The “Fallacy of Intellectual Property” Fallacy | Copyhype

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| Copyright, General

The “Fallacy of Intellectual Property” Fallacy

… Law professor Eric E. Johnson is currently writing a series of posts on “the great fallacy of intellectual property“. He describes this fallacy this way: “The long understood theory for why IP rights are necessary has been that people won’t invent useful technologies or create worthwhile art and literature without having the right to profit from their labors.”

We can call this the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy.

It’s a fallacy because it doesn’t accurately state the theory behind copyright. The economic justification for copyright is that it is an incentive to create — not a necessary condition. True, there exists a base level of drive to create knowledge and culture. But, as knowledge and culture are fundamentally important to a democratic society, an incentive to create above and beyond this base level provides significant benefits to that society.

In addition, the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy fails to account for an arguably more important function of copyright. Copyright provides an incentive to invest in creation.

via copyhype.com

This is an extract from a long, fascinating and subtle discussion by Terry Hart of a very important issue.

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Balkinization >> Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Prosecute Assange

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| 1A, Freedom of Expression, General

Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Prosecute Assange–For the U.S.’s Sake, Not His

 

Marvin Ammori

 

… Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.

… I end up, with Assange, where I do with racists and Klansmen. Despite the damage he has caused, the costs to our nation of prosecuting his speech outweigh the benefits. I hope our nation’s lawyers consider the merits of this position in determining how best to respond to Assange and Cablegate.

via balkin.blogspot.com

This is an extract from a very long post which is well worth reading. It is a thorough, well-considered and compelling case. As with Marvin, I too end up with Assange where I do with racists and Klansmen: we can’t choose who should benefit from rights – they ought to be available to everyone, racists and Julian Assange as well as the people we like.

See also Wikileaks: International Free Speech Reps Urge Restraint (First Amendment Law Prof Blog) and WikiLeaks and our obligations to the web of tellings: the principles of free speech, discretion and bearing witness come into conflict when considering a case such as WikiLeaks by Nicholas Shackel in the Guardian.

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Concurring Opinions » Privacy vs. Security vs. Anonymity

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| General, Privacy

Privacy vs. Security vs. Anonymity

posted by Sasha Romanosky

When I first began my PhD, I was keen to properly sort and define any new terms and reconcile them with my own education and experience. Three terms that always seemed to be intermingled were: Privacy, Security and Anonymity. Certainly they are related, but I wanted to be a little more specific and understand exactly when and how they overlapped.

First, let’s establish some basic definitions. For the purpose of this blog post, the following definitions will suffice (I’ll address alternative definitions later):
• Privacy: having control over one’s personal information or actions
• Security: freedom from risk or danger
• Anonymous: being unidentifiable in one’s actions

via concurringopinions.com
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Hello, world

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| General

Note: this was my first post on Posterous, which is now long gone. I ported my Posterous posts into this blog. This is my ‘Hello World’ post for this blog.

In the time-honoured tradition, my first post here is under the venerable title above: Hello, world.

I’ve started this site as a companion to my blog at Cearta and my twitter at feed @cearta. As the ‘about’ panel says: anything that catches my eye on the wild wild web that’s too long for twitter but too short for cearta will (probably – eventually) end up here. I’ll tweet links to most of the posts here, and may even bring a few together under the Gallimaufry category on Cearta.

It’s an experiment in which I hope you will join me. With apologies to Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve:

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

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Re Croskery [2010] NIQB 129

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| Academic judgment, Andrew Croskery, Grading and Marking, Litigation, Universities

Royal Courts of Justice, Belfast, via FlickrOn this blog last year, I discussed the circumstances in which a university student could challenge a grade in court. Just before Christmas, the Northern Ireland High Court handed down a very important judgment on this issue. In Re Croskery [2010] NIQB 129 (8 December 2010), the applicant, Andrew Croskery, sought leave to apply for judicial review against a refusal by Queens University Belfast to reclassify his degree. In the Queen’s Bench Division of the Northern Ireland High Court (pictured left), Treacy J denied the application. In cases of this kind, where an objection is simply to matters of academic judgment, the courts show great deference to such matters, and are very slow to interfere. The deference is stated in different ways in the cases, and the parties accepted a strong form of it in Croskery. As Treacy J held

on the authority of Re Wislang’s Application [1984] NI 63 (.doc) and Thomas v University of Bradford [1987] AC 795 (.doc) the matters in dispute would presently fall exclusively within the visitorial jurisdiction of the university – subject only to the possibility that any ultimate decision of the Board of Visitors might itself be judicially reviewable.

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Fair Use: Be careful what you wish for!

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Defamation, Digital Rights, Fair use

Google image, via GoogleA little later than promised, here are some thoughts that occurred to me at the recent seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy (which I blogged here and here). In the same way that browsers have a constant battle between features and speed, so the modern law of copyright is faced with a similar dilemma between encouraging and rewarding innovation. It is becoming increasingly clear that it has not solved this dilemma in a particularly satisfactory way. More than that, the most popular emerging solution – the introduction of a fair use defence to EU law – may not be sufficient for current needs, let alone for future developments.

At the seminar, Johnny Ryan argued that with the rise of the internet, where everything is in perpetual beta, we are in effect are reverting back to the pre-Gutenberg plasticity of information. In historical terms, this is the norm. It is the post-Gutenberg era of fixed information which is the anomaly. Copyright is a feature of this period: in the 1500s, it developed to protect the publishers; in the second half of the 1600s it came under increasing pressure to protect authors, and this was codified in the Statute of Anne, 1710; thereafter, the statutory protections were slowly expanded to other creators of other original works.…

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