Katharine Trendacosta, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); It’s Copyright Week 2020: Stand Up for Copyright Laws That Actually Serve Us All
"We're taking part in Copyright Week,
a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that
should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are
taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing
what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright
promotes creativity and innovation...
We continue to fight for a version of copyright that does what it is
supposed to. And so, every year, EFF and a number of diverse
organizations participate in Copyright Week. Each year, we pick five
copyright issues to highlight and advocate a set of principles of
copyright law. This year’s issues are:
- Monday: Fair Use and Creativity
Copyright
policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Fair use makes it
possible for us to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture.
- Tuesday: Copyright and Competition
Copyright
should not be used to control knowledge, creativity, or the ability to
tinker with or repair your own devices. Copyright should encourage more
people to share, make, or repair things, rather than concentrate that
power in only a few players.
- Wednesday: Remedies
Copyright claims should
not raise the specter of huge, unpredictable judgments that discourage
important uses of creative work. Copyright should have balanced remedies
that also provide a real path for deterring bad-faith claims.
- Thursday: The Public Domain
The public domain
is our cultural commons and a crucial resource for innovation and access
to knowledge. Copyright should strive to promote, and not diminish, a
robust, accessible public domain.
- Friday: Copyright and Democracy
Copyright must
be set through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process. It
should not be decided through back-room deals, secret international
agreements, unaccountable bureaucracies, or unilateral attempts to apply
national laws extraterritorially.
Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts and actions on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek and at #CopyrightWeek on Twitter.
As we said last year, and the year before that, if you too stand behind these principles, please join us by supporting them, sharing them, and telling your lawmakers you want to see copyright law reflect them."
Charles Duhigg, The New Yorker; Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property?
"Levandowski, for his part, has been out of work since he was fired by
Uber. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for him, though. He’s still
extremely wealthy. He left Google with files that nearly everyone agrees
he should not have walked off with, even if there is widespread
disagreement about how much they’re worth. Levandowski seemed constantly
ready to abandon his teammates and threaten defection, often while
working on an angle to enrich himself. He is a brilliant mercenary, a
visionary opportunist, a man seemingly without loyalty. He has helped
build a technology that might transform how the world functions, and he
seems inclined to personally profit from that transformation as much as
possible. In other words, he is an exemplar of Silicon Valley ethics.
Levandowski
is upset that some people have cast him as the bad guy. “I reject the
notion that I did something unethical,” he said. “Was I trying to
compete with them? Sure.” But, he added, “I’m not a thief, and I’m not
dishonest.” Other parents sometimes shun him when he drops his kids off
at school, and he has grown tired of people taking photographs of him
when he walks through airports. But he is confident that his notoriety
will subside. Although he no longer owns the technology that he brought
to Google and Uber, plenty of valuable information remains inside his
head, and he has a lot of new ideas."
Justin Fox, Bloomberg;
The Strange Case of Off-Patent Drug Price Gougers:
"There’s a conflict at the heart of pharmaceutical pricing in the U.S.: On the one hand, it’s in the public’s interest for pharma companies to get a good return on the huge investments they often make in developing new drugs. On the other, it’s in the public’s interest to be able to afford those drugs.
We try to resolve this by granting companies temporary monopolies (aka patents) on the drugs they develop -- letting them effectively set the price unilaterally -- but then allowing competition from generic substitutes once the patents expire...
What’s going on, basically, is that a new breed of pharmaceutical company has emerged (Valeant is, or at least was, the archetype) that doesn’t develop drugs but identifies business opportunities in existing drugs --many of them with expired patents -- that the previous owners were too lazy or timid or decent to fully exploit. So they acquire them, and jack up the prices."
