Discussion on Intellectual Property

The actions taken by many companies in the United States have got me thinking about intellectual property and its role in society. My last post was about how intellectual property laws concerning music are being abused in the United States.

Research into the abuse of intellectual property has lead to me literature that shuns the whole idea of intellectual property such as Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (freely available of course). Lessig brings up points such as the fact that the amount of time a work can be copyrighted has changed multiple times. Originally a work was copyrighted for 28 years, then it could be copyrighted for 75 years, and now a work can be copyrighted for 95 years. This means that since our current copyright laws in the U.S. started in 1923, any work whose copyright was properly renewed has not entered the public domain yet. This means at the current rate of copyright law changing the copyright term may one day be limitless.

An unlimited copyright term is probably the worst thing that can happen to intellectual property law. An unlimited term for copyright means that any new creation which is based on a previously copyrighted idea will be subject to royalty fees. If in 50 years people want to make things that are loosely based upon other works created a long time ago, they will have to pay royalty fees to create their work. With this cycle, people will eventually run out of completely original and new things to create and basically everyone who creates something will need to pay up.

Intellectual property laws discourage the creation of new works that are not completely original. Anyone who creates a derivative work could potentially be sued. The 'fair use' clause of copyright law should exempt some works from paying royalty fees. Fair use should cover educational uses and non-profit uses. Apparently filesharing and educational YouTube videos do not fall under this fair use clause.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 added another layer of evil to intellectual copyright law. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection methods in order to modify software or equipment that you own. This means that by modifying many electronic devices or pieces of software for your own personal uses you may be breaking the law. The most ridiculous section of the DMCA is the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act. Out of all the sections of the DMCA, this section has probably caused the most unnecessary court cases targeting innocent consumers.

One solution to the abuse of intellectual property is to abolish intellectual property from the law completely. This would hurt large companies and benefit consumers. One could argue that it makes sense for certain things to be copyrighted. Intellectual property could still be protected when absolutely necessary by including a contract of use that one must agree to when acquiring a particular item. This would make intellectual property unprotected by default, which allows for more incentive to create derivative works.

Abolishing intellectual property completely is not a feasible solution in the United States today. Our copyright laws are too deeply rooted. However, finding an optimum length for copyright terms and abolishing acts such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would help our situation. The optimum length of a copyright term would enable the creator to seek great financial reward but would allow the work to enter the public domain in an appropriate amount of time so new derivative works could be freely made. A Cambridge student claims to have calculated the optimum length of time for a copyright term to be 14 years. Hopefully someday our government will encourage creation and progress of intellectual property by lowering the copyright term for new works.

Insoluble Situations

The simple fact of the matter is that some situations have no good solutions. Young people, tend to be arrogant and believe that the world can be improved in every aspect, but, young people, and especially academics, tend to be arrogant in general. Unfortunately, any problem has many people, of good intelligence, working on it, and being unable to, for one reason or another, come up with a workable solution. Now, I am not saying that we should not discuss such things, but a little humility when thinking about them is appropriate. There is a reason that these problems are still problems, and that is that they are difficult, and some impossible, to solve.

I call these the insoluble situations. What I mean by this is that any course of action is going to take sacrifice, and will end up unfairly hurting a portion of the population. I have a historical example of such a situation. The Soviet Union. And let's face it with a regime death toll ranging anywhere from 10 to 50 million (possibly more if you count the international deaths caused by it), the resolution was hardly any good. But there was no good solution. Going to war would've been even more catastrophic.

There are a few modern situations like this. The situation in the Middle East, in Iraq and Israel are likewise insoluble. Someone is going to get hurt unfairly no matter what. But don't despair Fortunately there are situations that do have good solutions (not necessarily painless, but at least good). Global warming is one that does.

So, what I want to tackle in this post are some suggestions for dealing with problems that could be insoluble. For this, I have two suggestions, and I welcome more. First, don't make assumptions. Approach the problem humbly, look at what others have suggested, and always look at the flaw in your own plan (it will have one). Stating it to someone else will probably help you, because they're more likely to find the flaw.

Second, don't be afraid to compromise. Compromise is not a bad word. Although "uncompromising" is often used as a compliment, it really shouldn't be. Not everyone is going to get a fair deal, but a compromise is better than nothing. I mean, when in high school, one of my teachers had a poster on their door saying "Stand up for what you believe is right, even if you're standing alone." That sounds all good and inspirational and stuff, but the real situation is much more complicated. It's better to fix most of everything than all of nothing.

So, with this advice I leave you to your own pondering, if you have more suggestions leave them as comments

RIAA: The Worst Company In America

A recent poll conducted by The Consumerist concluded that the RIAA is currently the worst company in America. The RIAA has sued over twenty thousand file sharers since 2003. They are a relentless suing machine.

Among the people sued by the RIAA are a ten-year-old girl, a twelve-year-old girl and a dead woman. The RIAA has targeted YouTube video uploaders who dance to music, coffee shop owners who play live music, and AM/FM radio. A man who offers free guitar lessons through YouTube videos has even been targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement because the songs he teaches are copyrighted.

The RIAA has petitioned judges to lower artist royalties. This is the most wrong of all their wrongdoings. The people who deserve the money most in the music industry today are the artists.

The RIAA is not the only company fighting this losing battle against music lovers. The NMPA and MPA recently sent take a down letter to OLGA (as their homepage currently states). OLGA is an archive of guitar tablature. The take down letter was sent because OLGA has guitar tablature for copyrighted music. Most of this tablature is transcribed by ear and therefore not necessarily even accurate. I think it is just as wrong to sue OLGA as it would be to sue a website that posts the lyrics to a song, most of which would be transcribed by ear.

I sent an email to my local representative in the district I vote in because he has accepted large amounts of campaign contributions from the RIAA. The email informed him that he had lost my vote because of the people he received contributions from. Like a good caring politician he of course sent me a love letter back to me stating that he'd love to hear from me again. Most politicians will probably not listen at all but if you are interested here is a list of politicians who have received campaign contributions from the RIAA.

Despite the massive amounts of people that have been sued in recent years due to a "misuse of music," this fight is a lost cause. This is a lost cause just as a war against sex would be a lost cause. File sharing is on the rise and guitar tablature can still be found all over the internet. The plans of the RIAA will probably backfire badly at some point and they may end up in a bad mess with little income and no love from artists or listeners. Until then try to stay under the radar of the RIAA and if you are extreme enough, boycott them.

Morality and Rules

It appears some people have a belief in the existence of something called personal morality. I don't think something like that can exist. By personal morality, I mean people believe that it's possible to have a set of morals for oneself that is not to be applied to the rest of the world. To me, this issues from a misunderstanding of what morals are. I suppose this is technically a semantics argument, but I'm going to make it anyway. Morals require you to apply them to the world at large, otherwise they're just rules you make for yourself. I mean, I could say I never drink tomato juice. This is not a moral decision, and I don't see how it's any different from saying I won't have sex until I'm married, or I won't get an abortion.

Morals are standards of behavior that you judge people by, including yourself, but certainly not exclusively yourself. It's somewhat ridiculous to apply a separate standard to yourself and to other people, whether your standard for yourself is higher or lower than for others. Thus, personal morality is a set of rules that you choose to apply to yourself. But morality still doesn't fit completely in with this.

This is because the conditions for rules are very different from the conditions of morals. First, rules should be kept to a minimum, following the belief of Occam's Razor. Second rules are never ends in themselves. Here, my argument diverges from a purely semantics argument. I am saying that rules people set for themselves should not be an end in themselves. If they are, you're now applying a different standard of judgment to yourself than others. It is perhaps possible to argue that it's ok to have different standards of judgment for different people, and if anyone wishes to, feel free to make a comment. But it is counterintuitive to me to do so. Thus, rules must have a certain goal in mind when created.

Moreover, rules should be remade with relatively little difficulty. This is because the general expectation is that you will get smarter and wiser as you grow up. Thus if you feel you should change a rule you should. Thus, it doesn't make any sense to say "I won't have sex until I'm married" unless you're willing to say "People shouldn't have sex until they're married." In the future you'll be smarter and be able to rethink such a decision, so why would you restrict yourself unnecessarily. It is true that you won't always be smarter, thus it should take you maybe a few days of thought to reevaluate your rule to make sure you're not under duress or something similar. But then still, the rule that would make sense would be "I won't have sex without a prior decision to do so." That is, you won't just have it come to you unexpectedly.

What Democrats thought of Iraq

I found an interesting website that lists quotes from Democrats both after and before 9/11. All of the quotes support the claim that Saddam Hussein has been producing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of the claims show support for using force against Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically. All of the quotes have sources listed for contextual purposes.

I think these quotes demonstrate an interesting point. The Democrats quoted on this page are all currently against our current war in Iraq. However, these same Democrats were for taking action against Iraq at some time between 1998 and 2003 based on their quotes. I think information like this becomes quickly lost in the hate-driven debates between the Republicans and Democrats we see all over the media nowadays.

One of the main reasons we are in Iraq is because the Bush demonstration claimed there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and deemed it necessary to take action against Iraq. The facts brought up by the Democrats in the link above about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was also a very strong point.

The 9/11 and Iraq connection seems to be a foggy and easily-forgotten part of our recent political history. The Bush administration asserted that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq but many dismissed this link stating that there was not any valid evidence to support this connection. Cheney's haughty response probably did not help the Bush administration's case much. The odd thing about this Al Qaeda-Iraq debate was that the Clinton administration believed there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq also.

I'm not bringing up these points to determine whether starting the war was the right thing to do and I don't necessarily believe that any of the statements made by the Republicans or Democrats mentioned above are correct. I think there was an interesting connection between the agenda of the Democrats and Republicans though.

I am not going to go into details on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. You can use this Wikipedia article for that.

What's the best kind of Free Speech?

There are two definitions of the word free that are appropriate to this discussion. Free can mean unrestricted, as in "I am a free man." It can also mean economically cheap, as in "That is a free cookie." Free speech may exist in the first sense, in the sense that you can say what you want without fear of punishment, at least sort of... That is, you won't be placed in jail. But you may get punished in other ways .

That link isn't really too important; it is just an example. Speech, even if it is unrestricted, is definitely not without economic consequences. I suppose that ultimately free speech would have no consequences, except then it would be a contradiction in itself. Since if speech had no malignant consequences, others wouldn't speak out against you and would thus not have free speech. But, at least in the economic sense, is it possible to have free speech?

That is, is it possible to say what you want, without missing out on a job opportunity or being fired, or etc. Well, not in our society, but certainly it's not impossible to see one where it would be. The second and important question is, should we strive towards such a society. A society where speech is free not only in the unrestricted sense, but also in the economic sense. Obviously, some jobs would be exempted from this, especially public offices. That is, jobs where people's opinions are what constitute a job should obviously be based on said opinions. But what about jobs in the grey area, such as university professors. Or what about conduct outside your profession affecting job status? There was a teacher that was fired for having an offensive myspace page.

This affects people greatly, many are afraid of what they put on the internet, due to colleges or future employers basing decisions on such things. Logically, I can see how some of these things make sense. After all, why shouldn't you make a decision based on all the information available. But whenever I hear such a story, I feel for the person fired/not hired. Moreover, there are some good arguments why it shouldn't be implemented as well. First, you're rewarding people who are dishonest (who feel a certain way, but don't reveal it). Moreover, this discourages free speech and discussion, and encourages conformity for the sake of conformity. After balancing it out, I think speech should be free not just in the unrestricted sense, but in the economic sense as well. This is, however, a close call for me.