UNR Students for Liberty » intellectual property rights

How Copyright Laws, a Judge, and a Bad Decision Have Crippled the World

Barry Belmont — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:58:18 +0000

Today, Judge Denny Chin ruled against Google‘s plans to make available some 12 million books in a digital library that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. “While the digitisation of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” Chin wrote in his decision, Google “simply go[es] too far, [...] giv[ing] Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.”

More depressing, however, was the fact that the judge rejected the agreement Google reached with the plaintiffs allowing them to continue the digitization and redistribution of books in exchange for an cool $125 million annually. Sounds like a fair deal. But the judge said ‘No’ citing that the ownership (copyrights) of many of the works scanned by Google could not be established.

If you didn’t catch that, I’m going to repeat it, because it is that awful: Since no one is sure who owns the copyright of a particular piece of work, no one is allowed to touch it. What!? Why? That’s like saying you can’t pick up a penny (or a dollar bill) from the street because you can’t properly trace its origins. That. does. not. make. any. sense.

And the judge was able to make this decision so easily because it is not he that will ultimately bear this cost. It’s the hundreds of millions of people who will lack access to tens of millions of books and the vast catalog of information associated with it. This judge’s decision doesn’t just minutely hurt every single human being, it damages the human condition.

What reason could their possibly be to prevent the access to free and open exchange of information? Is the world not better with the internet, with Wikipedia, with knowledge? Cloistering information such that it is not allowed into the hands of others has never been the path of progress and this will be no exception.

It is better to light the world one booklight at a time than to see it cast in darkness as the next chapter of humanity is written.

Intellectual Property, Insomnia, and Lulz

Barry Belmont — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:06:55 +0000

What happens when you combine eclectic, off-the-wall musical tastes, a healthy sense of mockery for intellectual property, and an unceasing bout of insomnia? Well…a post like this.

Some of you may recall from our (three?) intellectual property meetings that things can get awful tricky when trying to parse out copying ideas, borrowing themes, being influenced, and converging tracts of thought. How do you tell which is which? Where do you draw the line? By what criteria? What each of these rhetorical questions is meant to emphasize is the utter arbitrariness involved in such disputes.

So consider these two rather odd songs. The first is “Skah of Iran” by Canadian ska band, The Planet Smashers. The thing I want you to take away is the chorus/chant “Skah of Iran!” at 0:33.

Now, stomach as much as you can of the next song, “Trollhammeren” by the Finnish folk metal band, Finntroll. The important part for your consideration is the chorus/chant “Trollhammeren!” at 0:45.

The astute among you will notice that the dah.da.da.dan! in both is exactly the same. And that’s okay. However, if this were a Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber (sp?), or Kanye West (is he still popular?) song, people would recognize it immediately and no doubt a lawsuit would be drawn up by the record company to ‘protect’ the intellectual property of their artists. After all this is what happens all too often in the “real world.” But since these are two no-name bands, there is nothing that could be strong-armed out of either of them and hence, they are free to have the same chorus.

If this isn’t the hallmark of the arbitrary, I don’t know what is.

And there you have it, the absurdity of intellectual property summarized through Iran and trolls.

Before the Debate – Intellectual Property 1

Barry Belmont — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:12:10 +0000

This Thursday will likely prove to be another rousing debate amongst ‘promoters’ and leave-aloners of free market capitalism. Arguably one of the most contentious issues throughout all of libertarian philosophy, namely intellectual property rights, will be discussed at length with a focus on the central issue: is there a net benefit or loss associated with the granting of intellectual property rights.

To get this debate started, please enjoy this sort of mini-debate which touches on many of the key points of the coming debate:

Fashion and Intellectual Property Rights

Barry Belmont — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:18:46 +0000

Gotta love the TEDTalks. Here is Johanna Blakely showing the beauty of an open field of productivity and its effects on creativity. She shows how the absence of intellectual property boosts the abilities and success of the fashion industry in this excellent video. Who knew libertarianism could look so good?

Property: A Prelude

Barry Belmont — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:26:31 +0000

It seems that we so-called libertarians have a few questions we need to answer. One of the biggest dilemmas highlighted at our previous meeting, Intellectual Property Rights, was apparently how to define “property” and how “intellectual property” is akin to this “property.” A rather sad minority of us really grasped what property should mean. In point of fact, much of the club wanted to resort to what Wikipedia had to say on the issue. This is a pathetic and lackluster way to establish the essence of property.

As I will be giving a lecture March 25 which will rely heavily upon the idea of property rights (the lecture itself is about Austrian Economics), I feel it is necessary to give just a taste of what is to come. Consider briefly the necessity of these things for the existence of property:

1. Land – By this it is meant that property must come from some natural resource. You can replace this term with “raw material” or “malleable good” or whatever should so happen to suit your fancy. The idea behind it is basically that in order to be property it needs to be “something” which can be manipulated, controlled, etc. In other words property must be some combination of your “land” with your

2. Labor – Simple and easy bullet point of most theories of property. This is the idea that one must do something to Something in order to claim that Something as their own. Hardly anyone would say by simply walking across an open field that it belongs to you, but if one were to tiller and enrich the soil, well, then, maybe that field might become yours. But only if this mixture of land and labor has

3. Excludability – This seems to be the big one that no one quite pinned down. Tons of other ideas were bandied about from “intrinsic value” to “reasonable use” to “intent to profit” at our Intellectual Property Rights meeting, but each of these misses the key point. In order for someone to claim dominion over something — for instance, our tilled field — it must be possible to exclude others from it. If this condition isn’t satisfied, then something cannot be owned. We can put a fence around our field, hence it is excludable, thus it is able to be owned.

But can anyone really be excluded from using the alphabet or the positive integers or Newton’s second law? No. But by the same logic can anyone be excluded from the idea of the steam engine or the chemical formulation of aspirin? There is no Platonic ideal that people can claim dominion over. No one owns the idea of the iPod: people simply own iPods and the means to make iPods. This is because the information — what is “intellectual property” but a claim over information? — exists and is nonexcludable. Newton couldn’t claim to own his laws because his laws, as information, are unownable.

Maybe this’ll help.

Probably not.

Campus Discussion – Intellectual Property Rights

Travis Hagen — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:30:29 +0000

Meeting: Intellectual Property Rights – Here we go again. We are revisiting one of our most divisive meetings to date and determining, once and for all, whether copyrights and patents are justifiable/necessary within a libertarian society. How is a modern society to deal with the exclusivity of information? We hope to find out.
Where: JCSU 317
When: 7PM – 8:30PM on Thursday, February 25, 2010