Copyright Issues

Copyrights, patents, trademarks have become contentious issues in a modern, increasingly digitized world. Copyright first became an issue with the invention of the movable type printing press. Previously, it was a non-issue because of the slow speed of manually copying a book and the lack of literacy amongst the general population. The printing press changed the equation by drastically reducing the cost of and time taken to copy a book. It also resulted in a gradual increase in literacy as people started seeing the advantages of being able to read. A good history of copyright can be found at the Copyright History website and also at Wikipedia.

Copyrights were originally seen as an incentive for creative artists. The idea was that they would have a limited time in which they could exploit their created work for commercial gain after which the work would be available in the public domain for anyone to do with it as they please. Copyrights and patents thus served a dual purpose. They were an incentive for creative people to be creative and to create new works and products. The second purpose was that once the work went out of copyright or patent protection into the public domain, the nation's cultural heritage would be enriched and succeeding generations would have a richer, more diverse heritage to build upon. Many of the cultural icons in most societies, specially Western ones, are as such because the original work either went out of copyright or the copyright holder did not strictly enforce his rights. Not just the local culture, but also the global culture is thus richer as a result.

The situation today is different. The value of enforcing copyrights and patents has increased dramatically. Not only that, but copyrights are increasingly being held by organizations and not by individuals. What is good for the organization is not necessarily good for the culture as a whole. What makes the matter worse is that copyright (and patent) enforcement frequently results in increased charges to the end consumer. When payments are tried to be collected globally, the product usually goes out of the reach of most consumers in developing countries who do not have the financial power of consumers in the developed countries. Sometimes, these attempts at rent collection results in consumers being left physically worse than before.

I'll give an example here. The example is the patents held by Western pharmaceutical companies on existing AIDS medication. While these medicines do not cure the disease, they do enable AIDS sufferers to lead relatively long, productive lives. These medicines are also priced at a level that Western consumers can (barely) pay. As a result, nearly the entire developing world cannot afford to buy them. Even governments in developing countries cannot afford to these medications due to their high cost. Millions of people are thus left to suffer a significantly lower quality of life. When developing world governments in desperation turned towards generic medicines, the Western pharmaceutical companies tried to prevent them from doing so backed by the full might of their national government (specifically the US). It was only a global and specially Western public backlash that forced these companies to back down. Their counter-offer was to reduce the price of these drugs by 90%. Unfortunately, the price was still significantly higher than the price being offered by generic manufacturers. What galls people in the developing world is that when the developed nations have what they perceive as a crisis, they suspend the rules for themselves that they impose on less powerful nations. When the US was faced with the possibility of the Swine Flu spreading dramatically, they threatened to break the patent of the manufacturer of the only drug, Tamiflu, that was effective against this disease. Previously, when a developing country had threatened to break the AIDS patent, the US government had weighed in on the issue in support of the patent holder. The life of a person in the developing world is not worth the same as the life of a person in the developed world. This is seen as rank hypocrisy in the rest of the world. One rule for the developed nations and another for the rest of the world.

Today the original intention of copyrights and patents has been hijacked. This has been done due to their increasingly lucrative nature. Since organizations hold most copyrights and patents, they have an incentive to have the time under protection extended to the maximum possible extent. That is why in the US, the period of copyright protection has increased over time till now it is over 100 years. The question is why should any organization or person be allowed to enjoy this protection for so long.

A case for extended copyright protection can be made for individuals - specially in cases where one work or a small number of works account for the bulk of an individual's creative output. If a songwriter has a single hit in his/her lifetime, then there is a strong case that he/she should enjoy copyright protection for the duration of his/her life. However, should this protection be enjoyed by the children? Why? Ofcourse a case for this also can be made. After all, children do inherit property and enjoy the benefits thereof even though they may have done nothing personally to obtain the property. But then the question in this case becomes should copyrights and patents be treated in the same fashion as say land is? If yes, then no creative work will come into the public domain and cultural heritage will be significantly poorer as a result. So a strong argument can be made that copyrights should be limited in time to the life of an individual.

What about organizations? Unlike a person, the potential lifespan of an organization is unlimited. Should a copyright or patent held by an organization then be under protection for the lifespan of the organization? Effectively this is what organizations are aiming for when they push for extensions of copyright and patent protection. In some cases, the costs to society are viewed as being so great that this effort is resisted. Thus patent protection for medicines is allowed to expire after a set period of time because this is seen as a net benefit to society as a whole. In other cases, the issue is not so clear cut. Take the case of the operating system OS/2 which is owned by IBM. The company has stopped selling this software and seemingly has no plans to re-introduce it. This is seen by their efforts to move existing customers of OS/2 to other operating system. In such a case, should IBM be forced to move OS/2 into the public domain? If OS/2 is moved into the public domain (and in this case moving into the public domain means putting the source code into the public domain), then either other people will start tinkering with it or they will ignore it. However, this will be a choice exercised by society. In the current scenario, this choice cannot be exercised because IBM refuses to allow other people to tinker with OS/2 thereby behaving rather like the proverbial dog in the manger. If other people are allowed to tinker with it, then who knows, they may produce something superior to current offerings. This did happen in the browser market. After Netscape collapsed, some enthusiasts got together and started developing Firefox based on Netscape. In the process, they re-ignited developments in the browser market which had stagnated as a result of the virtual monopoly exercised by Internet Explorer.

On the whole, I feel that there is a strong societal benefit having strictly temporary copyright and patent protections. The term should be long enough to give the original owner reasonable time to enjoy the benefits of his/her creation. Afterwords, the work should be moved into the public domain. The term of protection shoudl vary with the industry. To give examples, pharmaceutical companies need a relatively long time frame because of a long testing phase and an almost equally long regulatory process. Creative works like books, songs, articles etc. should enjoy protection for the lifetime of the original creator but no longer. The benefit to society outweighs the benefits that would accrue to the children. For software, protection should be afforded for a fairly limited period like say 10 years or as long as the product is commercially available whichever is shorter. Generally, a piece of software is no longer commercially available within 5 years of its introduction. Even if the software is made available, its undergoes frequent revisions and later versions bear next to no resemblance to the original version. The point is that a reasonable balance needs to be struck between private interests and societal interests.

Loss of Privacy

1984 by George Orwell is a fascinating book. It is an account of a totalitarian world in which every action and thought is controlled by an all powerful state. Reading it today, it can seem a bit over the top. I bring this book up because our headlong rush into a brave new digital world may inadvertently be creating conditions conducive to something akin to the situation described there. The interconnectedness engendered by the Internet has resulted in a dramatic reshaping of industries and our expectations. Exciting new products and services are popping up almost daily. Existing business models are being mercilessly destroyed. In many cases, it is not certain which new business model will replace the old obsolete one and how long that will last. But what is really of concern is that we as a society are accepting a loss of privacy that would have horrified an earlier generation.

Take cell phones as an example. These devices are now ubiquitous in most parts of the world. Their growth rate has been extremely sharp in developing countries where they have been taken up as an alternative to a usually dysfunctional land line system. However, mobile phones also give governments the power to pinpoint the locations of anyone who uses them. This is a loss of privacy that we as consumers have willingly given up for the convenience in communications that the mobile represents. Credit cards are another good example. Each time we use a credit card to make a purchase, we leave behind an electronic trail - a trail that can be used to determine our likes, dislikes, habits perhaps even modes of thinking. Any website that asks for registration is yet another example. Each website that we register on is another strand of our personality profile that we voluntarily weave.

Together all these developments enable governments to increasingly closely monitor us at an individual level. This is a frightening level of control. Previous governments were constrained by the level of technology available. Today this constraint is being increasingly lifted due to developments in hardware and software. Already, the US government can monitor millions of phone calls in real time. Imagine the level of control that developments in the future can bring. This concern can be countered by saying that democratic governments would never abuse (or at least seriously abuse) the increasing invasion of privacy that technology has enabled. It can also be said that consumer groups and the the rule of law would ensure that citizen's privacy is not violated. The counter to this is Hitler. The Nazi government was democratically elected in what was considered to be one of the most civilized countries in Europe. That government subverted the entire democratic process and marched the country straight into the misery and anarchy of World War II and the horror of the holocaust. The degree of control exercised by the Nazis was astonishing and remember that this was using primitive technology. Of course it can be said that we have learned a lesson from that time and such an event would never be allowed to be perpetrated by a modern, democratic government. But then, what about the reaction of the US after 9/11? The country descended into mass hysteria. The PATRIOT act was passed which would have been impossible in an earlier time. US citizens were required to go for special registration simply based on their place of birth and their religion. Many of these people had been living in the country for decades. Nearly all of them were exemplary citizens. None of that mattered. All this happened in a country with some of the strongest institutions in the world. Take the case of India. In 2002, there was an attack on the Indian parliament. The entire country descended into paranoia and a major war almost started. What about the massacres in Gujarat shortly thereafter? A religious group was deliberately targeted using fairly primitive technology.

Who is to say what will happen in the future. To say that the technologies that allow for loss of privacy will never be used in that fashion is to make an unwarranted assumption. How can we ensure that a demagogue along the lines of say Hitler or Stalin will not rise in the future? Given enough time, the horror of the holocaust will lose its shock value. It will eventually became an event that happened in history. The emotional connection to the event will be lost. This is inevitable because the generation that directly experienced it has largely passed away. The next generation is in its senior years. Another 20 - 30 years and they too will be gone. After that will come generations that will have read about these event only in history books. Like us today, they will insist that such events can never happen - until they do.

Anger

Anger is an interesting emotion. It short circuits the thinking mind and brings out raw emotions. In a state of anger, even the slightest things serve to trigger off a reaction. The problem is that while anger does cause a release in pent up emotion, it always worsens the situation further. What is worse is that anger rebounds on oneself. The other party will merrily go along on their way while the negative effects of anger slowly accumulate and cause harm. controlling anger is also not always possible. Often it just bubbles over suddenly and that of course only causes an already bad situation to become much worse.