Anonymous Coward wrote: Like so many other arguments that favor the free distribution of "intellectual" property, there's one thing missing from this analogy. Whether it's digital or physical, BOTH mediums share one common element - in fact, it's one element that makes them BOTH very viable in a free market. VALUE. Pure and simple.
Value is neither pure nor simple. The value you say is in your song is partly made of chords, progressions, harmonies, hooks and melodies that someone else thought, imagined and used before you. Another part of the value lies in the capacity of your audience to understand and appreciate your creation. That your song has value to them does not in itself ENTITLE you to the recoup the value, let alone benefit from a comfortable, state-run racket.
In a way, you are like the wanderer who lays the last brick in the building and calls it his own. You depend on the past and the commonality of shared culture to make your song or story or invention valuable. If I were to calculate the value of all those contributions, you would be left with a much smaller royalty, probably not worth the trouble of collection.
This notion is exceedingly important when one considers the implications of relaying an idea to someone else- an idea that has the potential of being of substantial value to a significant number of people. Yes, I still have the idea, but now that two people have access to its substance, its value has been effectively diminished.
It's value can only have been diminished if you ALREADY ASSUME IT IS YOUR RIGHT TO COLLECT ROYALTIES. Since this is the question at issue, I would say you are taking for granted what is to be proved. Not to mention being smug.
I really don't understand the mentality behind the idea that IP should be free. IP, in one form or another, has DRIVEN our advancement as a society, and the reason for this is simple. We reward those with good ideas by buying what they have created.
First of all, when copyright and patent became part of English law in the 17th century, printers, inventors and the like were impoverished by today's standards. It made sense to have the advancement of science and the useful arts as a social policy objective because there really weren't any cultural 'industries'. That was three hundred years ago. The situation now is much different, in fact just the opposite. Science is out of control; technology dominates and enslaves us, huge conglomerates have to spew out oceans of irrelevant, nauseating 'content' just because they exist. That's the danger of having a whole social class of professional intellectual property generators. If they stopped spitting out crap, they'd die. The situation we have now is exactly the reverse of England at the time of the Statute of Anne. Far from needing the encouragement of guaranteed monopoly, the intellectual property economy is overdeveloped and in need of restraint. Ask anyone what they think about having human genes patented and you'll see that my view is not unpopular.
Whether it's a physical item, like a new type of house paint that will last for 20 years, or a new song that leaves us with a positive sense of well-being, it's all the same. They both do something FOR us...they convey very real benefits whose value is based on what the maker is offering, and the buyer is willing to pay.
You're giving an example of someone who is willing to pay under the current intellectual property regime, but you are just following the ridiculous practice of the Software Anti-Piracy Lobby that overstates the losses to piracy by assuming that everyone who steals the software would have paid list price for it. That's just plain false. Some would, but most wouldn't. If the person who values something enough to buy it has no other option, then yes, they might buy where they would otherwise copy, but again, in counting this as a direct loss to the creator, you are assuming that the creator already has residual property rights in his creation when that is the very point that is in question.
If you don't pay, you don't play. Period. Otherwise, it's theft.
Why should we pay for someone else to play? Why don't they do it on their own dime like the rest of us?
I agree with you in principle, but the amount of effort it takes to create something profound and lasting is too draining to be undertaken as a part-time job.
And yet it's hard to judge before the fact what would happen if IP laws were eliminated or drastically scaled back. It may, in fact, turn out to be the case that with a million monkeys at the keyboard, we'll get another Shakespeare or two (hey, he didn't need any IP laws, did he?) but it isn't obvious or certain that the result would be any better than what we have now.
Yeah, I agree that the music industry is full of crap. Did you ever wonder why there have to be Stars in the music industry? Because if there weren't, Sony/Warner/EMI would never be able to MASS PRODUCE and MASS MARKET prerecorded media. That's the reason there are stars. Not because of talent or public taste. Long live garage bands, folk music, and home-made demo tapes!!
Art is discovery, too. Nothing gets created ex nihilo. Everything is an inspiration or a muse or a Platonic Idea. Shakespeare's plays were already written. He just had this dim voice in the back of his head telling him what to write.
There is no such thing as art. High culture is an illusion. Art is just people running around like ants trying to define themselves as gnostics and being "different". So even if you agree that Linux is Art, you're not really saying that much. Maybe we're not being fair to ant farms.
I was actually considering giving away burnt copies of Microsoft Office CD on the street. With a big sign. Seriously. I think ownership of software is more insidious than it seems. An operating system is mind control, so if my mind has to be owned, I would rather NOT have it owned by some faceless behemoth.
My civil disobedience plans are on hold for now. I don't think the average jane doe would consider this a "top-of-mind" issue. I'd be standing there holding out this CD with a nice generic label and she'd look at me like I was from Mars and this thought will occur to her: "That THING probably has a virus on it... He is giving me a computer virus, I just KNOW it. Eeewww." At which point she would start to walk away a bit faster.
(I think there really is something to be said for Red Hat's theory about the importance of brand-recognition in the open source software game.)
Politicians are not very interested in this issue either. If you talk about intellectual property their eyes start to water.
In a non-proprietary world, development costs would be a fraction of what they are now. Everyone would borrow everybody else's best ideas and everything would be so much the better. The programmers? Out of work? Nah, not a chance. Most people who are now working on creating "finished products" would be reassigned to client services and a continuous reengineering plan.
This is the same pathetic plea that we hear from pharmaceutical giants. "Oh, it costs us so much to develop and test the drug - boo hoo. We'll have to lay off researchers." If these companies coordinated their research efforts, their costs would be a fraction of what they are. I'm afraid to say it, but the pursuit of knowledge is one area in which cooperation is a more effective strategy than competition.
But what about Vietnam? They had like, what, over 90% pirated software? Something tells me that a) some of these ppl could afford a legal copy b) some of these ppl are using this software out of a real need c) they would likely have to buy a legit copy were it not for available pirated copies. (no?)
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I think this is a really nifty and legitimate (and cost effective because there's no bureaucracy) form of technology transfer. Hey, we use the third world for cheap labour. The least we can do is give them buggy software.
Are slave ownership contracts still valid? They are agreements in the same way that shrink wrap licenses are agreements. You don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
If you reply that slaveholding is immoral and therefore no contract can legally require or enforce it, then you have defeated your own argument. I am legally bound to disobey immoral laws. This is what War Crimes trials are about. You must have the character and common sense to know when laws are stupid. Don't just depend on the system, because the system will fail you.
Uhhh... just where did you get the stuff that you used to make your house or picnic table or macrame plant hanger? Did it issue forth from your loins? Or, as is more likely the case, did you steal it from some unwitting natives by claiming all of the New World in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella? Did you have a God given right to that? Did you have a God given right to anything that mother nature's bounty provided you with? You're like the selfish, spoiled child who thinks the world owes him everything. The rights you have to your stuff, whether it's intellectual or physical property exist only in so far as your fellow citizens are willing to extend them. That's called Goodwill, not Natural Rights. The material you use doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the world and all creatures first. You're just borrowing it. Intellectual property is riddled with problems because it makes even less sense to imagine ideas as personal ex-nihilo belongings than it does to think about physical property in this way. But when you strip away all the Jeffersonian rhetoric and the fantasy of the neo-conservative rugged individualist, physical and intellectual property are both subject to the GPL.
When I was using Win95, I was programming in Delphi, so I sort of liked the sophisticated IDE and integrated debugging, but I figured for a worthy cause like Linux I could learn to live without. But the other day I decided to try CodeForge for Linux and it's really great. It uses the built in diff tools and RCS, allows you to set all the GCC and G++ options in a dialog box. Error messages and output windows are well designed and the code editor has this cool feature where you can "collapse" and "expand" function blocks, classes, etc. In a few months, Borland is coming out with a version of JBuilder for Linux. Soon there will be no shortage of IDE's to choose from. So who cares if ONE vendor ties a product to Red Hat? There will be lots of other offerings, both GPL'd and commercial.
Every second that I spend at work is mine, not my employer's. I work for my own satisfaction and adhere to my moral principles. Organizations are built from cooperating human beings, not slaves.
>In the end, a poor product which thrives on >excellent marketing and vicious business >practices will only hurt itself.
For this prediction to come true, people have to have access to unbiased information about the quality of products. Because you have to buy the product in order to find out that it's crappy, the marketing department has a huge advantage over the quality control department in determining the success or failure of a product. If, in addition to having a very well paid marketing department, I also control the content of the "independent" information providers, then the battle for market-driven quality is all but lost.
That is why it is nearly impossible to combat a company that owns the mass media channels through which "unbiased" product information is distributed. This is the kind of unbreakable monopoly that Microsoft has.
Get a grip. How is it that everyone except you is a sheep? If you want to give away your democratic rights to private enterprises over which you have no control, fine. I'm not interested in having unrestrained capitalism trample on my human rights. If you think you'd survive a minute in the world you long for, you are a fool.
Intellectual property law purports to separate ideas from their particular expression. As an oversimplified example: I cannot copyright the notion of love but I can copyright a book about love. This is good because it means that even though there is legal protection against those who would copy the work for profit, there is little to prevent someone from borrowing ideas from existing works. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that all intellectual creations are derivative in some sense. Northrop Frye, the great literary critic, said that poetry can only be made of other poetry. The same can be said of any other intellectual artifact. Given the ubiquity of derived material, how can we justify penalizing certain kinds of intellectual borrowing but not others?
Traditionally, this has been justified by the "differentness" of the work in question from prior art and the fact that the work bears the stamp or impression of the author's soul. As you can imagine, this is not at all a simplistic task for a court to determine. It requires the court to make subjective and somewhat arbitrary judgements. In most cases, an absolutist view would make the cases easier to decide, but judges would be less inclined to make those decisions. The situation would be analogous to one in which the only penalty for murder was the death penalty. You would probably see a lot of cases in which charges were lowered from murder to manslaughter. The more grey area there is, the more room there is to hide or ignore the underlying contradiction in the notion of intellectual property -- that no one really owns it. It's just a convenient fiction that allows people to make money. That's not a bad thing in itself, of course. What is worrying is that there seems to be no way to slow the ever-increasing level of protection that intellectual property receives. Eventually, we may find ourselves without the raw materials which we need to create new works of art, culture, technology etc.
What does this have to do with the GPL? If, as some previous posters have suggested, the meaning of "portion" is determined to be "any amount of material", then that is in effect a new and absolutist legal definition of derivative. That means that patent and copyright holders will be able to impose even more restrictions on allegedly derivative intellectual property. The tiniest borrowing by one inventor from another could constitute patent infringement.
The same can be said about the question of "dilution" of the GPL over several generations of code inheritance. If the absolutist position were accepted by the court, Thomas Edison could sue Sony for violating his patent on the grammophone. Joseph Conrad could sue Francis Ford Copolla for Apocalypse Now (being loosely based on Heart of Darkness) et cetera et cetera.
The broader the restrictions imposed on developers by the GPL, the tighter the noose will be on the flow of information generally, because any decision to support the absolutist notion of "derived work" will be quickly capitalized upon by corporate intellectual property lawyers anxious to make their salaries seem worthwhile.
Clearly the GPL will be tested eventually, and when it is tested, the court will not be likely to accept an absolutist interpretation of "derived works" because of the above mentioned collateral damage to the public domain. If the court is unwilling to draw the line to prevent the commercialization of free software (without at least returning the knowledge value) then the license will have to be re-drafted so that it is less vague on what, if anything, "portion" really means.
Subject: Linux Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 00:17:19 -0500 From: Sydney Weidman To: JCoates@tribune.com
coates sayeth:
"Bill Gates isn't a monster."
I don't think anyone is suggesting that he's a monster. He's just a bureaucrat with a big salary who pushes people around and calls it free enterprise.
"Not only that, but we're all very, very lucky to have
Microsoft in our lives."
OK, this must be hyperbole. I'm assuming that you wanted to be as controversial as possible. I can't imagine that anyone would believe this unless they had a vested interest. But it's true in a way that we're very lucky to have Microsoft in our lives. Binary Bill was not the first person on the list when IBM was phoning around looking for someone to write the operating system for the first IBM PC. The first guy was out of his office at the time of the call. The IBM guy only knew of Gates through Bill Gates' mom, who served with him on the board of directors of a big charity.
"Furthermore, Microsoft Windows 2000, which made its debut in Chicago at last week's Comdex computer show, is a much more useful personal computer operating system"
It's useful for you. That's great. It is useful for millions and millions of other people, too. But that doesn't mean it has to be the ONLY operating system available for IBM PC's. In the meantime, your column may have discouraged people from trying Linux. I'm sure you don't care about that, but free software, even if it were "dinky" and "feature-weak", still has an important social and political goal the point of which you have missed entirely. I understand that you were responding to the toungue-in-cheek jabs that Linux fanatics often take at Microsoft. I think this anti-Microsoft stance is misguided because it's focus is too narrow, so I can identify with your reaction to a certain extent.
"application-starved flavor of home-brewed Unix known as Linux."
There are hundreds and hundreds of applications for Linux. Many are non-commercial, that is true, but the beauty of the GNU Public License is that the flow of information is toward the public domain rather than being stolen from the public domain. A lot of the work that went into Microsoft Word came from the users, from university graduates who were trained with public tax dollars, and directly from academic research. Moreover, Microsoft products inherited ideas that were freely available long before Microsoft was a glimmer in Binary Bills eye.
"I must take this dangerous stand after watching the teeming hordes of messiah-hungry Linux fans at Comdex."
What's wrong with being passionate about something? Would you prefer slavish apathy? Or the cold eye of the mercenary? One of the funnier things that Mr. Torvalds has been quoted as saying (perhaps this is Apocryphal:-) ) is that software is like sex -- it's better when it's free.
"These gloriously anti-establishmentarian crowds swarmed over young Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, whose anti-Microsoft pronouncements started to sound like some kind of call for jihad."
This is the kind of energy that is created when people have been stifled for a long time and then are released.
"They chafe at the fact that most of us are prisoners of the Microsoft model, working in jobs where the Windows desktop has become our home away from home and where our daily bread is earned working in Word, Excel, Access, Outlook and other Microsoft software."
This monoculture of computing is part of what made the Melissa virus so dangerous. Everyone is vulnerable. Besides, I don't really think anyone wants to take away your Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. We only want people to have credible options when choosing operating systems.
"It rankles these radical souls that the new Windows 2000 operating system probably consumes 50 million lines of bulky and balky code, bloated top-secret fatware that can crash out of the blue and that only works the way Microsoft wants it to work."
Shouldn't that rankle every Microsoft customer? The only reason it doesn't is that there isn't anything else around to compare it to -- except Linux .
"Linux, they note, is 2.5 million lines (at most) of highly flexible, free-to-use and free-to-modify software that almost never crashes and that works any way a programmer cares to make it work."
Agreed.
"I know going in that I'll take more flak for this column than just about any I could write, but I need to tell you that sometimes its OK to root for the dragon.
Sometimes St. George can be a pain in the tail that should just go away."
If there were no Linux someone would invent something like Linux or some other free operating system just to break the monopoly. Knowledge industry monopolies are a really actually quite vulnerable, since the means of production (peoples' minds) cannot be controlled in the same way as physical objects can. This is a case of the bigger they come the harder they fall. If Linux is so crappy, then why is Microsoft panicking? The truth is they know that even if they win the DOJ case that they are going to be in for a very rough ride because of free software. Microsoft fears open source software much more than they fear Linux. It wasn't Linux that was their first concern in the Halloween memos, it was the open source development process. Ideas and invention are healthiest when minds are free, and Microsoft knows this very well. They strive to stifle freedom and innovation except when it comes from Microsoft. In fact, St. George is protecting YOUR rights as a consumer.
"Whatever the merits Linux might offer the highly technical specialists who use it to administer Internet servers or use turbo-charged text commands to perform complex file transfers, Linux currently offers mighty slim pickings for ordinary computer users."
As I said before, I don't think anyone wants you to feel threatened because there is another alternative out there. You are welcome to continue using Windows 98 or whatever you use. Certainly at the present time, there are fewer applications available for Linux than for Windows, but this may well change in the future. Perhaps you should try Linux again in a couple of years.
"While Canada's Corel Corp. has ported a version of its WordPerfect software for Linux, the sad reality is that the great bulk of software that people can actually run on Linux is just as home-brewed as is the Linux operating system itself."
I don't know about you, but I like home brew. It's tastier than the commercial stuff...
"Meanwhile, billions of human hours have been spent writing the amazing applications that run on the Windows and Macintosh platforms."
I never consider sunk costs when I am making a business decision. I don't care how much time has gone into making something because that time is going to be there no matter what operating system I decide to use. I only want to know if switching systems is going to benefit me in the future. You argue that the hours which have been spent on developing Windows 2000 imply that time is being wasted developing other alternatives. This is a complete non-sequitor. It is irrelevant to any consideration of value. It would be like saying "Well, I've just discovered that I built my house on top of a bog and my house is sinking. There's no point building anywhere else because I've already put so much time and effort into this house!". You can see the analogy, I hope.
"In fact, the information revolution that has allowed us to prosper right along with Binary Bill was made possible by the empowerment of these applications-
-everything from Web browsers"
I feel sorry for you, man. You are going to get flamed up the WaZoo for that one. Web browsers were designed by public institutions like CERN and the various consortia that have governed the standards development. Private organizations like Microsoft and Netscape (yes, not everything is anti-MS) spent most of their effort trying to out manoeuver each other by introducing new "features" or "extensions" and trying to have them accepted as the standard. Some succeeded, but in many cases they were not in the best interests of consumers. What's good for Microsoft (or any corporation, for that matter) is not necessarily good for consumers, in spite of Microsofts appeals to the contrary.
"to e-mail engines,"
You have a knack for picking bad examples, I think. This was another are where the value of public contributions far outweighs that of private contributions. Sendmail, Fetchmail, Pine, Elm, and many others.
"to CD-ROM shoot'em-up games like Doom and Quake, to personal finance packages."
You finally picked a few where MS is at least a player. But Doom and Quake weren't developed by corporate giants like Microsoft. MS just waits around and buys ideas because no bureaucratic organization that size can innovate. The risk involved in innovating is antithetical to the middle management mentality that pervades the corporate world.
"The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix,"
OK, you've got a point there, but
"Macintosh"
hasn't had a server OS until recently, I believe. (I'm sure I'll get flamed if any of the Mac people read this)
"and Windows NT"
wasnt't what you'd call the traditional OS of the internet.
"Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich."
This is dreadful reasoning, as I showed above. You might want to ask yourself whether any two competing companies aren't wasting their time reinventing the wheel. Surely it is just as wasteful for two companies to be trying to solve the same problem independently. Wouldn't they be able to solve the problem more efficiently by sharing ideas and knowledge? Our university system exists for just this reason, but cutbacks have destroyed the capacity of these institutions to fuel technological development. Ideas belong to the public first. They are "on loan" to copyright and patent holders so that they can return something of value to the public. On no other condition would corporations be granted monopolies which are protected by the government. That's why I find the whole Department of Justice action so arbitrary and hypocritical, although now it has become a necessary evil. Government sponsored sell-off of the public domain - otherwise known as intellectual property - is what allowed Microsoft and others to grow so large and still deliver a sub-optimal product. If Microsoft had someone other than a bunch of volunteer hackers biting their ankles, they would really be sweating. But in fact hackers are all that's left to oppose the Redmond Supergiant. The only way anyone can touch Microsoft is by giving stuff away.
"By demonizing Gates and exploiting the natural human fondness for the underdog, da yoot in da Linux mob are wasting a lot of time that could be better spent making nice with da dragon."
There is much more to the Open Source software movement than "exploiting the natural human fondness for the underdog". Software can be better than it is now. You just don't have the imagination to see how that is possible and the people who do have been denied an outlet until now. It won't happen overnight, and there will be lots of bumps on the way, but Linux will eventually be just as popular as Windows.
Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond. You'll have a much deeper appreciation of the phenomenon.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me...
Can you imagine a form of speech so powerful that it is considered a munition? It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the world's funniest joke being used against the Axis powers in WWII.
Everybody's selling real military hardware to everybody else like they were penny candy or baseball cards. Why the fuss over a secret decoder ring?
First, there is no connection between creating great art and getting paid. If you really want people to create great art, you'll make it easy for them to be exposed to other people's art by making it publicly accessible. It seems to me that if we really want to preserve and enhance intellectual output, we ought to spend less time locking stuff away from children and more time sharing stuff with them.
Secondly, the argument that "well the artist/inventor/game show host/whatever has to eat and sleep somewhere" is totally spurious. Yes, everyone has to live somewhere and eat stuff, but that does not mean that they have to make their living solely as a creator of intellectual goods. Einstein (the scientist, not Albert Einstein who later changed his name to Albert Brooks and made movies) worked as a patent office clerk. Elvis was a truck driver. John Locke (the philosopher) was a physician. Lots of musicians, writers, inventors, philosophers and other intellectual property "creators" only moonlight as that and have a day job doing something that ought to be paid for, such as building stuff or directing traffic or something.
What motivation would there be to invent, you ask? Whatever happened to the old idea that necessity is the mother of invention, or have we forgotten what necessity feels like because we're too damn rich? We have patents because some whiners wanted the government to protect their moneybags just because they wanted to spend it on something that might not work out. What the hell is that about? I thought the beauty of entrepreneurship was that it encouraged risk taking? If you're not prepared to lose it, don't gamble it.
But you say, I'm exaggerating. Well, yes, I am. But not a lot. If there were no patents, it would have at least two impacts on investments: investors would accept a much longer payback period and wouldn't depend on getting their money back just on one invention. Also, the R & D investment wouldn't have to be as large because the competitor's ideas would be open as well. Yes, truly original research would not be as well compensated as it is today. But if original research can't be done for a reasonable profit without ransacking the public domain, then perhaps it should be left to public institutions like Universities. And don't give me this knee-jerk crap about big government. What we fucking need is right-sized government and sometimes that means spending money on things we all agree we care about. (Unless there aint any more of those things left, in which case its just the law of the jungle out there). Don't worry, businesses will adjust. Trade and commerce existed long before copyright and patents.
As for the writer who spent years writing a book only to never earn a dime - tough luck, buddy. Nobody said that life was going to be easy. If the only reason you were writing it was to get paid, then it probably wasn't worth saying.
"You DO have to pay for thoughts and creative inventions" Yes it takes effort to do something worthwhile, but that does not mean that the state owes you protection for it. If I spend time doing macrame or raising tulips, or building model cars the state doesn't bust down doors to make sure that I get paid for my time. Culture is many-faceted. It's not just white guys doing important stuff in offices. Why do we draw the line where we do between what you can and cannot patent or copyright? What about tribal medicines? What about herbal remedies? Shouldn't I be compensated for the time I spend raising my children? Naah, we don't pay for that kind of lame-ass crap in America -- that's women's work.
"Do you really believe more people would write software or music if they couldn't make money off it?" Man, do you care about anything except money? I can think of lots of reasons I would write software or music even if I KNOW I wont make money off it. How about "I enjoy it" for starters. I may not even care if someone else is making money off it, although if there were real freedom in Idea Space, it would be hard for someone who stole my idea to really take people to the cleaners. I may be really pleased that my ideas helped someone else make money, maybe even my competitor. Hey, I don't have anything against making an honest living.
"Wouldn't it be easier for musicians to just perform popular works stolen from others without paying?" Yes, and that's exactly my point. Why slow down the healthy hybridization of influences by putting up a toll-booth? And say, what about all the royalties your guys owe the Delta Blues men and the rest of the people who really created American music? If you ask me, I don't think they'd give a damn about the money even if you offered it to them because they made music for the love of it. Sure, if they could get paid for it, that was nice, but it was never a career choice.
"Intellectual Property is one of the primary products of most white-collar jobs" That explains why American companies did better after they got rid of three quarters of those jobs. My idea of intellectual property would not include a transcription of you and your workmates gossiping about the most recent Dilbert cartoon while standing beside the water cooler.
"Radio stations pay to play songs on the air... Copy that to MP3, and suddenly there's less revenue headed to the performer." Yes, radio stations pay to play songs on the air. In the next sentence you said that they pay for it with advertising. How is it that Joe Blow's MP3 decreases the amount that a station charges for advertising? Well, (you reply) what if everybody just recorded MP3's and then didn't listen to the radio any more? First, that's incredibly unlikely. Second, even if it happens you still have to listen to the radio to get the MP3, and third, if it means radio stations are just dinosaurs headed for extinction, so be it!
"Intellectual property is EXACTLY what we should be happiest paying for. It enriches our lives and our culture." You know, you sound like the people who wear price tags on their clothing. It's not laying down the cash that makes something good. Are you saying that I should be really excited about Arnie's newly patented cure for cancer JUST BECAUSE ITS SOMEONE'S PROPERTY? Oh, hooray!!! Someone owns it! What I want is a cure for my ailing mother, and ownership of that cure is something that I will just barely tolerate - a necessary evil - not something to be celebrated.
"Claiming that theft is justified by high prices is like saying it's okay to shoplift because the CD prices are too high." Ehh... let me see... "Theft is justified by high prices" and "It's OK to shoplift because the CD prices are too high" Is there an echo in here? I wouldn't say those things are "like" each other, no. ""You're just repeating the same thing twice." is just like saying "You're just repeating the same thing twice."" would be like what you just said.
"I used to write for a living... and I was sure glad copyright existed." I appreciate the fact that you're honest enough to reveal your vested interest in copyright. Now I understand why you are in favour of it. A doctor hates naturopaths because they threaten medical livelihood. I can understand that. My dad was a doctor. What you have to accept is that those days are gone and you've got to find something else to support yourself, which you already have done apparently.
I would argue that rather than freeing the spirit, the burden of having to make ones living as a writer, musician, inventor, etc, actually interferes with the creative process. It's as if someone is standing behind you with a gun saying "Hurry up, we want that Requiem by Tuesday." Is this the environment in which one can be the most inspired? It may be OK for real prodigious geniuses like Mozart, but for ordinary people like you and me and 99.99 percent of the population, it's probably a drag. Aren't you just going through the motions when you're fulfilling contractual obligations? Doesn't getting paid for stuff encourage you to write for the lowest common denominator? Doesn't it force you to compromise on quality? Isn't that exactly what Open Source Software was supposed to cure?
Three cheers for freedom, Free the corporate drones toiling in the salt mines of our collective consciousness!!!
Pythagoras has his hand out too, you know. What does he get for inventing chords? The Ramones ripped off all of Pythagoras' tunes and they get all the royalties. Geez, man, there's no justice.
Seriously, how can any musician claim to be really outraged when somebody steals their music when every musician has stolen from black folks, indian drummers, township jive guys, latin american music, etc, etc, etc. Show me a musician who doesn't owe a heavy debt to tradition, and I'll show you a crappy musician. Don't we all admire musicians more because they're closer to their roots?
Don't give me any bullshit about Sting or Beck creating musical ideas Ex Nihilo. There's more perspiration and imitation there than there is inspiration, and if you're gonna pay Michael Jackson for sweating, you'd better be prepared to pay the people who work in auto factories a hefty royalty every time a car leaves the showroom.
If you really think about it, charging for music is like laying claim to a free territory and then charging people rent just because you got there first or charging a toll to let them through because you've commandeered the only bridge. In other words it just sucks.
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Like so many other arguments that favor the free distribution of "intellectual" property, there's one thing missing from this analogy. Whether it's digital or physical, BOTH mediums share one common element - in fact, it's one element that makes them BOTH very viable in a free market. VALUE. Pure and simple.
Value is neither pure nor simple. The value you say is in your song is partly made of chords, progressions, harmonies, hooks and melodies that someone else thought, imagined and used before you. Another part of the value lies in the capacity of your audience to understand and appreciate your creation. That your song has value to them does not in itself ENTITLE you to the recoup the value, let alone benefit from a comfortable, state-run racket.
In a way, you are like the wanderer who lays the last brick in the building and calls it his own. You depend on the past and the commonality of shared culture to make your song or story or invention valuable. If I were to calculate the value of all those contributions, you would be left with a much smaller royalty, probably not worth the trouble of collection.
This notion is exceedingly important when one considers the implications of relaying an idea to someone else- an idea that has the potential of being of substantial value to a significant number of people. Yes, I still have the idea, but now that two people have access to its substance, its value has been effectively diminished.
It's value can only have been diminished if you ALREADY ASSUME IT IS YOUR RIGHT TO COLLECT ROYALTIES. Since this is the question at issue, I would say you are taking for granted what is to be proved. Not to mention being smug.
I really don't understand the mentality behind the idea that IP should be free. IP, in one form or another, has DRIVEN our advancement as a society, and the reason for this is simple. We reward those with good ideas by buying what they have created.
First of all, when copyright and patent became part of English law in the 17th century, printers, inventors and the like were impoverished by today's standards. It made sense to have the advancement of science and the useful arts as a social policy objective because there really weren't any cultural 'industries'. That was three hundred years ago. The situation now is much different, in fact just the opposite. Science is out of control; technology dominates and enslaves us, huge conglomerates have to spew out oceans of irrelevant, nauseating 'content' just because they exist. That's the danger of having a whole social class of professional intellectual property generators. If they stopped spitting out crap, they'd die. The situation we have now is exactly the reverse of England at the time of the Statute of Anne. Far from needing the encouragement of guaranteed monopoly, the intellectual property economy is overdeveloped and in need of restraint. Ask anyone what they think about having human genes patented and you'll see that my view is not unpopular.
Whether it's a physical item, like a new type of house paint that will last for 20 years, or a new song that leaves us with a positive sense of well-being, it's all the same. They both do something FOR us...they convey very real benefits whose value is based on what the maker is offering, and the buyer is willing to pay.
You're giving an example of someone who is willing to pay under the current intellectual property regime, but you are just following the ridiculous practice of the Software Anti-Piracy Lobby that overstates the losses to piracy by assuming that everyone who steals the software would have paid list price for it. That's just plain false. Some would, but most wouldn't. If the person who values something enough to buy it has no other option, then yes, they might buy where they would otherwise copy, but again, in counting this as a direct loss to the creator, you are assuming that the creator already has residual property rights in his creation when that is the very point that is in question.
If you don't pay, you don't play. Period. Otherwise, it's theft.
Why should we pay for someone else to play? Why don't they do it on their own dime like the rest of us?
And yet it's hard to judge before the fact what would happen if IP laws were eliminated or drastically scaled back. It may, in fact, turn out to be the case that with a million monkeys at the keyboard, we'll get another Shakespeare or two (hey, he didn't need any IP laws, did he?) but it isn't obvious or certain that the result would be any better than what we have now.
Yeah, I agree that the music industry is full of crap. Did you ever wonder why there have to be Stars in the music industry? Because if there weren't, Sony/Warner/EMI would never be able to MASS PRODUCE and MASS MARKET prerecorded media. That's the reason there are stars. Not because of talent or public taste. Long live garage bands, folk music, and home-made demo tapes!!
Art is discovery, too. Nothing gets created ex nihilo. Everything is an inspiration or a muse or a Platonic Idea. Shakespeare's plays were already written. He just had this dim voice in the back of his head telling him what to write.
There is no such thing as art. High culture is an illusion. Art is just people running around like ants trying to define themselves as gnostics and being "different". So even if you agree that Linux is Art, you're not really saying that much. Maybe we're not being fair to ant farms.
I was actually considering giving away burnt copies of Microsoft Office CD on the street. With a big sign. Seriously. I think ownership of software is more insidious than it seems. An operating system is mind control, so if my mind has to be owned, I would rather NOT have it owned by some faceless behemoth.
My civil disobedience plans are on hold for now. I don't think the average jane doe would consider this a "top-of-mind" issue. I'd be standing there holding out this CD with a nice generic label and she'd look at me like I was from Mars and this thought will occur to her: "That THING probably has a virus on it... He is giving me a computer virus, I just KNOW it. Eeewww." At which point she would start to walk away a bit faster.
(I think there really is something to be said for Red Hat's theory about the importance of brand-recognition in the open source software game.)
Politicians are not very interested in this issue either. If you talk about intellectual property their eyes start to water.
Oh well...
In a non-proprietary world, development costs would be a fraction of what they are now. Everyone would borrow everybody else's best ideas and everything would be so much the better. The programmers? Out of work? Nah, not a chance. Most people who are now working on creating "finished products" would be reassigned to client services and a continuous reengineering plan.
This is the same pathetic plea that we hear from pharmaceutical giants. "Oh, it costs us so much to develop and test the drug - boo hoo. We'll have to lay off researchers." If these companies coordinated their research efforts, their costs would be a fraction of what they are. I'm afraid to say it, but the pursuit of knowledge is one area in which cooperation is a more effective strategy than competition.
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But what about Vietnam? They had like, what, over 90% pirated software? Something tells me
that a) some of these ppl could afford a legal copy b) some of these ppl are using this software out of a real need c) they would likely have to buy a legit copy were it not for available pirated copies. (no?)
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I think this is a really nifty and legitimate (and cost effective because there's no bureaucracy) form of technology transfer. Hey, we use the third world for cheap labour. The least we can do is give them buggy software.
Are slave ownership contracts still valid? They are agreements in the same way that shrink wrap licenses are agreements. You don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
If you reply that slaveholding is immoral and therefore no contract can legally require or enforce it, then you have defeated your own argument. I am legally bound to disobey immoral laws. This is what War Crimes trials are about. You must have the character and common sense to know when laws are stupid. Don't just depend on the system, because the system will fail you.
Uhhh... just where did you get the stuff that you used to make your house or picnic table or macrame plant hanger? Did it issue forth from your loins? Or, as is more likely the case, did you steal it from some unwitting natives by claiming all of the New World in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella? Did you have a God given right to that? Did you have a God given right to anything that mother nature's bounty provided you with? You're like the selfish, spoiled child who thinks the world owes him everything. The rights you have to your stuff, whether it's intellectual or physical property exist only in so far as your fellow citizens are willing to extend them. That's called Goodwill, not Natural Rights. The material you use doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the world and all creatures first. You're just borrowing it. Intellectual property is riddled with problems because it makes even less sense to imagine ideas as personal ex-nihilo belongings than it does to think about physical property in this way. But when you strip away all the Jeffersonian rhetoric and the fantasy of the neo-conservative rugged individualist, physical and intellectual property are both subject to the GPL.
When I was using Win95, I was programming in Delphi, so I sort of liked the sophisticated IDE and integrated debugging, but I figured for a worthy cause like Linux I could learn to live without. But the other day I decided to try CodeForge for Linux and it's really great. It uses the built in diff tools and RCS, allows you to set all the GCC and G++ options in a dialog box. Error messages and output windows are well designed and the code editor has this cool feature where you can "collapse" and "expand" function blocks, classes, etc. In a few months, Borland is coming out with a version of JBuilder for Linux. Soon there will be no shortage of IDE's to choose from. So who cares if ONE vendor ties a product to Red Hat? There will be lots of other offerings, both GPL'd and commercial.
Every second that I spend at work is mine, not my employer's. I work for my own satisfaction and adhere to my moral principles. Organizations are built from cooperating human beings, not slaves.
>In the end, a poor product which thrives on >excellent marketing and vicious business >practices will only hurt itself.
For this prediction to come true, people have to have access to unbiased information about the quality of products. Because you have to buy the product in order to find out that it's crappy, the marketing department has a huge advantage over the quality control department in determining the success or failure of a product. If, in addition to having a very well paid marketing department, I also control the content of the "independent" information providers, then the battle for market-driven quality is all but lost.
That is why it is nearly impossible to combat a company that owns the mass media channels through which "unbiased" product information is distributed. This is the kind of unbreakable monopoly that Microsoft has.
Get a grip. How is it that everyone except you is a sheep? If you want to give away your democratic rights to private enterprises over which you have no control, fine. I'm not interested in having unrestrained capitalism trample on my human rights. If you think you'd survive a minute in the world you long for, you are a fool.
Intellectual property law purports to separate ideas from their particular expression. As an oversimplified example: I cannot copyright the notion of love but I can copyright a book about love. This is good because it means that even though there is legal protection against those who would copy the work for profit, there is little to prevent someone from borrowing ideas from existing works. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that all intellectual creations are derivative in some sense. Northrop Frye, the great literary critic, said that poetry can only be made of other poetry. The same can be said of any other intellectual artifact. Given the ubiquity of derived material, how can we justify penalizing certain kinds of intellectual borrowing but not others?
Traditionally, this has been justified by the "differentness" of the work in question from prior art and the fact that the work bears the stamp or impression of the author's soul. As you can imagine, this is not at all a simplistic task for a court to determine. It requires the court to make subjective and somewhat arbitrary judgements. In most cases, an absolutist view would make the cases easier to decide, but judges would be less inclined to make those decisions. The situation would be analogous to one in which the only penalty for murder was the death penalty. You would probably see a lot of cases in which charges were lowered from murder to manslaughter. The more grey area there is, the more room there is to hide or ignore the underlying contradiction in the notion of intellectual property -- that no one really owns it. It's just a convenient fiction that allows people to make money. That's not a bad thing in itself, of course. What is worrying is that there seems to be no way to slow the ever-increasing level of protection that intellectual property receives. Eventually, we may find ourselves without the raw materials which we need to create new works of art, culture, technology etc.
What does this have to do with the GPL? If, as some previous posters have suggested, the meaning of "portion" is determined to be "any amount of material", then that is in effect a new and absolutist legal definition of derivative. That means that patent and copyright holders will be able to impose even more restrictions on allegedly derivative intellectual property. The tiniest borrowing by one inventor from another could constitute patent infringement.
The same can be said about the question of "dilution" of the GPL over several generations of code inheritance. If the absolutist position were accepted by the court, Thomas Edison could sue Sony for violating his patent on the grammophone. Joseph Conrad could sue Francis Ford Copolla for Apocalypse Now (being loosely based on Heart of Darkness) et cetera et cetera.
The broader the restrictions imposed on developers by the GPL, the tighter the noose will be on the flow of information generally, because any decision to support the absolutist notion of "derived work" will be quickly capitalized upon by corporate intellectual property lawyers anxious to make their salaries seem worthwhile.
Clearly the GPL will be tested eventually, and when it is tested, the court will not be likely to accept an absolutist interpretation of "derived works" because of the above mentioned collateral damage to the public domain. If the court is unwilling to draw the line to prevent the commercialization of free software (without at least returning the knowledge value) then the license will have to be re-drafted so that it is less vague on what, if anything, "portion" really means.
Subject:
:-) ) is that software is like sex -- it's better when it's
Linux
Date:
Mon, 26 Apr 1999 00:17:19 -0500
From:
Sydney Weidman
To:
JCoates@tribune.com
coates sayeth:
"Bill Gates isn't a monster."
I don't think anyone is suggesting that he's a monster. He's just a
bureaucrat with a big salary who pushes people around and calls it free
enterprise.
"Not only that, but we're all very, very lucky to have
Microsoft in our lives."
OK, this must be hyperbole. I'm assuming that you wanted to be as
controversial as possible. I can't imagine that anyone would believe
this unless they had a vested interest. But it's true in a way that
we're very lucky to have Microsoft in our lives. Binary Bill was not the
first person on the list when IBM was phoning around looking for someone
to write the operating system for the first IBM PC. The first guy was
out of his office at the time of the call. The IBM guy only knew of
Gates through Bill Gates' mom, who served with him on the board of
directors of a big charity.
"Furthermore, Microsoft Windows 2000, which made its
debut
in Chicago at last week's Comdex computer show, is a
much
more useful personal computer operating system"
It's useful for you. That's great. It is useful for millions and
millions of other people, too. But that doesn't mean it has to be the
ONLY operating system available for IBM PC's. In the meantime, your
column may have discouraged people from trying Linux. I'm sure you don't
care about that, but free software, even if it were "dinky" and "feature-weak", still has an important social and political goal the point of which
you have missed entirely. I understand that you were responding to the
toungue-in-cheek jabs that Linux fanatics often take at Microsoft. I
think this anti-Microsoft stance is misguided because it's focus is too
narrow, so I can identify with your reaction to a certain extent.
"application-starved flavor of
home-brewed Unix known as Linux."
There are hundreds and hundreds of applications for Linux. Many are
non-commercial, that is true, but the beauty of the GNU Public License
is that the flow of information is toward the public domain rather than
being stolen from the public domain. A lot of the work that went into
Microsoft Word came from the users, from university graduates who were
trained with public tax dollars, and directly from academic research.
Moreover, Microsoft products inherited ideas that were freely available
long before Microsoft was a glimmer in Binary Bills eye.
"I must take this dangerous stand after watching the
teeming
hordes of messiah-hungry Linux fans at Comdex."
What's wrong with being passionate about something? Would you prefer
slavish apathy? Or the cold eye of the mercenary? One of the funnier
things that Mr. Torvalds has been quoted as saying (perhaps this is
Apocryphal
free.
"These gloriously anti-establishmentarian crowds
swarmed
over young Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux,
whose
anti-Microsoft pronouncements started to sound like
some
kind of call for jihad."
This is the kind of energy that is created when people have been stifled
for a long time and then are released.
"They chafe at the fact that most of us are prisoners
of the
Microsoft model, working in jobs where the Windows
desktop has become our home away from home and where
our daily bread is earned working in Word, Excel,
Access,
Outlook and other Microsoft software."
This monoculture of computing is part of what made the Melissa virus so
dangerous. Everyone is vulnerable. Besides, I don't really think anyone
wants to take away your Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. We only
want people to have credible options when choosing operating systems.
"It rankles these radical souls that the new Windows
2000
operating system probably consumes 50 million lines
of bulky
and balky code, bloated top-secret fatware that can
crash
out of the blue and that only works the way Microsoft
wants
it to work."
Shouldn't that rankle every Microsoft customer? The only reason it
doesn't is that there isn't anything else around to compare it to --
except Linux .
"Linux, they note, is 2.5 million lines (at most) of
highly
flexible, free-to-use and free-to-modify software
that
almost never crashes and that works any way a
programmer
cares to make it work."
Agreed.
"I know going in that I'll take more flak for this
column than
just about any I could write, but I need to tell you
that
sometimes its OK to root for the dragon.
Sometimes St. George can be a pain in the tail that
should
just go away."
If there were no Linux
someone would invent something like Linux or some other free operating system
just to break the monopoly. Knowledge industry monopolies are a really
actually quite vulnerable, since the means of production (peoples'
minds) cannot be controlled in the same way as physical objects can.
This is a case of the bigger they come the harder they fall. If Linux is
so crappy, then why is Microsoft panicking? The truth is they know that
even if they win the DOJ case that they are going to be in for a very
rough ride because of free software. Microsoft fears open source
software much more than they fear Linux. It wasn't Linux that was their
first concern in the Halloween memos, it was the open source development
process. Ideas and invention are healthiest when minds are free, and
Microsoft knows this very well. They strive to stifle freedom and
innovation except when it comes from Microsoft. In fact, St. George is
protecting YOUR rights as a consumer.
"Whatever the merits Linux might offer the highly
technical
specialists who use it to administer Internet servers
or use
turbo-charged text commands to perform complex file
transfers, Linux currently offers mighty slim
pickings for
ordinary computer users."
As I said before, I don't think anyone wants you to feel threatened
because there is another alternative out there. You are welcome to
continue using Windows 98 or whatever you use. Certainly at the present
time, there are fewer applications available for Linux than for Windows,
but this may well change in the future. Perhaps you should try Linux
again in a couple of years.
"While Canada's Corel Corp. has ported a version of
its
WordPerfect software for Linux, the sad reality is
that the
great bulk of software that people can actually run
on Linux
is just as home-brewed as is the Linux operating
system
itself."
I don't know about you, but I like home brew. It's tastier than the
commercial stuff...
"Meanwhile, billions of human hours have been spent
writing
the amazing applications that run on the Windows and
Macintosh platforms."
I never consider sunk costs when I am making a business decision. I
don't care how much time has gone into making something because that
time is going to be there no matter what operating system I decide to
use. I only want to know if switching systems is going to benefit me in
the future. You argue that the hours which have been spent on developing
Windows 2000 imply that time is being wasted developing other
alternatives. This is a complete non-sequitor. It is irrelevant to any
consideration of value. It would be like saying "Well, I've just
discovered that I built my house on top of a bog and my house is
sinking. There's no point building anywhere else because I've already
put so much time and effort into this house!". You can see the analogy,
I hope.
"In fact, the information revolution that has allowed
us to
prosper right along with Binary Bill was made
possible by the
empowerment of these applications-
-everything from Web browsers"
I feel sorry for you, man. You are going to get flamed up the WaZoo for
that one. Web browsers were designed by public institutions like CERN
and the various consortia that have governed the standards development.
Private organizations like Microsoft and Netscape (yes, not everything
is anti-MS) spent most of their effort trying to out manoeuver each
other by introducing new "features" or "extensions" and trying to have
them accepted as the standard. Some succeeded, but in many cases they
were not in the best interests of consumers. What's good for Microsoft
(or any corporation, for that matter) is not necessarily good for
consumers, in spite of Microsofts appeals to the contrary.
"to e-mail engines,"
You have a knack for picking bad examples, I think. This was another are
where the value of public contributions far outweighs that of private
contributions. Sendmail, Fetchmail, Pine, Elm, and many others.
"to CD-ROM shoot'em-up games like Doom and Quake, to
personal finance packages."
You finally picked a few where MS is at least a player. But Doom and
Quake weren't developed by corporate giants like Microsoft. MS just
waits around and buys ideas because no bureaucratic organization that
size can innovate. The risk involved in innovating is antithetical to
the middle management mentality that pervades the corporate world.
"The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix,"
OK, you've got a point there, but
"Macintosh"
hasn't had a server OS until recently, I believe. (I'm sure I'll get
flamed if any of the Mac people read this)
"and Windows NT"
wasnt't what you'd call the traditional OS of the internet.
"Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by
wasting billions more hours creating applications to
take
advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at
Linux
software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems
Inc.
rich."
This is dreadful reasoning, as I showed above. You might want to ask
yourself whether any two competing companies aren't wasting their time
reinventing the wheel. Surely it is just as wasteful for two companies
to be trying to solve the same problem independently. Wouldn't they be
able to solve the problem more efficiently by sharing ideas and
knowledge? Our university system exists for just this reason, but
cutbacks have destroyed the capacity of these institutions to fuel
technological development. Ideas belong to the public first. They are
"on loan" to copyright and patent holders so that they can return
something of value to the public. On no other condition would corporations be
granted monopolies which are protected by the government. That's why I
find the whole Department of Justice action so arbitrary and
hypocritical, although now it has become a necessary evil. Government
sponsored sell-off of the public domain - otherwise known as
intellectual property - is what allowed Microsoft and others to grow so
large and still deliver a sub-optimal product. If Microsoft had someone other
than a bunch of volunteer hackers biting their ankles, they would really
be sweating. But in fact hackers are all that's left to oppose the
Redmond Supergiant. The only way anyone can touch Microsoft is by giving
stuff away.
"By demonizing Gates and exploiting the natural human
fondness for the underdog, da yoot in da Linux mob
are
wasting a lot of time that could be better spent
making nice
with da dragon."
There is much more to the Open Source software movement than "exploiting
the natural human fondness for the underdog". Software can be better
than it is now. You just don't have the imagination to see how that is
possible and the people who do have been denied an outlet until now. It
won't happen overnight, and there will be lots of bumps on the way, but
Linux will eventually be just as popular as Windows.
Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond. You'll have a
much deeper appreciation of the phenomenon.
Sincerely,
Sydney Weidman
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me...
Can you imagine a form of speech so powerful that it is considered a munition? It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the world's funniest joke being used against the Axis powers in WWII.
Everybody's selling real military hardware to everybody else like they were penny candy or baseball cards. Why the fuss over a secret decoder ring?
Politicians ought to grow up, really.
A thoughtful post. Wrong, but thoughtful.
First, there is no connection between creating great art and getting paid. If you really want people to create great art, you'll make it easy for them to be exposed to other people's art by making it publicly accessible. It seems to me that if we really want to preserve and enhance intellectual output, we ought to spend less time locking stuff away from children and more time sharing stuff with them.
Secondly, the argument that "well the artist/inventor/game show host/whatever has to eat and sleep somewhere" is totally spurious. Yes, everyone has to live somewhere and eat stuff, but that does not mean that they have to make their living solely as a creator of intellectual goods. Einstein (the scientist, not Albert Einstein who later changed his name to Albert Brooks and made movies) worked as a patent office clerk. Elvis was a truck driver. John Locke (the philosopher) was a physician. Lots of musicians, writers, inventors, philosophers and other intellectual property "creators" only moonlight as that and have a day job doing something that ought to be paid for, such as building stuff or directing traffic or something.
What motivation would there be to invent, you ask? Whatever happened to the old idea that necessity is the mother of invention, or have we forgotten what necessity feels like because we're too damn rich? We have patents because some whiners wanted the government to protect their moneybags just because they wanted to spend it on something that might not work out. What the hell is that about? I thought the beauty of entrepreneurship was that it encouraged risk taking? If you're not prepared to lose it, don't gamble it.
But you say, I'm exaggerating. Well, yes, I am. But not a lot. If there were no patents, it would have at least two impacts on investments: investors would accept a much longer payback period and wouldn't depend on getting their money back just on one invention. Also, the R & D investment wouldn't have to be as large because the competitor's ideas would be open as well. Yes, truly original research would not be as well compensated as it is today. But if original research can't be done for a reasonable profit without ransacking the public domain, then perhaps it should be left to public institutions like Universities. And don't give me this knee-jerk crap about big government. What we fucking need is right-sized government and sometimes that means spending money on things we all agree we care about. (Unless there aint any more of those things left, in which case its just the law of the jungle out there). Don't worry, businesses will adjust. Trade and commerce existed long before copyright and patents.
As for the writer who spent years writing a book only to never earn a dime - tough luck, buddy. Nobody said that life was going to be easy. If the only reason you were writing it was to get paid, then it probably wasn't worth saying.
"You DO have to pay for thoughts and creative inventions"
Yes it takes effort to do something worthwhile, but that does not mean that the state owes you protection for it. If I spend time doing macrame or raising tulips, or building model cars the state doesn't bust down doors to make sure that I get paid for my time. Culture is many-faceted. It's not just white guys doing important stuff in offices. Why do we draw the line where we do between what you can and cannot patent or copyright? What about tribal medicines? What about herbal remedies? Shouldn't I be compensated for the time I spend raising my children? Naah, we don't pay for that kind of lame-ass crap in America -- that's women's work.
"Do you really believe more people would write software or music if they couldn't make money off it?"
Man, do you care about anything except money? I can think of lots of reasons I would write software or music even if I KNOW I wont make money off it. How about "I enjoy it" for starters. I may not even care if someone else is making money off it, although if there were real freedom in Idea Space, it would be hard for someone who stole my idea to really take people to the cleaners. I may be really pleased that my ideas helped someone else make money, maybe even my competitor. Hey, I don't have anything against making an honest living.
"Wouldn't it be easier for musicians to just perform popular works stolen from others without paying?"
Yes, and that's exactly my point. Why slow down the healthy hybridization of influences by putting up a toll-booth? And say, what about all the royalties your guys owe the Delta Blues men and the rest of the people who really created American music? If you ask me, I don't think they'd give a damn about the money even if you offered it to them because they made music for the love of it. Sure, if they could get paid for it, that was nice, but it was never a career choice.
"Intellectual Property is one of the primary products of most white-collar jobs"
That explains why American companies did better after they got rid of three quarters of those jobs. My idea of intellectual property would not include a transcription of you and your workmates gossiping about the most recent Dilbert cartoon while standing beside the water cooler.
"Radio stations pay to play songs on the air... Copy that to MP3, and suddenly there's less revenue headed to the performer."
Yes, radio stations pay to play songs on the air. In the next sentence you said that they pay for it with advertising. How is it that Joe Blow's MP3 decreases the amount that a station charges for advertising? Well, (you reply) what if everybody just recorded MP3's and then didn't listen to the radio any more? First, that's incredibly unlikely. Second, even if it happens you still have to listen to the radio to get the MP3, and third, if it means radio stations are just dinosaurs headed for extinction, so be it!
"Intellectual property is EXACTLY what we should be happiest paying for. It enriches our lives and our culture."
You know, you sound like the people who wear price tags on their clothing. It's not laying down the cash that makes something good. Are you saying that I should be really excited about Arnie's newly patented cure for cancer JUST BECAUSE ITS SOMEONE'S PROPERTY? Oh, hooray!!! Someone owns it! What I want is a cure for my ailing mother, and ownership of that cure is something that I will just barely tolerate - a necessary evil - not something to be celebrated.
"Claiming that theft is justified by high prices is like saying it's okay to shoplift because the CD prices are too high."
Ehh... let me see... "Theft is justified by high prices" and "It's OK to shoplift because the CD prices are too high" Is there an echo in here? I wouldn't say those things are "like" each other, no. ""You're just repeating the same thing twice." is just like saying "You're just repeating the same thing twice."" would be like what you just said.
"I used to write for a living... and I was sure glad copyright existed."
I appreciate the fact that you're honest enough to reveal your vested interest in copyright. Now I understand why you are in favour of it. A doctor hates naturopaths because they threaten medical livelihood. I can understand that. My dad was a doctor. What you have to accept is that those days are gone and you've got to find something else to support yourself, which you already have done apparently.
I would argue that rather than freeing the spirit, the burden of having to make ones living as a writer, musician, inventor, etc, actually interferes with the creative process. It's as if someone is standing behind you with a gun saying "Hurry up, we want that Requiem by Tuesday." Is this the environment in which one can be the most inspired? It may be OK for real prodigious geniuses like Mozart, but for ordinary people like you and me and 99.99 percent of the population, it's probably a drag. Aren't you just going through the motions when you're fulfilling contractual obligations? Doesn't getting paid for stuff encourage you to write for the lowest common denominator? Doesn't it force you to compromise on quality? Isn't that exactly what Open Source Software was supposed to cure?
Three cheers for freedom, Free the corporate drones toiling in the salt mines of our collective consciousness!!!
Pythagoras has his hand out too, you know. What does he get for inventing chords? The Ramones ripped off all of Pythagoras' tunes and they get all the royalties. Geez, man, there's no justice.
Seriously, how can any musician claim to be really outraged when somebody steals their music when every musician has stolen from black folks, indian drummers, township jive guys, latin american music, etc, etc, etc. Show me a musician who doesn't owe a heavy debt to tradition, and I'll show you a crappy musician. Don't we all admire musicians more because they're closer to their roots?
Don't give me any bullshit about Sting or Beck creating musical ideas Ex Nihilo. There's more perspiration and imitation there than there is inspiration, and if you're gonna pay Michael Jackson for sweating, you'd better be prepared to pay the people who work in auto factories a hefty royalty every time a car leaves the showroom.
If you really think about it, charging for music is like laying claim to a free territory and then charging people rent just because you got there first or charging a toll to let them through because you've commandeered the only bridge. In other words it just sucks.