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Neither Intellectual Nor Property
Techdirt's Mike Masnick is writing a series of short articles on topics around intellectual property. His latest focuses on the term itself, exploring the nomenclature people have proposed to describe matter that is neither intellectual nor property. The whole series (starting here) is well worth a read.
Actually, anything with that many lawyers has gone way past intellectual and we all know the lawyers end up with more of the property than anyone else...so yes - I'd say he's right.
I better go RTFA now
The Mothership
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain? That everything that comes out of my brain is MINE MINE MINE and has nothing to do with the world I live in? You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right? and that even he decided it was wrong.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't understand why this is so difficult for you idiots to comprehend. The "property" around that MP3 you're warezing isn't the file itself; it's the *copyright*, which can not be duplicated and which is scarce. Now, you may not think such a thing *should* exist in order to be property and Richard Stallman may have told you that it's thoughtcrime to think such a thing, but the fact is that in our legal system it *is* property. All this sophistry about scarcity is completely missing the point.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You're right, the answer is simple. No it does not exist. There is nothing physical, thus while you have the right to share or commercialize it, you cannot prevent anyone else from doing so as well, once they either learn of the idea or come up with it on their own. No matter what the facist corporatists say.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Sorry, it was done already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Teenage_Riot. They actually have an album that's a single 25 minute song of pure noise. And people liked it!
please excuse my apathy
That said,Sounds nice, but I don't think it holds merit at all. The very purpose of property and property rights is self-interest and the philosophical right to pursue self-interest. It has nothing to do with managing allocation of resources. It's human nature to declare ownership (ever been around a two-year-old?) because ownership of things translates to better survival and reporductive rates.
At any rate, I'm sure I'm gonna get modded into oblivion here, since my post runs counter to the opinions of some of the more rabid libertarian/anarchist moderators. I'm not going to get into some of the other things in his blog specifically in relation to IP... since rebuttal of same is apparent in the comments to so many articles have come before.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That's (one reason) why people get so upset over IP law - there's nothing stopping them copying ideas EXCEPT the law (it's so rare that something is produced by one person that it may as well be discounted), and there's no harm done by copying IP (RIAA/MPAA might argue that, but you could just as easily argue that their business system is based solely on the law, which means that it would be different/redundant without that law).
That's as succinctly as I could manage to summarise the article, and none of it seemed like intellectual wankery - this argument has serious ramifications IRL, and looking at the fundamentals of it seems as good a place to start as any. So, what you generate with your brain IS your property, but just like your money, it's completely useless if you don't SPEND it.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
So if you happen to simultaneously invent something with someone who beats you to the patent office by 20 minutes, you're happy paying him for his intellectual property that you clearly stole (telepathically)?
-- Alastair
IANAL (I don't even play one on TV), but it seems to me that IP might be considered a legal fiction, much like the equally disputed concept of corporate personhood. Maybe our resident NYCL could set me straight on this.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Code/music/data are no more than a sequence (pretty large sometimes) of numbers, that is, bytes. If I came up with sequence, say, 5, 10, 11, 35, 255 - can I claim it to be my property and sue you for copying it? If not, how long should such sequence be in order to allow this?
Coding etudes
Even if it is a nickel, it would solve so many problems. If it is worth so much to protect then there should be no problem in paying tax to cover for the mess it makes.
You'll know the IP lawyers are desperate when one of them brings a copyright infringement suit against someone for uploading/distributing John Cage's 4' 33".
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain?
I thought he was saying that he owes the estate of Aristotle for his use of that idea, and he owes some money to various Germanic tribes for their contributions to the English language. I'd imagine that is keyboard is illegal, as it didn't include any payment to the estate of Christopher Sholes, inventor of the QWERTY keyboard layout. Does his power company pay rights to Tesla's decedents for their use of alternating current to power that computer? Is there anything that we as humans can make or do that doesn't utilize the ideas of other people?
We are all just people.
So, lawyers have been thinking about the nature of property for hundreds of years, and have come up with the idea that property is a bundle of rights in a thing. And, there are some very real parallels between Real Property (ie land) and Intellectual Property:
The right to exclude: If you own real property, you can prevent trespassing; if you own intellectual property, you can prevent infringement.
The right to convey: If you own real property, you can sell it; if you own IP, you can sell it.
The right to subdivide: If you own real property, you can break it up into smaller units, or sell off parts of it (like, for example, Mineral rights). Similarly, with Copyright, you can sell off the right to distribute or the right to publicly perform it, and with patent, you can sell off the right to import it, or make products based on it.
The right to control how something is used: If you own real property, you get to say what happens with it. Same things with IP. (Both of these have limits)
The main complaint about IP as property comes from it not being "rivalrous" -- unlike, say, a coffee cup, which can only be used by one person at a time, IP can be used by any number of people at a time. However, there are non-rivalrous goods out there in which we attach property rights. For example, a public golf course near us has a public easement over the back yards of adjoining houses -- if you hit your golf ball onto their lot, you have the right to go and get it. That is a non-rivalrous property right: my ability to get my golf ball is not impeded by the number of other people who have that right.
IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else.
If you read further down the Wikipedia page, you'd know that it actually did happen:
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I'm sort of disturbed by the idea that just because you can make 10000 copies of something at no _cost_ to the original creator of the content, you should just be able to make as many copies as you want and never compensate them. Yes, it doesn't cost them anything, but what about compensating people for the work they do, or encouraging them to do more work in the future? There are lots of things I would like to write or produce that I think would be valuable, but rather than simply wondering how many people would like my product and what they would think it's worth, I have to wonder how many would just copy it and steal the product of my labor. Sure, open sourcers would still produce things, and there would be people willing to work for free for the fame or future job prospects or whatever, but not everybody wants to work for free! I like the idea of working hard and getting a higher income than the guy who doesn't, and having a nice house and a new car parked in front of it. I don't understand why people want to reduce the opportunity to do that.
what I generate with my brain is MY intellectuall property and
No man is an island.
The ideas etc that you generate with your brain are not emanating only from you but are generated by your experiences; your education, the society in which you grew up, your life experience.
They do not arise out of some kind of vacuum, unless you really *are* empty-headed.
Hence, if there really is *property* here it must be said to be the property of all of society; you *didn't* come up with it *all* by yourself. Never. Ever.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
It isn't a question of theft.
It is question of how society assigns rights and interests.
You snooze, you lose.
Elisha Gray filed his telephone patents three hours after Bell.
Gray - no innocent - was an electrical engineer with millions of dollars worth of patents in his name.
But it was Gray in the audience and Bell on stage when the telephone was demonstrated at the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia in June of 1876.
Gray standing next to the Emperor of Brazil who makes headlines when he shouts "My God, it talks!" Gray who drops out of the game and assigns his interests to Western Union.
With all due respect, Batt brought that on himself. He said he shared writing credits with another musician. I'm pretty certain I can record silence and attempt to sell it and perform it without gaining the ire of Cage so long as my performance is not like his (sit at a piano silently for a length of time) and doesn't reference him.
.. rests in music are as important as the notes. Cage made an interesting point; what if the rest is the whole song? It doesn't bother me nearly as much that he can copyright such a 'composition' than somebody owns the rights to Happy Birthday. Ultimately, Cage had a neat idea which is obvious in retrospect, and it's not like he goes around seeking infringement from any piece of media with dead air. He copyrighted silence as a musical performance, and its unclear to me why people are more concerned about that copyright expiring than cultural works that are ingrained in the public vernacular. Doesn't it seem clear that Batt was just hoping to ride on the coattails of Cage? No Cage, no one minute of silence from Batt.
The thing is, to me
"Old man yells at systemd"
In the past the artist had a patron: The church. The state. The merchant prince. The patron's one rule is that the art he commissions remains unique. You do not embarrass Nero by building a knock-off of his golden house.
You should ask yourself why you want to be paid forever for something you do once.
Because it is something no one else has ever done - perhaps no one else could ever do. Harper Lee has written one novel. But that novel is To Kill A Mockingbird.
Half the reason patent lawyers have no interest in filing quality patents is because that would cut down on patent litigation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Speak for yourself. Here in Philadelphia, we pay a 4.3% pants tax, but only while they're being worn, which is why so many Philadelphians go around pant-less. Stupid pants tax!