Thus the other half of the objection to "IP": its imprecision. Copyright is not anything like patent. Patent is not anything like trademark. Trade secrets are an entirely different thing again. Don't let's get started on sui generis and neighboring rights. 6/
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Steve Jobs didn't solve this problem by begging Bill Gates to task more engineers to Office for Mac. Instead, Jobs got Apple techs to reverse-engineer all of the MS Office file formats and release a rival office suite, Iwork, which could read and write MS Office files. 17/
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That was an Apple power move, one that turned MS's walled garden into an all-you-can-eat buffet of potential new Mac users. Apple rolled out the Switch ads, whose message was, "Every MS Office file used to be a reason NOT to use a Mac. Now it's a reason to switch TO a Mac." 18/
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More-or-less simultaneously, though, Apple was inventing the hybrid market/IP monopoly tool that would make it the most valuable company in the world, in its design for the Ipod and the accompanying Itunes store. 19/
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It had a relatively new legal instrument to use for this purpose: 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act; specifically, Section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" clause, which bans breaking DRM. 20/
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Under DMCA 1201, if a product has a copyrighted work (like an operating system) and it has an "access control" (like a password or a bootloader key), then bypassing the access control is against the law, even if no copyright infringement takes place. 21/
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That last part - "even if no copyright infringement takes place" - is the crux of DMCA 1201. The law was intended to support the practices of games console makers and DVD player manufacturers, who wanted to stop competitors from making otherwise legal devices. 22/
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With DVD players, that was about "region coding," the part of the DVD file format that specified which countries a DVD could be played back in. If you bought a DVD in London, you couldn't play it in Sydney or New York. 23/
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Now, it's not a copyright violation to buy a DVD and play it wherever you happen to be. As a matter of fact, buying a DVD and playing it is the OPPOSITE of a copyright infringement. 24/
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But it WAS a serious challenge to the entertainment cartel's business-model, which involved charging different prices and having different release dates for the same movie depending on where you were. 25/
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The same goes for games consoles: companies like Sega and Nintendo made a lot of money charging creators for the right to sell games that ran on the hardware they sold. 26/
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If I own a Sega Dreamcast, and you make a game for it, and I buy it and run it on my Sega, that's not a copyright infringement, even if Sega doesn't like it. But if you have to bypass an "access control" to get the game to play without Sega's blessing, it violates DMCA 1201. 27/
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What's more, DMCA 1201 has major penalties for "trafficking in circumvention devices" and information that could be used to build such a device, such as reports of exploitable flaws in the programming of a DRM system: $500k in fines and a 5 year sentence for a first offense. 28/
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Deregionalizing a DVD player or jailbreaking a Dreamcast didn't violate anyone's copyrights, but it still violated copyright law (!). It was pure IP, the right to control the conduct of critics (security researchers), customers and competitors. 29/
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In the words of
@saurik, it's "Felony contempt of business-model." And that's where the Ipod came in. Steve Jobs's plan was to augment the one-time revenue from an Ipod with a recurrent revenue stream from the Itunes store. 30/Mostrar esta sequência -
He exploited the music industry's superstitious dread of piracy and naive belief in the efficacy of DRM to convince the record companies to only sell music with his DRM wrapper on it - a wrapper they themselves could not authorize listeners to remove. 31/
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Ever $0.99 Itunes purchase added $0.99 to the switching cost of giving up your Ipod for a rival device, or leaving Itunes and buying DRM music from a rival store. It was control over competitors and customers. It was IP. 32/
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If you had any doubt that the purpose of Ipod/Itunes DRM was to fight competitors, not piracy, then just cast your mind back to 2004, when Real Media "hacked" the Ipod so that it would play music locked with Real's DRM as well as Apple's. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3387871/Apple+RealNetworks+Hacked+iPod.htm … 33/
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Apple used DMCA 1201 to shut Real down, not to stop copyright infringement, but to prevent Apple customers from buying music from record labels and playing them on their Ipods without paying Apple a commission and locking themselves to Apple's ecosystem, $0.99 at a time. 34/
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Pure IP. Now, imagine if Microsoft had been able to avail itself of DMCA 1201 when Iwork was developed - if, for example, its "information rights management" encryption had caught on, creating "access controls" for all Office docs. 35/
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There's a very strong chance that would have killed Apple off before it could complete its recovery. Jobs knew the power of interoperating without consent, and he knew the power of invoking the law to block interoperability. He practically invented modern IP. 36/
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Apple has since turned IP into a trillion-dollar valuation, largely off its mobile platform, the descendant of the Ipod. This mobile platform uses DRM - and thus DMCA 1201 - to ensure that you can only use apps that come from its app store. 37/
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Apple gets a cut of penny you spend buying an app, and every penny you spend within that app: 30% (now 15% for a minority of creators after bad publicity). IP lets one of the least taxed corporations on Earth extract a 30% tax from everyone else. https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/ … 38/
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Remember, it's not copyright infringement for me to write an app and you to buy it from me and play it on your Iphone without paying the 30% Apple tax. That's the exact opposite of copyright infringement: buying a copyrighted work and enjoying it on a device you own. 39/
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But it's still an IP violation. It bypasses Apple's ability to control competitors and customers. It's felony contempt of business-model. It shows that under IP, copyright can't be said to exist as an incentive to creativity - rather, it's a tool for maintaining monopolies. 40/
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Which brings me to today's news that Apple was successfully sued by a patent troll over its DRM. A company called Personalized Media Communications whose sole product is patent lawsuits trounced Apple in the notorious East Texas patent-troll court. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-19/apple-told-to-pay-308-5-million-for-infringing-drm-patent … 41/
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After software patents became widespread - thanks to the efforts of Apple and co - there was a bonanza of "inventors" filing garbage patents with the USPTO whose format was "Here's an incredibly obvious thing...WITH A COMPUTER." The USPTO rubberstamped them by the million. 42/
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These patents became IP, a way to extract rent without having to make a product. "Investors" teamed up with "inventors" to buy these and impose a tax on businesses - patent licensing fees that drain money from people who make things and give it to people who buy things. 43/
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They found a court - the East Texas court in Marshall, TX - that was hospitable to patent trolls. They rented dusty PO boxes in Marshall and declared them to be their "headquarters" so that they could bring suits there. 44/
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Locals thrived - they got jobs as "administrators" (mail forwarders) for the thousands of "businesses" whose "head office" was in Marshall (when you don't make a product, your head office can be a PO box). 45/
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Productive companies facing hundreds of millions - billions! - in patent troll liability sought to curry favor with locals (who were also the jury pool) by "donating" things to Marshall, like the skating rink Samsung bought for the town. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-the-only-outdoor-skating-rink-in-texas … 46/
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