The Economist is running a formal debate entitled "Copyright and wrongs; This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good" link here.

Most of us writing here accept the proposition and are opposed to copyright. One part of my mind argues to stick with principle. Another concludes we are slowly seeing the IP rights of the owners expanded. They have the money, the lawyers, and the political allies. We are losing. One way is through the steady accretion of legal complexity. Another is the spread of IP to other countries, with pressure growing on all to conform to some international minimum legal standard. In the meantime, so many consumers have been brainwashed that IP rights are virtues sanctified by the constitution.

Having cried in my beer, I urge you all to view the debate, which is about half over. You can still participate, as well as weighing in here when it suggests ideas worth arguing or passing on.

I don't mean to be linking exclusively to Volokh.com these days, but there has been a number of great IP posts over there recently worth checking out.

The latest comes from David Post who does a great job in defending the idea behind Google's book scanning project.

Some choice words from Post -

The Google Books project has the potential to become one of the great information-gathering activities in human history -- every book (just about), at everyone's fingertips, searchable and instantly accessible from any corner of the globe. And we want to deter that?? Because that will decrease "respect for IP laws"? Talk about putting the cart before the horse!! Because it will inflict some sort of terrible "harm" on copyright holders? I'm not terribly sympathetic. Copyright, as Jefferson stressed so long ago, is a "social right" -- given by society because we feel it serves useful ends (incentivizing authors to produce new creative works). When it ceases to serve those ends, it should be eliminated. The Google Books project is another example of how copyright interests, these days, do little more than obstruct useful innovations. There are 7 million (or more) out of print books that Google would like to place on-line where they can actually be accessed and read. I'm sorry if that infringes someone's copyright, but really -- in what way is society better off, exactly, from recognizing the copyright holder's rights in this circumstance?

Read the whole thing - along with the comments it generated.

(Strictly speaking this should have been Stephan's post, but he seems to have handed it off to me.) Disagree with my view below that copyright is absurd? Wondering what would happen to the movie industry without copyright? Luckily the marvelous Mike Masnick manage to answer both questions in a single post. If you still don't believe, go take a look at Star Wreck.

Alexandre de Ridder sends along a couple of links. The first is a speech by Eben Moglen Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture. The second is a piece called The Absurdity of Copyright by a fellow named Dr.Godfried-Willem RAES. Now the interesting thing is that while both agree (as do I) that copyright is an absurdity - I think that the Free Software people have it right, and I'm less sure about Dr. Raes...let me quote the part that makes me doubtful. Dr. Raes starts from the following thought:

Information cannot be possessed. It is not property since it cannot be taken away. It is object nor energy, but essentially form.

I don't really want to debate that point; it is true or false depending on what you mean about information. Specifically: it seems to be true of information in the abstract, but not in the concrete. That is, the statement would seem to be true of the fundamental theorem of calculus - and equally false when applied to any specific copy of the fundamental theorem of calculus (embodied in a book, in the head of a specific person, etc.) My point is simply that abstract information is irrelevant - and copies of ideas are pretty ordinary as economic commodities go, subject to quite ordinary profit and loss calculations. And here is where I think the Free Software people have the key point - in the ordinary profit and loss calculation, copies probably aren't that valuable, and in the future it will be the market for services that counts.

Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.

Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.

The Economist is organizing an online debate about Copyright and wrongs. It starts today with opening statements and will continue for about a week. "Comments from the floor" are allowed, too, so there is opportunity to participate.

Check out Prof. Adam Mossoff's recent guest blogging at Volokh.com where he discusses the history of the U.S. patent system via how the sewing machine developed, and the slew of lawsuits it generated in order to try and stifle competition.

Mossoff seems to advance some conclusions that I take issue with (i.e., that legal innovations such as 'patent pools' are solutions worth considering to help help resolve patent troll problems - as opposed to more fundamental reforms of patent law), but its still stimulating reading.

Read it all on one page here:

http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1240849478.shtml

This past week the Office of the United States Trade Representative released its annual 301 report, and once again named Canada for failing to develop more stringent intellectual property laws. This time, however, Canada has been placed on the Priority Watch 301 list along with China, Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Chile, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand, and Venezuela.

Eric H. Smith of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) seems particularly pleased that Canada has been elevated in its disgrace. According to Smith, "Canada remains woefully behind the rest of the developed world (and many countries in the developing world as well) in adopting critical legislation that will facilitate the development of a healthy online marketplace for copyright materials."

The USTR Report states, "The United States continues to have serious concerns with Canada's failure to accede to and implement the WIPO Internet Treaties, which Canada signed in 1997. We urge Canada to enact legislation in the near term to strengthen its copyright laws and implement these treaties."

At the heart of this grievance lies Canada's unwillingness to adopt the measures implemented by the United States in 1998, namely the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That the DMCA exceeds the requirements of the WIPO treaties is left unsaid, along with the inconvenient detail that Canadian law continues to meet its international obligations.

As is always the case, there are many Canadians quite competent to dispute the allegations of the USTR: for example, Howard Knopf and Michael Geist. Yet my favourite rebuttal came two years ago, from Bruce Lehman, chief architect of the DMCA. Speaking at a conference at McGill University in March 2007, he said, "Canada has the benefit of the soon-to-be decade of experience of the U.S. ... in some areas our policies have not worked out too well... Attempts at copyright control have not been successful; at least with regards to music."

Lehman placed the development of the DMCA as, in part, a consequence of President Bill Clinton's campaign promise to capture the economic benefits of the Information Superhighway. The phenomenon that is the Internet has changed considerably over the last decade, and business models previously unimagined have taken root. Current Canadian policy makers would be showing a lack of judgement if they mindlessly patterned Canadian law on the DMCA.

My colleague John Nachbar pointed out the following interesting fact to me.

The big US case right now is the MPAA against RealNetworks

My understanding is that the ability to copy or rip a DVD for own use is a legal grey area. Actually stripping out the drm is supposedly illegal under the law as it now stands (a stupid law, in my view). But the RealNetworks software does *not* strip out the drm. This case is the anti-napster: RealNetworks is not being accused of facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material. They are being accused of giving the owners of DVDs a way to convert them into a more convenient form for their own use.

Nothing to add.