From phm@a2e.de Fri, 31 Dec 1999 15:31:26 +0100 (CET)
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 15:31:26 +0100 (CET)
From: PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de
Subject: [Patents] campaign

Vin McLellan quoted a very interesting story from Boyan Paduh:

> >          I watched the 5-7 year debate in the US in the '70s and '80s about
> > what type of intellectual property protection was appropriate for software,
> > however.  Young people on this List often presume that they are the first to
> > consider these issues; and few look back to sort out the debates that framed
> > the issue in the past, when crucial policy decisions on software IP were made.
... 
> >         Back when, I was personally an advocate of a new and more short-term
> > class of IP for software functions, as were many of the larger and more IP
> > savvy US computer firms.
> > 
> >         We lost out to those who argued persuasively  that international IP
> > politics made it a simple choice: either software would claim the
> > traditional IP of copyright and patent protection -- which was already
> > codified in international treaties, widely endorse by the world's nations --
> > or it would dangle like low-hanging fruit; legally without any protection;
> > available for anyone to reverse engineer and copy.

Is there any reference of such a debate anywhere?
 
> >         It was unlikely in the entreme that the majority of the world's
> > nations would agree to ratify a new class of IP for software, it was said,
> > since so many had nothing to protect... and much to gain if software had no
> > IP status.

So we are captives of the TRIPS system, which is far removed from
democratic control. In a rush reaction, the advocates of software IP
protection pushed us into this system, because they believed they'd get
nothing if things were decided democratically.
 
> >         American firms had only slowly moved beyond freeware/shareware  (the
> > first IBM users' group was called SHARE) to an appreciation of the amount of
> > money that would be required for software development, and most eventually
> > realized that only if they obtained legal protection for IP in software
> > could they justify the enormous expense of developing (then mainframe and
> > miniframe) software applications.   Many had concluded that software
> > development costs -- even shared software development costs -- could not be
> > justified, period, when any competitor could stroll buy and walk off with
> > the results of a long software development effort... and bring it to market
> > or use it nearly as quickly as the firm which developed it.

Many American firms have meanwhile moved back, thanks to the efforts of
Richard Stallman and others.

> >         (That's one reason why, until the mid-1970s, virtually all computer
> > hardware and software development in the US was directly funded by the US
> > intelligence agencies and US Atomic Energy Commission.  The results of all
> > that development was left in the public domain,  available to all
> > competitors -- even new companies which popped up out of nowhere with skills
> > and enough capital to play in the league.  As the government retreated, and
> > as the corporations began to put their own money on the line, they demanded
> > some protection --  something beyond trade secret status -- for their
> > investment in software development.)

Maybe we should have concluded that information is not the domain of
market economy.  Market economy fails where replicable goods are needed,
as in the case of software.

Europe should adopt the earlier US model and stay with it.  The
corporations can not be at the core of software development.

When corporations start to demand "something beyond trade secret status",
they are demanding for themselves the right to censor the public and keep
it from exercising its right to create software in a non-market manner. 

Why should organisations who only create second-rate (i.e. not replicable,
closed-source, with trade secret) information be allowed to censor those
who create first-rate information?

And why should we allow them to use the brute means of an IP system that
was evidently not designed for information but for industrial goods?

Krzysztof Sobolewski <critto@proterians.net> wrote:
 
> >>   And one more thing - we, software makers, have the best protection
> >> in the world - copyrights. I think that copyrights are even more
> >> strict then patents, but do not have destructive influence on the
> >> market - and really they are RIGHT, not privilege like patents.
> 
> >The distinction between "right" and "privilege" is not an absolute one.
> >Imho both of these rights offer too little protection for recompensing the
> >creators of good informational works.  And both harm the public, patent
> >right much more so than copyright.  But this can't be generalised.
> 
>   I really disagree. Listen, when you write something, eg. science-fiction
> book (or newest Operating System :-)), you copyright it so anyone who 
> wants to use or purchase it needs a licence, oftenest for money that 
> he/she pays to you - it is just, and it could be called "right" 
> (because it IS right! :) 

There is one basic distinction:  patenting information means preventing
others from publishing their own work, while copyright prevents them only
from copying someone else's.

Yet this distinction can become blurred:

- Copyright is often extended to include derivatives of the work, that
  evidently must have resulted from copying, but are somewhat different.
  Copyright would be useless if I could circumvent it by making a slight
  modification to the unlawfully copied original.  
- When people write an MP3 application, they evidently copy the ideas
  of the MP3 inventors.   It is very unlikely that these are their own
  work.  Patent right works here like an extended copyright.  (Really this
  is due to a theoretical confusion in the patent system -- the IP
  advocates should really have aimed to extend copyright, but, as we
  heard above, they preferred to jump on the WTO-TRIPS train, so as to
  better undemocratically enforce their system on the world)
- Usually Copyright is to weak to stand by itself, and enforcing
  Copyright implies keeping source code secret.  The combination of
  copyright + closed-source is the driving force behind the Microsoft
  monopoly.  So you can't claim that copyright does no harm.

> Anyway, campaign IS NECESSARY to do the things I've described - to raise
> public awareness about the threat posed by patents to IT and programmers,

and to the public itself.

the encroachment on the informational sphere, the right to censorship in
the name of private property, the reckless aggression of the forces of an
ailing market economy on our liberty, that is very similar to the
aggressive measures that reactionary ancien regimes take.  This matter
should be taken up at least by philosophers and intellectuals of all kind.
Unfortunately, the sphere of politics and intellect has been subdued by
the commercial behemoth during the last decades.  The mass of people has
become more hedonistic, less oriented toward education and knowledge.

I think that you must be experiencing this very strongly in Poland.  
Poland has a certain catholic conservatism that is oriented toward basic
values of life and rejects the hedonistic propaganda of the business
world. You should try to address these people as well.

I have enlisted Popperian thinking in my EPC revision proposal

	http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/epue52en.html

and I think you might even get the support of people like George Soros,
who is Popperian and thinks a bit further than most capitalists.	

> and NOT to publically discuss about the "source vs binary", and similiar
> details, which are understandable only for us - programmers and lawyers
> (like Blue Ribbon wasn't intended to discuss about the provisions of 
> CDA, but abolition of CDA and censorship at all).
>   And I'm sure that we really COULD convince patent legislators to our
> rights, if we have thousands and millions of people (programmers and 
> nerds I think) on our side - someone said, that "when you form a strong

you won't find millions of nerds.

>   It is good. I'm sorry, I didn't have much time to surf around
> those pages, but at first sight they are nice... Anyway, I hope you 
> want to NAME your organization with "human-readable name" ? ;-)))
> ("ffii" says nothing to me!)

It means

	Foerderverein fuer eine Freie Informationelle Infrastruktur

and you could render it as

	For a Free Informational Infrastructure

This name also is chosen in a way so as to get the basic message across
each time it is reported in the media.

--
phm





