Many physical objects can only be used by one person at a time. If one person wears a pair of shoes, no one else can wear them at the same time.
This may be true, but physical property rights say more than: Don't snatch toys from other children they say Don't take toys belonging to other children even when they are not playing with them. If we follow this line of argument to its conclusion, i.e. no rights over things we are not using, we will find ourselves imagining no possessions, (to misquote John Lennon).
Technological developments have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of information....Yet there is a strong push to expand the scope of ownership of information.
It is precisely because it is getting cheaper and easier to make copies of information that there _should_ be a push to expand the scope of ownership of information While it may be virtually cost-less to copy information, there are still costs involved in creating it or discovering it. If you want to provide the information you have created or discovered for no charge, you are free to do so. But if the process of invention or discovery requires investment, the process will only take place if there is a mechanism for recouping the investment.
[S]ome Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This is nonsense. The only way that the transnational corporations could force people to keep buying their seeds is to make the seeds produce sterile plants. People are free to keep using the seeds that have been freely available to them for centuries, but may choose to use the genetically modified sterile seeds if they worth the price.
Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries.
Assuming, for a minute, that it is the world trade system that is the cause of the vast inequalities between rich and poor countries, to me a much better solution appears to be for rich countries to cancel more the debt of the poorest countries.
He notes that the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them. Copyrights and patents may encourage new ideas and innovations, but they also restrict others from using them freely.
Another nonsense argument. Two statements contradict each other if they cannot both be true. [T]o promote the development of ideas does not imply that you cannot reduce people's freedom to use them so there is no contradiction! It is true that copyrights and patents of new ideas restrict others from using them freely, but this is the price of having many of those new ideas. In the same way, property rights restrict people from using physical objects, but they are needed to give people the incentive to produce them. E.g. in the city in which I live there are many homeless people and empty houses yet I still support property rights over houses because otherwise there would be no incentive to build new houses and maintain existing ones.
This is one chapter of a book Information Liberation. The rest of this is also well worth reading (see my review), but unfortunately it is not online (ordering information). Danny.
Hmm.. why not? (I know it has been said already, but think it is particularly revealing) God forbid they (I know he doesn't) plan to recover some of their costs!
Napster can offer musicians a way out of indentured slavery. It can change the music industry forever, and free artists from writing MTV-specific music which promotes brands and consumerism. We can get "albums" that were not churned out like some Metallica Load/Re-load episode, to satisfy "contractual obligations".
I don't see how Napster offers musicians anything. If I want to distribute my music for free, I don't need Napster or any other _distributed_ distribution system. I can convert my music to mp3 and put it on my web site. Fans can download freely from here, so only need distribute links rather than files among themselves. The only time when a _distributed_ distribution system is needed is when someone is trying to suppress the distribution. I.e. when I choose not to distribute my music for free.
To get out of indentured slavery all that's is needed is a way to pay the rent, studio, manager etc without charging for music - Napster does not offer this.
His assertion is that Open Source systems such as Linux are developed in too chaotic a system to ever reach a trusted state.
This doesn't really seem to a question of whether trusted systems can have open source code - clearly they can. All that's needed is to develop a trusted in the traditional manner then releases the source code and this need not endanger the system's trusted state.
What I think would be a fairer reading of his claim is that a decentralised development model with different developers doing the bits that scratches their itch is not the best way to meet a set of centrally determined formal specifications. But then this is a question of how the system is developed, not whether the source is open. Paying a bunch of programmers to meet the formal specifications and opening the source so that others can spot bugs doesn't seem to be a problem.
Maybe, if all the design goals were centrally determined, outsiders would be less inclined to contribute, so the benefits of open source would be less. But this hardly seems to be an argument for not opening the source code at all.
What's so bad about this. If I don't like it, I'll turn it off and only visit sites that don't require it, or feed it false information.
The only good argument against it seems to be that some new users will be confused and not realise what they're doing. But 2 minutes explaining and 2 clicks and they can turn the thing off too if they want.
The missing piece in many of the uber-IP enthusiasts arguments is often where they got their own ideas from. Taken to its logical conclusion, what they currently propose is atrocious, and will ultimately have a chilling effect on learning, competition, and commerical and cultural development.
To be honest, I'm not really a uber-IP enthusiast so I might not be the best person to reply to this, but I'll give it a go anyway. What I'm enthusiastic about is doing more of what is important to me and for others to have the same opportunities. Now, some of the things that are important to me depend on the creativity of others - I'm a student and spent a lot of time digesting the ideas of others in books, I also enjoy reading Slashdot. The people whose creative energy went into these books and Slashdot needed some incentive to employ their energies in this way. For some, that incentive may have been public spiritedness, the respect of others, and for others it may have been some financial reward.
It is clear that not all incentives for creativity are financial and not all financial ones depend on IP. I don't dispute this. But it is equally clear that there are some cases of where the creativity of others could provide something useful and important to me but for the people cable of provide the required creativity, there exists no sufficient incentive to do so. Assigning intellectual property rights can provide the required incentive. The authors of the books I read receive royalties, the designers the processor in the PC I am reading Slashdot on can patent their design. So, the books get written and the computers built: I can develop my own idea from the ones in the books and the comments on Slashdot that I read.
So it seems plausible that IP has indirectly helped me develop my ideas and had a positive rather than chilling effect on my learning.
Is this what you consider the atrocious proposal to be or is this what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine . If it is the balanced doctrine, then what exactly is the atrocious proposal and what is the difference between the two?
The problem that I've always seen is that humans have stopped evolving.
How is it a problem? First of all, why should we want to evolve. Single celled organisms are the most successful in terms of adaptation to different environments but I have no desire for my offspring to be single celled. Second, if it's the survival of the human race you are concerned about, then isn't your claim that that the human race is not evolving an good thing, i.e. we are not evolving because we are so good at surviving in our environment.
This is because we no longer abide by "survival of the fittest".
It's not survival that's important. Maybe, in the developed world at least, everyone survives to adulthood. But this is not enough, not only must you survive, you must find a mate and successfully rear offspring. It is probable that better looking people and those with better social skills are better at finding mates so more likely to pass on their genes, and those who love children rear them better and have bigger families, so are more likely to pass on their genes.
weak genes are just as likely to be passed along as strong ones
This seems a bit muddled. If two genes are equally likely to be passed on, surely they must be equally strong/weak. Perhaps you have some goal other than survival, but then its not evolution in the biological sense and we have never been heading for it except by chance.
Please, I beg of you, do not... reply in flame because you disagree! I'm only trying to make a point (that you may or not believe in) for the sake of discussion.
Well, this is intended as discussion, not flame. Please take it as such!
We are intimately dependent on one another, on our ideas, our dreams, our goals; each of us fuels the others work as citizens, as thinkers, as creators of new ideas, new art, new programs (an art in itself, certainly). The unprecedented progress we have witnessed in the last century is unquestonably operating in spite of the growing trend toward brutal protection of intellectual property, in a vacuum of both understanding and enforcement. This intellectual growth could not have happened under the culture that is being created today, and a balanced intellectual property doctrine wisely recognizes the necessity of all ideas to mature into the public domain, and ignores the natural ecology of ideas at the extreme peril of those who would live under it.
Your argument sounds good, is in tune with what seems the prevalent view among Slashdot readers, and has clearly gone down well with the moderators, but to me seems lacking in substance.
If we are intimately dependent on one another as you say, shouldn't the things that this dependence is grounded in be the object of property rights so that we can give others the incentive to provide them even when it is not in their self interest to do so. If we don't assign these property rights, we have an externality - a positive one in this case - and externalities lead to what economists call Pareto inefficient outcomes, which means that everyone could be made better off without making anyone worse off. There are two solutions to externalities: (1) government regulation, and (2) assigning property rights and letting the market determine the outcome. Now, I hope that most people would agree that government is no competent for this task single handed. So assigning property rights seems the right thing to do.
Maybe this is what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine, and all you are saying is that these property rights should not last forever. But you following attack on capitalism suggests otherwise. The capital system you are attacking need not and does not depend on infinitely lived intellectual property.
NB this is intended more as a question than an attack.
First off, I'm glad I annoyed someone. Sometimes it is the only way get a debate going, and correct some of our unfounded views
There a three ways in which markets fail to maximise welfare in the way the theory tells us that they should. Who's theory?
I was referring to the theory argued for informally by Adam Smith and that has now been formalised into the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics. The theory says that under certain conditions, free markets will lead to the maximisation of social welfare, even when the agents who are trading only care about their own welfare.
Externalities... there are positive externalities as well as negative ones. It's really the negative ones that concern us the most.
I don't see why this is true. Surely anything that affects welfare that is not governed by the price mechanism should concern us equally whether it increases or decreases welfare.
Imperfect information is a constant condition, regardless of the system.
Maybe this is true, but it is not important. What is important is how imperfect information affects welfare, and this is different under different systems.
The only question is: which system provides the best incentives to spread information? Markets have been logically and empirically demonstrated to be the most effective conduits of information exchange
In most cases, I agree, markets are the best solution. However, in some cases imperfect information can cause markets to unravel. Think of the case of buying health insurance for the old people. In this case the insurance companies are likely to know less about peoples health than their potential customers. Less healthy people will buy more health insurance than the more healthy ones, so the insurance company will increase the price of insurance. This will mean if you are healthy, there will be no reasonably priced health insurance. In case like this, markets do not work, so there is a good case (i.e. it would improve welfare) for universal health insurance for provided by the government and paid for through taxes.
The answer to these questions is government regulation. How on earth do you reach that conclusion?
Like this: there are two types of solution. (1)Those involving unregulated free markets and (2) those that involve some government intervention. In cases where solutions of type (1) fail, try solutions of type (2) if there is a good reason to think that doing so would increase welfare. There is such a good reason, namely: correcting market distortions would move us closer to the welfare maximising situation that would obtain were markets perfect.
...aptly demonstrated in the former Soviet Union, centrally planning cannot *ever* work simply because it provides no calculative mechanism for determining relative value. In the absence of pricing, how do you know whether the cost/benefit of eating chicken is better than the cost/benefit of eating brocolli?
This is the bit of your post I agree with. I was not suggesting the complete abolition of pricing. Only intervention where prices do not reflect the approximate true value/cost in term of welfare of an action. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear!
No proposed solution for the environment could possibly be *worse* than regulation
Try this one. Suppose we abolish all property rights. In this case there would not even be an incentive to look after those parts of the environment that we had previously owned.
My guess is that the expertise of the majority of the Slashdot readers lie in computing and the natural sciences. I know this is not true of everyone - being an exception myself. What I tend to notice is that when the subject is in the area of computing and the natural sciences, the following debate is generally well informed. But when the topic turns to economics or politics, a lot of nonsense gets posted. I know this is going to annoy some people (I almost didn't post for that reason) but I think it is worth saying. So I guess, if you don't like getting annoyed: stop reading!
My point is: I expect that most of what is written in this book is nonsense and the only reason the story got posted is because it made a reference to open source software.
Before you flame me, let me qualify what I have said a little. There are some problems with capitalism (by which I mean the way markets are organised at the present), and this book clearly refers to some of them. Economic theory tells us that free markets will maximise welfare based on certain promises. I won't go into the detail here, but if you're interested, look up welfare theorems in an economics text book.
There a three ways in which markets fail to maximise welfare in the way the theory tells us that they should.
1 Externalities, this is when the price of an action to an individual is not equal to the price of that action for society. For example, my factory releases C02, which alters the climate, and causes a farmer in Uganda's crops to fail, but I do not compensate him for the adverse effect of my action on his welfare.
2 Imperfect information, this can be when I sell you something which I claim does something useful for you but in fact, after you have bought it, you find it does not. Another example is you might find no one is willing to sell you reasonably priced health insurance when you reach old age because the insurance company can't tell whether you are asking for the insurance because you know you have some disease (but don't tell them) whose treatment is expensive.
3 Imperfect competition, this is when a company can charge a price for something which is higher than the cost of production. This could because the company in question operates in such a way as to purposefully and unfairly harm its competitors. It's easy to think of examples.
The answer to these questions is government regulation. I hear the libertarians howl with outrage. And for effective government regulation, it is true that the lobbying power of corporations would need be reduced. But his is hardly a revolutionary new form of capitalism.
I am sure that this book refers to some of these things, but I get the impression that it is doing so to rationalise some environmentalist position - I've read many similar books before.
The primary threat to freedom is still governmental power.
The primary threat to freedom actually other people. In the case of democracy, those people are the majority of voters.
The problem is that governmental power is increasingly controlled and directed by corporate interests.
Namely, those people whose pension funds are invested in the stock market.
My point is that, for every freedom you have, there is another freedom someone lese doesn't have because of your having that freedom. Freedom, when it is not qualified by who has it, what they are free to do, and what they are free from, is meaningless.
Either napster does not reduce CD sales so there's no conflict of interest or it does and the anti-napster have something to legitimate complain about.
The only way I can see a conflict of interest arising is if this company writing the report were a rival of napster's. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Or has napster just entered the protected digital content business?
1 Their file formats APIs, and protocols are intellectual property, which they can't be forced to disclose
If the judge has the power to split MS, MS can be given the option of either opening them or being split up. As DGregory says I think MS should go the way of IBM. IBM has to publish specs for whatever they do, if people could make their own platforms & file formats TRULY compatible with the Microsoft ones, the world would be a much better place.
2 Licenses are in accordance with law, which is why M$ is pushing UCITA so hard -- to prevent reverse engineering even when it offers inter-operability (which is legal under the DCMA). So if M$ contracts are in conjunction with the law, the judge can't force them to change those either.
The same argument as above applies.
3 Microsoft protocols? They change every protocol they can so that no-one else's software (which uses the protocol correctly prior to the change) no longer interoperates with WinXX.
Likewise, the judge can give MS the option of letting an independent body control protocols, or face being split up.
4 if the cost for Windows goes up, the cost for IE goes up, and the cost of the apps goes up, consumers still have other choices -
If consumer have other choices but choose MS products, then MS is not a monopoly. So there is no case for break-up. (It is, in fact, evident that MS does have monopoly power, but making a monologist charge a higher price does not help consumers.)
I have patented the use of square items w/the letters of all languages printed on them to facilitate the fast input of ideas to both paper and electronic sources.
I hereby challenge your patent on the grounds of prior art.
If patents have been done before or are obvious, what's stopping people challenging them?
Have there been any recent cases of laws suits for Patent Infringement being overturned on the grounds that the patent was bad - i.e. patent was not novel or the patent was obvious?
If so, perhaps there is some hope for the patent system. If not, perhaps not.
A structural break-up works because securities law forces each of the so called baby bills to maximise profit individually -- even at the expense of other M$ operations. While the gov't attorneys wonder if "breakup plans, such as dividing Microsoft into an operating-system company and a software applications company, might be ineffective in breaking the company's lock on the market for personal-computer operating systems.", I personally don't see any other way.
Assuming Microsoft does have a monopoly on OSes and Offices suits, breaking MS into an OS company and an Apps company would be bad for consumers, i.e. the prices would be higher.
The reason for this is this: a monopolist chooses the price to maximise their profit, this means that they will increase the price until the increases in revenue from the higher price is offset by the reduction in revenue caused by lower demand at the higher price.
OSes and Apps and complementary goods, in other words, the more copies of Windows that are sold, the greater the demand for MS Office.
This means that MS as it is now will increase the price of Windows until the extra revenue from a higher price is offset by, the lost revenue due to fewer copies of windows plus the lost revenue due to fewer copies of Office being sold.
However, if MS were split into an OS and an Apps company, the OS company would increase the price of Windows until the extra revenue from the higher price is offset by the lost revenue due to fewer copies of windows being sold alone, without taking into account the lost revenue from fewer copies of Office being sold.
The same argument applies to the company selling Office. Hence, both Windows and Office would be more expensive after an MS split. So a split is bad for consumers.
The other option is splitting MS into several identical companies. However, it is hard to see how two baby MSes could sell Windows without forking the code, and equally hard to see how forking the code is good for anyone (except Red Hat etc)
So, by all means, change the way they license software, and force them to open their file formats, APIs, and protocols. But there is not justification for splitting them other than hatred!
"There's no victim in the sale of a domain name, therefore there's no reason to make a federal law prohibiting the sale of them."
The sale of domains does cause harm, namely legitimate users of domain names having to pay squatters to get an appropriate domain name. This is a good reason to make a law. Whether this is a sufficient reason to make a federal law I don't know - I am not an expert on federal law - so for the sake of argument I'll concede that such a law is not feasible.
Even so, the conclusion of my argument still holds: while the system I have proposed is certainly not flawless, it is better than the current system because it is harder for squatters to extract money from people who have some use for a domain. (I.e. you can't to sell or give up a domain name for money in any way that will produce evidence of doing so. Furthermore, few potential buyers would risk giving money in response to an anonymous offer to free a domain, but if you devise some non-anonymous way of making an offer, the potential buyer will have no need to pay you to give up the domain since they will have evidence of you offering to give it up for payment. Note that, precisely how it is made harder does not matter as long as it is harder) Because it is harder for squatters to extract payments, there will be less profits for squatters, and so less squatting. Which makes everyone, except perhaps squatters, better off.
My conclusion is that the system I am proposing is better than the current system.
"so they pay me for it, they then report to NSI that they paid me for it"
They don't need to pay you for it. All they need to do is produce evidence that you either (a) offered it to them for a payment, or (b) offered to give it back to the NSI for a payment. Then the NSI takes it off you and IBM takes it. Suppose that you offer it to them using some anonymous means: they pay you money, you return the domain to NSI, IBM complains to the FBI, the FBI takes the money from you and gives it back to IBM. Since you know that there is no prospect of extracting money from IBM for the domain, you don't bother to register unless you have some us for it yourself.
I expect that you'll object there is not much prospect of the FBI finding you in, for instance Russia, so I'll retreat and say while the system I have proposed is certainly not flawless, it is better than the current system. The reason for this is that it would be harder for squatters to extract money from people who have some use for a domain, which will mean less profits for squatters, and so less squatting. Which makes everyone better off (except perhaps squatters).
"If you couldn't sell a domain name to someone, you could offer them a 1,000 year contract to point the domain name to an IP address of their choice."
That's a good point. But suppose offering of such contracts were illegal, i.e. the domain name would returned to the provider if such a contract were offered.
I can't help thinking that the problem of domain squatting could easily be solved by simply not allowing domains to be transferred between owners. If this system was introduced, then people not using domains would have no incentive to hang on to them and arbitration would simply be between rival legitimate uses of a domain.
I don't dispute the usefulness of what has been pointed out by sesiquiped and mreece - that open source projects can be entered into the competition STI, or that winners of the are deserving, or that the criteria for judging it are valid. Perhaps it is true that someone "intelligent enough to work on open source projects and make intelligent contributions" would be " intelligent enough to put a "science" spin on whatever work [they] did to make it worthy of an STI project." I don't know, I'm not such a person.
The point I want to make is that, as I understand it, what makes a good contribution to an open source project is very different from what makes a good contribution to science or computer science. Both are valuable but in different ways. Talented young people doing both these things are deserving of scholarships. It seems the criteria of the Intel STI competition are more aimed at people making contribution to science or computer science. So that establishing some form of scholarships for young programmers contributing to open source projects who may not be pushing back the barriers of science but are providing valuable contributions would be a good thing.
Furthermore, since a few people have become very rich through open source software and many more have benefited greatly from using it, if these people did want to give something back to the community, contributing to such a fund would be a good way of doing it. Such a scheme would reward some those who have contributed and encourage others to contribute.
It seems to be that this technology would work equally well using modern technology, i.e. a computer, and would be far simpler to implement. Can anyone explain? I suppose that it would take longer to crack using DNA molecules?
I was thinking, something along similar lines (i.e. scholarships), but for young programmers working on open source projects would be a good idea. Working for nothing (at least financially anyway) is all very well, but talented young programmers still need to pay for their education (in some parts of the world).
Any internet millionaires wanting to give something back to the community listening?
Slashdot Mirror
This may be true, but physical property rights say more than: Don't snatch toys from other children they say Don't take toys belonging to other children even when they are not playing with them. If we follow this line of argument to its conclusion, i.e. no rights over things we are not using, we will find ourselves imagining no possessions, (to misquote John Lennon).
Technological developments have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of information....Yet there is a strong push to expand the scope of ownership of information.
It is precisely because it is getting cheaper and easier to make copies of information that there _should_ be a push to expand the scope of ownership of information While it may be virtually cost-less to copy information, there are still costs involved in creating it or discovering it. If you want to provide the information you have created or discovered for no charge, you are free to do so. But if the process of invention or discovery requires investment, the process will only take place if there is a mechanism for recouping the investment.
[S]ome Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This is nonsense. The only way that the transnational corporations could force people to keep buying their seeds is to make the seeds produce sterile plants. People are free to keep using the seeds that have been freely available to them for centuries, but may choose to use the genetically modified sterile seeds if they worth the price.
Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries.
Assuming, for a minute, that it is the world trade system that is the cause of the vast inequalities between rich and poor countries, to me a much better solution appears to be for rich countries to cancel more the debt of the poorest countries.
He notes that the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them. Copyrights and patents may encourage new ideas and innovations, but they also restrict others from using them freely.
Another nonsense argument. Two statements contradict each other if they cannot both be true. [T]o promote the development of ideas does not imply that you cannot reduce people's freedom to use them so there is no contradiction! It is true that copyrights and patents of new ideas restrict others from using them freely, but this is the price of having many of those new ideas. In the same way, property rights restrict people from using physical objects, but they are needed to give people the incentive to produce them. E.g. in the city in which I live there are many homeless people and empty houses yet I still support property rights over houses because otherwise there would be no incentive to build new houses and maintain existing ones.
This is one chapter of a book Information Liberation. The rest of this is also well worth reading (see my review), but unfortunately it is not online (ordering information). Danny.
Hmm.. why not? (I know it has been said already, but think it is particularly revealing) God forbid they (I know he doesn't) plan to recover some of their costs!
I don't see how Napster offers musicians anything. If I want to distribute my music for free, I don't need Napster or any other _distributed_ distribution system. I can convert my music to mp3 and put it on my web site. Fans can download freely from here, so only need distribute links rather than files among themselves. The only time when a _distributed_ distribution system is needed is when someone is trying to suppress the distribution. I.e. when I choose not to distribute my music for free.
To get out of indentured slavery all that's is needed is a way to pay the rent, studio, manager etc without charging for music - Napster does not offer this.
This doesn't really seem to a question of whether trusted systems can have open source code - clearly they can. All that's needed is to develop a trusted in the traditional manner then releases the source code and this need not endanger the system's trusted state.
What I think would be a fairer reading of his claim is that a decentralised development model with different developers doing the bits that scratches their itch is not the best way to meet a set of centrally determined formal specifications. But then this is a question of how the system is developed, not whether the source is open. Paying a bunch of programmers to meet the formal specifications and opening the source so that others can spot bugs doesn't seem to be a problem.
Maybe, if all the design goals were centrally determined, outsiders would be less inclined to contribute, so the benefits of open source would be less. But this hardly seems to be an argument for not opening the source code at all.
Am I missing something?
The only good argument against it seems to be that some new users will be confused and not realise what they're doing. But 2 minutes explaining and 2 clicks and they can turn the thing off too if they want.
If not, I hope bill g doesn't hear about this.
To be honest, I'm not really a uber-IP enthusiast so I might not be the best person to reply to this, but I'll give it a go anyway. What I'm enthusiastic about is doing more of what is important to me and for others to have the same opportunities. Now, some of the things that are important to me depend on the creativity of others - I'm a student and spent a lot of time digesting the ideas of others in books, I also enjoy reading Slashdot. The people whose creative energy went into these books and Slashdot needed some incentive to employ their energies in this way. For some, that incentive may have been public spiritedness, the respect of others, and for others it may have been some financial reward.
It is clear that not all incentives for creativity are financial and not all financial ones depend on IP. I don't dispute this. But it is equally clear that there are some cases of where the creativity of others could provide something useful and important to me but for the people cable of provide the required creativity, there exists no sufficient incentive to do so. Assigning intellectual property rights can provide the required incentive. The authors of the books I read receive royalties, the designers the processor in the PC I am reading Slashdot on can patent their design. So, the books get written and the computers built: I can develop my own idea from the ones in the books and the comments on Slashdot that I read.
So it seems plausible that IP has indirectly helped me develop my ideas and had a positive rather than chilling effect on my learning.
Is this what you consider the atrocious proposal to be or is this what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine . If it is the balanced doctrine, then what exactly is the atrocious proposal and what is the difference between the two?
How is it a problem? First of all, why should we want to evolve. Single celled organisms are the most successful in terms of adaptation to different environments but I have no desire for my offspring to be single celled. Second, if it's the survival of the human race you are concerned about, then isn't your claim that that the human race is not evolving an good thing, i.e. we are not evolving because we are so good at surviving in our environment.
This is because we no longer abide by "survival of the fittest".
It's not survival that's important. Maybe, in the developed world at least, everyone survives to adulthood. But this is not enough, not only must you survive, you must find a mate and successfully rear offspring. It is probable that better looking people and those with better social skills are better at finding mates so more likely to pass on their genes, and those who love children rear them better and have bigger families, so are more likely to pass on their genes.
weak genes are just as likely to be passed along as strong ones
This seems a bit muddled. If two genes are equally likely to be passed on, surely they must be equally strong/weak. Perhaps you have some goal other than survival, but then its not evolution in the biological sense and we have never been heading for it except by chance.
Please, I beg of you, do not ... reply in flame because you disagree! I'm only trying to make a point (that you may or not believe in) for the sake of discussion.
Well, this is intended as discussion, not flame. Please take it as such!
Your argument sounds good, is in tune with what seems the prevalent view among Slashdot readers, and has clearly gone down well with the moderators, but to me seems lacking in substance.
If we are intimately dependent on one another as you say, shouldn't the things that this dependence is grounded in be the object of property rights so that we can give others the incentive to provide them even when it is not in their self interest to do so. If we don't assign these property rights, we have an externality - a positive one in this case - and externalities lead to what economists call Pareto inefficient outcomes, which means that everyone could be made better off without making anyone worse off. There are two solutions to externalities: (1) government regulation, and (2) assigning property rights and letting the market determine the outcome. Now, I hope that most people would agree that government is no competent for this task single handed. So assigning property rights seems the right thing to do.
Maybe this is what you mean by a balanced intellectual property doctrine, and all you are saying is that these property rights should not last forever. But you following attack on capitalism suggests otherwise. The capital system you are attacking need not and does not depend on infinitely lived intellectual property.
NB this is intended more as a question than an attack.
The way to free information is not run beyond the reaches of law, but to distribute it so that for each site that closes, another two spring up
A quick question, the law may not be able to touch them, but they can cut the connection to the rest of the world can they not?
There a three ways in which markets fail to maximise welfare in the way the theory tells us that they should.
Who's theory?
I was referring to the theory argued for informally by Adam Smith and that has now been formalised into the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics. The theory says that under certain conditions, free markets will lead to the maximisation of social welfare, even when the agents who are trading only care about their own welfare.
Externalities... there are positive externalities as well as negative ones. It's really the negative ones that concern us the most.
I don't see why this is true. Surely anything that affects welfare that is not governed by the price mechanism should concern us equally whether it increases or decreases welfare.
Imperfect information is a constant condition, regardless of the system.
Maybe this is true, but it is not important. What is important is how imperfect information affects welfare, and this is different under different systems.
The only question is: which system provides the best incentives to spread information? Markets have been logically and empirically demonstrated to be the most effective conduits of information exchange
In most cases, I agree, markets are the best solution. However, in some cases imperfect information can cause markets to unravel. Think of the case of buying health insurance for the old people. In this case the insurance companies are likely to know less about peoples health than their potential customers. Less healthy people will buy more health insurance than the more healthy ones, so the insurance company will increase the price of insurance. This will mean if you are healthy, there will be no reasonably priced health insurance. In case like this, markets do not work, so there is a good case (i.e. it would improve welfare) for universal health insurance for provided by the government and paid for through taxes.
The answer to these questions is government regulation.
How on earth do you reach that conclusion?
Like this: there are two types of solution. (1)Those involving unregulated free markets and (2) those that involve some government intervention. In cases where solutions of type (1) fail, try solutions of type (2) if there is a good reason to think that doing so would increase welfare. There is such a good reason, namely: correcting market distortions would move us closer to the welfare maximising situation that would obtain were markets perfect.
This is the bit of your post I agree with. I was not suggesting the complete abolition of pricing. Only intervention where prices do not reflect the approximate true value/cost in term of welfare of an action. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear!
No proposed solution for the environment could possibly be *worse* than regulation
Try this one. Suppose we abolish all property rights. In this case there would not even be an incentive to look after those parts of the environment that we had previously owned.
My point is: I expect that most of what is written in this book is nonsense and the only reason the story got posted is because it made a reference to open source software.
Before you flame me, let me qualify what I have said a little. There are some problems with capitalism (by which I mean the way markets are organised at the present), and this book clearly refers to some of them. Economic theory tells us that free markets will maximise welfare based on certain promises. I won't go into the detail here, but if you're interested, look up welfare theorems in an economics text book.
There a three ways in which markets fail to maximise welfare in the way the theory tells us that they should.
1 Externalities, this is when the price of an action to an individual is not equal to the price of that action for society. For example, my factory releases C02, which alters the climate, and causes a farmer in Uganda's crops to fail, but I do not compensate him for the adverse effect of my action on his welfare.
2 Imperfect information, this can be when I sell you something which I claim does something useful for you but in fact, after you have bought it, you find it does not. Another example is you might find no one is willing to sell you reasonably priced health insurance when you reach old age because the insurance company can't tell whether you are asking for the insurance because you know you have some disease (but don't tell them) whose treatment is expensive.
3 Imperfect competition, this is when a company can charge a price for something which is higher than the cost of production. This could because the company in question operates in such a way as to purposefully and unfairly harm its competitors. It's easy to think of examples.
The answer to these questions is government regulation. I hear the libertarians howl with outrage. And for effective government regulation, it is true that the lobbying power of corporations would need be reduced. But his is hardly a revolutionary new form of capitalism.
I am sure that this book refers to some of these things, but I get the impression that it is doing so to rationalise some environmentalist position - I've read many similar books before.
I may be wrong, but read carefully!
The primary threat to freedom actually other people. In the case of democracy, those people are the majority of voters.
The problem is that governmental power is increasingly controlled and directed by corporate interests.
Namely, those people whose pension funds are invested in the stock market.
My point is that, for every freedom you have, there is another freedom someone lese doesn't have because of your having that freedom. Freedom, when it is not qualified by who has it, what they are free to do, and what they are free from, is meaningless.
Either napster does not reduce CD sales so there's no conflict of interest or it does and the anti-napster have something to legitimate complain about.
The only way I can see a conflict of interest arising is if this company writing the report were a rival of napster's. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Or has napster just entered the protected digital content business?
If the judge has the power to split MS, MS can be given the option of either opening them or being split up. As DGregory says I think MS should go the way of IBM. IBM has to publish specs for whatever they do, if people could make their own platforms & file formats TRULY compatible with the Microsoft ones, the world would be a much better place.
2 Licenses are in accordance with law, which is why M$ is pushing UCITA so hard -- to prevent reverse engineering even when it offers inter-operability (which is legal under the DCMA). So if M$ contracts are in conjunction with the law, the judge can't force them to change those either.
The same argument as above applies.
3 Microsoft protocols? They change every protocol they can so that no-one else's software (which uses the protocol correctly prior to the change) no longer interoperates with WinXX.
Likewise, the judge can give MS the option of letting an independent body control protocols, or face being split up.
4 if the cost for Windows goes up, the cost for IE goes up, and the cost of the apps goes up, consumers still have other choices -
If consumer have other choices but choose MS products, then MS is not a monopoly. So there is no case for break-up. (It is, in fact, evident that MS does have monopoly power, but making a monologist charge a higher price does not help consumers.)
I hereby challenge your patent on the grounds of prior art.
If patents have been done before or are obvious, what's stopping people challenging them?
If so, perhaps there is some hope for the patent system. If not, perhaps not.
Assuming Microsoft does have a monopoly on OSes and Offices suits, breaking MS into an OS company and an Apps company would be bad for consumers, i.e. the prices would be higher.
The reason for this is this: a monopolist chooses the price to maximise their profit, this means that they will increase the price until the increases in revenue from the higher price is offset by the reduction in revenue caused by lower demand at the higher price.
OSes and Apps and complementary goods, in other words, the more copies of Windows that are sold, the greater the demand for MS Office.
This means that MS as it is now will increase the price of Windows until the extra revenue from a higher price is offset by, the lost revenue due to fewer copies of windows plus the lost revenue due to fewer copies of Office being sold.
However, if MS were split into an OS and an Apps company, the OS company would increase the price of Windows until the extra revenue from the higher price is offset by the lost revenue due to fewer copies of windows being sold alone, without taking into account the lost revenue from fewer copies of Office being sold.
The same argument applies to the company selling Office. Hence, both Windows and Office would be more expensive after an MS split. So a split is bad for consumers.
The other option is splitting MS into several identical companies. However, it is hard to see how two baby MSes could sell Windows without forking the code, and equally hard to see how forking the code is good for anyone (except Red Hat etc)
So, by all means, change the way they license software, and force them to open their file formats, APIs, and protocols. But there is not justification for splitting them other than hatred!
"There's no victim in the sale of a domain name, therefore there's no reason to make a federal law prohibiting the sale of them."
The sale of domains does cause harm, namely legitimate users of domain names having to pay squatters to get an appropriate domain name. This is a good reason to make a law. Whether this is a sufficient reason to make a federal law I don't know - I am not an expert on federal law - so for the sake of argument I'll concede that such a law is not feasible.
Even so, the conclusion of my argument still holds: while the system I have proposed is certainly not flawless, it is better than the current system because it is harder for squatters to extract money from people who have some use for a domain. (I.e. you can't to sell or give up a domain name for money in any way that will produce evidence of doing so. Furthermore, few potential buyers would risk giving money in response to an anonymous offer to free a domain, but if you devise some non-anonymous way of making an offer, the potential buyer will have no need to pay you to give up the domain since they will have evidence of you offering to give it up for payment. Note that, precisely how it is made harder does not matter as long as it is harder) Because it is harder for squatters to extract payments, there will be less profits for squatters, and so less squatting. Which makes everyone, except perhaps squatters, better off.
My conclusion is that the system I am proposing is better than the current system.
"so they pay me for it, they then report to NSI that they paid me for it"
They don't need to pay you for it. All they need to do is produce evidence that you either (a) offered it to them for a payment, or (b) offered to give it back to the NSI for a payment. Then the NSI takes it off you and IBM takes it. Suppose that you offer it to them using some anonymous means: they pay you money, you return the domain to NSI, IBM complains to the FBI, the FBI takes the money from you and gives it back to IBM. Since you know that there is no prospect of extracting money from IBM for the domain, you don't bother to register unless you have some us for it yourself.
I expect that you'll object there is not much prospect of the FBI finding you in, for instance Russia, so I'll retreat and say while the system I have proposed is certainly not flawless, it is better than the current system. The reason for this is that it would be harder for squatters to extract money from people who have some use for a domain, which will mean less profits for squatters, and so less squatting. Which makes everyone better off (except perhaps squatters).
"If you couldn't sell a domain name to someone, you could offer them a 1,000 year contract to point the domain name to an IP address of their choice."
That's a good point. But suppose offering of such contracts were illegal, i.e. the domain name would returned to the provider if such a contract were offered.
I can't help thinking that the problem of domain squatting could easily be solved by simply not allowing domains to be transferred between owners. If this system was introduced, then people not using domains would have no incentive to hang on to them and arbitration would simply be between rival legitimate uses of a domain.
I don't dispute the usefulness of what has been pointed out by sesiquiped and mreece - that open source projects can be entered into the competition STI, or that winners of the are deserving, or that the criteria for judging it are valid. Perhaps it is true that someone "intelligent enough to work on open source projects and make intelligent contributions" would be " intelligent enough to put a "science" spin on whatever work [they] did to make it worthy of an STI project." I don't know, I'm not such a person.
The point I want to make is that, as I understand it, what makes a good contribution to an open source project is very different from what makes a good contribution to science or computer science. Both are valuable but in different ways. Talented young people doing both these things are deserving of scholarships. It seems the criteria of the Intel STI competition are more aimed at people making contribution to science or computer science. So that establishing some form of scholarships for young programmers contributing to open source projects who may not be pushing back the barriers of science but are providing valuable contributions would be a good thing.
Furthermore, since a few people have become very rich through open source software and many more have benefited greatly from using it, if these people did want to give something back to the community, contributing to such a fund would be a good way of doing it. Such a scheme would reward some those who have contributed and encourage others to contribute.
It seems to be that this technology would work equally well using modern technology, i.e. a computer, and would be far simpler to implement. Can anyone explain? I suppose that it would take longer to crack using DNA molecules?
I was thinking, something along similar lines (i.e. scholarships), but for young programmers working on open source projects would be a good idea. Working for nothing (at least financially anyway) is all very well, but talented young programmers still need to pay for their education (in some parts of the world).
Any internet millionaires wanting to give something back to the community listening?