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Topic: Yarr! Pirate (Read 829 times) |
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
  
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Yarr! Pirate
« on: 2004-03-23 08:25:31 » |
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Some Like It Hot
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/lessig_pr.html
OK, P2P is "piracy." But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry.
<snip>
The Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early 20th century in part to escape controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a monopoly "trust" based on Edison's creative property and formed to vigorously protect his patent rights.
California was remote enough from Edison's reach that filmmakers like Fox and Paramount could move there and, without fear of the law, pirate his inventions. Hollywood grew quickly, and enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents granted their holders a truly "limited" monopoly of just 17 years (at that time), the patents had expired by the time enough federal marshals appeared. A new industry had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property.
<snip>
Cable TV, too: When entrepreneurs first started installing cable in 1948, most refused to pay the networks for the content that they hijacked and delivered to their customers - even though they were basically selling access to otherwise free television broadcasts. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.
Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. As then Screen Actors Guild president Charlton Heston put it, the cable outfits were "free-riders" who were "depriving actors of compensation."
Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. The debate shifted to Congress, where almost 30 years later it resolved the question in the same way it had dealt with phonographs and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast, but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. Instead, lawmakers set the price so that the broadcasters couldn't veto the emerging technologies of cable. The companies thus built their empire in part upon a piracy of the value created by broadcasters' content.
<snip>
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Yarr! Pirate
« Reply #1 on: 2004-03-29 16:33:55 » |
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rhinoceros
Sent: 23 March 2004 03:26 PM
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Yarr! Pirate
OK, P2P is "piracy." But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV,
and (yes) the music industry.
[Blunderov]Apparently it goes back even further.
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property and the Origins of American
Industrial
Power
by Doron S. Ben-Atar
304 pages, Yale University Press (April 2004) ISBN: 030010006X
(available
through booksellers such as Amazon - unfortunately only the $38
hardcover is
on offer at the moment)
Doron Ben-Atar is associate professor of history at Fordham University.
Book Description
During the first decades of America's existence as a nation, private
citizens, voluntary associations, and government officials encouraged
the
smuggling of European inventions and artisans to the New World. At the
same
time, the young republic was developing policies that set new standards
for
protecting industrial innovations. This book traces the evolution of
America's contradictory approach to intellectual property rights from
the
colonial period to the age of Jackson.
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Britain shared
technological innovations selectively with its American colonies. It
became
less willing to do so once America's fledgling industries grew more
competitive. After the Revolution, the leaders of the republic supported
the
piracy of European technology in order to promote the economic strength
and
political independence of the new nation. By the middle of the
nineteenth
century, the United States became a leader among industrializing nations
and
a major exporter of technology. It erased from national memory its years
of
piracy and became the world's foremost advocate of international laws
regulating intellectual property.
"Ben-Atar tells the remarkable story of how the fledgling United States
used
pirated technology to lay the foundation for its future industrial might
even as it grappled with the timeless question of who owns knowledge,
revealing a previously hidden face of the early republic. A major
contribution to the field, Trade Secrets should also be read by students
of
modern intellectual property and international economic
development."--Bruce
H. Mann, University of Pennsylvania
"Doron Ben-Atar's elegant study moves from customary appreciations of
the
Founding Fathers to the tough realities facing statesmen establishing a
viable republic, technologically and commercially backward. Ben-Atar
guides
the reader through these thickets of intellectual thievery and smuggling
with aplomb and wit."--Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History
Emeritus,
Yale University
"Using a comparative, transatlantic framework, Trade Secrets provides a
lively, original, ironic analysis of the contradictory ways that early
national and state policy makers encouraged the innovation that
propelled
America's industrial revolution."--Richard D. Brown is co-author of The
Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in
Early
America
"Doron Ben-Atar's Trade Secrets opens a fascinating, and hitherto
little-known, chapter in early American history: the importance of
'technology piracy' to national development. Taken as a whole, the book
is a
remarkable fusion of intellectual, legal, political, economic, and
social
history; considered page by page, it offers trenchant analysis
interspersed
with lively narrative vignettes. And the issues it raises, most
especially
those concerning intellectual property, have much currency even
today."--John Demos, Yale University
---
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