Friday, March 13, 2015

A Printing Press is a Conduit

"Congress shall make no law...or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" - 1st amendment
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." - 9th amendment
The FCC has spoken, however poorly. Here is their "REPORT AND ORDER ON REMAND, DECLARATORY RULING, AND ORDER". Implicitly and explicitly their actions violate our rights to use morse code, or braille, or a printing press, or ones and zeroes, or not use them, or repeat what we hear, or not repeat what we hear, in whatever form, per se. The printing press in the 18th century was a conduit for conveying speech from one location to another.

The FCC claims in paragraph five hundred forty-four on page two hundred sixty-eight, they're not curtailing "free speech rights" as the people involved are merely "conduits for the speech of others". Printing presses were conduits, if one is going to argue the explicit First Amendment.

To go on... following this logic, let us protect only speech with original content. God forbid that you are only repeating what you have heard or are just writing it down without edit. Then all bets are off. You are a mere conduit.

I am speaking with these few paragraphs in defense of communicating via networks per se. Thank goodness there is a Ninth Amendment for the future none of us can imagine the words for; we cannot list the future, as even we cannot list the present, as, too, the founders could not.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Congratulation to the Pirate Party

It's been an eventful week. The Swedish Pirate Party has won a seat or two to the European Parliament, and the Supreme Court is to hear Bilski. Could the world be turning around?

In 2008, I thought that the issue of civil liberties would break through the left-right labeling to allow us Americans to rally for our rights, to raise the liberty pole once again. Will history find that this breakthrough happened first in Sweden?

Swedish pirates fire a warning shot over internet censorship
The Times
June 8, 2009

Thursday, October 30, 2008

The great patent thicket has been macheted

Software and business method patents are history, thanks to a decision by the the Court of Appeals to the Federal Circuit, except in those cases which happen to meet the general rule on patents, namely the machine-or-transformation test. Knock on wood. It's likely to be appealed to, but unlikely to be accepted by the Supreme Court. I feel the big mo. This is historic. Now the software economy can see the sky again.

Version 1.1

Update (Nov 1, 2008): It just occurred to me that any software written for a virtual machine is assuredly free now of any patentability.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Copyright - A primer on its history and its silliness

Karl Fogel presents at Google the essence of the abolitionist argument.



Fogel is my clone, my exact clone, on this topic, as presented here.

Monday, August 04, 2008

The tipping point

My sense is that the world economy will eventually be all about tipping. I've thought about this increasingly lately, and not just in the context of a world free of intellectual monopoly. Tipping accurately across the planet would foster free labor.

Today I discovered tipjoy. I look forward to finding out more about their approach and their ultimate vision on addressing the problem of micropayments. Having had great hopes in several micropayment systems from 1997 to 1999, I continue to hope, and I wish them success.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Boldrin and Levine have published THE BOOK



David Levine has announced that the long-awaited book Against Intellectual Monopoly, co-authored by Michele Boldrin and him, is now out, though it's not yet being shipped by Amazon, to which I can attest, having pre-ordered it a week ago. I read the early version last year and loved it.

Boldrin and Levine write in their blurb,

"Intellectual property" - patents and copyrights - have become controversial. We witness teenagers being sued for "pirating" music - and we observe AIDS patients in Africa dying due to lack of ability to pay for drugs that are high priced to satisfy patent holders. Are patents and copyrights essential to thriving creation and innovation - do we need them so that we all may enjoy fine music and good health? Across time and space the resounding answer is: No. So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps. This book has broad coverage of both copyrights and patents and is designed for a general audience, focusing on simple examples. The authors conclude that the only sensible policy to follow is to eliminate the patents and copyright systems as they currently exist.


Tonight after adding a Facebook "Pieces of Flair" button with the Swedish Pirate Party symbol, I happened to meander over to the US Pirate Party website, which had seen many months of apparent dormancy. I noticed no real activity until tonight. Now it looks like there've been some stirrings behind the scenes, starting with a "constitution" ratifed in Nov 2007. In Jan 2008 reportedly a 527 organization was registered. Tonight, despite periodically checking their main website for signs of life amidst the spam, was the first I became aware of this.

Sadly the positions Boldrin and Levine espouse do not seem to be welcome there, despite my efforts in 2006, making arguments on their wiki to which Levine himself contributed directly, and attending collegially the IRC meetings until the quorum flickered out. Judging from what I saw tonight on the wiki and the constitution, upon which more than a comment is due, the US Pirate Party now treats abolitionists as personae non gratae. On both patents and copyrights, the US Pirate Party 527 organization now is strictly reformist. This is odd since the Swedish Pirate Party calls for the abolition of patents. This fork did not need to happen. What to call the pirates who aren't "pirates"?

I'm looking forward to reading Boldrin and Levine's book just so that I know I'm not alone in my thoughts and imagination as a free pirate.

Update (Jul 13, 2008):
Here's a quote from Boldrin and Levine's Jan 2, 2008, online edition of Against Intellectual Monopoly, showing their abolitionist stripes,
Once the lobbyist's nose is inside the tent, the entire lobby is sure to follow, and we will once again be faced with a broken patent system and absurdly long copyright terms. To secure our prosperity and freedom we must abolish intellectual monopoly from the tent entirely. (p. 300)


Update (Jul 13, 2008, 10:52 pm Central): I just noticed on the US Pirate Party wiki, which has been damaged by spam—the footnotes are now missing (here they are in a well-formatted copy of the original)—, that one prominent member, Ray Jenson, Operations Officer of the Pirate Party of the United States, wrote this response to an argument made by David Levine,
There is no evidence that copyright serves to increase new creations??? You're obviously not a student of history.
This was Jenson's full response to Levine, as far as I can tell.

Here was David K. Levine's argument,
If I may add here. The bottom line is that they do get paid. The situation with patent and copyright is different, and in both cases there are a great many ways of getting paid. The problem is that there is a seemingly compelling theory of why people won't get paid - without IPR no one needs to pay because consumers will prefer to wait until it is available for free rather than pay the creator. There are two defects in this argument, one most relevant to patent, one to copyright. In the case of patent, the argument ignores the property right that exists without IPR, the property right in the first copy. Unless someone pays for the first copy, the innovator has no reason to make known the innovation. The right to go first is extremely valuable in fact. It is easy to debate the theory on either side. But the facts are pretty clear: there is no evidence that patents increase innovation, and plentiful evidence they do not. Two particularly good sources: Lerner's study [1] of 150 years of data on patents and innovation, and the careful study of the software industry by Bessen and Hunt [2] showing that patents reduced rather than increased innovation. Basically, while patents increase the return from innovation, they increase the cost due the need to acquire IPRs in order to innovate. So from a theoretical standpoint, patents can either increase or decrease innovation, depending on which effect dominates. In software it seems it is the latter; in general, it seems that it is something of a wash. It is important here to recognize that in addition to the effect on innovation patents have an impact on the usefulness of innovation. Hence, to justify patents from an economic point of view, not only must they increase innovation, they must increase innovation substantially enough to offset the other costs. The evidence is strong that they do not.

Turning to copyright, there is again no evidence that copyright serves to increase new creations. Simply looking at the time-series of copyright changes against the number of copyrights shows this pretty clearly - see for example my work with Boldrin [3]. The best comparative study is the book by Scherer Quarternotes and Banknotes documenting the fact that copyright had little or no effect on the output of classical music. The best pro-copyright argument is one of "now things are different because the electronic reproduction is so amazingly fast and cheap." This argument also is defective. First, it is the amount you can earn relative to the cost of production that matters - the same technology that makes electronic reproduction so amazingly fast and cheap also makes the cost of production amazingly cheap. Second, it ignores the potential for selling complementary items. The obvious examples are recorded music increases the demand for the creators live performances. So there is a perfectly viable model where recorded music is given away for free as advertising for the expensive concerts where the creator makes his living. The working example of this is the open-source software music, where the software is generally not only free as in freedom, but also free as in beer, with the profit coming from the sale of consulting services. added by David K. Levine, 10 November 2006.

I'm saddened that this Pirate Party organization has now excluded those who advocate abolition of either patents or copyrights from their ranks, as I understand it.

Levine, backing up my argument that the party allow abolitionists to participate as officers and members, wrote,
I urge support for Casey on this point. I've added material below explaining why patent and copyright are an intrinsically bad idea. It is possible to have principled disagreement on this point. I would urge the point of agreement to be that things have gone too far - that is, we agree that improvements need to be made. Does the party need to take a stand also against abolition? Would it not make more sense to be agnostic on this point? There are many of us who support abolition, but we support also sensible changes in existing law. added by David K. Levine 22 November 2006

Friday, April 11, 2008

The pirate's dilemma

Phenomenal book. Best story so far—I'm halfway through—is on the evolution of the game industry.



Update (Jul 26, 2008):