Ars Technica: Intellectual Property and the Good Society
Aug 04, 2001, 19:45 (13 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jon)
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Ars Technica tackles the issue of intellectual property,
describing the debate as one largely driven by extremes and
characterized by a need to find the balance between personal
freedom and the right of creators to profit from their work:
"Since Ars Technica started in the summer of '98, I've
seen a steady increase in the amount of reporting that I do on
intellectual property-related issues. This trend isn't due to a
change in my tastes in reporting the news so much as it is to a
marked increase in the visibility of intellectual property (IP) as
a significant factor in the shaping of the technological and
cultural landscape. IP has always been there, a mostly neglected,
esoteric corner of the legal system that has functioned largely out
of sight of the majority of consumers. But as of the past few
years, the sheer volume of patent, trademark and copyright disputes
seems to have increased exponentially. Even more significantly,
these disputes are having a greater impact on everyday folks, from
Quake mod authors to music fans to farmers. The current situation
has caught many of us off guard, provoking confusion as to the
nature and/or reality of an IP-based threat to our civic freedoms.
Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of
two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly
summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them
by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which
advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects
any notion that products of the intellect can or should be
understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other
extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong
analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and
concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this
camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for
information, much as it determines a value for more traditional
types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP
rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for
piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are
mindless shills for the corporate machine.
Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority
who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who
can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other. These
people (myself included) on the one hand acknowledge the many
benefits that IP law has yielded in the modern economy, but on the
other hand worry about the ever-encroaching technological and legal
threats to our personal freedoms by large, moneyed corporations
wielding bands of lawyers. Developments in the daily news make us
uneasy, and we don't quite buy the argument that a creator (or a
third party rightsholder) has some sort of basic, God-given,
exclusive "right" to completely dictate how, when, and where you
use the products of his or her labor. Neither, though, will our
essential conviction that people are entitled to be able to profit
from their work allow us to be convinced that price-free access to
all products of the intellect is a basic civic right."
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