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Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts

Saturday, 16 August 2014

The Nature of Copyright: Institutionalised Censorship



The Nature of Copyright

Institutionalised Censorship

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by Abdun Nur
   
“I met a man with a dollar. We exchanged dollars and we still both had a dollar.
I met a man with an idea, we both exchanged ideas and now we both have two ideas.”


“The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of production, and all that is called economic conditions.”
-         Ludwig Von Mises


The legal fiction of Copyright is an extension of the fraud of ownership, being the control and monopoly of intellectual ‘property’, used to extort revenue (taxation) upon the application or copying of the idea or design of the copyright holder, further imposing regulations upon another who uses the copyrighted goods, services or ideas, so dictating what someone can or cannot do with their own real resource to possess and use that resource.

These two types of possession - tangible possession and intangible possession - are mutually inconsistent; if you trade your labours in natural equity you give full and complete possession over to the buyer, but in the fictional world of copyright, you sell your goods and services yet claim you still retain them in full, and wish to be paid by everyone who uses the same idea by holding a state-granted criminal monopoly privilege (ie privilege means a right to steal).

“The monopolies now understood as copyrights and patents were originally created by royal decree, bestowed as a form of favouritism and control. As the power of the monarchy dwindled, these chartered monopolies were reformed, and essentially by default, they wound up in the hands of authors and inventors.”
-         Eric E. Johnson


Copyright has never been of net benefit to society and instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity. Copyright is invalid because only your labour generates wealth - if you have physical resources they are free, only the labour invested within those resources has value, while intellectual property is not scarce and is itself a resource, as knowledge builds upon knowledge. Therefore to claim monopoly upon the advancement of any knowledge or ideas that themselves are an extension of existing un-monopolised ideas is inequitable, and is a selectively applied legal fiction created by the state, applied only to limited and specified monopolies.

Copying never deprives the alleged victim of the original item, and so enforcement of copyright law constitutes aggression on the part of the state to impose monopoly and privilege.

In reality intellectual property is something you can trade, but not something you can rent out. In the case of copyright they demand rent on something they have sold, but we can only own what we ourselves create and therefore all forms of rental are definitely usurious, since it is equivalent to selling your resource, then still demanding it is your own. Selling anything is transferring in entirety a justification of use; in doing so you concede all fictional rights, and possession upon it. Two parties cannot possess one thing, each, in entirety, that constitutes a fictional relation of entanglement that cannot exist naturally.

It is claimed 'what is to stop someone else then taking my invention, story, song or discovery and claiming it as their creation'?

Being the originator of an idea does afford you advantages, for example if you write a book, and I copy your book but claim I wrote it myself that is fraud and you can seek relief. But if I copy your book and leave it unaltered, crediting you with its creation, I have caused you no harm. An author can claim things a copier cannot, for example the author can claim the first edition, the original and authorised version, the author can state clearly that their version benefits the creator of the work directly, whereas a copier could not, and those who enjoy the work of an author could seek out a copy that benefited the author.

The supporters of copyright monopoly claim the idea of plagiarism can only exist with copyright, which is utter nonsense. Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer's language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, some writers take care to credit those from whom they borrow and quote, but in reality all authors use a universal pool of existing ideas, they just combine ideas in new ways. Plagiarism in respect of taking credit for a written work that another wrote is a wrongful act in equity, it needs no corporate policy to make it so - it is innately. To claim ‘falsely’ anything that is of direct detriment to another can be disputed and relief established in equity.
 
 Höffner compared the economic effects copyright law had on authors and publishing in the United Kingdom to those in Germany in the first part of the nineteenth century when in Germany such laws had not been instituted, and found that more books were printed and read in Germany where authors, in general, also made more money.

“The roots of copyright literally lie in censorship. It was easy for State and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along, and the authorities worried that they couldn’t control official thought as easily. So Queen Mary created the Stationer’s Company in 1557, with the exclusive franchise over book publishing, to control the press and what information the people could access. When the charter of the Stationer’s Company expired, the publishers lobbied for an extension, but in the Statute of Anne (1710) Parliament gave copyright to authors instead. Authors liked this because it freed their works from State control. Nowadays they use copyright much as the State originally did: to censor and ban books.”
-         (N. Stephan Kinsella)


Electronic versions of written works cost almost nothing to copy and disseminate. There are advantages and disadvantages to electronic versions of written works, meaning the printed version will always have a dominant place, as it is an easier medium to access and to examine and digest the contents, more satisfying and interactive in many ways.

Electronic games and software is, in general grossly overpriced, generating obscene profits for corporate monopolies. Often the majority of these games or software programs are poor or low quality, dressed up and promising far more than they deliver. The true cost of software is pennies, development cost being small in comparison to the number of copies used. People would be happy to pay the true cost of pennies, not the corporate cost; even this would generate more rewards for the actual authors if they were free of corporation, than they could have ever earned through that fiction, and if the software was popular the pennies would far exceed earnings for the labour invested.

The ‘Stars’ of film, television, literature, sport and radio cry in outrage at those who copy the monopoly of the corporations they represent. These elite Stars have millions in the bank already, yet their avarice is so insatiable they still can't stop whoring themselves upon the corporate alter.

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‘Patent’ a ‘title’ of privilege copyright

Originally patents were “open letters” granted by the monarch authorizing someone to do something, as patent title, of for example a monopoly to sell certain goods in a certain area, or a land monopoly to homestead land in the New World on behalf of the Crown, or as monopoly copyright used by the corporations to prevent new technologies from entering the market to compete with the existing monopolies they presently enjoy. This retards natural competition and technological advance, created and maintained through State granted monopoly as a privilege of the corporations, and prevents those without financial backing from using their own creations and inventions.

In the case of the US, patents are administered by a huge federal bureaucracy that grants monopolies on the production and trade of various things, which means holders may ask the Federal courts to order the use of force to stop competitors. But the competitors have not done anything that justifies force. They merely have used information to guide their actions with respect to their own resources.

Russian authorities, with Microsoft’s approval, used IP law as a “pretext for seizing computers and other materials from political opponents of the government and news organizations.”(Engadget)

Another example: Alexander Graham Bell who is credited with inventing the telephone, stole the telephone patent of an Italian inventor Antonio Meucci claiming it as his own.Although he had a design it was later proven never to have worked; the true inventor took him to court but died before the case was completed. In 2002 the House of Representatives Resolution 269 recognised Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone and stated "If Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell"

Bell went on to monopolise the telephone defending his stolen invention over 800 times in court from those who used the idea without his consent.


Nature and copyright

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence, Congress declared that natural substances, e.g. water or salt, were God’s gift to mankind and that therefore products of nature should be limited in their patent protection. While this was a noble declaration, it has actually been used against those whose rights it would protect. It has forced private interests to synthetically alter natural substances -- for instance the burgeoning biotech field of recombinant DNA technology, i.e. genetically modified organisms (GMOs) -- for the sole reason that it guarantees them ownership/patent rights.

In fact, a medical system that legally requires it make a profit threatens to destroy and/or incriminate itself if non-patented, non-profitable natural substances or therapies are employed. It also results in so much collateral damage to those it purports to serve that it could rightly be called a modern form of human sacrifice.

The corporations involved in the movie, software, publishing, and music industries cry out for copyright protection, the monopoly protection afforded by the ‘legal’ system and the State Corporations allows the global legalized theft of hundreds of billions annually.

Copyright imposes artificial scarcity of innovation, invention, and creativity, as all knowledge builds upon existing knowledge, to monopolise that new knowledge stagnates, constricts and retards advancement; monopoly always has a stagnating effect, just as we see with government monopoly itself, or the banking monopoly - it creates imposition, as it exists against nature, only the threat or use of force can maintain the artificial scarcity of monopoly.

The corporations claim a loss of profits from those copying their monopoly copyright; profit is the monetary surplus added upon the cost of a product or service after accounting for wages, rent, cost of raw materials, etc., so corporate profit is added onto the actual cost of the created product or service to the end consumer, an invented amount, identical to the taxation added by the imposed State corporation that itself grants the monopoly through copyright protection.



From Servant of the Light @ http://servantofthelight.com/content/view/239/294/
For more information about copyrort see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/copyright  
For more by Abdun Nur on this see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/abdun%20nur
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Monday, 19 May 2014

5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything from Miracle Drugs to Science Research


5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything from Miracle Drugs to Science Research
Our system of intellectual property rights is patently ridiculous

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com




by Lynn Parramore
 


Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?

Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.

In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.

Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.

Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, "Human After All", sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.


1. Why do we have intellectual property rights?

The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:

“The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…”

Notice the reasoning: We the People, through our representatives, grant intellectual property rights so that we can move knowledge forward — not enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else.

The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson's day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.

Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Against_Intellectual_Property_cover.jpg


2. Patents have exploded since the 1980s.

If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.

Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.  

But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.

As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated nearly $2 billion in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.


3. Intellectual property rights can block innovation.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role — it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.

In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.

Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.

More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.

Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:

 "Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.”


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/GlamCamp_NY_Kippelboy_nina_Paley_(2).JPG


4. The public is getting harmed and cheated.

It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes. Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.

Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this.

The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.


5. Things don’t have to be this way.

While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:

“It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.”

Several of the economists I spoke to at the INET/CIGI conference, such as Italian economist Giovanni Dosi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have suggested other ways of rewarding inventors, such as prizes. Stiglitz has pointed out that prizes, as opposed to patents, could help reward research that might not be commercially profitable, like developing a cure for AIDs, or other urgent global problems.

Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public could get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.  

We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren't hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.


Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU. She is the director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.


From Alternet @ http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-things-know-about-how-corporations-block-access-everything-miracle-drugs-science-research?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark
 

For information about corporate control see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/corporation%20control
For information about suppressed technologies see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/suppressed%20technology
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