"Forty years ago, we had cake and asked for icing on top of it. Today, all we have left is the icing, and we’ve forgotten that the cake was ever there. If code isn’t licensed as “free,” you’d best leave it alone."
I've long had a nagging feeling that there was a deep connection between the current state of our "post truth" society and the continuously widening scope of "IP" (digital monopoly) protections. Cory disentangles some of those connections and shows some of the ways IP has become a tool for restricting freedoms. But there's more: I think that those same mechanics are narrowing the overton window and putting all thinking that's outside on the same level... and we end up in a world where the ordinary person can't distinguish between the credibility of un-approved ideas.
You need to bury truth, so you can keep selling people a stream of "novel" information. Truth doesn't get you monopoly profits, only novelty. Rearrange the truth every couple decades into crappier versions and profit.
Incentives matter.
#ImaginaryProperty is the worst. #IntellectualFreedom YOLO!!!
“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
I don’t quite buy the leap that “software companies being exploitative” is at all related to “protecting IP through the use of copyright”. Cory does not link the two successfully in my mind.
If you read the essay in full, you’d see that he distinguishes between copyright laws meant to encourage authorship and what is currently meant under the “IP umbrella,” which is more about protecting monopoly power.
Yes, he does conflate a bunch of behaviour into IP. But that’s just his conflation.
Monopolistic practices exist with or without IP laws, terms of service, etc.
Take a look at some other industries: energy companies have protected fossil fuel exploitation and stifled research and adoption of nuclear and green alternatives.
Finance industry have maintained monopoly and avoided regulation despite there being obvious harm to their practice.
These behaviours are related to capitalism... not intellectual property.
Frustrating that you'd seek to just undermine my knowledge on it rather than honestly assess my point. But I'll play:
- He intros by talking about copyright, DRM, terms of use, etc
- Then jumps to the fact that Opioid companies try to hook you with addiction, just like Facebook. (So what's that got to do with Copyright, DRM, Terms of use?)
- Then hints at network effects of "How can you leave Facebook if all your friends are there?" (What's that got to do with anything?)
- Then he talks about service lock-in which again has nothing to do with Intellectual Property. You are locked in to all sorts of things in your life as a consumer, that is a capitalistic practice the fact that software companies use IP as the way to pull the lock-in lever is kind of secondary to the point isn't it? Isn't the main point: Why do we accept lock-in at all? (Again he's conflated these, not separates them)
- He talks about Copyright like it's just the US... so what about GDPRs "Right to data portability?", that's the beginning of inter-op. Or Countries copyright exceptions for interop purposes? No mention of those. So not only has he conflated Monopolistic tendencies with IP, he then conflates "Global IP laws" with "US IP law"... which misrepresents the vast majority of the world. As I've mentioned in other comments, in the country I live in: there is no such thing as "Fair Use", you are allowed to copy things for certain protected reasons, and people can't even bring a case against you for those reasons (A subtle but important difference).
- Lets take the kindle example where he says (paraphrase) "Amazon have locked you in, and you are breaking the law if you attempt to undo it"... Well what if I live in a country that allows me the right to reverse engineer for the purposes of inter-op? I can (legally) hack that kindle to pieces... Now they might make that really hard, or even impossible... In a similar way that Oil companies have depressed the EV market and made it WAY harder to own an EV to an ICE... But IP isn't getting in the way here.
Huh? If I have a book, I can lend it to a friend, sell it on eBay, or even put it in a library where thousands of people can read it for free. If I "own" a book on a Kindle, I can do none of those things -- and if our corporate overlords decide they don't want me to read that book anymore, then they can remotely remove it from my device, even if I paid for it [0]. The abuse is that DRM is being weaponized to criminalize fair use and other consumer rights that copyright law otherwise would not give corporations authority over -- and because of DMCA 1201, it is illegal to work around DRM even for fair-use purposes.
In fact, DRM does next to nothing to prevent piracy, as evidenced by the thriving piracy "industry" today. Every DRM system can eventually be bypassed, somehow -- there has to be some way to decrypt the content, otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch it. It's akin to putting up a "no stealing" sign outside my house -- sure, it means that thieves are technically trespassing now -- but they were already breaking the law to begin with and no flimsy little sign is going to stop them. It could be argued that DRM only makes piracy more enticing, because consumers can use pirated content in completely normal, fair-use ways that are blocked by DRM.
As Doctorow explains in the article, DRM was never about protecting copyright, it's about protecting monopolies. DRM means I can only watch a movie with an approved web browser on an approved operating system on an approved computer using an approved cable to connect to an approved monitor, and that I can only repair a tractor at an approved tractor dealership.
In your book example... I don’t think you can (legally) redistribute your book. It’s just publishers don’t really care if you do, because cost of enforcement is too high. That’s why they like kindles.
Software used to be like this too, back when it was distributed as a physical thing (disks).
DRM was about protecting copyright, your book/kindle example was a perfect illustrator of that. But I agree, it has been weaponised and misused.
You can't distribute copies of the book (outside of limited exceptions).
First Sale doctrine says you can pretty much do whatever you want with the physical item.
It is globally accepted. There are many community libraries throughout the world that consist on a small shelf on a sidewalk where people leave books for others and take the ones they are interested in.
Can't speak to other countries but I know in NZ you're not allowed legally to rip DVDs or blurays you own (even just for private use, no distribution intended). The copyright act is structured with a whitelist of permissible format shifts, and while CDs made it onto that list, movie discs didn't.
This is true in America as well, though nobody cares. DVD's and bluray are protected with DRM, and you can only legally circumvent that DRM to use a short chunk as a critic or to develop accessibility features.
I am unaware of anyone prosecuted for ripping though, only several for developing/spreading the DRM circumvention.
Though, the other poster is right, that's a separate thing to what is being discussed.
Surely you can still resell and loan the physical CD/DVD though, which is what's being discussed here as universally legal? I think ripping DVDs would be seen as equivalent to photocopying a book.
I can't seem to respond to the sibling comment directly, so I'll comment here to say that ripping a CD or DVD is making a copy of it, which isn't what this thread is about.
You can't rip it, but you can sell, share, or do whatever you want with the original copy you bought and own. That is true everywhere in the world.
Reselling, lending or giving away books is legal in my country and, as far as I know, most countries in Latin America. Nobody is turning a blind eye, it's actually legal.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where I cannot lend my book to whoever the hell I want. Or give it away.
Fun fact: the Kindle Store doesn't sell the actual ability to access the books, as piracy does that just fine. They don't sell the ability to pay the author, as you can mail the author $20 just fine (and perfectly legally).
So what do they sell you? Well, legal legitimacy and possibly convenience.
This entire notion of respecting DRM to such an extent is absurd. If you buy a kindle book from Amazon, regardless of legal details, it's fairly "yours" and just as is the case with a physical book, you should have the right and inclination to strip off its DRM and then use it across devices as you please, even send a copy or two to friends. The right because you bought it, just like you'd have once bought a paper book, and the inclination because as we've seen with many cases of sealed digital content "ownership" platforms in the past, buyers have a funny way of suddenly losing everything they supposedly own. Stripping DRM removes both problems completely and, yes, it's usually very easy to do using perfectly legal software like Calibre, for example.
> So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
If by "books" you mean "copyright on books, as enforced against people rather than corporations[0]", then yes, yes 'they' are.
0: Nitpick: legal action against a corporation for printing something by request from a particular customer is legal action against that customer, the same as if you'd prosecuted 15'000$ that you stole from their car for being drug money.
Doctorow is referring to IP, which he explicitly claims is a mix of unrelated terms under an arbitrary umbrella, only one of which is copyright. IP also groups trademarks & patents, which are unrelated to copyright.
He also explains how each part of the so-called IP laws used to have an escape hatch, something that was useful to society at large even though the "owner" would prefer it didn't exist. And how, given the trend towards concentration of money and consolidation of monopolistic actors, these escape hatches are being eroded.
> Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
There's copyright for books, sure. But nothing else applies. I can resell books. I can quote them (with some restrictions, such as not quoting the entire book). I can lend them to whomever I choose. I can read them upside down. I can cut them up, I can pick a page and analyze its chemical composition. I can do all sorts of things that, when books turn into digital goods, their publishers make an effort to prevent me from doing -- making it effectively and practically illegal to try to bypass their arbitrary restrictions.
If you're willing to connect the dots in this way, where anything that gives you legal authority to control the conduct of others (competitors, critics, customers) in specific ways is "abusive", then you should realize that this sort of argument is very easily extended, because that's exactly what all property does.
Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you. Ordinary property is the right to say how others are allowed to use a physical thing that belongs to you. It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
No. The ability to abuse comes specifically from power imbalances, and that’s what we need to take into account when designing policy. This is something that can’t be explicitly enumerated in all cases, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed. We do have anti-trust law for a reason (even if it hasn’t been enforced).
A single company owning and having their fingers in everything from search engines, operating systems, phone and laptop hardware, self-driving cars, payment platforms, online shopping platforms, cloud computing platforms and a myriad of other things. I'm of the opinion no single entity should be allowed to be in control of so many things.
Yes they are worse, they're practically untouchable. The delusion is that we've all convinced ourselves that some 4-5 yearly cycle popular voting system actually gives us any control whatsoever.
Big companies manipulate the power we've given over to government or lobby for the extra power to be given to the government for them to exploit. It's so obvious it has to be some sort of group psychosis that means we're all continuely having these same discussions.
An alternative explanation for the these discussions is that not everyone agrees with your position, nor thinks that a small(er) government would be helpful for society.
And you all think career politicians like Biden or whoever give two fly fucks for you or me, or are they going to be listening to the billion dollar donors that got them elected. These individuals are so far detached from the people that to call it a "democracy" is a travesty.
These are oligarchies with the veneer of popular voting providing a pretense of democracy.
Also the irony of asking the government to help you from companies that said government gave defacto monopolies to in the form of copyright laws seems to be completely lost on everyone.
There was a podcast a couple of years ago on Enron, and one of the things that stuck with me was the presenter's musing on this cycle where vast power is given to huge profit-maximising machines operating as monopolies. Then one of them gets caught doing {bad thing}, and there's focus on them. And they become the sole target of court cases and investigations and ire (rightly so, but a load of other companies are also either doing the same thing, or are directly enabling them). Then everyone forgets all the lessons that should have been learned and allows the same cycle to repeat until the next time and companies get back to setting policy/laws via lobbying until the next big blow out.
> No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search.
Right, but it's about the level of control. It's not one single entity: instead control is effectively split between a very few megacorporations with an ability to obliterate smaller competition. Their incentive is to control the market, to control both ends of any pipelines they are involved in. Which is the same as any company, sure, but it is the level of power that these companies have that is worrying. It may not be a bad thing with bad effects -- it's really convenient in many ways! The power gives them the ability to produce some really good things! But history would suggest that, as a general rule, it is not a great idea to hand extremely large amounts of power and control to a few entities who are only beholden to (and whose only real aim is to) generate money for investors.
> But history would suggest that, as a general rule, it is not a great idea to hand extremely large amounts of power and control to a few entities who are only beholden to (and whose only real aim is to) generate money for investors.
I’d like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors. If you look at the incentive structures for the people involved, that starts to look like an untenable position. For example there are a lot of subject matter s experts whose incentive is to build careers based on their contributions and expertise - e.g. Chris Lattner. This is just one example of how this reductive idea of what a company is simply breaks down. Certainly some companies - usually financial ones - have no other goal, but outside of the financial sector this is just not true.
And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking.
There is no room to compete head to head with them, but plenty of room to innovate and compete in way that they are simply under delivering.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle.
> I'd like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Pick any megacorporation that has reached a point in terms of market cap where they can dictate favourable political/economic conditions for themselves, so from when companies started appearing, so mid-late 1700s. With the caveat that almost all of them have "good" effects from specific perspectives: all huge eastern trading companies (Dutch & British East India), all huge western trading companies (well, sure, they traded slaves but yowza, look at how much they put into the economy!), all huge chemical companies, all large arms manufacturers, all huge oil companies, Japan when split between zaibatsus, etc etc etc. Doesn't seem to matter what sector they are in apart from it involving control of a necessary resource.
> Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.
Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition. It's why a company as a legal/business entity is formed. Hiring subject matter experts -- well, yes, obviously a company will do that, and those experts will have personal reasons for working for the entity that are most often not directly be "enrich this entity". But that is for the most part irrelevant to my point.
> And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking
Their products being lacking from your perspective isn't really relevant here either. Google and AWS control and sell access to physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, cross spectrum products built on that infrastructure, tools to use that infrastructure. They control [a large % of] both ends of the pipe, so to speak. Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in. FB, well as a minor example: "ah well, yes, it was kinda sorta mainly organised on our platform using our infrastructure, but whatcha gonna do?".
And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
> > Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.
> Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition.
It's literally not the definition; now, it's true that the purpose of a public stock offering, or other offering of equity or debt for money is an effort to raise money from investors, but companies (even more narrowly corporations) need not ever engage in those activities, and even if they do that doesn’t make that purpose of the activity the overall purpose of the organization; it's just an instrument by way of which the organizations seeks it's broader goal.
Ok, I'll concede I'm only talking about the vast majority of companies operating in a capitalist system: their broad goal is to make profit. There are companies formed whose explicit (or hidden) aim is not to make profit, to just use the legal frameworks surrounding companies to their advantage, sure (more than there are companies formed for profit-making purposes? But are they then actually companies in anything but name? Is that too reductive, I dunno)
The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).
And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors
The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Money is an incentive, and there are certainly some companies whose sold purpose is to make profit. As I said these are in the financial sector.
But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
That doesn’t mean they don’t want to succeed against competitors, or that they don’t need profits to survive. Of course they do.
But you simply can’t reduce a company to this.
A common theme on HN and of people in general is people asking how they can make a project profitable. This is indicative that the project is the goal and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
A lot of public companies these days don’t give control to the investors. This is also consistent with the company not existing primarily as an investment vehicle.
> ...and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
Well, yes, exactly. Say you are a person. You have a goal to make {thing}. You achieve that goal by selling {thing}. To aid in this task under the economic system you live within, you create a legal entity, called a company. Your aim is still to achieve your goal. The aim of the company is to help with that.
The profit is a necessary condition, as you say. I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree. This is a basic fundamental thing, like 1+1 is 2. If profit is the necessary condition to acheive {goal} and a company is the legal vehicle by which you attempt to achieve {goal}, then the aim of the company has to be increase profit, there isn't a choice.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a thing. There will be other primary and ancillary aims, but the core reason for its existence is for that aim.
> But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
Yes, that's what I said re workers, and sure, it can apply to many smaller business owners. As you go up the ladder in company size from small business I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
> The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
“I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree.”
Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
> I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
Granted this is sometimes true, but you are just leaving out the fact that in order to increase profit, the business generally has to offer more value too. There are exceptions to this, but it is generally true.
And when they stop adding value or fall behind, unless there is a true monopoly which none of the tech companies have, they become vulnerable to competition.
> > The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
> Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
> Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
Similarly, if you build a machine to assist humans in consuming food you don't say the point of the machine is something other than assisting them in consuming food.
> But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
Right, but that seems to be missing the point. Which is that the business itself, seperate from the personal goals of the owners and employees, as an entity, has to attempt to maximise profit [because of the economic system it exists within] to enable the goals of the owners and employees. And further to that, if (and I've never said that it isn't an if) that becomes a driving factor, it subsumes the personal goals. For a business to grow to the level talked about, maximising profit has to be the driving force.
Edit:
> This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
Nono, these businesses are giant. They have grown giant, that's what this was all primarily regarding.
It absolutely makes sense as "from" - imagine I go to investors and say "I have this great scheme, and it will make a bunch of money", and they give me a bunch of money, and I pocket it. My company existed to "generate money from investors", for myself.
It's also, obviously, fraud. You can make it less obvious by actually spending the money on a scheme that looks busy and looks like it has potential to generate returns. If I realistically believe that it has the potential to generate the returns I'm promising the investors, then I'm doing the usual thing of trying to generate money for investors. If I'm selling $2 bills for $1, I'll get a lot of customers and build a big business but all the actual value flowing into the system is the cash from the investors and I don't have any real prospect of turning that around.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those.
Ah, but the original context seems to have been a attempted restatement of something you'd said, and "from" wouldn't fit.
I agree it was likely a mistake, but I think much of the talking past each other in the comments following comes from others not realizing that you had made that determination and were responding as if it said "to". People attempting to make money from investors is a pretty common topic around here.
> And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
Frankly it’s been much less than a decade. Apple (for one) was far less dominant a decade ago, indeed many people were still declaring them to be doomed.
What this means is that we may well be looking at a transient phenomenon. You simply do not know how stable this ‘power’ is. If they had been entrenched for a few decades, the case might be stronger.
Consider how long it took for Apple to develop their iPhone business. Years of theorizing, followed by 5 years of serious R&D work before it was even released, then more than a decade of growth before reaching a market penetration of less than 20% globally.
Why would you expect a competitor to take any less time than that to unseat them?
If we use Apple themselves as the model, we’d expect a competitor to be a product that is two years away release today, and 12 years away from being taken seriously as a threat.
Consider that in 2005 during the rise of the iPod, most consumer electronics manufacturers considered Microsoft to be the dominant force in their space, and ‘does it work with windows’, was what they thought mattered. The cloud was barely relevant, and Apple, was still considered a boutique vendor.
Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This all applies to the others equally. FB in particular already shows obviously signs of losing dominance.
> Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in.
If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
Again, I think you are looking at this from the wrong viewpoint, at the wrong level. Of course the power is transient, it always is. That isn't the issue.
> If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
Eh? You just did that, not me. I've mentioned Apple once, to say that I don't know enough about their rise [financially] to comment re point that parent was making re Google and Amazon. But
> Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This is why I think you're looking at this at the wrong level. "ripe for disruption"? So what? What I'm talking about is a company that can develop their own chips, spend a billion dollars buying a modem business off another company, lobby against regulations on use of forced labour. That's what it can do now, not a decade ago or a decade in the future.
> Don’t all companies have a power imbalance of some kind with their users?
Some amount of power imbalance is okay. Obviously not every entity can have the exact same amount of power nor would this be desirable.
What matters is the scale of the difference. A single entity having several orders of magnitude more power than the average entity. Let's call this a "giant", for ease of reference.
All entities optimize toward the execution of their own agenda (this shouldn't be controversial). This is in essence a good thing since it drives competition, refinement and development.
The trouble starts when giants appear. The giants are few and the non-giants are many. It is unlikely that the giants' agendas will forever be aligned well with the agendas of the non-giants. Yet, due to their sheer size, the giants have the ability not only to compete and cooperate with the non-giants, but to change and warp the very rules of the game to something that doesn't resemble the rules we started out with. In this sense, scale truly makes all the difference.
I think a physics analogy is apt here. Think of a bunch of marbles of roughly comparable masses bouncing around each other. They need not all have exactly the same mass for the overall dynamics of the setting to be retained. They will also have different individual momenta which will change constantly as time progresses.
Now introduce a large stone sphere weighing over a ton into the picture. Can we reasonably say this new system has similar dynamics to the old one? After all, it's just one more marble. Yet now for the first time we have a marble that is practically immoveable but can move any other, which is a strictly new dynamic.
> Dry water, an unusual form of "powdered liquid", is a water–air emulsion in which tiny water droplets, each the size of a grain of sand, are surrounded by a sandy silica coating.[1] Dry water actually consists of 95% liquid water, but the silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a bulk liquid.[2] The result is a white powder that looks very similar to table salt. It is also more commonly known among researchers as empty water. ~ https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dry_water
> Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
I completely agree it can be extended in that way and it has been done so in the past; There are even countries that have political parties that generally agree with such a statement and work towards (albeit imperfectly) to limit or abolish such monopolies of capital.
(The US on the other hand left their anti-trust laws to rust on the side and let monopolistic entities gain power such as Amazon and Facebook; here is a report on how Amazon has been using sale and review data to launch AmazonBasics products undercutting other brands: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayf... on the "Amazon's Version" section)
> It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
No, it isn't, because ordinary physical property can't be copied the way digital "property" can be. And the whole scheme of property rights with regard to ordinary physical property only makes sense because ordinary physical property can't be copied. If I steal your car, you are deprived of the car; that's why it's a crime for me to do it. But if I make a digital copy of some computer file you have, I'm not depriving you of it; you still have your copy and can still use it exactly as you did before. So why should it be a crime for me to make the copy?
The corporations that are pushing "intellectual property" rights over digital "property" would like it to be a crime, of course, but that doesn't mean we, the people, should agree.
In our current legal system, yes, you don't have any property rights over pieces of your DNA that you unavoidably leave all over the place as you go about your life.
Do you think we should? If so, how would you go about enforcing such rights?
Just imagine if that happened to become true one day. Some people would have to come up with secrets they exchange, as to make themselves unique to the other person, because there might be clones running around.
And all the art and music would either not exist or be somehow supported by society. Society would have to learn, that we need to support what we like, or else the makers of it could not live from it.
Would the system of money still work? Would we have different forms for economies unlike capitalism? How would greed work?
It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable. For example, many people can hunt in a large forest at the same time or fish the same giant lake, and enjoy its outputs in an effectively non-rivalrous way. (This changes if we shift from rod-and-reel fishing to nets and boats, of course.)
> It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable.
What you're describing is not "scalable" use. It's just an example of physical property whose "use" amounts to some number N of people doing something using it, where N is much larger than 1. But N is still based on, and limited by, the physical nature of the property; it can't be increased arbitrarily by just making more copies, the way it can for digital "property".
Well i agree generally, the parent did not make reference to the scarcity of physical property.
I agree with him/her that the enforcement aspect is just an extension of the enforcement rights of regular property. Where i disagree is that intellectual ideas should be owned like physical things in the first place, with the difference being scarcity as you say. Maybe im being pedantic but i feel like its an important distinction to make.
Just fyi- I think you mean rivalrousness, not scarcity, they're not exactly the same, and edge cases where they are similar but one is mistreated as the other have historically had serious consequences.
A very good article. A section that really spoke to me:
> Prior to the rise of the “intellectual property” as an umbrella term, the different legal regimes it refers to were customarily referred to by their individual names. When you were talking about patents, you said “patents,” and when you were talking about copyrights, you said “copyrights.” Bunching together copyrights and trademarks and patents and other rules wasn’t particularly useful, since these are all very different legal regimes. On those rare instances in which all of these laws were grouped together, the usual term for them was “creator’s monopolies” or “author’s monopolies.”
> The anti-IP argument leans into the differences between the underlying rationale for each of these rules:
> * US copyrights exist to “promote the useful arts and sciences” (as set out in the US Constitution); that is, to provide an incentive to the creation of new works of art: copyright should offer enough protection to create these incentives, but no more. Copyright does not extend to “ideas” and only protects “expressions of ideas”;
> * Patents exist as incentive for inventors to reveal the workings of their inventions; to receive a patent, you must provide the patent office with a functional description of your invention, which is then published. Even though others may not copy your invention during the patent period, they can study your patent filings and use them to figure out how to do the same thing in different ways, or how to make an interoperable add-on to your invention;
> * Trademarks exist as consumer protection: trademarks empower manufacturers to punish rivals who misleadingly market competing products or services that are like to cause confusion among their customers. It’s not about giving Coca-Cola the exclusive right to use the work “Coke” – it’s about deputizing Coca-Cola to punish crooks who trick Coke drinkers into buying knockoffs. Coke’s trademark rights don’t cover non-deceptive, non-confusing uses of its marks, even if these users harm Coca-Cola, because these do not harm Coke drinkers.
> Seen in this light, “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game?
> When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:
> “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
what worries me is that our mind (at the very least mine and all like it) are ultimately intellectual constructions. thus intellectual property leads the way to mind property.
how can it be that if I know something, this knowledge is not mine?
What you're talking about isn't a problem until and unless whole-brain emulation becomes a thing. You cannot assert copyright over a human brain because you cannot copy a human brain; and insamuch that brain is capable of copying other works, that's already covered by standard copyright law. It would be a good plot for a 2000s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk book (P2Ppunk?) but I suspect the Supreme Court would rule that the 14th Amendment overrides copyright interest in human brains were that to become a problem.
(If you wanted a 2010s-retro-futuristic cyberpunk sequel book you'd have some far-right militia group arguing for bringing back slavery to protect author's rights or something. Call it Twitterpunk.)
I disagree, what you describe is the extreme version of what I am worried about.
I'm not worried that about an external entity owning my entire mind. I'm worried about a society in which institutions and corporations have ownership over some parts of what I know.
And this is already happening, so many engineers and academics have signed NDAs, essentially giving up ownership (the ability to determine how to use) of certain information they have learned, in some cases even their own original ideas.
I disagree with this - if I've memorised a tune, I'm not allowed to replay it without paying a fee. But the line between biological and physical memory seems arbitrary to me, and this will become increasingly so.
We can already read basic images from a brain using AI to reconstruct the image[1]. If that device shows an image which is copyrighted, who is liable, the person with the scanner, or the brain that was scanned?
How about if I create a device which helps people who are physically disabled - or locked in - to communicate by projecting sounds from their brains - but not at will? If the person thinks about a tune ("Happy Birthday"), have they "performed" it?
What happens if they think something which is considered enough to have you banned from popular platforms? What about if the technology is forced to remove their services because the thoughts you're creating are unacceptable?
These things don't seem at all unlikely within the next 10-20 years.
You might enjoy "Replicas," — https://youtu.be/ze_ANsckvS0 — a 2018 sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves, which centers on whole-brain emulation. No spoiler review here!
It's not useless, knowledge grows with related knowledge, I take your company's top secret spaceship fusion warp drive knowledge and build a terrestrial power plant that uses that technology to create free electricity... I expressed it differently so I didn't breach any IP rights you had.
This kind of stuff happens all the time... Patents, are where this gets frustrating, where I can register a bunch of "expressions" of an idea and they get protected from execution... Then Software-patents are even worse in this realm...
I think that argument gets stuck on language. "Knowledge" is not a single, atomic thing. If I have warp drive "knowledge" that has been claimed by someone else, then there are two non-mutually-exclusive options:
- I have the knowledge of how to integrate a fusion plant and warp motor to form a warp drive. The only purpose of this knowledge is a warp drive, therefore I cannot express it.
- I have the knowledge of the fusion plant, and a warp motor, both of which are claimed. I cannot build the fusion plant even if I intend to integrate it with a terrestial power grid. I cannot build a warp motor even if I intend to integrate it with solar cells. There's no other purpose for any of this, so I am forbidden from expressing it.
I'm not seeing another way to define "knowledge" that would allow me to express it despite it being claimed by someone else, so I conclude IP makes knowledge useless.
Agreed. For example, a device which augments my memory by allowing me to replay and record my own experiences, would invariably violate copyright. Which is offensive to me.
Someday Disney will develop technology to delete copies of their movies from people's memories due to copyright infringement. People should not be able to simply remember the movie without paying for it after all.
Software copyright was an absolute mistake that fundamentally misunderstood the delicate balances between copyright owners, the market for creative works, and the public at large. I have no faith in Congress to fix it.
Keep in mind that copyright also enables free software. Without it, there would be no incentive to share source code since there would be no mechanism to stipulate that modified versions must be shared. That would significantly diminish the role of collaboration and significantly increase the role of opportunism. It is also worth noting that copyright increases the financial incentive to progress the state of the art.
The real problem with the current IP regime is its use to impose restrictions that go beyond reproduction.
Copyleft is generally regarded as a clever "fix" because of the brokenness of software copyright. Cory Doctorow even addresses this at the beginning of this article. He mentions that the GPL came out around the same time software copyright was first implemented. He distinguishes between copyleft (the "icing") and interoperability (the "cake") to point out how the new software copyrights took away interoperability. By the end of the article, he suggests we have no more cake and the icing may vanish soon.
Yes, you can use software copyright to prohibit object-only releases, but that doesn't necessarily mean that software copyright is helping. In fact, once software copyright became the norm, there was a huge disincentive to publish source. After all, why would you do that when you can withhold the source to prevent unauthorized modification of your work? Effectively, using a compiler is the software equivalent of encoding your movie with DRM.
Furthermore, copyright has to go beyond mere reproduction rights, because it's designed to cover creative works. The most lucrative part of copyright is not the monopoly over publication, but the monopoly over sequels. Disney is a multi-billion-dollar corporation not because it happens to own a bunch of old movies and comic books from the 60s, but because it has a monopoly over making sequels and remakes of that material. This is perfectly reasonable for creative works. However, it breaks down completely for software, because software is a mixed work of function and creativity that does not stand on it's own like a book or a movie can.
There's already precedent for how you handle these sorts of mixed function works: you give them a sui generis right. Around the same time software copyright was asserting itself, Intel and several other chip manufacturers lobbied Congress for copyright over IC designs. Congress instead decided to instead create an entirely separate monopoly regime for chips that only lasts 10 years and has explicit exceptions for reverse-engineering. That's what they should have done for software: give it 10 years of protection against duplication, require source code disclosure as a rights formality, and publish that source at the end of the protection term. It would work more like a patent, albeit without the terrible problems most software patents have.
> Without it, there would be no incentive to share source code
Without it, there would be no punishment for copying the source code, leaking implementation details, reverse engineering software and breaking copyright security mechanisms. People would be free to do these things without fear of retaliation or legal bullying by gigantic corporations with deep pockets and armies of lawyers.
Copyright itself is a mistake. It made sense in an era where you needed to own a printing press in order to copy works at scale. In the 21st century, anyone can easily copy anything. Stopping it requires tyrannical laws and enforcement mechanisms.
Either copyright goes away or free computing as we know and love will be destroyed.
It’s also worth pointing out that different countries have nuanced interpretations and applications of Copyright Law. The US is only one. For instance “Fair Use” is a US inspired thing that other countries don’t have. Rather than having a “defence” (when prosecuted) some countries actually give permission to copy things (as a right, not a defence)
The US is known for forcing other countries to adopt laws similar to its own via trade agreements. If they don't do what the US wants, its trade office will put them in a naughty list which results in political and economic pressure being applied.
The author makes a point about interoperability, and I wholly agree. But it must be balanced with diversity, we don't care just about being interoperable, we want a thousand flowers to bloom.
I get an unpleasant feeling that Free Software was never really popular. It was somewhat popular early on, because it formalised the way things were done at the time. This is why it received relatively little friction. So it wasn't really accepted. It was ignored.
This is an excellent article; as always, Cory Doctorow succinctly and perceptively cuts to the core of the matter.
From my own observations over recent years, I've come to the conclusion that the IP, copyright, patent and DRM issues that Doctorow discusses in this article are even worse than he has let on about (perhaps he's worried about overly frightening the horses and or is worried that his opponents would attempt to discredit him if he spilled all the beans).
In Western countries and especially the US, the field of software and so-called IP has become so monopolistic and proprietary—and ordinary users so disempowered from the consequences thereof that they're having not only a serious negative effect on productivity and the national economy but also they're dysfunctional to the extent that they even threaten national security.
Much software development is technically moribund (or it's more of the same). Time limits me to cite only one example here—the multiple, never-ending security breaches that we see day-by-day—breaches that we're never able to manage properly or get on top of—or engineer our way out of. (There, too, are dozens more examples.)
Whilst Western corporations maul both one another as well as poor long-suffering users over IP licenses, copyright and patent disputes that are, by nature, intrinsically trivial, China's 'command' economy is able to bypass all that nonsense and move on regardless—for the Chinese, it's IP be damned, and it's patently obvious that that attitude is benefiting them mightily.
China pays lip service to international copyright law but behind the scenes it does the exact opposite despite the fact that everyone knows it. As we've seen over the past 30 or so years, China has stolen more Western IP than would fill many a volume of old-fashioned telephone directories and all that Western countries have ever done in response is to make token complaints and objections which never amount to anything more than a kowtowing whimper. Clearly if you're big and frightening enough, no one's game enough to complain (or do anything) about the fact that one's ideas were stolen). To make matters worse, the West even has the utter damned hypocrisy to buy manufactured product from China that was made using this pirated technology! (It all reminds me a bit of Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Hitler.)
It seems to me that unless the West (and again, especially the US) pulls its collective head in over this IP nonsense and dismisses most of it—all the unfair stuff—then China Inc. will continue to gain an even further technological march upon us.
To catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output, the US and other Western nations need to adopt a capitalist command economy (à la China's and along the lines the US implemented in WWII). Even the Chinese have never equaled the heights the US achieved in manufacturing during WWII:
"William S. Knudsen, an automotive industry executive who was made Chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission by the Roosevelt administration to organize war production, said, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
In any such scenario, the current unfair and very unreasonable IP/copyright/patent laws (and concomitant wars) wouldn’t be tolerated. Post COVID-19, it'd make sense to implement such a scheme to rebuild the economy.
Right, it's only a pipe dream—we no longer have people of sufficient aptitude, caliber and with solid ethics of the likes of FDR, Harry Hopkins, Vannevar Bush (FDR’s top science advisor), Fredrick Terman, LTG Leslie R. Groves, William S. Knudsen et al to undertake such an ambitious project.
But whichever system of ethics compels us to "catch up to China's manufacturing technology and output" and "smother the 'enemy' in an avalanche of production" (quotes mine) sounds more like a civilizational suicide pact than a vision for the future.
Our smothering of the planet with production is the most immediate existential threat we face.
Oh dear, one has to so literal on posts these days. We were talking IP/software here - so 'poduction' here refers to software/organization. The WWII analogy/link has to do with what's possible if the country really tries - or has its back to the wall as it does now!
Even if I had been referring to manufactured hardware type goods - which I wasn't - ramping local production would only replace/reestablish what we lost to China over past decades. It would not be a world net increase in production as we'd be buying less from China (they won't make stuff if we're not buying).
There's many other reasons too for local production: jobs, better quality products, reskilling the workforce, strategic interests, etc.
I'm sorry for assuming your meaning, I didn't realize you meant to refer only to software. I do agree that we could benefit from re-localizing. I'd prefer it not come wrapped in a new cold war, though. We have all the motivation needed for mass mobilization in ecological crisis, if we could see or feel it more directly.
Right. I can't agree with you more about smothering the planet in mostly-unnecessary stuff. I'm truly fed up with the fact that almost every appliance or bit of gear we buy is designed with a short limited life and not meant to be serviced. No wonder the world is awash with e-waste and similar broken/junked stuff. Once, just about every bit of electronics I bought or owned I could fix, now I can't even open up gear without smashing my way inside because it's glued up or snapped shut with one-use-only one-way snap-lock catches, etc. It's a damn disgrace.
Two weeks ago the USB socket on my Netgear modem became intermittent and I literally had to smash my way through the plastic case to get inside to gain access to the circuit board. Unfortunately, in doing so I damaged something else which (I think) has rendered it useless (I'll know for sure when I get a chance to take a microscope to the PWA). The fact remains that I haven't been able change a 20 cent socket and to save time I've had to buy a new device!
It seems to me that green and ecological movements should do more in this area to stop the millions of tons of e-waste—and getting behind Right to Repair movements is a good place to start.
I think intellectual property should be taxed as are other properties and assets. This would seem to have the nice side effect of setting a monetary value in IP lawsuits. If you declare that your property is worth $X when you file taxes, you couldn’t really argue that it’s worth $10X when suing over violations of it.
And frankly, I think IP should be taxed since holders rely on the government to protect it. If I have a house, it’s at least hypothetically possible that I can defend it myself. That’s not possible with intellectual property. So if holders are relying on that government to uphold its value, they should be expected to contribute proportionally to that value for the service.
That's really clever to tie taxes to the declared scope of IP rights. Would be good to get this idea seen by Sanders. RIAA would do just about anything to stop this law. Right now they claim that a downloaded song (without their permission) or a movie makes them lose 10k usd a some fantasy amount in that range. But then IRS could multiply this amount by the number of songs they own and demand 2% - in line with property taxes. Better 3%, since IP rights, unlike houses, are active assets that bring royalties.
Double taxation is completely normal. You pay taxes on dividends, which have been taxed as company earnings already. In many places you pay a tax on real estate and other assets, which you of course bought with (presumably) already. Inheritance taxes are another example.
The comparison seems fair .. in the sense that property tax serves to cover the cost to society of the property existing, just as "IP tax" would be to cover the cost to society of protecting the "IP". Looks like such a tax would also separate the concern of protection, from the concern of exploitation of the IP. But I can't imagine how one would tax created IP .. at least in property, there is some sense of "market value", which is anybody's guess when it comes to IP.
edit: Maybe IP can be assigned "shares" in wealth injected into the market?
There is "market value" of IP in the sense that there are prices consumers are supposed to pay for it. The price of a movie ticket, the price of a music album, the price of a video game. The tax can be calculated based on that and the popularity of the creative work in question.
My salary is taxed. And yet when I spend it, it becomes someone else's salary, and theirs is taxed too.
How come the silly "double taxation" meme is only brought up when we're talking about rich people's money? (ie corporations, rent-seeking structures, etc)
And make that taxation progressive so it would be unprofitable to hold on to copyrights for decades. This feels even better than my idea about making copyright very short, on the order of several years — technically it would be indefinite, but only if you can pay the ever-increasing cost to maintain it.
The IP tax would also solve the status of abandonware once and for all — the company is no longer around to pay the tax on its copyright, so the copyright gets terminated and the works become public domain.
I feel like we're passively reading a piece about this rather than doing anything about it because Stallman never thought, "How ya gonna pay the bills," was an interesting question.
I offer WSB-- the assholiest of domains, yet one where that is an interesting question-- whose users are actually doing a better job of showing the world the corruption of their domain.
I shall endeavor to write a weird piece of Gnu fan fiction about this.
We have gotten to the point where we either use and develop open source, individual empowering, tech... or we work for our slavers, against our own best interest.
> Now, free software advocates – and free culture advocates – hate the term “intellectual property.” The argument against IP rails against its imprecision and its rhetorical dishonesty.
The "paradise lost" story of a "free state of nature" in software prior to 1980 only seems to come up in writings of free software people. The more I read other sources, the more that seems romantic, even nostalgic. And frankly academic, as in "endemic to college students".
Back in the mainframe era, there wasn't really a "software industry" as we know now. And there weren't so many rules about software specifically, because published software wasn't terribly relevant commercially. The question wasn't whether the law would step in to enable software developers to market their work, rather than hoarding it. It was whether they'd get their own software-specific regime, like Japan had, or come under some existing one.
But even before software copyright, it wasn't as though source code wasn't anybody's intellectual property. It was kept as trade secrets. There may not have been any specific public laws preventing you from doing as you liked with source code you had. But it was highly unlikely you would ever get source code you wanted in the first place.
GPL made peace with copyright, chose to depend upon it, to declare war on trade secrecy. To hear RMS tell The Parable of the Printer, the paper causing the problems was nondisclosure agreements---the tools of trade secrecy protection---not copyright statutes. And trade secrecy hasn't gone away. Folks working at software companies these days will have signed legal terms requiring them to keep company code close.
So yeah, maybe kids had their cake with icing back in the day. But they were cupcakes, mostly homemade. Not the 2^n-layer, all-you-can-eat wedding cake bonanza we gorge on now. The appearance of a software industry made that difference.
Similar rose-colored story with "intellectual property". Yes, that's in recent fashion, from about the 1980s. But there were other names before it. The near-neighbors "incorporeal property", "industrial property" (excepting copyright), and especially "intangible property" enjoyed popularity before the World Wars.
I suspect we're on about "intellectual property" because RMS turned hating on it into activist catechism. One of his many, largely failed attempts at Sapir-Whorf manipulation. But he's losing "intellectual property", too. It was and remains useful for lawyers, managers, accountants, and scholars to distinguish bundles of exclusive rights in physical assets from bundles of exclusive rights in ideas and information. "Bundles of exclusive rights" is exactly how we define "property" on the first day in law school.
Arguing that IP protection has gotten stronger because clever Bernays types chose a slippery-slope metaphor, which lawyers at court and in Congress just couldn't help sliding right down, conveniently avoids acknowledging the well organized interests behind stronger IP laws. Which, as a general rule, have knocked "commons" activists out cold in every bout since long before Lessig took up Eldred v. Ashcroft and lost.
"Monopoly", alas, is just another very general way to describe "property". And it's a bad choice here, because it's overloaded, as Cory points out. See also "patents", which didn't mean anything specifically to do with inventions to start, but all manner of government- or monarch-granted rights. There were "land patents". Before just anybody could form a corporation, they had to get a charter from the government, a form of "letters patent".
Playing guilt-by-pun-association, hopping from one meaning of "monopoly" to another, leads to some head-scratchers. Especially the definition of IP as "any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers". In practice, with crafty enough business people, that's nearly all of privately enforceable law. Defamation? Regulatory licenses? Business torts? Contract?
It's important to keep in mind even IP laws aren't weapons just laying around. They only apply to certain voluntary conduct. The nondisparagement clause in Goldman Sachs' font license doesn't entitle it to go back and sue Matt Taibbi for calling them a "vampire squid" in Rolling Stone. No more than RMS can sue Facebook for making non-free software under the copyleft clause of his GPL grant for Emacs. The issue is when "voluntary conduct" doesn't feel so voluntary any more, as when a particular firm totally dominates a market for essential goods or services. Railroads and telegraphs played that hand hard, and not primarily thanks to IP. Those dangers remain real, and Cory's been on about them, very honorably, for a few years now. It's the connection he tries to make between IP and antitrust that's weak.
As for where he ends up, in the end, "rights" and "freedom" are just vacuous generalities, like "community", "liberty", "innovation", and so on. We pour our hopes and dreams into them and feel happy feelings when others invoke them. Others like to hear us use the words, too. But we can't know which hopes or dreams they're swooning over when we do. They could be the same as ours. They could be in direct conflict. During the civil rights movement, "freedom" to some meant the right to live, work, eat, study, and worship free of racial discrimination. To others, it meant the right to enforce segregation in states that wanted it.
It's tempting to paper over conflicts with vague words, to make win-lose scenarios sound like win-wins. If you feel strongly about traditional hacker causes---privacy, autonomy, hackability, transparency---you will be in direct conflict with large, well organized, heavily capitalized chunks of industry. If you want that fight, play to win.
eReaders seem to be dying as a hardware device and becoming merely a form of DRM. Newest models, inluding all Kobo readers, have a soldered SD memory card. And it's not just cutting costs. They're deeply bothered by your ability to copy books and various text files to the device you paid for. Memory cards fail. eReaders are now essentially hardware Steam browsers, or book consoles. You can only load books from a store.
I was holding off from buying one to get a more open device, but the tendency is to become LESS open and featured, not more. I could buy an old device, but they're by definition not supported.
> """ It’s not just DRM. Take “Goldman Sans,” a free font released by the finance giant and global supervillain Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sans is a copyrighted work, and it comes with a copyright license that you “agree” to when you download the font. Among the license terms for Goldman Sans is a non-disparagement clause – that is, a clause that prohibits you from criticizing Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs doesn’t need copyright law to prevent people from copying its font. It gives the font away for free. Goldman Sachs needs copyright law so it can boss people around – so it can tell them what they may (and may not) say."""
Wow! That this even exists blows my mind. It reads almost as evil as surreptitiously inserting a "all your money belongs to us" clause in a EULA in the hope that nobody will read it. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I'm not sure what part of the license is actually this "non-disparagement clause".
The closest I could find in the above "restricted font license" is in the "Governing law" section -
"The User and Goldman Sachs hereby waive any right to a trial by jury and consent to exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York or, if federal jurisdiction is lacking, New York Supreme Court, New York County, for the resolution of any dispute regarding this License or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom."
.. which is limited to disputes regarding *this license or the parties’ relationship arising therefrom* .. and which doesn't seem as out of line as the article's wording suggests.
Again .. wow! Buy a pen at a store and it comes with a usage agreement that you may not write anything against <insert-party-name> using the pen! Not surprising that they removed the term as it would be overreach or something.
> To make your software “free” is to promise that its users will have freedom – as the saying goes, code is “free as in speech” even if it’s not necessarily “free as in beer.”
That's simply untrue. Everyone knows that copyleft licenses disallow certain forms of free speech (with code), for example the GPL 3.0. In fact the GPL 3.0 was designed specifically with the intent to constrain the "excessive" liberties allowed by the GPL 2.0 (which isn't very permissive to begin with).
If you want to make your code free, release it to Public Domain. Copyleft proponents pretend they're above the detested capitalists and IP enforcement but in reality they use "IP" to enforce their agenda just like all other people who license their IP under non-permissive licenses.
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