[DMCA-Activists] Reader Letter: Don't Believe "IPR" Hype

[Seth Johnson]

> http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/08/12/2003198441


Letter

Don't believe IPR hype


Alex Macfie
Thursday, Aug 12, 2004,Page 8 


Taiwan would be shooting itself in the foot if it were to go down the
American route of ever-broader and stronger intellectual property
protection, as suggested by Honigmann Hong and Lu Yi-hsun ("IPR should drive
our tech-based economy," page 8, Tuesday, Aug. 10). 

In the US this approach is beginning to be questioned -- last autumn the US
Federal Trade Commission produced a report suggesting that the extension of
patent protection in the US to cover software and business methods has been
a failure. The report suggests what most software developers and small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) know already -- that innovation in IT is
driven by competition, not by patentability, and that patents actually
impede development in that field.

Clearly, then, it spectacularly fails Hong and Lu's test to "find an
equilibrium between technological development and technological
dissemination."

The article says that IBM collected "over US$1 billion" in license fees for
its patents in 2001. But it misses the fact that the great majority of these
patents are on programming methods that IT professionals regard as trivial
-- ideas that would occur naturally to them and which certainly were not the
result of expensive and time-consuming research. For example, one of IBM's
patents is on the idea of marking text in a word-processor in different
colors for correcting. As well as IBM, Microsoft uses patents to bully
potential competitors; indeed Microsoft has openly stated its intention to
use the patent system to drive Linux out of the software market.

Other patents are held by companies whose sole business is litigating over
patents. Currently, Web sites are being threatened by Acacia,which holds a
patent on the principle of playing music and movies directly on the Web.
Another company, E-Data, is suing (legal) online music download services
over its patent on downloading data on the Internet. A British company, the
"British Technology Group," is now suing Microsoft and Apple over its patent
on downloading software updates from the Internet. Yet another company,
Divine, has extracted license fees from "e-retailers" over its patent on
selling things over the Internet. 

It is important to remember that these firms contributed nothing to the
innovations to which they claim exclusive ownership. Instead they are
playing the patent system like a lottery, patenting obvious ideas in the
hope that they will become widely used.

Such is the nature of software "licensing" patents, or, as it is better
characterized, legalized extortion. As US economics professor Brian Kahin
notes in his essay called "Information Process Patents in the US and
Europe," "The licensing market [for software patents], such as it is, seems
to be characterized by patentees looking for infringers, rather than
productive companies looking for technology."

It should be no surprise that there is great resistance within the EU to
proposals to adopt an American-style patenting regime on new technologies
there. If patents such as those mentioned above were to be made legally
valid in the EU or Taiwan, the result would be a net outflow of license fees
to the US and Japan, where most new technology patents are held. These
"license fees" are money which would otherwise be spent on developing new
innovative products.

Software and media piracy is undoubtedly a serious problem in Taiwan, albeit
completely unrelated to patents. But adopting a US-style copyright regime,
and in particular laws such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is
not the solution. This law outlaws many ordinary consumer practices, and
makes criminals out of ordinary honest citizens -- but would do nothing to
prevent piracy. For example, the US law makes it illegal for consumers to
try to bypass region-locks on legitimately-purchased DVDs. 

There is no copyright law anywhere in the world which makes it illegal to
play a movie legitimately purchased in another country, at least for one's
personal entertainment. By making it illegal to bypass any technology
designed to control access to content, this law overrides all safeguards in
copyright law. Clearly it is not intended to stop piracy, but instead to
enshrine the business models of the American movie studios. It is not in
Taiwan's best interests, therefore, that this law be adopted here.

Taiwan should continue to be a nation built on innovation, rather than try
to play the intellectual property litigation game of the US and Japan -- a
game which it is sure to lose.



-- 

DRM is Theft!  We are the Stakeholders!

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of
this incidentally recorded communication.  Original authorship should be
attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for
usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of
exclusive rights.