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Is IP Property?
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent article, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense. According to Lemley, while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society. Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
And don't even think about Elvis' "Lemonade, that cool refreshing drink."
<SARCASM>
Because, after all, if you do play it without paying the RIAA, Elvis won't have any incentive to produce new works...
</SARCASM>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
LOL I hadn't even thought of that but of course you are sooo right!
P2P Killed Elvis
That would be a great bumper sticker, even if nobody understood what it means.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
I don't think this is all that suprising. Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone. Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be. For example, A granted patent isn't valid if there's prior art. How could you apply that principle to say the ownership of a car? I don't think you can. I can smash, steal, set fire to or urinate on a car - I can't do any of these things with a patent! When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense. When someone steal something wealth is transfered atomically. When infringement occurs wealth can be diverted (and that's a dodgy word) away from the patent holder but it's never a transfer from the patent holder directly to the infringer. It's just not correct to call IP property in the traditional sense of the word.
Simon.
You can have them and I dont have to have a patent nor a law to keep them.
What about liberals like Howard Berman? I think it affects both sides equally, as both sides have people willing to take money for whatever cause.
If you look at where most of the support for IP in the form of DRM, media restrictions etc, it is from the liberals with the senator from Disney leading the charge.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
I realize this may not be the case with a lot of open source developers and project members, but in the case of corporate America and entrepreneurs, the financial benefits derived from the protection of IP is a huge motivating factor to its creation.
I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
Again, I realize this motivation doesn't apply to everyone. But it does to me, and many of my heartless capitalistic cohorts.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Where is this "free riding" you speak of, and how do I sign up for it?
And how many of my friends need I enroll?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Hehe, yeah I guess it is redundant. Oh well, nobody will miss him and Slashdork will be a better place with him gone.
A professor claiming that IP is not P at all. And it turns out, businessmen think IP is P. Each side tries to argue their own interest and they happen to be in conflict. Seems like a wash. But one profession is a drain on the economy and does not function to produce a product and the other does. I think I'll continue to side with the people that create jobs and wealth.
I don't think that distinction is surprising at all. Conservatives traditionally call for more government protection of property rights of all sorts, and liberals usually put less emphasis on property rights and more on other rights.
The two sides often disagree on what constitutes a "right," and this seems in line with usual liberal/conservative divisions.
Who owns your thoughts? I certainly hope I do, and that I have full rights to them, and who knows them. I hope they are very protected by the law.
Do you really want the government to say that your thoughts MUST be shared with someone else? That sounds almost like a form of Mind control/Mind reading.
Sorry, count me out.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I'm not buying the liberal/conservative bit. Wasn't Clinton's administration responsible for bringing us the DMCA?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Patents are not required if everyone in society is well behaved.. but when monopolies arise or some steals your ideas patents ARE required..
Unfortunately we live in such a society and patents and IP rights are required. Till we (and that means me too) improve as a society there will always be laws to govern IP rights and patents.
That's not really true. There are plenty of Liberals who support Intellectual Property, and plenty of Conservatives who do not.
Use any definitions you like, but the distinction between Left and Right is moot for IP.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Let's get this correct: True Liberals and true conservitives, both, want less regulation - or alt least, reasonable balances between the public-domain and free enterprise.
It's the self-serving politicians that want more regulation - regardless of their labels.
Remember: it took both a Republican house/senate and a Democrat president to pass DMCA and idea-monopoly extensions (read copyright extensions)
Remember: it was Democrat politicians that were pushing for the v-chip and music labels.
Remember: it was Republican politicians that were being bought by Disney.
Both parties suck.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The claim is partly misleading because the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them. For example, if the bookstore's stock of books were burned, or if the money in the register got torn up, that would really be a "loss." We generally agree it is wrong to do these things to other people. But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" got paid. That is based on the assumption that copyright exists and prohibits individual copying. But that is just the issue at hand: what should copyright cover? If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying. Copying in itself hurts no one.
"...traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
This is why I think the line between conservatives and liberals is becoming obscured. It used to be relatively simple: less government versus more government. Now, with intellectual property and the conservatives looming over the bill of rights in the name of fighting terrorism, I think the parties are primed for a switch. (And don't call me a lib, I'm a small govt. conservative deeply concerned with our rights).
As featured on slashdot before, IP can be abused by a company to own an employee's thought that wasn't even well formed. When you work for a company, do they own your thoughts? Are your thoughts your soul? Does a company own your soul? And does money buy souls?
I once had a signature.
to me it is more interesting that many law-makers want intellectual property treated as 'real' property for certain purposes, yet not treated as real property for others.
if IP were 'real' property it should be subject to value-based tariff when it enters the country. this might keep things like drug research, materials research, heck, analysing radiograms in the US instead of being exported as labor and imported as... thin air.
I'd be much more agreeable to strict IP laws if my 'real' job were treated with the same 'IP is real property' menality.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The Natural Rights Perspective. This section quotes John Locke's Two Treatises on Government, in which he writes:
For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what this is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
The Personhood Perspective. This section quotes Markaret Jane Radin's Stanford Law Review Article entitled "Property and Personhood." (34 Stan. L. Rev. 957 (1982):
One may guage the strenght or significance of someone's relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss. On this view, an object is closely related to one's personhood if its loss causes pain that cannot be relieved by the object's replacement. ... If a wedding ring is stolen from a jeweler, insurance proceeds can reimburse the jeweler, but if a wedding ring is stolen from a loving wearer, the price of replacement will not restore the status quo.
This section also quotes Hagel:
The person has for its substantive end the right of placing its will in any and every thing, which thing is thereby mine; [and] because that thing has no such end in itself, its destiny and soul take on my will. [This consitutes] mankind's absolute right of appropriation over all things.
The Utilitarian/Economic Incentive Perspective.This book covers a few articles/comments here, and gives this summation:
Thus the economic justification for intellectual property [in the US] lies not in rewarding creators for their labor, but in assuring that they (and their creators) have appropriate incentives in creative activities.
Not wanting to re-read the entire book, I remember the following. The origins of all IP dates back to ol' England, when the King granted rights to produce something exclusively (and pay the King money). This became patent law. Trademarks arose in a similar style, the exclusive right to mark a product's source (in exchange for paying money to the King). Trademarks became a lot more important during the industrial revolution. Until then, people would buy generic products from their local market/seller. As goods were transported distances, they needed some sort of identification so that people could recognize them. I forget where copyright comes from (I'm a trademark and patent guy). Basically, the origins of IP law were a method for the King to tax producers, who then could make exclusive money on their goods/products.
socialism and fascism don't go together you dumb fuck! the only fascists are conseratives. People shouldn't have to wait for their rights just because a bunch of stupid fucks are not able get used to a new world!
You are standing on the shoulders of giants. There is no idea in your head that was not influnced by those who came before. They never got their due, and yet you sit around demanding yours. As it is freely received, it should be freely given.
Most people have half formed ideas anyway. They usually need to be finished by someone else. IP slows this process down, and in turn slows down progress.
IP is short for Intellectual Property. I find it interesting that no one cares about the rights of the creator.
I think it goes without saying that since Bush is most likely going to win on Nov. 2 that Michael Simms will commit suicide.
It's about time. Slashdork will be a better place without him.
is an atm machine a machine?
-knowles
A traditional viewpoint on property is that of John Locke as propounded in his "Two Treatises on Government" - He argues that the justification for property is the labour spent in appropriating the property. A herd of deer belongs to nature and to everyone. But if someone hunts one of the deers, it becomes his by virtue of his labour. He has appropriated it.
With IP, the possession is an idea. When can someone say he has appropriated the idea? It is not a body that you can grasp exclusive of everyone. Many people could have the same idea at the same time. In this view, I do not think the traditional justification for possession of property works for IP.
Moreover, in the case of algorithms, should we not consider optimal algorithms as part of nature (the problem has the optimal solution, therefore it is a property of the problem itself.)? Therefore, optimal algorithms should be considered in the class of "discoveries", and hence not "patentable" IP.
In general conservatives tend to want to control or own people as long as it benefits business. But liberals are more interested in letting people do what they want as long as it benefits mankind. This is a dichotomy that will probably never be hurdled.
Un-news
while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society
And therein lies the problem in his argument, I didn't even have to RTFA. He uses the word 'society'.
Of course free IP is better for society. That's why science tends to grow exponentially. (historically, at least -- lately even science seems to be greedy) Mandel didn't horde his findings and keep them to himself -- and now the whole world teaches his experiments in high school classrooms as the foundation for further work -- if his experiments were a tightly kept secret, they wouldn't have become the foundation for anything.
But people -- as individuals, not as a society -- are more interested in personal gain. They want to hold on to their IP for whatever perceived advantage they think it gives them, however brief or delusional. I doubt you'll be able to convince them otherwise. When it comes to ownership, even of ideas, people tend to resort to the five-year-old "MINE! MINE! MINE!" thinking.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I just want to make the point to all you non-lawyers out there that property is not just physical objects.
;)
Property is anything in which you have "property rights". Property rights are a bundle of rights, different for different types of property, that give you some level of legal control over the object of those rights.
Probably most of the property in our society is not actually in physical objects. Consider money. Consider easements, equitable servitudes, usufructs, licenses, etc...
To say that intellectual property is not property is actually blatantly false when you understand what property actually is. To say that inventions shouldn't be the object of property rights, well, now you're at least being honest. (Although, I agree with the previous poster about creative incentives)...
If you go back to the ancient Greece, where they had democracy, look at Plato, look at Socrates: they used others' IP to make their own conclusions. And they were creative alright. Look later than that: Voltaire did the same thing, Nietzche as well. Philosophy wouldn't exist if IP sharing didn't exist. I don't know how people can argue with that. Prove me wrong, I'll do like Socrates and revert your argument.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
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It is saying in India that whenever some one outgrows he/she belongs to whole world. e.g. GANDHI his views etc. no longer belong to India or south asia or Asia. It belongs to whole world any one can use them try them
If you're interested into this kind of things (how IP is a temporary monopoly designed to reward authors without inhibiting innovation) do yourself a favor and go read on some of the amicus briefs sent in support of the Eldred V. Ashcroft case (the infamous Mickey Mouse Amendment). Yes, enlight me!.
Here is a peak
The main economic benefit from copyright protection is to give an author an incentive to create new works. The size of this economic incentive depends upon the present value of compensation, as anticipated by the author at the time of creation. [...] By reducing the set of building-block materials freely available for new works, the [extension of the copyright term for existing and future works] raises the cost of producing new works and reduces the number created.
"Is I P Property?" Well, I know I P Freely, but I don't know about I P Property. I guess I P Property, technically, because it's mine to do with as I please. But when I P, it's property I'm happy to dispose of.
Or did they mean to ask if I P Properly? I like to think so. At least, I try not to miss. My young son still has a ways to go before he really gets the hang of I P law.
What did I eat for breakfast? Pea Green Soup.
What did I eat for lunch? Pea Green Soup.
What did I eat for dinner? Pea Green Soup.
What did I do all night? I P Green Soup.
(I got a lot of Karma yesterday, so I feel the need to burn it today. Thank you for this opportunity.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
And misguided war in Europe.
Hell. Clinton was a Republican.
Liberals historically have distanced themselves from government. ->John Locke
I have no idea why american conservatives with social democratic tendencies are labeled liberals at all. :)
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So then, what does all this crap actually mean? I'm guessing it all builds into some ascii art somehow, after following all the links and pasting them into some text editor. I tried this but it didn't work. Apparently it's not goatse guy, which I find surprising for some reason.
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
I thought that originally patent law was supposed to protect the individual inventor, to give them time to make some profit off of their invention rather then having to compete directly with companies that already had the resources/retail connections/whatever to produce his product, profit off of it, and leave him sitting there wondering why he bothered having the idea in the first place.
I concede that the recent flurry of corporate activity concerning IP has turned it into almost a corporate owned environment because they finally realized they could pay people to sit around and think up ideas for the company, thus pre-emptively getting rights to the IP instead of that employee getting the full rights...
Plus there is the fact that now individuals are running into stonewalls trying to create their own products (whether or not you make a dime, it is still a product) based on technology that is considered to be someone's IP.
I grant that IP is a terrible title for patents, copyrights, et al, and the corporations are running amuck with the current laws, but I fail to see how abolishing the laws that protect an individuals invention from corporate theft is really good for that individual. Yes it leads to a more open society in that there is no protection for inventions, etc, but at the same time it also means that inventors have less (read: no) incentive to continue inventing products, or if they do invent them there is no incentive to release them. At least now they are released (under protection for a time, then for all) fairly quickly. With nothing to look forward to but Big-O'l-company taking the idea and turning it into their next product line, why would individuals bother releasing it to the world at all? And if there is no incentive to the individual to create new ideas, how is society freer?
And also realize that doing away with IP rights (such as patents) does not necessarally affect the big corporations heavily in terms of patents. In fact, I think very little would change for corporations because they can always fall back on trade secrets while still screwing the little guy that invented something in his garage and has no such protections.
Saying that getting rid of IP would suddenly make a freer society is short-sighted. The commentary that various political parties weigh in stronger on one side of the argument then the other is less than meaningless without knowing exactly how the question was asked and who was asked. It boils down to opinion and FUD, ie "Democrats want a freer society and care about you and me, Republicans want a closed society and don't give a damn about you unles you own a corporation"...without getting to deep into politics, I think the recent antics by politicians on both sides of that fence tend to show they both care most about who is putting money in their pockets...
Whee signature.
"Conservatives suck!"
"wooyay +5!"
"Liberals suck too!"
"Dont talk about that here, asshole! Save it for another forum."
teh?
They both want government regulation. They just happen to want regulation for different things. To say that one doesn't and the other does, is just plain ignorant. Now as far as liberal vs conservative on IP regulation, that's a tough nut. There will always be people from both sides of the fence that will want some sort of regulation because it's not just the wealthy who come up with some "great ideas". They just happen to be the people that can make the ideas happen and hire lawyers to enforce the "regulation" of said idea.
-Randy
Calling any data "intellectual property" is already buying into the idea that information can be owned. Information is not based in the material, and any concept that treats it as a singular entity, such as a chair or car, is flawed. Singular entities require ownership, because they are scarce and can only be in one place at one time. When we can start making chairs and cars with replicators, then come talk to me about aligning physical property laws with how we treat information - not the other way around.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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If there had been a 10-year long "Newton vs. Leibniz" patent lawsuit?
What if one of them had gotten a patent?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Sorry, posted the wrong link. It should be this.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
For example there is a famous incident in which Gandhi, in trying to promote local cottage industry, went to the sea to make salt, thereby violating the patent that the British crown had given to some company, which had a monopoly for all salt production in India. This was portrayed in the excellent movie "Gandhi".
The only kind of "ip" which has existed from ancient times are trade secrets. Those aren't really property at all, because simply telling someone else makes it not a secret anymore.
It's only recently that trade secrets had any kind of legal protection: US state trade secret law only disallowed getting the secrets through nefarious means, but explicitly permitted reverse engineering. Trade secret protection wasn't meant to provide any kind of monopoly. There were patents for that, and the government preferred patents because they require the inventor to fully describe the process of making the product that's patented.
The DMCA was the first law in the US that outlawed any form of reverse engineering.
The US Constitution allowed for Congress to:
But even this didn't create the concept of intellectual propery, it was more intended to be a limited grant of monopoly to help stimulate the economy of the young United States. I don't think that the concept that inventions and copyrighted creations were property existed yet. Did Congress intend that such monopolies could be bought and sold like land could? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure.I discuss this in more detail in my piece Change the Law, and also have some extensive discussion of what you can do to change things.
If you feel as I do that more people ought to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
Thank you for your attention.
- Mike
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Well, you could do like Walter Russell Meade, and think of all Americans in terms of Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, and Jacksonians. Unfortunately, this only covers foreign policy, not domestic; I'd love to see similar treatment in the domestic policy realm.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Imagine if Newton had patented gravity. We'd all float off into space!
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
That's why it's called Intellectual Property. Guess what? Both IP and physical properties are only owned (property) because the laws say that they can be. Hence there is really no difference in terms of ownership between IP and physical property other than copying someone's IP (potentially) devalues the IP, but you cannot copy physical property.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The claim is partly misleading because the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them. For example, if the bookstore's stock of books were burned, or if the money in the register got torn up, that would really be a "loss." We generally agree it is wrong to do these things to other people. But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" got paid. That is based on the assumption that copyright exists and prohibits individual copying. But that is just the issue at hand: what should copyright cover? If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying. Copying in itself hurts no one.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
If you don't want people to do whatever they want with your ideas, never let them outside of your head. Simple as that.
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be.
I posted this before but a clueless moderator is trying to silence me:
If you can't put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Like the air that we breathe, it belongs to nobody and everybody. The only reason that there are IP laws is because we have an economic system based on slavery (labor).
A good system should be based on property not labor. The land (earth) has been around for billions of years. It does not belong to anyone in particular. It should be divided among families for an inheritance. It should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for our children and their children.
What will we do when robots and AI replace everybody, i.e., when human labor and expertise become worthless? Neither capitalism nor communism will do since they are both based on labor. Always demand liberty, nothing less.
you pry it from my dead cold brain.
"/Dread"
-- Slow Down Cowboy? I'm on a roll!
In a recent article, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense.
I thought we all already knew that.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
"...in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Hollywood must be quite the bastion of conservatism, they way the MPAA is fighting for stronger IP laws. And it is also interesting to hear that the Right has strong conservatives like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Bill Clinton (signer of DMCA and Copyright Extention Act) on their side.
Interesting theory, but no. On this issue, there are good guys and bad guys on both side of the aisle, and which position they take has more to do with who they represent and where they get their funding than how conservative or liberal they are.
That's right. I'm a troll. Too bad.
I fully agree. While material property is firmly rooted in nature, because of the scarcity of material goods, IP is a purely artificial and ad-hoc concept. It might be acceptable for pragmatic reasons, but in no way questionning its fitness to a particular technological era amounts to questioning the concept of property in general, as some proponents of the status quo would have us believe.
Those who would abandon the concept of intellectual property should, I think, fully explain how society would (or could) continue to encourage the taking of risk to produce innovation. Let me propose two examples for consideration:
The problem of longitude
In the 18th century the biggest technological challenge of the age was the question of longitude--how to tell where you were at sea. In a particularly grim demonstration of this, Commodore Anson's fleet (of the British Navy) sailed east instead of west in search of fresh provisions, only to realize their mistake after almost a week of sailing in the wrong direction. They buried almost a hundred men a day from scurvy while they retraced their steps to find Juan Fernandez Island.
Dava Sobel's magnificent book Longitude describes the technological challenge, and the decades-long struggle the inventor and his family fought to claim the prize that was offered. The inventor died in poverty--while others rushed to market with copies of his invention. Parliament was finally shamed into awarding the money, but only after he'd died.
The question: without a substantial financial incentive, the guy would have kept making wooden clocks. Given the fumbling and stumbling around (and outright deceit) by the authorities, the inventor probably should have kept making wooden clocks.
The Ansari X Prize
Hey, we're on SlashDot. Everybody is watching Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites as they race into space. In theory they are propelled by the Ansari X Prize. In practice, they have already spent more than they'll earn from the X Prize. Paul Allen has plowed upwards of $20 million into the project--and might get nothing if somebody beats the Scaled Composites team to the prize. Absent a financial incentive, why should Paul Allen, Burt Rutan, and the rest of the team pursue this?
Learn the lessons of history
Historians have debated for centuries about why the Industrial Revolution began when it did, in England. An important precursor was a substantial rise in farm productivity--but the widely-acknowledged "tipping point" was the establishment of intellectual property laws. Up till that point anyone who figured out a better, faster, cheaper way to weave cloth or spin yarn would enjoy a momentary advantage over his competitors--and could be instantly crushed by a competitor with more available cash (who could thus implement the innovation faster). Once IP laws were in place, the inventor had a huge financial incentive to bring that invention to market, or simply to publicly disclose it. The results are undeniable: the Industrial Revolution spawned an unbelievable amount of technological innovation that has continued at an ever-increasing pace until today. Confined to those countries that have solid IP laws. Countries that do not have solid IP laws in place generally see no technological innovation at all--and when their countrymen do come up with something, it is only after they move to a country with strong IP laws. (To draw an extreme example, don't look for breathtaking pharmacology discoveries from Zimbabwe anytime soon.)
At the end of the day...
At least for Americans, talk of abandoning IP laws is kind of pointless. It would require a change to the U.S. Constitution, which is unlikely in the extreme. If any other country were so foolish as to abandon IP laws--hey, go right ahead. One less competitor for us to worry about....
That is a fascinating and underexplored train of thought. What will happen when everybody has sufficent? You can bet that those on top won't like being on the same level as the rest of us. I don't see AI replacing expertise and truly original thought. Indeed, (even after reading Godel, Escher, Bach), that is the one spot that people can do better than others. Talk about real upheaval when gold is a trivial item! Not that this Asimov-type future is very close, but have that many people given thought to what will happen? Just sci-fi writers I suppose. This would be a fundimentally different society. Will society be graded by intelligence or at least diplomas as opposed to wealth? Or will it be Hollywood popularity and political power? The parent post was not flamebait, in my opinion (for what little that is worth), but points out a fundimental flaw in our system and where the logical end takes us. Fantastic, and incredibly scary. I think I will look forward to it.
You cannot patent an idea (such as flight), but you can patent an invention that uses that idea (such as the Wright Brothers' flying contraption). Per Locke, you cannot protect the idea of hunting the deer, you can protect deer once you've hunted it, and have it for yourself. You can also protect new items for hunting deer (guns, scent sprays, bombs, etc).
An "optimal algorithm" is not a mathmatical theory, constant or the like (unpatentable.) It is a process that actually does something in a stepwise manner- presicely what US patent law covers.
There are many artists who barely make enough money from their 'intellectual property' to scratch out a very modest living: freelance writers, most novelists, most musicians. How are they supposed to make a living when you copy and steal their art, their IP? With no income from their art they'll be reduced to working in McJobs and have little time for creative work. Eliminate IP and you will greatly decrease the number of people who can afford to spend their time being creative. On the other hand I care nothing for the rights of evil corporations such as Viacom/CBS, AOL/Time Warner, Disney/Miramax etc.
What are the real arguments regarding why intellectual property should be taken from the originator without consideration and be owned outright by the community? Why should only the people who work for material property be fed while the originators of the ideas that will keep us alive in this uncertain future and innovate every aspect of our lives not be fed? With present conditions of wealth polarization it is not unforeseeable that only a few individuals will soon own almost all the material wealth of the planet, but should they also have free access to the all people's ideas as well? In other words, why should a genius of a person who has, by their own gifts, constructed all the ideas required to protect this planet and guarantee a better future continue to volunteer their time only to plunge themselves into the lowest economic strata just because they dared to create a better world? Why should IP creators bother offering those ideas to the world - when what they can expect in return is for these ideas to be used oppressively back against themselves? Why should a genius who envisions and builds the best open source project be kept in a lower financial rank than a general menial laborer? This is what is happening isn't it? The people who own material wealth rule with few in touch, pragmatic, compassionate, reasonable, or brilliant ideas at their disposal and the geniuses are left to fend for themselves in reduced capacities - working through the night for the benefit of the world - only to be trespassed upon and further impoverished health wise, socially, and financially for the effort. Until we have strong intellectual property rights and stronger open source property right agreements we are doomed to be ruled by the most materialistic and meglomaniac of the bunch rather than those most innovative, giving, considerate, and gifted.
Isn't it mostly a distinction between Avarice and Idealism for IP?
It seems to me there is plenty of both kinds of people on either side of the political spectrum.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Liberals and Conservatives are diametrically opposed on two axes. If you go to lp.org and find the "world's shortest political quiz", they describe the right an left as something like this:
Liberals want high self-governance for personal matters but low self-governance for fiscal matters.
Conservatives want low self-governance for personal matters but high self-governance for fiscal matters.
That's why people stereotype Liberals as being amoral socialists, while Conservatives are morality police who want you to keep the money you earn.
So.... that's why the comment about the stances of the right and left aren't at all 'unusual'. This is a money issue, so the liberals want to open it up and share intellectual assets, while the conservatives want individuals (and corporations) to have full control over their own assets.
[NOTE: Those who want high self-governance on both personal and fiscal matters are called "Libertarians", while those who are low on both are called "Authoritarians".]
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
What a load of bullshit. Look at the guest list at the Democratic convention; it's almost all Hollywood types. Liberal, Hollywood types. The Democrats are in the pockets of the RIAA and MPAA far more than the Republicans, nor surprising given that the Democrats rely on large corporate donors for most of their funding (don't bother trying to dispute this before you visit opensecrets).
The SuperDMCA in this state was pushed by a Democratic house member and a Republican senator. On the federal level, most of this shit legislation has been pushed by Democrats, such as Fritz Hollings.
Acting like it's those stupid conservatives is so stupid it's not even funny. And no, I'm not a conservative.
But this shows why I'm also not a liberal.
Do you have ESP?
What else did you think IP stood for?
Is that your face in the picture?
What would happen if, say, Nifty Larry's Foodstuffs, Inc., patented the concept of the hamburger?...
.
Sure, there's prior art, but sometimes things like that go through the patent office unnoticed.
Suddenly, if Burger King wants to sell hamburgers, they have to license the patent from Nifty Larry. The same with McDonald's, Wendy's, Rally's, B-Bop's, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., and pretty much every other restaurant in
Some small restaurants, like Phil & Marvin's Diner along Route 42, might not have enough money to license the hamburger patent, so they have to stop selling hamburgers. If that was one of their main entree's, then they might even end up going out of business.
And what about Free Food projects? For example, a tri-county little league baseball cookout, where they want to give away thousands of free hamburgers to the players and their families? Oops, that would be in violation of Nifty Larry's patent. The little league folks could license the patent, but then they couldn't afford to give the hamburgers away for free. Some people might still buy their hamburgers if they thought they tasted better, but others might decide to buy from Nifty Larry's, because they are a well-established hamburger seller, and most everyone else buys hamburgers from them anyway.
It even affects home users, because they hear all sorts of legal talk in the news about hamburger patent wars. They wonder if they are allowed to make hamburgers at home or not. They wonder if they are allowed to buy hamburgers from smaller establishments, because they might not be legal. Fear of eating anything but Nifty Larry's hamburgers starts to spread amongst the uninformed.
So tell me, should the hamburger be patented?
There are three different accepted definitions of "liberal" in a political context, and countless definitions of "conservative".
Most of the people using either term seem to use them as diminuitive slang for "Democrat" and "Republican" in a U.S. context -- so why not use specific language instead?
As for what "liberals" or "conservatives" "traditionally" call for, that's a futile approach to analysis because all three terms are relative and subjective. So-called liberal and conservative positions on issues today would not be regarded as either 20, 30, 50 years ago. Go back far enough, and they'd be equally regarded as statist/fascist.
P.S. As far as the topic is concerned,
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Thomas Jefferson (a traditional liberal conservative)
If IP is property, can I shoot someone for port scanning me? Claim tresppassing or something like that.
The single worst offender of the past 15 years on internet laws has been a Democrat: President Bill Clinton, who signed into law the Sonny Bono copyright extension, the DMCA, and the CDA. He was the single person in the best position to stop these laws, and he signed them into law.
As a pragmatist, this makes me wary of electing Democratic candidates until I see evidence that they plan to stand up for my civil liberties.
Oddly enough, the only person I've seen stringently taking a stand for online civil liberties is that old conservative Republican with whom I disagree on just about all other issues, Jesse Helms.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
He stole my Ideas on Intellectual Property!! I'll sue his ass off!
IMHO, the problem is that the US does not have run-off elections. This means that it is effectively impossible to have more than two parties. Anyone who votes for a third party that isn't likely to win can't vote between the final two candidates.
Further, the inaccurate rounding that is done by states that don't have split-elections (which is most of them) exaggerates the problem.
And don't call me a lib, I'm a small govt. conservative deeply concerned with our rights
Face it, you are a lib. A lib-ertarian, that is. As "liberals" have drifted from liberty-oriented values toward the "liberal" government spending of socialism, libertarians have reorganized classical liberalism under a new name. Where do you stand?
For example, if I own one Toyota Camry, I'm happy because I'm on wheels. If I own two of them, I still feel richer. If I own three of them, I feel richer. If I own 500 of them, I open a couple of dealerships and I cash out on them. I'm linearly as rich as many Camrys I own and there is no limit to that.
However if I'm granted the right by the 20th Century Fox to watch the original star wars trilogy, by owning the DVD for example, I'm richer that if I didn't have that right, but I'm not interested in getting that right one thousand times.
But while I can own virtually any number of Camrys , I only have a limited movie watching bandwidth, that is I can only watch that many movies. Having the right to watch more movies tha n I can actually absorb is worthless.
So there you are : material goods have a scarcity on the supply side, and no scarcity on the receiving side. It costs much more to produce one thousand cars than one, but one individual can enjoy receiving as many car as available to him. Intellectual goods have a scarcity on the receiving side : people's bandwidth is limited, but no scarcity on the supply side : it does not cost more to grand one thousand licenses than one.
I've a 10 year career as a software engineer. IP laws cause more problems and prevent improvements in the platform than it helps. I've had arguments with management about the technically correct solution, but was blocked because the lawyers say it's too risky. Consider Eliptic Curve Cryptography - great stuff, but a patent landmind.
You don't need IP laws to make money off of your work. You just need to do it in a different way. For example, sale hardware and services. The software development is paid for in that it is needed by the other.
Normally, when people refer to 'traditional' or 'classic' liberals, they're not referring to progressives, but libertarians. Classic liberals are the liberals that no one seems to vote for (with the exception of myself and some other 'rejects from a star trek convention' as Jonah Goldberg (I think) once said). Many are arguing the along neo-classic progressive/conservative split. Libertarians seem to be stuck in the middle (or nowhere in the case of the electorate)
You mean except for this part?
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
*IP* patents?
We're discussing IP law here, not the invention of an automated waffle iron or a machine for producing novelty clown noses.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
In what way does this professor argue his own interest?
And in what way is he a drain on the economy?
emt 377 emt 4
Perhaps those who freely offer their IP are more forward-thinking people/groups, who want to foster creativity at all levels, whereas those who try and protect their IP with legislation and legal inuendos do so to keep them on top, while keeping others beneath them in the pecking order of life.
A good example is Microsoft's recent patent achievments... They're (unfairly) acheiving patents on some very low-level, basic system processes and procedures. Everything from tabbing through a web page to how you administer your system. They aren't doing this to protect the purity of their IP so much as to keep "the little guy" down.
It's been argued by many better than I that Microsoft is stifling global development and innovation with their questionable tactics and patents. I think this article illustrates quite clearly why this shouldn't be allowed!
Microsoft was born due to both the creativity of it's founders, and their marketing/business savy. I think it's quite clear that Microsoft's trying to ensure that no one will be able to (legally) unseat them from the top of the mountain they've built. Not financially, but intellectually.
Think about it... You can build a car if you have the right tools and parts at your disposal. But if Ford says "Hold it! You can't use a wrench, or any threaded bolts or screws as those are items we've invented and patented", then your car isn't going to look or perform anywhere near the levels of those who were able to use bolts and screws during their build times. True, you might innovate in ways they hadn't dreamed of due to these restrictions, but more than likely, your invention will never be able to achieve its potential, nor will it perform or be accepted into a market that's already saturated with similar, well-built cars with easily added removed parts that are held on with threaded fasteners.
Or maybe it's this Dayquil I'm on... I probably shouldn't be hypothesizing when I feel this shitty. 8)
You, of course, own your thoughts. But do you own the words you utter? Do you own the vibrations in the air that reach others ears. Can you take those vibrations back, or inflict your will on others to tell them 'pretend you did not hear that... those are my words, not yours.' Are you going to reach into someone's mind and rip out their memory of the pages you typed and showed to them?
Abolishing IP law is not about forcing you to lack ownership of your thoughts. It is about admitting that you MAY NOT control the thoughts of others, by telling them what they may or may not create. IP is about controlling other people's thoughts, telling them what portions of their knowledge and experience they may or may not use in their own creative endeavors.
Once you make your creative works public, it can be argued that you lose the right to control how others use that work. Similar to how people who put their lives in the public eye, like elected officials and movie stars, have little recourse in libel and slander... perhaps people who put their thoughs in the public eye should have little legal recourse on the ownership of those thoughts.
Food for thought, IMO. I am not saying I wholly agree with abolishing IP, but I can see the ethical appeal of such a change.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
"What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work."
Isn't that the same motivation for the creation of physical property? If "doing it for the love" is a good enough reason to abolish "copyright and patents"? Isn't it a good enough reason to abolish compensation for physical effort?
"I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP."
I think it would be fair to say that a utopia would benefit mankind. However we don't live in a utopia, and having an idealized vision of "sharing" will not work.
Also many talk about "sharing" but how many of it's proponents are for truely unlimited "sharing" (I suggest everyone think that all the way through).
Also while "IP" isn't property in the physical sense, it has to have a physical embodiment in order to be "shared" (yes talking to another person has a physical component). It has other property properties. Property has value. So does IP (wouldn't be much point in "sharing" something valueless.) It takes time and effort in order to be embodied. So does property. It can be given away. So can property. You do lose in part the use of physical property when given away, but you do retain the memory of it. That in itself is yours and can influence you in the future. Much like IP. Can it be destroyed? Well look through history that all the IP (broad definition) that has disappeared from societies consciousness. Much like property.
In all the above, regardless of the definition of "property". I don't think it's a proper way to run a society. Having one side saying to the other "I don't have enough respect for you to honor your wishes". That trancends any kind of "definition".
That is a great example of tautological reasoning. At best it is a circular argument.
Property is that which you can hold and keep.
You cannot keep an idea.
You can keep property.
If IP is property, then tax it. Abandonment laws should apply. Squtters rights should be appliccable.
As someone else pointed out, IP owners want it as property sometimes and not in others.
One might think that we're stuck with these laws because right and wrong doesn't change with time or technology, right? Wrong.
I attended a speech last week by Larry Lessig and he brought up the Causbey case from the 1940s. Back then "property" extended from the Earth to the Heavens, so if your neighbor's fruit tree had a branch that hung over your property, you could either cut it off, or pick the fruit.
This started to be a gray area with commercial flights. A group of farmers in North Carolina brought suit against some pilots for trespassing by flying over their property. The case made its way to the Supreme Court who ruled that "common sense revolts" at the idea that an airplane flying over your property was trespassing.
Well, common sense also revolts at, as Lessig put it, the "insanity" of copyright and other IP law. The only difference is that the people protecting IP law are a lot better organized and funded than the farmers from North Carolina.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Because the laypeople on /. are a small fraction of the population. When was the last time you heard a report on recent supreme court decisions when you weren't listening to NPR? Now how many people get their news from NPR?
Part of the problem is the masses and the news media. Things that affect the lives of many (or could, or that they could care about) go unreported on television becuase they're not good enough for the ratings.
And what people don't know about, they don't complain about.
Cheers, Matt
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
Yes, they may pescribe 1) the manner in which marriage shall be proved, and 2) the effect of that marriage.
1) Are they going to declare that there's no way to "prove" a marriage in which the state makes publicly available its records - or that they can only "prove" some of the records (despite both same sex marriages and opposite sex marriage data being publicized in the same manner)? That would be a hard sell, especially given equal protection.
2) The effect thereof. Again, quite a hard sell under equal protection, if the state treats both same sex and opposite sex marriages the same.
Note also that congress is not given the right to *forbid* full faith and credit - only the right to determine the details of implementation.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "government" but the reason we've gotten to this state is because this one faction doesn't want any government at all. On one hand you have the ones who are pro-IP, they use the government to pass laws that work for them. On the other hand you have the ones who are for more freedom, they don't want the government to do anything. Guess who's winning?
The problem is that the pro-freedom faction isn't using the government for their own benefit. Instead of saying "no laws" they should be pushing for laws that clearly state the limits of IP ownership, the limits of filing frivulous lawsuits, etc. Look at Canada, they have rules clearly stating not only what can't be copied, but also what can be copied, not many silly lawsuits by the Canadian recoding association...
Yes, Canada has a levy. And that is the choice Americans must make: pay a little more for government support and get involved to pass laws more suited towards individuals, or continue to whine and get shafted by laws that remove their rights more and more.
Is a peeping Tom doing anything illegal? They take something that has no physical reality (a view of someone who does not know you are looking) and use it to pleasure themselves. What's the harm?
The question 'Is IP property?' is welled formed. The subject of the sentence is 'Intellectual Property'. Is it 'property' is what the writer wants to know about IP.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If the Slashdot community could answer collectively, that would be the reply.
Yeah, mod me down if you want to... you know I'm right!
Leaving aside society's opinions of how to treat IP, I'd like to know your opinion (as an IP attorney) about the inherent contradictory nature of artifically treating information (of any type) as property. As a layman, I would think that "property" must be a limited resource that one can control access to. In nature, something that can be reproduced or accessed for little or no cost has little or no value, and artificially placing a value on it doesn't change that fact. This disparity bothers me to no end. I don't even want to get started about the travesty of allowing something like a "business model" to be patented...
In my opinion, information itself has no value (though perhaps access to it does). The real value in most information lies in how it is used. Until we develop an economic and social attitude that is harmonious with this concept, we'll continue to waste countless amounts of time and money arguing over who really has rights to the air we're breathing.
Please, do enlighten me...I want to know how I'm being naive.I find it interesting that no one cares about the rights of the creator.
The rights of the Creator include the right to ban gay marriage, as expressed in Leviticus 20:13 and elsewhere in scripture.
RMS says don't use "creator" to mean what copyright law calls an "author".
Political divisions are based in small part on their opinions and party, and based in large part on who sends them the most political contributions.
Real liberals who don't run for federal office tend to fall in line with that sentence. Politicians always follow the money in the US and that's neither liberal nor conservative.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Almost forgot - I also wanted to point out that I'm against most government intervention, skeptical of regulation (mostly federal), etc. I'm also for restricting the executive power of the President (which is part of the Texas Republican platform document), against most federal taxes since I made around $2.5k one summer as a student, and had to pay almost $900 in taxes, in cash (the self-employment tax got me), and I had a small salary then, but right now I haven't worked since december '02 - guess I'm one of the rich, huh? ;) My ideals are extremely close to those of Alan Keyes, so if you study him and people like him, that's pretty much how I am.
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
I don't think this is all that suprising. Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone.
Conservetives believe one of the legitimate purposes of government is to protect private property. This is good for corporations, small business, individuals, democracy, and freedom in general.
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be. For example, A granted patent isn't valid if there's prior art. How could you apply that principle to say the ownership of a car? I don't think you can. I can smash, steal, set fire to or urinate on a car - I can't do any of these things with a patent! When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense. When someone steal something wealth is transfered atomically. When infringement occurs wealth can be diverted (and that's a dodgy word) away from the patent holder but it's never a transfer from the patent holder directly to the infringer. It's just not correct to call IP property in the traditional sense of the word.
Your argument about IP not being real property is an irrelevant one. So what if IP isn't physical matter? The rights to control IP have intrinsic value. The creation of IP usually requires investment - time, money, material. IP rights exists because governments realize that temporary exclusive rights to IP encourages innovation. In other words, people engage in creative behavior because they want their creation to create something of value for them. It is unlikely people would invest their capital in a creative process if there was no guarantee that their original idea couldn't be used by someone else (someone who made NO investment) for free.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Since IP, both copyright and patent, are really temporary monoplies and not pieces of property, they should be non-transferrable. They should belong to whoever or whatever (individual or company) created them, and not be able to be sold or traded.
The "owners" can still license their creation in any way they want, but they can't sell it like a car or land. Also the claim to the IP dies with them.That seems to me to be the most equitable way of giving what is due to creators while stopping the IP land grab mentality in use today.
Since it is a legal privledge given by government, not a tabgeable object or title to such; why should it be able to be bought or sold? That goes against the original purposes of patent and copyright.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
If IP is not property, then howcome I have to pay to read the darn essay?
_ id =582602
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract
Why does everybody seem to think that, with weaker or no IP laws, nobody would pay for creative works to be made? If IP law disappeared, would companies suddenly not need software written? Would people suddenly not want artwork to decorate their homes, or songs to listen to? Would people no longer be willing to pay for this?
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
IP? Internet protocol? I own j00 TCP/IP... ACK!
/yes, I'm joking, I know what IP is re: this article
while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable,
Sometimes it is. When I the only means to deliver a dying man to the hospital would be by stealing somebody's car, I wouldn't hesitate.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Both Democrats and Republicans are conservative. The term "liberal" has turned into a contentless profanity flung about from one side to the other simply to provide a convenient derogatory label.
The US leans so far to the right that Democrats seem liberal. There is really hardly anything to distinguish either US political party other than paying lip service to some ineffable ideology like "family values."
Most of the calls for social reform come from true liberals such as Eben Moglen and Noam Chomsky, people so far outside the conservative mainstream that they are labelled "radicals," and therefore automatically wrong.
The Democrats and Republicans just have different masters. There is very little real difference.
But I'm still voting Democrat.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
enforcement being a chief one. how do you tariff what is ostensibly random FTP traffic, or what could be co-workers chatting on the phone about the latest cricket scores as much as what they think of the radiogram?
in the end it is about importing labor. not goods, not IP. but labor is not something which can be measured too accurately, and would be self-reported even less.
even so, such a measure would perhaps give corporate boardrooms something to think about when they are weighing the issue of outsourcing.
right now they are getting something for nothing by outsourcing -- large stockholders are (almost rightly) pushing for outsourcing to happen, as the labor savings can be quite large. right now the only pushbacks are things like quality, customer service ratings, and so on. if there were tariff cost pushbacks there could be some interesting discussions.
for example, if Ford wanted to outsource construction of its cars to Korea, the boardroom discussion would involve shipping costs, import duties, and so on, which eventually outweight the labor savings in some cases.
but if, for example, Ford wanted to outsource design or materials engineering of its cars to Korea, the boardroom discussion would not involve shipping costs, import duties, and so on. The primary discussion would be quality of designs and labor costs.
MORTAR COMBAT!
From page 37:
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Although I know /. is almost violently anti-capitalist and anti-corporate to a fault, it needs to be said: IP laws have their place and can be beneficial to society so long as they are not abused. I will illustrate this point with a bit of example and a dash of history, and unless you're a frothing zealot, it would behoove you to read on before knee-jerking that "mod down" option.
/. would like it that way, but reality has a tendency to intrude on such Utopian Worker's Paradises.
IP laws exist so that researchers and developers of new things can do their researching and developing with a reasonable expectation of being reimbursed for their time and efforts. Sure, the system gets abused, but that's more due to the overly-legalistic culture of the U.S. and the woefully-outdated patent system in this country, not because IP laws are a faulty concept.
Let us assume I am a multinational drug company researching a cure for cancer. I employ hundreds of researchers and doctors along with their thousands of assistants, accountants, network administrators, and janitors needed to support them. This headcount is not free; these people expect to be paid, and pay them I must if I want them to work on the cancer cure.
Now let us assume I (being the head of the company) spent $20 billion over five years researching this cancer cure and finally succeeded. I'm now $20 billion in the hole and have to find a way to recoup my costs. Society now has two options:
1. I can use IP law to protect my research and my creation, selling the cure and recouping my investment with the profits. Or...
2. With no IP laws, a competing firm can immediately copy my cure and, having not spent a dime on R&D, can vastly undercut my price and prevent me from ever making back my $20 billion investment.
In scenario 1, the world gets a cancer cure, I make back my investment and modest profict, and my company goes on to develop the Next Big Thing.
In scenario 2, the world would never get a cancer cure. Why? Because no company is going to spend $20 billion developing anything if it can't be assured of making that money back!. Any research project or invention requiring any significant amount of investment in order to bring to fruition simply won't be done. Why should it? After all, you do all the hard work, someone else makes all the money, you get nothing. I'm sure the socialists, communists, and anarchist who make up a significant fraction of
Now, I'll be the first one to admit that IP laws have been taken to unhealthy extremes. Instead of being used to protect companies that take risks on long-term research projects, it's being used to lock-up potential avenues of research and squelch competition. What's needed here is tort reform, not a dissolution of IP laws.
A few centuries ago, around 1791 to be exact, France tried a little plan of abolishing patent laws. All the "people" thought it was such a great idea. After all, all these nasty, evil, wicked companies were just making beaucoup bucks off the backs of the noble, kind, honorable, downtrodden working classes. "Why work to feed a bunch of fatcats?" they thought. So, out went the laws, and in came Utopia.
Only it didn't work. Companies ceased to innovate in France. Instead, they left France and went elsewhere. Unemployment skyrocketed, invention stagnated. The poor got poorer than ever. The middle class evaporated. The upper class pulled up stakes and went elsewhere. After a bit of this, the laws were changed back to something more intelligent, and things recovered, but for a while the "workers" got a real taste of what they'd wrought, and it wasn't pretty.
The moral of the story here is IP laws are necessary, and anyone claiming otherwise is living in a fool's fantasy. You can despise the company you work for, you can despise other companies because of their patents and ridiculously-complex and overreaching copyright statues, but
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Your Rights Online: Is IP Property?
Posted by michael on 11:10 09 September 2004
from the bundle-of-sticks dept.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations
----------
Did Michael just call conservatives faggots?!?
faggot
n. Offensive Slang
1. Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.
fagot also faggot
n.
1. A bundle of twigs, sticks, or branches bound together.
2. A bundle of pieces of iron or steel to be welded or hammered into bars.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
Fixating on the word "property" is a mistake, taking this discussion in the wrong direction.
Invariably, someone asserts that IP is equivalent to "ideas" and that it is wrong/unethical/immoral to claim ownership of ideas.
I assert that entire line of argument is pointless. By its nature, an idea cannot be owned. An idea exists only as a thought confined to someone's brain.
However, works of intellect are not ideas. They are physical entities that use symbols to express and convey the information, the story, that the work's creator is trying to convey to others. Yes, those symbols express an author's ideas, but they are not ideas. The ideas remain in the mind of the author and, perhaps, in the minds of his audience.
So, therefore, if I write a book, the file or manuscript that is the single existing copy of that book belongs to me. Society may or may not benefit from exposure to that book, but society has no rights of access to it unless I, as its owner, transfer those rights.
The same applies, of course, to any such work -- music, sculpture, painting, etc. At some point, each work exists as some sort of a single physical entity that is owned, exclusively, by the person who made it. All rights to that object are vested in that person. No one else can legitimately access that work unless its owner transfers the necessary rights to them.
None of this has anything to do with ideas or access to ideas. To cite an extreme hypothetical example, if I conjure a formula for immortality and write it down on a piece of paper, I can do whatever I wish with that piece of paper. I can make millions of copies and drop them for airplanes, post it to Slashdot, or burn it and never tell anyone.
The counter to this argument requires explaining how rights to an object can move from that object's creator to someone else without that creator's sanction. (Such rights cannot move to "society", which is only a useful linguistic construct. They must move to one or more specific individuals.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Me and my mistakes.. ugh
"but certain ones like that one sure do."
You know what I meant:
Some of the P&T shows lack lots of evidence and credibility, but certain ones like that one sure don't.
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
The problem is, they were into the whole "IP is property" scam since day one (go read Atlas Shrugged for an early example). It used to figure more prominantly in their platform than it does at present, but it was one of the main reasons for my disenchantment with them (toning it down is good, repudiating it would be better).
The path they seem to be following (slowly) is the realization that "IP" is actually a government created monopoly, which they would on priciple oppose, rather than a natural property right, which they would on principle support.
-- MarkusQ
...weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
In the case of the invention of television, which was in effect (weak vs. strong)? what was the result?
Conservatives believe in big business because [generally] they believe "when the tide comes in, all the boats float". - an underlying philosphy of supply-side economics.
Liberals sort of believe whatever is good enough for the people is good for everyone. They believe when people are due what is coming to them - it's likely the government's responsibility to dole it out to them. And because there is corruption, graft, mismanagement, and just plain errors and miscalculations, the government needs to be large enough to compensate for all of this. - a gov'tl form of supply-side economics. Once it's big enough, everything will trickle down to those it is due to.
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IOW, both Conservatives and Liberals believe in monolithic bodies and good things trickling down to those not a member of the monolithic body (the members inherently are rich, creating a plutocracy - as a side note, it's a strong reason why the politically strong prefer to avoid term limitations and also prefer to keep things such as war chests, franking privileges, special pensions, etc. in place, claiming a vacuum would occur should they vacate their position). It's just a matter of which body spills the goodies. For Conservatives, it's big business. For Liberals, it's government.
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As far as patents go, Benjamin Franklin, the great man he was, believed patents had no place in reality. Those who contributed great things to society would be known & recognized by the things they made and their work would be purchased by those who recognized the true inventor|owner.
"freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society."
Yes, I'm sure given the billions of dollars required to develop prescription drugs, and the relative ease required to copy these drugs to produce generic equivalents, in a world without IP, there will certainly be a huge influx of money to develop prescription drug ideas that will immediately be stolen. Hell, regulating prescription drug prices in Canada and Europe has alone caused a lot of investmnet in prescription drug development.
If you didn't notice I was being sarcastic.
Vote for Pedro
The phrase "IP" covers patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, and other things, too. All of these have vastly different legal structures, some of which are more or less like property. The collection of IP laws in the US have the following characteristics which make them very different from regular property laws:
The bottom line is that IP grants the holder a limited monopoly over some intellectual creation. The creators of the various IP laws wanted to balance the evil of a monopoly with the good of encouraging people to invent and create. Real property, however, grants an unlimited monopoly on the property owner. I have an absolute monopoly over who can use my property. That's what property is.
So in some ways our legal system treats IP like property (registration of title) but in some o
It isn't absolute. Absolute property is defined by being physical property, unique and in your possession. No one can deny the existence of that property, although they may deny your continued ownership of it (communists, thieves).
Intellectual property is artificial. It doesn't exist in the real world. It exists only because we allow it to exist, and (currently, at least) grant it the status of absolute property, supposedly for a certain limited period of time. Under the Constitution, the ONLY reason for the existence of artificial property is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention that copyright is to be used as an absolute guarrantee of profit, nor does it say anywhere that anyone has a right to profit. Profit doesn't enter the equation, except indirectly, by allowing an inventor or creator time to ATTEMPT to make a profit, if he or she so desires.
All arguments concerning copyright and the 'right' to profit are pure bullshit. The Constitution never mentions a right to profit, or the right to make a profit from copyrighted materials. That right doesn't exist. Many people here and elsewhere seem to (deliberately) be confusing copyright with a right to profit that does not, and never has, existed. That includes profit which is dressed up in the doublespeak known as 'lost sales'.
The sole purpose of copyright is to spur development by allowing an inventor or creator a LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME to get the jump on potential competitors. Current copyright laws, while they may fulfill the technical definition of 'limited', are ridiculously long. The copyright has been extended several times to keep works of art which belong to certain powerful corporations out of the public domain, and for no other reason. This directly contradicts the purpose of copyright as defined by the Constitution, even if it doesn't violate the letter of the law. But it seems that the purpose of a law means little these days, and it's only the actual wording that counts in court.
It's rather clear that extending copyright to an absurd extreme does nothing whatsoever for the public welfare, and is designed solely to protect the profits of a few vested interests with the ability to buy Congressmen through bribes (colloquially known as 'campaign contributions' or 'a weekend in Tahiti with a teenage hooker'). But it's gone even farther than this, in that copyright laws are being used to prop up outdated business models in the face of advancing technology, an attempt to put a halt to that technology altogether. Copyright laws are being used as a weapon AGAINST innovation in a vicious, winner-take-all fashion. If the RIAA, MPAA, Disney et. al. have their way a number of new technologies would be banned from the United States altogether.
That's what the most serious issue is. It isn't about a 'right' to profit, which doesn't exist, and it isn't about the 'rights' of authors or musicians or movie makers, who only have the rights we feel like granting them when it comes to artificial property (re the Constitution). The biggest issue is that current vested interests are using whatever weapons they have at their disposal (or 'encouraging' Congress to create new ones) to slow down or put a complete halt to a variety of new technologies. They are, in fact, doing their very best to cripple innovation and impose a form of stasis over the entire American economy (with the help of a whole lot of other businesses who are doing the same thing by abusing the patent system) so that they'll remain at the top of heap, forever, secure that the government will destroy their competition for them.
Whether or not you happen to agree with free market principles (I'm a libertarian, so you can guess my take on this whole sorry business), the only logical outcome of this tangled mess is that America will no longer be a leader in technologica
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It doesn't break down to Libral or Conservative. You are correct in that IP isn't property in the normal sense, however it can be benificial to protect in certain cases. Copyrights and patents are intended to add value to a concept and to get it into the public. Let's say that a company spends R&D money (read: pay employees and other companies who also pay employees) to develop a better way of making widgets. They would never spend so much money if they couldn't get a return from it as well as a competative advantage. Without patents, companies would be less likely to innovate, and more likely to throw entry-level employees and natural resources at it. Competition and IP go hand in hand. Company B sees what Company A is doing, and spends more R&D money to create a better way to make their brand of widgets. Now, here's where things go wrong. Pantents and Copyrights do not expire based on the expense and effort put into them. Laws around them are constantly being extended. Example Company A files a patent for Super-Widget which took their janitor 1 hour to develop. Company B files for one on their Uber-Widget which is more complex and hence took a team of people 20 years to develop. The same expiration period for both. Now on copyrights, joe blow writes a top 10 pop-ballad over a cup of coffee in a night, publishes it, and 15 years later, the record industry can sue little Suzy 10-year old and her grandma for $10,000. There has to be some kind of balance. Sure, a more talented band could make more than that on the rights to the song, but People are trying to get a higher value for an idea than the idea is worth in the first place. It's just not as simple as saying "Strong IP laws favor the big companies - weak IP laws favor the little guy more" BS! I don't see Sheryl Crow and Metallica campaigning for Bush. (As info corporations are people). I think copyrights come down to this. Is there a value to a song or book? If there is value, then there is marketable IP. I don't care if your the RIAA, a record label, or a starving musician. Now what the value is and how to price it I think is where all of the debate is centered. Just don't give me that crap about Liberals care for people while Conservatives only care for corporations. Greed exists in any party. (I'm talking about you Fritz!) People usually only see 2 possibilities 1. eliminate copyrights and patents or 2. Keep it the way it is. My gripe is that we should develop a better system of patents and copyrights. Perhaps a peer review process for patents, since the USPTO can't seem to understand the concepts of obvious and prior art. Also, expiration dates should closly reflect the reasonable (not incurred) R&D costs. A company doesn't need to be able to push out an expiration date just because they research something poorly. Find the balance between rewarding innovation and the benefit of releasing patents and copyrights to the public domain.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Nope.
IP should only belong to its creator and/or inventor. When the lone geek invents something and accidently dies, corporations might store his stuff on DVD and make insane absurd profits out of a dead man/woman's IP. Certain corporations go as far to lament the complete branch of expertise with a dead persons work. For a society its unacceptable.
So when the creator/inventor dies , his works and IP should go into the public library, except if his will describes otherwise.
If the corporation created the IP by themselves, the corporation owns the IP and is valid as long as the corporation lives. If the corporation is taken over, a special ruling board should decide if the merger of take-over does not mean IP is being destroyed , intentionally or unintentionally.
Bottom line for me : IP should never be allowed to die or get jailed into someone's office drawer.
Robert
sometimes, jokes bomb. what do you want me to say? i paid the karmic price. i'm okay with that. i'll probably also lose a point or two pointing out that "welled formed" is not particularly well formed.
-knowles
What is owned? If something is owned, it has an owner. That owner is the sole possessor of that thing, and the only one who can control its use.
But in order to be controlled, a thing must be able to be controlled. That is, someone is able to limit how many people use the item. To use IP, all you have to do is know it. If you know Darth Vader is Luke's father, you've got IP from George Lucas. If you paid money to him for letting you know it, you haven't used the IP, you've used the medium to communicate the IP.
Of course, if you figured out Luke is Vader's son without paying, you don't owe Lucas anything. You didn't use a medium that he controls to get that knowledge.
Until we can bill people for knowing things, IP can't be considered property. The medium is property, but the information on it is not, since it's just thoughts.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
American govt has a LONG history of taking especially good care of the property of the rich. This goes all the way back to the slave/indentured servant days.
American govt has really always been about enTITLEments. Those who have lots of property have coerced the govt to let them have property enTITLEments. They feel they are enTITLEed to special privileges over those who have no property.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be. For example, A granted patent isn't valid if there's prior art.
There's another reason why one can argue that IP isn't 'property' in relation to its specific subject, e.g. the invention.
That reason is that the rights over the specific subject (effectively given to the rights-holder by the definition of what constitutes infringement) don't in sum add up to a property right over that specific subject (and never have, and should not). (For example, the patent owner doesn't actually _own_ an infringing specimen that falls under the patent, he gets certain rights to protect his trade, but that is different from ownership of anything.)
What the 'IP' owner's rights really add up to is a trade privilege over the specific subject (or, as the Germans quite descriptively call it, a 'protection right' -- Schutzrecht). (The bundle of rights is of course in itself an object of property, in that it can be sold, licensed, etc. but that is a different thing from saying that the specific subject, e.g. the invention itself, is the subject of a property right as opposed to a trade privilege).
It seems to me, now, that one strong reason why the expression 'intellectual property' has become so popular to describe the trade privilege rights conferred by patents etc is that it is useful for propaganda purposes when lobbying legislators.
It is easy, when you say 'my property rights need to be made more secure' to get an answer 'oh, yes, of course they should -- let us pass another law to make it so!'.
But if on the other hand you have to say 'my trade protection rights or monopoly privileges should be extended' then it is not nearly so obvious that the answer should automatically be yes. On the contrary, it is immediately much clearer, when the question is put like that, that there should be a policy of balancing the interests of the holders of rights with the interest of the public generally. If that happened, it would IMO be a good thing in the cause of saner legislation.
So I would applaud any effort to get 'IP' re-named 'trade protection rights' or something more accurate than the label 'IP' for denoting what the rights really are and what they do.
-wb-
"The generation of a copy by someone external to the copyright holder reduces the demand for the work. "
Bingo! Although people are going to make a snappy come-back about "consumerism not being a zero sum game"
"Your third claim, that the copying in itself hurts no one, that the loss is based on the assumption that copyright exists is rather mixed up to me. I don't think that the majority of the world has copyright systems because of some conspiracy of some elite few. We have copyright systems because when a person sits down and thinks about it seriously for a bit, they realize that the loss of the individual right to copy things wantonly is outweighed by the drop in production of new and good content."
Note when confronted by the above. Mention patronage and use the "back in my day" defense.
The problems with patronage is that you're simply swapping one set of controls for another.
The other is that while people have been creating before IP was formalized. It accelerated with the creation of IP laws. Also the "back in my day" ideas were more along the "two plus two" level. Something present day copyright and patents already address.
The orignal article (buried several links in) is 58 pages long. How the heck did everyone read it so fast so as to post comments so quickly? Oh, right, the adjunct to the Slashdot effect.
Gummy bears are not really bears.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
I don't think this is all that suprising. Traditional liberals tend to believe in property redistribution, and traditional conservatives tend to favor property rights.
The apparent reversal is simply that with physical goods, more government is perceived as the way to take goods from their creators under a cloak of legitimacy, while with intellectual goods, more government is perceived as the way to prevent "taking" goods.
"...and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."
I find it strange that he argues against copywrite, and yet the first footnote in his writings is his own copywrite. Given that the person immediately following him in the Stanford Law faculty directory is closely associated with a well known intellectual freedom license, I would think that he'd consider practicing what he preaches.
One of the trends I've noticed is that many of the people who advocate against the concept of intellectual property are the ones who have little or nothing to lose from its abolishment. (Yes, there are obvious exceptions, Stallman et all.) In this case, Lemley has little to lose - he has a nice position as a professor, writes $100+ textbooks that are a small enough market that there's little interest in trying to take the niche from his publishers. And yet, he still grabs for the very same rights he argues against.
> "Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Seriosly, what creations?!? Conservatives and intellectual!??!? Creationism maybe?
Lemley makes the grand mistake (made so often by people arguing for an "IP-free state") of making this statement:
In a market econonomy, we care only that producers make enough return to cover their costs, including a reasonable profit . . . . so long as the price stays above marginal cost producers will still make the good."
This is true for a mature product. But we're talking about invention, which implies innovation, which implies risk.
Lemley uses the example of a copy of "Hamlet". If the actual production cost of the book is $5.00, how much should a producer be allowed to make? What is a fair profit? 20%?
Now, say that the product isn't a book. Let's say it's a pill for cancer patients. The pill costs $0.30 to produce (that is the "marginal cost"). Still think 20% is okay?
Lemley would ignore the fact that this company spent billions of dollars on the research that led to the cure, in addition to billions of dolloars on ongoing research that never leads to a cure. How do they afford this? They have shareholders who are willing to take a risk: let's spend billions of dollars, and maybe we can get a return on our investment. Lemley says that "rent ['unfair' profit] seeking behavior" is "socially wasteful." Nothing could be further from the truth. Rent-seeking behaviour is the essence of entrepreneurship, and it is the very behavior we should encourage.
The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward that is required to make entrepreneurs take that risk. Any academic who uses the rhetoric of "covering costs, plus a fair profit" should be summarily ignored. Entrepreneurs do not take giant risks and invest in the creation of world-changing technology for "a fair profit."
The stuff you create, whether physical or intellectual, should be yours, and you should be able to do what you want with it, at least for some period of time. If it is in your interest to release your property under the GPL (as it most certainly is for some companies and their software assets), you should be able to do it. If you want to be the Grinch and stuff it under your mattress, you should be able to do that, too. For the good of the world and everyone in it, entrepreneurs should be allowed and encouraged to seek profit. And "zero-sum", "profit is wasteful", "you-should-only-have-'fair'-profit" academics like Lemley should be dismissed.
If IP were like property, maybe one could get squatters rights to IP they've been using for years but no one ever told them to get off of. For example, maybe you're using this image compression format that you think no one uses or cares about for years, but then all of a sudden, some company comes along and claims they have a patent on it. You'd be able to tell them to piss off.
Is there an I.P. Freely here? Hey, everybody, I.P. Freely! -simpsons
If I expend personal resources to develop a piece of "intellectual" property, why should I give away the fruits of my labor - or worse yet, why should I let others take it away? I could instead have chosen to direct my resources elsewhere, for a better chance of getting a return on my investment. Lemley's anti-property rhetoric seems far less compelling than the judicial system's long-held stance on IP.
Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense
Not to mention the fact that, as Larry Lessig points out in his most recent book, the "property" is the copyright or patent, not the protected work itself. Funny how "IP" attorneys so frequently pretend the distinction doesn't exist.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I wish I could post this to the story text. Many of the commenters are mininterpreting the author's use of the term "traditional liberals" as "Democrats", when he actually means a Von Mises "liberal".
Well I tried standing on the shoulders of giants, but since the motivation to develop growth hormones was taken away. I had to stand on the shoulders of midgets instead.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Makes sense to me!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
IMHO I don't think IP should be considered property. Unfortunately, "property" is defined by the dominant regime. In our case, capitalism defines property as something being owned by an owner, lawfully acquired under the dominate regime's justice system. Arguments about what property is will always fall back into this trap, because the dominant regime will define property rights as it sees fit, until it is is challenged to do otherwise. Usually this challenge comes in the form of a large-scale transformation (ie. agriculture -> mercantilism / monarchy -> aristocracy). I think it will take a big change in to get us to the point where we break away from seeing "lawfully acquired things" (be they etherreal or physical) as common goods.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
I agree completely that the current election system is very screwed up and that it is effectively impossible to have more than two parties. Many of the current problems like the continual worsening of IP laws are unlikely to improve under the two-party system, where both sides have effectively sold out to big business lobbyists. However, much better than simple runoff voting is a related method called Condorcet voting: electionmethods.org. This link is well worth a read and I think it is what we need. Urgently.
So... if the argument is being made they are not property, that means the are property in the traditional sense at the moment? If so, then logic would have it that it's also possible to adversely possess a stolen copy of Doom3... Didn't learn that in my copyright class now... Interesting.
Since the concept of private property has for the most part been eliminated from American life.
Think about it, ever since the advent of "property taxes", you have no real property rights, all you really do is lease from the gov.
Don't believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and watch what happens. Do you get compensation from the gov after they sieze your "property"? No, and according to the concept of property and the Constitution, you should. That is the end of the idea that you actually own something here in the USA.
Later...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
There should be a clear distinction between ideas and goods/products based on those ideas. The matter with IP is that, the property owner has surely based his work on someone else's ideas. Trying to ride with a pure innovation is forgetting the work done by others, before the innovation. Ideas should flow free, but the products based on those ideas can be sold for cash.
The existence of "property" depends on the others agreeing that such a thing exists. In a true anarchist viewpoint, it may be proposed that property even of physical objects doesn't exist (or is shared between all -- see LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" for an example).
I believe that property is an (extremely useful, effective and irreplaceable) intellectual concept, but still just a social convention. So, I don't agree with your viewpoint that there is an "absolute property".
I do agree with your other points though.
Ture, that a "loss" from copying by someone that would have never paid a penny for the item is only a virtual loss, and not a real one, in terms of money.
But one of the concepts of property, is the right to do with it as you want -- the right of "control" - which is irrelevant to money.
Is trespassing across a vacant lot really a "loss" to the property owner? I live in a state where I (the property owner) own the beach to the waterline of the Atlantic Ocean. Is someone sitting on the sand above the waterline "harming" me? Do I suffer a "loss?"
The answer is yes. See Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U. S. 374, 384 (1994) ("[T]he right to exclude others" is " `one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property' ") (quoting Kaiser Aetna v. United States, 444 U. S. 164, 176 (1979)
Infringing the right of a property owner to exclude others (this that do not pay for the right to use the property) is indeed a loss.
The difference in IP and other property is that IP rights (copyright and patent) have limited terms, recognizing the need to reward creative efforts with LIMITED exclusivity voer the invention but balancing with the benefit to society by that right not being perpetual.
The question is thus one of what is the proper time frame. That answer may change witht he type of right protected, the type of use, etc. Those are subjective judgments, but don't affect the premise that IP rights, regardless of whether the property involved is tangible or not, are important rights, not for just economic reasons.
Since IP stands for Intellectual Property, then the natural answer is yes, since the word property is in the term being used.
Maybe the real question should be, is Intellectual Property the most appropriate way to refer to ideas? The term as it stands now simply implies property and ownership.
I'm not here to say what the term *should* be, but I just thought it was somewhat silly to ask whether a term that *has the word property in it*, is really property. Of course it is, because that's how "IP" is defined. Change IP to some other term, and that question becomes more valid, like asking "are ideas property?".
Just my $0.02
Re: your sig.
Tell that to Janet Jackson.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
noun: a legal right to use and derive profit from property belonging to someone else provided that the property itself is not injured in any way
Would you rather see J.K. Rowling making billions of dollars off the Harry Potter books, or would you rather see her still trying to make ends meet as a substitute teacher while single-handedly raising her daughter, and only writing in what little spare time she has because "IP wants to be freex0r!" Same goes for Mike Mignola, Neal Stephenson, or whatever other successful author you want to blow. Unlike the current problems with patent law, IP law IS still working, and encouraging people to believe they can make a living as an author/artist/whatever because there are laws protecting their creations.
IMHO, the problem is that the US does not have run-off elections. This means that it is effectively impossible to have more than two parties. Anyone who votes for a third party that isn't likely to win can't vote between the final two candidates.
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) has the same problem, it's just obscured.
More precisely, under IRV voters can safely vote for a third party, but only as long as that party has no chance of beating either of the major parties. If the third party grows strong enough to risk knocking out one of the major parties, then voters run the same risk they do under the current system. Why?
Suppose there are three parties, the two major parties and the up-and-coming Libertarian party, whose growth has been permitted by the implementation of IRV. Most of the Libertarian voters were drawn away from the Republican party, and still prefer to vote Republican over Democrat. So, they vote L, R, D, indicating their first preference is Libertarian, their second is Republican and their third is Democrat. As long as the Libertarian party is weak, their ballot ends up, effectively, being "R, D", but if the Libertarian party grows enough and draws enough support away from the Republicans that it actually *beats* the Republicans, then their ballot becomes "L, D". But the Libertarian party hasn't grown enough to actually beat the Democrats, so the voters, by choosing to put a Libertarian as their first choice, gave the election to the Democrats, their third choice.
The way Libertarian voters can avoid giving the election to the Democrats, of course, is by voting Republican over Libertarian, just as they have to do in the current system.
What's particularly pernicious about this failure of IRV is that third parties are most likely to grow in strength in exactly this way, by siphoning voters away from one of the major parties, and it is likely therefore that the first major party the newly-powerful third party will beat is the one its members are most sympathetic to.
A good argument can be made that IRV is actually worse than our current plurality system, especially because of its failure of the Monotonicity Criterion. It's failure of the Summability Criterion is also painful for large-scale application. In practice, I think it probably allows third parties to grow more than plurality voting does, which helps them get their viewpoint across, but it doesn't really help them to actually break the two-party lock.
If you're going to endorse a better voting system, you should really go for Condorcet, which is as close to a perfect voting system as is likely to be created. If you think Condorcet is too complicated (I don't), then you should favor Approval Voting, which is simple and more accurate than Instant Runoff Voting.
Condorcet is better because it attempts to fully account for all of each voter's preferences, but Approval is almost as good, and much better than Instant Runoff.
For more information about the strengths and weaknesses of different election methods, look here.http://electionmethods.org/evaluation.html#SC
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yes, "intellectual property" is property. Hence the "property" in "intellectual property".
--Slashdot. Stuff for turds. Stuff that splatters.
Actually, common-law jurisprudence says no. In real estate law, there are statutes governing adverse possession, wherein a party that has continuously used land as if they owned it for a period of time may obtain title to the land, regardless of any previously existing title. The traditional justifications are that land use is better than land disuse, and that otherwise it can become prohibitively troublesome to discover the title holder of a piece of land that has undergone many changes of title, some of which may or may not have been entirely legal.
Given the lengths of copyright terms, the poor documentation of copyright transfers, and the tendency of most copyrighted works to fall out of use after a very brief time (journalism providing an extreme example), it requires no new thought to see where similar statutes might benefit copyright law.
If only it were easy to define when a copyrighted work is no longer in use.
To my mind it has less to do with the times than with Mulrooney. The most hated PM of the last half of the twentieth century, and his cynical appointment of the abysmal and inept Kim Clark as his sucessor, single handedly destroyed the Canadian Conservatives. I'll always fondly remember, shortly after the federal election that swept the Liberals to power, having dim sum in Ottawa at the table next to the remains of the federal Conservative Party. And his wife and kids.
I can just see it... Intellectual Property in 2050... the personal "ownership" of individual ideas:
"Today I'm going to Wal-Mart. That's my idea for the day. When I arrive there, if I see anyone else heading there, I'll either charge them royalties or sue their asses off in court for infringing on my idea. It was my idea in the first place, so I own it. People should make way for me in the streets too, and show respect for my unique and ingenious idea." - John Doe, year 2050
That's also similar to how the current patent system is (especially with tech-related issues). Thomas Jefferson wrote a wonderful paper on the problems with claiming ownership over ideas (it was mainly about patenting ideas instead of inventions). If John Doe in 2050 designes his own type of modified car that automatically takes him to Wal Mart, then he would at least be more closer to an "invention" than an idea.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
"...'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable..."
This statement is not true. Free riding is not always undesirable. In fact, free riding built much of the early American frontier, a number of Lima, Peru's neighborhoods, areas in Cairo, and many other areas of the developing world. In the case of the American frontier, the land belonged to the US Government and was completely undeveloped until settlers, dissatisfied with their lives elsewhere built cabins, planted crops and began to establish townships. In Lima, Peru, a similar dynamic was in place, with the exception that the people were moving from the countryside to the city. An excellent book on this topic is Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital, or, if you'd like a more detailed look, check out De Soto's The Other Path.
These examples could, however, support Lemley's thesis, since these people essentially took a resource that was not being utilized and made it productive. Taking someone else's idea and making it productive and of benefit to others is probably in most cases a good thing, which should be supported.
Bureaucracy loves company.
This is the most creative troll I've seen in a while. Kudos.
Nope. The "collective wisdom" is that conservatives want less government, but it's not quite true. I'd re-phrase it this way: they don't want to pay for government unless it protects their interests. I learned this the hard way, while working at a bakery 20 years ago: we had a machine that allowed us to dump in eggs by the dozen. It would then spin them really fast, thus cracking the shells, which were held up by a strainer, and then dumping the eggs' contents into a container for the bakery to bake with. Nifty idea, and kept us from having to buy pre-packaged, less-fresh, already-shelled eggs.
Until the owners of the businesses that sold said already-shelled eggs noticed. They, in turn, called up their (republican) congressmen, and screamed that they were losing profit. So, under the guise of "protecting the public's health" [despite the fact that NOT ONE SINGLE CASE of disease/sickness was reported], a law was passed outlawing the nifty egg cracker.
Needless to say, there are zillions of parallels to this lesson in IP-land, deCSS-land, etc. Sadly, it's not just the republicans who stand behind larger gov't to protect interests: the dems are just as bad with the DMCA as the republicans. Just one of the reasons I'm an independent.
how is it different in terms of technological or other intellectual property situations. if a person doesn't have the right to protect and profit from the fruit of their own labor then WTF! and yah it happens to be Big Bad Corporations(TM) who are pusing this, but to be fair (and I HATE to be fair) it is the BBC(TM)'s who actually produce the lion's share of 'stuff' which is protectable. In this case good IP law, (like good copyright law) also helps the shmoe who's writing in his unheated garret, or coding in his parent's basement.
yah free stuff is good, and there's a case to be made from the rightness and goodness of said free stuff. But if i write a book, or invent a widget, i wanna be the only one who makes a buck off of it and not have some knob tell me that that i should give it away.
Should I really? and are you gonna pay my student loans off which i incurred while studying my chosen field? or my rent while i wrote/coded/invented? or my groceries? no you're not, I am and i deserve the right to recoup and perhaps profit from it.
intellectually speaking, yes.
PCB#@
free ipod and free gmail!
"while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable."
He is pro-property rights!!! I am sure the Realtor association would be very happy with the above statement. What is ironic is that he claims librals are against IP ownership but fails to mention that it is the real librals who are also against property rights for real estate, and it is conservatives that fight for land property rights.
anyway i guess he gets away with it by calling the librals traditional librals....hell as a libratarian this defintion encompases me...as much as I hate to be called a libral.
stendec@gmail.com
If a prospective lawmaker comes out and says that copyrights should expire after 3 months. Every news outlet and publisher would be calling for his head. He could not get enough paid advertisements to counter that bad press.
I don't think that there's any problem with the concept of IP ownership. Everyone on the planet agrees that the "inventor should get credit". What's missing is a good concept of intellectual property valuation AND a perpetuated misconception of how easy it is to freely give IP away.
Managers will have you believe that your ideas are both miniscule and inherent in a team effort. They have devalued your personal intellectual property and encouraged you, on a personal level, to freely give it away. In many cases, electing to withhold your own personal intellectual property (holding out for a better return) can lead to an adversarial atmosphere that the employee will never win. There is no valuation of your personal intellectual property in your employee agreement except to say, should you have any, the company owns it.
Corporations will have you believe that the products of their IP (pharmaceuticals, cars, music, software) are infinitely valuable and that they retain all rights to that IP for all eternity.
Maybe it's only obvious to me, but this is a classic game of "crapper tennis". Look left, look right, look left, look right... never notice what you're actually doing. What are we actually doing? We're being encouraged to freely share the products of our labor while being legal hamstrung to pay the asking price for someone else's labor. This sets up a perfect circle where the people best suited to profit are the people handling the money, not the people who are laboring. The people who handle the money are, by definition, the people who have the most money.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
all those liberal book authors won't mind when people copy their books freely and profit off of their work. Non-protection of IP discourages 'creativity' because it destroys one's ability to profit from one's own creative work. Without that profit, no one could make a living on their work. This article falsely assumes that the only ones creating things are corporations. What about writers, musicians, artisits, and everyone else who works freelance for themselves. Should we let them create and then give others the right to copy and profit from it? If that happens, I don't think we'll see anything being created since no one will be able to earn a living from their work. Non protection of IP is Communism.
So, IP is not P because the effects are undesirable? Man, it's really frickin' hot in San Diego right now, I guess the sun must not be a burning ball of gas and plasma, because the effects are undesirable.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government
"Traditional" liberals have always been calling for less government, in this and all things. I think the poster should have left out "traditional".
while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
Another misspeak. If IP is not P, then conservatives don't have a 'right' whose protection is required. By saying they're protecting their rights, the poster has conceded victory. I'm all for rights, myself.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
Quote:
How do the implications of my approach differ from the externalities/free riding argument I rejected in the previous section? The critical difference is that intellectual property law is justified only in ensuring that creators are able to charge a sufficiently high price to ensure a profit sufficient to recoup their fixed expenses. (pg 35)
That is, the creators are able to profit from their ideas.
I dunno, my IP changes all the time. Oh wait, we're talking about intellectual property? Never mind... (****ing abbreviations)
Republicans and conservatives do not equal the same thing.
There are many types of Republicans just as there many types of Democrats.
Let's apply your example to the topic, but add actuality to it:
Republicans ARE for LESS government and would rather have people who KNOW what they are doing in charge. This is oftenmiscontrued as protecting interests.
In this case, Republicans want intellectual property protected because that is in agreeance capitalism. It's not about control or what can be afforded.
Democrats, on average are for more government. The concept of no intellectual property is actually socialist and would fit in with the generally social program agenda of the Democratic platorm.
Democrats don't base anything on cost, they take the expense right to the taxpayer.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
First, while many people confuse copyright and real property, the law doesn't. Buy land and you can own it indefinitely as long as you pay the taxes. Write a book and your ownership won't last longer than your grandchildren. (Yes, it lasts too long, but it does come to an end.) In law, it's not property in that sense and never has been.
Second, copyright laws don't restrict the flow of ideas in a "free and creative society." As any book on copyright will tell you, you cannot copyright ideas, only the words in which an author garbs them. If I come up with a clever idea for reforming our health care system, you can publish it in a bestselling book and get rich off my idea. The only flack you'll get is if you fail to attribute the idea to me and that's moral not legal.
Third, it's dumber than dumb to claim that liberals want less government/regulation of copyright and conservatives want more. The Hollywood entertainment industry is perhaps 90% liberal and wants nasty copyright enforcement. And the majority opinion rejecting Lessig's challenge to the recent 20-year extension of copyright was written by the Supreme Court's most liberal justice.
In the real world rather than "Michael's World," copyright is an issue that has little to do with the right/left divide. For instance, both the ACLU and Phillis Schafly's Eagle Forum opposed copyright extension. Money predicts attitudes better than ideology.
And for what it's worth, I have the equivalent of a Purple Heart to prove I oppose overbroad copyright laws. I fought the Tolkien estate for over a year in Seattle's federal court to win the right to publish Untangling Tolkien, the first-ever chronology of The Lord of the Rings. I know all too well how lawyers abuse copyright laws. Their lawsuit began with a demand that all copies of that book be destroyed and I pay them $750,000 in damages for a book that had not even been published. But in the end, the law vindicated me. The judge, bless her very liberal heart, dismissed their lawsuit "with prejudice." You can find it on Amazon.
Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien
Our rights are NOT only those spelled out in the bill of rights, but are everything else, not granted to the federal government. Read the 9th and 10th amendment.
Article [IX.]
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Article [X.]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So, yes... you have the right to a TRY to make a profit. That does not GAURANTEE you WILL make a profit, but you have the right to TRY, as it is not enumerated as being given to the Federal Gov., nor is the right to profit prohibited by the states, therefore, it is a right, retained by the people.
"In 2004, CDs are subject to the same "breakage" reduction. How many do you think actually break?"
Well??? How many do actually break? Any particular reason why you didn't provide an answer?
"The only way the band will see that money is if they hire an auditor firm to analyze the figures and formally dispute the royalty payments. Labels sometimes even intentionally make the auditors' jobs hard by providing all of the reports on paper, not electronically, out of order, and mixed in with other stuff. This way the auditors' fees discourage bands from auditing the records. Tens of thousands of auditor fee dollars later, the auditors will have compiled their version of what the band should have been paid. The label will then negotiate a settlement. At the end of it all, the band will get most of the royalties they're due -- after breakage, recoupment, etc., of course."
Gee, people use to form unions when faced with that kind of behaviour. Now we all just sit around and mope at how powerless we are.
As usual, most of the comments here either concern the wording of the post or come out of thin air. Take the time to read the article. It explains various reasons why treating ideas "just like property" is wrong, and goes far beyond the usual rant that ideas are intangible.
... IP is like property except... IP is like torts except... The caveats get forgotten over time, and the analogies are applied too strictly. The
For one thing, laws that regulate real property tend to focus on reducing negative effects on others, but never to restrict benefits to others. Building codes tend to promote public safety and prohibit things that would reduce property values in the neighborhood, but they never regulate positive benefits -- people with beautiful gardens and newly painted houses can't demand money from neighbors whose property values rise. For another thing, property owners are liable for damages inflicted by their property. But if products cause harm it's the manufacturers and sellers who are held responsible, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
The author believes (and cites various works that suggest) that intellectual property laws should interfere with the free market only to an extent that allows creators and inventors to recover their costs. After that point it's up to them to conduct their business in a profitable way, just like everybody else. Here's a great quote:
"The proper focus is on the intellectual property owner, not the accused infringer. The question is whether an extension of intellectual property rights is necessary to permit intellectual property owners to cover their average fixed costs. If so, it is probably a good idea. If not, it is not necessary, and the likelihood that it will impose costs on competition or future innovation should incline us to oppose it. Whether an accused infringer obtained a benefit without paying for it bears only indirectly on that question."
The Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, he points out, was bad because it provided no incentive whatsoever for the creation of new works, and made the use of a huge body of existing material much more difficult.
He also touches on a point I've been harping on for a long time myself, which is that property and theft are familiar concepts that carry a lot of cultural baggage. Rights holders tend to hijack these social concepts. For example, the RIAA loves to play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher, or the enraged homeowner walking in on a thief carrying away the family TV. It's hard not to sympathize with the rights holders, but that sympathy is undeserved because rights and property are not the same thing.
For me the really interesting part was where the author makes an analogy suggests between intellectual property protection and social welfare programs. Both are government interference with the free market system to benefit a private party. Both are motivated by benefits to the overall public good, rather than out of generosity to the individual. Protecting copyrights and patents is important because ultimately everyone benefits, rather than because fundamental principles of ownership are at stake.
One problem with this analogy is that the public pays directly for welfare through taxes, whereas intellectual property protection affects only those who want to buy protected works. [I disagree with this point, because in fact the public does pay directly for the enforcement of IP laws. When the FBI raids the home of a P2P file sharer, that's your tax dollars at work.] But, the author quickly adds, living in a modern society without paying for creative works and inventions would be nearly impossible, so in practice we all pay. In any case, the analogy between IP protection and a welfare program seems more realistic to me than equating IP with real property.
Finally, the author points out that it's not a good idea to base our treatment of IP on any analogy. Analogies always come with caveats
I've had Schlafly. A very good Kolsch and Pale Ale.
Haven't had Forbes. Sounds a little pretentious. Where can I get it?
Paul? You mean Paulaner? Not bad. Middle of the road, really.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
"Yes, but any organization strong enough to enforce rights on behalf of the weak is certainly strong enough to deprive them of those rights while propagandizing that it is, in fact, enforcing them on behalf of their "rightful" holder."
That's assuming that the "rightful" holder, and the "organization" are seperate entities. A co-op is however a demonstration that, that isn't always true.
Whether we like them or not, IP laws are here to stay. They are important to a society that desires growth and advancement, so important, in fact, that the framer's of the US Constitution thought it was necessary to include a provision regarding them while not including provisions regarding ownership of physical property. Article 1 section 8 says: Congress has the power (Clause 8:) "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" Considering how difficult it is to amend the Constitution, it is probably best to stop arguing about the necessity or desirability of these rules. The truth is, IP is just as important to protect as physical property in a technological society. No protection=no incentive.
All property rights are there to restrict the use and enjoyment of property to the owner. IP rights are the same. They control the use of the IP so that the owner can chhose how the IP is used.
To say a patent isn't granted if there is prior art is equivalent to saying that a land claim is not granted if there is already a prior claim on the same land (indeed in the old days those land claims were called patents).
People often argue that IP can't be "used up" and therefore is different to other property which has physical limits. This misses the fact that the IP rights are there to control the use of the IP, not the IP itself. The thing of value in IP is the potential to use it to make money or whatever. If someone else takes my IP and makes gizzmos and sells them to everyone then they have taken away from me the rights to a market.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
For your scenario to make any sense at all, there would have to exist people who voted republican in round 1, but would switch to Democrat in round 2 if round 2 was Libertarian vs Democrat. I really don't see that happening.
And there are quite a few ex-democrats in the libertarian party as well. Don't ignore them. The Libertarian party is more in agreement with the Republicans on trade and business issues, but it is more in agreement with the Democrats on being laissez-faire about personal lifestyle (i.e. religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, etc). It's possible for someone to come to the libertarian party from either direction.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It may be possible that you've signed your thoughts over to a major corporation.
According to my employment agreement, mine are currently owned by FreeScale Semiconductor. (At least during the hours of 8 and 5)
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
liberal = whats mine is yours
conservative = whats yours is mine
Wouldn't that somewhat butcher the flow of a thread if the first post was displayed in the middle since later posts got more mod points?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The author explains in great detail how real property and intellectual property are not the same thing and are treated very differently by the law.
For example, restrictions on actual property focus on prohibiting negative effects on others, and almost never on restricting the benefits to others. You can charge rent for occupying land, but you can't charge your neighbors for walking by your house and smelling the flowers, or because your nice new paint job makes their houses more valuable. Those types of non-consumptive benefits are free and always have been. Intellectual property law, by contrast, is devoted almost entirely to tracking down people who get some benefit from something proprietary without paying, even if they consume nothing. Cases against infringers are based on the idea that their actions interfere with a flow of money to the rights holder. This is entirely a tort view, not a property view.
For another thing, people are responsible for controlling their own property and are liable for damages caused by it. But if an invention turns out to be harmful it's the manufacturers and sellers who get sued, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
No, and no.
-I am an elective eunuch.
we human can live praticaly well on this planet ... considering how some humans prefer a ...
as animals. no idea or so needed for humans to
live on this planet. built by nature, nurtured by
nature. this IP etc. stuff is just to make it
"nicer"
more proto-state
so... we now have the possiblity for an implosion
bomb. just show that no one is going to care who had
what idea or did what "work" and we can safely
assume we can make this "high tech culture" implode
back to the stone age!
A: No.
That's the short answer. The long answer is that while many people would like you to believe in "intellectual property", it has no support in nature or law. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are very different things, and are only in existence because we as a society (of the people), through the government (by the people), have decided that it is beneficial to society (for the people) to encourage people to create by giving them financial incentive to do so. There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There is copyright, patent and trademarks. Lumping them all together is not only foolhardy, but short sighted and misleading.
See the Disinfopedia article and the Wikipedia article for more details.
Nathan's blog
No
"laypeople" here on slashdot have been expounding for years?
I think you mean "not-laid-people" here on slashdot.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Corporations should not be allowed to hold IP. This should be a right reserved for individuals and after their time on this planet the IP should become public domain.
That's my 2 pennies...
W.E.P.
What the DMCA really did was grant copyright holders a new right that they had never had before. Before the DMCA, a copyright holder could not tell you what you could do with a copyrighted work once you'd bought a copy, so long as you didn't make more copies and distribute them. But you could read the work, set fire to it, wallpaper your bedroom with it, or wipe your ass with it. And you didn't need the copyright holder's permission to do any of these things. In fact, before the DMCA, it was entirely legal to buy a DVD, break the encryption, transcode it into a DivX file, and store it on your private file server so that you could watch it on your computer without needing the disc.
The DMCA made it illegal to break the encryption, even if you legally bought a copy, without explicit permission from the copyright holder. Combined with encryption methods that were themselves protected by IP law (like CSS, on DVDs), and suddenly the copyright holder can legally control how you can use their work in the privacy of your own home. You can decrypt the DVD by using a player that is either licensed by the CCA -- thus limiting what you can do with the DVD, since the CCA only licenses players that have a restricted set of functions -- or by using a player which is not licensed by the CCA (and allows you to do whatever you want with the DVD) -- but doing so violates the DMCA.
So now, even though the right is not explicitly spelled out in law, copyright holders can legally control what you can do with the work in the privacy of your own home. This is a right they do not need and should not have, and thus the DMCA should be repealed.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We prefer a simple ballot, a quick and final decision.
Politicians who cannot lose a close count gracefully are abandoned by friend and foe alike.
I really don't see that happening
Unlikely, true. But possible, especially if voters game the system, by intentionally voting for a disliked candidate in round 1, hoping that he'll knock off another disliked candidate, clearing the way for the victory of their own guy.
In a world with daily polling predictions, such a scenario is moderately plausible (a little like how Republican agents collect signatures for Nader, hoping he'll take Kerry votes). IRV works well so long as the voters honestly list candidates in order of preference- but if a voter wises up and decides to vote to maximize his candiate's chances, chaos sets in.
That's the true risk of IRV; the system is much more vulnerable to exploitation by political machines and dishonest voters. Master-planners like Karl Rove already have an abundance of power, which IRV would only enhance.
And there are quite a few ex-democrats in the libertarian party as well. Don't ignore them.
It was a hypothetical example. And don't capitalize inconsistently; in that case, it really changes the meaning of the sentence. (Any real ex-democrats in the LP are probably ex-Republicans, and not ex-Democrats)
But an additional point is that modern music companies are little more than fiscal lending insitutions for musicians. Every cost that is incurred in the recording of an album is simply billed back to the artist against future sales. Often, the artists don't have it explained that clearly to them, so they are under the impression that the record company is footing the bill.
The record company then manages how the money is spent, bringing in producers, engineers, and suits to oversee everything. I can't fault them there, I wouldn't give 250k to a bunch of un-supervised 19 year olds, either. Once the album is done, they bill the cost back until the album is payed off. Since the promotional costs are also billed back, this can take quite a bit of money.
Incidentally, this is where the 'payola' comes from to insure that you have to listen to the same top 40 crap constantly on the radio. Promotional fees are payed to broadcasters to get airtime. This practice was outlawed in the 70s, I think, but I just got re-organized to avoid the law.
That a record company gets all the money for an album isn't really a travesty. After all, they did 'loan' the money to the band in the first place. They deserve a chance to make a profit. However, no bank in the world owns your house in perpetuity AFTER you have paid it off. Also, I don't believe that most bands get much say in how the money they are being 'loaned' is spent. On the whole their managements practices are pretty sickening.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
For your scenario to make any sense at all, there would have to exist people who voted republican in round 1, but would switch to Democrat in round 2 if round 2 was Libertarian vs Democrat. I really don't see that happening.
No, those people would still vote for the Libertarian in round 2, but with full knowledge that the Libertarian would lose. The point is that in order to obtain their preferred outcome (Libertarian, and if not that then Republican), they would have to vote strategically. That is, vote for the Republican in the first round.
And, actually, I was assuming Instant Runoff Voting, in which there aren't really explicit rounds. You just rank the canditates on your ballot and the "rounds" are done automatically. The effect is identical to runoff voting, but more convenient.
And there are quite a few ex-democrats in the libertarian party as well. Don't ignore them. The Libertarian party is more in agreement with the Republicans on trade and business issues, but it is more in agreement with the Democrats on being laissez-faire about personal lifestyle (i.e. religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, etc). It's possible for someone to come to the libertarian party from either direction.
Certainly. And the Greens party attracts a number of Republicans. But by and large it's true that Libertarians ally more closely with Republicans. And regardless of what the party names are, it's pretty obvious that if the growth of a third party pulls more from one of the major parties than the other, then the first major party it can beat is the one it weakened.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
(Any real ex-democrats in the LP are probably ex-Republicans, and not ex-Democrats)
To clarify, I meant the party. There are ex-"D"emocrats in the Libertarian party. Plenty. Some people had loyalties to the Democratic party more because of their utter dislike of the Religious Right than becuase of fiscal policies.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Is property property?
... away from the villagers who had shared them for ages and into the hands of the nearby estate-owners ("rob from the wretch and give to the peer").
...)
What is exclusively yours, what must be shared, and what can be taken by anybody (or by some other specific body) has always been socially defined. It is not something fixed by nature.
Consider the village commons, which was shared up until the time the British Parliament (a.k.a the representatives of the wealthy classes in Parliament assembled) decreed that the commons would be privatised
Taxation is another example of "property" changing hands without the owner's choice. Similarly, I "own" some land - but not the minerals that might exist in that land: someone else could get a licence to mine for gold on my "property". And any number of public sector agencies might decide they need my property for public purposes (a road, a railway station, a school, a hospital
The big landlords have always desired that the commons belong to their estates. Changing the property rules and definitions is just the means. In the end, property is a form of power (not simply power over an object but power over other people) - and some people and groups have a lot more of it than others.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
/. liberals recognize the difference between (modern) liberals, libertarians (classical liberals), and conservatives here...
Doesn't he mean "classical liberals" -- i.e., people of the small-'l' libertarian persuasion? You know, the ones who favor a freer market regardless of whether it pisses off liberals (more commonly) or conservatives (less commonly, but IP is an exception; corporate welfare is another)?
You know, people like Nobel prizewinning economist Milton Friedman, actor/governator/economics major Arnold Schwarzenegger, economist Murray Rothbard, and myself (an armchair economist)? (not all such people are economists, but many are)
I hope
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
IRV works well so long as the voters honestly list candidates in order of preference- but if a voter wises up and decides to vote to maximize his candiate's chances, chaos sets in.
No, it doesn't, and that's the point. In my example, a Libertarian who would prefer a Democrat over a Republican ended up helping the Democrat by hurting the Republican because he put his honest, preferred candidate -- the Libertarian -- in first place. By doing that, he, and others like him knocked the Republican out of the running, even though the Libertarian had no chance of beating the Democrat.
What makes IRV really bad, though, is that it has an unstable 'tipping point'. Before a third party gets big enough, voters really can vote their conscience and the result is the same as if it had been a plurality system in which the minority party supporters had opted to vote for the lesser of two evils. Their vote helps the major party they'd prefer, even though it's not their first choice. As soon as the minority party gets big enough, though, the result suddenly tips and the effect of those minority votes is to help the major party they *don't* want.
And it's not just theoretical. Actual experience with IRV in Australia has shown that voters *do* end up having to vote against their true preferences in order to avoid giving the election to someone they hate. Note that Australia has been using IRV since 1920 but still has a two-party system -- IRV has not been effective at breaking the two-party lock.
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The law is just programming humans. You probably could be a lawyer, the body of law is supposed to be a logically consistent work. Anything inconsistent is supposed to be thrown out. Lawyers do a lot of wrangling, trying to prove authority for laws and trying to disprove it. This guy went through and proved his position, you just had a hunch. Think about it this way, a lot of people had the same hypothosis for a problem that required a very difficult experiment. This guy went out and conducted the experiment and is publishing the results.
Would you claim to have the same level of insight as a scientist who just got published for something you had thought about, but never tested?
The law is published. It's history, it's current status, and precedent. You can access all of it through your local library. Thinking that it should be in unexact language is folly. That's like saying science shouldn't be so precise because memorizing Latin terms is so hard. Western Law traces it's origin to Rome and encompasses every aspect of human activity. Our current legal system is a iterative development project that has been worked on for 2200 years. The precision of language and dedication to dialectic reasoning is what has made it such a useful tool for society. You might understand how a monolithic kernel works, does that mean Linus should make you top priority for patches?
If you want to change society, learn how to change the law. If you want to change the law, RTFM.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Let's face it - patent and copyright laws are utilitarian. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to promote science and the useful arts (that's copyright and patent, respectively) by providing authors and inventors exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries. Therefore, once the advancement of science and the useful arts is hobbled by copyright and patent laws, we've gone too far.
No, it doesn't, and that's the point.
No. You may think you're disagreeing with me, but you're not. I suspect you misunderstand the word "chaos"- it doesn't mean randomness! It means there is order in complexity, but it's difficult to understand and predict. A small change in one direction may in fact push the larger system in th other direction. That's chaos.
In fact, the "unstable tipping point" you mention later is a traditional sign of a chaotic system.
Actual experience with IRV in Australia has shown that voters *do* end up having to vote against their true preferences in order to avoid giving the election to someone they hate.
Actual experience with WinnerTakeAll voting in the USA has shown that if New Hampshire Nader voters *had* voted against their true preference, they would've avoided giving the election to Bush.
IRV, in practice, would give virtually the same results as WTA (except that ballots will be more expensive to print, and slower to count). 3rd parties would never be able to grow to the point of competitiveness, because voters will be aware of the chaotic effect that might ensue, and would shy away from supporting mavericks for that reason.
In an IRV system, if there were 3 parties of comprable popularity, then results of individual elections will be highly unstable- an undesirable condition, because the public doesn't like huge surprises. They will fight back against the uncertainty by either forcing the parties to be mostly identical (so that no matter who wins, it matters little), or by randomly shunning one of the parties (returning to bipartisan predictability)
You make a valid point, but it's not just the legal system that requires authority for the introduction of a concept or idea. In fact this tendency isn't even restricted to humans. I read a study some time ago (I believe in the book "Influence" by Cianaldi). They introduced caramel into primate family groups. When they introduced it first to the top primates, the caramel quickly caught on, with around 75 percent (IIRC) consuming it within a very short time.
However, when they introduced it to other family groups through the lowest members, it took a year for the consumption rate to get up to 25 percent of the group. People, other primates, and even many other animal species, are simply programmed to be more open to ideas coming from those with authority.
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop
The above post makes the exact same assertions that didn't make any sense to me the first time around, and it didn't change anything about how they were described, so I remain unconvinced.
If you use the premise that Libertarians have more draw from Republicans than from Democrats, then that should mean that people picking Republican as their first choice will pick Libertarians as their second, and thus knocking Republicans out of round 1 helps rather than hinders Libertarians.
To say that knocking Republicans out in round 1 will help the Democrats, it would have to be the case that most Republicans picked Democrats instead of Libertarians as their second choice. And that's directly contradictory to the premise that Libertarians have more in common with Republicans than Democrats. If the Republicans are voting in a pattern of R->D->L, then the Libertarian party doesn't really have the draw from the Republicans that it is being claimed they do, and so the scenario isn't the failure you claim.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
By doing that, he, and others like him knocked the Republican out of the running, even though the Libertarian had no chance of beating the Democrat.
Only if the Republicans had their votes sorted as follows:
1: Repub, then Dem, then Lib.
If they had them sorted as follows, that would not be true:
2: Repub, then Lib, then Dem.
If the situation is #2, then knocking the Republicans out gives their votes to the Libertarian in the next round.
The alleged problem you are citing only occurs when it reflects that people really would want that - if people really do prefer two-party stability over having what they like, then republicans would vote R->D->L and Democrats would vote D->R->L. If they prefer choices closer to what they really want, and the assertion that Libs have more in common with Repubs that Dems is true*, then they will sort their votes as R->L->D and the problem you mention won't happen.
In both cases the system will do exactly what it is supposed to - reflect the will of the people. If the will of the people is "don't rock the boat", then that's what will happen. And if that's the case, then the problem lays not with the system, but with the voters themselves and they get what they deserve for it.
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Your morals are what you use to keep yourself alive. If you default on your morals, your endanger your own life. Your rights are what you expect society to grant you in order for you to stay alive. If other people deny you your rights, they threaten your life.
A person's mere willingness to die -- or kill -- doesn't mean anything, because people can be rational or irrational (and there's more than one way to be irrational). But whether a person lives or dies, whether a person can survive (if he chooses to) or must perish (regardless of his own choice in the matter), is an objective fact, amenable to observation and analysis.
It is this observation and analysis that politicians are failing to do all over the political spectrum. When they do it, they are inconsistent and incomplete, but the reason why we still have some civilization left is because some politicians make some life-affirming decisions now and then, or because some politicians made them in the past and they still haven't been completely undone. The Declaration of Independence is an example of the latter.
Today's radicals prefer to base their decisions on some ideology or other, but inevitably an ideology which itself is based on faith. Not observation, not analysis, just pure faith. Whether it's in God or in the evil of capitalism. Or both. That's their mistake. Then you've got the middle, which is just a bunch of compromisers and appeasers who stand for nothing.
Politics is about organizing a society. A society can be organized in a life-promoting way, or in a way that poses a mortal danger to its members. The purpose of law is not to impose views on people, it's to prevent them from killing each other. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter whether they take the red pill or the blue pill.
If people are extremely passionate about politics, it's for good reason. Politics is a matter of life and death. Many people understand this even though they may be very wrong about whether their political ideas will actually have the effects they predict. History is the only guide to that. But extreme moderates like you do not understand it. You think that there is no difference between facts and feelings, no difference between one view and another, no difference between imposing views on people by force, and preventing them from being so imposed.
And that makes yours one of the most dangerous political views of all.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
In fact, the "unstable tipping point" you mention later is a traditional sign of a chaotic system.
Ahh, okay. Yes I've studied chaos theory, strange attractors, iterated function systems and all the rest of it, and I definitely agree that IRV has some chaotic effects. I just hadn't realized you were referring to that definition of chaos.
I can see we're locked in violent agreement.
BTW, I think "plurality" is a better name than WinnerTakeAll, because in all of the election methods the winner takes all. What differs is the method for determining the winner.
In an IRV system, if there were 3 parties of comprable popularity, then results of individual elections will be highly unstable- an undesirable condition, because the public doesn't like huge surprises.
Very good point, and this sort of systemic instability is precisely what Arrow's election criteria try to minimize. His original paper didn't really get at why it's important to minimize instability and maximize order, but what you said is the reason: Because the public doesn't like it, and because it breeds distrust in the outcome.
Have you ever fiddled with Condorcet? I have. It's amazing how stable it is. I wrote a program a while ago that takes a set of ranked ballots and uses Condorcet iteratively to compute a complete ranking of the candidates. The algorithm is simple:
This is actually an abuse of the method, but even so the results were remarkably stable and sensible for every situation I could construct. Even better, when I used the system for real with a dozen voters voting for about 10 candidates, at the end when I published the (anonymous) ballots and the results, absolutely everyone agreed that the final ranking was the most reasonable ordering possible -- and this was a situation where at least some of the people really cared about the vote and were unhappy with the winner (the vote was for a name for our SCUBA club, and there were surprisingly strongly-held views).
Some of the interesting things that came out of running and re-running the system, varying the ballots a little each time were:
Armed with the confidence built by that experiment, I tried another somewhat novel application of Condorcet: A race tournament. Specifically, it was a Cub Scout Raingutter Regatta (boys build and race small sailboats down lengths of water-filled raingutter, moving them by blowing on their sails). The challenges were:
A round robin was simply out of the question, it would require over 400 races! A triple-elimination tournament would do the trick, but setting it up requires knowing exactly how many contestants there are and to fulfill challenge 5 above you really have to have some idea of how to seed the thing.
So, I hit on an interesting idea: If the outcome of each race is treated as a two-entry ballot, I can apply Condorcet iteratively to produce a complete ranki
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As someone else pointed out-in the case of artistes (musicians)-anyone who chooses not to play by the rules of the recording companies remains at the fringes and cannot hope to become as popular as say, an Aerosmith or a Britney Spears (!). Drawing a parallel with the OSS movement-today open source is strong enough to provide an alternative to closed source solutions-to the extent that biggies like IBM and Oracle too are taking linux etc seriously. A similar revolution of sorts is needed among the music (and possibly amateur movie) community. Suppose there were bands that made it big on their own, and actually acquired cult status (like the Grateful Dead once did)-and also refused all offers from big labels to sign up-then we would have some contenders for open music. The same way-(although this is harder)-with the advent of technology-it may be possible for amateur movie makers to come up with good alternatives to commercial cinema (just an idea, though). I recall an article once earlier about how people are using the Halo level editor to create short animated movies. Only if there is an open alternative to copyrighted works, the way we have open vs closed source-can we finally be free of the RIAA MPAA and their draconian rulings, and cock a snook at them.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
If you use the premise that Libertarians have more draw from Republicans than from Democrats, then that should mean that people picking Republican as their first choice will pick Libertarians as their second, and thus knocking Republicans out of round 1 helps rather than hinders Libertarians.
I don't think this is likely. Libertarians may have more in common with Republicans than they do with Democrats, but mainstream Republicans are more comfortable with mainstream Democrats than with Libertarians, who are too... radical for their tastes.
I think a more likely scenario is that the Republicans who aren't drawn away by the Libertarian party will cast a ballot that is R, D and won't mention the other parties, implicitly ranking them all lower.
The proof is in the pudding, however, and the pudding in Australia, which has used IRV for 80+ years, is a two-party system.
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As I said in another post, I think it's more likely that the mainstream Republicans will vote "R->D", omitting the L entirely.
The alleged problem you are citing only occurs when it reflects that people really would want that - if people really do prefer two-party stability over having what they like, then republicans would vote R->D->L and Democrats would vote D->R->L.
Yes, but that's beside the point, because the existence of a big group of Republicans that prefers a two-party system still leaves the Libertarians in a situation where if they vote their conscience, they're helping the Democrats. In order to avoid that, they must choose not to vote their real preference. If they don't game the system, you may well end up with a situation where the majority of the populace prefers the Rep to the Dem, but the Dem wins.
In any case, why would we want to accept a system like IRV that is both hard to scale and poses (at the very least theoretically) some of the same risks posed by plurality voting? If you're going to change the system, go to Approval Voting, or, ideally, Condorcet.
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government.
I'm well aware of that.
Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Why not? Sure you wouldn't want to look at IRV's effect on the selection of the Prime Minister, because that's a level removed, but if IRV really does help third parties, wouldn't you expect to see a greater representation of minorities in parliament vs., say, the UK?
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> There wasn't even remotely anything like the 10s of thousands of people seen in the streets of Najaf brandishing arms in support of al-Sadr, or no-go zones like Fallujah, Samarra, Kufa, and increasingly Sadr City.
.
You fools, you don't realize what you've actually done. You've replaced a brutal secular dictator who played war for material gains with a bunch of religious fanatic fundamentalists who are fighting for spiritual gains of another world. Suicide bombers and the jehadi BOYS are very very difficult to fight compared to a conventional war against an army.
Of course this is the same Secular dictator who saw the world a lot clearer than most. He was the only middle east ruler to accept that Kashmir was a territorial issue which had nothing to do with religion. British intelligence supplied the chemical weapons tech to Saddam to gas the Kurds and US of A supplied the planes for him to beat down Iran. Call to the Jehad was his last stand , after a decade of economic war by America through the UN sock puppet
The entire Iraq conflict was a proxy war to defend the Dollar against Euro in the OPEC and to divert attention from Bush's oil selling cronies in Saudi, not to mention "earn" cash by "rebuilding" Iraq.
I'm just waiting for tomorrow to see if the world sees another 9/11. The recent events seem ripe for another.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange the apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
- George Bernard Shaw
No, it's an encoded binary file. If you stick it all together and run uudecode on the result, you're given a binary file called 'payload', which sounds a little ominous. :)
'file' tells me it's a 120x120 jpeg image, but I haven't been able to open it in any image viewer.
Maybe I pasted it all together wrong?
Many bills that pass on voice vote and are vetoed never override the veto. To override a veto requires a roll-call vote, whereas the initial voice vote does not require congresspeople to officially register how they voted (which could later be used against them). Furthermore, many members of a president's own party won't support a veto override unless it's an issue that is particularly important to them, as overriding the president tends to make him look bad. So people who would've supported the bill initially won't support it to the point of overriding their party's leader.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
here's a short page on import tariffs. I was talking about import tariffs for IP, not export tariffs, which are rare but they do exist. For example there is a US ad valorem export tariff on raw lumber of 5%.
The more I think about your comment, though, perhaps an export tariff on IP is a very interesting topic, which I have not actually even thought about. Thanks for an interesting perspective!
Another thing is, about "radiogram analysis" and "accounting data" -- they are not really IP, yet this type of "labor" is imported more and more. I'd be interested in ways of basic protectionism there -- not crippling, evil kinds of protectionism, just some basic fairness kinds of measures.
MORTAR COMBAT!
of course, all of this pre-supposes that tariffs (import or export) are things that should be done.
The Case For Free Trade of course offers another opinion.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Condorcet is really impressive in practice. It's too bad no one has managed to apply it where it really matters.
The core flaw of Condorcet is the name. Few people have even heard that word before- and if they do know what it means, they probably still can't guess how the voting works.
IRV has the serious advantage (in terms of ever being implemented in major elections) because just saying the words "Instant Runoff" enables an average listener to deduce how it works: "Ok, like a runoff vote, but instantaneously... so we must vote our second choices ahead of time."
(Of course, IRV is not really like a runoff, because in a traditional runoff you wouldn't have to pre-buffer all your votes. You pick your 2nd choice only after the loser of the first round is known, giving a stabler result)
Did you remember to replace the '?' characters in the first block _only_ with the character '&'? Also, you have to remove all whitespace in the data portion of the encoding before running uudecode. The 120x120 that the 'file' command reports is the resolution (in DPI), not the size of the image. The size of the image is 17x17 pixels.
Few people have even heard that word before- and if they do know what it means, they probably still can't guess how the voting works.
A better name wouldn't help people guess. The ideas are a little too subtle and non-obvious for that. What could you call it, anyway? Pairwise Evaluation?
Of course, IRV is not really like a runoff, because in a traditional runoff you wouldn't have to pre-buffer all your votes. You pick your 2nd choice only after the loser of the first round is known, giving a stabler result)
Is there really a difference? It seems to me that you only get a difference if people are trying to game the system. Your true preference ordering wouldn't change (barring news between runoffs). Also, it wouldn't change the scenario we were discussing: A Libertarian would have to choose during the first runoff whether he voted his true preference, and risked knocking off the Repulican, or voted strategically, knocking out the Libertarian.
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Sonny Bono was passed on a voice vote. The dynamics of voice votes are much different than the dynamics of roll-call votes. Especially if Clinton had vetoed it, you could expect that if the veto was overridden, it would be with far, far less than 90% support. And there'd be a good chance it wouldn't be.
Either way, it doesn't excuse Clinton signing it into law. He should at least have put up a fight. Except that he actually supported the law, which is the problem.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Republicans are more comfortable with mainstream Democrats than with Libertarians, who are too... radical for their tastes.
If this is true, it would mean that the alleged problem you speak of is not a problem. It's the hypothetical system giving the hypothetical voters precisely what they want. The problem is that the voters don't want what the Libertarians want them to want.
The proof is in the pudding, however, and the pudding in Australia, which isn't a republic, so its example is not related to how it would work in the US.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The point you're missing is that you keep using examples where the majority actually do not want the third party to come to power. You even say so explicitly here. Well, duh, if that was what everybody wants, then the voting method that *fails* to give them that would be the one that is broken, not the one that *does* give them that.
you may well end up with a situation where the majority of the populace prefers the Rep to the Dem, but the Dem wins.
When there are more than two parties with a signifigant following, it is entirely possible to win with less than the majority, and there is nothing broken about that in the slightest. If the majority had a huge problem with the Dems being in power, they should have ranked their choices that way. In your example, they are explicitly stating they *do* prefer the Dems over the Libs, so there is nothing bad about that.
If people really don't want more choices, then the failure doesn't lay with the voting system, it lays with the people.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Being a republic or not has absolutely zero influence as to how democratic processes work. In fact, the phrase "republic style of government" is an oxymoron. The only reason Australia isn't a republic is that their nominal head-of-state is a (foreign) Queen.
China is a republic, and they're still stuck in a one-party system... I seem to remember a place called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, too... what was it like?
If this is true, it would mean that the alleged problem you speak of is not a problem. It's the hypothetical system giving the hypothetical voters precisely what they want. The problem is that the voters don't want what the Libertarians want them to want.
Wrong. We're only looking at things from the perspective of the Libertarian voter. "Does voting the way I want contribute to results I want?"
They voted LRD, and got D. But if they had voted RD, R would've won. So at best, this means that IRV has not addressed the problem that voting for a 3rd party wastes your vote.
Off-topic, but... Is your sig a reference to reference to the anime Revolutionary Girl utena? I just started watching it the other day. Strange how you start understanding the references in sigs on Slashdot slowly.
Lalala
The point you're missing is that you keep using examples where the majority actually do not want the third party to come to power.
I'm not missing it, that's precisely the precondition for the point that I'm making.
When there are more than two parties with a signifigant following, it is entirely possible to win with less than the majority, and there is nothing broken about that in the slightest.
Yes, there is, if the introduction of a third party causes the most widely preferred major party to lose.
What we're talking about here is a simple concept: The introduction of a candidate who does not win should not change the winner. And this should hold without requiring the voters to vote against their true preferences.
In the simplest terms, in the example we're talking about, assuming that everyone votes their preferences:
What's even worse, though is that with IRV, voters who prefer L,R,D can vote their conscience, confident that IRV will make sure they're not throwing their vote away (unlike a vote for L in a plurality system) -- but only while the Libertarian is weak. As soon as the Libertarian gains enough strength, the L,R,D voter has to choose between throwing his vote away or voting against his true preferences. This is exactly the same situation as a plurality voting system, the "lesser of two evils" problem, except that it's intermittent.
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I'm not missing it, that's precisely the precondition for the point that I'm making.
Then in that case your point doesn't make sense. If the majority doesn't want X to happen, and then X doesn't happen, that is hardly a failure of the system. Perhaps it's a failure of the voters.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure? Remember, for your scenario to come out, you have to assume republicans would vote R->D->L. If that is the case then the system is giving the right result. If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D, then your problem scenario doesn't happen. So the real question is, why are the Libtertarians in your scenario failing to woo the Republicans into picking them as a second choice if they are allegedly so close to each other in attitudes?
For your problem to occur, the third party has to like a major party that doesn't reciprocate and like them back.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure?
No. A system that gives a minority what they don't want, because they voted for what they want, is flawed. Any system which encourages non-sincere voting is imperfect.
If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D,
False. Prehaps this math error has been underlying most of your other objections*. If the majority of Republicans pick RLD, the Democrats still win! It's only if all Republicans go for Libertarian second will the problem be avoided. (And nobody should expect unanimity!)
Step back from the RDL designations and just consider parties A,B,C. A & B are very similar, and have about 25% support. C is very different from them, and has 49% support (1% other/undecide). An A supporter would be happiest with A, but tolerate B (and vice-versa).
In the current USA system (highest count wins), if everyone votes for their favorite, C will always win. Either A or B will need to decide to give up and endorse B or A, to prevent the C landslide. The fact that so many people are forced to vote against their preference is considered a problem.
Now, if IRV were in place, what happens? Nothing's actually different. C always wins, unless the campaign for either A or B decides to drop out early. So IRV isn't actually too different from the current system- so why bother changing?
Under Concordet (or "pairwise") voting, on the other hand, all A supporters could confidently vote for "A>B,B>C,A>C", knowing that either A or B will win (since they collectively have 50% approval to C's 49%). Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election beforehand to avoid splitting their vote in the general election. 2000 could've had Bush, Gore, McCain, and Nader all in the election together.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!
In your ABC example, you tried to highlight a situation where 50% of the people prefer either A or B over C, while only 49% prefer C, and yet C wins anyway, and you imply this is a problem, presumably because the 49% is smaller than the 50% and thus shouldn't win. Well, that's fine except that in order to get the outcome that C wins, you are invoking the implication that not ALL the A's and B's will pick each other as their second, otherwise C wouldn't actually win. This falsifies the premise that the number of people who would have preferred either A or B over C was 50% and thereby gets rid of the reason to complain about the 49% winning.
Yes, if the 50% lost to the 49%, that would be a flaw. But that's not what happened because there was no such thing as a 50% of the people that all wanted either A or B over C - not if C won there wasn't.
Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election
Regardless of vote counting style, there is still a need for primaries. The parties have to decide on where to spend their money on the campaign. A single pick will consolidate their efforts and make a more coherent campaign in the minds of the voters. The only way parties would stop consolidating their efforts would be if they were so weakened that there weren't any parties anymore at all. As long as they exist, they'll want to consolidate their efforts.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!
Your fundamental error is in assuming that I was talking about level of democracy. Parliaments don't work the same as republics because you don't vote for a Prime Minister in the same way you vote for a President. That's not to say no such vote occurs, but it follows very different rules.
I am not making the errors you claim. YOUR error is assuming I'm trying to optimize the same thing you are. I see nothing wrong with the 49% party winning when there exist portions of the other two that prefer to throw their weight their way when their own candidate loses.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
If the majority doesn't want X to happen, and then X doesn't happen, that is hardly a failure of the system.
Under the scenario I'm describing, the majority doesn't want the Democrats to win, and the Democrats win. That is a failure of the system.
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Actually, Proudhon makes a difference between possession and property: I can posses a house because I happen to live in it. Property means that my children will inherit the house, so it leads to accumulation of wealth over the generations. Proudhon did not oppose possession but only property.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.