Boyle deconstructing IP stupidity

James Boyle was in full flow in last Thursday's FT.

"Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them...

Let me be clear. IP is a good thing... Not all proposals to extend rights are silly, but if we do not start looking rigorously at evidence, we will never know which."

Wonderful.

It certainly generated some traffic at Slashdot. Frank Field has an insightful take on all this too:

"The power of ideology (which I would define as a simplified explanation of how the world works) is that it generally does work – that’s why it becomes accepted. Developing a good model gives one advantages – the ability to anticipate outcomes and act with confidence upon that expected outcome. However, that success also leads the user to confuse the model of reality with reality itself and, eventually, the ideology disappears – “Why is more copyright protection better? That’s just how things work, stupid.”

As long as the model works, that confusion is not a problem. But when the model starts to fail (as it inevitably must), the dogmatic ideologue is in serious trouble – the explanations for how the world works sudden no longer work, and the easiest response (and most typical) is to argue away (or ignore) the inconsistencies and press on.

That’s where we are now. The inconsistencies cited in Boyle’s article and elsewhere are all around us, but the ideologues just keep repeating their mantra “more control/property/market discipline is better.” The ideology is now visible, at least to those who do not accept it, and the inconsistencies keep piling up – and the non-dogmatists have started to develop a better, more refined model for reality, one that allows them to be more successful, and have started to move on.

The danger lies in spasms of the ideologues whose explanations no longer help, but who still have the power to construct structures that enforce their world-view."

Which nicely takes me back to our Open University course on all this. In there we deal with both the concept of models and the power of ideology and the need to be continually alert to both. We also felt that the power of rhetoric and the invisibility of underlying facts, values and beliefs are so important that we devoted a whole section of the course to this.