Tag Archive for 'copyrights'



1,908 views

Google Granted Dangerous Monopoly, DMR Requirements in Settlement with AAP

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 24, 2009
in DRM Rant and Disruptive Business Models in Content
. 0 Comments

Timothy Lee reports that Association of American Publishers and Google have reached a tentative agreement with the courts regarding the class action lawsuit between the two. The point of the suit by the AAP was to stop Google form innovating and making books more useful on Google’s own terms. The terms of the settlement were negotiation in secrecy, and the voice of the public was left out. This is troubling on many levels.

The stodgy book publishing industry and copyright owners, who themselves recognize that their books are no longer commercially viable to reprint, are handed a solution by the courts to Google to once again see income generated. The real value publishers provide is in the act of publishing physical books. They could just use Google’s data to figure out what books to actually reprint, since this admittedly would not be a competence of the publishers. While the publishers have every right to assert a copyright claim on these works, they had no motivation commercialize since, to them, commercialization in mainly in print sales. If the publishers were not as short-sighted, focusing solely on the sale of new, scarce goods, they would have a their solution to make out-of-print books available digitally. However, this was a job for a company like Google to develop and create terms for. I trust Google much more than the courts and the AAP on how to make this knowledge available in a manner that is fair to all parties. Google bypasses inefficiencies, it does not prop them up unnecessarily. Most web publishers understand this, and allow search engines to scan and cache web content for this purpose, and without having to opt-in (only to opt out with robots.txt). Now, there is a double standard: one for content that is printed in a book and registered with the US Copyright Office, and another for html on the web. Why? Only because of the print industry’s lack of foresight. All web content automatically receives copyright (with the exception of license such as Creative Commons), without the need for bureaucracy. Google, will you pay me to cache this post?

Google will receive exclusive right to profit from orphaned works. This would seem to go against Google’s own motto: Do no evil. Google themselves should understand that creating an exclusive right for work that should either be entered into the public domain or to not allow competing services such as the defunct Microsoft book scanning program does not jibe with their own ethical compass. Google seeks only to win by meritocracy. Google search points to the better source, and most if the time it is not Google’s own content. Google wants competition. It should want to allow it to find the best interpretation or organization of orphaned works. For this reason, I could not imagine it sending DMCA nastygrama to sites that republish these works. Google would want to open the orphaned works to the general public and to any developer so that they may mine even more public value from it. There is now a Books and Interest Registry for copyright holders and publishers of any book to register their works so, they too can get a cut of Google profits on sales to orphaned book access. Now, anyone can receive this welfare, just write a book.

The settlement of this suit grant protection to foreign, non-US works, but if is a domestic work, it has to have been registered with the US Copyright Office. No doubt, this is to “live up to international treaties” at the cost US publishers’ convenience in comparison.

Lastly, Google will be providing works to libraries and selling book access (not downloads) to individuals, but with DMR. If and when the Google Book program is terminated, so will the access to purchased books be terminated too. While we have the technology to preserve writings for an eternity, short-term commercial interest seek to limit access to knowledge when it no longer suits them. And since Google will have the exclusive right, to orphaned works, these digitizations lost forever, or sold to another private party. We all know when happens when DRM servers are shut down. Digital media become less useful than real, physical media.

These terms are still modifiable, and the court will hear objections up until June 2009. But you have to wonder if Google’s own Dan Clancy has any objections to the monopoly that they will be unnecessarily granted. We all lose out, just because AAP does not want to spend resource to whack another questionable mole.



1,507 views

When the cost of making ideas can be zero, the fee to use an ideas should be zero

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on May 24, 2008
in Creativity and Innovation
. 2 Comments

As AgainstMonopoly and Techdirt like to say: when the marginal cost of producing a product, service or experience drops to zero, the price the market is willing to pay will drop to zero. For those that can craft ideas in their heads or on a napkin, the cost of this production is zero. However, what makes an idea valuable is the idea crafter’s ability to execute on the idea successfully. This requires scarce resources such as time, skills and maybe materials. Coming up with ideas and executing them successfully should be allowed to be mutually exclusive activities.

However, regimes such as patents put an artificial price on ideas and slow down innovation. One great example is the push-back on copyright by artists who license their works under Creative Commons. They are aware that someone else might be able to execute on their ideas better than themselves, and the license grants these permissions. Open APIs (application programming interfaces) allow 3rd party developers to use applications in ways the original application developers did not yet imagine. Execution is the natural and scarce barrier that differentiates competitors. It should not be an artificial price on ideas, methods, abstract processes, or the discovery of naturally occurring mathematics, physics, or biologies. The patents that are most dangerous to innovation are software patents. When patents first came on the scene in the US, it was intended for mechanical processes or methods, not necessarily for abstract ideas. Patents on software methods and business process are more akin to abstract ideas.

All of the money spent on patents and the barriers they creates for others is useless in “promoting the useful arts and sciences” unless you can successfully execute on them. And failure for one party to successfully execute holds everyone back, thus prohibiting the promotion of the useful arts and sciences. Your R&D resources are also a waste if you fail to execute. But this is the risk business must take. Even if you have a patent or a copyright, you can fail in the execution.

One might argue that there is a cost to making ideas, since you need to pay for R&D. This may be a leftover thinking from the industrial area. Sure, even for the development of abstract systems such as software applications and business methods, the time resource of engineers and the scarcity of their skills are necessary. But in a situation where one party has spent resources to come up with the same ideas that someone else might develop with fewer resources, and without any influence for the first party, it is as if the act of spending any resources whatsoever means that the idea deserves exclusive rights to execute. The context for protection comes from the belief that party A can “steal” ideas or the fruits of research from party B. These protectionist schemes make no room for the fact the two parties can come up with similar solutions independently, nor do that allow for the ability for some to ideate at no cost, and there is an automatic assumption that they are “anti-market”. It is as if the shareholder value for a couple individuals or firms is more important than the health and well-being of the world over. Or, the appearance that if the executioner is following protocol is going to covers some of their liability for failing and the false stigma of failure.