NATS 1700 6.0 COMPUTERS,  INFORMATION  AND  SOCIETY

Lecture 19: Intellectual Property Rights

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Introduction

  • Thanks to the rapidly increasingly commercialization of the internet, the issues concerning intellectual property rights have become a major problem, also because such issues directly affect other issues such as privacy and security. The situation is rather fluid, which means that key references may become obsolete overnight. Here are some starting points. An obligatory first stop should be at WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Canadian counterpart is CIPO , the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Here are other important references:

  • Read first Henry Hillman Chartrand's article Read !  Intellectual Property in the Global Village. Here is the abstract: "In a post-Cold War world, competitiveness in the global knowledge-based economy requires better understanding of how knowledge is treated as property in the different neighbourhoods of the global village. The author outlines intellectual property rights traditions in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Worlds." An interesting, and more recent document is C Fink and K E Maskus'  Read !  Intellectual Property and Development: Lessons from Recent Economic Research,  published jointly by the World Bank and Oxford University press.

  • Browse through Read !  Intellectual Property in Cyberspace 2000,  a full on-line course, with case studies, by professor William Fisher and others fellows of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. The University of Texas System has a  Crash Course in Copyright. An often-used reference is Stanford University Library's Copyright & Fair Use  website, which also includes some important links. Finally, Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure  is a report issued by the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF). "The report explains applications of the laws in cyberspace and recommends certain changes in the intellectual property law to accommodate the digital age."
    See also Copyright Law in Canada.

  • Visit the website of Read !  WIPO: World Intellectual Property Organization. "The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest. WIPO was established by the WIPO Convention in 1967 with a mandate from its Member States to promote the protection of IP throughout the world through cooperation among states and in collaboration with other international organizations. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. WIPO’s vision is that IP is an important tool for the economic, social and cultural development of all countries.."

  • Intellectual property rights, copyright, fair use, attribution, permissions policies are important and urgent issues, particularly because of the traditional everything-is-free culture on the Internet. A survey of these issues and many useful references can be found in R S Rosenberg, The Social Impact of Computers, Academic Press, 1997.

  • Perhaps more than many other issues, the Napster affair has brought the debate on intellectual property rights to the limelight. An article by Charles C Mann on The Atlantic Monthly,  Read !  The Heavenly Jukebox,  is a very good synthesis of the various issues surrounding Napster, and more generally, the information industry.

  • A very important organization which, while affirming the principles of intellectual property rights, is equally concerned with the issues of freedom of expression, is the  Electronic Frontier Foundation . "From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990--well before the Internet was on most people's radar--and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today.From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights. Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. Sometimes just defending technologies isn't enough, so EFF also supports the development of freedom-enhancing inventions. EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit [organization]."

 
Topics

  • There are three fundamental premises which must be kept in the foreground when we discuss intellectual property rights. The first is, as I pointed out above, that the information or knowledge society has commodified information more than ever before. All facets of information have a cost and a price, and a market. The second is that, to a large extent--thanks to the Internet--the information society has become global, with the consequence that information can easily move across all national barriers. The third premise is that, despite international treaties and common markets, laws still differ in substantial ways from country to country, and the distributed nature of the Internet allows and fosters the exploitation of such differences. We can add a corollary of this premise: in part because national--and especially international--laws are still somewhat ineffective in definining and protecting intellectual property rights, and because information is now one of the most important assets of huge, global corporate conglomerates, there is a real danger that business interests may prevail over social and cultural ones.

  • To gauge the seriousness of the possible consequences of these premises, consider [from Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, The MIT Press, 2000, p. 76 ] the case of Apache, "a powerful, flexible, HTTP/1.1 compliant web server." According to the Apache Software Foundation, "Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. The November 2005 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that more than 70% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined." Now, Apache is free. Yet, as Schiller puts it, it has "more than double the share garnered by Microsoft or Netscape for their competing proprietary server programs. In the view of adherents of electronic commerce, such palpable demonstrations of the hacker slogan 'Information wants to be free' constitute subversive infringement on the rights of enterprise.."

     

    Apache Software Foundation

    The Apache Software Foundation Logo

  • This example, and countless others, illustrate the practical meaning of "competitiveness in a global, knowledge-based economy." You may want to read the World Competitiveness Yearbook published by the International Institute for Management Development.

  • If we go back to the original (that is, pre-internet) intent of most national intellectual property legislations, the fundamental principle was "to balance the rights of society and the rights of creators, so they could each benefit from new works and inventions." [from Donald Gutstein, e.con: How the Internet Undermines Democracy, Toronto, Stoddart, 1999, p. 288 ] Or, to use Ursula Franklin's terminology [ The Real World Of Technology, 2nd edition, Toronto, Anansi, 1999, p. 65 ], intellectual property rights guaranteed that the benefits would be essentially indivisible, that is, shared by all. As Franklin says, in a more general context, "the public purse has provided the wherewithal from which the private sector derives the divisible benefits, while at the same time the realm from which the indivisible benefits are derived has deteriorated and often remains unprotected." The problem is that, while in the past, copyright, and other systems of protection of creative works, were essentially aimed at individual, and thus necessarily local, artists and inventors, now the main beneficiaries of such protection are global corporations. Not quite what Article 27 of the 1948 UN  Read !  Universal Declaration of Human Rights  had envisaged:

    1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
    2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

  • While so far we have insisted on the 'rights' stemming from intellectual property, we must now say a few words about the question of who, in a global society, should bear the responsibility of enforcing the laws protecting these rights. This, as we have already observed, is still a largely unsolved problem. There is, for example, a continuing debate about the responsibilities of ISPs (Internet service providers): should they be liable for copyright infringement by their users? Should they have the duty to monitor and police files and other property of their users, or should it be the responsibility of copyright owners?

  • Finally, read again this course's  Read !  Copyright and Fair Use  page, and consider the specific issue of 'fair use.' This too is a controversial issue. Should copyright be relaxed when educational and research use, without personal gain, is involved? In the US, despite the fact that existing laws support it (see the United States Code, Section 107. Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use ), there are plenty of contrary opinions, including those of many artists. The situation in other countries is often quite different and diverse. The global information society has still much to do to put its house in order.

 
Questions and Exercises

 

Picture Credit: Apache Software Foundation
Last Modification Date: 09 March 2010