the right to read

[Trent Shipley]

So ... is this a bad thing?

Historically it is hard to justify a natural right to intellectual property.

Ad hoc monopolies were transformed into bureacratic legal institutions in a 
very Adam Smith sort of gambit.  By *inventing* a property right over 
intellectual production it made innovation *MUCH* more profitable.  The 
result was a material advance in economic growth ... with the usual cost in 
equitable distribution.

After all, Democratic Capitalism is the art harnessing the sin of unbounded 
greed to advance  the good of commonwealth.

Exercising tight control over intellectual products *should* result in a net 
economic gain in the aggregate.

As a Republican (capital 'R') I axiomatically prefer growth to equity.  The 
impoverished deserve to be destitute because they are poor.

However, I have a dark and guilty doubt.  Is it possible to reach a point of 
absuridity (or worse, declining returns) in defining intellectual property?  
Is an intellectual commons necessary (that is beyond the un-avoidable common 
property in the still free good of un-recorded verbal conversation).


CREDO!!

IP is *GOOD*!
Respect for property is virtuous.
Common ownership of durable intellectual products is pernicious.


###########################################

On Thursday 29 August 2002 08:02 pm, The Fool wrote:
> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/24/1030052995857.html
>
> How you see it, how you don't
> By Nathan Cochrane
> August 27 2002
>
> Microsoft has unveiled its vision for the future digital media landscape
> and it's a world where content creators are king.
>
> Version 9 of its Windows Media technology, codenamed "Corona", to be
> launched in September as part of the Windows.NET server, gives media
> conglomerates complete control over the way their content is viewed by
> consumers.
>
> Corona's monolithic Digital Rights Management (DRM) is by far the most
> exhaustive envisaged by a software company, extending from the content
> server, through the network and lobbing on to the user's device.
> Microsoft will extend the concept over the next few years to embrace not
> just audio and video, but all content, including computer software and
> the text used in electronic books.
>
> Already more than 350 million player applications use Microsoft Windows
> Media CODEC (coder-decoder) and the plan is to extend it off the desktop
> into the home-theatre lounge room, DVD players, cinema and for
> professional film and television production, replacing industry standards
> Avid and Apple QuickTime.
>
> But the software giant may have overreached itself in its rush to cozy up
> to Hollywood and the music recording industries, all but abolishing
> consumer rights such as timeshifted video recording and "fair use" for
> the purposes of education and criticism.
>
>
> In the Microsoft world, makers of software that play media streams
> ("media players") will have to get a licence from Microsoft before they
> will be allowed to process content encoded in the Windows Media format.
> Makers such as competitors Real and Winamp have already passed this first
> hurdle and use the Microsoft software development kit in their players.
> This is doubtless a lesson Microsoft learnt from its DivX experience, a
> rogue CODEC derived from leaked and reverse-engineered Microsoft MPEG-4
> technology, a favourite of online movie pirates.
>
> Player makers will be under the gun to ensure their software isn't used
> to view suspect media streams, using a scheme similar to the one
> developed by Hollywood for dealing with DVD makers, the DVD-Copy Control
> Association. The DVD-CCA issues DVD player makers with a licence and
> encryption keys that allow their devices to read movie discs.
>
> "We can block out rogue applications or compromised applications or
> broken applications," says the Singapore-based manager of Microsoft's
> digital media division, Winston Chan. "From the Microsoft standpoint we
> will get feedback from individual (content) companies and use the licence
> to lock out those applications. If an application has been broken, we
> only have to update the licence server. You have to go through the
> process with Microsoft and be issued a certificate."
>
>
> But Microsoft's dominance of the wrappers that will surround digital
> media extends further to the licensing of individual streams as they are
> sent over the Web. In the main, to play a digital video, for instance,
> all that is needed is to download it to your hard drive. It can then be
> played at any time.
>
> Microsoft's Media Player v9.0 adds an extra level of protection, calling
> an outside licensing server run by a copyright clearing house, which then
> issues an encrypted licence key before playback begins. The key does not
> travel with the media stream and has to be issued for each session. This
> approach has the wholehearted support of the media cartels.
>
> It enables finely tuned licensing terms and conditions, such as limited
> 24-hour play, a set number of plays over a given time, or an outright
> purchase licence that lets the viewer watch the video or listen to music
> whenever they want. It will also be used to bind content to a specific
> PC, so that it cannot be redistributed around a house or played on a
> different device. It is like buying a videotape or music CD that will
> work only with your equipment, which you specify to the retailer at the
> time of purchase, and won't work on anyone else's.
>
> The television industry is developing a parallel protection technology,
> called the "broadcast flag", which has many of the same features and
> restrictions. And for Corona to be effective it will ultimately have to
> mesh with protections enacted for broadcast and stored mediums (such as
> DVDs and CDs), a process Chan hints is under way.
>
> The sting is that a content licence can be revoked at any time by the
> copyright owner on application to Microsoft, which will then yank the
> offending content off the air. The purpose is to stop wholesale piracy of
> films, but swaths of cultural history could disappear forever if the
> content owner decides it doesn't want its intellectual property viewed by
> the public.
>
> The idea is "to keep honest users honest", says Chan, by greatly
> restricting the ability of consumers to dictate how the media they
> consume is used. For instance, built-in fraud detection would mimic the
> registration process used in other Microsoft products such as Windows and
> Office.
>
> The potential further exists for oppressive governments to use the
> revocation feature to censor what we see and hear. In this Orwellian
> scenario it would be possible to erase from the collective consciousness
> striking images of the lone student facing down a tank in Tiananmen
> Square, the "children overboard" photos, a pie-faced Bill Gates or any of
> hundreds of images, sounds and visions that define our cultural heritage
> if they embarrass those with political and economic clout.
>
> Chan thinks these examples are unlikely, although he concedes the present
> solution is "pretty binary, yes or no", meaning either something can be
> copied or not and there is no provision for fair use or protecting the
> public interest if it conflicts with private intellectual property
> protection. But instead of censoring, he says, Microsoft's aim is more
> mundane - simply to use the free player to sell more .NET servers.
>
> "(Censorship) is not easily done because you need pervasive PC deployment
> and broadcast (media) is the primary channel," Chan says. "You need all
> the content to be able to be revoked, and to do that you need all the
> content to come from the same service, which is unlikely. This is not
> something that is possible."
>
> ------
> Verses:
>
> The Right to Read
> by Richard Stallman
>
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
>
> This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the
> ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
>
>
> (from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the antecedents
> of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)
> For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz
> asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could
> borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she
> dared ask, except Dan.
> This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his
> computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go
> to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the
> very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since
> elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that
> only pirates would do.
>
> And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection
> Authority--would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had
> learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and
> where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this
> information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest
> profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central
> Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the
> harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.
>
> Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might
> want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a
> middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her
> reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate.
> He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all
> the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers
> who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could
> hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring
> in enough to repay this loan.)
>
> Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the
> library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay.
> There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without
> government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and
> nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047,
> libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim
> memory.
>
> There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing.
> They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank
> Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip
> over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too
> many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a
> reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In
> 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a
> debugger.
>
> Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have
> debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or
> downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to
> bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had
> become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were
> illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
>
> Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors
> in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed
> and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept
> behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class
> exercises.
>
> It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a
> modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free
> kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the
> turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you
> could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's
> root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you
> that.
>
> Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he
> couldn't refuse to help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak
> with her filled him with delight. And that she chose him to ask for help,
> that could mean she loved him too.
>
> Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkable--he
> lent her the computer, and told her his password. This way, if Lissa read
> his books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was
> still a crime, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it.
> They would only find out if Lissa reported him.
>
> Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own
> password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless
> of what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with
> their means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for
> disciplinary action. It didn't matter whether you did anything
> harmful--the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check
> on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden,
> and they did not need to know what it was.
>
> Students were not usually expelled for this--not directly. Instead they
> were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail
> all their classes.
>
> Later, Dan would learn that this kind of university policy started only
> in the 1980s, when university students in large numbers began using
> computers. Previously, universities maintained a different approach to
> student discipline; they punished activities that were harmful, not those
> that merely raised suspicion.
>
> Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to
> their marriage, and also led them to question what they had been taught
> about piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of
> copyright, about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and
> even the original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where
> they found others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of
> the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to
> read soon became one of its central aims.
>
>
> Author's Note
> This note was updated in 2002.
>
> The right to read is a battle being fought today. Although it may take 50
> years for our present way of life to fade into obscurity, most of the
> specific laws and practices described above have already been proposed;
> many have been enacted into law in the US and elsewhere. In the US, the
> 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act established the legal basis to
> restrict the reading and lending of computerized books (and other data
> too). The European Union imposed similar restrictions in a 2001 copyright
> directive.
>
> There is one exception: the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the
> root passwords for personal computers, and not let you have them, has not
> been proposed. This is an extrapolation from the Clipper chip and similar
> US government key-escrow proposals, together with a long-term trend:
> computer systems are increasingly set up to give absentee operators
> control over the people actually using the computer system.
>
> But we are coming steadily closer to that point. In 2001, Disney-funded
> Senator Hollings proposed a bill called the SSSCA that would require
> every new computer to have mandatory copy-restriction facilities that the
> user cannot bypass.
>
> In 2001 the US began attempting to use the proposed Free Trade Area of
> the Americas treaty to impose the same rules on all the countries in the
> Western Hemisphere. The FTAA is one of the so-called "free trade"
> treaties, actually designed to give business increased power over
> democratic governments; imposing laws like the DMCA is typical of this
> spirit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation asks people to explain to the
> other governments why they should oppose this plan.
>
> The SPA, which actually stands for Software Publisher's Association, has
> been replaced in this police-like role by the BSA or Business Software
> Alliance. It is not, today, an official police force; unofficially, it
> acts like one. Using methods reminiscent of the erstwhile Soviet Union,
> it invites people to inform on their coworkers and friends. A BSA terror
> campaign in Argentina in 2001 made veiled threats that people sharing
> software would be raped in prison.
>
> When this story was written, the SPA was threatening small Internet
> service providers, demanding they permit the SPA to monitor all users.
> Most ISPs surrender when threatened, because they cannot afford to fight
> back in court. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1 Oct 96, D3.) At least one
> ISP, Community ConneXion in Oakland CA, refused the demand and was
> actually sued. The SPA later dropped the suit, but obtained the DMCA
> which gave them the power they sought.
>
> The university security policies described above are not imaginary. For
> example, a computer at one Chicago-area university prints this message
> when you log in (quotation marks are in the original):
>
> "This system is for the use of authorized users only. Individuals using
> this computer system without authority or in the excess of their
> authority are subject to having all their activities on this system
> monitored and recorded by system personnel. In the course of monitoring
> individuals improperly using this system or in the course of system
> maintenance, the activities of authorized user may also be monitored.
> Anyone using this system expressly consents to such monitoring and is
> advised that if such monitoring reveals possible evidence of illegal
> activity or violation of University regulations system personnel may
> provide the evidence of such monitoring to University authorities and/or
> law enforcement officials."
> This is an interesting approach to the Fourth Amendment: pressure most
> everyone to agree, in advance, to waive their rights under it.
>
>
> ----
> Fight the future.