Le dimanche 23 Juillet 2006 22:43, Chuck Norcutt a écrit :
> Manuel Viet wrote:
> > That's why intellectual property is a State temporary privilege, it's not
> > like the property of a 'real' thing. In the copy process the owner still
> > has the use of the copied thing.
> > Don't be fooled by the hype organized by IP holders. This is not the same
> > league.
>
> Apparently you are quoting Manuel's law. But if you were to be sued by
> one these IP holders in the United States (such as me, for example) you
> would discover that the laws of the United States consider it very much
> the same thing until my "State temporary priveilege" expires.
You're of course right. I don't want to be misunderstood : much everywhere you
live in the 'west' world, penalties for unlawful copying are harsh. And I do
respect copyrights, personaly, be it on books, films, pictures, or computer
programs, for a lot of reasons, the least being that if I were to face a
trial because of an illicit activity, my education, training, and job, as a
lawyer, would forbid me to use ignorance as an excuse for my defense.
BUT, let me stress that, it's not because I comply with the law that I will
defend it, especially when that law which was already just so-so is turned
into a weapon of mass dumbification.
As it was made, the IP system (in the sense of the Berne's treaty) is a
balance between two distinct forces : on the one hand, the authors, who must
be rewarded for their efforts (as far as logic goes, that's perfectly OK),
and on the other hand, the society as a whole, which accept the authors
privilege on mere 'ideas' as a limited property, provided that those 'ideas'
become available to anybody after a while in the sake of progress. Because,
as the saying goes, to see farther, you must stand on giants' shoulders. So
if an idea becomes the monopoly of a single person and his heirs, that would
effectively prevent anybody else to build upon it, therefore setting back
progress. To the extreme in the patenting system, the limited privilege is
only given as a counterpart to the description of the invention. This was
(and maybe is, time and bird flu will tell) to avoid some massive loss of
knowledge after a catastrophic event (pandemia, mass starvation, war). But an
inventor can still keep his knowledge secret, refuse to patent it, and try to
outlast the limited timeframe of the law privilege : think coca-cola, for
instance.
This balance between right to know and monopoly of the author, depending how
it was enforced by local laws in details, was achieved in such a way that the
copyright holder or the inventor would be limited by 'fair use'.
But this carefully crafted balance has recently been destroyed by the
successful efforts of the industry lobby. Firstly, copyrights holders are now
frequently incorprated companies, with the nice ability to be potentialy
immortals, instead of mere mortals human beings, so copyrights are now
basically unlimited in time ; when they aren't, anyway broadcasters and
editors will soon be granted a right on their own for airing protected
pieces, further barring the piece to fall into public domain. Secondly, DMCA
& the european counterpart (EUCD) makes it a misdemeanor to reverse engineer
a DRMed piece, and the copyright holder is still not bound to escrow an
unencumbered example of his work, so libraries can't protect knowledge
anymore : if a company goes bankrupt, everything it has producted so far is
terminaly lost for mankind. Thirdly, while the previous balance used to
protect privacy of the user via fair use, allowing him to use the copyrighted
work as he see fit at home, the DRM scheme now mandatorily opens a peep hole
into anybody's bedroom. Would you agree if the police came into your home to
setup remote operated video cameras everywhere, on the pretense of being able
to speed up investigations in case a burglary happens ? No ? So why do you
allow the music industry to do the same into your computer ? What do you know
about what is collected and send away ?
So, all in all, I'm fighting tooth and nail the new world order setup by the
WIPO, but strictly within the limits of the law. I use linux, I refuse to buy
anything protected with a drm of any kind, I certainly won't by any sort of
buged computer. That's just me. I do it because on a personal level, I find
those NEW restrictions on my liberty to be just plain wrong, and on a general
level I can't help thinking this is just plain suicide for our world. We're
speeding backward toward the middle-ages, creating some new feudal rights and
corporations (the complete historical analysis would be a bit long here, I
fear), and we're giving an edge to more liberal countries wrt to IP laws such
as China. It's like clunching a fist to catch water : the more the law is
strictly enforced, the more the economy will back out of this craze and
develop somewhere else.
--
Manuel Viet
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