first

1 files changed, 212 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/not-ipr.md b/docs/not-ipr.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a757616
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/not-ipr.md
@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+---
+Generator: 'texi2html 1.82'
+description: Untitled Document
+distribution: global
+keywords: Untitled Document
+resource-type: document
+title: Untitled Document
+...
+
+1. Did You Say “Intellectual Property”?@entrybreak{}It’s a Seductive Mirage {#did-you-say-intellectual-propertyentrybreakitsaseductivemirage .chapter}
+===========================================================================
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{ Copyright © 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013,
+2015 Richard Stallman\
+ {This article was written in 2004 and published in Policy Futures in
+Education, vol. 4, n. 4, pp. 334–336, 2006. This version is part of
+@fsfsthreecite} It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents,
+and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three
+separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot
+and call it “intellectual property.” The distorting and confusing term
+did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the
+confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to
+reject the term entirely.
+
+According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the
+widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fashion that
+followed the 1967 founding of the World “Intellectual Property”
+Organization (WIPO), and only became really common in recent years.
+(WIPO is formally a UN organization, but in fact represents the
+interests of the holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.) Wide
+use dates from around 1990.
+
+The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking
+about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights
+for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal
+philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but
+only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like
+physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change
+them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies
+that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias
+introduced by the term “intellectual property” suits them.
+
+The bias is reason enough to reject the term, and people have often
+asked me to propose some other name for the overall category—or have
+proposed their own alternatives (often humorous). Suggestions include
+IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for
+Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of
+“exclusive rights regimes,” but referring to restrictions as “rights” is
+doublethink too.
+
+Some of these alternative names would be an improvement, but it is a
+mistake to replace “intellectual property” with any other term. A
+different name will not address the term’s deeper problem:
+overgeneralization. There is no such unified thing as “intellectual
+property”—it is a mirage. The only reason people think it makes sense as
+a coherent category is that widespread use of the term has misled them
+about the laws in question.
+
+The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together
+disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various
+laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function
+similarly.
+
+Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated
+separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have
+different rules, and raise different public policy issues.
+
+For instance, copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art,
+and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended
+to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the
+one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may
+be worth paying in some fields and not in others.
+
+Trademark law, by contrast, was not intended to promote any particular
+way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.
+Legislators under the influence of the term “intellectual property,”
+however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for
+advertising. And these are just three out of many laws that the term
+refers to.
+
+Since these laws developed independently, they are different in every
+detail, as well as in their basic purposes and methods. Thus, if you
+learn some fact about copyright law, you’d be wise to assume that patent
+law is different. You’ll rarely go wrong!
+
+In practice, nearly all general statements you encounter that are
+formulated using “intellectual property” will be false. For instance,
+you’ll see claims that “its” purpose is to “promote innovation,” but
+that only fits patent law and perhaps plant variety monopolies.
+Copyright law is not concerned with innovation; a pop song or novel is
+copyrighted even if there is nothing innovative about it. Trademark law
+is not concerned with innovation; if I start a tea store and call it
+“rms tea,” that would be a solid trademark even if I sell the same teas
+in the same way as everyone else. Trade secret law is not concerned with
+innovation, except tangentially; my list of tea customers would be a
+trade secret with nothing to do with innovation.
+
+You will also see assertions that “intellectual property” is concerned
+with “creativity,” but really that only fits copyright law. More than
+creativity is needed to make a patentable invention. Trademark law and
+trade secret law have nothing to do with creativity; the name “rms tea”
+isn’t creative at all, and neither is my secret list of tea customers.
+
+People often say “intellectual property” when they really mean some
+larger or smaller set of laws. For instance, rich countries often impose
+unjust laws on poor countries to squeeze money out of them. Some of
+these laws are among those called “intellectual property” laws, and
+others are not; nonetheless, critics of the practice often grab for that
+label because it has become familiar to them. By using it, they
+misrepresent the nature of the issue. It would be better to use an
+accurate term, such as “legislative colonization,” that gets to the
+heart of the matter.
+
+Laymen are not alone in being confused by this term. Even law professors
+who teach these laws are lured and distracted by the seductiveness of
+the term “intellectual property,” and make general statements that
+conflict with facts they know. For example, one professor wrote in 2006:
+
+> Unlike their descendants who now work the floor at WIPO, the framers
+> of the US constitution had a principled, procompetitive attitude to
+> intellectual property. They knew rights might be necessary, but…they
+> tied Congress’s hands, restricting its power in multiple ways.
+
+That statement refers to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, of the US
+Constitution, which authorizes copyright law and patent law. That
+clause, though, has nothing to do with trademark law, trade secret law,
+or various others. The term “intellectual property” led that professor
+to make a false generalization.
+
+The term “intellectual property” also leads to simplistic thinking. It
+leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these
+disparate laws have—that they create artificial privileges for certain
+parties—and to disregard the details which form their substance: the
+specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the
+consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages
+an “economistic” approach to all these issues.
+
+Economics operates here, as it often does, as a vehicle for unexamined
+assumptions. These include assumptions about values, such as that amount
+of production matters while freedom and way of life do not, and factual
+assumptions which are mostly false, such as that copyrights on music
+supports musicians, or that patents on drugs support life-saving
+research.
+
+Another problem is that, at the broad scale implicit in the term
+“intellectual property,” the specific issues raised by the various laws
+become nearly invisible. These issues arise from the specifics of each
+law—precisely what the term “intellectual property” encourages people to
+ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law is whether
+music sharing should be allowed; patent law has nothing to do with this.
+Patent law raises issues such as whether poor countries should be
+allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them cheaply to save
+lives; copyright law has nothing to do with such matters.
+
+Neither of these issues is solely economic in nature, and their
+noneconomic aspects are very different; using the shallow economic
+overgeneralization as the basis for considering them means ignoring the
+differences. Putting the two laws in the “intellectual property” pot
+obstructs clear thinking about each one.
+
+Thus, any opinions about “the issue of intellectual property” and any
+generalizations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish.
+If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your
+opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which
+is any good.
+
+If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or
+copyrights, or trademarks, or various other different laws, the first
+step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as
+separate topics. The second step is to reject the narrow perspectives
+and simplistic picture the term “intellectual property” suggests.
+Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have
+a chance of considering them well.
+
+### Notes {#notes .subheading}
+
+-   See also “The Curious History of Komongistan (Busting the Term
+    ‘Intellectual Property’),” at
+    <http://gnu.org/philosophy/komongistan.html>.
+-   Countries in Africa are a lot more similar than these laws, and
+    “Africa” is a coherent geographical concept; nonetheless, talking
+    about “Africa” instead of a specific country causes lots of
+    confusion.[(1)](#FOOT1)
+-   Rickard Falkvinge supports rejection of this term.[(2)](#FOOT2)
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+### Footnotes
+
+### [(1)](#DOCF1)
+
+@raggedright Nicolas Kayser-Bril, “Africa Is Not a Country,”
+24 January 2014,
+<http://theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/24/africa-clinton>. @end
+raggedright
+
+### [(2)](#DOCF2)
+
+@raggedright “Language Matters: Framing the Copyright Monopoly So We Can
+Keep Our Liberties,” 14 July 2013,
+[http://torrentfreak.com/language-matters-\
+framing-the-copyright-monopoly-so-we-can-keep-our-liberties-130714](http://torrentfreak.com/language-matters-%3Cbr%3Eframing-the-copyright-monopoly-so-we-can-keep-our-liberties-130714).
+@end raggedright
+
+</div>
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\