weblawg.net: Information Society through the Prism of Law Costin on IP, IT, Media, and Business Law

Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) are the fortresses of code, silicon, and/or law that enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM). By not criminalizing (as a per se offense) the circumvention of TPMs, Canada keeps the doors open to innovation.

Period.

Innovation is not spontaneous. For all the lip-service we pay to the “spark” of creativity, it is a much more romantic notion that what we really see. In a vacuum, there is little, if any, innovation.

Why? Because in a vacuum there is no ether connecting the various things residing there. The DMCA, by legislating the right to extend property beyond its appropriate borders, creates a social vacuum. We lose the ether of interaction that allows us to build upon each others’ successes.

Without ICQ, we wouldn’t have MSN and Yahoo!. Without MSN, Yahoo!, etc., we wouldn’t have MySpace. Without all of those social networking and template-page predecessors, we wouldn’t have Facebook, or the impetus for the (mainly open source) blogosphere.

Without Palm, we wouldn’t have Research in Motion. Why? Because RIM built the Blackberry upon the lessons learned from Palm’s Pilot.

How does one thing build on another?

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Posted under Information Technology, Intellectual Property

Why does the history matter?

From Stationers to Sony, it’s about use.

In this discussion about the Canadian Copyright Reform Bill, we are really discussing several legal ideas, which though often conflated are subtly different. History demonstrates this conflation through the development of regulations, labels, et cetera, for these concepts.

We have the right to disseminate, as curtailed by the Stationers’ Charter. We have the moral rights, as awarded in the Statute of Anne. We have the right of exclusivity, created by the propertization of the intangible in the U.S. Constitution. We have future rights in as-yet non-existent copies of an expression, as defined by copyright. We combine these rights to derive a general regime of control over the dissemination of information, and we are but one should-have-been-large step away from a total system of informational control.

That step is the right to control the use of legally obtained informational goods.

Here they come, those three letters you’ve grown to love or hate, depending on whether you’re a producer or a consumer: DRM.

Digital Rights Management.

But we already have a system of rights encoded in copyright and other IP legislation everywhere in the informationally-developed world! What is the purpose of another?

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Posted under Communications, Information Technology, Intellectual Property

Here’s the irony of the thing: Our copyright regime, in Canada, is rooted in Crown monopoly in the 16th century - a monopoly created by charter to ease the Crown’s ability to censor published materials and prevent sedition. Two things have happened since then: The Statute of Anne gave certain rights to authors, and parliament attained the power to govern.

In other words, people got governing rights from the monarchy, and authors got rights over the use of their own work.

The ironic part is that parliaments in the Commonwealth are bound by various charters and bills of rights that restrict governments’ rights to hamper freedom of expression. Since copyright has its roots in a Crown grant (at least in the Commonwealth), and the Crown no longer has the right to restrict the freedom of expression, the originally censorial regime has given us a (potentially) freer form of intellectual property.

By contrast, an that irony happens in reverse occurs south of the 49th: the intellectual property regime was born out of constitutional decree. Article 1, Paragraph 8, Clause 8 grants limited monopoly in creative works and industrial designs to promote the “progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Free enterprise and innovation were the goals of this pronouncement, and Thomas Jefferson himself believed firmly in the (relatively) free propagation of ideas (He wrote the U.S. Patent Act). But free enterprise also prevents government interference in the actions of a business, and in recent years, intellectual property law has become a tool wielded bluntly and ferociously by businesses who seek to protect their ownership of the unownable by any means necessary.

In Canada, where all laws are sealed with a kiss by the Queen or her representative, the Governor General, at least two copyright reform bills have been sidelined by public uproar, counting this latest. In the United States, where all laws are made by the People, for the People, with the People, etc., the people who actually sign them have been bought and sold by the RIAA, the MPAA, and other organizations run by artificial People (i.e. corporations). They created absolute freedoms for people, both natural and artificial, and those absolute freedoms include the freedom to restrict freedom.

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Posted under Communications, Information Technology, Intellectual Property

Not discussing the latest Canadian copyright reform bill, or the Canadian DMCA as it has been touted, to kick off weblawg.net would be like Han Solo ignoring his friend in need barreling down the trench of a moon-sized space station.

Discussing the evolution of Intellectual Property in the information age is a major reason for this site. IP today is something like criminal codes in the 18th century; it is a regulatory paradigm for a new frontier. Our interactions - the interactions that are the silken web of society - are increasingly becoming dependent on the exchange of information. Human interaction has always been the product of information exchange - it has been said that the ability to talk is what separates us as a species, and other species with not-too-primitive forms of communication also evolve communities; what has changed is that the exchange itself is becoming informationalized. We no longer carry information upon the backs of mechanical means such as messengers, paper letters, carrier pigeons, etc., but instead entirely through electronic smoke signals carried passively by fibre-optic and copper. We can informationalize, or virtualize, nearly anything, and transmit it all in the same way, regardless of origin or destination. Music no longer needs vinyl, tape, or even aluminum, let alone a live performer to be exchanged or present to be perceived. Books don’t need paper; money doesn’t need coins or bank notes; you get my point.

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Posted under Communications, Information Technology, Intellectual Property