extempore: focused IP discussion

Paul Phillips (

extempore) wrote,
@ 2005-05-21 12:52:00

focused IP discussion
While I'm glad that a lot of people read my blog and are willing to respond in detail, it also means that it'd be a full time job for me to address everyone individually. Rest assured that I read all the comments on the last entry, and I will use that material to help me refine my "IP position statement."

Let me try for a more focused discussion here. Please limit your comments to this specific topic.

To me, the majority of the commentary was written looking past the central thrust of the argument: the cost of enforcement. And I use "cost" here to include many, many different kinds of costs. Take it as an article of faith for the moment that in the absence of preventive measures, we will soon have the technology to trade unlimited and arbitrary data with impervious anonymity. In that world IP control will not exist no matter how much you wish it did.

So how far are you willing to go to prevent this? How much are you willing to give up to enable enforcement?

Are you willing to only use government-approved encryption?
Are you willing to see all legal hardware be government-approved?
Are you willing to let the government have backdoor access to your equipment?
Are you willing to have no legal secrets?

This isn't some paranoid orwellian fantasy. These are the kinds of measures that will definitely be necessary to control the distribution of IP. The nascent state of the technology allows you to imagine that there is a middle ground where reasonable controls are in place and reasonable enforcement is achieved, but in fact there is no middle ground. Anything less than top-to-bottom control will be too easy to route around. "Information wants to be free" is not a canard, it is a law of (human) nature.

You can hate illegal drugs and wish drugs didn't exist but still believe that criminalizing drugs is a terrible idea and a proven failure. In the same vein, you can wish there was a way for the creator of a work to control what happens to it once it's out of the creator's head, but believe that criminalizing the act of copying information is folly.

(29 comments) - (Post a new comment)

	spiritualmonkey 2005-05-21 09:07 pm UTC (link)
	To me, it sounds very much along the lines of a Harm reduction argument (the harm being Big Brother scoping thorugh your hard-disk to make sure you have no un-paid for files). Works for me. I'd rather fundamentally rethink who IP is and how commerce around it works than live under the gaze of the Panopticon. (Reply to this) (Thread)

ronebofh
2005-05-21 09:39 pm UTC (link)

I'd rather fundamentally rethink who IP is and how commerce around it works than live under the gaze of the Panopticon.

Yeah, what he said. When you talk of the cost of enforcement, you're talking about the contemporary implementation of IP (or even future implementations of IP, but then we're back to "fundamentally rethink"), which i think we can all agree needs to be blown up. But you haven't addressed the concept of IP, which i feel you need to do if you want to do away with it. And i still want to know what "almost" means.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

extempore
2005-05-21 09:53 pm UTC (link)

what "almost" means.

That is still a source of uncertainty for me, but it may hinge on private vs. public usage. It's very useful that I can buy a box labeled "apple computer" and know where it came from, and enforcing the restriction on who can label boxes that way doesn't require letting big brother have all the keys to my stuff.

I can imagine lots of non-invasive rules about how information is used in public, e.g. forbidding plagiarism. We don't have to let some schmoe take another guy's PhD thesis and publish it under his own name. My enforcement concerns don't manifest until they try to control private information transactions between consenting parties.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	ronebofh 2005-05-22 01:07 am UTC (link)
	Sounds like a good start to me. (Reply to this) (Parent)

patrissimo
2005-05-23 06:20 am UTC (link)

And those reputational rules actually fit the analogy to physical property, unlike IP. That is, if I copy your song, you still have it. But if I tell people I wrote your song, you have lost those people knowing your reputation, the credit for being the original source. Use of data is non-exclusive, but a reputation is exclusive. Many people can read a book, but only one person can have the reputation for having written it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	freedom of info in the academic community combinatorics 2005-05-23 02:28 pm UTC (link)
	There's an article in the first column of the wsj today concerning the freedom of information re scholarly journals. It will be interesting to see how great a threat to the publishing establishment the free online databases become. Link here: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111680539102640247,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Deleted post)

What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic?

jedipii
2005-05-22 12:52 am UTC (link)

In the reference you cite, it makes mention that according to US courts, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy while on the internet, which is really just an extention of the common law tenet "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy while in a public place." (This definition is what makes the tabloid industry possible.)

So, if you want your correspondence to remain private as it traverses the Internet, you must encrypt the data. Encryption is not limited to web surfing, or online shopping. You can also encrypt your email messages, provided the recipient has the means to decrypt the message once it arrives (This type of encryption is called PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, and is based on very large prime numbers, a widely available "Public" key, and a corresponding secret "Private" key). This same cryptography can be applied to any data file, or even your complete hard drive.

In answer to your question about whether or not this is "failsafe," the answer is no. Every kind of cryptography is vulnerable to what is known as a brute force attack, which is essentially a million monkeys banging away at a million keyboards for eternity, and eventually one of them will produce the key that unlocks your encrypted data. This is an issue of computing cost. Larger encryption key sizes mean an exponetially larger number of possible keys, and consequently, far more computing power and time to break.

If a government agency wants to decrypt your data, eventually they will, but with a large enough encryption key, you'll be long dead before they stumble across the right key.

If more people used encryption, there wouldn't be enough computing power on the planet to decrypt it all. There's safety in numbers.

If you couple this type of encryption with a technology like I2P, which Paul mentioned a couple of posts back, then you can anonymously share and access files on the internet in a manner that "they" (those with a curiousity to find out who and what) wouldn't be able to tell what it was that you were sharing or accessing, nor would they be able to find out where it was coming from, or going to.

Paul's point in this thread is that once bandwidth is universally available, and once encryption and anonymity are fused together with that bandwidth, what kind of societal cost will be required in order to stop the free trading of intellectual property, like movies, music, and/or books? In order to prevent it, your computer will have to be wide open to the prying eyes of Big Government, or their agents (which may be the MPAA, or the RIAA, or any number of organizations that have a vested interest in seeing just what it is that you're doing on the Internet), because that's the only way they'll be able to catch the data pirates.

Protecting "their" intellectual property rights will mean that you have to surrender your privacy rights, because from their point of view, the two points of view are mutually exclusive.

It'll mean all of the things that he mentioned: Hardware that can only run "approved" operating systems, and operating systems that have "approved" backdoors, and backdoors that can be utilized by "approved" parties, and the list of approved parties will be ever expansive, comprised of anyone and everyone that has any kind of IP portfolio, and an antiquated revenue stream to protect.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic? extempore 2005-05-22 12:56 am UTC (link)
	If you're wondering what that comment was in reference to, there was a thread I deleted as off the main track, but this comment (appropriately) survived the deletion. (Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic?

sleepycell
2005-05-22 01:08 am UTC (link)

thanx for your explanantion. it does clear things up.
as i mentioned before (in a post that has grown wings and flew off)i don't know jack about computers and put very little faith in the fact that it would take a "million monkeys pounding away at a million computers" to break my encrypted code far after i'm dead. whereas in my paranoid little world i would envision one super big and all-knowing monkey pounding at one computer and breaking my code before i finish eating my breakfast burrito. but this is where my ignorance comes into play.
thanx again.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic?

dmorr
2005-05-22 04:18 am UTC (link)

There is another way for the government to get access to your computer, and that is a subpoena. If your communications are all well encrypted, you are still vulnerable to traffic analysis -- if they can watch the packets move, then they may be able to get enough information about what you're doing to issue a subpoena, at which point you have the fine choice of handing over your keys or going to jail.

All of this is just to say that even if we have access to hard crypto, which it's really hard to see not happening, that doesn't guarantee security from some agency that really cares. I2P claims to also be immune to traffic analysis, but I am pretty sure that an agency with enough resources and desire could figure out where the packets are going much more easily than they could break decent encryption.

ObTopicalComment: Enforcement of IP rights is going to be nigh impossible without extreme measures, as Paul astutely observes. I wonder, though, whether all transactions, financial and otherwise, are going to be similarly untraceable. If that's true, it's going to be hard for the government to collect taxes or otherwise do much of anything. If that happens, then there's a much larger incentive for government to do all kinds of crazy super-intrusive things that mere IP rights might not justify.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic?

chrisrw109
2005-05-22 05:07 pm UTC (link)

If your communications are all well encrypted, you are still vulnerable to traffic analysis -- if they can watch the packets move, then they may be able to get enough information about what you're doing to issue a subpoena, at which point you have the fine choice of handing over your keys or going to jail.

The problem is that in a world with I2P and even reasonable number of people using encryption, traffic monitoring to try to catch people who are violating IP rights amounts to a gigantic fishing epedition and would require a fundamental change in the rules for wire/data tapping (althouh they have loosened recently, anyway).

Even with tremendously large movie files, you have a large number of people who would use I2P and encryption and aren't doing more than downloading porn from the 'net for their own personal 'use'.

The problem with going to the courts for a subpeona, after having received permission to monitor a specific person's traffic... is that the more times they come up empty, the harder it is to get subsequent subpeonas, and the stronger the arguments against those actions become.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: What is Crypto, and how does it relate to this topic?

patrissimo
2005-05-23 06:22 am UTC (link)

I wonder, though, whether all transactions, financial and otherwise, are going to be similarly untraceable. If that's true, it's going to be hard for the government to collect taxes or otherwise do much of anything. If that happens, then there's a much

for those who want to learn more, the buzzword is 'crypto-anarchy'. _The Sovereign Individual_ is also an interesting book which tries to analyze what effects this will have on the structure of governments.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	crypto-anarchy sources dmorr 2005-05-23 06:25 am UTC (link)
	Don't forget Snow Crash and The Diamond Age! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	maurile 2005-05-22 04:17 am UTC (link)
	Paul, you may enjoy this: Future Imperfect, by David D. Friedman It's a book (in draft form) about what the future might look like, with comments on encryption, privacy, and intellectual property laws. Written by a guy with lots of interesting thoughts (more of which can be found on his website). (Reply to this)

Please clarify something from "paulp on intellectual property"

fun160
2005-05-22 05:55 am UTC (link)

The third world is being devastated by IP, which of course is almost exclusively the province of developed countries. Millions die every year from treatable diseases because the drugs they need are too expensive. Countries that challenge IP to save untold lives are faced with international sanctions.

The two scourges of third world countries are AIDS and malaria. AIDS is a very preventable disease caused primarily by lifestyle choices. Are the drug cocktails that combat HIV too expensive strictly because of IP or also because the drugs are very expensive to research and produce? If prices were slashed by 80% they would likely still be too expensive for all but the wealthiest of third world citizens.

As for malaria, we can thank the errors/lies of the book Silent Spring, which led to a drastic curtailment of DDT use and tens of millions of deaths most in sub-Saharan Africa.

Genetic sequences are being patented, leaving some third world inhabitants unable to legally plant seeds they have been using for generations.

I wasn't able to find any information on this. Can you please link any article(s) about this subject? Thanks in advance.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Please clarify something from "paulp on intellectual property"

dmorr
2005-05-22 06:34 am UTC (link)

As for malaria, we can thank the errors/lies of the book Silent Spring, which led to a drastic curtailment of DDT use and tens of millions of deaths most in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is the second time I've seen this claim in a blog post in the last couple of weeks. It turns out not to be true.

DDT is very heavily used in India, where mosquitoes are gaining resistances to that and similar pesticides. DDT is still heavily used in sub-saharan Africa, at least in South Africa, Mozambique, and Botswana. And while environmentalists aren't a fan of the chemical, almost none of them oppose its use for malaria control (as opposed to a general crop-supporting insecticide).

There is an IP side to the whole Malaria issue, actually: a malaria vaccine is now in human trials. One could argue that without the chance of making money from it because of IP rights, drug companies wouldn't be willing to run expensive human trials and drug research labs. Or, one could note that the high price of these drugs keeps them out of the reach of those who need them the most.

A fiscal liberal might claim that the best thing to do is have the government pay for the people who can't afford the drugs, or to force the drug companies to give drugs to the poor, but that's not very workable in places where the entire population is too poor to afford drugs.

I do think the problem of incentive in a world without intellectual property rights is a real one. I'm not so worried about music and movies and whatever, but developing new drugs is very expensive, and it seems like there's a good chance that drug research will be severely curtailed.

I'm sure there's a good solution, but I don't know what it is.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Back at ya on malaria...

fun160
2005-05-22 02:00 pm UTC (link)

Check out the article Silent Spring at 40 by Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine.

One could argue that without the chance of making money from it because of IP rights, drug companies wouldn't be willing to run expensive human trials and drug research labs. Or, one could note that the high price of these drugs keeps them out of the reach of those who need them the most...Developing new drugs is very expensive, and it seems like there's a good chance that drug research will be severely curtailed.

I think this is one of the key issues that must be addressed by paulp regarding the elimination of IP. Where are the new drugs going to come from if we destroy the incentive to spend enormous amounts of money developing said drugs? The last thing I want to see is government taking over this R&D role.

All this being said, Paul's predictions about the government having their heavy, instrusive hand in our computing in order to protect IP scares the piss out of me.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Back at ya on malaria...

chrisrw109
2005-05-22 05:26 pm UTC (link)

I think this is one of the key issues that must be addressed by paulp regarding the elimination of IP. Where are the new drugs going to come from if we destroy the incentive to spend enormous amounts of money developing said drugs? The last thing I want to see is government taking over this R&D role.

I think that's the crux of the problem. A lot of compaies across various industries lose a lot of money in terms of the black market on drugs & products that feeds the third world. There's an expression I heard somewhere about it cost drug companies $.30 per pill, bu it costs them $100M for the first one.

Those compaies put a lot of pressure on the US government to enfore P & T (patent and trademark) law overseas, and that's become more of a tenet in US Foreign policy lately.

Despite those losses on the black market, the companies are doing a-ok, because they still have the massive marets of your G8+ countries to get them their payback on investment.

Now, I2P isn't going to change that situation for drug companies, they've already had to write off large segments of the third world and data transfer isn't going to change that.

The largest impact of the anonymization of large data transfers will be on the same industries that were feeling it before, gaming, movies, television and music. How much worse can it get for them than it was at the height of Napster?

You're still going to have a large segment of the population that will buy that whole 'Don't steal' argument, and a large number that will just prefer to experience the media in it's original setting.

I guess I'm just not sure how strong of an argument they'll have at marginalizing civil liberties to maximize their profit margins.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Back at ya on malaria...

slowjoe
2005-05-22 09:31 pm UTC (link)

The cost of the first pill is actually worse than that.

Quote from an Economist article dated July 16th 2002 (available to subscribers at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1232696):

Analysis from the Tufts Centre for the Study 
of Drug Development suggests that it now costs 
an average of $800m to get a drug to market, 
more than twice as much as in 1987.

(I think that number may be high, but $100m is probably low.) Another fascinating issue is that universities aren't generally bound to observe patents, yet many are trying to set up in-house VC services, and claim ownership of the IP of staff and students. For example, Stanford was mentioned as owning a chunk of pre-IPO Google, but they probably didn't have to pay much for it.

What this all adds up to is that the massed ranks of IP industries (publishing, movie-making, fashion, software, academia, drugs research and the music industry) along with the massed ranks of lawyers will fight any major reform tooth-and-nail. They'll buy up honest politicians (read: ones that will stay bought) to fight any reform. In economic terms, these guys all derive a "rent" from the status quo.

I don't see any "force for change" with sufficient political force to change this status quo.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: Please clarify something from "paulp on intellectual property" extempore 2005-05-22 11:49 pm UTC (link)
	I do think the problem of incentive in a world without intellectual property rights is a real one. Me too. I promise to devote space to that in the future. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: Please clarify something from "paulp on intellectual property" patrissimo 2005-05-23 06:55 am UTC (link)
	Ok, I generally agree with you about Silent Spring. However, there are some big mistakes here. First is that malaria kills lots of people even if you use DDT. Second is that your "two scourges" is incorrect. There are 4 scourges, IIRC, AIDS, malaria, influenza, and tuberculosis. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	fun160 2005-05-24 09:44 pm UTC (link)
	Your "two scourges" is incorrect. There are 4 scourges, IIRC, AIDS, malaria, influenza, and tuberculosis. Check your sources. There are far more annual deaths from AIDS and malaria than TB and the flu. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	patrissimo 2005-05-24 10:03 pm UTC (link)
	Checking...Huh? TB is definitely up there, it killed 1.74M in 2003: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/ Which is more than malaria, although that includes TB+HIV combination. But even TB w/o HIV is still up there w/ AIDS and Malaria. You are right that the flu is less, it only kills like 250K/year. (Reply to this) (Parent)

It's Pinup Heaven all over again...

matchesmalone
2005-05-23 04:18 am UTC (link)

We had almost exactly the same discussion about a year or two ago on the above mentioned Yahoo group, and the topic of Intellectual Property pops up every now and again. I take the side of less government involvement, as the copyright laws that make stealing of intellectual property illegal are already on the books, and we don't need more laws. As I'm sure you know, the Sonny Bono Act extended the life of copyright protection from life+75 to life+95 years. Known "out there" as the Mickey Mouse Act, as basically the law went into effect in time to protect the creation of Mickey Mouse for another twenty years....

All this to say, I do have a passing interest in the topics you mention. To answer your specific questions; I don't believe I have to give up anything, based on what I stated above originally, and your premise that information wants to be free. I brought up the Sonny Bono Act to state that the original framers of the Constitution never intended for someone to own intellectual property forever, that it would seem that you create it, and exploit it, and move on, and let the next guy have his way with it, after a set amount of time. Information does indeed want to be free. No, I don't want to use only government approved hardware, software, whatever, I should be allowed to create and exploit without government interference. All the secrets I keep, I don't put into an online blog for all to see :) Therefore, I believe that I can keep a few. So, Paul, I invite you to hack into my computer, and take all my screenplays, budgets, art, and other stuff i have stored on my hard drive....If you can

(Reply to this)

sap_pete
2005-05-23 04:21 pm UTC (link)

While I understand that creators of products / software / music etc have an interest in protecting their investment to reap the fruits of their labor, so to speak, I really don't think that the goverment needs to be involved in enforcing laws designed to protect the economic interests of a few to the detriment of personal freedom (the thought police isn't far off).

Copyright holders are free to pursue whatever legal action they wish, without the goverment providing them a peep hole to make their job easier. Thanks to encryption and I2P, it will hopefully become too expensive to go after anybody but the biggest offenders, i.e. commercial violators of IP / copyrights.

Dragging teenagers to court for downloading a couple of songs is ridiculous.

(Reply to this)

definitively "no"

caimlas
2005-05-25 09:07 pm UTC (link)

I would sooner stop using computers (or at least the Internet) than submit to using a computer which has some sort of government control or fingerprinting on it. The Internet is simply too vast, wild, and insecure for me to willfully have something distinctly fingerprinted as "mine" on it, and be responsible for its actions (through the manipulation of others, potentially). Even as someone that works with computers, this is too large a risk for me. Shit happens that is out of our control.

After all, it is the governments of the world which have a monopoly on violence and control. I would rather not submit to that control unless I have to, as it puts an unnecessary "cost of living" on me: both in time and energy, and forseeable consequences.

But then, I believe in little or no government. Legislative government run by people seems completely unnecessary in a world where computers are everywhere: just have people vote on the issues themselves. Then they (we) have nobody to blame but ourselves for the mess we're in.

(And we'd have a lot less bullshit, interfering laws.)

(Reply to this)

joshuamayes
2005-05-31 07:15 pm UTC (link)

I am not willing to endure the measures you suggest would be necessary to prevent the anonymous sharing of music and film, despite the fact that I strongly believe in protecting IP. That being said, I have several responses to your belief that this counsels in favor of eliminating nearly all IP protection.
First, your argument is persuasive only as to those forms of IP to which it applies -- mainly copyrighted music, software and film. The vast bulk of IP does not lose its value even though it can be easily copied or shared. This is because most consumers lack the ability or resources to take advantage of the protected information. In other words, I am not going to manufacture allergy medicine in a home lab even though I can easily discover the process for doing so. For most forms of IP, prohibiting public commercial sales of infringing products is all that is needed to protect the IP owner.
Second, society can proscribe conduct without aggressively enforcing the proscription. For example, adultery has long been illegal in several of the United States, but adultery laws have rarely been enforced. Keeping IP theft illegal sends a message that society considers it immoral. In short, society could keep IP infringement illegal and enforce the law the best it can without infringing our privacy or excessively regulating technology.
Third, even if governmental enforcement of IP law will be too costly, society can maintain civil remedies for the owners of IP. In other words, we can let the RIAA figure out how to catch file swappers who use anonymous P2P networks to steal or distribute their IP. I have faith that the owners of IP will find ways to detect misappropriation and protect their property. The prospect of facing large statutory damage awards could serve as a large deterrent to infringers.
Finally, we can, at the very least, prohibit the public commercial exploitation of another's creation. Even if the government cannot prevent me from downloading a copy of a film before it is released in theaters, it surely can prevent me from publicly advertising my theft and charging patrons to view the copy.

(Reply to this)

	deltree .gov chemlab_tv 2005-06-01 12:15 pm UTC (link)
	Once they've outlawed ideas, only criminals will have ideas. CHEMLAB.TV (Reply to this)

fun160
2005-08-05 08:04 pm UTC (link)

There was an interesting IP article in Wednesday's New York Times.

It seems Microsoft is flooding the United States Patent and Trademark Office with applications, to the tune of 3K+ per year.

Excerpt from the article:

The staff of the United States Patent and Trademark Office has been deluged with paperwork from Microsoft of late. It was one year ago that the company's chairman, Bill Gates, announced plans to pick up the pace, raising its goal of patent applications submitted annually to 3,000 from 2,000. The company is right on target.

It must feel like a bit of a stretch to come up with 60 fresh, nonobvious patentable ideas week in, week out. Perhaps that is why this summer's crop includes titles like System and Method for Creating a Note Related to a Phone Call and Adding and Removing White Space From a Document.

(Reply to this)

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