Very interesting article on the Swedish Copyright battle here. This is the way that the world will look. The Swedish have in my experience a law abiding and respectful culture. There is great store set on the idea of a harmonious society, and equality, while not perfect, is very high compared to many places in the world.
In other words, the Swedes are not habitual scofflaws who run around generally being anarchic and out of control. So, for so many Swedes to be "breaking" the law, indicates very strongly to me that the law has not won strong public acceptance, and that its enforcement would be clearly seen as breaking the social contract. In other words, enforcing these rules would be political suicide, and something that the police will not seek to squander their public goodwill and acceptance on.
So, if this is the picture in the law-abiding world, then what of the rest of the world?
Also in the IHT, I saw this about the intellectual property discussions that are going on. I think to paraphrase Richard Stallman (Inventor of the notion of the GPL or General Public Licence that lies behind much Open Source software.) the notion of intellectual property is a false one that leads to erroneous assumptions. There are three broad classes of intellectual property for most purposes.
Copyright: a song, book, or other distinctive original work of authorship is given strict limits as to who can publish the work, and make money from it. Is theoretically time limited, but with many copyrights at life-of-author plus fifty years, or fifty years alone, this is a fairly abstract notion.
Patent: an idea that lies behind an invention is described, and anyone else that tries knowingly to build a product that relies on that idea must either desist or pay a licencing fee to the inventor. Usually time limited, to around 15 years or so in many cases.
Trademark: the recognisable face of a product, company or organisation in the market. For example, Gillette for razors, Snickers for chocolate, or BMW for cars. Any attempt on the part of organisations that attempt to "pass off" goods using the trademarked information without permission can be stopped by legal means. It is effectively treated as fraud. Trademarks are interesting in that they have to be continuously defended. If you allow someone to use the trademark without comment or action, then they may be able to argue that the term has become generic, like Hoover, or more recently, a big discussion about "Windows".
Now, if I buy physical goods, I want the real deal, Levis should be Levis, Intel chips, from Intel, etc. Thus, I see the relevance of trademarking, and other quality assurance laws for physical goods. No question.
Patenting to give a period of profitable exploitation of R&D investment seems a fair reward, although the actual patenting process is very broken. Incompatible patenting laws world-wide, the notion of being able to patent an external reality rather than an original idea, like the human genome, or mathematical ideas in software patents seem very dubious. The end game is a portfolio approach by big R&D organisations which they are too terrified to use on each other, but which they will use to suppress new entrants.
Copyright, however, as we can see from the above has become nigh unenforceable in its current forms. The fixes proposed, from the legal ones to the introduction of DRM are all only a speed bump on the way to the new reality. Electronically distributable content is free.
So, how to react to this new reality?
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