TheProperty

“If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then we both will have one apple each.

But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then we both have two ideas.”

George Bernard Shaw. (1856-1950) Literature Nobel Price 1925.

Intellectual property is roughly spoken the concept of owning an idea or better say being the originator of a thought.

The generalised term "intellectual property" is somewhat questionable, since it subsumes copyright, trademark and patent law, which are all completely different.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Isaac [[McPherson]] (13 August 1813), wrote

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Magnus Stålnacke

(on "intellectual property") In sweden we do not have that phrase, whenever people try to tranlate it, others start to smile, it sounds really ridiculous. I think we use a better phrase for it, our phrase is: "immateriella rättigheter" wich translates perfectly to "immaterial rights" This describes what it is and doesent bundle patents and copyright in the wrong way. It just says what it is, a "right" (not property) that is given to you (on the expense of others of course).

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

Gnu:"According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term "intellectual property" is a fad that followed the 1967 founding of the World "Intellectual Property" Organization, and only became really common in the past few years."

In the context of Askemos, the meaning of intellectual property, authors rights, 'distribution' or better say 'usage' rights pertaining to information play a central role. At the same time the act of physical copying looses it's meaning, as different physical encodings are regarded 'same'. The pointers given here supply further backing that this notation of 'immobile', global information (only "accidentally" projected into local, physical data) is actually more practical and logical than a view centered around data copying.

There is an excellent article about copyright and the american law system and constitution: http://www.msnbc.com/news/594462.asp?cp1=1#BODY .

Ernest Miller and Joan Feigenbaum claim in http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/jf/MF.pdf that the act of physical copying is only instrumental, not purpose of protection.

With Askemos you actually treat that copying issue, which has no sensible meaning in Askemos, for a much stronger global rights management system. The Askemos system has been derived from it's legal and social pattern with the design guiding intent to be in turn applicable in legally binding context (what's that? Range from http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/ to RousseauSocialContract). In this context it is definately a step into the right direction to provide the people with an undisputable sign of the usage right associated with a particular information as proposed over there.

At this time (2003/2004) there's a lot of political discussion going on concerning several aspects of intellectual property. The experience from several years of research behind the Askemos system allows to define a kind of "lower bound" on DigitalRightsManagement systems. It results in huge damage to the whole socitety, if that border is crossed by rules of law. Since free individuals value their moral above any human defined law, the legal system becomes instable and must either heal itself (costely correcting the error) or it will eventually vanish. TODO:fix the text, I learned since, that this is called "überpositives Recht" (in german) -- probably "super positive" in english?. The basic claim, which I'll back up here is:

No society can alienate any right over natural law and grant them exclusively to any person.

That's a requirement to protect intellectual wellfare of the society, since it could otherwise be bleaded to death on that individuals discretion. While there are no exclusive rights to go with the discovery of natural laws, there is however a need to protect rights of the person for any particular application of those laws the person invented. (A related topic is copyright enforcement, which could also cross the boundary accidentally. Watch http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/0,39023166,20281871,00.htm )

Some more points:

• The Netzwerk Neue Medien and creative commons propose to resort to "gema" style compensation for infrmation distributed online.

• At Privatekopie.de people fight to keep the right of private copies. I'm pretty sure that this is "überpositives Recht" anyway: you keep the information, you once received, this is called "memory" or "conscience" - an antropological constant not subject to negotiation. -- And that's probably the reason, why people are that hot about it and outright disregard some of the current legal campains.

  There's more concern: we can't avoid to keep private copies (memories) anyway -- so how much of it might be denied? Going to far would impede the right to gather evidence - how would you proof having received bad quality if you are raided for the private copy before?! The worst fact anyway: the argument that Digital Restriction Management would work is simply not true, it's faced with a fundamentally impossible cryprographic task: deny the receiver of the message access to the message.

• The german ministry of justice asks at Kopien brauchen Originale for a fair regulation. That's the point, where the basic idea behind Askemos (which is actually the well known, old meaning of information) that the information is the actual or original idea while all physical copies are just that: copies. For the computer scientist the borderline is right between the denotation of an algorithmus (inalienable right to reuse by everyone) and binding of free variables to concrete values.

  A real world example: the logarithm was a discovery, which anybody might use, for the sliding rule - it's application - there shoud be patent protection.

  Why? Because algorithm are natural law, which can't be replaced, no matter how smart you are. Invention at the other hand can be done again. A fair chance is left for the future. So there's a balance between the interest of the individual inventor and the general society (the inventor included).

the pitty legal situation

It's a pity since the 22.6.2001 we have the EU-Richtlinie 2001/29/EG, which rules the imoral legal: it's not allowed anymore to apply basic engineering and math knowledge if the thing it is applied to might later be claimed to have been done with a certain intention, the intention to protect against copying. Now we can't help you to gain to your moral rights anymore. But there are four catches (brain twists): a) it's neither ethical nor practical to forbid thinking b) there is absolutely no official need for computer security anymore, because nobody is allowed to circumvent even useless "protection"; therefore useless protection will become the rule, not the exception c) everybody will just go for it, devalueing the laws alltogether and make the world even less secure. d) there are plenty of ideas to abuse this law; nothing to be said about it here, but we'll have fun. German article (Spiegel) explains the situation from the customer point of view: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,215555,00.html

Read more more the risks of such neo-dictatorial legislation.

12th April 2003: The story continues http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,244723,00.html Good bye.

22nd Oct 2003: Did I say (b) "no need for actually working security" and (c) "everybody will just go for it"? Here we go. Even just the plain windows operating system is now a forbidden tool: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,270719,00.html (I've always thought of ROT13 as one of the abuse ideas I mentioned as (d) above.)

The IPac groups seeks a sensible regulation for "intellectual property" (see newsforge).

18th Dec 2004: Groklaw has a nice essay on the legal situation regarding computer fraud.

consumer dialog

Related Topics

http://www.ipmall.fplc.edu/hosted_resources/jepson/unit1/aneconom.htm german: http://www.sffo.de/machlup1.htm

Patents http://www.worldforge.org/website/about/patents/

There must be something useful at European Union site.

Free exchange of information is also believed to improove biology http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0207.thompson.html . The question remains: how to compensate the producer?

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AHistoryOfFreeAndOpenSource

HomesteadingInTheNoosphere / http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/x317.html

A few comments regarding property and scarity as the basis of free markets.

Slasdot comments on a R. M. Stallmann speech about free software.

Giving birth to a (new) thought is either luck or hard work (learn the context/background etc.) hence it calls for compensation *if it's not kept as a secret* (traded).

The hard part comes in, when it comes to bargin. The customer needs to judge whether the value of the product (thought) is worth the compensation - to the consumer (prize is the value of a product as accepted by the society) while the vendor has to decide whether he can make a living from that and maybe whether the customer might want to rip him.

This is not easy with material goods, but even harder with ideas because you can own an idea, but you can't sell it (all you can is share your secret, which is to give away a copy).

A simple point we made for many years is now backed up with at least one court ruling in the united states. Programm code is an expression for human and machine consumtion. As such it's protected as free speech: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/20011101_eff_fap_bunner_pr.html

One can imagine funny sketches, if exchanging intelletual property was understood as the exchange of data: http://www.pigdogs.org/art/adobe.html But simply understanding the joke doesn't save the world. Using DigitalRightsManagement the wrong way puts high risk at the values you just wanted to protect. beeing largely missunderstood or missused (depending on your point of view) puts chains on the rights what to do with your own information. At least the western countries (at the time of writing the only whose need to be concerned about the topic) used to deem this unconstitutional.

See also spain going harder after copyright infringement and proposing fees on media. Fees on (storage) media are strange: artist and authors are expected to pay anonymous royalities. Next those, who store data for their clients pay. Both are essential roles to support (create and host) information, supporters now pay while they should actually receive. (Consumers pay too, but that's considered ok here.)

The missconception is rooted in a wrong focus: Legally the focus should consider the works of authors and actors as abstract information and their interests as rights to harvest from their creation (license to play/view/execute).

Fees ougth to be left to the freedom of contract between producers and consumers. This freedom is impeded by flat fees on the media, especially since many producers don't participate on the fee.

Even worse: fees on media impedes freedom of since and expression (art).

Fees on media might be an intermediate escape from the conflict between the legal system's requirements to set up enforceable rules and procedures and the lack of quality, uniform and standard meta data support on digital media.

Such support would allow to leave contract negotiation with the respective parties and free the underlying media from an unjust cost.

Usually it's claimed that p2p software would impact the income of artists. Seems untrue: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/geist/

Still thinking... http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16071,00.html

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/22/1242217=nested

Let's see if this will work.