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Dangers of over-zealous intellectual property cops
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| The industrial inventors of the nineteenth
| century, too - heirs to the heroic ideal of
| James Watt - would have understood today's
| enforcers. They complained loudly that
| patents needed to be easier to police and
| longer-lasting, denouncing rival
| industrialists as piratical. Their campaign
| to secure patentees' prerogatives had many
| implications, one of which was the passage of
| Britain's first modern patent law.
|
| But it also sparked a counter-campaign to
| abolish patenting altogether. Led by
| Victorian Britain's principal arms
| manufacturer, it denounced the very idea of a
| patent as monopolistic, retrogressive, and
| philosophically absurd - and it identified
| the practice of enforcement as a serious
| impediment to the nation's progress. Although
| it came very close to triumphing (and a
| parallel bid in the Netherlands did triumph),
| the campaign against patenting eventually
| failed.
|
| [...]
|
| In principle, there is no reason why not.
| Conflicts over intellectual property in its
| various domains -- gene patenting, GMOs,
| pharmaceuticals, and digital media, to
| mention only a few -- are an everyday
| presence. Criticisms and piratical practices
| in any of these realms have the potential to
| ramify into major challenges to the
| conceptual structure of modern intellectual
| property itself. What has been missing so far
| has been a sufficiently general trigger. The
| practice of policing could supply it. It
| would be ironic if the greatest revision of
| intellectual property's nature in 150 years
| were to be set in train by the very measures
| adopted to preserve it sacrosanct.
`----
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2010/02/dangers_of_over-zealous_intell.html
Recent:
Disney's Takedown Of Roger Ebert's Tribute To Gene Siskel
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| Notice that they think it's Disney again.
| How nice of them to repeatedly take down the
| videos of Ebert's tribute to his close
| friend. Just like copyright law intended.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100217/0310368194.shtml
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