The recent attention to SOPA/PIPA and the FBI raid that shut down megaupload.com probably make this the best time to try and get people to actually think about this question. I think normally something like copyright law doesn't attract enough interest or attention to make people question the status quo with regards to it. I take the position that it should be abolished in it's entirety, and am so confident that I can back up this position on ethical grounds that I wish to open a formal debate on the subject. So without further ado...
Should copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and the other similar forms of intellectual property be abolished? I'll go ahead and make a preliminary case for 'yes':
IP laws restrict a person's right to reproduce, alter and distribute things by limiting that ability to the rights holder. It does this by restricting the rights of everyone else: if you haven't been granted the ability to reproduce or alter the work by the rights holder then you cannot. As such copyright isn't really granting any specific rights to the creator, it's simply restricting the rights of others under the guise of protecting the creator. In society we usually only restrict natural rights and behaviors only when they're directly harmful to others (e.g. it's natural to rape, kill and steal, but we restrict the right to do so since it harms others needlessly). Yet the creator of something is no more harmed by it's being reproduced by others than anyone else is by regular economic competition.
In the end, IP laws come down to a few assertions:
a) Creating something should give you exclusive rights to it's reproduction and alteration.
b) Information should be able to be owned and the redistribution of it controlled.
c) Overall IP laws encourage invention and creation and are good for society.
To shoot these down one by one:
Creating something should give you exclusive rights to it's reproduction and alteration.
This is really just an assumption people take for granted. Why, and where do you draw the line? Jules Verne is widely regarded as the originator of the science fiction genre: should he have been able to limit other people's ability to copy his type of story just because he was the first one to create it? If one cannot copyright a new genre simply because they created it, why should one be able to restrict use of character names or settings then?
In reality there's no basis for saying that it's unfair of people to reproduce what someone else has done. When you create something, unless someone else has also made it independently, you have exclusive control over it for the time being. You can sell the idea to someone else, or not tell anyone about it, or give it away for free, but once the basic idea is out there it's out of your hands.
Just as people have natural desires to create they also have tendencies to reproduce and redesign, and this seems on par with the original creation. Especially the alteration part; saying that an idea can't be modified by others because you created it first is arbitrarily restricting the creative abilities of others at the expense of the everyone else, solely for the potential monetary benefit of the creator.
Information should be able to be owned and the redistribution of it controlled.
This idea seems particularly dangerous, although it also seems to be the basis for all IP laws. Fundamental to the idea of copying is having the information necessary to copy something. With patents and trade secrets this might be an algorithm to do something or design plans to make something, or with copyright and trademarks the information describing a song or movie or something - in the end these things can all be converted to a format of pure information. The law seems rather vague on whether it's the information itself which is owned or the ability to use the information; knowing how to build a proprietary machine isn't an arrestable offense, but actually building one is, while copying the binary string needed to play a song is illegal even if you never actually play it.
This just seems like a horrible precedent to set. In a free and open world information itself shouldn't be able to be owned by anyone, it should be free to be shared, viewed and altered by all. (Perhaps this gets more complicated with stuff like chemical weapons and such, but there are certainly other solutions for that and IP law isn't meant to protect against such things anyways.) When such a wide variety of things can be converted to the same information storage formats (e.g. binary files on a computer) it makes the idea of specifying what information can and can't be copied even harder under an IP system. Suppose I don't know what file type that thing is? Should I not copy it just in case? What if it turns out it was an encoding of a copyrighted film? Have I broken the law now? What if I just wanted it to analyze the encoding for a research project or something?
The truth is that there is enough information out there today that this is a real issue, and short of a global apocalypse it only gets worse from here. Does anyone have time to check against some copyright/patent database every time they want to view or reuse something else? What if they don't know what it is or where it came from?
Aside from all that the entire idea that information even can be owned at all is dangerous. The idea that strings of bits can be owned or have their reproduction restricted opens the door for all kinds of censorship. Suppose a later government gets rid of IP law but uses the precedent to declare ownership of some other type of information, maybe anything involving them? Is it really any more absurd to say that someone has a right to own information "about them" as they do to own information "first used by them"?
In the end people talk about "digital rights", and people try to blow that off as people wanting the right to watch movies for free or something, when it's really more about the fundamental right to view, modify and copy information without restriction. That right seems more basic and fundamental than the silly idea that someone owns something just because they first used it (which is more like squatting), and other well-recognized rights like freedom of speech and freedom of expression are encompassed within it.
IP laws encourage invention and creation and are good for society.
It seems that the leading reason for supporting IP laws is that it incentivizes invention and creation by allowing the creator to sell his works without competitors distributing them also. After all, why put the money into making a $200 million movie when someone else can just copy it and redistribute it for free?
First off, that's highly debatable and probably not even true, but more importantly the harm that IP laws do grossly outweighs even the supposed benefits. IP laws do in fact totally hinder information sharing, public discussion and the advancement of science and technology. You can see this with stuff like the takedown of Napster, Megaupload.com, restrictions on what you can send via email, facebook, what you can put on youtube, etc. Hotmail and facebook actually monitor email for links to sites considered infringing and remove it automatically, regardless of false positives, without notifying either the sender or receiver. (This has happened to me personally, btw.) People use file sharing services for lots of stuff besides just piracy, like legitimate business materials or non-copyrighted stuff. Under SOPA and PIPA most online privacy and encryption services like proxies and VPNs (which are used by legitimate businesses also because of industrial espionage, client privacy, financial info, etc.) would likely be illegal as well.
Now I have no idea just what percentage of these things are used to facilitate copyright violations versus other reasons. Even in the cases where it's high, stuff like basic file sharing and encryption services are important enough that I don't see how it's worth getting rid of it all in the name of intellectual property. And fundamentally you can't have both: either people are able to anonymously copy files over the internet or they're not - expecting larger authorities to be able to pick and choose which files can be anonymously copied and which ones can't is unrealistic. Is the fact that this could be abused to violate copyright laws more important to the world than being able to anonymously share and copy information? Do people not care how much that will hold back science, technology, business, art, and pretty much all of human civilization?
Then we have the blatant abuses of IP itself. The fact that companies own IP they had no part in making, that they buy tens of thousands of patents to prevent others from using them, that they want to patent things like genetic sequences or genetically modified organisms, or that they use threats of copyright violations to take small competitors to court or get them shut down. Or the copyright/patent trolls (link) who buy them and sit on them waiting for some other company to make a lot of money off them, then sue them for it, or use legal threats to extort money (link) from people. Keep in mind people actually go to jail and have their lives ruined because of this kind of stuff, and those people often have done nothing wrong.
Overall this seems to do more to hinder creation and invention than it does to promote it. By creating an environment where ideas and information are proprietary and not free to use it keeps others from experimenting with new ideas and drives up the cost of things that should be easy to reproduce. Furthermore it seems completely unnecessary, since after all while some people produce things for money, others produce things simply because they want to, as has been extensively demonstrated by the open source communities and pretty much any indie film/music/game/art thing anywhere. IP is in fact a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer entities: the big studios, the famous celebrities, etc., and also gives them more influence and control over their respective mediums. Is a world where you really need approval from a major publisher to have your works widely distributed helping these forms overall? Probably not.
So really, while there would likely be some restructuring in certain industries if IP was dropped completely tomorrow, and some people might go out of business, the majority of the world would seem to benefit greatly from it. Maybe certain things wouldn't be as profitable anymore; perhaps a few hundred millions of dollars would be way too much to invest in most movies. How much are we really getting from such expensive Transformers movies anyways, though? The most likely outcome would seem to be less competition and more freedom for small-time developers (of whatever).
Aside from that, it's been ridiculously easy to "pirate" things for a while now, and the world hasn't collapsed. People still create things, people still pay for things, people can still make money making things - but now people also have more access to information and ideas than they did before, because they can get whatever whenever. The content industries still suck money out of them, just perhaps not as much per the same amount of content.
Conclusion:
The real issue here is that IP laws extensively restrict people's fundamental right to share and copy information so that a very few people can charge more for their products than modern distribution systems would dictate they should be able to. It's safer to cling to out-dated business models rather than take risk by expanding into new technologies. In this case that means effectively outlawing the use of technologies which threaten your business model, regardless of the widespread damage it does to everyone else.
Should copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and the other similar forms of intellectual property be abolished? I'll go ahead and make a preliminary case for 'yes':
IP laws restrict a person's right to reproduce, alter and distribute things by limiting that ability to the rights holder. It does this by restricting the rights of everyone else: if you haven't been granted the ability to reproduce or alter the work by the rights holder then you cannot. As such copyright isn't really granting any specific rights to the creator, it's simply restricting the rights of others under the guise of protecting the creator. In society we usually only restrict natural rights and behaviors only when they're directly harmful to others (e.g. it's natural to rape, kill and steal, but we restrict the right to do so since it harms others needlessly). Yet the creator of something is no more harmed by it's being reproduced by others than anyone else is by regular economic competition.
In the end, IP laws come down to a few assertions:
a) Creating something should give you exclusive rights to it's reproduction and alteration.
b) Information should be able to be owned and the redistribution of it controlled.
c) Overall IP laws encourage invention and creation and are good for society.
To shoot these down one by one:
Creating something should give you exclusive rights to it's reproduction and alteration.
This is really just an assumption people take for granted. Why, and where do you draw the line? Jules Verne is widely regarded as the originator of the science fiction genre: should he have been able to limit other people's ability to copy his type of story just because he was the first one to create it? If one cannot copyright a new genre simply because they created it, why should one be able to restrict use of character names or settings then?
In reality there's no basis for saying that it's unfair of people to reproduce what someone else has done. When you create something, unless someone else has also made it independently, you have exclusive control over it for the time being. You can sell the idea to someone else, or not tell anyone about it, or give it away for free, but once the basic idea is out there it's out of your hands.
Just as people have natural desires to create they also have tendencies to reproduce and redesign, and this seems on par with the original creation. Especially the alteration part; saying that an idea can't be modified by others because you created it first is arbitrarily restricting the creative abilities of others at the expense of the everyone else, solely for the potential monetary benefit of the creator.
Information should be able to be owned and the redistribution of it controlled.
This idea seems particularly dangerous, although it also seems to be the basis for all IP laws. Fundamental to the idea of copying is having the information necessary to copy something. With patents and trade secrets this might be an algorithm to do something or design plans to make something, or with copyright and trademarks the information describing a song or movie or something - in the end these things can all be converted to a format of pure information. The law seems rather vague on whether it's the information itself which is owned or the ability to use the information; knowing how to build a proprietary machine isn't an arrestable offense, but actually building one is, while copying the binary string needed to play a song is illegal even if you never actually play it.
This just seems like a horrible precedent to set. In a free and open world information itself shouldn't be able to be owned by anyone, it should be free to be shared, viewed and altered by all. (Perhaps this gets more complicated with stuff like chemical weapons and such, but there are certainly other solutions for that and IP law isn't meant to protect against such things anyways.) When such a wide variety of things can be converted to the same information storage formats (e.g. binary files on a computer) it makes the idea of specifying what information can and can't be copied even harder under an IP system. Suppose I don't know what file type that thing is? Should I not copy it just in case? What if it turns out it was an encoding of a copyrighted film? Have I broken the law now? What if I just wanted it to analyze the encoding for a research project or something?
The truth is that there is enough information out there today that this is a real issue, and short of a global apocalypse it only gets worse from here. Does anyone have time to check against some copyright/patent database every time they want to view or reuse something else? What if they don't know what it is or where it came from?
Aside from all that the entire idea that information even can be owned at all is dangerous. The idea that strings of bits can be owned or have their reproduction restricted opens the door for all kinds of censorship. Suppose a later government gets rid of IP law but uses the precedent to declare ownership of some other type of information, maybe anything involving them? Is it really any more absurd to say that someone has a right to own information "about them" as they do to own information "first used by them"?
In the end people talk about "digital rights", and people try to blow that off as people wanting the right to watch movies for free or something, when it's really more about the fundamental right to view, modify and copy information without restriction. That right seems more basic and fundamental than the silly idea that someone owns something just because they first used it (which is more like squatting), and other well-recognized rights like freedom of speech and freedom of expression are encompassed within it.
IP laws encourage invention and creation and are good for society.
It seems that the leading reason for supporting IP laws is that it incentivizes invention and creation by allowing the creator to sell his works without competitors distributing them also. After all, why put the money into making a $200 million movie when someone else can just copy it and redistribute it for free?
First off, that's highly debatable and probably not even true, but more importantly the harm that IP laws do grossly outweighs even the supposed benefits. IP laws do in fact totally hinder information sharing, public discussion and the advancement of science and technology. You can see this with stuff like the takedown of Napster, Megaupload.com, restrictions on what you can send via email, facebook, what you can put on youtube, etc. Hotmail and facebook actually monitor email for links to sites considered infringing and remove it automatically, regardless of false positives, without notifying either the sender or receiver. (This has happened to me personally, btw.) People use file sharing services for lots of stuff besides just piracy, like legitimate business materials or non-copyrighted stuff. Under SOPA and PIPA most online privacy and encryption services like proxies and VPNs (which are used by legitimate businesses also because of industrial espionage, client privacy, financial info, etc.) would likely be illegal as well.
Now I have no idea just what percentage of these things are used to facilitate copyright violations versus other reasons. Even in the cases where it's high, stuff like basic file sharing and encryption services are important enough that I don't see how it's worth getting rid of it all in the name of intellectual property. And fundamentally you can't have both: either people are able to anonymously copy files over the internet or they're not - expecting larger authorities to be able to pick and choose which files can be anonymously copied and which ones can't is unrealistic. Is the fact that this could be abused to violate copyright laws more important to the world than being able to anonymously share and copy information? Do people not care how much that will hold back science, technology, business, art, and pretty much all of human civilization?
Then we have the blatant abuses of IP itself. The fact that companies own IP they had no part in making, that they buy tens of thousands of patents to prevent others from using them, that they want to patent things like genetic sequences or genetically modified organisms, or that they use threats of copyright violations to take small competitors to court or get them shut down. Or the copyright/patent trolls (link) who buy them and sit on them waiting for some other company to make a lot of money off them, then sue them for it, or use legal threats to extort money (link) from people. Keep in mind people actually go to jail and have their lives ruined because of this kind of stuff, and those people often have done nothing wrong.
Overall this seems to do more to hinder creation and invention than it does to promote it. By creating an environment where ideas and information are proprietary and not free to use it keeps others from experimenting with new ideas and drives up the cost of things that should be easy to reproduce. Furthermore it seems completely unnecessary, since after all while some people produce things for money, others produce things simply because they want to, as has been extensively demonstrated by the open source communities and pretty much any indie film/music/game/art thing anywhere. IP is in fact a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer entities: the big studios, the famous celebrities, etc., and also gives them more influence and control over their respective mediums. Is a world where you really need approval from a major publisher to have your works widely distributed helping these forms overall? Probably not.
So really, while there would likely be some restructuring in certain industries if IP was dropped completely tomorrow, and some people might go out of business, the majority of the world would seem to benefit greatly from it. Maybe certain things wouldn't be as profitable anymore; perhaps a few hundred millions of dollars would be way too much to invest in most movies. How much are we really getting from such expensive Transformers movies anyways, though? The most likely outcome would seem to be less competition and more freedom for small-time developers (of whatever).
Aside from that, it's been ridiculously easy to "pirate" things for a while now, and the world hasn't collapsed. People still create things, people still pay for things, people can still make money making things - but now people also have more access to information and ideas than they did before, because they can get whatever whenever. The content industries still suck money out of them, just perhaps not as much per the same amount of content.
Conclusion:
The real issue here is that IP laws extensively restrict people's fundamental right to share and copy information so that a very few people can charge more for their products than modern distribution systems would dictate they should be able to. It's safer to cling to out-dated business models rather than take risk by expanding into new technologies. In this case that means effectively outlawing the use of technologies which threaten your business model, regardless of the widespread damage it does to everyone else.
