It's good to see a company clearly state that it wishes to prevent counterfeit goods from harming end users, but that SOPA is not the way to address that problem.
Most of the talk from supporters plays up the "counterfeit" angle, dragging in firemen, soldiers, etc. as examples of who could be harmed by these knockoffs, but all of the push is coming from groups who want to shut down piracy at the expense of the internet and who have nothing physical to protect. It's an ugly bait-and-switch. Fortunately, this dodge no longer seems to be working.
It's cool that they published this letter. All that stuff about counterfeiting is not just an abstract concern. Here's a forum thread from early this year about counterfeit biners and ascenders:
> In February, 2011, Petzl did sign on to a letter circulated by the Outdoor Industry Association supporting government action against intellectual property theft via “rogue websites.” That letter made no mention of any specific legislation, and support for it was spurred by Petzl’s own encounter with the problem of counterfeit life-safety products.
Ahh, so that's how they're getting supporters... very shady.
Back in September I sat besides a Petzl employee on a flight into Kathmandu. Petzl had tasked him with teaching snow safety and mountain skills to Nepalis who would otherwise not have access to this instruction.
My guess is that they were training folks on the safety equipment and procedures that Western mountaineers use, so the Nepalese guides and outfitters don't have a culture clash in an emergency situation. The truth is, modern mountaineering equipment and procedure is really good, even if some aspects the traditional mountain knowledge and ways are timeless and extremely valuable too.
Not everyone in Nepal is a guide. All the guys up there are tough as nails, but there isn't much education about safety or equipment. The most advanced tool in a porter's repertoire is a t-shaped walking stick.
Even the Sherpa are relatively recent migrants to the region (~400 years), and the Rai people have only moved into the highlands with the modern demand for labor. By and large they're coming from a tradition of subsistence farming.
As an example, a friend was traveling in the Khumbu last year and his party came across a deceased porter around 6000m. He had presumably been paid off after getting sick and sent down on his own. All they could do was build a cairn over his body.
You seem to be advocating the meme of old wives tales. The idea that things back in the past were very knowledgeable, and that all of modern society with their modern methods aren't nearly as good as ancient traditional folk tales. That's silly, the scientific method, empiricalism, and modern material science has lots to teach traditionalists.
Excellent response. A couple more of these, and the facade might really start to crumble. Support for this thing is non-existent outside of a few very wealthy organizations, and the more reversals we have like this, the easier it's going to be to make the case against it.
This is likely the case with a number of the supporters. It's important to note all the companies who back out of their support -- which is an even stronger signal that not signing in the first place.
I'm glad to see a company that has very little to do with the internet be so affected by the outreach and feel a need to send out this letter. I use Petzl headlamps and they're great. Plus their site runs on Drupal. Petzl is a-okay in my book.
I use a Petzl headlamp when I go backpacking, they make great products. As a side note, headlamps also make great gifts, even for people that won't be using it for outdoor activities. Once you have one you find it can be used for all kinds of things, like when you are fixing something under the sink. I love using mine for reading as well.
And I can speak from experience having owned a few Petzl headlamps and some cheapo no-name Chinese headlamps, or even cheapo Chinese headlamps with Eddie Bauer branding. There's a world of difference. I have a Petzl that's 15 years old and works like a champ.
So I can understand them being pissed about counterfeit goods sullying their good name. Now, I'm a little baffled as to why anyone would buy a $5,000+ handbag, but hey, whatever floats your boat. I can also see where designer labels would be desperate to protect their businesses too.
But that's the thing: there's nothing wrong with a company pushing hard to use the law to protect its business. But since lawmakers are supposed to promote the common welfare, they shouldn't just roll over like obedient dogs. The people need to yell about it until the lawmakers wise up.
I believe that if the law is immoral then there is something wrong with a company pushing hard to use the law to "protect" it's business. How do you feel about companies dumping toxic waste in poor countries where the law says its fine?
The issue of counterfeit products is an interesting one, and I agree completely with them it can even come to be a safety issue with some sorts of parts like climbing gear, and airplane and car parts, all of which have counterfeiting problems which have likely resulted in deaths and accidents.
Rather than ban "rogue" overseas web sites offering such goods though, why not have a central registry where counterfeiters can be reported and consumers can check with before buying.
A lady at work was telling me she was going to buy $1000 french designer shoes for $50 from a discount web site. I pointed out to her it was obviously either counterfeit or a credit card stealing site. That stopped her, but not everyone has someone to advise them on these matters. A reputable site that validates claims, to protect the public, would be something useful the government could do, without also giving it power that can be abused to censor free speech.
I love the irony of Petzl having a problem with trademark law just as we're having these twin furors over copyright and patent laws. Oh, the wonders of intellectual property law. Anyway, just keep in mind that "intellectual property" is a fake thing, it is the superposition of three distinct classes, as follows.
* Patents cover inventions and systems. They hope to prevent trade secret, thus making public knowledge disadvantageous to publish, by granting temporary global monopolies on physical mechanisms.
* Copyright covers creative works. It hopes to prevent art from being un-monetizeable and thus expensive to create, by granting temporary localized monopolies on creative works.
* Trademarks cover identity and brand. It hopes to prevent "brand dilution" (some sort of passive libel, might we say?), thus making trust-based business difficult; it does this by granting infinite namespaced monopoly on symbols and marks.
Patents and Copyrights are temporary: they exist only for a specified period (20 and 100 years are good approximate figures, but the rules are complex) after which the monopoly disappears; trademarks are infinite: they must be renewed (yearly?) but can be indefinitely.
Patents are global: once one is granted, independent discovery is not a defence (though it may help prove that the patent was obvious and thus shouldn't've been granted); copyright is local: once one is granted, independent discover is a defence (though the greater the independent discovery, the more suspicious the claim); trademarks are namespaced: independent discovery and use valid if it "doesn't cause confusion", that is, if the entities trademarked don't do similar-enough things that someone might mean one and get the other.
Thus a (hypothetical) patent on linked lists would make it illegal to use linked lists anywhere, anytime until it ran out, for any reason, and with any (obvious-enough) implementation. One could not patent a poem specifically, though one could (concievably) patent a mechanism of constructing them. One could not patent the Apple logo, though one could concievably patent a particular way of drawing it, or the technique by which plastic is molded in its shape (if this method is sufficiently novel).
One could not copyright a linked list, though one could patent the contents of its cells, and one could copyright the use of a linked list if this itself presented a creative contribution (perhaps a linked list of versions of MS Windows, where linkage underscores the fact that one was based on another). One could copyright a poem, and in fact any creativity-baren modifications (fixing typos, rendering in HTML, a program that prints the poem), though not creativity-requiring modifications (rendering to music, translations, or a literary criticism of it) (all of these might be more or less tenuous depending on exact circumstances). One could copyright the Apple logo, but only if you could argue that its precise configuration is an artistic work, and this would have to be done for every specific variant every: if I made an outline of the logo and filled it in with a cutout of Jobs's face, that would not be covered.
One could not trademark a linked list, unless the linked list was a trademark of my particular trademark or brand; with a lot of twisting the law, one might imagine Lisp trademarking the use of linked lists everywhere, but this wouldn't apply to programs, just other programming langauges (and of course, this is pretty nebulous, trademarks are actually supposed to be quite concrete). One could trademark a poem, if this poem was the canonical definition of your identity, but it'd have to be a short poem, since long poems are too long to read to just be an identity, and it'd only apply to that entity in its field: a plumber, a physicist, and a computer company could all have the same poem as their trademark. Finally, you'd trademark the Apple logo since it is the core symbolic identity of Apple.
So for the issue at hand, Petzl could be concerned about three things. First: someone could be stealing exactly how the mechanism of carabiners, headlamps, and life safety equipment and building atop this idea without paying Petzl due credit. That would be hurting Petzl by removing its competitive advantage it gained from discovering new types of safety equipment. For example, Paul Petzl has patent 5357657 on carabiners; he should be rewarded for discovering the idea and telling the world about it. That patent still has 2 years of life (by my guess), so Petzl might be concerned. But that's not the issue they're bringing up here.
Second: someone could be copying the exact design of their carabiners, something they might consider an artistic form, and copying this art to other people without forcing them to pay Petzl for the privilage. That would make it more expensive for them to produce similar art in the future. However, they might be hard-pressed to argue that the artistic merit of carabiners and similar are what they sell. This is also not the issue Petzl is concerned about here.
Third: someone might be making things that claim to be Petzl things, but aren't, and be thus both stealing Petzl costumers (illigitimately growing his business by hurting customers) and be hurting Petzl by producing inferior product or support, reducing trust in Petzl the entity. This would hurt customers by making trust-based business hard to do, and make it hard for Petzl to pride itself on anything but prices, since everything else it sells (quality, support, practices) rely on being able to identity Petzl products. This is what Petzl is concerned about here.
SOPA (by my knowledge) mostly deals with reforming copyright law, not patent or trademark law. Thus it would do nothing for Petzl (beyond doing the evil we suspect it will to everyone).
Finally, I've always loved Petzl gear (I have use for a good headlamp, and really, who doesn't?), and this is yet another reason for me to support them. Not that they take the default position, but by taking the time to check and publicly state that their "support" was a mistruth at best, a lie at worst.
Just FWIW, from what I've heard from people in the pharma industry, similar concerns over seriously sub-par counterfeit products are why they support legislation like this. It's not so much that they're worried about profits (counterfeit drugs don't hurt revenues by any significant factor for big drug companies), but that people can end up dying because of counterfeit drugs, either because they contain contaminants or do not contain the right amounts of the drugs that they should contain so the conditions end up untreated without the patients realizing. Both, I'm told, have happened in the real world on many occasions.
Not that this makes SOPA any more reasonable, of course, as it will cause a lot of trouble in other areas. But the anti-counterfeiting angle is bringing in quite a bit of support for it, and in many case it really is based on legitimate safety concerns rather than greed.
Surely we can come up with a better technical solution for this!
Currently pharmaceutical companies try to prove authenticity by e.g. printing little holograms on the pillboxes, which is not very effective since pirates can print holograms too. How about this instead:
Each pillbox comes with a little paper which contains a random-looking string of characters and a trademark. It is folded-over and sealed so the contents are not readable. When an end-consumer wants to know if their drug is authentic or not, they tear open the paper, go to a website operated by (say) the US Patent and Trademark Office, and type in the trademark and character string (or scan a QR code). The website says "authentic"/"inauthentic"/"this string was already used".
On the production side, you can set it up so that the factory needs to communicate with a central company server to allocate codes, so you get an accurate count of how many codes are produced and if it matches the amount of drugs manufactured. This way, if an insider starts leaking codes to pirates it can be noticed quickly.
Your talking about people who buy pills of the internet from spam emails. What makes you think "Remember to type in the letters on the government's site to check it" is something that would happen at all?
Fake pills is not a technical problem, so a technical solution is not required. You're just shifting blame to the customer.
Well, I wasn't primarily thinking about the internet pills. In many developing countries (particularly in south-east asia), something like 5-30% of all drugs are counterfeits without proper active ingredients (see e.g. http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7341/800.full). There are many skilled and motivated users (doctors) failing to detect the fakes because the packaging is identical.
Similarly, the rock climbers mentioned earlier in the thread probably would also be motivated to check authenticity?
I find the "a technical solution is not required" comment a bit odd. Spam is not a technical problem either, but we still use spam filters.
To precise, pharmaceutical companies are concerned that bad counterfeits will harm the reputation of their products, which will cut into order volume and profits.
Either way it's a legitimate concern. If you want to produce your own products, sell them under your own name. Counterfeits are piggybacking on the hard work of other people and I have no sympathy for people doing it.
It's interesting that some companies supporting SOPA do so because of sheer cluelessness on the matter. And it's ironic because SOPA will not stop the phenomenon.
I think this counterfeit gear is petzl's main concern though their have been several cases of other companies producing gear that is remarkably similar in design to petzl gear. The new black diamond cobra and fusion closely mimic the geometry of the petzl quark and nomic and many companies have copied elements of the spirit carabiner (black diamond positron, trango smooth). Only the keylock gate was covered by 5357657 and I think it expired recently as I recall a bunch of new keylocks being introduced though those may have been licensed.
I have no doubt, as a consumer, that something made by Black Diamond will protect me while I'm climbing - even if it closely resembles something developed originally by Petzl.
But I would very much like strong protections against fake Petzl gear being imported that may, in fact, kill me.
Trademarks cover identity and brand. It hopes to prevent "brand dilution" (some sort of passive libel, might we say?), thus making trust-based business difficult; it does this by granting infinite namespaced monopoly on symbols and marks.
As a consumer, I want trademark laws are enforced rigorously. I don't want fake goods of inferior quality that can be even endanger my well-being.
Or does anybody want to buy cheap climbing gear from china with Petzl on it?
I hope you check your gear yourself before use and don't trust blindly in any brand name printed on it. And check out alternative brand, too; less expensive is not synonymous worse quality.
Most of the talk from supporters plays up the "counterfeit" angle, dragging in firemen, soldiers, etc. as examples of who could be harmed by these knockoffs, but all of the push is coming from groups who want to shut down piracy at the expense of the internet and who have nothing physical to protect. It's an ugly bait-and-switch. Fortunately, this dodge no longer seems to be working.