intellectual property

 Oh dear!  Two Lib Dem peers, Tim Clement-Jones and Tim Razzall, have caused an almighty ruccus across the internet over an amendment they have tabled to the Digital Economy Bill that could, according to various opinions, end up seeing ISPs effectively told to block access to major "user contributed" web services, such as YouTube or FlickR if a copyright holder accuses those sites of hosting "substantial" amounts of copyrighted material.  

There's lots more to it, in particular that their amendment is itself almost certainly far better than what was originally in the bill giving the Secretary of State god-like powers over the internet and for changing copyright law without legislation, but this adds to an awful bill that would allow "collective punishment" by cutting off an ISP's account holder for sharing or downloading copyrighted material even if it was not them doing so but someone else using their account, and potentially put the blockers on open access Wi-Fi such as you find when you are getting your coffee in Starbucks or wherever.

Is it a misguided and probably quite naive attempt to clean up an even more nasty in intention piece of the bill, or have they been nobbled by the rights "industry" like Mandelson has before them?  Time will tell.  

But what it highlights, to my mind are several things...

The Lib Dems, despite many IT savvy members crying out for it, have not really got a policy on IT as a whole and the internet specifically.  For all the bluster over the years about being the most internet enabled party (a claim which is undoubtedly untrue), many of us have called for a proper policy debate on intellectual property, policy supporting open source software, and internet policy.  It has never happened.

The "Establishment" are shit scared of the internet.  Either they have not actually for the most part grasped its potential as an epoch changing medium of global interpersonal communications that has huge ramifications for democracy, government, blurring the often arbitrary lines drawn on maps to designate "countries" and potentially heralding an era of much heightened innovation and collaboration between people all over the planet and have fallen for the siren calls of rights owners without realising the other consequences, or they have realised it and, like the Ancien Regime, are determined to maintain control of it.

The real debate we should be having is about the very nature of and justification for intellectual property at all.  Let's face it, rights holders know the potential for the internet having to change the way they work, the way they, we make a living out of ideas, creations and innovations, and both here, with the Digital Economy Bill, earlier in the US with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in Europe over the issue of software patents, have rallied their troops and arguments to capture our legislators.  This entire Bill needs to be thrown out and a proper debate framed around what are the legitimate, if any, bounds to intellectual property before you can create legislation, if any is needed, to support innovators and creators.

The one solace I take is that the internet works like a self-healing organism in many ways.  Whatever obstacles states try to put in its way, clever brains will eventually find a way around, I am sure.  But at what risk?  We already have grown used the notion that sharing songs is the linguistic equivalent of Blue Beard and his army of killer ocean going pirates.  How long before people who try to break such controls are branded "electronic terrorists" or some such?

The protectionism of intellectual property laws is an artificial intervention in the free market caused and maintained by the state.  It creates artificial scarcity that costs us billions as consumers and most of the time does very little for the actual creatives it ostensibly tries to protect, and these rich pickings are greedily snapped up by "IP farming" by giant corporations, some of whom now make more money out of enforcing IP rights against little people than they do out of the "innovations" they are supposed to be manufacturing and selling.

Intellectual Property was one of the four great evil state created monopolies that the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists railed against as one of the ways in which the state assisted in the exploitation of labour by capital owners.  It is thoroughly illiberal in principle and it is illiberal to be supporting this bill in any shape or form until we have had this Brave New World debate about IP itself and the role of the internet more generally.  It needs killing off and starting again.

 Over at Lib Dem voice there's a guest post proffering an alternative response to the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament.  The "people's party" has expressly committed itself to attacking the people's rights in response to incessant bleating from the Intellectual Property Farming Industry by proposing some form of mandatory cutting off of people's internet connections if they are discovered downloading or sharing copyrighted material.

The guest author, Jim Killock of the "Open Rights Group", a body campaigning against these aspects of the bill, argues from the basis that ISPs will be forced into "collective punishment" by disconnecting people who may done nothing wrong, but whose accounts have been used by other people, perhaps without the knowledge of the account holder.  I think this is the wrong tack for supposed liberals to be taking.  We should instead be focussing on the whole basis of this bill's origin - the further protection of intellectual property by the state, against the interests of the people who elect them and in favour of the interests of the corporate megaliths with the sleekest lobbying operations.

Here's the comment I left on the discussion following the post:

Wrong tack I believe. And I disagree with the notion that when you contract a service from a private company they have not got the right to set whatever rules they like. Event the nationwide universities’ network has the same rule – you as account holder are responsible for any misconduct, based on the terms and conditions of service, carried out with the account, regardless of whether it was actually someone else using your account, unless you can prove your account was hacked. 

Sure, the resulting sanction, suspension of your account, is usually temporary since we do regard it as an essential service, but, and particularly in halls of residence, it could be permanent and you could be forced to use the open computer labs instead.

That said, as I stated, this is the wrong tack for developing a new economy. It is purely based on the wishes and lobbying of the rights-holders. As usual, regulation is being captured by the industry with the biggest lobby (and no doubt the best entertainment budget) in preference to the rights of the people who elect these legislators.

We should be using the opportunity to present an alternative world view – of abolishing intellectual property rights as amounting to artificial state protection on unscarce resources that has resulted over the years in a flourishing commercial scene of IP “farming” by some of the biggest and most influential corporations in the world, certainly at the expense of the consumers (which makes it extortion and theft of our rights), and most probably also at the expense of many would be artists whose entry to the market is effectively controlled by these megaliths of corporate greed and control.

Then, if one or other ISP wants to control the download of some product or service produced by one of its corporate buddies, they can do so in their contracts, and see how they fare in competition with those who don’t. Problem solved.

Come on guys – we are Liberals, supposedly. Intellectual Property is inherently illiberal. A state enforced attack on one group by another who has the ear of government. It is a monopoly right. We don’t believe in monopolies and state created ones especially, and seek to eradicate them. Do we? There is clear water to be gained in this between the corporate cronyism of both Tories and Labour and a real Liberal marketplace. 

So, my latest audiobook recording, this time actually "commissioned" by Stephan via the Mises Institute, is Stephan Kinsella's monograph "Against Intellectual Property".  You can get the text at the Mises.org website, or buy a dead tree version, or read it online at Scribd or in HTML at the author's own site.  Attached to this blogpost though you'll find the audiobook version in several formats - a single MP3 that will work on more or less anything, a set of one-per-heading MP3s (and a zip file of those), and for iTunes/iPod users an m4b version that comes in one file but with chapter markers that show up in those Apple devices and you can skip back and forward to.

I find the whole area of Intellectual Property fascinating.  We are so conditioned that, for example, pharmaceutical companies would never develop any important drugs ever again if they were not able to secure a twenty year monopoly in the form of a patent on their discoveries, or that the music industry is on the brink of collapse because of copyright "theft", when actually what you have to consider is that by granting these state protected monopolies, as Kinsella explains, we are actually restricting our own rights to use our own property as we like.

Got a blank CD you want to burn the latest hits onto?  No can do - your right to use that blank CD, your property, as you wish, is restricted by someone you may very well have already paid a fair price for a creation from.  It's obviously a contentious one for me as a university employee - after all, academia usually worships intellectual property rights, but it's an important debate to be had.  The "monopoly of patents" is one of the four "great monopolies" identified by the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists with which the state conspires with select, favoured or powerful interest groups to skew markets, usually to the disadvantage of consumers and always to the disadvantage of owners of tangible property.

I may try and follow this up with an audio version of Boldrin and Levine's recent "Against Intellectual Monopoly" which greatly expands on the subject set out by Kinsella here with responses to many of the common objections to the eradication of Intellectual Property protections.  In the meantime, there's a great website/blog that covers many of the issues involved at "Against Monopoly".

Incidentally, yes, there is a wonderful irony currently in the recording.  Since I read it straight from the printed version you get the title, and then, yes, you guessed it, the "copyright" notice for the Mises Institute.  But we should make clear that actually, Mises has to declare its copyrights over it just in case someone else does and excludes them from distributing the work how they please.  But since Mises gives away all its material for free, and aims at the widest possible dissemination of its work in the spirit of evangelist, you should feel free to copy, share, pass on and generally do as you please with the audiobook version too.

Oh, and I should add, you can watch a video of Stephan giving a lecture on this subject at the Austrian Scholars' Conference last year on TheUKLibertarian blog.

Thanks to Liberal conspiracy for highlighting protectionist amendments being sneaked into the Telecoms directive which MEPs will decide on tomorrow:

The amendments basically set the scene for forcing ISPs to monitor all their customers' traffic to catch them sharing copyrighted material on the web and to cut customers off if they keep doing it.

Over in the comments on Matt Wardman's blog posting the other day I suggested that this whole surveillance obsession smacks of "we do it because we can". Why should one's electronic communications, voice or data, be any more permissible to be snooped on than any other communication - snail mail, face to face or similar. Just because we can. For a variety of reasons electronic communications leave traces, and traces can always be tracked, but why should they be?

It is true that we need to have a debate about intellectual property and how, or indeed whether, it should be enforced in an era of global instant communication. It appears that the artists tend to be ahead of their production companies in exploring how to use the massive marketing opportunity that is the internet, such as recent experiments in releasing music for free, or on honesty box terms, on the web. But of course it is the media corporations and production companies that are lobbying for this sort of protectionist measure. The debate needs to be held much more widely than that though, and not snuck through where these measures were explicitly removed from the directive last time the European Parliament discussed it.

I have written to Sharon Bowles and Emma Nicholson. I suggest everyone take a look at the details of these amendments and give some thought to writing also to any of their MEPs. It is being debated tomorrow, so act fast!

I very fundamentally believe that the internet in particular is seen as a threat by both governments and corporations who feel they are not able to control it. For me, it is the greatest advance in people communicating with people and eventually needing far less "government" to broker their international relationships or trans-national corporations to broker their trade. But for it to bring about the vast benefits of voluntary co-operation amongst individuals around the world it needs to find its own rules, not have them imposed by those very bodies that are scared of it!

Dan Paskins takes me to task for moaning about Labour's tactics against me when they put out that "scurrilous" leaflet while others, including he says the Lib Dems, are doing just as negative things in their leaflets. I should treat it, he says, as an opportunity to debate those issues if I feel so strongly about them and accept that, in such a debate, I might win over some people, or at least their respect for making the case rather than whining.

He provides an example that, in our East Oxford wide tabloid, we ran an article asking whether Andrew Smith, Oxford East's constituency's New Labour MP, was the biggest hypocrite in town for his duplicitous stance on post office closures. He says that as an issue, that too was beyond the remit of the City Council and therefore, by one of my "rules" of discourse not something that should be mentioned in the context of those elections.

Set aside for the moment a leaflet I saw for Hinksey Park ward with a priceless (literally!) picture of Andrew, the Labour council candidate and A N Other hugging a pillar box pledging to keep Grandpont Post Office open. Even if they hadn't made it a campaign issue of their own, economic well-being is, according to their own government, part of the remit of any local authority. The other four districts in Oxfordshire have pledged to fight the closures and to support communities that are affected if they fail in that fight. Already considerable time and effort had gone in, not, it has to be said, much on the part of the city council, as much as by the various bodies that help social enterprises in the county, to keeping Iffley Village Shop and Post Office going after previous owners decided to stop running it. But clearly the campaign issue for Grandpont and Mr Smith's own actions in supporting the closures in parliament are at odds. They made it a campaign issue even if it wasn't. The person in the photos objecting to the closures voted in favour of them when he had the chance. That seems materially different from my case.

Then there's the question as to whether one should simply debate what is thrown at you to debate, or object to it. Well, I don't for one minute believe that putting out a leaflet on the last weekend of the campaign, distorting my views by selective quoting, is an invitation to a debate. After all, I know some Labour lackey had collected the quotes some weeks previously - I saw them trawling through my drug posts in the week commencing 7th April - if they wanted a debate, there would have been time. It was also notable that they did not put out the said leaflet in the part of the ward that might have been expected to be most interested in such a debate, in the halls of residence (though they didn't put anything round the halls of residence to be fair, in their apparent attempt to disenfranchise a quarter of their electorate by not engaging with them).  Yes, let's have such a debate. It is all too rare in this country to be able to have a reasoned debate about drugs policy. And stunts like this leaflet prove why.

Dan thinks my position is significantly different from that of my party. It is not. The party concluded that the current system of criminal enforcement was often if not always ineffectual and counter productive, failing to minimize harm and continuing to put users and others into the realms of the brutal organized crime networks supplying these substances. The main difference really between my position and the party position is the action I would take to remedy that - legalize, regulate and tax - whereas the party still feels that legalizing would not be an option even if it wanted to promote that as policy because of international obligations. As their leaflet nearly managed to get right, whilst not strictly legalizing, policy is that people whose only crime is possession of small amounts of any drugs for personal use will not be impriisoned, usually leading them to further addiction and contact with drugs.  Honest reporting of my opinion would of course also have said that I believe legalize, regulate and tax is the way to stop drugs getting into the hands of children, for example, which was obviously not even explained to former councillor Standingford when asking for her opinion who went off on one about protecting and educating children about drugs.

No, let's face it, I have a moral right in law to object to my work (this blog) being chopped up into sentences and rearranged out of context to create a derivative work whose sole intention, the evidence suggests, was to bring into question my character or reputation. I will argue that doing so (creating a derivative work against copyright rules) amounts to making a false statement of fact about an opponent (the same cannot be said of claiming, correctly, that Andrew Smith is "supporting post offices" in Labour leaflets, but voting for their closures in Hansard, or indeed in Dan's case that a vote for the Labour Party is support for the party that has recently taken us into several illegal wars). I say again, it is this sort of stunt that puts people off indulging in meaningful progressive debate about what is a significant issue in our world, even if not one that I have any power to do anything about whether elected to the city council or not.

I say supporters of prohibition are accessories to the gangland and drug related deaths that happen at home and abroad as a result of the criminal underworld in which the drugs trade operates with justification. Such moral turpitude on the part of those that would shirk that debate or use the difference of opinion for a little electoral gain is shameful, frankly. It's uncomfortable I'm sure, but call a spade a spade - Labour traded those deaths, past and future, for a few extra votes.

A number of others have kindly blogged about the interesting discussion at the ALTER conference fringe event last Saturday night. From the point of view of being on the platform for the first time it was all the more interesting for me. I wanted to pick up on some of the issues that were raised, not so much by the audience, though many were very insightful questions and observations, but the issues raised by both Tony Vickers in his introduction and especially by Vince Cable in his speech.

First, Tony Vickers introduced the whole event by saying that ALTER wanted to spend some time focussing on the second half of our acronym, Economic Reform more generally, rather than Land Tax which we have fixated on thus far. I'm afraid I rather brushed that aside with my little speech about our book, which will now focus more on land than anything else.

I have always taken the view personally that there is indeed more to the essential economic reforms we need to see in an equitable economic system that will benefit the greatest number of ordinary people than just land. I look to the great individualist anarchists and mutualists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fore-runners of the libertarian movement, who all held that there were four great monopolistic systems we needed to eradicate to level the playing field for all - land, banking, intellectual property and the state itself, or most especially the tariffs they use in pursuit of protectionist policy. Indeed my journey to understanding the land problem began with reading books about the debt-money system.

Colleagues involved in the editorial team for the book, whose economics education is far superior to mine, however, are more convinced that the land monopoly underpins all of these others, and whilst I am yet to understand their arguments fully I do I think see roughly where they are coming from. Essentially their argument is that by creating "free land" the power of the worker is increased by enough to offset the coercive power of debt money, that the ability of governments to manipulate a tax system based on market set values of land to effect protectionist policies is reduced and intellectual property becomes much more a negotiable part of an inventor's portfolio rather than something easily "enclosed" by big business as a result of the relative increase of the power of labour versus capital. At least I think that's how it goes.

But anyway, the upshot of all this is that the book will be more about land than about any of the other areas I have been interested in and which Tony suggested we would be looking at in the future. Though no doubt the chapters on each area of policy will show how "free land" feeds through into greater empowerment of the individual and worker.

Second, (we weren't ganging up on Tony, I promise!) Vince again turned the discussion around onto land tax. He said, I think, that we had largely won the theoretical argument on land taxes - that the party acknowledged its potential importance. But that there was much work to be done he said to produce "SMART" (my corporate bingo word, not Vince's) policies that can actually be sold to people (ie voters) and implemented. And on that theme I want to post a few separate thoughts of my own in separate posts in the near future.

James Graham rejoined that actually we need to make the "moral case" for LVT, what I would call, and agree with, the TINA (there is no alternative) argument - though my powers of persuasion in the housing debate on that position were clearly not very good! I could put it a slightly different way - "can we afford not to". And that, I think, is also shaping up to be the real message of the "Liberal Alternative" book.

I will end this introduction to a series of posts on "can we afford not to" with a thought on what seems to be a trait in Liberal Democrat policy making. Do we need to have such detailed plans for exactly how we would proceed from day one of a Lib Dem administration, or should we focus more on getting the "big messages" across. It seems to me that the last time we had a big ideological shift in British government, in 1979, that the Tories had a clear "direction of travel" but were not obsessed with landing in Number 10 with a full set of detailed measures to implement that. They may have had behind the scenes, ready to wheel out when the time was right, but the message to the public in the election was of the broad direction of travel.

This is not something we are alone in. Nowadays every party seems to have to have these details all thrashed out in order to give them credibility amongst the electorate that they would be competent to run the country. But I'm not entirely sure that that is what the voter actually wants - perhaps they want the big ideas rather than the detailed minutiae. I suspect this minute detail is a symptom of our modern managerial one-upmanship and the absence of ideological politics. But surely as a party we actually want to return to ideological politics that we think voters will engage with and be excited by.

I don't think I would be accused of disloyalty if I said that we are not going to be the party of government after the next election! So we spend a lot of time selling detailed policies that we will not get to implement before circumstances, most likely, change again. We have had most success with our "big themes" - we are known for PR, for opposition to war in Iraq, and for the idea, expressed through our previous tax pledges (though I hate to admit it in oh so many ways - not least that it will give succour to the likes of Evan Harris!) that we want "fair" taxation. We can sell LVT as "fair taxation" without minute details as to how it would be implemented, perhaps at most a broad timescale for a tax shift, as the Tories did with reducing income taxes in 1979 - something that actually took them three terms to really implement as far as the average voter would feel in their pocket.

Our detailed policy making produces a couple of not always welcome effects - that we are hostages to fortune - what we promise in one election might one day come back to haunt us several elections later when we make it to Downing Street, and it saves other parties a deal of work thinking for themselves when we create policies that they like to nick. We can of course take some pride in others wanting to use our policies, but people soon forget where they originated, and we risk being forever a glorified "think tank" rather than a party with the big ideas that will win us power. LVT is such an idea. We should not be afraid to tout it without trying to explain to people exactly how it would be implemented except in broad outline until we are closer to being in a position to do so. That will not stop the likes of us in ALTER, however, trying to show the party internally how it might work, but in the end, the detail is what the Treasury is for when we have control of the Great Court!

I've just been watching a BBC Breakfast package about this issue of reseling tickets for music and sporting events with a "vox pop" where most of the respondents were saying things like reselling is "not fair, because we can no longer afford it".  

Well this may not be a populist line to take but I'm sorry, that's tough! Nobody is entitled to attend such an event as of right. What if your preferred art-form is Impressionist art. Are politicians supposed to limit the price at which Sotheby's can sell a Renoir so that every household can afford one? No, you have to settle for a print or poster that you can keep - analogous say to a CD - or perhaps a visit to a one off exhibition to see an original - analogous say to watching the event live on TV.

MPs for once seem to be taking the right line - tighten up on sharp practices, but don't interfere in a legitemate market.