Anomaly UK

The ippr think-tank has published a paper “Markets in the online public sphere” on Intellectual Property issues. (Author William Davies).

The paper is an attempt to identify the questions involved, rather than answer them, and as such is worthwhile but not particularly exciting. The main new idea is to classify information transfers in the digital realm according to temporality, classifying information as:
Deliberation (synchronous, interactive transfers) Service (synchronous, passive) Content (asynchronous, temporal) Heritage (asynchronous, timeless) These categories leak into each other, but are probably a useful tool in thinking about the issues.

The leakiness is what the author appears to see as the root of the problems – how one can protect commerce in Content without unacceptable impact on Deliberation or Heritage, or conversely how can one protect the freedom to Deliberate without destroying the business of Content.

While those questions are real, to me they are not the sticking point. I believe that compromise can be reached on what forms of information transfer should be restricted and what shouldn’t. Not a perfect compromise, to be sure, but some kind of widely acceptable outcome.

What I see as the most vital issue is not what should be subject to restriction by law, but who should bear the cost of enforcement. That might sound like a minor detail, but it is in fact the fundamental problem, with far-reaching consequences.

(The rest of this piece is on Anomaly UK – The Director’s Cut)

The BPI has brought more civil actions against uploaders of music to peer-to-peer networks in Britain.

Once again, this is a plea not to complain. As I said last time, the practical intellectual property debate is over whether the scope of copyright and patent law should be increased in the light of new technologies. The Right Answer is that it should not. It might be that without such expansion of copyright, certain business models will cease to be sustainable on a large scale. Whether that is the case, and whether different business models can flourish, remain to be seen.

As these matters unfold, copyright owners will attempt to apply existing laws in defense of existing business models. To the extent that this attempt succeeds, there will be less reason to extend those laws, and, most importantly, less justification for restricting the manufacture, sale and use of ordinary general-purpose tools that can be used for copying, modifying and distributing digital information. If widespread unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material can be substantially prevented by bringing civil suits against the people who do it, then the copyright owners’ problems are solved with the least impact on everyone else.

If these legal actions are not effective in protecting the copyright owners’ business models, then the real battle will follow. Showing respect for the law as it stands, and for the copyright owners’ attempts to employ it, is a solid foundation from which one can make principled objections to copyright expansion. “I want free stuff” is not.

Does information want to be free? If I say so, I mean that restricting copying and distribution of digital data is likely to be very difficult. It means that copying is likely to continue despite these suits. It does not, by itself, make a moral argument. You could say, in the same way, that petrol wants to be on fire, but it’s not an excuse to get the matches out.

Beyond what I called the “practical intellectual property debate”, there is questioning over whether copyrights and patents are a good thing at all, and whether their scope should be reduced. Some good arguments have been made, but they don’t really amount to a criticism of the BPI for seeking to protect the legal rights they hold, and have traditionally held. If their program of protecting their business model is entirely unsuccessful, that might strengthen the argument for changing the legal status of information entirely, at the same time as it strengthens the arguments for creating new IP law powers. I think it’s an entirely separate argument.

In looking at news coverage of the Sony story, I saw a piece by Bill Thompson, a technology analyst for BBC. His insight into issues seems to be consistently good. I was particularly impressed by this piece on eBay and tax, where he makes the seemingly obvious but often ignored point:

The internet is not a separate space, but part of the real world.
Politicians have to get to grips with this

He has a blog, but the good stuff seems to be copies of his BBC articles.

I am aware that some people download music files from the internet. I don’t do this myself, because of the time and hassle, and the risk of getting something other than what I wanted.

I may have to rethink this attitude, however. It is now official – buying music legitimately from the copyright owners can install trojan horses and spyware on your computer, potentially resulting in crashes and other malfunctioning. Much safer to get an MP3.

I already have a CD that I can play at work only because I made a copy of it at home – the original will not play on my work PC because of its copy protection. It’s now getting worse.

A few jobs back we bought a copy of Rational Rose – we never used it because we couldn’t get past the copy protection. It sat on a shelf for years. No repeat business there.

Illegal rip-off software, music and DVD is generally of higher quality than the legal stuff. A free MP3 is worth more than an iTunes download or an original CD, because it’s compatible with more hardware. A hacked game is worth more than the legal copy, because you don’t have to fuss with the license key.

They never learn.