Author: blackspot

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,” Mark Twain said. Paraphrasing his words I can claim that the man who cannot use good ideas has no advantage over the man who simply can’t understand those ideas. So does the copyright protection of intellectual “property” help the engineer, the writers, the artists or the scientists to be more creative when they are severely restricted in using copyrighted, patented or licensed materials?

Yes, but only in theory. Instead, the intellectual “property” rights allows the monopolization of knowledge and makes it easier for companies to blackmail innovators and customers.
The Canadian composer John Oswald once said, “If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.” In our market-based life, when someone’s ideas run out and new competitors come in with fresher ideas, the old players use the government-enforced monopoly to protect their old ways of doing business.  The copyright laws are then brought out of the closet to prevent innovative inventions from competing with the existing, often obsolete ones.

Small companies are frequently unable to compete with big corporations simply because they cannot afford to pay the fees required by the license-holders, and thus cannot even enter the market.

Indeed, the impression one can get from simple observation of the economy today is that the more inefficient certain industry of a country is, the stronger is the demand for monopolistic protection from new entrants. Copyright laws are probably the best gun the monopolists can use against the newcomers.

The case of Microsoft is one of the best known when it comes to hiding knowledge behind the copyright gates. Holding firm for the copyright policy, Microsoft prevented any serious competitor for entering the market and in the same time kept the improvements of its products to the bare minimum. And why should Microsoft spend money for further development when they knew they were the monopolists? Back in the 90s, you either buy software from them or don’t buy software at all.

The situation was that until Linux was introduced on the market. It took years for the creators of the free operational system to construct it. They had to start from a scratch because the knowledge of Microsoft was unreachable. Instead of paying for lawyers (because the source code, or the knowledge, of Linux was distributed for free), companies like Red Hat and Novell spend their money for actual research. Now, even though they sell open-source software those companies are market successes. Novell achieved 1.19 billion $ of revenues for the year 2005 for example .

When dealing with copyright issues one question should receive an answer: how do we define the owners of an idea? Maybe those who manage to fill a patent application first are the owners? But there are a number of companies which only goal is to acquire as much licenses as possible so if one day somebody comes up with invention they can charge him.

PanIP, a San Diego-based intellectual “property” firm, filed more than 50 lawsuits against small e-commerce firms in 2002, claiming that their Web sites are infringing on its patents. The company owned US Patent No. 5,576,951 from 1996 and US Patent No. 6,289,319 from 2001. In a few words, the first patent made the use of multimedia presentations for commercial purposes without the approval of PanIP illegal. The second patent allowed the online credit card transactions only after PanIP got paid for it.
[Read more about the PanIP case here and here]

PanIP, however, neither invented, nor developed these technologies. The company did not contributed in any way to the field, yet they tried to make money abusing the copyright laws. And the question of who owns an idea is still left unanswered.

We know that property is a good thing. Ownership of land, building, vehicles and weapons contributes to our wealth or power. Defenders of the copyright laws often find it convenient to use this analogy and state that ownership applied to ideas is also beneficial for the society. If property is good for land and weapons, does this necessary means that is good for ideas too? The difference between tangible goods and intangible ideas should not be ignored.

Peter Russell, Anti-Copyright

“Intellectual “property” does not behave like material property. If I give you a physical object I may no longer have use or control of that thing, and may ask for something in return — some payment or barter. But when I give you an idea, I lose nothing. I can still use that idea as I wish. I need ask nothing in return.

[…]

We say “an idea came to me”. I did not make it happen. What I do is shape the ideas “that come” into forms – usually words and images – that satisfy me, and hopefully communicate something to others. If I am to be paid for my work (which I am not averse to), I should be paid for my time and energy, not some dubious concept of intellectual property.

Thoughts are free. They should remain free, and be given freely.”

Ideas cannot be owned. Ideas are for everybody.

to be continued…

References:
Boldrin and Levine, Against Intellectual Monopolly

(K) All Rites Reversed — Copy What You Like

The open source projects are more than just a counter-attack against the monopole of the corporations. They are now mediums for communication, exchange of knowledge and creating links between people. The open-source initiative turned to be a social event that later served as a model for the expanding blog communities.
The roots of the open-source industry and philosophy can be traced back to the mid-70s. Originally, computers were used only in universities as research tools. The software for them was not proprietary and was freely passed around. Programmers were paid for their work, not for the programs they created.

In the mid-70s the company Micro-Soft (later renamed to Microsoft) was rapidly expanding its market positions. The profits of the corporation were supposed to come by selling copies of the software they created, and while this might seem logical, at the time that was not the norm. In 1976 Bill Gates wrote an open letter in which he criticized the practice of freely distributing software:

“An Open Letter to Hobbyists”

One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. […] [T]here is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

This letter became an important milestone for the development and expansion of proprietary software in the market. For the first time copying software without the publisher’s permission was presented as an unethical act and the concept of piracy was invented. In the following years, Micro-Soft’s monopolistic position gave Gates a chance to enforce this policy.

In 1997, Bruce Perens defined the ten principles of the open-source philosophy. The definition he created was invented to grant more rights to the customers, as opposed to the licenses that limit the freedoms. Richard Stallman, Founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, said:

ZNet, Free Software As A Social Movement

The basic idea of the Free Software Movement is that the user of software deserves certain freedoms. […] With these freedoms, users have full control of their own computers, and can use their computers to cooperate in a community.

In 1998 Microsoft executives dismissed open-source as hype. Complex future projects on such software will require big teams and big capital, says Ed Muth, a Microsoft group marketing manager. Nowadays, despite the skepticism and hostility, it is not possible to imagine the world without open-source products. From Linux with its various distributions, through the Apache server, allowing the hosting of thousands web sites on one computer, to the various blog platforms, the open-source club is growing and improving much faster than any corporation can.

A study by the MIT Sloan School of Management found that organizational reasons are the leading motivators for the majority of the employees in the corporate environment.

MIT, Research Policy 1451 (2002) 1-21, How open source software works: “free” user-to-user assistance

ZNet, Free Software As A Social Movement

Non-free software, by contrast [to the free software], keeps users divided and helpless. It is distributed in a social scheme designed to divide and subjugate. The developers of non-free software have power over their users, and they use this power to the detriment of users in various ways.

Indeed, the open-source projects (OSP) succeeded in creating informal communities gathered by a sense of duty towards each other, rather than by an obligation towards an institution. The MIT study also found out that the providers of information in the support forum of the open-source server Apache are motivated to give information by the sense of duty towards the other members of the community:

MIT, Research Policy 1451 (2002) 1-21, How open source software works: “free” user-to-user assistance

What are the similarities between the open-source projects and the blog communities?

The relation between bloggers and the blogs they write in is very similar to the relation between open-source information providers and the projects they support. The communication between the contributors in these cases provides both the information and the motivation.

Chimera Project, Blogging: personal participation in public knowledgebuilding on the web

[The] blogs are merely tools; they are not a golden ticket into the knowledge society. Knowledge is synthesized by communication between people sharing objectives. Blogs facilitate this by making people easier to find, and providing immediate and direct communication channels once contacts have been established.

The strong diversification between the information providers and the information seekers in the corporate world does not exist in the open-source/blog communication. Information seekers and providers often switch places in the open-source/blog communication. In this cases, knowledge is not a monopoly of one of the sides mainstream media or software corporation but it is a public property available for everybody.

*The entry was also posted on Euro Tribune.

CFQD, LES MATONS DE MOULINS ONT LES TYMPANS FRAGILES

They tried to strangle me… A huge warder was squeezing my throat while his colleagues were beating me with fists. I passed over. And each night in the solitary confinement I was going out of my mind that they will come again… to hang me.
…
Tuesday, May 18. The sun has not risen yet. The vague feeling that the door is opening waked me up. Some shadows immediately jumped over my bed. One hit, then another… I cannot protect myself under the blanket. They are at least two, maybe three? They are holding me while the first one is covering my face with towel. It seems he is trying to force it into my throat while the others are putting the handcuffs… I’m suffocating. I’m trying to breath. A knee, maybe a fist, is hitting me in the shoulder blade. From the strength of the blow I’m raising my head…

Those are the memoirs of Jean-Marc Rouillan, an inmate sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. Hundreds of detainees in France are being subject to abuse by prison officials every year. Despite considering itself as a democratic country, France hasn’t improved much its attitude towards the increasing prison population since the 1970s. While the riots in France in October 2005 alarmed the world about the poor treatment of minorities and refugees by the authorities in the country, the violence and inhumane treatment of the increasing prison population is somewhat ignored. Is this because the prisoners are not considered to be human beings, and therefore lack human rights? Or it is because the penitentiaries are turning into commercial enterprises that forget their main purpose?

Imprisonments are not reducing the number of felonies because the prisons themselves are sources of criminality. The French penitentiaries, where criminals are supposed to learn how to behave properly and respect the law, are actually arenas of sexual abuse, drug addiction and violence.

Le Monde Diplomatique, France Return of the convicts

Physical and mental violence now play a bigger part in the running of prisons, to keep a potentially explosive situation under control and quell thoughts of resistance. In February 2003 France’s justice minister, Dominique Perben, set up regional intervention and security teams (ERIS); this sent a powerful message to all prison officers. Since then beatings have increased, without attracting any attention in the media or the courts (2). A duty of ERIS units is to supervise prison searches. These high-profile operations have never produced convincing results (3), but provide an excuse for punitive expeditions and collective punishment after attempted break-outs or minor incidents.

In 2001, two parliamentary commissions issued a report that called for major reforms in the country’s prison system. The reports noted that unsentenced prisoners made up 40 percent of the French prison population, one of the highest such rates among industrialized countries. Various other disturbing issues were also reported in the period 2001-2005 by a number of independent observers.

Amnesty International, Report of 2005 on France

In a report in March covering visits in 2003, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), reiterated its disagreement with official refusal to grant access to a lawyer in some cases for the first 36 hours in police custody. The CPT stressed that all detainees should have access to a lawyer from the outset of custody, and also during police questioning – which is not currently permitted. According to figures published in May by the police and prison oversight body, the National Commission of Deontology and Security (CNDS), complaints of police abuse or violence almost doubled in the previous year.
…
[However,] officers continued to enjoy effective impunity: frequently, no action was taken against officers following complaints, or cases were slow to come to court. By contrast, police prosecutions of people charged with insulting state agents or resisting arrest usually came before the courts promptly.
…
The CPT report in March expressed concern at the “recent and alarming” rise in the prison population, which had resulted in serious overcrowding, an inhuman and degrading environment, and a high rate of suicides. […] It detailed unhealthy and unsafe conditions, the lack of activities for a large number of prisoners, a sense of exhaustion and frustration among prison officers, and the absence of an effective policy to prevent suicides. These problems were not only, or even mainly, caused by lack of infrastructure, the report found, but originated in a more repressive penal policy that would not be addressed by simply building new prisons. The CPT’s recommendations stressed the need for prompt and radical action to cut overcrowding and obtain humane conditions.

Can we get away with blaming only the United States for the terrible treatment of detainees? Yes, the Bush administration is responsible for the abuses committed against the Guantanamo prisoners but apparently this is not a separate case. The yard of Europe is not much cleaner that the American one.

Unfortunately, the policy of a number of “developed” countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean implies that the prison population is a degenerate excrescence requiring quick removal. In those cases, the imprisonment sentence is all about punishment while the rehabilitation part is kept somewhere in the bottom, if not removed at all.

Disturbingly, the prisons in some post-industrial countries are turning into commercial institutions adopting money-generating schemes. About a third of the income of the inmates is subject to training schemes organized by the ministry of education although the rehabilitation policy in the penitentiaries is hitting an all-time low.  Furthermore, the prisoners can buy lighter sentences and better conditions by contributing to “criminal injuries compensation schemes.” Fifteen Euros means a day less in prison, while 30 Euros each month takes one month off the sentence. This measures certainly benefit the wealthier part of the prison population, which despite the severity of its crimes is able to receive shorter sentences with better living conditions. On the other hand, unemployed, and alienated from a society indifferent to their needs, poor citizens become involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. They are arrested, imprisoned, and made to work.

Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy

For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation to pay. No language problem, as in a foreign country. New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret. All at a fraction of the cost of “free labor.”

To close the economic circle, the inmates are required to pay for their everyday needs (including food, prescription drugs and items for personal hygiene). The prices are between 30 and 50 percent higher than those in the regular shops outside. At the same time, the standard of life in prisons is constantly deteriorating. Thus, it is interesting to know what amount of funds are generated by the penitentiaries due to the commercial activities done on their premises and what part vanishes into the pockets of officials and big businesses.

Le Monde Diplomatique, France Return of the convicts

It seems to have become deliberate prison policy to cut the standard of living of inmates and reduce the range of services available to them. This operates together with a drive to extort as much money as possible from those serving sentences; the official reason is the need to boost the finances of criminal injuries compensation schemes.

The policy towards the prison population in some post-industrialized countries like France is causing, intentionally or not, the humiliation of human beings. Although humiliation by itself might be seen as a punishment for the crimes committed, this will not make the inmates better persons when they are finally released. In fact, when they finish serving their sentences those victims of both physical and mental abuse will be full of hatred towards the system and society. “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind,” said Gandhi once. Society is not correcting the prisoners. Society is simply taking revenge. So, why should we also become criminals and commit the same crimes we want to see punished? What is the point of such a policy?

BBC News, I Still Have Nightmares, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4229777.stm

“The first eight of them attacked me as I shouted “Prensa! Prensa! (Journalist!)” One of them said to me in English ‘You are Black Bloc and we’re going to kill Black Bloc.’
…
I fell to the floor after being batoned around the kneecaps. They kicked me in the spine and I was used as a football. Eight of my ribs were broken. One lung was shredded, not punctured but shredded.
“I had two bones broken in my left hand and a vein twisted around my spine.
“I lay on the floor for a while and then more police came along. One hit me in the back of the head with a baton and another one kicked me in the face, which is when I lost my 10 front teeth.”

This is just part of the experience Mark Covell went through after midnight, on July 22nd 2001 when a large number of policemen in battle gear attacked the journalist covering the demonstrations during the G8 summit in Genoa. Covell, a reporter from the Independent Media Center, was 14 hours in unconsciousness and was sent to hospital in a critical condition. He spent 12 days there after what he was departed to England for further treatment.

BBC News, I Still Have Nightmares, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4229777.stm

“My post traumatic stress disorder is sky high and I am still having counselling. It was like having a shell go off next to you in Iraq.
“I almost died at Diaz and I still have flashbacks and nightmares every night, and recently they have got worse.”

The assault over Covell happened in the Diaz school, a few kilometers from the place of the G8 summit. 93 people were arrested following the police raid of which 72 were injured and none convicted.

BBC News, “Genoa police “admit fabrication” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2636647.stm

A senior officer, Pietro Troiani, reportedly admitted under questioning that two petrol bombs allegedly found at the school were planted by police to justify the raid.
…
Demonstrators said riot police beat them with clubs, smashed windows and wrecked computers in the raid.

The BBC’s Bill Hayton was among those who stood outside the Diaz school, hearing the screams coming from within, then watching bodies brought out on stretchers.

When the police left he went in and saw blood on the walls, floors and radiators of an upstairs room.

The police forces are believed to be also responsible for the dead of the protestor Carlo Giuliani. Videotape and photos are showing Giuliani being shot in the head and ran over by a jeep belonging to the Italian carabinieries (more information about the death of Giuliani can be found on http://www.carlo-giuliani.com/ ). The 19th and 20th court hearings of the case, in which 70 police officers are accused of police brutality against protestors, were conducted on January 11 and 19 2006.

Independent Media Center, Witnesses Reclaim Truth in Geneva, http://www.indymedia.org/en/2006/01/831973.shtml

The first to give evidence was BBC reporter Bill Hayton, who happened to be present during the raid and could recall the whole night basing on his mobile phone bill. The timing of his calls to the BBC show the sequence of events: when the raid started and he could watch everything from the independent media headquarters, when the police took him “hostage” for 40 minutes and when he was freed and could go and watch the havoc caused by the police in the school.

After him the court listened to Hamish Campbell, a videomaker who was in the media center when the raid began and filmed everything from the rooftop of the building facing the Diaz school. His video is a milestone in the accusation, since it testifies that there was nobody fighting against the police when the agents attacked the makeshift dormitory. The thesis of the defence is instead that the police were assaulted by people throwing objects against them. From his rooftop hideout, Hamish Campbell also witnessed the policemen beating Mark Covell in the street.

However, even found guilty, the police officers might avoid jail because of the law devised to enable Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s former lawyer to escape a jail term on bribery charges but also applying to various other offenses.

The journalistic community is increasingly concerned with the violence employed by various security institutions towards the press. Most people consider normal, although unacceptable, repressions against the freedom of speech in countries like Iran. However, developed countries should not believe they are immune against such problems. Often, especially in the cases of demonstrations and protests, the police forces are reacting overly-aggressively and, thus, threatening the lives of bystanders.

International Federation of Journalists, Journalists Condemn Police and Demand Probe Into Genoa Violence Against Media http://media.gn.apc.org/fl/ifjgenoa.html

The International Federation of Journalists today accused Italian police of violence against media staff and heavy-handed tactics that “have put reporters at risk and show contempt for press freedom” in the confrontation with protestors at the G8 summit over the weekend.

“We had numerous reports of reporters and news teams caught up in the crossfire of some brutal policing,” said Aidan White, General Sectretary of the IFJ, the world’s largest journalists’ organisation. “We demand a full investigation into how the police have acted and particularly how they have compromised journalists’ rights and put reporters at risk”.

However, Covell believes the violence against him was not accidental.

International Federation of Journalists, Statement by Mark Covell, http://media.gn.apc.org/fl/0109sky.html?i=flolder&d=2001_09

The purpose of the Italian police raid on Indymedia, says Covell, may have been to seize film of their earlier actions. It may have been to prevent us reporting their outrageously violent raid on the peaceful protesters’ billet on the other side of the street. Either way, it was an attack on the media – your media as much as mine.

The deterioration of the freedom of speech is a global trend. Journalists are being beaten by police forces, editors are being persecuted for their work, and the normal people are not allowed to express their opinion. The Patriotic Act is taking over the world and is threatening to turn Orwell’s “1984” into reality. Where are we going from here?