
Petzl comes out against SOPA, after appearing on the list of supporters - mikeocool
http://www.petzl.com/us/outdoor/news-2/2011/12/22/petzl-americas-stance-sopa-and-protect-ip
======
secretwhistle
It's good to see a company clearly state that it wishes to prevent counterfeit
goods from harming end users, but that SOPA is not the way to address that
problem.

Most of the talk from supporters plays up the "counterfeit" angle, dragging in
firemen, soldiers, etc. as examples of who could be harmed by these knockoffs,
but all of the push is coming from groups who want to shut down piracy at the
expense of the internet and who have nothing physical to protect. It's an ugly
bait-and-switch. Fortunately, this dodge no longer seems to be working.

------
phil
It's cool that they published this letter. All that stuff about counterfeiting
is not just an abstract concern. Here's a forum thread from early this year
about counterfeit biners and ascenders:

[http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1409671/Attention-
Pe...](http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1409671/Attention-Petzl-warns-
for-fake-Chinese-reproductions)

This stuff has been popping up for a while. It's scary as a climber since your
gear failing so far below rated strength could get you killed.

------
iamandrus
> In February, 2011, Petzl did sign on to a letter circulated by the Outdoor
> Industry Association supporting government action against intellectual
> property theft via “rogue websites.” That letter made no mention of any
> specific legislation, and support for it was spurred by Petzl’s own
> encounter with the problem of counterfeit life-safety products.

Ahh, so _that's_ how they're getting supporters... very shady.

~~~
mikecaron
Yes, very deceitful way to gain "supporters". I just wonder how many companies
on that list were duped into signing something like this.

------
bhickey
Back in September I sat besides a Petzl employee on a flight into Kathmandu.
Petzl had tasked him with teaching snow safety and mountain skills to Nepalis
who would otherwise not have access to this instruction.

Plus their gear is great.

~~~
Kroem3r
Really? teaching Nepalis snow safety? That seems amusingly unlikely. Wouldn't
that be like teaching Polynesians water safety?

~~~
DavidAdams
My guess is that they were training folks on the safety equipment and
procedures that Western mountaineers use, so the Nepalese guides and
outfitters don't have a culture clash in an emergency situation. The truth is,
modern mountaineering equipment and procedure is really good, even if some
aspects the traditional mountain knowledge and ways are timeless and extremely
valuable too.

~~~
bhickey
Not everyone in Nepal is a guide. All the guys up there are tough as nails,
but there isn't much education about safety or equipment. The most advanced
tool in a porter's repertoire is a t-shaped walking stick.

Even the Sherpa are relatively recent migrants to the region (~400 years), and
the Rai people have only moved into the highlands with the modern demand for
labor. By and large they're coming from a tradition of subsistence farming.

As an example, a friend was traveling in the Khumbu last year and his party
came across a deceased porter around 6000m. He had presumably been paid off
after getting sick and sent down on his own. All they could do was build a
cairn over his body.

------
cheald
Excellent response. A couple more of these, and the facade might really start
to crumble. Support for this thing is non-existent outside of a few very
wealthy organizations, and the more reversals we have like this, the easier
it's going to be to make the case against it.

------
davidu
This is likely the case with a number of the supporters. It's important to
note all the companies who back out of their support -- which is an even
stronger signal that not signing in the first place.

It indicates they were hoodwinked!

------
switz
I'm glad to see a company that has very little to do with the internet be so
affected by the outreach and feel a need to send out this letter. I use Petzl
headlamps and they're great. Plus their site runs on Drupal. Petzl is a-okay
in my book.

~~~
fletchowns
I use a Petzl headlamp when I go backpacking, they make great products. As a
side note, headlamps also make great gifts, even for people that won't be
using it for outdoor activities. Once you have one you find it can be used for
all kinds of things, like when you are fixing something under the sink. I love
using mine for reading as well.

~~~
DavidAdams
And I can speak from experience having owned a few Petzl headlamps and some
cheapo no-name Chinese headlamps, or even cheapo Chinese headlamps with Eddie
Bauer branding. There's a world of difference. I have a Petzl that's 15 years
old and works like a champ.

So I can understand them being pissed about counterfeit goods sullying their
good name. Now, I'm a little baffled as to why anyone would buy a $5,000+
handbag, but hey, whatever floats your boat. I can also see where designer
labels would be desperate to protect their businesses too.

But that's the thing: there's nothing wrong with a company pushing hard to use
the law to protect its business. But since lawmakers are supposed to promote
the common welfare, they shouldn't just roll over like obedient dogs. The
people need to yell about it until the lawmakers wise up.

~~~
dantheman
I believe that if the law is immoral then there is something wrong with a
company pushing hard to use the law to "protect" it's business. How do you
feel about companies dumping toxic waste in poor countries where the law says
its fine?

------
edwardy20
This shows that all the efforts by the online community to raise awareness
about SOPA are having some effect. Keep it up!

------
droithomme
The issue of counterfeit products is an interesting one, and I agree
completely with them it can even come to be a safety issue with some sorts of
parts like climbing gear, and airplane and car parts, all of which have
counterfeiting problems which have likely resulted in deaths and accidents.

Rather than ban "rogue" overseas web sites offering such goods though, why not
have a central registry where counterfeiters can be reported and consumers can
check with before buying.

A lady at work was telling me she was going to buy $1000 french designer shoes
for $50 from a discount web site. I pointed out to her it was obviously either
counterfeit or a credit card stealing site. That stopped her, but not everyone
has someone to advise them on these matters. A reputable site that validates
claims, to protect the public, would be something useful the government could
do, without also giving it power that can be abused to censor free speech.

------
pavpanchekha
I love the irony of Petzl having a problem with _trademark_ law just as we're
having these twin furors over copyright and patent laws. Oh, the wonders of
intellectual property law. Anyway, just keep in mind that "intellectual
property" is a fake thing, it is the superposition of three distinct classes,
as follows.

* Patents cover inventions and systems. They hope to prevent trade secret, thus making public knowledge disadvantageous to publish, by granting temporary global monopolies on physical mechanisms.

* Copyright covers creative works. It hopes to prevent art from being un-monetizeable and thus expensive to create, by granting temporary localized monopolies on creative works.

* Trademarks cover identity and brand. It hopes to prevent "brand dilution" (some sort of passive libel, might we say?), thus making trust-based business difficult; it does this by granting infinite namespaced monopoly on symbols and marks.

Patents and Copyrights are temporary: they exist only for a specified period
(20 and 100 years are good approximate figures, but the rules are complex)
after which the monopoly disappears; trademarks are infinite: they must be
renewed (yearly?) but can be indefinitely.

Patents are global: once one is granted, independent discovery is not a
defence (though it may help prove that the patent was obvious and thus
shouldn't've been granted); copyright is local: once one is granted,
independent discover _is_ a defence (though the greater the independent
discovery, the more suspicious the claim); trademarks are namespaced:
independent discovery and use valid if it "doesn't cause confusion", that is,
if the entities trademarked don't do similar-enough things that someone might
mean one and get the other.

Thus a (hypothetical) patent on linked lists would make it illegal to use
linked lists anywhere, anytime until it ran out, for any reason, and with any
(obvious-enough) implementation. One could not patent a poem specifically,
though one could (concievably) patent a mechanism of constructing them. One
could not patent the Apple logo, though one could concievably patent a
particular way of drawing it, or the technique by which plastic is molded in
its shape (if this method is sufficiently novel).

One could not copyright a linked list, though one could patent the contents of
its cells, and one could copyright the use of a linked list if this itself
presented a creative contribution (perhaps a linked list of versions of MS
Windows, where linkage underscores the fact that one was based on another).
One could copyright a poem, and in fact any creativity-baren modifications
(fixing typos, rendering in HTML, a program that prints the poem), though not
creativity-requiring modifications (rendering to music, translations, or a
literary criticism of it) (all of these might be more or less tenuous
depending on exact circumstances). One could copyright the Apple logo, but
only if you could argue that its precise configuration is an artistic work,
and this would have to be done for every specific variant every: if I made an
outline of the logo and filled it in with a cutout of Jobs's face, that would
not be covered.

One could not trademark a linked list, unless the linked list was a trademark
of my particular trademark or brand; with a lot of twisting the law, one might
imagine Lisp trademarking the use of linked lists everywhere, but this
wouldn't apply to programs, just other programming langauges (and of course,
this is pretty nebulous, trademarks are actually supposed to be quite
concrete). One could trademark a poem, if this poem was the canonical
definition of your identity, but it'd have to be a short poem, since long
poems are too long to read to just be an identity, and it'd only apply to that
entity in its field: a plumber, a physicist, and a computer company could all
have the same poem as their trademark. Finally, you'd trademark the Apple logo
since it is the core symbolic identity of Apple.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

So for the issue at hand, Petzl could be concerned about three things. First:
someone could be stealing exactly how the mechanism of carabiners, headlamps,
and life safety equipment and building atop this idea without paying Petzl due
credit. That would be hurting Petzl by removing its competitive advantage it
gained from discovering new types of safety equipment. For example, Paul Petzl
has patent 5357657 on carabiners; he should be rewarded for discovering the
idea and telling the world about it. That patent still has 2 years of life (by
my guess), so Petzl might be concerned. But that's not the issue they're
bringing up here.

Second: someone could be copying the exact design of their carabiners,
something they might consider an artistic form, and copying this art to other
people without forcing them to pay Petzl for the privilage. That would make it
more expensive for them to produce similar art in the future. However, they
might be hard-pressed to argue that the artistic merit of carabiners and
similar are what they sell. This is also not the issue Petzl is concerned
about here.

Third: someone might be making things that claim to be Petzl things, but
aren't, and be thus both stealing Petzl costumers (illigitimately growing his
business by hurting customers) and be hurting Petzl by producing inferior
product or support, reducing trust in Petzl the entity. This would hurt
customers by making trust-based business hard to do, and make it hard for
Petzl to pride itself on anything but prices, since everything else it sells
(quality, support, practices) rely on being able to identity Petzl products.
This _is_ what Petzl is concerned about here.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

SOPA (by my knowledge) mostly deals with reforming _copyright_ law, not patent
or trademark law. Thus it would do nothing for Petzl (beyond doing the evil we
suspect it will to everyone).

Finally, I've always loved Petzl gear (I have use for a good headlamp, and
really, who doesn't?), and this is yet another reason for me to support them.
Not that they take the default position, but by taking the time to check and
publicly state that their "support" was a mistruth at best, a lie at worst.

~~~
bermanoid
Just FWIW, from what I've heard from people in the pharma industry, similar
concerns over seriously sub-par counterfeit products are why they support
legislation like this. It's not so much that they're worried about profits
(counterfeit drugs don't hurt revenues by any significant factor for big drug
companies), but that people can end up dying because of counterfeit drugs,
either because they contain contaminants or do not contain the right amounts
of the drugs that they should contain so the conditions end up untreated
without the patients realizing. Both, I'm told, have happened in the real
world on many occasions.

Not that this makes SOPA any more reasonable, of course, as it will cause a
lot of trouble in other areas. But the anti-counterfeiting angle is bringing
in quite a bit of support for it, and in many case it really is based on
legitimate safety concerns rather than greed.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Surely we can come up with a better technical solution for this!

Currently pharmaceutical companies try to prove authenticity by e.g. printing
little holograms on the pillboxes, which is not very effective since pirates
can print holograms too. How about this instead:

Each pillbox comes with a little paper which contains a random-looking string
of characters and a trademark. It is folded-over and sealed so the contents
are not readable. When an end-consumer wants to know if their drug is
authentic or not, they tear open the paper, go to a website operated by (say)
the US Patent and Trademark Office, and type in the trademark and character
string (or scan a QR code). The website says "authentic"/"inauthentic"/"this
string was already used".

On the production side, you can set it up so that the factory needs to
communicate with a central company server to allocate codes, so you get an
accurate count of how many codes are produced and if it matches the amount of
drugs manufactured. This way, if an insider starts leaking codes to pirates it
can be noticed quickly.

~~~
rmc
Your talking about people who buy pills of the internet from spam emails. What
makes you think "Remember to type in the letters on the government's site to
check it" is something that would happen at all?

Fake pills is not a technical problem, so a technical solution is not
required. You're just shifting blame to the customer.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Well, I wasn't primarily thinking about the internet pills. In many developing
countries (particularly in south-east asia), something like 5-30% of all drugs
are counterfeits without proper active ingredients (see e.g.
<http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7341/800.full>). There are many skilled and
motivated users (doctors) failing to detect the fakes because the packaging is
identical.

Similarly, the rock climbers mentioned earlier in the thread probably would
also be motivated to check authenticity?

I find the "a technical solution is not required" comment a bit odd. Spam is
not a technical problem either, but we still use spam filters.

------
samstave
Good. They are climbing up the cliff of my opion on any company that supported
this.

------
electic
They need to do more. Pull out of the US Chamber of Commerce, then we know you
are serious.

