Cory Doctorow On IP

Intellectual property (IP) is a term that's come into more common usage in the last few years as different people and organizations fight to gain control over software, books, music, photos, and movies. 

Cory Doctorow, SF author and consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been fighting for the IP rights of individuals for many years. He's written a long column for Locus magazine about it, a deep dive into the murky world of intellectual property rights and how they're being lost to the control of faceless multinational corporations.

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.”

That is, in a world of uncertainty, where other people’s unpredictability can erode your profits, mire you in scandal, or even tank your business, “IP” is a means of forcing other people to arrange their affairs to suit your needs, even if that undermines their own needs.

There are some ways in which this is absolutely undeniable. Take DRM, “Digital Rights Manage­ment.” These are the digital locks in our devices that prevent us from using them in ways that the manufacturer dislikes. Your printer uses DRM to force you to buy ink that the manufacturer has ap­proved; your phone uses DRM to force you to buy apps that the manufacturer has approved. Ventilators from Medtronic and tractors from John Deere use DRM to force you to get them repaired by the manu­facturer – and to scrap them when the manufacturer decides it’s time for you to buy a new one.

Copyright laws – that is, “IP laws” – ban tamper­ing with DRM, making it a serious, jailable felony to provide others with tools to bypass DRM. From Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copy­right Act to Canada’s Bill C-32 to Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive, countries around the world have imposed indiscriminate bans on breaking DRM.

These are all copyright laws, but, tellingly, the ban on breaking DRM is not limited to copyright infringement. Bypassing DRM to get your printer to accept third-party ink is not a copyright violation: you’re not reproducing its code, nor are you duplicat­ing the traces etched into its chips. But even though you’re not breaking copyright when you jailbreak your phone, you’re still breaking copyright law. The law bans legal conduct, if you have to break DRM to engage in it. This isn’t copyright protection – it’s felony contempt of business-model.

It's a long article but important and worth reading. If you don't have the time, he's published the TL;DR summary on his Pluralistic blog.