‘Huge stress’ now on IP laws
p2p news / p2pnet:- There’s a growing risk that intellectual-property laws are now so tough that they’re inhibiting innovation, rather than protecting it, says an editorial in Britain’s The Economist.
Because of this, things must change, it has a prominent legal scholars, artists, scientists and experts including Brazilian culture minister (and pop star) Gilberto Gil, Sir John Sulston, a Nobel-winning scientist who helped decode the human genome, and Duke University law professor James Boyle, saying.
In their Adelphi Charter, the group, “lays out a ‘public-interest test’ for policymakers to use before changing intellectual property laws,” says the editorial, “an automatic presumption against expanding rights, placing the burden of proof on those who seek this, as well as requiring rigorous analysis to justify changes, along with broad public consultation.”
The Economist says it’s clear that as technologies such as computers and the Net, “make the exchange of information easier than ever – and inventions become more conceptual – huge stress is being placed on today’s intellectual-property laws, which trace their foundations to the birth of the printing industry and mechanical industrialisation.
“Industries that rely on copyright and patent protection are increasingly turning to the law to protect their businesses. For example, music firms are suing thousands of people for swapping songs online and trying to stem the tide of counterfeit CDs. Google has also recently been sued by a trade association of authors to prevent it from placing book excerpts online. And Microsoft has recently reiterated its intention to patent a basic format for storing files – a move that could let the firm collect money from the IT industry for things that have been done cost-free for years. Meanwhile, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations body, is pushing ahead with treaty negotiations that will create a new layer of rights for broadcasters, including on the web.”
But, the editorial points out, at the same time, “new approaches aim to work around overly-restrictive rights, such as the open-source software movement and an effort called the Creative Commons, which makes it easy for creators to give away some of their copyrights under licence while retaining others to control how their works are reused”.
It concludes with a quote from Boyle: “good policy does not just consist of ‘more rights’, it consists of maintaining a balance between the realm of property and the realm of the public domain”.”
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See:-
The Economist – An initiative to reverse the proliferation of patents and copyrights, October 13, 2005
October 17th, 2005 at 3:52 pm
“It concludes with a quote from Boyle: “good policy does not just consist of ‘more rights’, it consists of maintaining a balance between the realm of property and the realm of the public domain”.”
Law professor Boyle got it wrong and pushes the Cartel agenda.
Better: …it consists of maintaining a balance totally in favor of the public. If the public is better served by allowing some private rights, then and only then should private rights be allowed.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
October 18th, 2005 at 2:15 am
I think it is definatly important for the creators to have rights concerning how their works are used. Without SOME control, there really would be no incentive to create anything.
The problem we have now is that those “controls” have been so badly abused that they are dangerous to the public good.
People (generally) have a fairly good understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong. One of the reasons P2P is so popular is that we (the people) are just informally correcting intellectual propery rights that have been allowed to be skewed to (unfairly) favour one small group of people.