Re: [Patents] Washington Times: Internet Patents Divide Industry

[Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Hartmut Pilch wrote:

> It's lifetime may be too long and some enforcement modalities (not limited
> to copyright) may be draconian, but there is rarely a problem of excessive
> breadth of copyright property claims.

  As soon as you factor in software interface copyright, with "Legal
protection for Technological Protection Measures" being a special case of
interface protection, then breadth very much becomes a problem.  You are
no longer talking about protection of an expression of a single work under
copyright, but a monopoly on a whole class of similar/compatable works.

  I realize that this forum is concentrating on information process
patents, but interface copyright is as serious a problem that needs to 
have our attention as well.

> The problem is to get the idea of sacrosanticity of all kinds of
> "property" out of people's head.

  I don't believe this is always the right approach, as some peoples
belief in personal property has taken on almost religious levels of
support and is unlikely to change.  Sometimes you can use peoples respect
for personal property in a campaign to oppose expansionism in eithor
copyright of patent policy.

  For instance, "Legal protection for TPM" is a case where the claimed
protection is from a first party (the recipient of the message) rather
than from a third party (TPM that protects the privacy of a message
between sender and receiver, an entirely different social/legal context).  
The only way to enforce protection from first parties is to not allow that
first party to own/control the ICT device used to receive the message.  
This quickly becomes an infringement of property rights if governments do
not allow citizens to own certain ICT devices.

  Given the remote ownership of the devices, and some of the proposed 
business models, these devices also become a violation of privacy rights.


  So what we are talking about is a legal construct that tries to ballance
infringement against intangible rights against privacy rights,
communications rights, tangible property rights, as well as other rights.

  When you list the long list of infringements of rights that Legal
protection for TPM causes, then the reality of the issue (rather than the
special interest rhetoric) becomes much more obvious.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 At Ottawa Linux Symposium: July 23rd-26th
 http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2003/view_abstract.php?talk=193
 Hosting "Birds of a Feather" for http://www.goslingcommunity.org