Eben Moglen: "Sharing is how knowledge grows. Owning is how knowledge shrinks… Sharing produces technological innovation and social benefit. Ownership does not."

“We began our activities in changing the law applicable to software with a political purpose in mind. The purpose was to support freedom.

Our belief was, and remains, that only a form of knowledge sharing which permits everyone to learn is safe for political liberty as well as economic innovation.

We don’t consider this to be our invention. We consider this to be Galileo’s invention. We consider the right to tell the truth and to share scientific knowledge without permission and without control by law to be one of the greatest achievements of European civilization.

We regard what we do as in the main line of the activity of the people of Liberty who brought a new Europe into being in 1789. We consider ourselves to be acting on behalf of the very idea of shared knowledge and common self-improvement, which is the achievement of European science.

We reject wholeheartedly that this is either some danger or something to be careful about.

Every government on Earth should now be aware that the largest IT firms in the world, including Microsoft, cannot live or operate without free software. Every government on Earth is aware that no bank, no telecommunications firm, no energy company can exist or operate without free software.

I am disappointed, I must admit, among all the things that make me happy and delighted and honored to be here today, that in 2013 we’re still talking about this. We shouldn’t be. The data are long since in. The changes in the industry have long since been registered.
…

But whatever may be the case about our persisting licensing structures, the documents on which we do business, which are a tiny bit of this story, the larger principles should no longer be in question: Sharing is how knowledge grows. Owning is how knowledge shrinks.

The GPL has demonstrated that, with respect to computer software, sharing produces technological innovation and social benefit. Ownership does not.
…

The Principle of Freedom, the free exchange of technological knowledge, and the Rights of Users with respect to technology, are however not trivialities. They are the central institutions of technology that serves Human purposes in the 21st century.

And I will close only with one more statement: Technology which doesn’t serve human purposes in the 21st century, serves inhuman purposes.”

• Eben Moglen

Transcript: http://lepartipirate.be/node/1891

Woodie Guthrie: “anybody caught singin it without our permission…”

A declaration on his recordings from the 1940s by folk musician Woodie Guthrie:
‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do’.

Despite the declaration, these days a number of companies continue to claim copyright over Guthrie’s songs.

• Woodie Guthrie

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mbc3l-5rHHgum7Nm361K4wmklQJP15nLTUIUlWN9dbs/edit?pli=1#

“Intellectual property” in fact leads to escalation of conflict, the opposite of real property

Why is it that sometimes your society will respect your ownership claims to certain property?

“Physical objects bear an inherent conflict within themselves because of their physical properties: they can only be made up of specific atoms and occupy specific space and so cannot be owned multiple times at once. Avoiding the conflict that stems from those properties is advantageous from a pure game theory perspective. Life’s much easier if we don’t have to fight each other every second of every day. That’s where the idea of property and ownership come in. A community that didn’t respect SOME form of property consensus (even if it’s just “everything belongs to the high priest!”) would not get very far.
Legitimate property is therefore a tool for reducing conflict inherent in society. Things that are (in practical terms) abundant, like …(air when we are outdoors)… or a piece of publicly available knowledge, are not a source of conflict, therefore it makes no sense to call it anyone’s property. “Intellectual property” in fact leads to escalation of conflict, since it requires violent enforcement of unprovable claims against parts of established and otherwise uncontested property.”

• Piotr Witold Von Fedorowski

http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/30/the-copyright-monopoly-is-a-legal-featherweight-compared-to-property-rights/

The Stationers came up with the Idea of copyright, but with a sleight of hand.

“In the long history of literature, copying was a significant cost to the person or organisation requiring a copy as they usually had to provide the parchment and either the time or a scribe to carry out the copying. As a result of this, most copying of books was carried out by the church, and the noble who could afford this activity.”

“When the printing press arrived in Europe, it not only reduced the price of books, but also made them available to many more people. This was a threat to the established order of the nobles and the church, and this resulted in a battle to control knowledge leading to control of printing. This control in England was administered by The Stationers Company and over most of the content by the church via Imprimatur.
Both these were a means of censoring the information that was printed by the State and the Church, and were a means of controlling what authors were allowed to publish.”

“In England, after the Censoring function of the Stationers company had been abolished, the Stationers came up with the Idea of copyright, so that the could maintain their control over the allocation of titles to printers. Note the sleight of hand in copyright, grant it automatically to an author, who has to transfer the right to the stationers to get the book published. This maintained their control over printing.”

“The natural right of an Author is that of deciding whether or not to publish a work. By long tradition, they also have a right of attribution, that is being named as the author of a work. Modern copyright is a recent invention which was created for the convenience and regulation of the publishing industry, rather than the right of an Author to control the actual copying of their work.”

“It is worth noting, that as far as I am able to tell, performance rights in music are an invention of the recording industry, and that under the original copyright rules, only sheet music was protectable. Again copyright is associated with the publishers, in this case record labels, rather than the creators of works.
Given the damage it is doing to society as the publishers try to maintain their control over copying, intrusive monitoring and arbitrary take down powers, it should be abolished, or drastically weakened.”

• printersMate

December 31, 2012 – 11:20

The Copyright Monopoly Is A Legal Featherweight Compared To Property Rights

“If you cant compete against the $300 copying machine, you’re saying you can’t compete at all. because there is already several billion of them sold into the market.”

mine

Rufus Pollock: Copyright is a Monopoly! (And isn’t like normal property)

The equation of ‘intellectual property’ (IP) such as copyright with (traditional “real”) property is frequently made, especially by those advocating its extension. However, this equation is fundamentally erroneous and results in very serious misapprehension of the nature and effect of IP. In particular, patents and copyright confer monopolies in a way that ownership of real property does not.

How is it different?
‘Real’ property like an apple, a car or an acre of land can only ever be used by one person/entity at one time — in economist’s terminlogy they are ‘rival’ goods. Giving someone exclusive rights over them therefore does no harm — only one person can have it and via trade we can ensure the person who values it most ends up with it 1. Here, creating property rights leads to an efficient outcome (at least in our simple case — in more complex setups we would need to think about complementarities, transaction costs etc).

By contrast, a copyright in, for example, a particular text confers not simply control over this or that particular book containing the text but over every instance of such a book. This is the very essence of a monopoly: being sole supplier of some good!

And it has all of the standard consequences of the monopoly: prices rise relative to what they would have been and access is reduced relative to its efficient level in which the price equals the cost of reproduction (i.e. we have a “deadweight” loss).

Furthermore, this cost of monopoly can be particularly serious when we have extensive “reuse” — i.e. new work builds upon old — as the monopoly inhibits not only access by users but the creation of new creative work.

The difference then between “normal” property and “intellectual property” is the difference between giving someone control of one apple (the apple they bought say) and control of all apples. The latter results in significant harm and inefficiency while the former does not.

Now, of course, the fact copyright is a monopoly does not mean it is per se bad. After all, we are deeply concerned with the incentives to create and the copyright monopoly helps provide such incentives.

We may therefore be willing to tolerate the ex-post costs of a monopoly because of the ex-ante benefits it provides in incentivizing and rewarding the creation of new work. But this is fundamentally a trade-off and one which gets worse as the monopoly is extended — a completely different situation from that with “real” property.

This point is made elegantly by Macaulay (opposing a copyright term extension in the 1840s):

“It is good that authors should be remunerated, and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil: but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

This is not something one would write about normal, ‘real’, property.

• Rufus Pollock

http://rufuspollock.org/2011/01/31/copyright-is-a-monopoly-and-isnt-like-normal-property/

Profit without Copyright: “Copies have been devalued. There’s so much of it it’s like confetti.”

Piracy
The issue with piracy is really an issue of entrepreneurs insisting that they use a business model of printing and selling copies (that have been devalued) and not understanding why their copies arent worth as much as they think it does.

Whereas in the 20th century, printing copies required giant printing press which costs hundreds of thousands (if not millions) in investment capital. in the 21st century, the commoner can buy one for several hundred. So there was a paradigm shift. For something like $300 and a $20 monthly internet connection, u can rival the output of a factory from 20 years ago.
What happens when every household can produce as much as what costed millions to produce a decade ago? It creates an abundance.
Because basic economics tells us that prices tend towards marginal costs. The marginal costs for producing a copy is now $0.00001, so cheap, that people are willing to produce it for free. That’s why it is free, not because people stole it, but because competing printers bid each other down repeatedly until the price of it hits rock bottom.

There’s so much of it it’s like confetti.

The problem is that entrepreneurs are stuck in the 20th century business model, they want to sell confetti but they don’t understand why consumers don’t want to buy that anymore. Therefore, the fix to the problem is simply to produce things that haven’t been devalued yet. Like your labour. The act of creating a new movie or a new video game is always going to be scarce, because I cannot pirate a movie into existence. I have to offer to pay the artist to motivate him/her to exchange his or her services in creating new movies.

That is why you are seeing in post-netflix world, a market that is mass-emigrating over to this model of production. Just the other day we saw crowd funding exceed $10 million http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/10/4410436/chris-roberts-celebrates-star-citizens-10-million-crowdfund
In 2012, kickstarter, just one private player alone, has facilitated for more funding to the arts than the entire National Endowment of the Arts!

Of course, I’m not saying the first hundred copies that the artist sells is not extremely valuable. But once it is sold into the world, there is no enforcement ability capable of preventing purchasers from manufacturing more copies for their friends & neighbours (short of a totalitarian police state).

That is why even in the absence of scarcity of copies, you can still make money. Just because the copies have been devalued, it does not mean that there is no business model.
Apart from selling your labour, you can also sell:

• Immediacy (i want it in my folder here as soon as it comes out. I will pay $3).
• Personalization (i want u to record a brand new version of this track just for me)
• Support (i want 24/7 support for this piece of software. I want online play.)
• Accessibility (i want it on all my platforms. i want it on smartphone)
• Convenience (i dont want to fiddle with file transfer. u do that for me)
• Embodiment (i want a boxed copy. i want it to line my shelf)
• Generosity (i want it bcuz u are so generous. i like how u sold me $400 worth of games for $25)
• Attention (https://sharingisliberty.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/attention-economy/)
• Patronage (i want to pay you. i like how 95% of my money goes to u)
• Transparency (i like how u tell me how much u make, other sellers dont tell me this, aka humble bundle)

^ None of these things can be pirated.

Russian Hacker Creates Unauthorized PC Port of Xbox game: The Dishwasher VS

A Russian hacker who goes by the name of "Barabus" created an unauthorized Windows PC version of Ska Studios’ Xbox 360 game The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and released it last week. [Destructoid.com] [Polygon.com]

So this is my take:

“What has happened here is that, the owner had invested his time and energy to make changes to his own copy, and in his generosity, he shared those changes to his friends and community, but that this kind of production is held as a state-granted ‘exclusive privilege’ (aka monopoly) of the copyright holder. The holder of the monopoly has been given the power to crush any competitors who competes against him in the porting of this game.

If this was true free markets, we say that the Russian hacker who ported the game has outcompeted the devs by providing this service faster and cheaper than the devs could do it themselves. But in monopoly land, doing so is an infringement on somebody’s privilege to be the exclusive provider of this service (copyright infringement). But infringement itself does not constitute moral wrong because he invades no one else’s property. He merely modifies his own legitimate property for which in normal circumstances, he would have had the right to do, but that that some of these rights to his own property has been seeded over to the copyright holder in the hopes that it will "promote the progress of ‘knowledge’ and useful arts" See US constitution copyright clause.

“US Federal Court of Appeals (8th Circuit), in 2012:

“Congress’s protection of copyrights is not a “special private benefit,” but is meant to achieve an important public interest: “to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward, and to allow the public access to the products of their genius after the limited period of exclusive control has expired.” [ca8.uscourts.gov]

I’m not making this up. Hit Ctrl+F and type "copyright" on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Roderick T. Long: You cannot own information without owning other people

“Ethically, property rights of any kind have to be justified as extensions of the right of individuals to control their own lives. Thus any alleged property rights that conflict with this moral basis – like the “right” to own slaves – are invalidated. Intellectual property rights also fail to pass this test. To enforce copyright laws and the like is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. If you have acquired the information legitimately (say, by buying a book), the on what grounds can you be prevented from using it reproducing it, trading it? Is this not a violation of (added: one’s property’s rights) and the freedom of speech and press?

It may be objected that the person who originated the information deserves ownership rights over it. But information is not a concrete thing an individual can control; it is a universal, existing in other people’s minds and other people’s property, and over those the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people.”

• Roderick T. Long

http://aaeblog.com/2010/05/20/bye-bye-for-ip/

Fundamental property rights come first over artists/industry survival

Well, this is the disconnect I guess. You admit you only hold this view because of the detrimental effects (you think) are impacting the industry. You are asserting that a fundamental aspect of property rights and consumer rights as it has existed since the beginning of trade should be adjusted and recodified on a per-industry basis, not because it’s inherently bad or unethical, but just because you think it’s a threat to the industry’s health. Which means you are essentially arguing for protectionism for corporations–consumers are free to exercise their consumer rights only up to a certain point, but if that free exercise is perceived to threaten the viability of the industry, then their rights must be limited in order to save the industry.

I don’t think I can put into words my disgust at this demeaning display of groveling at the feet of your game developer overlords. Less a die-hard laissez-faire capitalist, but because even a capitalist would accept that sometimes industries die and that’s the way the world works. As much as I enjoy games, there is no inherent good in this industry to claim ‘public good’. The ends do not justify the means here; there is nothing that makes the gaming industry inherently worthy of preservation, not to the point that would justify carving out a special exemption for them. Just because your favored set of content producers couldn’t properly adapt does not justify rewriting the rules of what “property ownership” means and fundamentally removing the ability to preserve, inherit, pass on, lend, and share its products.

The industry does not come first; consumers do.

• modified from neogaf post about first sale doctrine, but it is applied in the same way to real property rights and the right to manufacture copies of your own property for others. Substitute “industry’s health” with “artist’s rights to a living”.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=59545309&postcount=1361

The right to translate is a real natural human right

The right to translate is a real natural human right (& not a statutory one). if we have the right to freedom of expression, it therefore follows that we have the right to Express ourselves in our own languages using Somebody-Else’s expression (so long as this other person had willingly published it and it wasn’t stolen from him).

Then how can copyright also be a human right if it contradicts this one?

(Protip: one of them isn’t a human right.)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121019/12333120767/no-copyright-is-not-human-right.shtml

Prof. Stephen Davies: intellectual property is both intellectually incoherent and dangerous

“The third view, which I personally hold, is that intellectual property is both intellectually incoherent and dangerous. It’s dangerous because in order to enforce intellectual property, you have to interfere with people’s other real property rights in real physical objects and to stop them using those objects freely and as they wish to. So you aren’t able to freely use, for example, your computer, your mp3 player, or your video recorder.”

• Prof. Stephen Davies

Boldrin & Levine: Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea

“All of this brings us to what intellectual property law is really about – a reality that is simply obscured by analogies to other types of property. Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea – this is a right that we have just pointed out, does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea. This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.

It is important to distinguish between property rights and contractual agreements. You could sell me the delicious cup of coffee you just made, and have me sign a contract agreeing not to drink the coffee after 4 pm. But if I were to violate this agreement it would not be theft. As a matter of law, you could not send the police after me. You could sue me for breach of contract – and the courts might or might not decide the contract was valid. But there would be no question of theft or violation of property rights.

So what is the contractual arrangement in current intellectual property law? The most significant feature is the agreement not to sell copies of the idea in competition with the person who sold you the idea. Outside of the area of “intellectual property” such an agreement would be called anti-competitive, and a violation of the anti-trust law. If you reach an agreement with someone else not to compete with them, not only would the courts refuse to enforce such a contract, but you would be subject to substantial civil and criminal penalties. “Intellectual property” in other words, is not about property at all, it is about legal monopoly.”

• Michele Boldrin and David K.Levine

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/coffee.htm

The devs at greenheartgames are mistaken when they use the word ‘steal’.

The devs at greenheartgames are mistaken when they use the word ‘steal’.

What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

Making copies takes nothing away from the ones being copied from. You steal nothing. Rather you are manufacturing something without paying the monopoly holder. This is completely different conceptually and morally.

[u]Compare the following four sentences:[/u]

“He downloaded a copy of Avengers for free.”
“He got a copy of Avengers without paying for it.”
“He manufactured a copy of Avengers for free.”
“He made a copy of Avengers without paying for it.”

[quote]the first two are reinforces the copyright industry’s “stealing” moniker, with a clear tone of dishonesty. whereas the second two just don’t work in that respect – if anything, they have a “yeah, so?” tone to it. http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/08/its-not-getting-or-downloading-a-copy-its-making-or-manufacturing-one/%5B/quote%5D

You cannot copy what the devs do not willfully release into the world. If you try to copy it [i]before [/i]it is released, then that IS stealing. But when you [i]buy[/i] a copy, then manufacture copies from your copy, then that’s copyright infringement. You are producing more of the thing that the holder of the copyright is supposed to have a monopoly on the production of.

So these so-called pirates, are really people who are choosing the rational economical decision WITHOUT stealing. It is cheaper to manufacture your own instead of using the dev’s print shop (who is charging $8), therefore you just print it on your own, it’s just cheaper (yet never reaches $0. not in energy costs. nor in labour costs.). For they instinctively know that producing one more copy removes NO copy from anyone else, therefore is not stealing. And they know this even though they are taught to confuse sharing with stealing. manufacturing with theft. Amazing isn’t it?

Copies are worthless. There’s so much of it. It’s like confetti. The service of information production is not worth anything that people are willing to pay a CENT for. (Unless. Unless there is value-added.)
Rather, the devs should focus on providing value that the people with household printers [i]cannot [/i]print.

They hijacked our sense of morality here in the West

[Aaeru] K13T3Y: they hijacked our sense of morality here in the West. for example in the 70s in the US, copyright was largely considered by the public as an advantage given to authors that the public was willing to tolerate, in order to see More creations. it was only after the 80s that this view began to be reversed (see first 4 paragraphs http://open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php/ by professor Loren)

[Aaeru] K13T3Y: in fact the term ‘intellectual property’ didn’t even appear in our vocabulary until the 80s http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=intellectual+property&year_start=1950&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
so before the 80s, it wasn’t even regarded as property

[Aaeru] K13T3Y: in fact, the chinese had almost 1000 years worth of printing technology (they were several centuries ahead of the west), and yet NO concept of author’s rights or intellectual property ever arose.

[Aaeru] the first chinese copyright law appeared at the start of the 20th century (they copied the Japanese), and serious enforcement was not in place until the 70s, when it was still being Resisted by the public at the time. http://c4sif.org/2013/02/to-steal-a-book-is-an-elegant-offense-chinese-saying/

A response I wrote to an attorney employed by Mangagamer to threaten me with a coercive take down

Below is a response I wrote to an attorney from Greenville, Delaware (US), who was employed by Mangagamer to threaten me with a coercive take down of a Da Capo III fan translation. The first part of my response is here.

This is the 2nd half.

These advantages (copyright) I mentioned, is in the handing out of exclusive rights to the artist to copy & distribute one particular work. An exclusive right is simply an euphemistic way of saying the destruction of everyone else’s right to copy in order to give the artist an economical advantage, let me explain. So an exclusive right, is not the same as a natural human right. Statutory rights work by necessarily rewriting other people’s real rights.

So say for example.
my legitimate copy of Da Capo III is sitting here on the shelf in front of me. Everything in the box is mine. Including the DVD. The DVD is a physical object and I have a physical property right in the DVD. Here when I say physical property right, I mean that I am justified in the use of (sufficient) violence to thwart any attempts by anyone who dares to intrude on my exclusive use of this object. And that moral justification exists outside of legislature. It is before Any State legislations factor in to the protection of these rights, Before there is even law, I was already entitled to the full use my physical disc in anyway I like, be it to play it, to break it, to play frisbie with it, or to print the data on it onto another disc and then give it out to my neighbour (because the 2nd disc is also my property). Outside of legislature, I am already justified in the use of violence in defence of this piece of property, because it is my property. And that includes my right to copy the disc.

Now Enter 18th century copyright.
Now one of my rights in my physical property, the right to copy, is denied, because a law created by legislature steps in and explicitly takes away those rights that I had in my disc. But not just one right. A total of Six rights are taken away. (ie. copy/distribute, derivative work, sell copies, perform in public, display work publicly, & audio transmission, USC Section 17, chapter 1, para 106). The argument that I want to make is that copyright is necessarily the rewriting of the customer’s real physical property rights (in their purchases) so as to give an economic advantage to the artist or publisher, and therefore, constitutes theft. For all Statutorily-created rights work by necessarily rewriting other people’s real rights. Either we fully respect real physical property rights, or we rewrite real physical property rights to make way for copyright. There is no in between. [see thomas paine rights of man]

We are all born with the right to copy – today as well as prior to 1709. It is merely a law that says otherwise, that this right should be annulled and held, by exclusion, in the hands of ‘copyright holders’ for their commercial exploitation. It is not that people abuse copyright, and are even now, trampling on the author’s humananity into non-existence, but that copyright abuses people. In fact, you can deduce this in just a couple of sentences:

“Copyright grants its holder certain rights.”

What rights does copyright grant to the holder?

“The right to produce copies or reproductions?”

No, the holder already can do that. He does not need the government to tell him that he can.

“The right to make adaptations and derivative works.”

No, again the holder already can do that.

“The right to perform or display the work publicly?”

Again, this isn’t a right being granted to the holder, he is permitted to perform the work as he sees fit. None of these rights are granted to the holder by copyright law; they exist independently. What copyright law does is take away the rights of everyone else to do these things.

That is why I can make the moral argument that I have a right to improve on my own purchased copy of Da Capo III, and then share those improvements to whomever I wish, but that these rights were merely annulled temporarily by the State for a default total of 14 years…. (*cough*) ahem… I mean life of artist + 50yrs.

The last argument I make is that freedom of speech, is incompatible with copyright.

“Congress shall make no law… prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the (people’s) freedom of speech,”

It does not say, “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise or abridging the freedom of speech, unless someone wants to repeat someone else’s speech.”

Stopping people from repeating each other’s speech IS abridging the freedom of speech.

So these people cannot even obey the very first law in their lawbook. [See No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment]

Anyways regardless of my views, I have done as you’ve asked. All localization efforts have been ceased and all distribution stopped (including seeding of the torrent).

After all, you are the one with the guns.
Aaeru

First half is here: http://visualnovelaer.fuwanovel.org/2013/03/da-capo-iii-fan-translation-cease-desisted-by-mangagamer