Extract From Byte Magazine - July 30 - Intellectual Property

[Steve Bildermann]

As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

Property and Copyright

The right to property was pretty well embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Committee on Style changed John Locke's basic rights of "Life, Liberty, and Property" to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," in part to make it clear that even those who had no property had rights including the right to acquire property. Americans thus grow up with the notion of property rights, and we think we know what property is.

In fact, though, there's no universal agreement on just what property is. Proudhon said "Property is theft!" At the other end of the spectrum we have libertarians who believe that property rights are absolute, and can neither be given nor taken away by governments. It would probably startle them to discover that Proudhon was a founder of both the libertarian and anarchist movements, but that's a story for another time. My point is that as a practical matter, property is whatever the government allows you to keep. Property is what the police and courts say is yours, and property rights are those enforceable in courts: Property is what the law entitles you to and will award you if someone takes it away.

Those who dispute that definition are in good company, but they don't agree on much. Some object to inheritance taxes, some to progressive income taxes, some to any form of income tax, and some to any kind of involuntary tax at all; and of courses taxes and property are intimately related. The power to tax is the power to confiscate.

All that is a matter of theory. In practice, property is what you can keep, and while you may continue to "own" a hijacked car that has been dismantled and sold piecemeal, the ownership does you precious little good.

Intellectual Property

But so far we have been talking about physical property, stuff that can by nature have only one owner. If you take my car, I can no longer use it.

Intellectual property is different. If I write a book and your friend buys it, and you make a copy of that book and read it without paying my publisher anything, you have deprived the publisher (and me) of royalties and profits but you sure haven't deprived me of the book itself. Nor have you deprived the original purchaser, who may not even know you have made a copy.

It can be more complicated. The law confers on your friend the undoubted right to lend his copy of my book, and in fact I pay taxes to support institutions known as libraries that loan out copies of my books. (In Norway and a few other countries the government actually pays royalties to authors whose books are loaned out. They use a rather complicated system of categories to determine who gets how much, and most of the money ends up in the hands of author associations such as the Science Fiction Writers of America which get quite significant percentages of their annual budgets this way. The United States makes no such payments.)

Now suppose that instead of loaning my book out (let's say it's a signed copy) the buyer lets his friend make a copy, but conscientiously keeps the original locked up in a safe; and when his friend has finished reading the copy, reclaims and destroys that copy. This may be technically a violation of copyright law, but it's hard to fault the practice on ethical grounds.

Given such complexities, whatever view you may have of natural rights to physical property, it's pretty clear that "intellectual property" is something more artificial, and one's rights to intellectual property are a creation of society. You may have a moral right to the physical ownership of an oil painting, but suppose someone makes copies? Copies may be indistinguishable from the original. Has the owner been deprived of anything because a copy exists? Two copies? A dozen? A thousand?

And of course the same argument may be made about books.

Recording artists have never made much of their money from record sales, because the publishers take the lion's share and then some. John Dvorak recently pronounced the record industry on its last legs, and recommended that artists rely on concerts and performances for their major source of income. That may be good advice, but it's not going to work for those who make a living writing books.

The spectacular sales of the latest Harry Potter, and Hillary Clinton's book, obscure the fact that book publishing profits have been falling, and that's not entirely due to the general state of the economy: Adventure fiction usually does better in hard economic times. In particular, no one is making much profit in paperback sales. Worse, major best sellers are so discounted in stores that the profits (and royalties to authors, depending on the contract) are a lot smaller than on "normally" selling hardbounds, but the mid list books that were the mainstay of many literary authors aren't doing well either. There was a time when a literary author could eke out a living in genteel poverty on literary and academic teas and a book every couple of years. Fewer and fewer of those exist now.

I don't know what the answer to all this is, but we had better all be thinking about it. The technology is leaping ahead, and it will not be all that long before it is at least as convenient to read a book on a tablet PC as it is in a paper copy.

I gave one answer twenty years ago in A Step Farther Out: Deal directly with readers, who go to a Web site, click a button to send me a dollar or two, and download my latest book. No need for publishers or middle men at all. Bob Thompson refines that notion: Post the book and charge $5 for it. People who want to read it now will pay. Two weeks later drop the price to $2.50, and a month after that to a dollar; at which time, he thinks, I'll get money from people who downloaded a pirate edition and feel guilty about it.

I'd like to think that will work. By then we ought to have something like the late, lamented MilliCent that makes it easy to send small amounts of money over the Internet.

Computers, Education, and Budgets

If you go to the US Department of Education Web site you can find a graph that plots U.S. federal education spending and reading test results. Just in case it has been removed by the time you read this, you can find the graph where I copied it lest someone in the Department of Education realize just how damning that information is.

Federal spending has risen exponentially (and essentially monotonically) from around a billion dollars in 1966 to about 22 billion per year in 2003; during that time reading scores have essentially changed not at all. If we consider reading the key skill in elementary education if you can read, you have a chance to learn other things, if you can't read you aren't going to learn much then what this says is that since federal aid began the results have been minimal; perhaps none at all.

Note also that the Computer Revolution took place during these years and had essentially no effect on average reading skills. Far too many children couldn't read when the spending and the studies began that was the justification for the massive federal programs, after all and far too many can't read now.

Incidentally, while many assume that the popular Head Start program tries to teach children to read, it doesn't. It's required by law to offer only "developmentally appropriate" instruction, and the Experts have decided that Head Start children aren't "ready" to learn to read. The "readiness" fallacy has been exposed many times as the excuse for poor or missing instruction that it is; but that doesn't matter, and Head Start doesn't even try to teach the kids to read. When he was Speaker, Newt Gingrich tried to have that "developmentally appropriate" language explained by a sentence: "Nothing in this Act shall forbid teaching Head Start students to read," but that was blocked by concerted political action and the effort to include it expired when he left office. No one has tried to change it since.

It doesn't have to be this way. As I have noted many times here, my wife has developed a reading program that, used conscientiously, has taught children of every IQ, ethnicity, and age above 5 to read (and some younger). The success rates are very high. We don't know of anyone who has finished the program who didn't learn to read. Now that statement needs qualification, because you can't finish the program without going through all the steps, and you can't get from one step to the next until you have made certain accomplishments. However, in both individual and classroom settings, the number of kids who start the program and don't finish is pretty small, and of those many simply didn't have proper access to the computer.

The results are given on Mrs. Pournelle's Web site, and you can read up on it there; my point is that, crude as this is she recorded all the voice parts, and she and a teenage boy did the actual programming in Delphi it works, and works splendidly, and it's cheap. With computers capable of running this program now selling for a few hundred dollars retail, we could afford to buy every kid in the U.S. a computer and a copy of that program for far, far less than the federal government is spending on experts, consultants, textbooks, special programs, and all the rest; and since what they are doing has had no discernable results, while her program has had demonstrated and repeatable results in every classroom where it has been tried, I would think the conclusion obvious.

If your investment portfolio showed performance like that, would you continue to put money into it, or try something else?

I Slammed Myself

I own several web domain names, including some like "Feathersnake" which relate to books I have written. Of course my main web site is http://www.jerrypournelle.com. I'd prefer http://www.chaosmanor.com but that seems to be owned by an Iowa writers' group. At one time they offered to sell it to me, provided I let them host it. That seemed too high a price to pay.

Incidentally, it's easy enough to find out who owns a domain name. Visit the Network Solutions whois server, type in the domain name, and click the search button. Up pops a password in graphics format designed to foil automated spammer tools. After you type in the password, the whois server returns the registrant name, address, and other details about the domain owner. If the domain is registered with a different registrar, the whois server lists basic information about the domain name and refers you to the whois server at the other registrar for additional details.

Bob Thompson notes that various advocates for the blind are objecting strenuously to these graphic spammer spoilers because blind users can't see them and therefore can't prove they're human, but everyone has started using them, e.g., Yahoo, MSN, etc. I'm not sure what ought to be done about that. Text to speech programs come to mind. Eakspay the etterslay in igpay atinlay.

Another domain I'd like to own but don't is http://www.pournelle.com. My son Richard had that one for a couple of years, but he forgot to make a payment, and a commercial speculator grabbed it. Last time I made contact with those people they offered to sell it to me for about a thousand dollars. I told them to go to the devil.

I'm told I can appeal to some organization or another in a case like Pournelle.com and possibly get the domain back, but it looks to be a lot of trouble, and there's no assurance I'd win anyway; not worth the bother.

Then the other day I got a "bill." It said one of my Web domain registrations was about to expire, and to send money to Domain Registration of America to renew it. I'd never heard of that outfit, but domain registration outfits change their names a lot, and this looked official, so I wrote out a check the next time I paid my bills. The registration wasn't to expire for a couple of months, but no harm in doing it early.

So yesterday I got a letter thanking me for moving my Web registration to its new home. It turned out that this outfit wasn't where I had the domain registered at all. I had already thrown away the original "bill" so I can't say for certain, but if there was any notice that in sending them money I was changing my registration site, I certainly didn't see it. To make it worse, I think now I had already renewed the registration of that domain with the original registrar.

There are several morals to this story. First, keep better records than I do, so that you will know where you have registered your domain names.

Second, pay by American Express or a Chase Visa or other credit card with good support services so you can protest the payment if it turns out to be questionable; don't so as I did and mail them a check. Finally, it's probably worthwhile to choose one registration outfit and get all of yours registered there so that you can ignore all the various "notices" and "bills" that firms seeking to get you to slam yourself will be sending you.

Bob Thompson and I have been using a registration service with the unlikely name of GoDaddy which is easy to use, competent, and doesn't send me unwanted solicitations. Recommended.

Google Tricks

I was looking for a sound driver for the Philips PSC 706 Acoustic Edge card, so I went to Google and typed "Philips Sound Driver." The result was not what I expected. Some outfit has bought or otherwise captured the first place, and it's not Philips; but it looks like it might be, and the card is listed, and a link to get a driver.

But then you have to register to get the driver, and the registration wants a lot of intimate details about my life. I hadn't been paying attention and thought Philips was doing this to me; but in fact not, it's another outfit entirely. Looking further down the Google search list I found Philips' own web site, and there I didn't have any registration hassles, and was able to download the driver just fine.

The moral of this story should be obvious. Always pay attention to where Google takes you; it may not be where you thought you were going, and may even be a place you didn't want to be.

[Taro Toporific]

As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
Property and Copyright

The right to property was pretty well embedded ...All that is a matter of theory. In practice, property is what you can keep...

Hey is this posting on "Intellectual Property" a transcendental trick question, that is:
"Is it legal to appropriate the intellectual property of an article about "Intellectual Property" of a writer discussing the facets of his intellectual property"?

:P

[Steve Bildermann]

Yes I'm on top of that. The editor of Byte allows selected 'extracts ' to be posted as long as it's not entire issues. Also Jerry Pournelle allows selective reposting of certain of his columns.

[Taro Toporific]

.. Byte allows selected 'extracts ' to be posted as long as it's not entire issues...

How much of an "extract" do you think is allowed?
Back in the when the Internet was severely limited in Japan, I subscribed to the monthly CD of "Computer Select" which carried Byte and 90 other computer magazines. Those damn CDs cost $1,400/year and my company banned me from sharing floppies of any anything copied from the CD.

I sure wish I knew that "selected 'extracts'" policy back then in the bad-old-days. Oh well... nowadays, bi-polar Japan is now once of the most Internet-unlimited countries on the planet and my daily "extracts" and email would not fit on a floppy.