"People are acting like OS X has been announced for generic X86 boxes and it hasn't."
And even if it were announced for generic X86 boxes it wouldnt be announced as Free software, so what would be the point?
Now, if Apple released OS X under the GPL, and let you choose to run it on PPC, Sparc, x86, or whatever you want and some distro maker worked on for fun that would be another thing. But that just plain not going to happen.
For those who wants someone to tell them how they will do their computing they can already buy Windows or Mac. It's not like they're the ones using Linux.
There's a bunch of pundits who plain just dont get it, and if they still dont it's not likely they ever will. It's amazing that they can still get words out around their feet.
With the damage that intellectual monopoly rights cause to the economy, consumers and taxpayers it shouldnt be too hard to recruit supporters provided one uses the correct arguments.
Remember, intellectual monopoly rights are, in fact, monopoly rights and nothing else. They cause the same economic damage by diverting economic resources into inefficient organizations as any other monopolies.
Organizations that can fail to make a profit on a product that costs $10k to produce and will sell a million copies at $15 a pop shouldnt exist in a free market economy.
"This actually leads to stronger intellectual laws to provide the market with a crutch as we move forward."
The wealth of nations is generated by the evermore efficient production of goods; the ever decreasing scarcity. Creating artificial scarcity where there is none damages the market and destroys wealth by diverting resources to flawed production.
To the economy and society as a whole, intellectual property has about the same effect as a several hundred percent VAT on shoes which is then used to pay for people following other people around and counting their steps.
It may generate a whole lot of jobs, but you'd have to engage in a whole lot of selective blindness to actually argue it has any place in a market economy.
Adam Smith understood this a long time ago. History is full of examples demonstrating the damage caused by monopolies, not the least of which is the former communist states.
Yet, apparently, some people are perfectly willing to ignore that and engage in yet another damaging experiment that will cost us, as a society, immense amounts of wealth.
"Now your implying that they are just rolling the cost into Windows, but I don't agree with that.
They have offered Media Player as a free download for Mac OSX as well (I don't think they do that anymore, but not sure)."
And they're paying for the development of that by what? Printing their own money?
Not only do the consumers get to pay for the rolled in costs of Media Player for Windows when they buy it, they'd get to pay for it for OSX too. Ultimately, it's the consumers financing each and every man hour companies spend on development, wether or not the products are given away for 'free' or not. Money does not magically appear in the payroll accounts of companies (unless they're Enron). They come from somewhere.
The whole idea with competition is ultimately to get lower prices. Of course, in any intellectual property laden industry it's almost impossible to enforce any kind of competition as the fundamental nature of intellectual property is to legalize monopolies. Microsoft is as much a natural result of copyright law as it is of shady buisness practices.
Probably not. A year or two you'll see headlines like 'jwz gives up on OSX, it just isnt what he thought'.
Giving up on things in disgust once or twice is understandable, but sometimes when it starts becoming a pattern one would do better to perhaps ask onesself if the problem might lie elsewhere.
True, but the classification system hasnt grown to the same extent as science and 'inventions'. We have much, _much_, more detailed knowledge available today than we had 50 years ago. Where one person might have know almost everything there was to know in the entire field of electronics, today that would be, perhaps, comparable with knowing everything about the silicon-on-insulator field.
Conceivable, to keep the obviousness level at a similar meaning one would have to scale the classifications of fields linearly with the number of patents. Grant 50 patents in a field and it becomes 5 subfields, once there are 50 patents in one of those, that one is split, etc.
Copyright Opponents
* Adam Smith, the father of capitalism
The economic monopoly damage of intellectual property is becoming more apparent all the time, as it is counterproductive to the wealth of nations. In a free market where wealth is created by the ever more efficient production of goods, the transaction costs and resource diversions into non wealth-creating areas like excessive marketing, legislative and administrative overhead created by monopolies are slowly eroding the very basis of western wealth.
The council would have gotten to make some decisions with a smaller majority, but the parliament would be granted co-decision status on all fields.
Pro-EU as I am, I can only say it sucked. A constitution as long as the one proposed is inherently defective, and I'd have a number of nits about contents that dont belong in a constitution. And the council of ministers doesnt need an easier time in any way, they need to be kicked out of the procedure entirely. In most european countries, it's not like we let our local and regional politicians co-decide about country level laws, we let our elected representatives for that level decide about those laws. Otherwise you end up with endless regional bickering where the politicians represent their own local political interest, not the interest of the voters.
Even as a beneficiary of the current system where my vote is vastly overrepresented I can say this; one person one vote, and I dont care where you live or if you're spanish, polish, danish or english. If we're to have a union, we should all have equal say.
No, as long as not even the EU politicians can trust the people of europe to vote for who they wish to represent them, the idea of a more tightly integrated europe is dead.
AFAIK, it works this way; if you develop something that is patentable you'll have to patent it or publish it. If you've published it you cant patent it, and neither can anyone else. If you kept it secret and someone else came up with the same idea and published or patented it, well, tough luck.
So, theoretically, it shouldnt be that bad for OSS as it usually publishes very early.
The trouble with science today is that it's divided into so many fields. What is obvious to one of the ten experts in frog intestinal bacteria in the world wont be obvious to someone specializing on the aerodynamics of bovine fur. And what would be obvious to both of them wont be obvious to a computer scientist. This does not mean an idea one of them comes up with is particularly inventive.
"I think that x86 Mac is attempting to threaten Linux. "
Perhaps, but anyone who thinks they'll succeed hasn't understood why linux has been successful.
It's not because it isnt Microsoft. It's because it gives you back control over your computing.
Apple is even more controlling than Microsoft, deciding where you want to go today on both a software and hardware basis. That's fine for competing with Microsoft for end users, and if Apple can offer better prices or something with x86, all kudos to them, and hopefully they'll get a few more customers.
But it wont put a dent in the Linux market, neither at the enterprise level or at the hobbyist level because where Linux offers a new compelling free and competetive approach, Apple only offers the same old proprietary hardware and software combination that countless of vendors have offered for decades.
Wrong impression? Perhaps... check around for the actual per capita rates, not only the changes in per capita rates, and you'll find the previous statistics to be designed to confer exact that idea.
To express myself slightly better; with WINE it's a matter of developers testing their applications with two different implementations of the same 'platform'. Like testing a website with two browsers, like testing a game on two versions of Windows, etc. It's not like a complete new port to another platform.
Sure, WINE will lag in features and bugs, but once the API infrastructure is there it's just laziness on the part of game developers to not test on that particular configuration when they release updates.
That's sortof like saying 'There are no games on Windows. Unless you install DirectX, but that doesnt really count.'
WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's an implementation of various API's, and as such you'd have to have a very odd method of counting if you're not counting it.
"I don't think a Quantum computer will run well with an x86 instruction set."
Quantum computing is good at so very different things than a normal CPU that it's unlikely they'll be interchangable. It would be like choosing between an Integer CPU or a Floating point CPU but even more divergent. For a general purpose computer you'd want both, and their instruction sets can be separate.
So unfortunately I dont think those advances will necessarily kill the x86 instruction set.
In fact, I think the currently most promising way to get rid of it would be if some chip producer decided to go full out with the opensource commoditization of software and completely drop the idea of binary compatibility and design cheap powerful CPUs for the segment that can recompile their applications from scratch when necessary. It'll probably be a few years before that market segment is large enough tho.
That's where the other part of his idea comes in; recycling.
I think he's actually right. The essence of material wealth is the efficient transformation of undesired products into desired products. This allows the transformation to be as efficient as it can be (as little human labour involved as possible), while solving the issues of raw materials _and_ the wealth reduction of wear and tear into waste (undesired products).
So, any raw material the robots can use becomes a permanent wealth input into the economic system. This is unlike the colors in a laser printer, because once they've served their desired purpose they're gone, and the wealth they represented is permanently gone (unless you're printing something like artworks or something that will bind the value permanently).
"The fact of the matter is that there are many other pieces of music you can listen to and the product in question is really the reproduction of that music, not the score itself."
There are many other construction materials, but that doesnt change the fact that if someone has a monopoly on aluminium they have a monopoly.
The existence of partial replacements does not make something a non-monopoly. The ability to engage in monopoly pricing without risk of getting undercut is the economically important factor, and the factor that disables the free markets efficiency pressures.
Now, this is not necessarily bad for the economy when we're talking about an inventor or a writer, they simply cannot get very inefficient, but when the derived monopoly of the rights encompass an entire organization you get a whole different effect. The monopoly rights of many different products combine together to create an extended staggered monopoly (something the single inventor or author cannot do either) with the same consequences as any other such entity.
"It is absurd to think that allowing anyone to run off copies of anyone else's music, perform it when and where they want, and sell recordings without the consent of the composer would do anything but ruin the ability of a composer (especially and independant one) to make a living which is contrary to the entrepreneurial American ideal."
True. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the effect of the current system too. The supply of composers outstrips the demand of the controlled market, and thus their theoretical power amounts to no real power as they are forced to sell cheap to sell at all. Without the current system they at least would not have to compete for attention on uneven ground. Tying the rights to the actual author would be even better.
"In fact, because of our open system, researchers collaborate."
You're absolutely right, and I think you misunderstood what I meant. The free exchange of ideas and collaboration is indeed the most important factor for creative growth, but I dont consider that to be related to intellectual property, but consider it related to educational institutions and communication infrastructure.
The overhead added to the exchange by IP is nowadays slowing the exchange down, not speeding it up. Few inventions can be built in an intellectual vacuum, and the dependency chains on patented research slows the collaboration down.
"Researchers, and I'm sure artists of all kinds, detest all the BS that the profit-driven world heaps on us, but recognize it as a necessary evil that keeps the money flowing into our multi million dollar instruments."
There I partly disagree. I dont think it actually is a necessary evil anymore; it causes more problems than it solves. Many fields are perfectly able to evolve without major investment (software, for example), and in many others I suspect a large part of the cost is actually due to the existence of IP.
Consider this; why exactly do those instruments cost millions of dollars? Compared to mass-market level products of similar complexity, can you really justify the common price levels for such equipment from a cost-to-produce point of view?
"Unfortunately if we removed the ability to buy and sell IP today, tomorrow our economy would collapse because so much of it is in fact built on the buyin and selling of ideas and IP."
Probably, yes. Rather like the end of the Soviet union when the factories suddenly had to compete and had to deal with their excessive cost structures.
I think we'd have to phase it out slowly to avoid such problems, but if we wish to avoid even worse long-term problems I think it's necessary.
"So many were laid off when the economy tanked (R&D is the first to go), but since the companies own all the work, there is no demand to hire them back until profits are back at a level that justifies a big R&D budget."
Even worse, there is no demand to hire them back until the companies need
"You seem to be implying that Gustav Holst cornered The Planets market such that no one else could write the exact same piece and claim it as their own..."
So that no one else can produce copies of it.
That shifts the economic profit interest from producing it as cheaply as possible to maximizing sales volume at monopoly pricing level.
Wether or not one can avoid buying it is irrelevant; as long as they are no equivalent replacements there is no competition which results in a monopoly pricing level.
The effect on the total economy is to shift resources from the actual production of desired products to creating demand for products far above their value level, resulting in a loss of living standard as productive work is replaced by artificial market inefficiencies.
"Patents and copyrights and by extention the idea of intellectual property were written into the US constitution."
Allowing congress to artificially create such rights in the interest of stimulating creativity was written into the constitution (after much doubt). However, those rights no longer serve that purpose and actually harm the economy and creativity and should be removed.
"Look at Taiwan"
Indeed. Look at Taiwan. In fact, take a generalized approach and look at correlation factors for patents. I did, and it changed my point of view entirely. I no longer believe that IP protection is necessary to recover the huge costs incurred. I've come to the conclusion that the huge costs are a result of IP protection.
"the lack of patent law (or enforcement) has lead to a research climate that is so secretive that three different labs could be working on exactly the same thing at the exact same time"
Unlike in the countries with strong patent protection where three different labs work on the exact same thing, but only one gets to take the profits?
"There are markets all over Eastern Europe and Asia that Western companies won't touch simply because of a lack of reasonable patent law."
That's because they cant make a profit when they risk competition. Which rather proves the point.
"That said, there are extremes on both ends."
Oh, indeed, but IP is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If it doesnt work, it needs to be changed. Frankly tho, I dont think it should be completely scrapped, I just think the derived monopoly rights need to be dealt with. The monopoly protection needs to be limited to _only_ the actual creative work; the artist, writer, inventor/group of inventors should be the only ones allowed to be free from competition. The rest of the creator-to-customer chain should be forced to compete like everyone else.
"In our crappy "regulated market" they are forbidden from using their capital to undersell smaller labels which is the only reason they can exist."
Producing a record costs about $5k. When corporations can refuse to release finished records of platinum selling artists on the grounds that they cannot make a profit you have a hint that the cost structures of the industry have become grossly disfigured.
The effect of monopoly rights and marketing has led to an iterated prisoners dilemma where the actual costs have risen that far out of proportion to the actual expenses needed for production. In an unprotected market the costs would be limited by the level at where competition will begin undercutting you, but this is not the case in a protected market.
The indie labels are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place as they cannot get exposure without expenses and they cannot get income without exposure. This forces them to incur similar expenses as the big corporations if they want to make it 'big' and we're back at the inefficiencies you get when there's no free competition.
(In the case of music there is a solution however; "people who liked this also liked that" systems are far more efficient than marketing for connecting customers and artists, which may become an exit strategy for the independents from the no-winner game going on for the moment. Providing the big labels dont succeed in blocking the indies out and creating artificial entry costs.)
Can you detail the budget a bit better so I can help you optimize it?
Remember, Blair Witch Project cost about $30k, grossing $150M in box office, so would you consider giving it away for free after box office cost recovery and small profit?
While movies are one of the few areas actually needing some method of cost recovery, they could be made far cheaper than today.
In a theoretical future it would even be possible to build a huge 'open-source-like' library of film sequences, models, environments, allowing the creation of new movies while reusing old material.
All intellectual 'property' is by definition monopolies. As such it inherently damages the free market and reduces the total wealth of society by diverting funds from efficient production of desired goods and services into inefficient monopolistic organizations.
As the amount of the global economy comprised of protected intellectual monopoly goods becomes greater as free market competition lowers prices on other goods this damage will become more and more apparent, with ever increasing demands on those employed producing desired services and goods, as they have to provide for not only themselves and others through taxes and insurance systems, but also for the protected markets inefficiencies through monopoly pricing on many products. The former Soviet monopolies would be a good example of the effects of protection from competition.
"It is okay for people to download and listen to copyrighted music 24/7, benefitting from someone's labor without paying for it."
There are some people like this.
"It is not okay for people to download copyrighted GPL software and make use of it in their own product, benefitting from someone's labor without paying for it. The violator's excuse?"
There are some people like this too.
You may get an 'average slashdotter' if you mix them together, but they're not necessarily the same people. I'd agree it's easy to confuse, especially since you have an issue where the actual legal situation diverges from what many consider the ethical situation. The GPL is merely a framework for creating a certain result within the current legal situation, and would be unecessary should the legal situation be changed to achieve consistency with the actual ethics.
As such you get a strange situation. I think you find the ethics naive and selectively applied because you're a bit of selecting and applying yourself.
"you could bet that they might not apply the same standard of ethics."
Yes, well, blaming other people for ones own mistakes is a pretty common human pasttime. That doesnt change the actual situation tho.
"I guess it looks fairly obvious from my point of view, and perhaps my analogies are also flawed"
I'd combine person X and person Y, as the 'you' is making the information accessible to everyone by mistake. It's as if they sent it out in the mail a day early, expecting the mail to take a day extra. Would you assign blame to someone for opening the letter, even tho they were not told not to expect the results until the next day? Would you assign blame to someone for going home early to check their mail because a friend home sick called you and told you the letter came early?
Slashdot Mirror
"Most of the users I know just want their desktop OS to work and allow them to do what they need to do"
In which case they're already running Windows or OSX, and whatever platform OSX runs on for the day is completely irrelevant.
"People are acting like OS X has been announced for generic X86 boxes and it hasn't."
And even if it were announced for generic X86 boxes it wouldnt be announced as Free software, so what would be the point?
Now, if Apple released OS X under the GPL, and let you choose to run it on PPC, Sparc, x86, or whatever you want and some distro maker worked on for fun that would be another thing. But that just plain not going to happen.
For those who wants someone to tell them how they will do their computing they can already buy Windows or Mac. It's not like they're the ones using Linux.
There's a bunch of pundits who plain just dont get it, and if they still dont it's not likely they ever will. It's amazing that they can still get words out around their feet.
Maybe we can hope for a rare and odd form of mutually assured destruction where all the innocent bystanders gain instead?
With the damage that intellectual monopoly rights cause to the economy, consumers and taxpayers it shouldnt be too hard to recruit supporters provided one uses the correct arguments.
Remember, intellectual monopoly rights are, in fact, monopoly rights and nothing else. They cause the same economic damage by diverting economic resources into inefficient organizations as any other monopolies.
Organizations that can fail to make a profit on a product that costs $10k to produce and will sell a million copies at $15 a pop shouldnt exist in a free market economy.
"This actually leads to stronger intellectual laws to provide the market with a crutch as we move forward."
The wealth of nations is generated by the evermore efficient production of goods; the ever decreasing scarcity. Creating artificial scarcity where there is none damages the market and destroys wealth by diverting resources to flawed production.
To the economy and society as a whole, intellectual property has about the same effect as a several hundred percent VAT on shoes which is then used to pay for people following other people around and counting their steps.
It may generate a whole lot of jobs, but you'd have to engage in a whole lot of selective blindness to actually argue it has any place in a market economy.
Adam Smith understood this a long time ago. History is full of examples demonstrating the damage caused by monopolies, not the least of which is the former communist states.
Yet, apparently, some people are perfectly willing to ignore that and engage in yet another damaging experiment that will cost us, as a society, immense amounts of wealth.
"Now your implying that they are just rolling the cost into Windows, but I don't agree with that.
They have offered Media Player as a free download for Mac OSX as well (I don't think they do that anymore, but not sure)."
And they're paying for the development of that by what? Printing their own money?
Not only do the consumers get to pay for the rolled in costs of Media Player for Windows when they buy it, they'd get to pay for it for OSX too. Ultimately, it's the consumers financing each and every man hour companies spend on development, wether or not the products are given away for 'free' or not. Money does not magically appear in the payroll accounts of companies (unless they're Enron). They come from somewhere.
The whole idea with competition is ultimately to get lower prices. Of course, in any intellectual property laden industry it's almost impossible to enforce any kind of competition as the fundamental nature of intellectual property is to legalize monopolies. Microsoft is as much a natural result of copyright law as it is of shady buisness practices.
That's rather the point. He used to. With his track record he's going to have 'used to like OSX' in a couple of years. Grass is always greener...
As such, one may or may not attach much value to what jwz is currently fed up with and storms off from. That's just something he does...
Probably not. A year or two you'll see headlines like 'jwz gives up on OSX, it just isnt what he thought'.
Giving up on things in disgust once or twice is understandable, but sometimes when it starts becoming a pattern one would do better to perhaps ask onesself if the problem might lie elsewhere.
True, but the classification system hasnt grown to the same extent as science and 'inventions'. We have much, _much_, more detailed knowledge available today than we had 50 years ago. Where one person might have know almost everything there was to know in the entire field of electronics, today that would be, perhaps, comparable with knowing everything about the silicon-on-insulator field.
Conceivable, to keep the obviousness level at a similar meaning one would have to scale the classifications of fields linearly with the number of patents. Grant 50 patents in a field and it becomes 5 subfields, once there are 50 patents in one of those, that one is split, etc.
Copyright Opponents
* Adam Smith, the father of capitalism
The economic monopoly damage of intellectual property is becoming more apparent all the time, as it is counterproductive to the wealth of nations. In a free market where wealth is created by the ever more efficient production of goods, the transaction costs and resource diversions into non wealth-creating areas like excessive marketing, legislative and administrative overhead created by monopolies are slowly eroding the very basis of western wealth.
As far as I can tell, both more and less.
The council would have gotten to make some decisions with a smaller majority, but the parliament would be granted co-decision status on all fields.
Pro-EU as I am, I can only say it sucked. A constitution as long as the one proposed is inherently defective, and I'd have a number of nits about contents that dont belong in a constitution. And the council of ministers doesnt need an easier time in any way, they need to be kicked out of the procedure entirely. In most european countries, it's not like we let our local and regional politicians co-decide about country level laws, we let our elected representatives for that level decide about those laws. Otherwise you end up with endless regional bickering where the politicians represent their own local political interest, not the interest of the voters.
Even as a beneficiary of the current system where my vote is vastly overrepresented I can say this; one person one vote, and I dont care where you live or if you're spanish, polish, danish or english. If we're to have a union, we should all have equal say.
No, as long as not even the EU politicians can trust the people of europe to vote for who they wish to represent them, the idea of a more tightly integrated europe is dead.
AFAIK, it works this way; if you develop something that is patentable you'll have to patent it or publish it. If you've published it you cant patent it, and neither can anyone else. If you kept it secret and someone else came up with the same idea and published or patented it, well, tough luck.
So, theoretically, it shouldnt be that bad for OSS as it usually publishes very early.
The trouble with science today is that it's divided into so many fields. What is obvious to one of the ten experts in frog intestinal bacteria in the world wont be obvious to someone specializing on the aerodynamics of bovine fur. And what would be obvious to both of them wont be obvious to a computer scientist. This does not mean an idea one of them comes up with is particularly inventive.
"I think that x86 Mac is attempting to threaten Linux. "
Perhaps, but anyone who thinks they'll succeed hasn't understood why linux has been successful.
It's not because it isnt Microsoft. It's because it gives you back control over your computing.
Apple is even more controlling than Microsoft, deciding where you want to go today on both a software and hardware basis. That's fine for competing with Microsoft for end users, and if Apple can offer better prices or something with x86, all kudos to them, and hopefully they'll get a few more customers.
But it wont put a dent in the Linux market, neither at the enterprise level or at the hobbyist level because where Linux offers a new compelling free and competetive approach, Apple only offers the same old proprietary hardware and software combination that countless of vendors have offered for decades.
Wrong impression? Perhaps... check around for the actual per capita rates, not only the changes in per capita rates, and you'll find the previous statistics to be designed to confer exact that idea.
Yeah, and I know what you meant.
To express myself slightly better; with WINE it's a matter of developers testing their applications with two different implementations of the same 'platform'. Like testing a website with two browsers, like testing a game on two versions of Windows, etc. It's not like a complete new port to another platform.
Sure, WINE will lag in features and bugs, but once the API infrastructure is there it's just laziness on the part of game developers to not test on that particular configuration when they release updates.
That's sortof like saying 'There are no games on Windows. Unless you install DirectX, but that doesnt really count.'
WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's an implementation of various API's, and as such you'd have to have a very odd method of counting if you're not counting it.
"I don't think a Quantum computer will run well with an x86 instruction set."
Quantum computing is good at so very different things than a normal CPU that it's unlikely they'll be interchangable. It would be like choosing between an Integer CPU or a Floating point CPU but even more divergent. For a general purpose computer you'd want both, and their instruction sets can be separate.
So unfortunately I dont think those advances will necessarily kill the x86 instruction set.
In fact, I think the currently most promising way to get rid of it would be if some chip producer decided to go full out with the opensource commoditization of software and completely drop the idea of binary compatibility and design cheap powerful CPUs for the segment that can recompile their applications from scratch when necessary. It'll probably be a few years before that market segment is large enough tho.
"it's a LOT cheaper and easier"
Because streamlining the process reduces the amount of human labour needed per unit.
That's where the other part of his idea comes in; recycling.
I think he's actually right. The essence of material wealth is the efficient transformation of undesired products into desired products. This allows the transformation to be as efficient as it can be (as little human labour involved as possible), while solving the issues of raw materials _and_ the wealth reduction of wear and tear into waste (undesired products).
So, any raw material the robots can use becomes a permanent wealth input into the economic system. This is unlike the colors in a laser printer, because once they've served their desired purpose they're gone, and the wealth they represented is permanently gone (unless you're printing something like artworks or something that will bind the value permanently).
"The fact of the matter is that there are many other pieces of music you can listen to and the product in question is really the reproduction of that music, not the score itself."
There are many other construction materials, but that doesnt change the fact that if someone has a monopoly on aluminium they have a monopoly.
The existence of partial replacements does not make something a non-monopoly. The ability to engage in monopoly pricing without risk of getting undercut is the economically important factor, and the factor that disables the free markets efficiency pressures.
Now, this is not necessarily bad for the economy when we're talking about an inventor or a writer, they simply cannot get very inefficient, but when the derived monopoly of the rights encompass an entire organization you get a whole different effect. The monopoly rights of many different products combine together to create an extended staggered monopoly (something the single inventor or author cannot do either) with the same consequences as any other such entity.
"It is absurd to think that allowing anyone to run off copies of anyone else's music, perform it when and where they want, and sell recordings without the consent of the composer would do anything but ruin the ability of a composer (especially and independant one) to make a living which is contrary to the entrepreneurial American ideal."
True. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the effect of the current system too. The supply of composers outstrips the demand of the controlled market, and thus their theoretical power amounts to no real power as they are forced to sell cheap to sell at all. Without the current system they at least would not have to compete for attention on uneven ground. Tying the rights to the actual author would be even better.
"In fact, because of our open system, researchers collaborate."
You're absolutely right, and I think you misunderstood what I meant. The free exchange of ideas and collaboration is indeed the most important factor for creative growth, but I dont consider that to be related to intellectual property, but consider it related to educational institutions and communication infrastructure.
The overhead added to the exchange by IP is nowadays slowing the exchange down, not speeding it up. Few inventions can be built in an intellectual vacuum, and the dependency chains on patented research slows the collaboration down.
"Researchers, and I'm sure artists of all kinds, detest all the BS that the profit-driven world heaps on us, but recognize it as a necessary evil that keeps the money flowing into our multi million dollar instruments."
There I partly disagree. I dont think it actually is a necessary evil anymore; it causes more problems than it solves. Many fields are perfectly able to evolve without major investment (software, for example), and in many others I suspect a large part of the cost is actually due to the existence of IP.
Consider this; why exactly do those instruments cost millions of dollars? Compared to mass-market level products of similar complexity, can you really justify the common price levels for such equipment from a cost-to-produce point of view?
"Unfortunately if we removed the ability to buy and sell IP today, tomorrow our economy would collapse because so much of it is in fact built on the buyin and selling of ideas and IP."
Probably, yes. Rather like the end of the Soviet union when the factories suddenly had to compete and had to deal with their excessive cost structures.
I think we'd have to phase it out slowly to avoid such problems, but if we wish to avoid even worse long-term problems I think it's necessary.
"So many were laid off when the economy tanked (R&D is the first to go), but since the companies own all the work, there is no demand to hire them back until profits are back at a level that justifies a big R&D budget."
Even worse, there is no demand to hire them back until the companies need
"You seem to be implying that Gustav Holst cornered The Planets market such that no one else could write the exact same piece and claim it as their own..."
So that no one else can produce copies of it.
That shifts the economic profit interest from producing it as cheaply as possible to maximizing sales volume at monopoly pricing level.
Wether or not one can avoid buying it is irrelevant; as long as they are no equivalent replacements there is no competition which results in a monopoly pricing level.
The effect on the total economy is to shift resources from the actual production of desired products to creating demand for products far above their value level, resulting in a loss of living standard as productive work is replaced by artificial market inefficiencies.
"Patents and copyrights and by extention the idea of intellectual property were written into the US constitution."
Allowing congress to artificially create such rights in the interest of stimulating creativity was written into the constitution (after much doubt). However, those rights no longer serve that purpose and actually harm the economy and creativity and should be removed.
"Look at Taiwan"
Indeed. Look at Taiwan. In fact, take a generalized approach and look at correlation factors for patents. I did, and it changed my point of view entirely. I no longer believe that IP protection is necessary to recover the huge costs incurred. I've come to the conclusion that the huge costs are a result of IP protection.
"the lack of patent law (or enforcement) has lead to a research climate that is so secretive that three different labs could be working on exactly the same thing at the exact same time"
Unlike in the countries with strong patent protection where three different labs work on the exact same thing, but only one gets to take the profits?
"There are markets all over Eastern Europe and Asia that Western companies won't touch simply because of a lack of reasonable patent law."
That's because they cant make a profit when they risk competition. Which rather proves the point.
"That said, there are extremes on both ends."
Oh, indeed, but IP is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If it doesnt work, it needs to be changed. Frankly tho, I dont think it should be completely scrapped, I just think the derived monopoly rights need to be dealt with. The monopoly protection needs to be limited to _only_ the actual creative work; the artist, writer, inventor/group of inventors should be the only ones allowed to be free from competition. The rest of the creator-to-customer chain should be forced to compete like everyone else.
"In our crappy "regulated market" they are forbidden from using their capital to undersell smaller labels which is the only reason they can exist."
Producing a record costs about $5k. When corporations can refuse to release finished records of platinum selling artists on the grounds that they cannot make a profit you have a hint that the cost structures of the industry have become grossly disfigured.
The effect of monopoly rights and marketing has led to an iterated prisoners dilemma where the actual costs have risen that far out of proportion to the actual expenses needed for production. In an unprotected market the costs would be limited by the level at where competition will begin undercutting you, but this is not the case in a protected market.
The indie labels are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place as they cannot get exposure without expenses and they cannot get income without exposure. This forces them to incur similar expenses as the big corporations if they want to make it 'big' and we're back at the inefficiencies you get when there's no free competition.
(In the case of music there is a solution however; "people who liked this also liked that" systems are far more efficient than marketing for connecting customers and artists, which may become an exit strategy for the independents from the no-winner game going on for the moment. Providing the big labels dont succeed in blocking the indies out and creating artificial entry costs.)
Can you detail the budget a bit better so I can help you optimize it?
Remember, Blair Witch Project cost about $30k, grossing $150M in box office, so would you consider giving it away for free after box office cost recovery and small profit?
While movies are one of the few areas actually needing some method of cost recovery, they could be made far cheaper than today.
In a theoretical future it would even be possible to build a huge 'open-source-like' library of film sequences, models, environments, allowing the creation of new movies while reusing old material.
All intellectual 'property' is by definition monopolies. As such it inherently damages the free market and reduces the total wealth of society by diverting funds from efficient production of desired goods and services into inefficient monopolistic organizations.
As the amount of the global economy comprised of protected intellectual monopoly goods becomes greater as free market competition lowers prices on other goods this damage will become more and more apparent, with ever increasing demands on those employed producing desired services and goods, as they have to provide for not only themselves and others through taxes and insurance systems, but also for the protected markets inefficiencies through monopoly pricing on many products. The former Soviet monopolies would be a good example of the effects of protection from competition.
"It is okay for people to download and listen to copyrighted music 24/7, benefitting from someone's labor without paying for it."
There are some people like this.
"It is not okay for people to download copyrighted GPL software and make use of it in their own product, benefitting from someone's labor without paying for it. The violator's excuse?"
There are some people like this too.
You may get an 'average slashdotter' if you mix them together, but they're not necessarily the same people. I'd agree it's easy to confuse, especially since you have an issue where the actual legal situation diverges from what many consider the ethical situation. The GPL is merely a framework for creating a certain result within the current legal situation, and would be unecessary should the legal situation be changed to achieve consistency with the actual ethics.
As such you get a strange situation. I think you find the ethics naive and selectively applied because you're a bit of selecting and applying yourself.
"you could bet that they might not apply the same standard of ethics."
Yes, well, blaming other people for ones own mistakes is a pretty common human pasttime. That doesnt change the actual situation tho.
"I guess it looks fairly obvious from my point of view, and perhaps my analogies are also flawed"
I'd combine person X and person Y, as the 'you' is making the information accessible to everyone by mistake. It's as if they sent it out in the mail a day early, expecting the mail to take a day extra. Would you assign blame to someone for opening the letter, even tho they were not told not to expect the results until the next day? Would you assign blame to someone for going home early to check their mail because a friend home sick called you and told you the letter came early?