
What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright - zoowar
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-party-wants-with-patents-trademarks-and-copyright/
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tzs
Please explain how content that is inherently very expensive to create (such
as big movies and games) would be funded under the proposed system.

Please take into account the following:

1\. The studies usually cited saying that piracy does not reduce the income of
content creators are studies of the _current_ _system_ , where there are legal
barriers to the kind of commercial support of file sharing your proposal
advocates. They are irrelevant to the question of what would happen under the
proposed system.

2\. Sites like TPB are completely legal under the proposal. It seems likely
that the legalization of commercialization of file sharing (only the actual
file sharing itself must be non-commercial under the proposal) will cause many
other competitors to TPB to appear. Why wouldn't Google get in on it--
integrate sharing of commercial movies with YouTube, for instance.

I would expect this to make file sharing become the main way most people get
their content. Even those who prefer physical media and aren't technologically
sophisticated enough to deal with burning discs will likely find someone
serving them commercially.

E.g., I'd expect something like Red Box to appear that instead of dispensing
pressed DVDs for rental downloads the movie the customer wants via file
sharing, burns it to a DVD-R, and dispenses the disc. I have no doubt the
operator of such a daevice could structure things in such a way that the
customer is not paying for the shared file itself but rather just for the
costs and service of retrieving the file and burning it, and so would be
commercial support of file sharing, not commercial file sharing.

~~~
maratd
> Please explain how content that is inherently very expensive to create (such
> as big movies and games) would be funded under the proposed system.

Kickstarter-like model? This has been shown to work.

Donate and get your name in the credits, get included in the production
process, get a vote, etc., or some other perks.

~~~
jiggy2011
Kickstarter is also a pre-order system.

People who donate to kickstarter will do so at least partly to get a copy of
whatever at a (possibly) reduced cost.

The costs of kickstarter pre-orders are also partly dictated by the market
value of other similar products, $20 for an indie game or whatever.

Under this system that incentive goes away since there will be no personal
advantage in making the lower end pledges especially since the perceived cost
is now free.

I'm sure someone will jump on and say "but I will do it just to support the
project!" , congratulations but you are probably in a minority.

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malandrew
TBH, I think the appeal to "economic growth" is often the wrong argument and
instead there should be a focus on maximizing benefit for the public and the
individual.

Having lots of patents and stuff produces economic growth and jobs, just not
for inventors, creators, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and
salespeople. Instead it creates economic growth for lawyers, para-legals,
judges, courts and patent trolls.

Recently it was reported that Apple and Google both spend more on intellectual
property related activities than on research and development, and they spend a
lot on research and development. This shows that there is economic growth, but
it is not desirable economic growth the same way a disaster like Hurricane
Katrina or Hurricane Andrew created after they destroy entire regions and
contributed to those economies via recovery activities.

Instead the argument needs to focus on growth that is maximally beneficial for
society at large. IP strong and IP weak regimes both produce economic growth,
but in different vectors, but only a weak IP regime produces an economic
environment where the availability and quality of the goods and services
available improves while the price drops of those same goods and services
drops. That is maximally beneficial.

~~~
rayiner
> Recently it was reported that Apple and Google both spend more on
> intellectual property related activities than on research and development,
> and they spend a lot on research and development.

I hope this particular bit of FUD doesn't take off. The study that reported
this accounted for e.g. the Motorola Mobility purchase as being a
"intellectual property related activity." While IP was surely some part of the
Motorola purchase, it also came with products, engineers, physical plant, etc.
It's ridiculous to chalk up the $12 billion spent on the purchase to
"intellectual property related activities" but that's exactly what the study
did.

All the study says is that Apple/Google spend as much money buying technology
as they do developing in house. Which is not news to anyone. Heck, many
(most?) startups are driven by the prospect of an eventual exit in the form of
an acquisition, and intellectual property is part of every such acquisition.
Should you count all startups acquisitions as part of this supposedly
undesirable Katrina-like expenditures on "intellectual property related
activities?"

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6ren
Patents act as a tariff against imports. So, if the US abolished patents,
imports of products using US inventions could compete on an equal footing
(perhaps winning, because of cheaper labour costs; perhaps not). For example,
Foxconn could manufacture iPhones and sell them itself.

What happens when the supply of existing patents runs out? i.e. consider it
globally, not nationally. I can only guess that people wanting to develop
inventions for commercialization would try to keep them secret - and people
wishing to invest in commercializing inventions would prefer those that can be
protected (by keeping them secret). This, apparently, was the situation before
patents.

But this is Sweden (not the USA), which I hazard is a net-importer of patented
products, so Sweden doesn't gain from patents. In fact, the Netherlands did
abolish patents, and Switzerland delayed enacting them - and that was _good_
for their economic development. I understand that they were compelled to, by
powerful countries who _did_ benefit from patents.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_views_on_patents#Histo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_views_on_patents#History)

It seems logical to me that patents and copyright encourage investment in
inventive and creative work, by enabling the value of the work to be captured.
As a researcher, I also feel that the work of inventors and artists _should_
be rewarded. But I agree the present system doesn't seem to be working very
well.

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mtgx
They sound like very reasonable proposals, that I would think most people with
common sense with accept. I especially find interesting the proposal to use
R&D for the pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how
practical that is. It would need serious commitment and serious investment
from Governments to do that.

In countries where healthcare is also paid by the Government, that might work,
but I doubt many of them would take on it eventually. I don't think any of
this would be implemented in US in the short to medium term, though, as that
kind of proposal would be immediately considered communist by half the country
(especially if Fox News has anything to say about it).

I'm also not sure if I would let the Government be 100% responsible for the
pharmaceutical R&D, but maybe it could use taxpayer money for some R&D anyway,
and any drug that comes out of it, would be patent-free. Think of it as the
open source Linux to Microsoft's Windows, or Firefox to IE. Companies would
still be free to patent drugs and sell them for whatever they want, but the
Government would be able to reverse engineer or create very similar
alternatives that are patent-free, and much cheaper.

~~~
Falkvinge
> _I especially find interesting the proposal to use R &D for the
> pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how practical
> that is. It would need serious commitment and serious investment from
> Governments to do that._

You're quite right in this analysis - especially with your followup about this
being the most applicable where healthcare is also paid by the government.

In Europe, 83% of the pharma revenue - on average - comes from taxpayer money,
mostly through drug subsidies. Yet, only 15% of their revenue total is used
for R&D (and another 30% of the total is used for manufacturing), according to
the pharma industry's own numbers.

So if we pay all of those 30 percent units for manufacturing from the tax
coffers, another 15 percent units is needed to bring research on par. That
takes us to 45 percent units - but we're paying for 83 percent units today. We
can afford to double the research and still save a significant chunk of
taxpayer money.

This doesn't even begin to take into account that 70% of today's new
pharmaceuticals are so-called _copycat drugs_ with no other purpose than to
circumvent another company's patent monopoly. If we assume that these
resources will be spent researching new drugs instead, as nothing is patent-
encumbered, we have tripled the research _just in forcing drugs to be generic_
, before taking actual increases or decreases in research funds into account.

The loser here is the pharma industry's _"marketing"_ account, which has been
overly well-fed with taxpayer money.

Cheers, Rick

~~~
MaysonL
There's also the point to consider that much of the pharma industry's output
is bogus: see Ben Goldacre's recent book _Bad Pharma_.

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A1kmm
The main problem with IP laws (and I exclude trademarks here because they have
different properties) is that they discourage the use of content and ideas
that have been created or invented. This is an unintended side effect of
current system - the original aim was to reward and increase supply, rather
than decrease demand.

So the Swedish Pirate Party are asking the wrong questions. They should be
asking how can we continue to support innovators and inventors, even if they
don't have the means to be producers, while not decreasing demand.

A good solution is to provide an alternative to the monopoly model with
something more like a tax. A business can elect to pay a certain fixed
percentage of their profits before IP costs, IP revenue, and tax to a pool of
money which is distributed to creators / inventers. In exchange the business
is exempt from IP laws (excl trademarks) as long as it only trades with
individual consumers and similarly exempt businesses. Each participating
business is legally required to declare what content / inventions they used to
create their product / services, and the participating businesses that
supplied them, or face penalties; copies of content or inventions made by
anyone must be labelled with the reporting code. The pool of funds is
distributed based on a formula taking into account the direct (used by
business making profit) and indirect (i.e. used to create something in the
supply chain of participating businesses) use of content / ideas that
contributed to the profits.

Under this system, participating businesses would want to read and apply as
many relevant patent documents as possible, and use as much outside content as
possible, since they don't pay any more, meaning that there is much more reuse
of ideas, but the creators of that content would still be rewarded.

------
benologist
It seems a bit ridiculous to say you want to legalize _non-commercial_ file
sharing and then specifically cite TPB, a website full of ads and affiliate
shitware doing billions of pageviews a month.

It really just detracts from the better arguments made. Do you want to shorten
copyright and reform patents, or do you want to legalize very commercial file
sharing?

~~~
Falkvinge
This isn't ridiculous at all. To use a parallel, you can commercially
facilitate non-commercial _dating_ as much as you like, and many websites make
a killing out of doing so. If they were to facilitate _commercial dating_
(prostitution), it would be a different matter, and that would be illegal in
most places.

But as long as the main activity is legal, then of course it's also legal to
commercially aid somebody in doing so. Entire industries are built on that
fundamental logic.

Cheers, Rick

~~~
benologist
Are you claiming TPB is not commercial because the person sending the file is
not charging the person receiving the file, in a relationship facilitated
commercially by TPB?

~~~
Falkvinge
TPB may or may not be commercial, and it doesn't matter in the slightest here,
as they're aiding a _noncommercial and therefore legal_ sharing of knowledge
and culture. Aiding that would always be legal under this proposal.

Somebody making money off of _aiding_ a legal noncommercial sharing doesn't
make the original sharing commercial and illegal. Again, compare dating.

And if you can make money off of people wanting to share culture and
knowledge, all the better for you.

~~~
benologist
By that argument there is basically nothing that qualifies as "commercial"
file sharing because ultimately those bytes are moving for free whether it's
P2P or a bootleg DVD transferring them to a DVD player.

 _Everyone_ benefits from patent reform, copyright reform, the cost of drugs
being reduced, DRM being abolished etc. Why derail those arguments with "and
legalize piracy!" when TPB etc's perhaps illicit business models are of no
lasting consequence to anyone but the few whose pockets they line?

~~~
tomp
I think the argument is not so much "legalize piracy" as it is "decriminalize
30% of the society". In this case, it's obvious that the law sucks.

Also, it's pretty easy to judge when file-sharing is commercial - whenever it
is done by a commercial entity, e.g. a for-profit radio station that would
otherwise have to pay public-performance fees.

~~~
tzs
Falkvinge explicitly said above that it doesn't matter whether or not the
entity is commercial.

~~~
Falkvinge
No, I said that it doesn't matter whether an entity _aiding_ noncommercial
filesharing is itself commercial (like The Pirate Bay might be; just having
ads does not make an entity commercial).

The analogy with the postal service made earlier was actually quite apt.

Cheers, Rick

~~~
benologist
I'm increasingly curious what you consider commercial - there's an awful lot
of businesses out there with the exact same monetization methods as TPB that
are indisputably "commercial".

The line between "aiding file sharing" and "file sharing is their business
model" is also very, very questionable. We all saw what happened to Mininova
when they stopped "aiding".

~~~
Dylan16807
Could you name a few so this discussion can make more sense?

TPB could easily run without ads. In my mind adding ads to something should
generally not affect legality.

A guy who prints DVDs with movies on them and sells them on the street is a
commercial pirate. A guy that takes DVDs someone else made and brings them to
people is a courier. It's not a very complicated distinction.

~~~
benologist
You need examples of ad supported websites? Really?

The commercial nature of the site affects whether it falls under non-
commercial file sharing the OP would like to see legalized of course, in which
case it changes the argument from "legalize non-commercial file sharing" to
"legalize commercial piracy".

~~~
Dylan16807
Sorry, I guess I misunderstood that point. I thought you were saying something
about the commercial nature extending to site uses, not just pointing out that
there are commercial sites funded by ads. You're definitely right on that
point.

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ewillbefull
> A ban on DRM (digital restriction mechanisms), or at a bare minimum, making
> it explicitly legal to break digital restriction mechanisms if needed for
> any use that is itself legal.

I don't see how banning DRM entirely would ever be a good idea. Lots of code
could be misconstrued as DRM, and there are a number of free speech concerns
that remind me of bans on encryption up to certain key lengths. What about
building DRM for research purposes, code analysis, etc? Why exactly would DRM
need to be banned when it has always been so easy to work around?

~~~
politician
I believe that the law should be either-or: either you can come to the courts
to seek remedy for infractions of your copyrights _or_ you can pursue
vigilante justice through DRM schemes. If a company drops a rootkit into your
computer because you popped in a CD, well, then I think the courts should wash
their hands of it if that company then insists that their extrajudicial
measures failed.

