Cory DoctorowVerificeret konto

That revelation was about the meaning of the term "IP," which had been the center of this tedious linguistic cold war for decades. People who advocate for free and open technology and culture hate the term "IP" because of its ideological loading and imprecision. 2/

Ideology first: Before "IP" came into wide parlance - when lobbyists for multinational corporations convinced the UN to turn their World Intellectual Property Organization into a specialized agency, we used other terms like "author's monopolies" and "regulatory monopolies." 3/

"Monopoly" is a pejorative. "Property" is sacred to our society. When a corporation seeks help defending its monopoly, it is a grubby corrupter. When it asks for help defending its property, it is enlisting the public to defend the state religion. 4/

Free culture people know allowing "monopolies" to become "property" means losing the battle before it is even joined, but it is frankly unavoidable. How do you rephrase "IP lawyer" without conceding the property point? "Trademark-copyright-patent-and-related-rights lawyer?" 5/

Thus the other half of the objection to "IP": its imprecision. Copyright is not anything like patent. Patent is not anything like trademark. Trade secrets are an entirely different thing again. Don't let's get started on sui generis and neighboring rights. 6/

And this is where my revelation came: as it is used in business circles, "IP" has a specific, precise meaning. "IP" means, "Any law, policy or regulation that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers." 7/

Copyright, patent and trademark all have limitations and exceptions designed to prevent this kind of control, but if you arrange them in overlapping layers around a product, each one covers the exceptions in the others. 8/

Creators don't like having their copyrights called "author's monopolies." Monopolists get to set prices. All the copyright in the world doesn't let an author charge publishers more for their work. The creators have a point. 9/

But when author's monopolies are acquired by corporate monopolists, something magical and terrible happens. Remember: market-power monopolies are still (theoretically) illegal and when companies do things to maintain or expand their monopolies, they risk legal jeopardy. 10/

But: The corporate monopolist who uses IP to expand their monopoly has no such risk. Monopolistic conduct in defense of IP enjoys wide antitrust forbearance. What's the point of issuing patents or allowing corporations to buy copyrights if you don't let them enforce them? 11/

In the early 2000s, Apple was in trouble. The convicted monopolist Microsoft ruled the business world, and if you were the sole Mac user in your office, you were screwed. 14/

When a Windows user sent you a Word file, you could (usually) open it in the Mac version of Word, but then if you saved that file again, it often became forever cursed, unopenable by any version of Microsoft Office ever created or ever to be created. 15/

This became a huge liability. Designers started keeping a Windows box next to their dual processor Power Macs, just to open Office docs. Or worse (for Apple), they switched to a PC and bought Windows versions of Adobe and Quark Xpress. 16/

Steve Jobs didn't solve this problem by begging Bill Gates to task more engineers to Office for Mac. Instead, Jobs got Apple techs to reverse-engineer all of the MS Office file formats and release a rival office suite, Iwork, which could read and write MS Office files. 17/

That was an Apple power move, one that turned MS's walled garden into an all-you-can-eat buffet of potential new Mac users. Apple rolled out the Switch ads, whose message was, "Every MS Office file used to be a reason NOT to use a Mac. Now it's a reason to switch TO a Mac." 18/

More-or-less simultaneously, though, Apple was inventing the hybrid market/IP monopoly tool that would make it the most valuable company in the world, in its design for the Ipod and the accompanying Itunes store. 19/

It had a relatively new legal instrument to use for this purpose: 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act; specifically, Section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" clause, which bans breaking DRM. 20/

Under DMCA 1201, if a product has a copyrighted work (like an operating system) and it has an "access control" (like a password or a bootloader key), then bypassing the access control is against the law, even if no copyright infringement takes place. 21/

That last part - "even if no copyright infringement takes place" - is the crux of DMCA 1201. The law was intended to support the practices of games console makers and DVD player manufacturers, who wanted to stop competitors from making otherwise legal devices. 22/

With DVD players, that was about "region coding," the part of the DVD file format that specified which countries a DVD could be played back in. If you bought a DVD in London, you couldn't play it in Sydney or New York. 23/

Now, it's not a copyright violation to buy a DVD and play it wherever you happen to be. As a matter of fact, buying a DVD and playing it is the OPPOSITE of a copyright infringement. 24/

But it WAS a serious challenge to the entertainment cartel's business-model, which involved charging different prices and having different release dates for the same movie depending on where you were. 25/

The same goes for games consoles: companies like Sega and Nintendo made a lot of money charging creators for the right to sell games that ran on the hardware they sold. 26/

If I own a Sega Dreamcast, and you make a game for it, and I buy it and run it on my Sega, that's not a copyright infringement, even if Sega doesn't like it. But if you have to bypass an "access control" to get the game to play without Sega's blessing, it violates DMCA 1201. 27/

What's more, DMCA 1201 has major penalties for "trafficking in circumvention devices" and information that could be used to build such a device, such as reports of exploitable flaws in the programming of a DRM system: $500k in fines and a 5 year sentence for a first offense. 28/

Deregionalizing a DVD player or jailbreaking a Dreamcast didn't violate anyone's copyrights, but it still violated copyright law (!). It was pure IP, the right to control the conduct of critics (security researchers), customers and competitors. 29/

In the words of @saurik, it's "Felony contempt of business-model." And that's where the Ipod came in. Steve Jobs's plan was to augment the one-time revenue from an Ipod with a recurrent revenue stream from the Itunes store. 30/

He exploited the music industry's superstitious dread of piracy and naive belief in the efficacy of DRM to convince the record companies to only sell music with his DRM wrapper on it - a wrapper they themselves could not authorize listeners to remove. 31/