "IP goods" is. I would reaffirm my point that the simplistic answer of throwing the whole thing out, though, risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.