IP and the ownership society

Traditionally, intellectual property has been the method of creating a product. So if you figured out a new way to make an engine more efficient, or a vacuum cleaner suck better (about the only situation where you can say that combination of words), then you patented it and hoped to sell bajillions of your new product at overinflated prices until the market couldn't bear it any longer.

Ok, fine. But now intellectual property (ip) has been expanded to include situations wherein the *product* is the ip. The most obvious and headline grabbing examples are music and movies. Content producers - musicians, directors, etc. - create their product and then try to release it into the marketplace. But here's where it gets a little tricky. If you decide to use your vacuum cleaner to help power a levitation device (as Mythbusters did a few weeks ago) that's all fine and dandy. You own that vacuum cleaner. You weren't buying the ip, just the result.

But that's not the same when it comes to content. In that case, you're paying for your right to enjoy - listen, watch, etc. - the content. So the person or entity who actually owns the content -
which usually isn't the same as the creator, but that's a different issue - has, under current law, greater rights to it than the purchaser. This worked fine (from the owner's perspective) when there was no simple way to copy content. But once the digital age started to really progress, the content owners (specifically music content owners) lost this advantage, and got so mad they started throwing out lawsuits like a blind paperboy. Content, which was once naturally restricted, became artificially restricted. And like most artificial creations, it didn't work so well. Every instance of DRM (digital rights management, which restricts how and when a purchaser can listen to their music or dvds) yet created is so full of holes it looks like a Swiss moon.

That's one battle. But what about software? In this industry, ip extends to the methodologies required to create the content as well as the content itself. This lends even greater restrictive control to the content creator. Which leads me to one of my two main points with
this whole little tirade. This week, Intuit, the makers of Quicken, introduced a new format for their online bill paying. Quicken users have been able to pay bills directly from their software for years. Now, however, anyone who purchased a copy of the software as recently as last year has to go out and plunk down money for the new version which supports this format change. Not only that, by changing the format (which has been around so long that it's the industry
standard), they're forcing banks to upgrade their systems as well. So they're raking in profits from both ends because of a system change that many say was unneeded (I'll spare you anything more technical).

This means that because the software creator essentially owns both sides, the production of the product and the product itself, he or she (or it) can revoke the purchaser's right to do so whenever the inclination strikes. The only check on this power is the concerns raised by consumers - whose power in the issue after the fact is dubious anyway. Why? Normally, another vendor could distribute a similar product, but because Intuit owns the right to the format, they could be in legal hot water.

Of course, that's not the entire story. Whereas Intuit is an example of a company trying to make money be destroying old versions of an ip, in many instances, consumers want to continue to access versions of an ip that are no longer supported. That sounds confusing. What I mean
is much more direct, and it usually involves gaming. Say you bought a computer game 10 years ago that you really enjoyed playing. Problem was that it was only made for a Sega Saturn, which Sega stopped supporting in, oh, 97 or so. You were allowed to make a backup of
that software *for archival purposes only* - meaning that, if you had lost your original copy (and hadn't sold it), you could use your archival copy. But what if your Sega Saturn, which you'd attended to dilligently for all these years, suddenly went belly up? You would not technically be allowed to play the game on any other system, so it would be lost forever. A number of developers have written emulators that will play old games, but the distribution of the games (which the average person can't copy from their original cartridge) is strictly illegal - as is using the emulator to play them. If the content owner decides to stop supporting the product, then its fans are sol.

In both cases, it shows a shift toward a licensing model, wherein you stop owning products and instead own a license to use them as the actual owner sees fit. You, the purchaser, can't use it longer or in a way other than than the owner decides. So you can't technically do a 'mash-up,' where you take 2 songs and put them together to create a new song, or sample a song in another creation, etc. Even worse, since software creators own the process, they control some things that are intrinsic to our society. Amazon, for example, owns the rights to the concept of having a shopping cart on a website. SCO, which hasn't produced anything in years, decided instead to file patent infringement lawsuits against any company that 'infringed' on any of
their patents, which they had purchased from another, defunct company. A couple years ago, someone tried to collect royalties from every website owner because they claimed a patent to a hyperlink (like this: http://www.yahoo.com - Oh no! Now I'd owe them money!).

Bush says he wants to create an ownership society. In reality, though, society is dropping the traditional model of ownership. Directed by legislators and the corporations that hold their chains, we are moving instead to a licensing society.