Tag: Against Intellectual Property

What Do You Own

When you purchase a computer do you own it? What about your cell phone? Or your automobile? At one time the answer to these questions was an absolute yes. Today, not so much:

Cars, refrigerators, televisions, Barbie dolls. When people buy these everyday objects, they rarely give much thought to whether or not they own them. We pay for them, so we think of them as our property. And historically, with the exception of the occasional lease or rental, we owned our personal possessions. They were ours to use as we saw fit. They were free to be shared, resold, modified, or repaired. That expectation is a deeply held one. When manufacturers tried to leverage the DMCA to control how we used our printers and garage door openers, a big reason courts pushed back was that the effort was so unexpected, so out of step with our understanding of our relationship to the things we buy.

But in the decade or so that followed those first bumbling attempts, we’ve witnessed a subtler and more effective strategy for convincing people to cede control over everyday purchases. It relies less—or at least less obviously—on DRM and the threat of DMCA liability, and more on the appeal of new product features, and in particular those found in the smart devices that make up the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).

I’ve annoyed many electrons criticizing the concept of intellectual property. The idea that somebody has a government granted monopoly on something simply because they were the first to receive a patent is absurd in my opinion. But we live with much more absurd ideas today. Due to the way software copyright and patent laws work, if a company loads software onto a device they can effectively prevent anybody from owning it. At most a buyer can acquire a limited use license for those devices.

Combining software copyright and patent laws with the Internet of Things (IoT) just amplifies this. Now there are a bunch of devices on the market that rely on continuous Internet access to the manufacturers’ servers. If the manufacture decides to drop support for the product it stops working. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue if laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) didn’t make it illegal for you to hack the device and load your own software onto it that allowed it to continue working.

Right now we’re dealing with relatively cheap IoT devices. If your $99 Internet connected thermostat stops working it sucks but it’s not something that is so expensive that it can’t be replaced. But what happens when IoT comes to, say, automobiles? What happens when critical functions on an automobile cease to work because the manufacturer decides to drop support for one of the Internet connected components. Suddenly you’re not talking about throwing away a $99 device but a machine that cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Although this scenario might sound absurd to some I guarantee that it will happen at some point if software copyright and patent laws continue to be enforced as they have been.

Implied Licenses are Bullshit

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been thoroughly fucking over people in the United States since 1998. One of the things that the DMCA accomplished was effectively abolishing property rights on anything that includes copyrighted material. This has had wide reaching ramifications including preventing farmers from repairing their own equipment:

In fact, the craziness of this goes even further: In a 2015 letter to the United States Copyright Office, John Deere, the world’s largest tractor maker, said that the folks who buy tractors don’t own them, not in the way the general public believes “ownership” works. Instead, John Deere said that those who buy tractors are actually purchasing an “implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

[…]

But what this has meant is that tractor owners can’t repair their own tractors—and if they do, they’re in violation of the DMCA. So, if a machine stops working, its owner can’t pop the hood, run some tests, and find out what’s going on; he or she is legally required to take the tractor to a service center (one owned by the manufacturer, since that’s the only entity allowed to analyze the tractor’s issues).

I’m against the concept of copyright, in part, because it is an implied license.

That is to say it’s a contractual agreement that the purchaser didn’t agree to. If you manufacture something and want to restrict the user of that thing then you need to get them to agree to contractual terms. For example, if you want to sell a book and prevent the buyer form copying it then you need to write up a contract that states the signer agrees not to copy the book and include penalties if the contract is broken. Then you need to convince the buyer to agree to it.

Copyright doesn’t work that way though. When you buy a book you don’t sign a contract binding you to an agreement not to copy the book. The agreement is implied, which is a fancy way of saying you were bound to it involuntarily. As the article notes, John Deere stated in a letter to the United States Copyright Office that people who had purchased its equipment were restricted by an implied license. The company is changing the rules after the fact by trying to force an agreement upon farmers through the State. In any sane sense of contract theory that is nonsense but in the statist interpretation it’s a perfectly sound method of getting buyers to agree to specific terms.

People should not be subject to involuntary agreements of any sort and nobody should be allowed to change an agreement willy nilly after the fact without the other party agreeing to those changes.

Mossberg To Courts: Muh Intellectual Property

Drop-in triggers are nothing new. There are approximately one bajillion drop-in triggers available for AR pattern rifles and some rifles, like the Tavor, are designed around drop-in trigger packs. The fact that everybody and their grandmother manufacturers drop-in triggers hasn’t stopped Mossberg from suing basically everybody because it believes a patent it purchased some time ago grants it a monopoly on the bloody obvious:

In another instance of the firearms industry feeding on it’s own, it appears that Mossberg is exercising it’s control on the original Chip McCormick patent (US 7,293,385 B2), that it acquired a while ago, and bringing lawsuits against a number of manufacturers of drop in triggers.

Mossberg currently licenses the design to the new CMC company, who has apparently decided to get Mossberg to go after their competition, i.e. anyone making drop in triggers.

This is an example of patent trolling. Mossberg didn’t invent drop-in triggers, it purchased a patent covering their design. It also conveniently waited to file a lawsuit until after numerous manufacturers were making drop-in triggers, which coincidentally allows Mossberg to reap more wealth than it could have if it filed a lawsuit the moment somebody violated the patent. Then there is the fact that the patent is absurd. The idea of packaging up the components of a trigger so it can be easily inserted into a firearm isn’t novel or innovative. It’s bloody obvious.

I can only hope that a court renders this patent invalid and Mossberg is forced to pay the attorney fees for all of the companies it’s trying to exploit.

A New Hero Arises

Setting aside my general hatred of intellectual property, I want to discuss an especially heinous abuse of intellectual property laws. A lot of research done in the United States is funded by tax dollars. We’re told this is necessary because the research wouldn’t be done if it was left to the market and that we shouldn’t complain because the research benefits all of us. But the research fueled by tax funding seldom benefits all of us because the findings are locked away being the iron curtain of publisher paywalls. We may have been forced to fund it but we don’t get to read it unless we’re willing to pay even more to get a copy of the research papers.

Aaron Swartz fought against this and was ruthlessly pursued by the State for his actions. Now that he has left us a new hero has risen to the call. Alexandra Elbakyan is the creator and operator of Sci-Hub, a website created to distribute research papers currently secured behind paywalls:

But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research’s Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who’s living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like “hacker” and “criminal.”

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It’s a portal that offers free and searchable access “to most publishers, especially well-known ones.” Search for it, download, and you’re done. It’s that easy.

“The more known the publisher is, the more likely Sci-Hub will work,” she told Ars via e-mail. A message to her site’s users says it all: “SCI-HUB…to remove all barriers in the way of science.”

I fear many libertarians will be quick to dismiss Alexandra because she espouses anti-capitalist ideals. But it’s important to focus her actions, which are very libertarian indeed. She is basically playing the role of Robin Hood by liberating stolen wealth from the State and returning it to the people. The money has already been spent so it cannot be retrieved but what it bought, research, is still there and should be returned to the people as compensation for the original theft. That is all freely releasing tax funded research is and for her part Alexandra should be treated as the hero she is.

If You Don’t Own It, It’s Not Yours

If you don’t own it, it’s not yours. A lot of people are learning that lesson today after Google announced that it would be disabling customers’ Revolv smart-home hub in spite of the promised lifetime subscription:

As we reported on Tuesday, shutting down the Revolv smart-home hubs does not mean Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 (£211) devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.

[…]

And the decision to deliberately disable the smart-home hubs comes despite the fact they were previously advertised as having a “lifetime subscription.”

Do you own the devices you purchase? If you read most license agreements, which you usually can’t read until you’ve purchased and opened the product, you’re not buying the product but a license to use the product. This is especially true with products that include software, which are regulated under easily abused copyright laws. John Deere, for example, claims you don’t own your tractor, you’re merely licensing it. Because of that John Deere argues that you’re not allowed to fix the tractor as that is a violation of the license you agreed to.

The problem with licenses is that they can be revoked. In this case Google is not only ceasing online services for the Revolv but is entirely bricking the devices themselves, which is likely allowed under the device’s license agreement (those agreements basically read, “We can do whatever we want and you agree to like it.”) regardless of any marketing promises of a “lifetime subscription.”

Had the Revolv been a device that ran open source software with a permissive license its fate wouldn’t be so bleak. At least the option would exist for developers to continue updating the software and creating an alternate online service. That’s the type of freedom ownership allows but licensing usually doesn’t.

As more devices are needlessly tied to “the cloud” we’re going to see more bullshit like this. In my eyes it’s the “in-app purchases” economy brought into the physical world. Many applications used to sell for a one-time fee only for the developers to change their mind and start relying on in-app purchases. An example of this is Cyclemeter. When I first purchased the app it included everything. Now you need to pay a yearly subscription fee via the in-app purchase feature to unlock most of the features. The same bait and switch is coming to our physical world via the Internet of Things. Manufacturers will brick older devices to persuade customers to buy the latest model. Since these devices are almost exclusively licensed instead of owned there will be little recourse for customers. It’s going to be a large scale demonstration of if you don’t own it, it’s not yours.

Freely Accessing Scientific Publications Behind A Paywall

On the one hand we’re told that pure science can only be performed under the “neutrality” of government funding while on the other hand we’re told the research we were forced to fund isn’t ours to access. Having to pay to access research papers that I was forced to fund has been a pet peeve of mine since college. Even though I enjoyed free access to most scientific papers in college the simple fact that I would lose that access as soon as I graduated really rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately I’m not alone. A group of people have developed a service aimed at pirating scientific research papers:

Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions. When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version.

Unsurprisingly, Elbakyan’s project has drawn the ire of publishers. Last year, Elsevier sued Sci-Hub and an associated website called Library Genesis for violating its copyright. The two websites “operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database,” Elsevier’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, referring to the company’s subscription database.

[…]

But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.

Sci-Hub can be accessed via the normal Internet here and via Tor here. That second link is important to have since Sci-Hub was already shutdown once. While it’s feasible for the State to censor the normal Internet it’s not feasible for it to censor Tor hidden services since there is no centralized name server to threaten.

I don’t hide my opposition to intellectual property in all forms but I especially detest copyright applying to criminally funded research. A thief should make reparations to right the wrong they have caused so the only way to right the wrong of the State stealing money to fund favored researchers it to make the findings of their research freely available to everybody.

Intellectual Property Means Not Owning Your Stuff

Intellectual property laws are always justified as being necessary for human innovation. Setting aside the fact humans have been innovating for longer than intellectual property laws have existed, the belief many people hold is that nobody would invest the resources necessary to innovate if they weren’t promised a monopoly on manufacturing afterwards. More and more though we’re seeing what the real purpose behind intellectual property laws are. It’s not to encourage innovation, it’s to curtail ownership.

Copyright is the biggest offender. Due to software copyright laws it’s getting more and more difficult to say you own anything because manufacturers are claiming anything with a computer in it is licensed, not sold. What’s that mean? It means when your product breaks down you are legally prohibited from fixing it:

How many people does it take to fix a tractor? A year ago, I would have said it took just one person. One person with a broken tractor, a free afternoon, and a box of tools.

I would have been wrong.

When the repair involves a tractor’s computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. government agencies, an official hearing, hundreds of pages of legal briefs, and nearly a year of waiting. Waiting for the Copyright Office to make a decision about whether people like me can repair, modify, or hack their own stuff.

[…]

Thanks to the “smart” revolution, our appliances, watches, fridges, and televisions have gotten a computer-aided intelligence boost. But where there are computers, there is also copyrighted software, and where there is copyrighted software, there are often software locks. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, you can’t pick that lock without permission. Even if you have no intention of pirating the software. Even if you just want to modify the programming or repair something you own.

Enter the tractor. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a repairman by trade and a software engineer by education. I fix things—especially things with computers in them. And I run an online community of experts that teaches other people how to fix broken equipment. When a farmer friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way to tweak the copyrighted software of his broken tractor, I knew it was going to be rough. The only way to get around the DMCA’s restriction on software tinkering is to ask the Copyright Office for an exemption at the Section 1201 Rulemaking, an arduous proceeding that takes place just once every three years.

Ownership implies you have sole control over something. It can’t exist under intellectual property laws. So long as you stand the chance of being severely punished for repairing, modifying, or selling something you cannot claim to own it. Intellectual property claims are promises granted by the State that it will dish out those severe punishments.

This problem is also going to become exponentially worse as the number or products with embedded software increases exponentially. Soon we won’t be able to claim ownership over our refrigerators, coffee makers, or door bells. Everything in our homes will be rented property of the manufacturer. And if we violate the terms of the rental agreement the State will send its armed goons at oh dark thirty, kick down our doors announced, and shoot our pets.

Smith And Wesson Don’t Believe You Own Your Gun

Update: Smith and Wesson has apologized for being legal cunts. I guess they didn’t have their lawyers on a short enough leash, which is a problem common to most companies. Glad to see they backed off.

My original article is below for preservation purposes.

For years now I’ve been contemplating buying a Smith and Wesson M&P. They’re wonderfully designed pistols. The only thing I don’t like about them is the trigger doesn’t have a tactile reset. Fortunately Apex triggers add that functionality so I need only buy one and drop it in, right? Wrong. According to Smith and Wesson making such modifications violates their precious intellectual property rights:

That’s one of Brownells’ series of ‘Dream Guns‘ (above), highly customized, one-off project guns Brownells gins up as examples of what’s possible if you want to put some money, time and love into your stock pistol. They use these as come-ons for trade shows and such, as attractions to get passers by to stop and check out their wares. Their latest effort, a Smith & Wesson M&P, wasn’t well received by the venerable Springfield gun maker…

They had their IP attorneys send a love letter to Brownells and the other aftermarket companies who collaborated on the M&P Dream gun.

There is a picture of the legal threat Smith and Wesson mailed to Apex, Brownells, DP Custom Works, Blowndeadline Custom, and SSVi. Although I find this entire situation ridiculous I do appreciate Smith and Wesson going out of its way to save me the money I would have otherwise dropped on one of their pistols.

I believe it’s perfectly valid to void the warranty if a customer makes a modification to a product. But threatening a lawsuit over imaginary property being violated is absurd. But this is becoming more common. John Deere already claims farmers don’t own the tractors they purchase because those tractors contain software and that software implies the entire piece of machinery is being licensed. Automotive manufacturers are also using intellectual property laws to justify preventing customers from making certain modifications to their vehicles.

What’s interesting about Smith and Wesson’s case is that it doesn’t involve software, which is the goto excuse used to claim owners don’t actually own the products they buy. Instead it’s claiming that displaying its logo on one of its own guns violates the company’s trademark. I guess anybody who modifies a Smith and Wesson firearm is supposed to file off any logos.

While I fully admit I haven’t purchased a Smith and Wesson firearm in years, the last time I did I didn’t sign any contractual agreement to remove all of the company’s logos if I modified the firearm (if such an agreement were demanded I wouldn’t have bought the gun). Since there is no cause for Smith and Wesson to claim I don’t own the pistol and I didn’t sign a contract making me responsible for removing its logos I’m curious on what grounds they plan to enforce this newfound legal power trip. Granted, I won’t have to worry about it because this kind of nonsense will ensure I take my money elsewhere.

Cultures Cannot Own Ideas Either

Several of my friends have been passing around the story of the University of Ottawa cancelling a free yoga class because of concerns of cultural appropriation. I ignored it just as I ignore most culture war stories. Especially when the remedy to the cancellation is as simple as continuing the classes without official recognition from the university. But some valuable discussion did manage to rise from the ashes. Namely that ideas aren’t property and therefore cannot belong to anybody:

Yoga, whether you’re a fan of it or not, doesn’t exclusively belong to some group of people who share the same skin color or language or culture or religion — just as classical music or Western medicine or modern physics doesn’t belong to the Europeans. It, like all such ideas, is the common heritage of all mankind. That means of each and every one of us, even those of us who have a genetic background or culture that some people feel aggrieved at.

We (Indian, American, African, Oceanian, anyone else) are entitled to use it, to adapt it, to merge it with other ideas. There’s no improper “appropriation” here because there’s no “property” here in the first place.

After this the author does some backtracking and tries to justify patents and copyrights. His inconsistency towards the end of the article don’t invalidate the beginning of the article though. Ideas are not a finite resource that can be exclusively held by a single individual. You can copy an idea but that doesn’t deprive the originator of it so the act cannot be called theft.

Most instances where I’ve seen accusations of cultural appropriation made were when somebody was making use of an idea that originated in another culture. Sometimes the usage is malicious and meant to mock the culture but more often than not the usage is innocent. In the former case I think an accusation of the user being a jackass suffices and in the latter I think the usage should be encouraged. Adopting ideas from other cultures tends to have the effect of forwarding the adopter’s view of the culture they’re drawing from.

For example, I participate in Japanese martial arts and part of that involves adopting Japanese cultural ideas not directly related to the combat styles themselves. Several of those ideas are themselves adopted from Buddhism. Buddhism in Japan came from China, which adopted Buddhism from India where the religion originated. So I’ve adopted cultural ideas that were adopted from cultural ideas that were adopted from cultural ideas. If I am guilty of cultural appropriation, and I have been accused of it by one person, then I am merely continuing a trend of cultural appropriation that spans back into prehistory. With all of that said I feel as though I’m a better person because of it. My overall understanding of the world expanded because I adopted ideas from another culture.

I use myself as an example because I am the person I know best. But most people I know who had adopted ideas from other cultures have become better people because of it. A lot of people I know practice yoga and feel they are better because of it. Seeing their enjoyment of life increase leads me to believe they are correct. Many of my friends also practice various forms of meditation, which clearly do not have roots in European culture. Again they feel it has made them better people and I agree. In addition to becoming better people these friends of mine tend to have a more expansive worldview. That fuller worldview tends to make them less xenophobic and if there’s anything the world needs it’s less xenophobia.

The idea that one’s ability to adopt ideas from other cultures is dependent on what culture they were born into is another attempt at monopolizing ideas. Cultural appropriation belongs on the same shelf as copyrights and patents: fiction. While there are certainly valid grounds for criticizing people who adopt a cultural idea for the sole purpose of denigrating the culture they should be based on the person being an asshole. On the other hand people who adopt ideas from other cultures should be encouraged because it will only help expand their worldview and very well may help to different cultures come together. Above all though we should recognize that cultural ideas aren’t a special exception to the illegitimacy of intellectual property.

Socialized Loses, Private Profits

A quip about government bailouts of private corporations is “Socialized losses, private profits.” When these companies fail it is at the tax victims’ expense but when they succeed it is to their personal profits. But government bailouts aren’t the only situations where this phrase is applicable. Public universities receive a great deal of tax victim money and often profit from it tremendously:

Apple Inc could be facing up to $862 million in damages after a U.S. jury on Tuesday found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices.

The jury in Madison, Wisconsin also said the patent, which improves processor efficiency, was valid. The trial will now move on to determine how much Apple owes in damages.

Representatives for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.

WARF sued Apple in January 2014 alleging infringement of its 1998 patent for improving chip efficiency.

Ask yourself this, why should a publicly funded university be allowed to declare a legal monopoly on an idea? Taxes, which is to say the public, paid for the research so the only fair trade would be for any findings to be placed in the public domain. But that’s not the case. Universities can socialize the losses of research and privatize the profits.

Why do so many people whine when private corporations get away with this shit but say nothing with a public university does? I’m part of the club that views both with equal revile but, sadly, it is a very small club.