perspectiveWhatever you may think about the recently proposed OpenDocument Format policy switch for Massachusetts' executive agencies, one thing can be agreed on by all sides: It's a big deal. More than two years ago, Massachusetts embarked on an "open standards, open source" policy, ostensibly working to guide its executive agencies toward a more citizen-accessible, cost-effective management of state IT assets. The state finally settled on the mandated use of OASIS' OpenDocument Format, plus Adobe's PDF schema, for its executive agencies' office suites by January 2007. This policy has pitted those in favor of government mandates to meet "larger considerations" against others in the industry who favor a more market-oriented approach.
One editorial labeled Massachusetts' OpenDocument Format plan as the "domino" that will cause other governments and private parties to follow suit, fostering more choice. Others believe that it represents a mandate for a single type of software model, one purposely imposed to limit competition, not strengthen it.
Massachusetts' move to open-source could help loosen Microsoft's grip on desktop software.
Yes, all of this is big. But there's also something bigger going on. It points to a perfect storm that can't be good for those who depend on intellectual property, or IP, to prosper. As part of the discussion between Massachusetts and software developers who would be affected by the state's mandate, the designer of the OpenDocument Format policy, Eric Kriss, flippantly stated:
"Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property."
This sounds positively pre-Boston Tea Party to me.
Kriss' supporters say the statement has been taken out of context. And they're right. It can't be considered in isolation. It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it.
A recent court decision in the U.S. (i.e., the Supreme Court's eminent domain decision in Kelo); regulatory and legislative actions in the EU (i.e., the EC's stance on interoperability, and failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation); and rampant piracy, not just in the developing world but here on these shores, buttress this supposition.
But the real tipping point seems to be apathy. Thus far, the IP community in America and Europe all seem to have collectively yawned. Such a view can be nothing short of myopic.
Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, notes that America's main economic product has become "predominantly conceptual," based in large measure on IP assets. Perhaps as much as 75 percent of publicly traded company value in the U.S. comes from intangible assets, again largely IP-based. The EU parallels much of this experience.
Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit. Our world-leading, IP-dependent goods and services--our car airbags, drug delivery mechanisms, air traffic control systems, toaster ovens, etc.--make the lives of billions of people better. Strong and enforceable IP rights--e.g., copyright, trademark, patent and trade secrets--have played no small part in this development.
The rest of the world--developed and, importantly, developing--is following suit.
While piracy remains problematic in Brazil, China and India, collectively their IP industries all compete on the world stage, either through their own exports or via the work performed for well-established multinational players. Thus, they depend on IP rights to grow, working to stop piracy, while also boosting their own IP rights regimes.
It may be human nature to wish for the demise of your competitors. Yet to do so through the tool of blunt, confiscatory government policy is a tidal wave that can't be controlled. Regardless of the development model, the IP community in depends on strong IP rights to prosper and grow. Governments must resist the temptation to take this property.
As Kriss points out, it's a strong temptation, even for a "probusiness" appointee. The stakes are high. If the IP community can't disabuse people like Kriss and others of that temptation, our industry, as well as worldwide consumers, had better get used to having their rain parkas on. We're in for a long and furious storm.
Biography Melanie Wyne is executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a global coalition run by the Computing Technology Industry Association.
"...and rampant piracy, not just in the developing world but here on these shores..."
IMNSHO, Piracy is the reflection of the fact that intel. property owners try too hard to squeeze more profits from their belongings.
"But the real tipping point seems to be apathy. Thus far, the IP community in America and Europe all seem to have collectively yawned."
No state will try to demolish "property". "Property" when applied to tangible goods differs from "property" when applied e.g. to real estate.
What people now increasingly call "Intellectual Property" (IP) is in fact very different matter from both property as thing and propery as real estate.
When Earth was underdevelopped - nobody cared about property rights on real estate. People lived where they liked to live. Over time as humanity started expanding need appeared to establish "borders" - this is IMHO first time ever when "property" on something was established.
Here I can draw parallel to IP. Internet eased information exchange what has spawned enourmous horizontal innovations - innovations occuring when several known technologies and know-hows are aggregated. IP-related regulations (patents and copyrights) know used as "borders" - to divide the profits from aggregated inventions.
If we will persue parallel further we will notice that real estate ownership has many strings attached: gov't strictly controls what you do on your own backyard (e.g. you can't make toxic waste there).
IP (patents & copyrights) at moment enjoy more or less complete anarchy. Patents valid for more than inventor's life time, constantly extending copyright terms - it's a dictatorship of IP owners over consumers. I see piracy more like (inevitable) rebel & anarchy of consumers against the regime.
I wouldn't expect that state would challenge any legitimate IP owners. I rather would expect states adding more regulations to define how IP can be used. The problem now is not the IP ownership itself, but often discriminatory policies of many vendors. Just recall U.S.' litigious companies owning piles of patents and producing nothing but litigations.
IP owners *must* have responsibilities. Current regime when IP owner can slap any contract/license on his/her property is *unacceptable*. This is just like with estate: we didn't get for free from nature - but we have borrowed it from our children. So we bear the responsibilities before our children. IP doesn't appear from vacuum - it is all based on previous works. As long as nobody copyrighted/patented wheel, all IP must be considered to have prior art.
Melanie Wyne works for a pro-industry lobby group that has Microsoft and Intel as significant members. That said, there is a disturbing anti-private property, anti-free market ring to alot of the open standards open source efforts.
Why not let the markets decide standards? In cases of monopolistic efforts by one or another player (IBM in the 80's, Microsoft in the 90's, Intel?) there are judicial remedies that can be brought. Though even there, market forces seem to temper one company's influence over time.
Are you saying that the government you pay for is not a market player that should decide in favor of freedom... ? The entities that want to deal with the government will have to do so at the terms of the government, and not the other way around. If MS seriously wanted this business but didn't want that standard to be more publicly supported, they could come up with "MS Office Gov't Edition" that has what the OpenDoc standard support that the MA Gov wants...
Why do people keep getting this confused? I have read countless articles saying Massachusett's decision to use an open standard for document storage is "the start of the end of IP"... All the standard does is define a method of storing data and markup information of a document. Any company is free to use its products and IP to support that standard, and since the standard is open for all to see/use, we will most likely see a flush of new products and IP that would not have been possible if the document standard was closed and controlled by one company. The reasons we have standards on HTML, XML, and all the other W3C standards out there is so that all these big and small groups came come together and agree on something to work with. I think we can all agree that the internet worked out pretty nicely thanks to open standards.
You said: *********************** The state finally settled on the mandated use of OASIS' OpenDocument Format, plus Adobe's PDF schema, for its executive agencies' office suites by January 2007. This policy has pitted those in favor of government mandates to meet "larger considerations" against others in the industry who favor a more market-oriented approach. ******************
Nothing in the current requirements is at all discriminatory against any provider of software. Massachusetts created a standard/requriement that any software product be able to read and create a certain file format. They said nothing about who the vendor should be, and the standard they picked is unencumbered so that any software that wants to compete has no barrier to entry. The state is actually encouraging competition, and deliberately did not choose a specific software package as that would be anti-competitive and remove choice and efficiency from the procurement process.
Whether the state's motives are to support open source software and its model, the actual regulation itself is hardly biased in this direction. Any maker of word processing software (Microsoft, Word Perfect, AbiWord, etc.) can compete as long as they will use the standard file format.
Its hard to see how the state could have done better, since they've made a decision that avoids many future risks such as those of having a single provider of goods and services.
States have settled on lots of other standards that are free to any competitor to implement. Manhole covers don't have to be made by acertain company, they just have to meet certain specifications. The same goes for countless other good and services the state may purchase.
Why should the choice of an office document format be any different?
"car airbags, drug delivery mechanisms, air traffic control systems, toaster ovens"
Don't they all use standards based electricity plugs right? That's all OpenDocuments is! Compete on making a better toaster or word processor in this case, not locking us all into a Microsoft only socket!
She is COMPLETELY wrong. OpenDocument guarantees that the content owner (in short me, when I write a doc) has full access to it independently from a gate keeper!!!
This industry is out of control: they want to control EVERYTHING including what should belong to the user. In fact, they want to redefine ownership. As an example, they do not want you to resell a software that you bought (and hence, own a copy of!!!). Well, they keep making analogies with lawnmowers and guess what? I can resell a lawnmower (see recent MPAA statements), there is no stupid license!!!
Also, IP does not MEAN anything because there you can not have ownership of intellect. You can have copyrighted material that follows certain rules (that they keep changing in favor of the industry every decade) and you can have patents. There is nothing intellectual about all this.
What happens is people found an unlimited gold mine, or a golden egg hen and they protect it!!! In short, they try to create infinite value out of little for an INFINITE time it seems now. What will happen when the space is so crowded that there is nothing left to "claim" without infringing? It is really like a land grab from the old western expansion. Well, there is a time when all land has been claimed! And who wins??? Certainly not the people...
Power needs to go back to the people and corporations have no interest in the best of society. They will milk it to the very end.
So, they complain about ownership? Well, then let me complain about ownership: I want to fully OWN what I buy. If I do not own it, then it means that I am renting it and I consider this unacceptable.
How would you feel if the dealership would tell you that you were actually renting your car and that you cannot resell it???
"...As an example, they do not want you to resell a software that you bought (and hence, own a copy of!!!)..."
I highly doubt that you have ever actually purchased software. Most software purchases are written up as a byline in the WSJ. What you are really buying is a license to use the software under the terms of an EULA. This seems like a subtle distinction but it is an important one legally speaking.
I would provide more details here but from the tone of your comments I don't believe that you have any interest in hearing them and I doubt that they would have any chance of getting through to change your opinions...
It is interesting to see MA's attempt to preserve and utilize their own Intellectual Property (State records) mischaracterized as an attempt to destroy Intellectual Property rights. Massachusetts got fed up with the protection racket that software providers had been using to hold their data hostage. "Buy our new version or a bad 'accident' just may happen to all your saved information." Instead they are insisting on a common format, open to all, to maximize it's utility and to minimize the cost to their taxpaying constituents. Newsdotcom Commenter: I see others have had to resort to character assasination as answers to your opinion. If they can't refute your argument they are left with trying to refute the source. Inferior debate technique and inferior logic.
I completely agree with Newsdotcom Commenter. If I pay for software, I own the software period. How come I don't own it if I have an original copy? Now sure, there is software that is rented. Take Wolfram's WebMathematica for example. You rent it for a yearly fee. THAT you don't own. But if you paid for it once and have a copy, why wouldn't you own it? Because of the EULA that's why. The EULA is a "legal document" you are "forced" to read when you install your software. It is written in legal terms and is so long that most users just ignore it and press Next. But it's a legal agreement that, despite it being unfair, is in my opinion, enforceable in court. However, it's also my opinion that software companies don't make enough of an effort to make the user aware of this agreement. Everyone knows that nobody reads EULAs, but it is the fine print of the "contract".
Interesting that all it takes to take my ownership of MY software away from me is a text file.
Would Melanie Wyne argue that the World Wide Web was flawed from the very beginning because HTML is an open format? Would she argue that this beautiful marketplace we've created on the Internet is actually not market-oriented simply because it is not patented?
In fact, we saw what happened to Gopher when the University of Minnesota tried to collect royalty fees on it. Gopher lost to the Web in a free marketplace of choice.
Melanie is misapplying her belief in intellectual property. Business will flourish when more firms are allowed to sell office suites which are compatible with one another. The IP won't be file format patents; it will be copyrights on user interface decisions. And lots of people will make money.
Every type of business and every type of customer will be able to choose an office suite based on its features; whether it is better suited to particular tasks, whether it is easier, whether it is more robust, etc. And they'll never again have to worry about document loss.
Any firm could develop an office suite with any focus or any features. And they can all share the same documents. Just like the Web was a beautiful thing for business, so too could OpenDocument be.
Why is an organization known as the "Initiative for Software Choice" arguing against an open file format which will increase SOFTWARE CHOICE?
Full disclosure here. I'm a conservative Republican. And it's offensive to me that this organization would take conservative language and so utterly warp it beyond recognition.
Massachusetts isn't seizing Microsoft's Office XML patent. It's simply choosing an alternative. Massachusetts isn't forbidding Microsoft from supporting OpenDocument. Even a plugin for Office would seemingly meet the policy requirement. Massachusetts isn't throwing down a barrier immediately. The policy wouldn't take effect for another 2 years.
I hate to be ad hominem, but I really don't think this woman believes what she's writing. I'm very disappointed that CNET and the News.com editors even published it.
Obviously, the author is another apologist for M$, but the real issue that IP holders don't want to face and the State of Mass. brought up is that the individual that generates an output owns the output, and must/should have absolute assurance of access to that output for an infinite period. Back in the pre-historic days we generated documents on typewriters and printing presses. Under the logic espoused here, the typewriter and printing press manufacturers would "own" the document as their product was used to generate it. M$, Adobe, ad nauseum have relentlessly pushed the idea of a paperless office and businesses and individuals have bought into that. If M$, Adobe, etc. all of a sudden decide that they want to rake in more bucks, come out with a new product, and provide no support for the old (as M$ has already done), we got a big problem. If they do that before IP patents or copyrights expire, then a 3rd party could be open to litigation if they infringed in developing a "translator".
I had a Mustang GT that required tires no other car used. Paid $250 a tire for 30,000 mile tread wear (soft, high performance tire). Got rid of that in a hurry. Current vehicles have a choice of 8 tire manufacturers. I can go to Pep Boys and buy a windshield washer pump made by other than the OEM and it works just fine. I really don't care how the fluid gets from the tank to the windshield, I just need it to get there. The OEM and after market mfgrs. can patent all they want to protect their pumps or tire technology and one or the other can discontinue production, but I can still keep my car on the road.
Boos to the greedy CEO's who generate products with planned obsolescence and to Wall Street for encouraging it; cheers to the organizations that have stood up and said "enough". Viva la revolution; long live the tea party and baked beans!!
This "article" speaks of a standard required by a state and speaks of rights of IP owners, but shows no connection between the two.
The state of massachusetts has a right to demand that documents the state handles are in an archivable format. And they have the right to require that this archive does not require creating an eternal revenue stream to some private parties holding the keys to the archive (apparrently those that the writer calls "IP owners"). There are some rights given by law to "IP owners". The right to an eternal revenue stream due to the need to use their "property" to gain access to archived information is not one of them. The state can certainly require that the keys to its archive are legally replicable by anyone who knows how to replicate keys. It isn't required to put itself in a situation where only one private party can provide this service without any competition.
IP owners are not hurt in any way by this decision (the only thing hurt is their belief that they are above the law and that the limited monopoly copyright or whatever grants them is above any other right of anyone else).
what proprietary document standards remind me of is in my younger days when i owned a mobile home, but rented a lot in a mobile home park. the lot fee was an expense that i'd always have, even after the home was paid off, unless i bought a piece of property. the park was rarely run to my satisfaction (the property owner lowered everyone's water pressure to 15 psi when he learned he could save big bucks doing so--ever try to water your lawn with 15 psi?). i felt that i was stuck with it because the cost of moving the home to another piece of property was prohibitive at that time.
that's what i think of when i see proprietary document standards--trapping people and organizations into a substandard structure. this has nothing--absolutely NOTHING!--to do with taking anyone's ip. it has everything to do with making smart, long term decisions that protect valuable content prepared by the ip owners of that content. i applaud that sufficient large customers are moving behind open document standards so that we can rid ourselves of those who consider ip as a way to trap their customers into a long-term, cash milking business.
Trailer park owner sells out to Condo developer. You gotta move. Unfortunaterly, no trailer park owner around will take you because they make the money selling trailers. This has happened to many trailer owners.
But chear up. There are emulators for all the old computers, so Wierd 2000 will still be runnable in 2050. It will just have to be run under Pentium 4 emulation.
Open standards are much easier. I think that M$ may actually be thinking of free software, once they get enough hooked, back to a charge model. Like one of the music services that doubled their charge, pay up or lose your music.
The sad part about the debate of open verse proprietary formats is that we may never get to it. As long as paid shills keep muddying the water with pedantic arguments that don't pertain to the issue we can't really have a discussion.
This is not about intellectual property. This about a customers choice to use products that meet their needs. Microsoft needs to stop funding people mislead the marketplace and just give their customers what the want.
I was shocked that CNET would run such a baseless and deceptive article that seemingly could only come from a MS shill! By the reasoning in this piece, there should be no standards worldwide. How dare the world use HTML. This standard surely stifles progress. A proprietary web surfing program should be required for each website in the world. How can any thinking person say that standard data interchange formats are a bad thing? I agree that there are some people out there with no respect for intellectual property; I am not one of them. This article has nothing to do with a lack of respect for intellectual property. The Open Document push is about data interchange. In an age where less and less is printed, what good does a great proprietary document format do, if no one else can read what one has written? Support all of the document formats that you wish, but include standard data interchange formats in the list.
This is such nonsense I don't know where to start!
*FUD Nonsense* The article tries to imply that big government is trying to force someone (well, sweet innocent MS, of course, is who is meant here) into surrendering it's IP, using pejoratives like "confiscate" to make it sound scary. So, MA is adopting an open, public, independently developed standard for documents. Please explain to me, Ms. Wyne, exactly _what_ IP is being "confiscated" here, and from whom?
*Hypocrisy Nonsense* Implied in the article is that government shouldn't set such bad standards. Of course, MS was quite happy when government standardized on Word/Excel etc. That was _good_ standardization, while this is _bad_ standardization -- how silly of us not to realize that "good for ms" == "good for us". Outrageous!
*Chicken Little Nonsense* According to this article, the use of OpenDoc is going to destroy the US lead in toaster ovens, air traffic control and drug development (I'm not making this up -- go read the nonsense!). Yeah, right.
Cnet should be ashamed for letting such drivel get posted as an editorial "placement".
I thought Ms. Wyne's comments were right on the money. What Mass is doing is a total waste of money, resources and time. None of which has the Commonwealth documented. You want to "own" your data and you hate Microsoft, save it as text...export as rtf, or save it as a non-standard-bandwidth-hog pdf file. But whatever you CHOOSE, please refrain from putting anymore government mandates in my life!
"You want to "own" your data ..." >> I already do, and I don't want to have to use a proprietary (and perhaps transient) piece of software to access it.
"and you hate Microsoft....." >> No. but the MS corporate egotism is more than a bit tiring...
"save it as text...export as rtf, or save it as a non-standard- bandwidth-hog pdf file...." >> Rather use a nice stable, accepted, and non-proprietary OpenDocument format. But PDF is an alternative, since I don't have to mess with Adobe software .
"whatever you CHOOSE, please refrain from putting anymore government mandates in my life!..." >> Okay, no mandates for you. You can do what you want, as long as you are willing to accept the results of your choice. That's always been the way it goes. And sometimes, you do have to go alone...
And as far as being 'Right on the Money', how far can you go on a nickel???
I have to ask, who do YOU think should own the data YOU create?
This is not government putting a mandate in your life, at all. This is about a government that wants to buy software. They are just a customer in this transaction, and they are telling their vendors what kind of software they want. It's that simple.
An open document format is a wise choice, by the way. This means that future purchasing decisions can be driven by which vendor provides the best software for the job. Search for the term "switching costs" and you'll see why this govenment (and thus its taxpayers) will be much better off by requiring their software vendor to use an open document format.
Too many customers in the past have been burned by the lock-in associated with closed document formats. They figured it out and they're not going to let it happen again. Good on them. Even Microsoft (the mother of all software vendors) understands that customers care about this - they are opening the document formats for Office 12!
Why don't you say openly that Microsoft is one of the members of the "Initiative for Software Choice"? <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.softwarechoice.org/init_members.aspx" target="_newWindow">http://www.softwarechoice.org/init_members.aspx</a>
I feel very disappointed. A name such as "Initiative for Software Choice" says NOTHING. What matters is WHO is behind that.
Also, why does the ISC say one of its goals is " Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards"? Isn't THAT exactly what the OASIS open document is about?
According to Melanie Wyne of the Initiative for Software Choice, we are facing disaster.
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it."
"confiscatory government policy" ??? Mandating a standard (open) document format for government use is "confiscatory" policy? What in heavens name is "confiscated"? Not the holy IP anyway.
What is "confiscated" is the possibility for the currently dominant Office software vendor to maintain a lock on office software through proprietary document formats. And how is that bad? Every software writer on the planet can use the Open Document standard for free. Including the current heavyweight. Funny thing is ... if the document format becomes standardised, then you loose an argument for buying the next version of MS Office. Competition will be more on price and performance. Bad news for Mircrosoft, the firm wich currently has market dominance, good news for everyone else. If that is "confiscatory" then I can live with it.
But who is this Initiative for Software Choice anyway? According to the Economist, the Initiative for Software Choice, is a Microsoft-supported lobby group that also made itself heard to decry the adoption of Linux in Munich. (see <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm" target="_newWindow">http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm</a> ?story_id=2054746
Ah, now it starts to make sense. If you want to villify something in US public perception, call it "Socialist", or even better "Communist". "Anti-property" will do nicely too. If you can make that stick, then you have them on the defensive no matter what. In the absence of credible evidence try the next best thing ... and call it "confiscatory government policy".
What better way to try and rub off a scary association onto Open Document than to have an innocuously sounding "initiative" worriedly denounce it as "confiscatory". It doesn't make sense but that it doesn't matter. PR pieces don't have to make sense, they have to make a splash.
Well done Initiative for Software Choice, and well done News.Com for publishing it without comment or research!
The problem here is that some software companies want it to be the case that a users' investment in their own intellectual property locks them in, so that they can only use the intellectual property of the software company in question. That is, so that they do not have sovereignty over their own intellectual property - the documents that they have written.
This is a failing strategy, both for the customer and for the software company. It's true that lock-in can be vastly beneficial to the company that gets it, in the short term, but it leads to a situation just like the one that you're describing, where at some point customers decide that they've had enough, and they revolt. And then, overnight, the company that has pursued the lock-in strategy is out. They're out because instead of serving the customer, they've been serving themselves.
The entire reason why you see a large, potent open source movement is because of this: companies are serving themselves, not their customers. And their customers are getting tired of it.
You have two choices at this point, if you are such a company: you can recognize that your business model needs tweaking, roll up your sleeves, and start serving the customer instead of yourself. Or you can keep on with business as usual, and try to get laws passed to protect your lock-in, and try to get patents and other kinds of protection to make sure that open source competition never succeeds in stealing your customer base.
If you pursue the former strategy, you will see a downturn in revenue, because you have decided to be a capitalist, and competition is hard. You'll actually have to work for your customer's money, instead of being sure of it.
However, the result in the long term will be that you'll actually be doing something good for your customer, and the proof will be that they keep sending you money. When you have lock-in, you can't assume that money from your customer means that you're doing the right thing, and you will never know until it's too late that you have lost them.
I don't like your intentional blurring of distinctions...
It's articles like this that really make things more difficult for those wanting to sell mainline proprietary products. Rather than creating useful distinctions around which better evaluations and choices can be made, she is attempting to "blur" distinctions and then associate them with "fear of loss" if things continue the way they are.
The bottom line - the GPL software is just as IP based as any of the rest of the world of software. And the free market will choose the model(s) that favor it becoming more effective and more free long-term with lots of oscillations back and forth in the interim. There is no means to offer "control" without there being an ability to "invert" the control via something very similar to the mechanics used by the GPL. To paraphrase Douglas Hofstadtler paraphrasing Godel, "In any given context, there is a meta-context required to accurately describe the context itself. And this process is infinitely recursive." It is the core principle of self-referentiality. It is this core idea of one "belief domain" that makes truth relative, and not absolute.
I think this paragraph is very deeply insightful: > "Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property." - Eric Kriss, State of Mass.
The author of the article calls the comment flippant. She would do well to think more deeply about where the notion of IP is actually rooted, in the "permission/grant" of the government. IP advocates would like to think of IP in terms of an inalienable rights. They are not. And until some form of constitutional amendment is generated to make them such, they remain "government granted and enforced monopolies", and exist by permission of the public body. And the lesson to learn is that same public body is now analyzing the choice of sovereignty having higher precedence than IP grants. Rather than condemning the evaluation with a term like "flippantly", there is much that can be learned about WHY the customer is facing such a choice in the first place. And then a focus on meeting that customer's needs such that the conflict is removed.
The article asserts that the developing world "depends on [strong] IP rights to grow".
This seems like a somewhat hypocritical stance given that American publishers were not forced to respect international copyrights until 1891; up to that time the US essentially sanctioned literary piracy. (foreign works were deemed 'common' property.) This generated a huge market in cheap books that greatly contributed to general literacy in a democracy struggling to establishing itself.
Given this historical example, we should be wary of trying to assert our own barnacled copyright regimes on other developing nations.
"Intellectual Property" is a neccessary evil. It should be supported only to the minimum required to promote creation of useful arts and sciences. Articles like this which equate ever stronger copyright and patent laws with a growing economy are are wrong both theoretically and historically. Growth is based on innovation and creation of wealth. IP laws are based on putting barriers to the spread of innovation and sponsorship of creative acts for a short time only. The idea is to create a short term toll and then let the general public benefit thereafter. That isn't what we see. We see pure naked greed trying to keep these barriers in place on a permanent basis instead. The ODF fight is an action on who owns the document you write. The open document format can be implemented by anyone, proprietary maker or not. The alternative is to have the items you write locked into a format that only one maker will ever be able to fully support. This is not competition, this is permanent tax on all the citizens who will be trapped in ongoing tribute to one company. Companies should serve people, not the other way round.
Confused thinking inspired by the confused term IP
Thank you Melanie for showing what kind of muddled thinking comes from terms such as "Intellectual Property".
What is staggering, is that in this very same article, you refer to "IP" as "copyright, trademark, patent and trade secrets" - these are all *rights* and do not imply property! A more accurate rendering of "intellectual property" is "intellectual rights". Note how many of the sentences containing "intellectual property" seem odd if one replaces "property" with "rights".
The fact is that the biggest source of prosperity in the modern world has the endless well of knowledge that is Science. Only a handful of companies have not benefitted from the contributions of Science - contributions that were made without the expectation of making a quick buck from unsuspecting sods.
The "contributions" that companies have made to the world are so neglible as to be laughably pathetic. Yet, companies want to "protect" these "intellectual contributions".
I have no problem with IR (Intellectual Rights), as long as companies understand that these are *temporary* rights and in no way resemble property.
Your comments are good, but 'rights' isn't right either. Given the arbitrary nature of IP 'rights' who is to say what the proper term of patent protection or copyright should be or exactly what should be covered. These are rather subjective qualities. Most things we consider 'rights' do not have nearly the same subjective qualities.
The better term is Intellectual Monopoly. That is exactly what we are talking about. These are only rights because the state has seen fit to grant them. That makes them more of a privilege don't you think? More over these are rights which allow the holder to prohibit or control others' behaviour. I.E. they affect my very real property rights. That's almost the opposite of a right.
This kind of interpretation is exaclty what is doing the IP industry the most harm. There will always be fringe outliers who prefer using open source software as opposed to mass market productions. This perpsective seriously misinterprets the law and the way things should develop. First, Kelo does not give the govenrment unfettered discretion to take personal property under the Fifth Amendment. On the contrary, Kelo was a very fact specific holding. The local government in that case expended a great amount of effort to reform the downtown area of New London. It was not the wholesale expansion of public purpose that would similarly apply to intelectual property. While Kelo did expand the situations in which emminent domain could operate, assuming that Massachusetts' new open document initiative can even qualify as a taking, it would not apply to taking over the software industry in order to serve the "public good." The open document format is more of a service to the individual, securing the ability of the lay person to access the court system, and alleviate the problem theorized by Kafka. "Open Sourcing" the legal system does a service to the individual, and will not serve to harm the IP industry. There comes a threshold point when the open source community will not be able to satsify the needs of the consumer. Any worry that Microsoft has about the end of its empire do to Sun's recent foray into hte close quarters of office software should ease at the idea that software like Open Office won't satiate the appetite of enterprise consumers. At some point the open source community can't support the largely computer illiterate corporate structure. Rather, open documents insure that regardless of the software the documents will be available to individuals to edit. In the legal context, this opens the doors of the legal system to the pro se filer who used to be locked behind software restrictions making it even more untenable that they could gain access to the legal system. What Massachusetts has done serves due process, not the socialistic revolution of intellectual property.
Web giant is spending $120 million to beef up its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, according to filings with the city reviewed by the San Jose Mercury News.
The Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 S6500 could make its debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, according to a leaked promotional image.
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
IMNSHO, Piracy is the reflection of the fact that intel. property owners try too hard to squeeze more profits from their belongings.
"But the real tipping point seems to be apathy. Thus far, the IP community in America and Europe all seem to have collectively yawned."
No state will try to demolish "property". "Property" when applied to tangible goods differs from "property" when applied e.g. to real estate.
What people now increasingly call "Intellectual Property" (IP) is in fact very different matter from both property as thing and propery as real estate.
When Earth was underdevelopped - nobody cared about property rights on real estate. People lived where they liked to live. Over time as humanity started expanding need appeared to establish "borders" - this is IMHO first time ever when "property" on something was established.
Here I can draw parallel to IP. Internet eased information exchange what has spawned enourmous horizontal innovations - innovations occuring when several known technologies and know-hows are aggregated. IP-related regulations (patents and copyrights) know used as "borders" - to divide the profits from aggregated inventions.
If we will persue parallel further we will notice that real estate ownership has many strings attached: gov't strictly controls what you do on your own backyard (e.g. you can't make toxic waste there).
IP (patents & copyrights) at moment enjoy more or less complete anarchy. Patents valid for more than inventor's life time, constantly extending copyright terms - it's a dictatorship of IP owners over consumers. I see piracy more like (inevitable) rebel & anarchy of consumers against the regime.
I wouldn't expect that state would challenge any legitimate IP owners. I rather would expect states adding more regulations to define how IP can be used. The problem now is not the IP ownership itself, but often discriminatory policies of many vendors. Just recall U.S.' litigious companies owning piles of patents and producing nothing but litigations.
IP owners *must* have responsibilities. Current regime when IP owner can slap any contract/license on his/her property is *unacceptable*. This is just like with estate: we didn't get for free from nature - but we have borrowed it from our children. So we bear the responsibilities before our children. IP doesn't appear from vacuum - it is all based on previous works. As long as nobody copyrighted/patented wheel, all IP must be considered to have prior art.
Why not let the markets decide standards? In cases of monopolistic efforts by one or another player (IBM in the 80's, Microsoft in the 90's, Intel?) there are judicial remedies that can be brought. Though even there, market forces seem to temper one company's influence over time.
Additionally, real open standards boost marketplaces. (TCP/IP, HTTP, ...)
The reasons we have standards on HTML, XML, and all the other W3C standards out there is so that all these big and small groups came come together and agree on something to work with. I think we can all agree that the internet worked out pretty nicely thanks to open standards.
***********************
The state finally settled on the mandated use of
OASIS' OpenDocument Format, plus Adobe's PDF schema, for its executive agencies' office suites by January 2007. This policy has pitted those in favor of government mandates to meet "larger considerations" against others in the industry who favor a more market-oriented approach.
******************
Nothing in the current requirements is at all discriminatory against any provider of software.
Massachusetts created a standard/requriement that any software product be able to read and create a certain file format. They said nothing about who the vendor should be, and the standard they picked is unencumbered so that any software that wants to compete has no barrier to entry. The state is actually encouraging competition, and deliberately did not choose a specific software package as that would be anti-competitive and remove choice and efficiency from the procurement process.
Whether the state's motives are to support open source software and its model, the actual regulation itself is hardly biased in this direction. Any maker of word processing software (Microsoft, Word Perfect, AbiWord, etc.) can compete as long as they will use the standard file format.
Its hard to see how the state could have done better, since they've made a decision that avoids many future risks such as those of having a single provider of goods and services.
States have settled on lots of other standards that are free to any competitor to implement. Manhole covers don't have to be made by acertain company, they just have to meet certain specifications. The same goes for countless other good and services the state may purchase.
Why should the choice of an office document format be any different?
Don't they all use standards based electricity plugs right? That's all OpenDocuments is! Compete on making a better toaster or word processor in this case, not locking us all into a Microsoft only socket!
This industry is out of control: they want to control EVERYTHING including what should belong to the user. In fact, they want to redefine ownership. As an example, they do not want you to resell a software that you bought (and hence, own a copy of!!!).
Well, they keep making analogies with lawnmowers and guess what? I can resell a lawnmower (see recent MPAA statements), there is no stupid license!!!
Also, IP does not MEAN anything because there you can not have ownership of intellect. You can have copyrighted material that follows certain rules (that they keep changing in favor of the industry every decade) and you can have patents. There is nothing intellectual about all this.
What happens is people found an unlimited gold mine, or a golden egg hen and they protect it!!!
In short, they try to create infinite value out of little for an INFINITE time it seems now.
What will happen when the space is so crowded that there is nothing left to "claim" without infringing? It is really like a land grab from the old western expansion. Well, there is a time when all land has been claimed! And who wins??? Certainly not the people...
Power needs to go back to the people and corporations have no interest in the best of society. They will milk it to the very end.
So, they complain about ownership? Well, then let me complain about ownership: I want to fully OWN what I buy. If I do not own it, then it means that I am renting it and I consider this unacceptable.
How would you feel if the dealership would tell you that you were actually renting your car and that you cannot resell it???
I highly doubt that you have ever actually purchased software. Most software purchases are written up as a byline in the WSJ. What you are really buying is a license to use the software under the terms of an EULA. This seems like a subtle distinction but it is an important one legally speaking.
I would provide more details here but from the tone of your comments I don't believe that you have any interest in hearing them and I doubt that they would have any chance of getting through to change your opinions...
(State records) mischaracterized as an attempt to destroy Intellectual Property rights.
Massachusetts got fed up with the protection racket that software providers had been using to hold their data hostage.
"Buy our new version or a bad 'accident' just may happen to all your saved information."
Instead they are insisting on a common format, open to all, to maximize it's utility and to minimize the cost to their taxpaying constituents.
Newsdotcom Commenter:
I see others have had to resort to character assasination as answers to your opinion.
If they can't refute your argument they are left with trying to refute the source.
Inferior debate technique and inferior logic.
Interesting that all it takes to take my ownership of MY software away from me is a text file.
In fact, we saw what happened to Gopher when the University of Minnesota tried to collect royalty fees on it. Gopher lost to the Web in a free marketplace of choice.
Melanie is misapplying her belief in intellectual property. Business will flourish when more firms are allowed to sell office suites which are compatible with one another. The IP won't be file format patents; it will be copyrights on user interface decisions. And lots of people will make money.
Every type of business and every type of customer will be able to choose an office suite based on its features; whether it is better suited to particular tasks, whether it is easier, whether it is more robust, etc. And they'll never again have to worry about document loss.
Any firm could develop an office suite with any focus or any features. And they can all share the same documents. Just like the Web was a beautiful thing for business, so too could OpenDocument be.
Why is an organization known as the "Initiative for Software Choice" arguing against an open file format which will increase SOFTWARE CHOICE?
Full disclosure here. I'm a conservative Republican. And it's offensive to me that this organization would take conservative language and so utterly warp it beyond recognition.
Massachusetts isn't seizing Microsoft's Office XML patent. It's simply choosing an alternative. Massachusetts isn't forbidding Microsoft from supporting OpenDocument. Even a plugin for Office would seemingly meet the policy requirement. Massachusetts isn't throwing down a barrier immediately. The policy wouldn't take effect for another 2 years.
I hate to be ad hominem, but I really don't think this woman believes what she's writing. I'm very disappointed that CNET and the News.com editors even published it.
I had a Mustang GT that required tires no other car used. Paid $250 a tire for 30,000 mile tread wear (soft, high performance tire). Got rid of that in a hurry. Current vehicles have a choice of 8 tire manufacturers. I can go to Pep Boys and buy a windshield washer pump made by other than the OEM and it works just fine. I really don't care how the fluid gets from the tank to the windshield, I just need it to get there. The OEM and after market mfgrs. can patent all they want to protect their pumps or tire technology and one or the other can discontinue production, but I can still keep my car on the road.
Boos to the greedy CEO's who generate products with planned obsolescence and to Wall Street for encouraging it; cheers to the organizations that have stood up and said "enough". Viva la revolution; long live the tea party and baked beans!!
The state of massachusetts has a right to demand that documents the state handles are in an archivable format. And they have the right to require that this archive does not require creating an eternal revenue stream to some private parties holding the keys to the archive (apparrently those that the writer calls "IP owners"). There are some rights given by law to "IP owners". The right to an eternal revenue stream due to the need to use their "property" to gain access to archived information is not one of them. The state can certainly require that the keys to its archive are legally replicable by anyone who knows how to replicate keys. It isn't required to put itself in a situation where only one private party can provide this service without any competition.
IP owners are not hurt in any way by this decision (the only thing hurt is their belief that they are above the law and that the limited monopoly copyright or whatever grants them is above any other right of anyone else).
that's what i think of when i see proprietary document standards--trapping people and organizations into a substandard structure. this has nothing--absolutely NOTHING!--to do with taking anyone's ip. it has everything to do with making smart, long term decisions that protect valuable content prepared by the ip owners of that content. i applaud that sufficient large customers are moving behind open document standards so that we can rid ourselves of those who consider ip as a way to trap their customers into a long-term, cash milking business.
mark d.
move. Unfortunaterly, no trailer park owner around will take you
because they make the money selling trailers. This has
happened to many trailer owners.
But chear up. There are emulators for all the old computers, so
Wierd 2000 will still be runnable in 2050. It will just have to be
run under Pentium 4 emulation.
Open standards are much easier. I think that M$ may actually be
thinking of free software, once they get enough hooked, back to
a charge model. Like one of the music services that doubled
their charge, pay up or lose your music.
progress.
What fuels progress is necessity, with or without the snake-oil
salesmen.
The Internet, as one example, seemed to be picking up steam
exponentionally before companies started patenting every click.
that we may never get to it. As long as paid shills keep muddying
the water with pedantic arguments that don't pertain to the issue
we can't really have a discussion.
This is not about intellectual property. This about a customers
choice to use products that meet their needs. Microsoft needs to
stop funding people mislead the marketplace and just give their
customers what the want.
deceptive article that seemingly could only come from a MS shill!"
How could you be even mildly surprised? C/net has been a
Microsoft Shill for as long as I can remember.
*FUD Nonsense* The article tries to imply that big government is trying to force someone (well, sweet innocent MS, of course, is who is meant here) into surrendering it's IP, using pejoratives like "confiscate" to make it sound scary. So, MA is adopting an open, public, independently developed standard for documents. Please explain to me, Ms. Wyne, exactly _what_ IP is being "confiscated" here, and from whom?
*Hypocrisy Nonsense* Implied in the article is that government shouldn't set such bad standards. Of course, MS was quite happy when government standardized on Word/Excel etc. That was _good_ standardization, while this is _bad_ standardization -- how silly of us not to realize that "good for ms" == "good for us". Outrageous!
*Chicken Little Nonsense* According to this article, the use of OpenDoc is going to destroy the US lead in toaster ovens, air traffic control and drug development (I'm not making this up -- go read the nonsense!). Yeah, right.
Cnet should be ashamed for letting such drivel get posted as an editorial "placement".
You want to "own" your data and you hate Microsoft, save it as text...export as rtf, or save it as a non-standard-bandwidth-hog pdf file. But whatever you CHOOSE, please refrain from putting anymore government mandates in my life!
>> I already do, and I don't want to have to use a proprietary
(and perhaps transient) piece of software to access it.
"and you hate Microsoft....."
>> No. but the MS corporate egotism is more than a bit tiring...
"save it as text...export as rtf, or save it as a non-standard-
bandwidth-hog pdf file...."
>> Rather use a nice stable, accepted, and non-proprietary
OpenDocument format. But PDF is an alternative, since I don't
have to mess with Adobe software .
"whatever you CHOOSE, please refrain from putting anymore
government mandates in my life!..."
>> Okay, no mandates for you. You can do what you want, as
long as you are willing to accept the results of your choice.
That's always been the way it goes. And sometimes, you do have
to go alone...
And as far as being 'Right on the Money', how far can you go on
a nickel???
This is not government putting a mandate in your life, at all. This is about a government that wants to buy software. They are just a customer in this transaction, and they are telling their vendors what kind of software they want. It's that simple.
An open document format is a wise choice, by the way. This means that future purchasing decisions can be driven by which vendor provides the best software for the job. Search for the term "switching costs" and you'll see why this govenment (and thus its taxpayers) will be much better off by requiring their software vendor to use an open document format.
Too many customers in the past have been burned by the lock-in associated with closed document formats. They figured it out and they're not going to let it happen again. Good on them. Even Microsoft (the mother of all software vendors) understands that customers care about this - they are opening the document formats for Office 12!
It appears to be MS, Intel, and a whole pile of peanut flakes. And
CompTIA may be nothing better.
AH so, phantom organizations rise again!!!!!!!!
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.softwarechoice.org/init_members.aspx" target="_newWindow">http://www.softwarechoice.org/init_members.aspx</a>
I feel very disappointed. A name such as "Initiative for Software Choice" says NOTHING. What matters is WHO is behind that.
Also, why does the ISC say one of its goals is " Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards"? Isn't THAT exactly what the OASIS open document is about?
Liars.
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it."
"confiscatory government policy" ??? Mandating a standard (open) document format for government use is "confiscatory" policy? What in heavens name is "confiscated"? Not the holy IP anyway.
What is "confiscated" is the possibility for the currently dominant Office software vendor to maintain a lock on office software through proprietary document formats. And how is that bad? Every software writer on the planet can use the Open Document standard for free. Including the current heavyweight. Funny thing is ... if the document format becomes standardised, then you loose an argument for buying the next version of MS Office. Competition will be more on price and performance. Bad news for Mircrosoft, the firm wich currently has market dominance, good news for everyone else. If that is "confiscatory" then I can live with it.
But who is this Initiative for Software Choice anyway? According to the Economist, the Initiative for Software Choice, is a Microsoft-supported lobby group that also made itself heard to decry the adoption of Linux in Munich. (see <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm" target="_newWindow">http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm</a> ?story_id=2054746
Ah, now it starts to make sense. If you want to villify something in US public perception, call it "Socialist", or even better "Communist". "Anti-property" will do nicely too. If you can make that stick, then you have them on the defensive no matter what. In the absence of credible evidence try the next best thing ... and call it "confiscatory government policy".
What better way to try and rub off a scary association onto Open Document than to have an innocuously sounding "initiative" worriedly denounce it as "confiscatory". It doesn't make sense but that it doesn't matter. PR pieces don't have to make sense, they have to make a splash.
Well done Initiative for Software Choice, and well done News.Com for publishing it without comment or research!
This is a failing strategy, both for the customer and for the software company. It's true that lock-in can be vastly beneficial to the company that gets it, in the short term, but it leads to a situation just like the one that you're describing, where at some point customers decide that they've had enough, and they revolt. And then, overnight, the company that has pursued the lock-in strategy is out. They're out because instead of serving the customer, they've been serving themselves.
The entire reason why you see a large, potent open source movement is because of this: companies are serving themselves, not their customers. And their customers are getting tired of it.
You have two choices at this point, if you are such a company: you can recognize that your business model needs tweaking, roll up your sleeves, and start serving the customer instead of yourself. Or you can keep on with business as usual, and try to get laws passed to protect your lock-in, and try to get patents and other kinds of protection to make sure that open source competition never succeeds in stealing your customer base.
If you pursue the former strategy, you will see a downturn in revenue, because you have decided to be a capitalist, and competition is hard. You'll actually have to work for your customer's money, instead of being sure of it.
However, the result in the long term will be that you'll actually be doing something good for your customer, and the proof will be that they keep sending you money. When you have lock-in, you can't assume that money from your customer means that you're doing the right thing, and you will never know until it's too late that you have lost them.
The bottom line - the GPL software is just as IP based as any of the rest of the world of software. And the free market will choose the model(s) that favor it becoming more effective and more free long-term with lots of oscillations back and forth in the interim. There is no means to offer "control" without there being an ability to "invert" the control via something very similar to the mechanics used by the GPL. To paraphrase Douglas Hofstadtler paraphrasing Godel, "In any given context, there is a meta-context required to accurately describe the context itself. And this process is infinitely recursive." It is the core principle of self-referentiality. It is this core idea of one "belief domain" that makes truth relative, and not absolute.
I think this paragraph is very deeply insightful:
> "Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property." - Eric Kriss, State of Mass.
The author of the article calls the comment flippant. She would do well to think more deeply about where the notion of IP is actually rooted, in the "permission/grant" of the government. IP advocates would like to think of IP in terms of an inalienable rights. They are not. And until some form of constitutional amendment is generated to make them such, they remain "government granted and enforced monopolies", and exist by permission of the public body. And the lesson to learn is that same public body is now analyzing the choice of sovereignty having higher precedence than IP grants. Rather than condemning the evaluation with a term like "flippantly", there is much that can be learned about WHY the customer is facing such a choice in the first place. And then a focus on meeting that customer's needs such that the conflict is removed.
Jim
This seems like a somewhat hypocritical stance given that American publishers were not forced to respect international copyrights until 1891; up to that time the US essentially sanctioned literary piracy. (foreign works were deemed 'common' property.) This generated a huge market in cheap books that greatly contributed to general literacy in a democracy struggling to establishing itself.
Given this historical example, we should be wary of trying to assert our own barnacled copyright regimes on other developing nations.
What is staggering, is that in this very same article, you refer to "IP" as "copyright, trademark, patent and trade secrets" - these are all *rights* and do not imply property! A more accurate rendering of "intellectual property" is "intellectual rights". Note how many of the sentences containing "intellectual property" seem odd if one replaces "property" with "rights".
The fact is that the biggest source of prosperity in the modern world has the endless well of knowledge that is Science. Only a handful of companies have not benefitted from the contributions of Science - contributions that were made without the expectation of making a quick buck from unsuspecting sods.
The "contributions" that companies have made to the world are so neglible as to be laughably pathetic. Yet, companies want to "protect" these "intellectual contributions".
I have no problem with IR (Intellectual Rights), as long as companies understand that these are *temporary* rights and in no way resemble property.
The better term is Intellectual Monopoly. That is exactly what we are talking about. These are only rights because the state has seen fit to grant them. That makes them more of a privilege don't you think? More over these are rights which allow the holder to prohibit or control others' behaviour. I.E. they affect my very real property rights. That's almost the opposite of a right.