The digital revolution will not be televised but it is already digitized. It is a struggle over the public commons and personal privacy.

Intellectual property laws can have two functions: to grant special economic favors to a minority, or to grant incentives to develop works for the public commons. For five hundred years the west has seesawed from one extreme to the other. While it is the authors humble opinion that the public commons are an extreme good, he can give no justification but conviction. It is absurd to attribute ownership to ideas and apply concepts of theft where no party is at a loss, but for a policy that encourages development of new ideas.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813

Before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, there were very few examples of intellectual property ownership. Books were too costly to produce to merit copyright and policies to assist innovation were hardly the concern of opulent monarchies. However, following the availability of the printing press, copyright monopolies were used to censor, for example the English Stationers’ Company was chartered by Mary I in 1556 to prevented the spread of the Protestant Reformation. Patent monopolies were granted to those favored by the courts for such staples as salt; as a gift rather than an attempt to stimulate inventiveness, until public outcry in England forced James I, in 1623, to revoke all existing monopolies except ‘projects of new invention’ or importation from the continent. The English Civil War (1640s) brought about reform in censorship, attribution, and as a result, saw an explosion of printed material.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
-John Milton, 1644, Areopagitica

In 1709, the Statute of Anne vested authors with a 14 year monopoly of reproduction in Great Britain and became the precedent for much of the western world throughout the century. The American Constitution specifically empowered Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” and soon after provided a 14 year renewable copyright. The point is worth repeating: The purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress by securing monopolies for a limited time, specifically 14 years.

However, within only a hundred years, the copyright began to be seen less as a common good via innovative incentive but as a natural or moral right of ownership, particularly in France. In the 1880s the Paris and Berne Conventions internationalized intellectual property norms. While the laws of each country differed, many were moving toward longer durations, beyond the lifespan of the author. No longer were works seen as a good for the public but as a moral right of the creator and in practice the economic benefit of the producer.

One hundred years later again, international trade organizations (GATT and WTO) have put pressure on governments to harmonize copyright to extend several generations after the death of the author with the European Union extending to 70 years in 1993, matched by the United States in 1998, and debate is ongoing in Japan to extend from 50 years to 70 postmortem in harmonization with other rich nations.

Since the 1980s manufacturers have attempted to redefine ownership in the courts. For example, rather than selling a good (such as software or music) one purchases a license agreement effectively borrowing a good with unprecedented restrictions. The United States has granted patents for business practices, algorithms, and methodologies never before subject to intellectual property. Europe has rejected such patents thus far. In the past decade manufacturers and policy has been written well beyond copyright and patent to enforce technological restrictions to copy or preserve a work, criminalizing any attempt to copy works not otherwise protected by copyright law. At the turn of the century, following the WTO TRIPS agreement of 1994, both the United States and Europe criminalized any technology that circumvents measures to protect copyright. Thus a manufacturer can and now does prevent users from making copies of material and any attempt (even for personal or fair use) will subject the offender to the full force of international law.

Just as in seventeenth century England, there is a public outcry. Copyrights were granted in the name of innovation and attribution to the author but primarily benefited the producer who sought more and longer control over works for profit. Now the debate includes digital media in addition to those printed by the fifteenth century ancestors. This revolution will not be televised because it is not in the interests of media producers to open such a debate. However, movements such as copyleft, open source, and free culture have emerged on computer networks and are extending to all aspects of the human commons. Developing nations are concerned about aggressive patent grants for traditional practices in the public domain immemorial. Individuals are engaging in civil disobedience to challenge growing restrictions of media and information. Political parties have emerged, first in Sweden, whose sole agenda is to reform intellectual property laws and privacy infringements.

1040s Bi Sheng invented movable type printing in China

1440s Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany

1474 Venetian Statute granted patent monopoly for 10 years after communicating a new invention to the Republic

1491 Peter of Ravenna secured from the Republic of Venice exclusive right to print and sell Phœnix

1449 Henry VI of England grants a 20 year letters patent to a Flemish manufacturer of stained glass

1623 Statute of Monopolies limits patents to only new or newly imported inventions under King James I of England

1709 The Statute of Anne vests authors with a 14 year monopoly of reproduction in Great Britain

1787 Article I of the United States Constitution empowers Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

1790 Copyright Act provides a 14 year renewable copyright in the United States

1833 William Forster Lloyd coined the phrase “tragedy of the commons” as a conflict for resources between individual interests and the common good.

1880s Paris and Berne Conventions internationalized intellectual property and copyright norms such that while the laws may differ, works are protected equally within a signing country

1845 “Intellectual property” first written by Massachusetts Circuit Court Justice Charles L. Woodbury, “only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man’s own…as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.”

1879 Reference to copyright infringement as ‘piracy’ attributed to this era such as in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lover’s Tale” where he mentions that sections of this work “have of late been mercilessly pirated”

1955 SHARE Inc. volunteer user group was founded in Los Angeles and is considered a precursor to open source software

1962 British Petroleum Company is granted a software patent for solving simultaneous linear equations

1969 ARPANET established first links between universities in the United States and would become the Internet. First Request for Comments published, considered a precusor to open source collaboration

1976 Copyright Act of the United States granted copyright for the life of the author plus 50 years; defines fair use based on purpose, nature of work, amount, and its market effect; and codifies the 1908 first-sale doctrine which limits the distribution rights of a copyright holder to the first sale granting the new owner the right to transfer a purchased good as he sees fit. Many End User License Agreements avoid this doctrine by selling a limiting license to a good rather than the good itself with conflicting legal precendence

1978 TCP/IP v4 becomes the backbone of the Internet for the next 30 years

1981 software patent is granted by the Supreme Court of the United States for a device to mold rubber. The court stated that while algorithms can not be patented, devices utilizing algorithms could

1989 Richard Stallman writes the first version of the GNU General Public License (copyleft) which grants the recipient of a computer program the right to copy, modify, distribute, and profit from a work as long as those rights are passed on to subsequent recipients

1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland

1990 Computer Misuse Act criminalized any modification of data stored on a computer to gain unauthorized access in the United Kingdom

1991 Linus Torvalds begins work on the Linux kernel and licensed it with the copyleft GPL 2

1991 Bill Gates while CEO of Microsoft wrote in an internal memo, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

1993 Council Directive 93/98/EEC harmonized the copyright duration throughout the European Union to 70 years post mortem auctoris

1994 WTO’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights set minimum copyright terms to 50 years post mortem, 20 year patent monopoly, automatic copyright, defines computer programs as literary works, constrains terms of fair use, and requires that patents are granted in all fields of technology

1996 Telecommunications Act forced local telephone companies to share their lines with competitors at regulated rates and deregulated media ownership which reduced the number of major media companies in the United States to five

1998 term “Open Source” christened by Christine Peterson before Netscape released their source code under the name Mozilla

1998 Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright to 70 years post mortem in the United States

1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalized technology that circumvents measures to protect copyright in the United States

2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would put all of the educational course materials online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the year 2007. Hundreds of universities globally join the OpenCourseWare Consortium

2001 the Wikipedia free encyclopia project began with a GNU copyleft license on all content which can be edited in dozens of languages by everyone on the internet

2001 Directive 2001/29/EC criminalized technology that circumvents measures to protect copyright in the European Union

2001 Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons which released several copyright licenses that aim to encourage the sharing of various works

2003 SCO Group, with Microsoft funding, files and looses intellectual property infringement lawsuits against several GNU/Linux vendors, contributors, and automobile manufacturers and is successfully counter sued by Novell and IBM validating the legallity of the GPL

2004 most major computer manufacturers have included Trusted Platform Modules in some systems which has major privacy concerns, unprecedented restrictions (DRM), and non-competative features desireable to manufacturers to the detriment of consumers.

2005 the Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (2002/0047/COD) was rejected by the European Parliament

2005 Major software corporations collude the Open Invention Network to share patents, royalty-free, to anyone that agrees not to use GNU/Linux-related patents against other OIN participants

2005 The One Laptop per Child association announced a plan to produce millions of durable $100 laptops running GNU/Linux for students in the developing world

2006 Pirate Party of Sweden founded with an agenda to reform intellectual property laws and the right to privacy with similar political parties sprouting elsewhere in the world

2006 Novell and Microsoft agree not to sue each other’s customers over intellectual property infringement. Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft states to at the Professional Association for SQL Server conference in Seattle, “every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.” Rumours of a Microsoft legal attack on GNU/Linux vendors spread on the net

2006 Former CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates quoted in the Wall Street Journal “Stolen’s a strong word. It’s copyrighted content that the owner hasn’t paid for.”

arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051110-5553.html
creativecommons.org
laptop.org
news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/
ocwconsortium.org/
piratpartiet.se/
www.eetimes.com
www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/resources/copyright/history.htm
www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/
www.openinventionnetwork.com/
www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/

Wikipedia:
Berne_Convention
Copyright
Copyright_Act_of_1790
Copyright_infringement
Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
Directive_on_harmonising
English_Civil_War
EU_Copyright_Directive
Fair_use
History_of_copyright_law
History_of_patent_law
Intellectual_property
Licensing_Order_of_1643
Open_source
Paris_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Industrial_Property
Software_patent
Statute_of_Anne
Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Tragedy_of_the_commons
Trusted_Platform_Module
TRIPS