The problem is that copyrights are like the guilds. For example, you can call the right to make shoes a property right, buy and sell it, make profit off of it. But on no uncertain terms it is not a property at all and in fact it is an immoral restriction on peoples liberties.
Well the same is true with copyright. Contrary to myth copyrights don't promote creation, all they do is force the market to center around creation controls instead of creation services. Well, lawyers are good at controling things, while creators are good at creating things.
In fact, even when they do all these lawsuits, it's gotten to the point where they are not even trying to get copyright infringers any more. They know darn well it's unenforcable. Their only goal now is to sue guilt and intimidate people into buying overpriced content. That is why we have a moral duty to promote copying no matter what and treat it like a moral duty, not an infringement on peoples property.
I hate to sound cynical, but here's what's really going on. You see, the poor people of India have been ripped off so many times that the use of gold for savings and financial transactions is deeply embedded into their culture. That drives the central bankers of the world, and especially in India absolutely batshit crazy, because it deprives them of the opportunity to water down peoples money and keep the difference for themselves while saddling the poor with inflation and debt. This wasn't so unbearable as long as India was just some destitute pit-stop. However, now that the economy is industrializing and growing, the mere thought that people might actually get to keep the value of their earnings is causing them to desperately seek any kind of "solution". Micro-loans, cell phone transactions, free college level "economics" courses for everybody in India, massive public relations campaigns, you name it - they are desperate to get India away from gold.
You see, it's not just about money, but control. By using gold, it would force all new investment capital in the economy to come from savers and producers instead of central bankers and their backed governments - that just print it up.
"vendor lock in only works if you buy into it in the first place. stop blaming microsoft for it."
Just one caveat. Software vendors are given an unnatural government monopoly called "copyright" that dictates what people are allowed to do with information at their disposal. This allows Microsoft to leverage themselves into markets and pull crap that would have been impossible in a normal free market.
I know the theory that says copyrights are property, I know the theory that says slaves are property too. In practice though, copyrights act nothing like, and are nothing like regular property, but rather are like massive government micro-regulations regarding what people are allowed to do with information they posess.
>The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially.
This is complete bullshit. What is really going on is that free software forces the software market to center around services instead of licensing controls. That might be bad for somebody who wants a global monopoly, but is very nice for those who create and do stuff.
In an open source world, a software engineer may have lost a total monopoly over a work he creates... but in return he has gained billions of hours worth of developed software without any financial loss. That increases his productivity drastically and thus the demand for his services and his pay.
It is Microsoft who has deprived us of that benefit with their constant licensing fees and constant vendor lock in, not open source.
Bottom line, patents are anti free-market, they are not property, they are not incentive, they are not protection. Rather brought to their logical conclusion they are genocidal.
He minus well have said - we need slavery, nobody will grow cotton on the plantations for free. The point being that copyright and patent are nothing like a normal property right and are the anti-christ of freedom and free markets. Every 'value' that they have is coerced at the expense of someone else, is asserting control over things they have no right to control, is an artificial monopoly.
I think a lot of people fail to understand that what made the web/internet a power horse was not cool technology. While that helped bring it to the masses, what really made it bigger then life was the non proprietary nature of the technology behind it. Until those fundamental building blocks are taken care of, all this talk about new web paradigms is just going to be talk.
Open Source is a trademark group, but the real success has been free (an in GPL) software. Economic forces alone have pushed growth in this area up way above 20% per year in many areas, but the Open Source movement was sort of drug along by the coat tales. I'm not saying it's hasn't accomplished a lot, but pure economic forces would have forced this growth anyhow even if the Open Source group never formed.
I want a pro constitution pro honest money pro limited government candidate. One who will end the war on drugs, One who will cut back the constant unrestrained growth of government that has happened over the last 60 years. Never once has the size of the federal government ever shrank. Never once has the amount of spending gone down. One who will get the Iraq war off our back, reign in the USA empire and bases all over the planet, one who will drastically reduce taxes AND spending, but not screw us over regarding the value of our money, and not load the future generation with 10 generations worth of debt.
Dammit. WTF is wrong with people? The fact that I don't even need to mention this candidates name should tell everybody everything that they need to know.
Using government and global quasi government agencies to stop bad deeds on the internet is simply not a rational solution. You can't stop information with planes, boats, guns, and tanks. But this is exactly what government (global or otherwise) is about. Government is a tool of coercion. That tool simply doesn't work well online any more than it will work of you threaten to beat the crap out of me if you don't like what I say. Seriously, try it - see if I even care. The rational solution is self organization and technological solutions. Black lists and AI have done more to stop spam than every government law on the books combined. All those lawsuits from the RIAA were barely able to even minutely influence peoples online behaviors.
I hate to tell you this, but you're the one drinking the koolaid. It is the Ron Paul opposition that treats the government as an omnipotent being that must be involved in education, health, environment, retirement, and most other aspects of peoples lives ranter that as a servant that must constantly be restrained, limited, and disciplined. Speaking about koolaid, what about that myth that the Federal Reserve is there to provide "flexibility" in the economy and "cool down" the economy when it's "too hot", and "stimulate" the economy when it's too slow. It's simply amazing that people still believe that crap in the 21st century, I truly feel sorry for them, when house of cards collapses they will get nailed up the back-end so hard they won't know what hit them.
I changed my mind about the war in Iraq because of Ron Paul. I was always sympathetic to the idea of bringing liberty to those overseas, but it is clear now that the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones. Ron Paul made it clear and final that the war is not helping the freedom of the people over there, and it is obviously not helping the freedom of people over here, and is directly responsible for the rise of a police state mentality in the USA, and is contributing greatly to our ongoing economic collapse. As Ron Paul once said, if we want wars all over the planet and want the government babying people from cradle to grave - then we must have an IRS and massive debt. But if we want freedom and liberty, then yes we can get rid of them.
It sure seems that as of lately, all these measures they are taking to protect us from terrorists are really measures to turn the USA into a police state. Exit controls? Not in a free country.
Proprietary software will attack their IT infrastructure and soak away profit in the form of opportunity costs, computer security costs, saturated network bandwidth due to compromised systems and bot networks, and attack carer mobility, self sufficiency, R&D, learning capacity, and growth ability of the people who work with the proprietary infrastructure.
Seriously, there is a reason why billion dollar data centers from google, to amazon.com, to wall street are using Linux and open source software in their data centers up and down the chain.
Another thing that really blows me away is how they are almost always referring to income taxes. But that means that the Kennedy's, for example, sitting on billions of dollars worth of assets would barley even notice while the while a small business man who busts his ass to create 20 jobs and earn his first million will get his nuts ripped off. Many of the elite love income taxes because it wipes out all their competition. I can't think of a better way to oppress the poor and keep them from getting rich.
Last time I checked, the 7th commandment of God says "thou shall not steal", and the 9th "do not covet thy neighbors goods". I didn't see an exemption in there - "thou shall not steal unless you do it in the form of mass coveting in the form of a democratic mob"
The paper proved something even more fundamentally important. That as technology makes copying easier, it is more beneficial overall to decrease the term rather than increase it.
This says nothing about how technology would evolve in an unlicensed system though, all you talk about is how some current technology doesn't to a good job of differentiating new signals that come along.
"Whoever had the most money for the most transmitters and amplifiers, would win."
This is another FCC myth, but the physics doesn't back it up. It is false for the same reason that I can criss-cross my flash light signal thru a 500 terawatt laser beam without interference.
"it would be whoever has the most powerful transmitter would win."
That's the other common fallacy that goes along with the FCC, but it's not based off of physics. You could shoot off a 500 terawatt laser and it's not going to interfere with a flashlight beam cris-crossing thru it. There is nothing different about the RF spectrum, accept that we can't see it with our eyes.
The whole premise behind the FCC was that if spectrum was unregulated you would have a tragedy of the commons were everybody would pollute it so much that it would become unusable. However in practice that has turned out to be a complete and absolute lie. In the unregulated spectrum's, the more the spectrum got "polluted", the more people created technologies that could intelligently allocate, detect, shift, and route around. So now all spectrum regulation does is lock in obsolete technologies and wasteful inefficient use of the frequencies in place.
You need to understand government regulation. For example, if they passed a law that said there were fines and punishment for putting people at risk for food contamination - then that wouldn't be so bad. But that's never what they do, instead they pass laws that say, you must pay x fee, have y inspections per year, have e f g licenses, have this kind of flooring, that kind of sinks, file forms a b c d e f g, wash with this soap that x many times under y circumstances z many times under b circumstances, and on and on for 1000 pages. And if the food does get contaminated - the company has no risk of legal punishment as long as they filed correct paperwork. This is not protection of rights and freedoms - it is padding a bureaucracy and corporate sponsors.
Yeah because pretty gold rocks have so much intrinsic value. Get real. If gold wasn't a world currency it wouldn't be worth jack.
The "value" of gold is that it can't be printed out of thin air to buy bonds to finance pork and wars. Yeah, they can mine it, but that historically has only been able to expand the supply by about 1% per year, and it takes work, effort, and capital investment to do that.
At least they try to adjust it to meet the business cycles.
You've got to be kidding. The fed amplifies the "business cycle", the Great depression and the stagflation in the late 70's happened After the creation of the fed, not before. Now we have a housing bubble, had a stock market bubble, all commodity prices have tripled in the last 5 years, where do you think all that extra "liquidity" came from?
The biggest myth in innovation is patents. Patents are not needed to overcome high R&D costs, because they are the cause of high R&D costs. And those stores about the lone inventor, well, that myth flourishes because patents discourage and punish collaberation. The worst myth of all is one that says patents financially benefit creators more than they harm them. But to a real innovator, the loss of one patent monopoly at the benefit of gaining access to 10 million other patent monopolies that were previously closed to him is a net gain. The thing to understand about patents is that patents force the market to center around invention controls instead of invention services. Well lawyers, governments, and bureaucrats are good at controlling things, but inventors are good at inventing things. A quick look at the real world will show that courts, lawyers, and executives benefit far more from patent controls than innovators.
But patents are far more evil than that. The fact that they must lie and try to pretend that it's just like a physical property right when ideas and inventions clearly are not even close to the nature of property in any way should be a clue that patents are not what they've been cracked up to be. Like how African nations were sued in the world court and 15 million Africans dying of AIDS were locked out from Indian made generics. Like how patents held back air-bags and anti-lock-brakes in automobiles for 20 years while over a million people died in accidents. Like how DDT and Freon were pushed out when their patents expired for less effective and less safe alternatives. The 15,000 estimated cancer deaths caused by DDT are nothing compared to the 50 million malaria deaths since it's ban. The environmental toxicity of freon is nothing compared to it's more complicated replacement for which DOW also has a patent. Like how vitamins, natural herbs and medicines, and alternative medicines, and "simple" medicines, are all pushed and regulated out of the marketplace in favor of medicines that have chemical side effects that can be patented. Companies have a vested interest in pushing less than optimal medicines even if better, safer, and cheaper alternatives exist. Also, people assume that every product having incompatible parts with every other product and all the environmental waste that ensues is just a normal part of a free market, it is not.
In sum, patents not only fail to help innovators, but are in fact genocidal. It will be a glorious day for productive people when patents die.
Laws exist to serve people, not the other way around. When a law is unjust, it is the system that has the obligation to change for the people, not the people whom have an obligation to take a beating till the system gets around to working. People are the ends in themselves, not systems.
It is the Movie industry that looses the moral high-ground because they allocate millions of dollars worth of capital on the assumption that they have a God given right to control how people copy and distribute. This mis-allocation of capital would never happen in a free market that centered around information services rather than information controls. With out distribution monopolies, the movie industry would likely be much more independent with more variety.
we agreed 200+ years ago that those people had the right control its distribution for a limited period of time
And that agreement is invalid because they had no right to negotiate away my right to copy to begin with. That's my right to negotiate, not the mobs, not the Congresses. They agreed that slavery was a property right too, that should teach you a lot about the nature of unjust rights and the appropriate ways to deal with them.
Re:copyrights are an illegitimate law
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
Land ownership is another artificial, government-granted monopoly
It is not artificial because with land, not everybody can have the same resource at the same time, but with information they can. Because of that nature of land - property rights are a very natural outcome, and are rights even if no government existed at all. Though people typically organize into government to secure those rights, they have the right even without government, it's a natural consequence of it's limited nature. With information, the limiting factor is the time and effort to create it meaning: charge for creation related services and not a government imposed monopoly on information distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that copyrights are like the guilds. For example, you can call the right to make shoes a property right, buy and sell it, make profit off of it. But on no uncertain terms it is not a property at all and in fact it is an immoral restriction on peoples liberties.
Well the same is true with copyright. Contrary to myth copyrights don't promote creation, all they do is force the market to center around creation controls instead of creation services. Well, lawyers are good at controling things, while creators are good at creating things.
In fact, even when they do all these lawsuits, it's gotten to the point where they are not even trying to get copyright infringers any more. They know darn well it's unenforcable. Their only goal now is to sue guilt and intimidate people into buying overpriced content. That is why we have a moral duty to promote copying no matter what and treat it like a moral duty, not an infringement on peoples property.
I hate to sound cynical, but here's what's really going on.
You see, the poor people of India have been ripped off so many times that the use of gold for savings and financial transactions is deeply embedded into their culture. That drives the central bankers of the world, and especially in India absolutely batshit crazy, because it deprives them of the opportunity to water down peoples money and keep the difference for themselves while saddling the poor with inflation and debt. This wasn't so unbearable as long as India was just some destitute pit-stop. However, now that the economy is industrializing and growing, the mere thought that people might actually get to keep the value of their earnings is causing them to desperately seek any kind of "solution". Micro-loans, cell phone transactions, free college level "economics" courses for everybody in India, massive public relations campaigns, you name it - they are desperate to get India away from gold.
You see, it's not just about money, but control. By using gold, it would force all new investment capital in the economy to come from savers and producers instead of central bankers and their backed governments - that just print it up.
"vendor lock in only works if you buy into it in the first place. stop blaming microsoft for it."
Just one caveat. Software vendors are given an unnatural government monopoly called "copyright" that dictates what people are allowed to do with information at their disposal. This allows Microsoft to leverage themselves into markets and pull crap that would have been impossible in a normal free market.
I know the theory that says copyrights are property, I know the theory that says slaves are property too. In practice though, copyrights act nothing like, and are nothing like regular property, but rather are like massive government micro-regulations regarding what people are allowed to do with information they posess.
>The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially.
... but in return he has gained billions of hours worth of developed software without any financial loss. That increases his productivity drastically and thus the demand for his services and his pay.
This is complete bullshit. What is really going on is that free software forces the software market to center around services instead of licensing controls. That might be bad for somebody who wants a global monopoly, but is very nice for those who create and do stuff.
In an open source world, a software engineer may have lost a total monopoly over a work he creates
It is Microsoft who has deprived us of that benefit with their constant licensing fees and constant vendor lock in, not open source.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168820&cid=14072468
Bottom line, patents are anti free-market, they are not property, they are not incentive, they are not protection. Rather brought to their logical conclusion they are genocidal.
He minus well have said - we need slavery, nobody will grow cotton on the plantations for free. The point being that copyright and patent are nothing like a normal property right and are the anti-christ of freedom and free markets. Every 'value' that they have is coerced at the expense of someone else, is asserting control over things they have no right to control, is an artificial monopoly.
I think a lot of people fail to understand that what made the web/internet a power horse was not cool technology. While that helped bring it to the masses, what really made it bigger then life was the non proprietary nature of the technology behind it. Until those fundamental building blocks are taken care of, all this talk about new web paradigms is just going to be talk.
Open Source is a trademark group, but the real success has been free (an in GPL) software. Economic forces alone have pushed growth in this area up way above 20% per year in many areas, but the Open Source movement was sort of drug along by the coat tales. I'm not saying it's hasn't accomplished a lot, but pure economic forces would have forced this growth anyhow even if the Open Source group never formed.
I want a pro constitution pro honest money pro limited government candidate. One who will end the war on drugs, One who will cut back the constant unrestrained growth of government that has happened over the last 60 years. Never once has the size of the federal government ever shrank. Never once has the amount of spending gone down. One who will get the Iraq war off our back, reign in the USA empire and bases all over the planet, one who will drastically reduce taxes AND spending, but not screw us over regarding the value of our money, and not load the future generation with 10 generations worth of debt.
Dammit. WTF is wrong with people? The fact that I don't even need to mention this candidates name should tell everybody everything that they need to know.
Using government and global quasi government agencies to stop bad deeds on the internet is simply not a rational solution. You can't stop information with planes, boats, guns, and tanks. But this is exactly what government (global or otherwise) is about. Government is a tool of coercion. That tool simply doesn't work well online any more than it will work of you threaten to beat the crap out of me if you don't like what I say. Seriously, try it - see if I even care. The rational solution is self organization and technological solutions. Black lists and AI have done more to stop spam than every government law on the books combined. All those lawsuits from the RIAA were barely able to even minutely influence peoples online behaviors.
I hate to tell you this, but you're the one drinking the koolaid. It is the Ron Paul opposition that treats the government as an omnipotent being that must be involved in education, health, environment, retirement, and most other aspects of peoples lives ranter that as a servant that must constantly be restrained, limited, and disciplined. Speaking about koolaid, what about that myth that the Federal Reserve is there to provide "flexibility" in the economy and "cool down" the economy when it's "too hot", and "stimulate" the economy when it's too slow. It's simply amazing that people still believe that crap in the 21st century, I truly feel sorry for them, when house of cards collapses they will get nailed up the back-end so hard they won't know what hit them.
I changed my mind about the war in Iraq because of Ron Paul. I was always sympathetic to the idea of bringing liberty to those overseas, but it is clear now that the source of liberty is individual choices not government ones. Ron Paul made it clear and final that the war is not helping the freedom of the people over there, and it is obviously not helping the freedom of people over here, and is directly responsible for the rise of a police state mentality in the USA, and is contributing greatly to our ongoing economic collapse. As Ron Paul once said, if we want wars all over the planet and want the government babying people from cradle to grave - then we must have an IRS and massive debt. But if we want freedom and liberty, then yes we can get rid of them.
It sure seems that as of lately, all these measures they are taking to protect us from terrorists are really measures to turn the USA into a police state. Exit controls? Not in a free country.
Proprietary software will attack their IT infrastructure and soak away profit in the form of opportunity costs, computer security costs, saturated network bandwidth due to compromised systems and bot networks,
and attack carer mobility, self sufficiency, R&D, learning capacity, and growth ability of the people who work with the proprietary infrastructure.
Seriously, there is a reason why billion dollar data centers from google, to amazon.com, to wall street are using Linux and open source software in their data centers up and down the chain.
Another thing that really blows me away is how they are almost always referring to income taxes. But that means that the Kennedy's, for example, sitting on billions of dollars worth of assets would barley even notice while the while a small business man who busts his ass to create 20 jobs and earn his first million will get his nuts ripped off. Many of the elite love income taxes because it wipes out all their competition. I can't think of a better way to oppress the poor and keep them from getting rich.
Last time I checked, the 7th commandment of God says "thou shall not steal", and the 9th "do not covet thy neighbors goods". I didn't see an exemption in there - "thou shall not steal unless you do it in the form of mass coveting in the form of a democratic mob"
The paper proved something even more fundamentally important. That as technology makes copying easier, it is more beneficial overall to decrease the term rather than increase it.
This says nothing about how technology would evolve in an unlicensed system though, all you talk about is how some current technology doesn't to a good job of differentiating new signals that come along.
"Whoever had the most money for the most transmitters and amplifiers, would win."
This is another FCC myth, but the physics doesn't back it up. It is false for the same reason that I can criss-cross my flash light signal thru a 500 terawatt laser beam without interference.
"it would be whoever has the most powerful transmitter would win."
That's the other common fallacy that goes along with the FCC, but it's not based off of physics. You could shoot off a 500 terawatt laser and it's not going to interfere with a flashlight beam cris-crossing thru it. There is nothing different about the RF spectrum, accept that we can't see it with our eyes.
The whole premise behind the FCC was that if spectrum was unregulated you would have a tragedy of the commons were everybody would pollute it so much that it would become unusable. However in practice that has turned out to be a complete and absolute lie. In the unregulated spectrum's, the more the spectrum got "polluted", the more people created technologies that could intelligently allocate, detect, shift, and route around. So now all spectrum regulation does is lock in obsolete technologies and wasteful inefficient use of the frequencies in place.
You need to understand government regulation. For example, if they passed a law that said there were fines and punishment for putting people at risk for food contamination - then that wouldn't be so bad. But that's never what they do, instead they pass laws that say, you must pay x fee, have y inspections per year, have e f g licenses, have this kind of flooring, that kind of sinks, file forms a b c d e f g, wash with this soap that x many times under y circumstances z many times under b circumstances, and on and on for 1000 pages. And if the food does get contaminated - the company has no risk of legal punishment as long as they filed correct paperwork. This is not protection of rights and freedoms - it is padding a bureaucracy and corporate sponsors.
The "value" of gold is that it can't be printed out of thin air to buy bonds to finance pork and wars. Yeah, they can mine it, but that historically has only been able to expand the supply by about 1% per year, and it takes work, effort, and capital investment to do that.
You've got to be kidding. The fed amplifies the "business cycle", the Great depression and the stagflation in the late 70's happened After the creation of the fed, not before. Now we have a housing bubble, had a stock market bubble, all commodity prices have tripled in the last 5 years, where do you think all that extra "liquidity" came from?
The biggest myth in innovation is patents. Patents are not needed to overcome high R&D costs, because they are the cause of high R&D costs. And those stores about the lone inventor, well, that myth flourishes because patents discourage and punish collaberation. The worst myth of all is one that says patents financially benefit creators more than they harm them. But to a real innovator, the loss of one patent monopoly at the benefit of gaining access to 10 million other patent monopolies that were previously closed to him is a net gain. The thing to understand about patents is that patents force the market to center around invention controls instead of invention services. Well lawyers, governments, and bureaucrats are good at controlling things, but inventors are good at inventing things. A quick look at the real world will show that courts, lawyers, and executives benefit far more from patent controls than innovators.
But patents are far more evil than that. The fact that they must lie and try to pretend that it's just like a physical property right when ideas and inventions clearly are not even close to the nature of property in any way should be a clue that patents are not what they've been cracked up to be. Like how African nations were sued in the world court and 15 million Africans dying of AIDS were locked out from Indian made generics. Like how patents held back air-bags and anti-lock-brakes in automobiles for 20 years while over a million people died in accidents. Like how DDT and Freon were pushed out when their patents expired for less effective and less safe alternatives. The 15,000 estimated cancer deaths caused by DDT are nothing compared to the 50 million malaria deaths since it's ban. The environmental toxicity of freon is nothing compared to it's more complicated replacement for which DOW also has a patent. Like how vitamins, natural herbs and medicines, and alternative medicines, and "simple" medicines, are all pushed and regulated out of the marketplace in favor of medicines that have chemical side effects that can be patented. Companies have a vested interest in pushing less than optimal medicines even if better, safer, and cheaper alternatives exist. Also, people assume that every product having incompatible parts with every other product and all the environmental waste that ensues is just a normal part of a free market, it is not.
In sum, patents not only fail to help innovators, but are in fact genocidal. It will be a glorious day for productive people when patents die.
Laws exist to serve people, not the other way around. When a law is unjust, it is the system that has the obligation to change for the people, not the people whom have an obligation to take a beating till the system gets around to working. People are the ends in themselves, not systems.
It is the Movie industry that looses the moral high-ground because they allocate millions of dollars worth of capital on the assumption that they have a God given right to control how people copy and distribute. This mis-allocation of capital would never happen in a free market that centered around information services rather than information controls. With out distribution monopolies, the movie industry would likely be much more independent with more variety.
And that agreement is invalid because they had no right to negotiate away my right to copy to begin with. That's my right to negotiate, not the mobs, not the Congresses. They agreed that slavery was a property right too, that should teach you a lot about the nature of unjust rights and the appropriate ways to deal with them.
It is not artificial because with land, not everybody can have the same resource at the same time, but with information they can. Because of that nature of land - property rights are a very natural outcome, and are rights even if no government existed at all. Though people typically organize into government to secure those rights, they have the right even without government, it's a natural consequence of it's limited nature. With information, the limiting factor is the time and effort to create it meaning: charge for creation related services and not a government imposed monopoly on information distribution.