Intellectual Property

Political Philosophy Law
21

I don’t understand how the government uses copyright to censor anything. By law, the federal government cannot prohibit copying its works. Other levels of government are usually required to make available public records, so for example they cannot suppress dissent by forbidding discussion of a particular law (anyhow, that right is covered by the First Amendment, which trumps copyright law). A state or municipal government could, for example, publish a book and under copyright law could forbid you from copying that work, but I don’t see how that constitutes censorship. That’s a point that needs to be explained.

It is not censorship when a publisher exercises its property right to a work that it owns. Censorship is an act done by the government

Your implication that copyright expiry is not “readily available” anymore is simply untrue – copyright always expires at a legally-defined time. Maybe you are claiming that the duration of copyright is too long. The 75 years vs. 50 years vs. 25 years question is a difficult one, but “arbitrary” numbers are necessary in a society with objective laws. The determination that a person can be held liable for contracts at age 18 is an “arbitrary” number, perhaps the number should be 19 or 17. If you want to argue that a 4 year old should be held liable for their contracts, perhaps that would be an topic worth discussing separately.

And fyi, “fair use” is rampantly available. The main problem with fair use is that it is not clearly defined – what counts as “fair” is highly arbitrary.

Physical copies can disappear at the whim of certain people (“owners”) just as much as electronic copies can. There are tons of physical products that I can’t get anymore because there doesn’t seem to be sufficient market to warrant maintaining the machinery. That’s life.

Far from suppressing the acquisition of desirable stuff, the expansion of electronic means of promulgation has made it much easier to get free stuff. Print books are rather expensive, and electronic books are dirt cheap, or could be. These days, it is not difficult to self-publish and freely distribute a book that you write. An author has to make a choice – do they want to make money from the work and do they want it to be widely and systematically disseminated, or are they satisfied with free, informally-distributed samizdat? If you’re not happy with your particular publisher, there are plenty of competing publishers, so I don’t see how publisher control is relevant to the question of whether I have a property right to the book that I write.

I just don’t see any argument here that government officials have in any way corrupted concepts of intellectual property rights. Your objections seem to be based on commercialization – Disney not making their movies available all the time and using the law (statutory law and the law of supply and demand) as a way of generating value; contract law and the fact that you can’t sell trade secrets when you agree to not sell trade secrets.

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As an aside I think Sherlock Holmes just entered the ‘public domain’ , I assume that means Doyle’s estate no longer generates revenue from the character.

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5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

As an aside I think Sherlock Holmes just entered the ‘public domain’ , I assume that means Doyle’s estate no longer generates revenue from the character.

Is entering the public domain basically the default when a copyright/patent has expired? 

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It is true that all of the copyrights for Sherlock Holmes have expired, therefore those works are ‘in the public domain’. It is not the case that the estate cannot garner further revenue – that depends on the terms of the license granted to a publisher. If e.g. Random House obtained a license to publish some work of Doyle’s in exchange for some per-copy royalty, that obligation still exists unless there is an explicit clause terminating the obligation to pay. You’d really have to read the agreement to see what it says. I read my agreements, and there is no clause to the effect that “We don’t have to pay for sales once copyright expires”.

“Entering the public domain” is, pretty much defined as “copyright has expired”. People may declare that a work is “in the public domain”, but US copyright law does not define the concept “public domain”, and it’s just a common way of talking about expired copyright.

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25

It is possible to have trade secrets without the “inevitable disclosure” idea. If you work for a company, learn its trade secrets, and then deliberately disclose them to a competitor, that is properly illegal. But it’s another thing if the employer can say that the trade secrets are things that have become habits for you, so that, regardless even of your own desire in the matter, you would inevitably disclose them, if you worked for a competitor – and then uses that as a basis for preventing you from changing jobs.

So if you are a “star player” for a company then maybe some personal habit of yours, such as your handwriting, or your typing style, or your method of composing music or flipping omelets, if the job involved such a thing – might become a “trade secret” of the company, which they then own (not you). So you can never leave, unless you change careers entirely, or retire, or die.

Objectivism (as far as I know) does not support the notion of signing yourself into slavery. But such a thing used to be possible, because your freedom could be regarded as a “property,” separate from yourself, which would originally belong to you but could be signed away. “Inevitable disclosure” hearkens back to that sort of idea, because it creates a situation where an aspect of you can become the property of someone else; thus, as I said, the intellect of one person becomes the property of another.

Sometimes I sense this notion that “if you disagree with these ideas then you probably think it’s okay to rob banks” or something, but that is not the case. What I disagree with is more like the sort of thing like when Hank Rearden was blackmailed into signing over the patent to Rearden Metal. That kind of thing happens not just to the Hank Reardens of the world but to lots of people, all the time, in a corrupt system, and further, the system will be developed in such a way as to make that sort of expropriation easier to commit and harder to resist, to make it look like it’s just laws and contracts operating as they should, to make it look like the sort of people who think that sort of expropriation is going on under a cloak of “legality,” probably oppose patents and contracts, and think it’s okay to rob banks.

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26

10 hours ago, necrovore said:

It is possible to have trade secrets without the “inevitable disclosure” idea.

What is most unfortunate is when multiple inventors are competing and there are many paths to take to create X. One inventor takes the very expensive route and the product is created. Now the others know of a way to do it. They know at least that the expensive route will pan out. Until then none of them dared to go that route. In other words, the idea that it is impossible will prevent one from moving forward. Once the competition shows you that it is possible, they created competition for themselves. The idea that “it can be done” allows for copies or similar things.

At that point a government could say it is a copy, or not. Even if it was independently created. The only way for it to not be a copy is if it was done without any knowledge of the existence of the product. And that can’t be proved.

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Objectivism does not countenance signing yourself into slavery, it does support the concept of a contract. When I hire a painter to paint my house, that contract entails that the painter must do specific work: paint my house. A contract can also specify, for reasons tangentially relating to trade secrets, that a person cannot harvest the firm’s clients and start a competing business for a period of a year. The only reason why the firm hired you in the first place is that you promised to abide by this contract clause, so if you don’t like it, work for someone else. Or, you and your buddies can get together and agree to refuse any such contracts, which might lead to a labor shortage and thus some change in the contract.

A contract that prohibits a person from “using their own writing style” in future employment is plainly unenforceable. The subject matter of trade secrets in law is better defined that a unilateral declaration “we consider this to be a trade secret”. An employer can only lay claim to actual work product created in the course of employment, or limit employee use of kinds of knowledge previously owned and protected by the firm, as stated in the contract and subject to short time limits.

Your accusation that people are routinely forced to sign over patents needs to be concretized. I suspect that you’re referring to the fact that a firm will typically contractually require its employees to assign their patents to the firms. Therefore the scientist who, working as an employee for a drug firm using the firm’s resources discovers a cure for Alzheimer’s cannot seize the resulting patent and claim it as his own. The scientist has to abide by whatever IP-sharing agreement is in the contract. If you have a specific real case that illustrates your concern, please direct us to the details.

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3 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

What is most unfortunate is when multiple inventors are competing and there are many paths to take to create X. One inventor takes the very expensive route and the product is created. Now the others know of a way to do it. They know at least that the expensive route will pan out. Until then none of them dared to go that route. In other words, the idea that it is impossible will prevent one from moving forward. Once the competition shows you that it is possible, they created competition for themselves. The idea that “it can be done” allows for copies or similar things.

At that point a government could say it is a copy, or not. Even if it was independently created. The only way for it to not be a copy is if it was done without any knowledge of the existence of the product. And that can’t be proved.

Ayn Rand dealt with the issue of two inventors working independently on the same invention, and one beating the other to the patent office.  The first one to the patent office is entitled to the patent.  This would be even more true if the second inventor’s work depended on knowledge of the first’s.

But if one inventor patents the very expensive route and another makes a less expensive route work, the second inventor should be able to patent the route they made work.

 

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On 1/14/2023 at 3:32 PM, Doug Morris said:

But if one inventor patents the very expensive route and another makes a less expensive route work, the second inventor should be able to patent the route they made work.

As a designer, good design practice was not to stipulated the process, unless it is necessary. This allowed fabricators to bid what they deemed necessary to meet the design specifications most economically.

Patents, per Rand required the material object being patented, but not the process by which it was produced. If a cheaper process can be found, perhaps there would be value in it to the inventor/holder of the patent.

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On 1/14/2023 at 10:18 AM, Easy Truth said:

The only way for it to not be a copy is if it was done without any knowledge of the existence of the product. And that can’t be proved.

And therein is a big part of the problem.

 

Patent and copyright infringement is supposed to refer to the theft of an idea which only occurred to the perpetrator because of the victim.  But short of mind-reading technology this cannot be proven, which means that the only sensible alternative is to ban all similar uses of that idea _ as if _ they’d been inspired by the original.

 

This whole conversation would be much simpler if we could read peoples’ minds to discover the source of any given idea.

 

On 1/14/2023 at 10:37 AM, DavidOdden said:

Your accusation that people are routinely forced to sign over patents needs to be concretized. I suspect that you’re referring to the fact that a firm will typically contractually require its employees to assign their patents to the firms. Therefore the scientist who, working as an employee for a drug firm using the firm’s resources discovers a cure for Alzheimer’s cannot seize the resulting patent and claim it as his own.

When I worked at Boston Scientific that was a standard clause in everybody’s contract.

 

I mean, if I’d thought of any way to improve their processes I certainly would’ve handed it over to the company (as they routinely talked about and encouraged) but less because of that clause and more because Boston Scientific is just a great company to work for.  If I’d had a similar insight several years later while I was working at Covidien (which had the same boilerplate clause but was not the best place to work) I probably would’ve quit my job and then sold my idea to Boston Scientific.

31

An AI system could come up with a huge number of permutations of musical notes and copyright each one. At that point preventing any new piece of music or writing to be owned by another. I’m not sure what there is to prevent this from happening. A person could then only use public domain stuff or pay up.

In the case of patents there is a payment that has to be made that may mitigate a system that spits out “random ideas”.

With the internet, it seems the concept of property will be attached to “community” which will be “agreements” rather than determined by geography. And that kind of property would exist based on agreement … per community. I assume someone has come up with a way to deal with it.

32

“Brains in a silicone or quantum jar” would have to be excluded from obtaining copyright. It isn’t apparent that anyone has yet developed a generalized artificial intelligence. I suspect a reading of the “legalese” involved in copyright/ patent laws could ‘find’ intent as a condition of application, so in that sense an “AI” system,( and without the ‘generalized’ qualifier would lack intent) that creates musical scores should not qualify as an author. Or it could be that it needs to be codified , lol

33

heh didn’t even read this yet but ..

https://www.barrons.com/news/getty-images-targets-ai-firm-for-copying-photos-01673961609

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1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

heh didn’t even read this yet but ..

https://www.barrons.com/news/getty-images-targets-ai-firm-for-copying-photos-01673961609

…and so it begins. Regulation of just what an AI can use in satisfying its programmers.

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9 hours ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

Patent and copyright infringement is supposed to refer to the theft of an idea

Maybe this is the root of the problem, in these discussions. Because copyright and patent infringement is widely talked about in social media as “theft” or “piracy”, people quite reasonably identify an important difference between theft and infringement – deprivation. A common retort is “but you are depriving them of their livelihood!”. I think instead the attention should be in what the fundamental claim of patent and copyright law is, it is a claim that a particular expression can be property.

When a person trespasses on my tangible property, there is no theft (permanent deprivation). The discussion should look at the similarity between trespass to land or chattels, and trespass of intellectual property. I think the parallelism (identified by Rand) between claiming and maintaining a claim to lands and goods qua property that were not previously owned because the person recognizes their value applies equally to the concrete expression of an idea, and that’s where the discussion should be focused.

 

5 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

An AI system could come up with a huge number of permutations of musical notes and copyright each one. At that point preventing any new piece of music or writing to be owned by another. I’m not sure what there is to prevent this from happening.

The automatic output of a computer program is not protected by copyright law, only the creative – non-mechanical – creation of a human is protected by copyright. That’s a legal point, not a philosophical – I’d say that the law has it right. You don’t even need an AI, you just need to know what the vocabulary of music is (♯, ♪, A etc) and the most elementary system of rules about meaningful sequences of those letters, and you can easily generate all possible “pieces of music”, up to length n (the set is unbounded).

 

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16 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

Patents, per Rand required the material object being patented, but not the process by which it was produced. If a cheaper process can be found, perhaps there would be value in it to the inventor/holder of the patent.

Patents Limit and deny freedom I have the right to my own property to make and sell as I please if i copy someones idea and sell that product cheaper than they can it isnt theft because I am not taking their property I am only copying a non scarce idea if you say I can not make a certain type of fishhook because someone made it first and so they get a monopoly you are treading on my freedom to use make and sell as i see fit

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@KateTheCapitalist, individuals complying with patent law in America make new inventions available under different premises than you are using to rationalize “freedom” in the broader context at play. The “non-scarce” idea has to pass into the public domain first presumably, not by your fiat.

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7 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:

@KateTheCapitalist, individuals complying with patent law in America, make new inventions available under different premises than you are using to rationalize “freedom” in the broader context at play. The “non-scarce” idea has to pass into the public domain first, presumably not by your fiat.

The patent law in america is blatant violation of property rights you can not own an idea its imposible so to claim you do just violates others ability to make and trade as they see fit

 

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7 minutes ago, KateTheCapitalist said:

The patent law in america is blatant violation of property rights you can not own an idea its imposible so to claim you do just violates others ability to make and trade as they see fit

 

@KateTheCapitalist , there is a process to change the laws of this country. As Washington was credited with having stated and Rand paraphrased, let us raise a standard to which the honest will 

 

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3 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:

@KateTheCapitalist, there is a process to change the laws of this country. As Washington was credited with having stated and Rand paraphrased, let us raise a standard to which the honest will repair 

 

no there is not if voting worked they would make it illegal im not going to let my rights be trampled on by the ignorant majority the only solution is dissociation and radical change