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"Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason."
"In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, this push to position government-funded research as an engine of economic growth may seem logical. But there are innumerable problems with this commercialization strategy, beyond the reality that it is unclear how areas such as stem cell research and genetics will generate billions in profits."
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First, in addition to all the well-documented social issues associated with industry/researcher collaborations and commercialization pressure – biased results, reduced researcher collaborations, data withholding and the potential for the premature and possibly harmful application of technologies – the emphasis on economics will inevitably lead to more of the kind of hype and overly optimistic predictions described above. When research funding is conditional on the potential for economic growth and rapid translation, the research community will find ways to promise economic growth and rapid translation.
Second, as more and more of the publicly funded research community becomes associated with this commercialization agenda, it will become increasingly difficult to find truly independent voices to critique the hype and calibrate expectations. The best science is dispassionate, independent and objective. The promised pursuit of profits is one of the surest ways to erode these qualities.
Third, it will reduce public trust in the science and the scientific community. Our research team recently completed a survey of more than 1,200 Albertans. We found university researchers funded by government to be among the most trusted. But that trust erodes significantly when those same researchers receive funds from industry.
Finally, this strategy fails to recognize how science usually unfolds. It is very difficult to predict what research will be beneficial or commercially viable. This is especially so in areas as scientifically complex as genetics and stem cell research.
As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is particularly stupid. It not only doesn't work -- DRM is always broken, and DRM-less versions quickly produced -- it also makes the official versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry eventually decided to drop it.
Sadly, the world of ebooks seems unable to learn from that experience, and insists on making the same mistakes by using DRM widely. But it turns out that there are even more problems in the publishing domain, as this fascinating tale of how DRM acts as a barrier to entry in the online bookstore market makes clear
"DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM. "
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The source of that massive fall-off at the midpoint is seemingly simple: all books published in the U.S. in 1922 or earlier are in the public domain. What's immediately apparent from this graph is the fact that copyright is limiting the public's access to older works—but why and how, exactly? The answer lies in the reality of what a copyright is really worth, commercially, and how long it retains that value—and it sheds light on another problem with copyright law.
"The Enlightenment's core discovery was the positive-sum game... ways that democracy, markets and science can "float all boats," so that even those who aren't top-winners can still see things get better, overall, year after year -- leading to the diamond-shaped social structure we discussed in an earlier post (last week), with a vibrant and creative middle class outnumbering the poor."
"Much of the discussion around this case highlights public misperceptions of libraries and of licensed content. Both Swartz’s supporters and the prosecution have focused on Swartz’s copying of articles, despite the fact that the charges focus on fraud, not theft or copyright violations. His supporters ridiculed the prosecution by suggesting his alleged downloading was like checking “too many” books out of the library. The prosecution repeatedly made reference to Swartz’s actions as “stealing,” despite the fact that the charges they brought against Swartz focus on fraud. Most academic library employees could readily explain to Swartz’s supporters that subscription license terms are often more restrictive than the “First Sale” doctrine that enables library lending, and would probably also point out that most libraries do impose some limits on book borrowing. Similarly, library employees could explain to the prosecution that although Swartz may have acquired copies of millions of JSTOR documents, there was never any erasure or removal of content from JSTOR’s servers, so invoking the rhetoric of “theft” is a bit problematic. "
"The point can be made more general: surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. And in the few circumstances where that is not true – where inventions truly are "singletons" – it is often because of an accident or error in the experiment rather than a conscious effort to invent. "
"In a context of great technological and social change, existing intellectual property regimes such as copyright must contend with parallel forms of ownership and distribution. Proponents of open access question and undermine the paradigm of exclusivity central to traditional copyright law, thereby fundamentally challenging its ownership structures and the publishing practices these support. In this essay, we attempt to show what it is about the open access endeavour that resonates with a feminist theory of law and society - in other words, we consider what is “feminist” about open access. First, we provide an overview of a relational feminist critique of traditional copyright law and the assumptions of possessive individualism that pervade it. We then offer a brief description of the open access movement and the way in which it reflects or responds to this criticism. In doing so, we discover vital synergies between this branch of feminist legal theory and the open access movement. Ultimately, we hope to underscore the importance of an open access policy for legal journals such as this one, whose mission is to support, advance and disseminate a feminist perspective that challenges the prevailing hegemony within traditional legal scholarship. We conclude by offering ways in which this journal can help draw out the synergies between feminist criticism and the open access movement. "
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose laws that systematically impede or hamper innovation, especially those enforced in the name of defending "intellectual property," such as patent and copyright; these should be radically reformed or entirely abolished.
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What's the limit to ISP intermediaries aiding with private enforcement? That remains unclear. Both Espinel and the industries involved favor schemes to deputize intermediaries to police behavior in ways that would have been anathema to the old telephone companies. Today, ISPs will take action against subscribers based on repeated allegations of copyright infringement; tomorrow, they might be approached to help with auction fraudsters, corporate hackers, those accused of repeated libel or defamation, or child pornographers.
ISPs already do this under court order, of course, and some also take these kinds of measures voluntarily upon request (such as blocking child porn links, spammers, etc.). Today's agreement matters not because it's necessarily new—ISPs have been forwarding notices and even disconnecting customers for years—but because it marks a public, coordinated, standardized national effort to get intermediaries involved in enforcement against actions taking place on their networks.
Such intermediary enforcement isn't necessarily bad in principle—ISPs are a natural Internet choke point where pressure can be applied to the 'Net, and sometimes pressure can address crime and bad behavior (see Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith's book Who Controls the Internet? for much more on this theme).
Yale University aims to change all that. In an announcement on May 10th, the university says its libraries, museums and archives will provide free universal access to high-resolution digitisations of holdings in the public domain
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