About copyright
Recently, the debate on copyright has become more frequent on Habré - with many hundreds of comments, sometimes very emotional ones. Proponents and opponents of copyright lead each other, in general, the same set of arguments - that you have to pay for the work; that copyright is needed not to authors, but to copyright holders; etc.
Unfortunately, both opponents and supporters of copyright demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is all about and why it is needed. An extensive text is offered to your attention, in which the meaning and functions of copyright in human evolution as a species will be analyzed in detail.
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The last decade of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century were marked by a huge breakthrough in the field of information dissemination. Currently, the Internet audience is estimated at about 1.7 billion people ; Although on a global scale Internet penetration is relatively small (about 26%), in developed countries this figure reaches 80% or more .
Digital technologies allow to reduce the cost of creating new copies of works to virtually zero. File exchange networks allow you to share information almost for free. However, the current system of remuneration of authors implies payment for each newly created copy of the work. And this is the cause of a protracted conflict, on one side of which are the copyright holders who want to receive their profits from each consumer of intellectual goods, and on the other - the multimillion army of those who consider copyright obsolete and not relevant to the realities of the 21st century.
In this article we will try to address this problem from all sides; we consider the arguments put forward by both parties to be essentially incorrect (or, at least, incomplete); both of them act mainly from the point of view of their monetary interests, which, from our point of view, are not fundamental in this matter.
Surprisingly, we were unable to find any satisfactory definition of the basic concept. The World Intellectual Property Organization defines what it protects as: “Intellectual property refers to inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. ” reason: inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images and patterns used in trade ” ). Definitions in other sources ( Oxford Dictionary , Wikipedia ) are no better. None of these definitions reflects the properties of intellectual property that distinguish its object from the non-intellectual property object. We will try to highlight these differences.
First of all, it should be noted that the name "intellectual property" is a deliberate misrepresentation: intellectual and non-intellectual property reflect fundamentally different phenomena of the material world. The object of non-intellectual property is a thing - something that exists in reality, regardless of our consciousness . A thing is a real object. On the other hand, the object of intellectual property is not a real object and does not exist outside of our consciousness. The object of intellectual property is a certain principle, a certain idea that can be understood and interpreted by man.
The question arises, why are so different concepts combined into a single “property”, although they describe completely different objects? The answer is rather trivial: a person can benefit from both properties. It seems to us quite obvious that the differences between the objects of two properties are so fundamental that the use of a single term is impractical. In the future, we will talk about objects of intellectual property as ideas (in the Marxist sense, “a form of comprehension in thought of phenomena of objective reality, an objective, concrete and comprehensive knowledge of reality, including the consciousness of the purpose and projection of further knowledge and practical transformation of the world” ) and their implementations in the form of copyright works.
We also list briefly the main features of intellectual property, the difference between ideas and things:
By copyright, we will mean the totality of the property and non-property rights of the author in relation to objects of intellectual property created by him - i.e. ideas and their specific implementations in the form of works of art, scientific works, computer programs and others. At the same time, we are forced to note that in modern definitions ( Wikipedia , the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, Art. 1226 ) copyright is the exclusive right of the author to his works; we are forced to regard this circumstance as a logical trick, since we see no reason not to call copyright and non-exclusive rights.
Recall that the exclusive right ( exclusive right ) is the right of a person to receive benefits (in any form) from something along with the right to prohibit or allow, at its discretion, everyone else to benefit from the same object (as we see, again intellectual and non-intellectual property is combined according to the formal feature of the possibility of obtaining benefits).
In the future, we will adhere to a broad definition of copyright, implying under copyright just the totality of the rights of the author to his creation, without reservations about the exclusivity of these rights.
In addition to copyright law, modern jurisprudence highlights a number of rights related to intellectual property: patent law, rights associated with trademarks, etc. In general, these industries are of little interest to us, although most of the following applies to them.
Copyright is divided into property and non-property (moral). Immediately make a reservation that our reasoning will not concern moral rights in general: we see no reason to revise these rights.
The concept of "copyright" (which is copyright English copyright ), we will use as a synonym for the concept of "copyright", without going into details, which are not important in the context of our research.
As mentioned above, the generally accepted terminology does not give any comments on the grounds for copyright exclusivity. Many defenders of the concept of copyright copyright exclusivity is presented as something self-evident. “Piracy is theft, and pirates are thieves, plain and simple,” says MPAA . Meanwhile, copyright is not natural, neither in Lokkovsky nor in the modern sense of the word. Recall that the concept of natural law implies that some rights are generally valid for any society and every era. Locke, in particular, understands by natural rights the right to life, to liberty and to property.
Considering that the Earth and all that is on it are given to man by God, Locke so deduces the right to property: every person owns his own body and the fruits of his labor. Removing something from the state of nature and applying his labor, one thereby acquires property ( John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government: Chapter 5, Sec. 25-27 ). It is not difficult to see that exclusive copyright in Locke’s concept is not natural: the author cannot claim any rights as to the creation of which he did not apply; if someone himself copied a work of art, using the resources available to him, then, according to Locke, this someone is the full owner of the copy, because he created it only with his work.
Similarly, copyright is not natural from the point of view of modern theories of natural law. More detailed analysis can be read, for example, here . It should also be noted that copyright is in fact not historically significant; in particular, Roman law, apparently, does not contain any provisions relating to copyright, despite the highest level of development of both law and science and art in ancient Rome (see here ).
Thus, we formulate the general conclusion of this section:
The rights of the author are not natural, but positive (objective), and are established by society to the extent that its members assume is fair and reasonable .
So, as we noted in the previous section, the scope of copyright is established by society in accordance with its ideas of justice and expediency. Unfortunately, in modern Western society, an understanding of why WHY need copyright is absent as a principle. On the part of the advocates of the existing state of affairs, the need to maintain the author’s exclusive right to the work created by him is argued as follows:
First of all, I would like to note the following: none of the organizations that protect copyright has, until now, bothered to count the losses caused by copyright. For example, exclusive copyright leads to an increase in the cost of education, which in turn means a decrease in the availability of quality education. Is this a loss in the modern world? Sure. It would be interesting to assess the specific amount of lost profits of the average citizen of any of the developed countries due to less access to education. Of course, the example of loss is not the only one.
However, this is nothing more than a particular consideration regarding the methodology for calculating the economic effect. There is a more general consideration, which is formulated as follows: the arguments presented refer only to economics; Meanwhile, no one has shown that copyright affects only this area of society . We consider this silence to be a direct deception; From our point of view, the causes and goals of copyright are super-economic, and the institution of authorship is the most important in the context of human development as a species. The reasons that make us think so will be discussed in detail in the following sections.
We will have to start very far away and consider, first of all, the meaning of the movement of information in nature in general and in human society in particular, to establish the role of the dissemination of ideas in human development as a species and outline the reasons that gave rise to copyright, then to interpret the meaning and goals the existence of copyright law and evaluate how they comply with current legislation.
Following, perhaps, the most authoritative and consistent researcher of life as a cosmic phenomenon, I.S.Shklovsky, we believe that the definition of life should be based primarily on its functional properties, and not on the features of a specific biological realization (see: I.S. Shklovsky. Universe. Life. Reason. ). For our research, consideration of life from the point of view of cybernetics is of the greatest interest (see: A.N. Kolmogorov. Life and thinking from the point of view of cybernetics; A.A. Lyapunov. On control systems of living nature and general understanding of life processes.) system .
The vital activity of a living organism is a controlling process , i.e. such a process in which "the transfer through certain channels of small amounts of energy or substance entails the action of transforming much larger amounts of energy or substance" (Shklovsky). A living organism processes incoming information from the outside, compares it with the information available and produces a response. Lyapunov defines life as “a highly stable state of a substance, using information encoded by the states of individual molecules to formulate preserving reactions”
So, the presence of some coded information is one of the defining properties of life. The more information the system stores, the more flexible its response to external influences will be. Where does this information come from and in what form does it exist?
If we are talking about life in the form in which it exists on Earth, then the carrier of the encoded information in all living organisms without exception are DNA and RNA molecules, which strictly code for protein synthesis. Richard Dawkins compares DNA macromolecules with a kind of program that determines the development and behavior of an organism (see R. Dawkins. Selfish gene. ). A living organism has the ability to replicate itself: despite the fact that every single organism is relatively short-lived, individual genes (chains of DNA molecules) can exist as copies of themselves for millions of years. Of course, reproduction (replication), like any other information process, takes place against the background of interference, which leads to various kinds of copying “errors” (mutations), i.e. the emergence of new genes.
In addition to the factors of accumulation of information (reproduction + mutations) in nature there are also factors of culling the accumulated information. First of all, this is, of course, the quality of preserving reactions. A gene that determines a clearly inadequate response to a particular effect will quickly die. In addition, it is clear from the definition of life that the vital activity of an organism requires a continuous expenditure of energy to produce conservation reactions. Consequently, the reproduction of living organisms can not occur indefinitely, and at some point the organisms will compete for sources of energy.
Above the field of accumulated information (gene pool) there is a constant selection (which is called natural). On the one hand, new portions of information, formed as a result of mutations, are constantly coming into the gene pool. On the other hand, functionally unsuccessful genes are gradually removed from the gene pool. The evolutionary process, therefore, is a continuous selective accumulation of information.
I hereby convey the above text to the public domain.
Unfortunately, both opponents and supporters of copyright demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is all about and why it is needed. An extensive text is offered to your attention, in which the meaning and functions of copyright in human evolution as a species will be analyzed in detail.
')
Introduction
The last decade of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century were marked by a huge breakthrough in the field of information dissemination. Currently, the Internet audience is estimated at about 1.7 billion people ; Although on a global scale Internet penetration is relatively small (about 26%), in developed countries this figure reaches 80% or more .
Digital technologies allow to reduce the cost of creating new copies of works to virtually zero. File exchange networks allow you to share information almost for free. However, the current system of remuneration of authors implies payment for each newly created copy of the work. And this is the cause of a protracted conflict, on one side of which are the copyright holders who want to receive their profits from each consumer of intellectual goods, and on the other - the multimillion army of those who consider copyright obsolete and not relevant to the realities of the 21st century.
In this article we will try to address this problem from all sides; we consider the arguments put forward by both parties to be essentially incorrect (or, at least, incomplete); both of them act mainly from the point of view of their monetary interests, which, from our point of view, are not fundamental in this matter.
1. About terminology
1.1. On the concept of "Intellectual Property"
Surprisingly, we were unable to find any satisfactory definition of the basic concept. The World Intellectual Property Organization defines what it protects as: “Intellectual property refers to inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. ” reason: inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images and patterns used in trade ” ). Definitions in other sources ( Oxford Dictionary , Wikipedia ) are no better. None of these definitions reflects the properties of intellectual property that distinguish its object from the non-intellectual property object. We will try to highlight these differences.
First of all, it should be noted that the name "intellectual property" is a deliberate misrepresentation: intellectual and non-intellectual property reflect fundamentally different phenomena of the material world. The object of non-intellectual property is a thing - something that exists in reality, regardless of our consciousness . A thing is a real object. On the other hand, the object of intellectual property is not a real object and does not exist outside of our consciousness. The object of intellectual property is a certain principle, a certain idea that can be understood and interpreted by man.
The question arises, why are so different concepts combined into a single “property”, although they describe completely different objects? The answer is rather trivial: a person can benefit from both properties. It seems to us quite obvious that the differences between the objects of two properties are so fundamental that the use of a single term is impractical. In the future, we will talk about objects of intellectual property as ideas (in the Marxist sense, “a form of comprehension in thought of phenomena of objective reality, an objective, concrete and comprehensive knowledge of reality, including the consciousness of the purpose and projection of further knowledge and practical transformation of the world” ) and their implementations in the form of copyright works.
We also list briefly the main features of intellectual property, the difference between ideas and things:
- An idea can be replicated an unlimited number of times (both on a physical medium and verbal communication) without the participation of the author.
- The idea requires doing mental work for your perception.
- The idea is subject to interpretation, each recipient can develop and complement it.
- The influence of an idea on a society is ultimately determined by the sum of all interpretations of its recipients.
1.2. Copyright
By copyright, we will mean the totality of the property and non-property rights of the author in relation to objects of intellectual property created by him - i.e. ideas and their specific implementations in the form of works of art, scientific works, computer programs and others. At the same time, we are forced to note that in modern definitions ( Wikipedia , the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, Art. 1226 ) copyright is the exclusive right of the author to his works; we are forced to regard this circumstance as a logical trick, since we see no reason not to call copyright and non-exclusive rights.
Recall that the exclusive right ( exclusive right ) is the right of a person to receive benefits (in any form) from something along with the right to prohibit or allow, at its discretion, everyone else to benefit from the same object (as we see, again intellectual and non-intellectual property is combined according to the formal feature of the possibility of obtaining benefits).
In the future, we will adhere to a broad definition of copyright, implying under copyright just the totality of the rights of the author to his creation, without reservations about the exclusivity of these rights.
In addition to copyright law, modern jurisprudence highlights a number of rights related to intellectual property: patent law, rights associated with trademarks, etc. In general, these industries are of little interest to us, although most of the following applies to them.
Copyright is divided into property and non-property (moral). Immediately make a reservation that our reasoning will not concern moral rights in general: we see no reason to revise these rights.
The concept of "copyright" (which is copyright English copyright ), we will use as a synonym for the concept of "copyright", without going into details, which are not important in the context of our research.
1.3. On the applicability of the concept of natural law to intellectual property
As mentioned above, the generally accepted terminology does not give any comments on the grounds for copyright exclusivity. Many defenders of the concept of copyright copyright exclusivity is presented as something self-evident. “Piracy is theft, and pirates are thieves, plain and simple,” says MPAA . Meanwhile, copyright is not natural, neither in Lokkovsky nor in the modern sense of the word. Recall that the concept of natural law implies that some rights are generally valid for any society and every era. Locke, in particular, understands by natural rights the right to life, to liberty and to property.
Considering that the Earth and all that is on it are given to man by God, Locke so deduces the right to property: every person owns his own body and the fruits of his labor. Removing something from the state of nature and applying his labor, one thereby acquires property ( John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government: Chapter 5, Sec. 25-27 ). It is not difficult to see that exclusive copyright in Locke’s concept is not natural: the author cannot claim any rights as to the creation of which he did not apply; if someone himself copied a work of art, using the resources available to him, then, according to Locke, this someone is the full owner of the copy, because he created it only with his work.
Similarly, copyright is not natural from the point of view of modern theories of natural law. More detailed analysis can be read, for example, here . It should also be noted that copyright is in fact not historically significant; in particular, Roman law, apparently, does not contain any provisions relating to copyright, despite the highest level of development of both law and science and art in ancient Rome (see here ).
Thus, we formulate the general conclusion of this section:
The rights of the author are not natural, but positive (objective), and are established by society to the extent that its members assume is fair and reasonable .
2. On the copyright functions in human society
2.1. Introductory notes
So, as we noted in the previous section, the scope of copyright is established by society in accordance with its ideas of justice and expediency. Unfortunately, in modern Western society, an understanding of why WHY need copyright is absent as a principle. On the part of the advocates of the existing state of affairs, the need to maintain the author’s exclusive right to the work created by him is argued as follows:
- Copyright promotes economic development. Literally the following is stated: “IP-intensive industries” provide 72% more surplus value per employee than “non-IP-intensive industries” . Here we leave out of brackets the correctness of the conclusions and the representativeness of the original data (which are very doubtful).
- Copyright encourages authors to encourage more intense creativity.
- Revenue from copyright (and patent) rights allows private companies to pay for research and development.
- Finally, copyright creates jobs. "The global piracy causes a loss of $ 12.5 billion of economic jobs every year, 71,060 US jobs lost," the RIAA said .
First of all, I would like to note the following: none of the organizations that protect copyright has, until now, bothered to count the losses caused by copyright. For example, exclusive copyright leads to an increase in the cost of education, which in turn means a decrease in the availability of quality education. Is this a loss in the modern world? Sure. It would be interesting to assess the specific amount of lost profits of the average citizen of any of the developed countries due to less access to education. Of course, the example of loss is not the only one.
However, this is nothing more than a particular consideration regarding the methodology for calculating the economic effect. There is a more general consideration, which is formulated as follows: the arguments presented refer only to economics; Meanwhile, no one has shown that copyright affects only this area of society . We consider this silence to be a direct deception; From our point of view, the causes and goals of copyright are super-economic, and the institution of authorship is the most important in the context of human development as a species. The reasons that make us think so will be discussed in detail in the following sections.
We will have to start very far away and consider, first of all, the meaning of the movement of information in nature in general and in human society in particular, to establish the role of the dissemination of ideas in human development as a species and outline the reasons that gave rise to copyright, then to interpret the meaning and goals the existence of copyright law and evaluate how they comply with current legislation.
2.2. Life as a system of selective accumulation of information
Following, perhaps, the most authoritative and consistent researcher of life as a cosmic phenomenon, I.S.Shklovsky, we believe that the definition of life should be based primarily on its functional properties, and not on the features of a specific biological realization (see: I.S. Shklovsky. Universe. Life. Reason. ). For our research, consideration of life from the point of view of cybernetics is of the greatest interest (see: A.N. Kolmogorov. Life and thinking from the point of view of cybernetics; A.A. Lyapunov. On control systems of living nature and general understanding of life processes.) system .
The vital activity of a living organism is a controlling process , i.e. such a process in which "the transfer through certain channels of small amounts of energy or substance entails the action of transforming much larger amounts of energy or substance" (Shklovsky). A living organism processes incoming information from the outside, compares it with the information available and produces a response. Lyapunov defines life as “a highly stable state of a substance, using information encoded by the states of individual molecules to formulate preserving reactions”
So, the presence of some coded information is one of the defining properties of life. The more information the system stores, the more flexible its response to external influences will be. Where does this information come from and in what form does it exist?
If we are talking about life in the form in which it exists on Earth, then the carrier of the encoded information in all living organisms without exception are DNA and RNA molecules, which strictly code for protein synthesis. Richard Dawkins compares DNA macromolecules with a kind of program that determines the development and behavior of an organism (see R. Dawkins. Selfish gene. ). A living organism has the ability to replicate itself: despite the fact that every single organism is relatively short-lived, individual genes (chains of DNA molecules) can exist as copies of themselves for millions of years. Of course, reproduction (replication), like any other information process, takes place against the background of interference, which leads to various kinds of copying “errors” (mutations), i.e. the emergence of new genes.
In addition to the factors of accumulation of information (reproduction + mutations) in nature there are also factors of culling the accumulated information. First of all, this is, of course, the quality of preserving reactions. A gene that determines a clearly inadequate response to a particular effect will quickly die. In addition, it is clear from the definition of life that the vital activity of an organism requires a continuous expenditure of energy to produce conservation reactions. Consequently, the reproduction of living organisms can not occur indefinitely, and at some point the organisms will compete for sources of energy.
Above the field of accumulated information (gene pool) there is a constant selection (which is called natural). On the one hand, new portions of information, formed as a result of mutations, are constantly coming into the gene pool. On the other hand, functionally unsuccessful genes are gradually removed from the gene pool. The evolutionary process, therefore, is a continuous selective accumulation of information.
I hereby convey the above text to the public domain.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/86422/
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