Ethics are the new craft

"Ethics are the new craft" by Cory Doctorow in the latest edition of SCRIPT-ed. He's in full flow:

"It's one thing to be a conservative company offering copy-restricted digital music players in a world of open MP3 players (you'd get clobbered)," [which is the point I was making about drm in the context of the Apple v Real spat yesterday] "but it's another entirely to inhabit a market where every firm is part of a gentlecompany's agreement not to roll out any really disruptive, novel, dangerous features.

Of course, there's another word for that kind of agreement: cartel. Or, possibly, conspiracy. Not an explicit back-room conspiracy (though the tech world has its share of those), but rather, an emergent conspiracy of risk-aversion and overstuffed comfort that has turned our once-heroic, envelope-pushing defenders into a race of cowardly, timid toymakers whose wares put-put along alongside of the roaring engines of progress in the world of general-purpose computers and networks...

Technology is commodity...

in the past, the thing that stood between a trade and commodification was *craftsmanship*. Bespoke suits, hand-made clocks with jeweled movements, hand-carved fripperies on a cuckoo clock.

But no one wants a bespoke USB thumb-drive (after all, you'll be throwing it out and replacing it with one twice as capacious and half as massy in a year)...

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors, then?

By giving users the one thing you're better equipped to provide than they are: Freedom...

Once your customers get wind of the fact that all the features they've dreamt of are possible, cheap, and on offer in the high street, you'll find yourself in a category all your own."

And that's precisely the point. Locked down technology depends on too many people accepting that that is all that's possible and too many other people (within what Cory might consider the entertainment cartels) keeping the secret. It is impossible to lock down the knowledge that something can be done better or a piece of gadgetry can be improved.

That first mover in the generic digital music/video/entertainment player market will have an early advantage, as Cory suggests, but once the secret is out, expect the big players to follow rapidly. But don't bet on them downsizing their legal departments or scrapping drm any time soon - the lawyers, the lobbyists and the drm are currently doing an effective job of slowing down the pace of change.

There is a range of really interesting articles in this edition of SCRIPT-ed, probably the most important being the draft text of the lecture by South Africa's Supreme Court Judge Cameron held at the University of Edinburgh, Tuesday 19 October 2004. Highly recommended and lucidly indicative of the incredible importance in the modern world of the arcane, obscure, abstract subject with the eye-glazing label "intellectual property."

"Without patents or a comparable system of rewards and/or incentives, the drugs that can save six million lives in the developing world would probably not exist. Yet the system that made possible their creation helps ensure that the drugs remain inaccessible to those who need them most desperately.

The rights to exclusivity that lie at the heart of patent enforcement were developed in conditions of affluence that ill suit the conditions of most of the world’s people: in particular, those nations most severely affected by the world-wide AIDS pandemic. Yet despite significant progress in asserting the entitlement of poor nations to exploit knowledge productively to counter the ill effects of AIDS, those nations themselves have done relatively little to expand access.

Some, at least, of this inaction must be ascribed not to the formal constraints of international patent enforcement – for they after courageous activist interventions have been significantly relaxed – but to the constraining power of those with most to gain from continuingly rigid enforcement of that system.

True appreciation of the value of the patent idea demands resistance to this trend. In some cases, this could entail the comprehensive adoption and active use of the public health safeguards identified at Doha. In others, it could entail a departure from certain forms of IP protection in respect of certain innovations, such as product patents for pharmaceuticals. But in many – if not most – developing country scenarios, this might require much more, quite possibly including the adoption of new methods to encourage innovation and commercialisation.

One possibility is to replace market exclusivity with a royalty-based system in which any company that produces safe and effective generic medicines can sell its product and pay a percentage of the sale price to the patent holder. What constitutes a reasonable royalty would have to be determined to ensure a careful balancing of incentives to innovate versus increasing access. This would mean particularly low – or no – royalties in respect of products produced for developing countries."