Company can defend or pay up. Paying up is cheaper. Company pays up. Extortionist profits.
As X is a hefty sum, and investment costs in bogus software patents are very low you can 'Make Money Fast' and you dont need any specifically valid patents. You dont even need to take it to court, in fact, taking it to court is likely unprofitable. You just need the threat. And as you have a paper from the patent office saying your invention is legit, you wont even be engaging in criminal activity with such extortion as you could reasonably be considered to have a chance in court, in which case it's not illegal to send threatening lawyerish letters.
So, you see, the USPTO wallpaper is worth several hundred thousand dollars per square meter. It doesnt matter if it's valid or not, the paper itself is a carte-blanche to engage in legal extortion for defense costs - $1.
"There are cases where software patents are valid."
Um, no. There is no valid reason for infringing other peoples right to develop and invent.
"For example, a new, intuitive interface that cost a great deal of money develop."
Why should that give you the right to profit off other peoples work? I spend money so now everyone else owes me? In that case, where can I send the bill?
Of course those jobs will be moved to India soon enough, at which point tens of thousands of small and medium size buisness IT employees will be sued out of existence for patent violations, and Ireland can go back to farming and being poor.
The large corporations arent in the buisness of being nice. They're in the buisness of screwing you in any way they can for short-term profitability.
RFID passports would be an assassins dream; you could drop a whole load of ID triggered bombs along a victims possible routes. And then a few extra at the nearest hospital, should they survive. The assassin would be halfway around the world by the time one goes off.
And as there would be no problem surreptiously reading an ID, just a number wont do either, as it could be pre-scanned and used later.
Oh, I agree that there will always be something to do from an interpersonal view; the question is wether there will be an associated value that can generate a salary.
Personal recommendations have value, but they're available for free from friends, and while we may trust some reviewers, I think a quick questionnaire on what movies you've liked before, and matching that with people with similar tastes would generate just as good a prediction. The intelligence is not in the program, but in the ready availability of matching people and subgroups in a streamlined culture with instant connectivity.
And further, even while you and I may enjoy debating with eachother and exchanging ideas, and some poor sods may find our discourse enlightening or amusing, it's not like it's worth enough for us to pay eachother, for the readers to compensate us, or for slashdot to spend money on us when there are many more where we came from.
I dont mean we're a consumption machine, I mean there's a limit to our time, and our time is consumed and used for consumption. Our social tendencies is just yet another aspect we consume; me sitting here writing is more time I'm not spending doing something else, with the potential to take hundreds of manhours from people just reading it. With such purely intellectual exercises I can waste time for any number of people with no extra effort, for free, competing with both other free timewasters and commercial timewasters.
I agree that the competition will be for the best of everything (at least insofar as people regard different things as 'best'), but that only enhances the point; only the very best can expect to live off intellectual exercises, because the mediocre is almost infinitely competetive and available.
"how do we sort out what is good from what is not"
Automation. See 'Tivo'. See online-shops 'also-bought' and 'also liked'.
"that, my friend, is a creative, knowledge-worker-type question"
No, it's a tedious extremely personalized task suitable for datamining expert systems. Another case of 'do once, repeat forever'.
It's not a question of 640K being enough, it's a question of 24 hours _not_ being enough. We need more, but we're not getting more anytime soon. Personally, I have a to-do list of things to read, watch and study that reaches into the 30th century, and that's with what's available today.
"How many do we need?"
We need the amount to fill any persons mind with their desired knowledge for an entire lifetime.
But we are rapidly approaching that level of fulfillment. TV loses to internet, books lose to internet, internet loses to MMORPGS, radio loses to mobiles, mobiles lose to portable TV's, etc. The same consumers are already spending almost as much time as is humanly possible consuming, and there is no more time available.
Being able to get anyones attention for any time at all is already so difficult that you can get paid for watching things. Of course, once supply outstrips demand so greatly that you may have to pay your customers, you're going to go through a rough time.
"The new age will be creativity and knowledge-based"
Yes, that's the nice and comforting thing we get told. In fact, there never has been, nor ever will be, as many 'knowledge' workers required.
How many manhours does it take to build cars for a dozen people? How many more manhours does it take to build cars for a thousand people?
Now, how many manhours does it take to design cars for that dozen people? And how many more does it take to design cars for a thousand people?
How many newspapers do we need? How many reality soaps? How many books can one read? How many games can one play?
The knowledge economy is a pipe dream. Society barely has the capacity to digest the knowledge output produced today, and with the way that information production scales against consumption it will only get worse. Near-infinite production capacity and instant transmission has created a supply that vastly outstrips demand.
Opensource, PVR's, do-not-call lists, SPAM, all are different symptoms of the effects of infinite reproduction and instantaneous transmission. One-to-many, many-to-one, both wreak havoc on traditional supply-and-demand, and will ensure that the manufacturing age will not be replaced by an knowledge age, and automation will probably kill any services age.
"From what I've seen anti-virus companies generally do an excellent job."
They do? As far as I can tell, if fire departments did as 'excellent' a job as anti-virus companies, many buildings would be permanently on fire and it would be getting worse.
They may be doing an excellent job at generating revenue tho...
If someone takes the car you're using you can argue you have lost something that was of use to you, wether or not there are any property laws. Land has value as grazing grounds, mineral availability, woodland, etc.
But if someone sees a chimney you invented and builds one just like it, you can not argue that you have lost anything of value to you at all, because you have not lost the use of that chimney.
Without the legal invention of intellectual property, there _is_ no intellectual property, any more than there are 'air rights' giving someone the right to charge you for breathing (of course, if there were, the 'air industry' would be suing people for 'stealing air' from them).
Intellectual property is the artificial limitation of everyone elses rights, not the protection of any inventors or creators property rights. We could invent any number of such artifical scarcities, letting people own colors, light, names, letters or numbers, but none would be based on the principles of physical property; the actual inherent value of utility and scarcity in the object.
"Finally, what we are talking about are property rights"
No, we're not. We're talking about _intellectual_ property rights, that should more aptly be called temporary government granted monopolies or something to avoid such confusion.
"Would you want someone to move in and take something that belongs to you, and not pay compensation?"
If you're not granted the temporary monopoly, there _is_ nothing that belongs to you, _nothing_ has been taken, and _no_ compensation could arguably be required under any 'property right'.
Dont confuse property and intellectual property. Property usually has value and utility to a person with or without the legal framework of property rights.
Intellectual property doesnt even exist outside the legal framework. It derives its value not from inherent worth, but by depriving everyone else of the value inherent in their ability and right to benefit from their own work and thoughts.
If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that.
The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration.
Isnt it odd how almost the entire top-list is sci-fi which lacks distribution in a lot of places, while there is pretty much no downloading of reality soaps?
Maybe the programming execs should get repeatedly fired for so completely and utterly failing to satisfy demand...
Of course, comparing a corporation with what is nominally a democracy with at least some checks and balances is a bit misleading.
A better comparison would be 'MS not having them would be a fools game just as would North Korea without a national defense'.
While legislating a nuclear disarmament is very difficult, we actually can legislate a patent disarmament as everyone can be made equally and certainly harmless.
"I hear this argument a lot from the paranoid Left and the militant right alike."
I think that's probably because it's easier to spot the lies when you're on an extreme side. You'll spend more time searching for the lies of others. However, their failing is they're not examining their own side carefully enough.
One could hope that the truth was in the middle, but unfortunately the middle of two lies is not necessarily the truth.
For an extreme but pointed (and vastly simplified) example, take communism and fascism. Both can be two wildly divergent sides, but the middle might end up somewhere around a totally authoritarian corporate socialized state. As both sides would be promoting the differences between them, the entire propaganda machine would have a free-for-all taking out any anti-authoritarian ideas, and probably without very many noticing, as the main discourse would be focused elsewhere.
The very concepts of left and right are really part of our own everyday propaganda, more or less willfully clouding and simplifying our thinking. They're extremely useful when defining and villifying the opposition, but close to useless when it comes to defining some reality from which to have a constructive and reasonable discourse. Perhaps they once had a meaning, but now they're simply used to create identity; those who we are, those who we are not, those whose opinions we wish to imagine to be opinions that are different from ours.
North Korea is one beast, but not very relevant from the point of view of analyzing our own situation.
China is more interesting, as it is slowly changing into something closer to ourselves. Apart from the propaganda picture of China, how different is it today, and how different will it become? While you'd certainly face a stronger risk of inprisonment from offending the state apparatus, how much of that is because the state apparatus lacks the more refined methods of punishment? Once the economy of the country reaches the same level we have, will the Chinese state be able to discard those tools and perform a controlled change, where instead of inprisoning the opposition they'll either ridicule them out of relevancy, call in favours and get them fired or tie them up in court and ruin them instead? Why inprison journalists when you can make the ones that matter write what you want under the threat of killing their access to the government?
The means of oppression are many, and the most obvious and brutal are often the least effective. Eventually the power class realizes they can keep their wealth and power, and they dont have to spend as many resources on the authority machine. And maybe apart from some ideologists once upon a time, the keeping of wealth and power in the face of everyone from 'socialists' to 'free marketists' is what it's all about anyway.
For every person exposing the truth, hire ten to malign him, change the issue, confuse the facts, misrepresent his views, misrepresent your views and outright lie and threaten.
I've realized that I'm being manipulated every day, and I live in a western democracy. Do you know how very difficult it is to discern who is manipulating you in what way, and how they in turn have been manipulated? Do you understand how difficult it is when you cannot even trust your own mind and language, as you will find your very instincts erraneous and the very language biased?
In your average newspaper and newscast it's almost impossible to find a single unbiased and non-propagandistic article. They're as rare as factually correct articles, and often the two go hand in hand. As journalists no longer appear to have the time, and few the integrity, try to do the factchecking yourself, and trace interests and bias in the article, and compare between different ones.
It's not that the average person cant form an opinion, understand a problem or draw conclusions from the facts. It's that the average person does not have the time, inclination or opportunity to double-check and cross-reference every fact and opinion they hear and question every belief and opinion they have once they discover inconsistencies. It's not very rewarding or conductive to living a happy life.
Propaganda works. And you, I and the Chinese get tricked every day.
You're right of course. The tricky part is to remember that the courts have often gone with what the seller presents the deal as. If they say 'buy your music from us', they are implying an actual transfer of property and the property rights that pertain to it, and as long as the customer can wait a hundred years to copy it, they can expect to be able to do pretty much what they want with it.
On the other hand, if they say 'rent your music from us', or 'buy access to our music library and borrow all the music you want' that would probably be interpreted entirely differently.
"IANAL, so I don't know whether a downloaded WMA would constitute a physical item."
IANAL either, but from what I've seen many courts have traditionally gone with what the seller is claiming and is presenting the deal as.
If they say 'rent your WMA online' they can have a rental contract regulating all sorts of things with the WMA.
On the other hand, if they say 'buy your WMA online', they are essetially suggesting a transfer of ownership of the actual property, with all the rights pertaining to that piece of property, except the rights reserved under copyright, to the customer.
While the technology is new, the courts may not find the problem itself new.
"Copyright law says that you need permission from the owner of the copyright for those bits, and that allows that owner to set the terms."
Eh, no. Copyright law says you need permission from the owner to copy those bits. Once you purchase them, you hold all property rights and can do whatever you wish with the bits, except copy them, as the right to copy them is taken from you and given exclusively to the author for the duration of the copyright term.
Take some time and read up on the first sales doctrine, and dont mistake intellectual property for physical property. The 'property' in 'intellectual property' is not the product itself, it's the right to prevent others from exercising their own right to copy their property. The fact that someone owns the _copy right_ should not be confused with the ownership of the _copy_.
That said, DRM is a grey area and the lobbying propaganda usually tries to argue that it's only intended to stop illegal copying, which would fall within the legitimate realm of a copy right. However, we all know that is not the case; DRM usually expands far beyond that exclusive realm, and tries to control what devices you can play things on, where you can play them, when you can play them, etc.
True, but as I already have that music, and thus will not be downloading it, I wont be paying $15 per month for all the music I've ever wanted, I'll be paying $15 per month for new music. Which, if I wish to keep both getting and keeping that music, I'll have to keep paying.
The entire idea is, of course, entirely in line with the payola/MTV/one hit per week fire and forget pop music think rampant in the music industry. They want an advanced pay version of a radio station.
They completely ignore the vast number of people who collect music according to their own taste over a longer term, for whom this deal is exceptionally bad.
I already have all the music I've ever wanted. And I've even paid for it. And, you know, I dont have to pay a monthly fee for it, it wont go away when some company goes bankrupt, and I can move it where I want it.
So what is the sales pitch? I can see the improvement for them, but where's the improvement for me?
So, if the government did not grant you the exclusive right to be the only one allowed to play a certain tune, how are you going to argue that nobody else should be allowed to play that tune?
If you draw a square, I can see your square and draw one exactly like it. Without the government taking away my right to draw a square just like that and giving exclusive control to you, how would you argue that you had lost something?
You have the right to anything you create, but 'intellectual property' is not the right to do what you wish with what you create, it's the right to prevent anyone else from creating something similar, or the same.
Slashdot Mirror
"Other than amazon, what website rembered all your information"
Oh, wait, that was the reason cookies were put into browsers _at all_.
Defense costs X dollars.
Patent extortionist charges X-1 dollars.
Company can defend or pay up. Paying up is cheaper. Company pays up. Extortionist profits.
As X is a hefty sum, and investment costs in bogus software patents are very low you can 'Make Money Fast' and you dont need any specifically valid patents. You dont even need to take it to court, in fact, taking it to court is likely unprofitable. You just need the threat. And as you have a paper from the patent office saying your invention is legit, you wont even be engaging in criminal activity with such extortion as you could reasonably be considered to have a chance in court, in which case it's not illegal to send threatening lawyerish letters.
So, you see, the USPTO wallpaper is worth several hundred thousand dollars per square meter. It doesnt matter if it's valid or not, the paper itself is a carte-blanche to engage in legal extortion for defense costs - $1.
... and opensource rather proves that software patents are not legitimate.
Corporations, of course, want patent protection to protect their waste and executive lifestyle, not any actual investment.
"There are cases where software patents are valid."
Um, no. There is no valid reason for infringing other peoples right to develop and invent.
"For example, a new, intuitive interface that cost a great deal of money develop."
Why should that give you the right to profit off other peoples work? I spend money so now everyone else owes me? In that case, where can I send the bill?
Of course those jobs will be moved to India soon enough, at which point tens of thousands of small and medium size buisness IT employees will be sued out of existence for patent violations, and Ireland can go back to farming and being poor.
The large corporations arent in the buisness of being nice. They're in the buisness of screwing you in any way they can for short-term profitability.
Hand-held? Think 'bomb mounted'.
RFID passports would be an assassins dream; you could drop a whole load of ID triggered bombs along a victims possible routes. And then a few extra at the nearest hospital, should they survive. The assassin would be halfway around the world by the time one goes off.
And as there would be no problem surreptiously reading an ID, just a number wont do either, as it could be pre-scanned and used later.
Oh, I agree that there will always be something to do from an interpersonal view; the question is wether there will be an associated value that can generate a salary.
Personal recommendations have value, but they're available for free from friends, and while we may trust some reviewers, I think a quick questionnaire on what movies you've liked before, and matching that with people with similar tastes would generate just as good a prediction. The intelligence is not in the program, but in the ready availability of matching people and subgroups in a streamlined culture with instant connectivity.
And further, even while you and I may enjoy debating with eachother and exchanging ideas, and some poor sods may find our discourse enlightening or amusing, it's not like it's worth enough for us to pay eachother, for the readers to compensate us, or for slashdot to spend money on us when there are many more where we came from.
I dont mean we're a consumption machine, I mean there's a limit to our time, and our time is consumed and used for consumption. Our social tendencies is just yet another aspect we consume; me sitting here writing is more time I'm not spending doing something else, with the potential to take hundreds of manhours from people just reading it. With such purely intellectual exercises I can waste time for any number of people with no extra effort, for free, competing with both other free timewasters and commercial timewasters.
I agree that the competition will be for the best of everything (at least insofar as people regard different things as 'best'), but that only enhances the point; only the very best can expect to live off intellectual exercises, because the mediocre is almost infinitely competetive and available.
"how do we sort out what is good from what is not"
Automation. See 'Tivo'. See online-shops 'also-bought' and 'also liked'.
"that, my friend, is a creative, knowledge-worker-type question"
No, it's a tedious extremely personalized task suitable for datamining expert systems. Another case of 'do once, repeat forever'.
It's not a question of 640K being enough, it's a question of 24 hours _not_ being enough. We need more, but we're not getting more anytime soon. Personally, I have a to-do list of things to read, watch and study that reaches into the 30th century, and that's with what's available today.
"How many do we need?"
We need the amount to fill any persons mind with their desired knowledge for an entire lifetime.
But we are rapidly approaching that level of fulfillment. TV loses to internet, books lose to internet, internet loses to MMORPGS, radio loses to mobiles, mobiles lose to portable TV's, etc. The same consumers are already spending almost as much time as is humanly possible consuming, and there is no more time available.
Being able to get anyones attention for any time at all is already so difficult that you can get paid for watching things. Of course, once supply outstrips demand so greatly that you may have to pay your customers, you're going to go through a rough time.
"The new age will be creativity and knowledge-based"
Yes, that's the nice and comforting thing we get told. In fact, there never has been, nor ever will be, as many 'knowledge' workers required.
How many manhours does it take to build cars for a dozen people? How many more manhours does it take to build cars for a thousand people?
Now, how many manhours does it take to design cars for that dozen people? And how many more does it take to design cars for a thousand people?
How many newspapers do we need? How many reality soaps? How many books can one read? How many games can one play?
The knowledge economy is a pipe dream. Society barely has the capacity to digest the knowledge output produced today, and with the way that information production scales against consumption it will only get worse. Near-infinite production capacity and instant transmission has created a supply that vastly outstrips demand.
Opensource, PVR's, do-not-call lists, SPAM, all are different symptoms of the effects of infinite reproduction and instantaneous transmission. One-to-many, many-to-one, both wreak havoc on traditional supply-and-demand, and will ensure that the manufacturing age will not be replaced by an knowledge age, and automation will probably kill any services age.
"From what I've seen anti-virus companies generally do an excellent job."
They do? As far as I can tell, if fire departments did as 'excellent' a job as anti-virus companies, many buildings would be permanently on fire and it would be getting worse.
They may be doing an excellent job at generating revenue tho...
If someone takes the car you're using you can argue you have lost something that was of use to you, wether or not there are any property laws. Land has value as grazing grounds, mineral availability, woodland, etc.
But if someone sees a chimney you invented and builds one just like it, you can not argue that you have lost anything of value to you at all, because you have not lost the use of that chimney.
Without the legal invention of intellectual property, there _is_ no intellectual property, any more than there are 'air rights' giving someone the right to charge you for breathing (of course, if there were, the 'air industry' would be suing people for 'stealing air' from them).
Intellectual property is the artificial limitation of everyone elses rights, not the protection of any inventors or creators property rights. We could invent any number of such artifical scarcities, letting people own colors, light, names, letters or numbers, but none would be based on the principles of physical property; the actual inherent value of utility and scarcity in the object.
"Finally, what we are talking about are property rights"
No, we're not. We're talking about _intellectual_ property rights, that should more aptly be called temporary government granted monopolies or something to avoid such confusion.
"Would you want someone to move in and take something that belongs to you, and not pay compensation?"
If you're not granted the temporary monopoly, there _is_ nothing that belongs to you, _nothing_ has been taken, and _no_ compensation could arguably be required under any 'property right'.
Dont confuse property and intellectual property. Property usually has value and utility to a person with or without the legal framework of property rights.
Intellectual property doesnt even exist outside the legal framework. It derives its value not from inherent worth, but by depriving everyone else of the value inherent in their ability and right to benefit from their own work and thoughts.
If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that.
The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration.
Isnt it odd how almost the entire top-list is sci-fi which lacks distribution in a lot of places, while there is pretty much no downloading of reality soaps?
Maybe the programming execs should get repeatedly fired for so completely and utterly failing to satisfy demand...
Of course, comparing a corporation with what is nominally a democracy with at least some checks and balances is a bit misleading.
A better comparison would be 'MS not having them would be a fools game just as would North Korea without a national defense'.
While legislating a nuclear disarmament is very difficult, we actually can legislate a patent disarmament as everyone can be made equally and certainly harmless.
"I hear this argument a lot from the paranoid Left and the militant right alike."
I think that's probably because it's easier to spot the lies when you're on an extreme side. You'll spend more time searching for the lies of others. However, their failing is they're not examining their own side carefully enough.
One could hope that the truth was in the middle, but unfortunately the middle of two lies is not necessarily the truth.
For an extreme but pointed (and vastly simplified) example, take communism and fascism. Both can be two wildly divergent sides, but the middle might end up somewhere around a totally authoritarian corporate socialized state. As both sides would be promoting the differences between them, the entire propaganda machine would have a free-for-all taking out any anti-authoritarian ideas, and probably without very many noticing, as the main discourse would be focused elsewhere.
The very concepts of left and right are really part of our own everyday propaganda, more or less willfully clouding and simplifying our thinking. They're extremely useful when defining and villifying the opposition, but close to useless when it comes to defining some reality from which to have a constructive and reasonable discourse. Perhaps they once had a meaning, but now they're simply used to create identity; those who we are, those who we are not, those whose opinions we wish to imagine to be opinions that are different from ours.
North Korea is one beast, but not very relevant from the point of view of analyzing our own situation.
China is more interesting, as it is slowly changing into something closer to ourselves. Apart from the propaganda picture of China, how different is it today, and how different will it become? While you'd certainly face a stronger risk of inprisonment from offending the state apparatus, how much of that is because the state apparatus lacks the more refined methods of punishment? Once the economy of the country reaches the same level we have, will the Chinese state be able to discard those tools and perform a controlled change, where instead of inprisoning the opposition they'll either ridicule them out of relevancy, call in favours and get them fired or tie them up in court and ruin them instead? Why inprison journalists when you can make the ones that matter write what you want under the threat of killing their access to the government?
The means of oppression are many, and the most obvious and brutal are often the least effective. Eventually the power class realizes they can keep their wealth and power, and they dont have to spend as many resources on the authority machine. And maybe apart from some ideologists once upon a time, the keeping of wealth and power in the face of everyone from 'socialists' to 'free marketists' is what it's all about anyway.
Get ready for a lawsuit. Any spreading around of that virus is a patent violation, so keep your bodily fluids to yourself.
For every person exposing the truth, hire ten to malign him, change the issue, confuse the facts, misrepresent his views, misrepresent your views and outright lie and threaten.
I've realized that I'm being manipulated every day, and I live in a western democracy. Do you know how very difficult it is to discern who is manipulating you in what way, and how they in turn have been manipulated? Do you understand how difficult it is when you cannot even trust your own mind and language, as you will find your very instincts erraneous and the very language biased?
In your average newspaper and newscast it's almost impossible to find a single unbiased and non-propagandistic article. They're as rare as factually correct articles, and often the two go hand in hand. As journalists no longer appear to have the time, and few the integrity, try to do the factchecking yourself, and trace interests and bias in the article, and compare between different ones.
It's not that the average person cant form an opinion, understand a problem or draw conclusions from the facts. It's that the average person does not have the time, inclination or opportunity to double-check and cross-reference every fact and opinion they hear and question every belief and opinion they have once they discover inconsistencies. It's not very rewarding or conductive to living a happy life.
Propaganda works. And you, I and the Chinese get tricked every day.
What exactly are they protecting you from?
You're right of course, but it gets really complicated when one gets into the more estoteric exceptions around IP :).
You're right of course. The tricky part is to remember that the courts have often gone with what the seller presents the deal as. If they say 'buy your music from us', they are implying an actual transfer of property and the property rights that pertain to it, and as long as the customer can wait a hundred years to copy it, they can expect to be able to do pretty much what they want with it.
On the other hand, if they say 'rent your music from us', or 'buy access to our music library and borrow all the music you want' that would probably be interpreted entirely differently.
"IANAL, so I don't know whether a downloaded WMA would constitute a physical item."
IANAL either, but from what I've seen many courts have traditionally gone with what the seller is claiming and is presenting the deal as.
If they say 'rent your WMA online' they can have a rental contract regulating all sorts of things with the WMA.
On the other hand, if they say 'buy your WMA online', they are essetially suggesting a transfer of ownership of the actual property, with all the rights pertaining to that piece of property, except the rights reserved under copyright, to the customer.
While the technology is new, the courts may not find the problem itself new.
"Copyright law says that you need permission from the owner of the copyright for those bits, and that allows that owner to set the terms."
Eh, no. Copyright law says you need permission from the owner to copy those bits. Once you purchase them, you hold all property rights and can do whatever you wish with the bits, except copy them, as the right to copy them is taken from you and given exclusively to the author for the duration of the copyright term.
Take some time and read up on the first sales doctrine, and dont mistake intellectual property for physical property. The 'property' in 'intellectual property' is not the product itself, it's the right to prevent others from exercising their own right to copy their property. The fact that someone owns the _copy right_ should not be confused with the ownership of the _copy_.
That said, DRM is a grey area and the lobbying propaganda usually tries to argue that it's only intended to stop illegal copying, which would fall within the legitimate realm of a copy right. However, we all know that is not the case; DRM usually expands far beyond that exclusive realm, and tries to control what devices you can play things on, where you can play them, when you can play them, etc.
True, but as I already have that music, and thus will not be downloading it, I wont be paying $15 per month for all the music I've ever wanted, I'll be paying $15 per month for new music. Which, if I wish to keep both getting and keeping that music, I'll have to keep paying.
The entire idea is, of course, entirely in line with the payola/MTV/one hit per week fire and forget pop music think rampant in the music industry. They want an advanced pay version of a radio station.
They completely ignore the vast number of people who collect music according to their own taste over a longer term, for whom this deal is exceptionally bad.
I already have all the music I've ever wanted. And I've even paid for it. And, you know, I dont have to pay a monthly fee for it, it wont go away when some company goes bankrupt, and I can move it where I want it.
So what is the sales pitch? I can see the improvement for them, but where's the improvement for me?
So, if the government did not grant you the exclusive right to be the only one allowed to play a certain tune, how are you going to argue that nobody else should be allowed to play that tune?
If you draw a square, I can see your square and draw one exactly like it. Without the government taking away my right to draw a square just like that and giving exclusive control to you, how would you argue that you had lost something?
You have the right to anything you create, but 'intellectual property' is not the right to do what you wish with what you create, it's the right to prevent anyone else from creating something similar, or the same.