The express purpose for granting an artist exclusive copy right for a limited period was to encourage the production of more art.
Actually the terms are "sciences" and "useful arts". These terms have changed somewhat since the text was written, but that basically translates to "writings for the purpose of knowledge and/or instruction" (the basis of copyright) and "techniques or processes of production" (the basis for patents). In other words, not entertainment, or "art" in the modern sense.
Not that I disagree with your conclusion, but to call this "a pure example of Occam's Razor" you would first have to show that it is simpler for someone to be right than it is for them to be wrong. Given that the simplest way to answer "are the United States' copyright laws good or bad" would be a random flip of the coin, and that a uniformly random binary result is just a likely to be "right" as "wrong" (however you define those terms), I would say that it is no simpler for the majority to be right and the minority wrong than visa-versa. You would have to bring in other observations, such as the premise that human beings are mostly rational and tend to come to the right conclusion more often than not, such that some additional influence would be required for the majority to be wrong. That is a perfectly reasonable premise, but by including it you no longer have a pure example.
But yeah, I don't really understand the tele-part of this. It seems like it would only be useful in the scenario that a remote hospital has a state-of-the-art medical facility with robotic surgeons and for some reason doesn't have a heart surgeon on hand.
There are specialties among heart surgery as with anything else. No hospital can afford to employ every kind of specialist full-time, even assuming there were enough of each to go around. The ability to operate remotely allows a hospital to obtain the help of a specialist from another hospital on short notice, as may be required in an emergency—even mid-surgery, in the even something unexpectedly goes wrong.
Even in the cases where the specialist would have had enough time to travel to the patient's hospital (assuming the patient can't travel to them), why should they waste their valuable, life-saving time on the road, between hospitals, when they can just perform the operation remotely and move on to the next patient, who may also be half-a-world away?
Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?
That depends. What does your contract say? If the contract states that you give him a certain amount of money on the condition that he plays for you, and after he plays you refuse to turn over the money, then you are indeed stealing from him—that's his money you're withholding. One can envision other circumstances, including the absence of any contract (not necessarily written), where refusal of payment would not be theft. The expectation is not enough, by itself.
If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.
In the second case you explicitly did not agree in advance to pay him. This changes matters. If you did agree to such in the first case then the situations are not analogous.
he was deprived of the use of his time
Perhaps, but not by you. The decision to spend his time playing or recording his performances was his own. You have not deprived him of any additional time by listening. He was under no obligation to make his recordings available to you without first arranging for payment. Only the existence of a voluntary contract would create an obligation on your part for payment after the fact.
Yeah, Tor isn't designed for bulk data transfers. If you want to use BitTorrent anonymously, via onion routine, try I2P instead—but make sure to configure your client properly. The actual peer connections need to go through I2P, not just the communication with the tracker. There's a built-in web-based client that's correctly configured by default. All the peers have to be inside I2P, of course; you couldn't join a non-I2P swarm without giving away your real IP address anyway.
You skipped over the "would otherwise have been earned" part in order to make your point.
I didn't "skip it"; I considered it irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is that, copyright was created in order to create a support a market for intellectual goods.
Yes, that was it's (stated) purpose. It doesn't matter. Those who created copyright had no just authority to do so. Their motives are irrelevant.
Saying it's theft is convenient shorthand. It's close enough to the truth to be a rounding error.
No, copyright infringement and theft are as different as two actions can be, when considering whether the action justified forcible retaliation. One is a violation of natural property rights, the other is not. Only violation of natural property rights can justify the same in return.
If someone snuck into a concert, and the bouncer threw them out saying "sneaking into a concert without paying is the same as theft", I don't think anyone would really waste their time splitting hairs about whether is was or was not technically theft.
I agree. However, in this case you would be trespassing, which is a violation of the property owner's natural rights. Trespassing can be considered theft, in a general sense, or one could simply say that the definition of "theft" doesn't matter here; you were still guilty of trespassing, and as such they have the right to evict you.
And, if it's not theft, what if some store started creating their own copies of copyrighted material and selling it (without paying the creator)? What if they priced it lower than the average price on the street? Would you say this is "theft", that they have "deprived the owner of sales"? Would you say it is wrong?... Would you have a problem if Netflix or Blockbuster started burning their own copies of movies, paying no money back to the original creators?
No, on all counts.
Personally, I wouldn't have any problem calling what that "theft", but I guess you'd disagree.
You guess correctly. They would merely be receiving an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else; that is not theft.
Which is why I used the term "theft" rather than the GP's term "stealing". Who cares whether copyright infringement is "stealing", when "stealing" is not only not always illegal, but is not even always wrong? Clearly the GP mean "stealing" in the sense of "theft". Theft, not "stealing", has been the subject of this thread from the beginning. If the GP meant something other than theft then that comment is nothing but meaningless noise.
BTW, you left out other obvious uses like "stealing a base" in baseball, or "stealing a kiss", or "stealing time", etc. Obviously you would prefer those definitions which imply something shady or immoral, but not all of them do. "Stealing" is simply too broad a term for this discussion.
For your sake, however, I will state my conclusion more generally, without reference to "stealing" or theft:
To violate any property right one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. That which does not violate any property right does not justify the use of force in response—defined as any deliberate violation of property rights—and consequently should not be illegal (as anything illegal must be prevented or punished via a violation of the practitioner's property rights). Ergo, copyright infringement, which does not deprive any owner of the use of any property, should not be illegal.
Theft is one way to deprive an owner of the use of their property; murder, extortion, slavery, etc. are some of the other ways. Copyright infringement is not among them.
So? I do agree to all of that. Note that it doesn't mean that I have to give anyone my information, any more than a content creator is required to publish or mass-market their work. But if someone can get that information without violating anyone's property rights, and without agreeing to an NDA (or are willing to pay the required compensation for breaking it; contracts only extend to forfeiting alienable property, not inalienable freedom of action), then they are free to do what they wish with it.
If you want to keep that data private, keep it to yourself, or at least insist on an NDA where disclosure will cost them more than the information is worth.
By you downloading, you now have in your posession a copy of the material which you never purchased.... Stealing
Hardly. One can possess something one never purchased without having stolen it. In fact, this is the origin of all property, via homesteading: the appropriation of that which has no owner for one's own private use. Homesteading, of course, requires an actual scarce resource, and thus does not apply to information. Still, it is established that the act of theft requires more than possession without purchase. Gifts would be another example of possession with neither purchase nor theft. Agriculture, likewise; one does not purchase the food one grows—or even provide most of the energy required to produce it, which comes from the sun—but it belongs to one nonetheless. Your definition is far too broad.
To steal—more precisely, to commit the property-right violation commonly known as theft—one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. Duplication gives you a copy of the desired pattern (newly imprinted onto your own property) without depriving anyone else of the use of theirs. As no one has been deprived of the use of their property, no theft has occurred. You have merely received an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else.
Did you mean to reply to some other comment? I don't see where I made any claims concerning how most people behave. I simply said that copyright infringement and choosing to go without have precisely the same effect on the income of the copyright holder.
As for official, ad-laden torrents: do you really think anyone would watch the ads if their player didn't force them to?
If they did release a player which enforced the ads, do you think it would be (a) cross-platform; (b) secure (e.g. not spyware); (c) and used in preference to ad-free, standard-format video torrents playable in standard malware-free media programs? I admit that they'd have a bit of a time advantage—assuming they did away with separately-timed releases in different countries.
If you're arguing that copyright could be transmuted into a contract governing access to the physical copy—not the abstract pattern which copyright currently covers—then I agree with you in theory but do not believe this transmutation to be likely, or effective. The contract would be similar to an NDA, with the same weaknesses. NDAs are only effective when distribution of the information is limited; copyright must cover the case where content is to be distributed to the public at large. Enforcement (tracking) costs would be high, and recovery limited to the individual who first broke the contract. Buyers would be skeptical of agreeing to formal contracts over a mere few hours of entertainment. Content providers are welcome to try it, but I don't think it would work.
If you are instead saying that there is a property right in the value of a secret, such that duplication (devaluation) becomes a violation of the owner's property rights—just think about that for a moment. That would mean that all production (and all decreases in demand) must violate the property rights of existing owners in the values of their goods. This way lies madness.
Property rights can only apply consistently to the goods themselves, not their values.
However, even taking the value-as-property approach, the change in market value of that copy, or any additional copies, is no different than if I had simply decided against having/using the "thing" entirely, or even created something which competes against it. If not-buying and competition do not infringe on this "property right" in the value of the good, then neither can the making of a copy, since the effect on the value is identical.
On the other hand, accepting that property rights apply to the goods themselves rather than their market values, the statement "You got value at his expense" is false; I did receive value, but there was no expense to him. He has exactly as much as he had before: the original copy.
Finally, if there is no objective harm then force is not a proportional, or appropriate, response. (Speak up if you disagree...) A rule-of-thumb in determining the existence of objective harm is thus: if you could not determine, by any theoretical means, that an action had taken place simply by observing your own property, then that action does not objectively harm you. When the "property" is the pattern embedded in some physical object, and the action mere duplication, then there is no change in your "property" which would indicate that the action had taken place. Ergo, there is no objective harm, and no justification for the use of force.
After all, what is the difference in outcome which would justify making the production of a deliberate copy illegal, but not the creation of an identical copy by random convergence? Surely the "harm" is the same in either case? Accidental harm is still harm, but accidental creation of a copy is not considered copyright infringement.
If you sneak into a drive-in then you're trespassing, violating the drive-in owner's property rights in the physical land. If you can see and/or hear the movie without trespassing then no, you haven't stolen anything. Care to try again?
What the content producer wanted, or expected, is not the issue. No one is obligated to ensure that others get what they want or expect. They are only obligated to avoid preventing others from making use of their property. Which copyright enforcement—not copyright infringement—does. Copyright enforcement is immoral; infringement is neutral.
The router is physical, and the GP presumably doesn't have the owner's permission to interact with it and thereby influence its behavior. The radio signals are also physical, albeit transient. Apart from that, you're quite right (disregarding the sarcasm): if there were nothing physical involved then no theft could have taken place.
Copyright infringement, on the other hand, concerns patterns, which may describe an arrangement of physical matter (fixed or transient) but are not themselves physical. It's the different between the shape of a wave and a mass of water (or sand or photons or whatever) of that shape. The former is abstract, whereas the latter is physical (concrete).
What if the file is copyrighted, but not by them? They would themselves be infringing on others' copyrights, by their own rules. Of course, they might not be uploading, but still...
The enlightened argument is not that the act of copying is theft, but that illegal copying deprives the copyright owner of monetary gains which would otherwise have been earned.
So does simply choosing to go without. Should that be illegal now as well?
You can't "steal" the expectation of income. Only that which is owned is subject to theft, and theft only occurs when one is deprived of its use. If one cannot be deprived of the use of a thing—as is the case for everything subject to copyright, since mere duplication cannot deprive anyone of use of the original copy—then that thing cannot be stolen.
YOU are denying the person who created the content the sale. YOU have denied them the money they would have made. YOU have TAKEN from them something that was rightfully theirs. THE SALE.
<sarcasm>Just think of how much you've stolen by not-buying all those CDs you don't own! You must owe the RIAA more than the GDP of the United States by now!</sarcasm>
Choosing not to buy something is not theft. No one owns "THE SALE". They own their physical property, because it is scarce. And they have not been deprived of that property.
Sure, provided you're not relying on unverified self-signed certificates. HTTPS would work fine for securing the Search Bar—but I was responding to the more general solution proposed by the OP. "Encryption for everything" covers more than just HTTP.
This would only be true in a society where "the rich" are an even cross-section of society at large.
So you say. Care to provide an example of how others being rich per se—while still respecting my property rights, of course—hurts me? Note that I have a very strict definition of "hurts", which amounts to violating my property rights. In this case I will relax that restriction; anything which significantly reduces my own absolute wealth (inverse of discomfort; somewhat analogous to purchasing power) may serve as an answer.
... long lecture attempting to justify theft by appeal to tradition and utilitarian calculus...
You should note that I am not a utilitarian; I do not base my principles on what "makes for a better society"—which is inherently subjective anyway; different people will have different opinions on what a "good" society looks like. Mine starts from the premise that rightfully-acquired property rights are secure, regardless of wealth, status, etc. Ergo, to me, taxes and the like cannot result in "a better society", regardless of how they are applied.
Appeal to tradition is equally useless; I do not support behavior contrary to my principles just because it has been employed in the past, particularly by (failed) societies as notoriously populist as the Romans were. (Remember the phrase "bread and circuses"?)
You are attempting to say that theft is sometimes justified, if you approve of the ends or if enough people agree with you. I disagree: theft is always wrong, for whatever ends, and no matter how many people would approve.
Sure, but do you want to take the risk? Costs can be justified. The marginal overhead of decryption and re-encryption may not be significant compared to scanning plain-text traffic for key URLs and editing them on-the-fly. The risk of discovery for MiTM is no worse than it would be without the encryption, given their goal of redirecting requests to another search provider. It would be a different matter if they were just eavesdropping, of course.
Remember that encryption won't help without authentication; your ISP will just MITM all your encrypted traffic. You need to know who you're really talking to.
After redistribution you would be competing for those rooms against millions of others, all equally wealthy. The rooms you'd receive would barely be any better than the rooms you can get now.
Sorry about the self-reply, but I felt this required qualification. I was speaking of the short-term only. In the long-term, due to consumption of capital and the consequent drop in productivity (of labor and materials) you're likely to get much worse rooms than you can get now, if you can get them at all. Leisure and vacation would become a thing of the past; all your efforts would be required just to survive. You can just forget about rare comic books and dates with celebrities; there would be no margin left over for such frivolities.
If the rich make $1 mill a year and you make $100k a year, then they can afford to bid 10x as much for a hotel room as you. If you *really* want to, you can still afford to stay at that hotel (or buy that comic, or date that model).
Sure they can. However, I'm not competing with them for that specific hotel room. They can have it. The rich can only use so many rooms, after all, being a small percentage of the population, and the hotels are happy to make a smaller but steadier profit margin renting out ordinary rooms to ordinary people like me, in addition to the better suites for those who can afford their upkeep. Or did you really think that redistribution would make you rich? Allow you to rent the high-class suites frequented by the rich? After redistribution you would be competing for those rooms against millions of others, all equally wealthy. The rooms you'd receive would barely be any better than the rooms you can get now.
But they show you lots of nice things on Fox (and CNN) and you hear nice things on the radio and you rail in favor of the rich while they think of you as less than the dirt on their $4000 shoes.
I don't know what the very rich think of me, if they think of me at all—and I don't really care, either. I wouldn't expect most of the poor or middle-class to care about my interests either; that's my job. In fact, I expect that my interests would weight much more lightly in a truly poor stranger's mind than the state of their only pair of worn, $10, off-brand tennis shoes, and rightly so.
The rest, however, is pretty far off the mark; I don't watch Fox or CNN, or pay much attention to talk radio. I don't "rail in favor of the rich"; I simply consider them no different than any other set of human beings. All human beings, including the rich and poor alike, are entitled to keep or spend their rightfully-acquired property as they choose, subject to respecting the same rights of others. If nothing else, on what rational basis, aside from threat of force, could I expect the rich to respect my just property claims if I did not respect theirs? I may not be rich myself, in comparison to some, but neither do I wish to lose what property I have.
What would be the point of using a band name on a fake if you were going to announce that it's fake? Why wouldn't you just sell it unbranded?
You might find this surprising, but people actually do buy brand-name goods knowing that they're fake, just to be able to show them off. There is a legitimate market for this sort of thing.
More to the point, though, Windows is a licensed product, not a durable good. If you want to sell an OS, feel free, but you can't take Windows and sell it with no brand on it, because it's Windows and you don't own the rights to sell Windows.
Were you following the thread at all? Yes, Windows is currently covered by copyright. We were discussing counterfeiting, not copyright. Counterfeiting Windows—selling a modified version with the Microsoft Windows brand name—would only be fraud if the buyer was not informed. If the sale is not fraudulent then the act of counterfeiting it shouldn't be illegal per se. The sale may be illegal for other reasons; for example, the copies themselves may be stolen goods.
As an aside, I consider copyright enforcement to be immoral, so your argument wouldn't get very far with me even if it was on-topic.
If everyone rich is being taxed, then the $6.5 million left over has as much purchasing power for that rare comic book (or night at a luxury resort). as the $10,000,000 did.
Sure, if every dollar was taxed equally, and said taxes were taken permanently out of circulation. Obviously that isn't the case; taxes take money from some to be spent by others, usually the government, and are unevenly distributed (vs. dollars owned). They don't increase the purchasing power of the dollar. There are just as many dollars in the economy after taxes as there were before.
How long will the propaganda keep fooling you into voting against your own self interest?
Um... it never did? I oppose the application of political (aggressive) means toward any goal. That would naturally include voting. And taxes.
To answer your real question, though: others being rich relative to me, or society at large, does not hurt me in any way. In fact, the capital investment practiced mainly by the rich is quite beneficial to me. Their capital goods magnify the productivity of labor, which both increases my wages and decreases the costs of the goods and services I buy. Redistribution would promote capital-consumption, with the not-so-long-term consequence that ordinary people like me would be left with nothing more than our own unassisted manual labor in, at best, a subsistence-level society. More likely we would be starving; without the aid of capital goods we can't keep producing enough food for the number of people currently alive.
So much for the reasons based on pure self-interest. More importantly to me, their rightfully-acquired property is theirs to do with as they will, provided they in turn respect the property rights of others. How much property they might have, relative to me or others, is entirely irrelevant. What's theirs is theirs, and that's the end of it.
Incorrect; mean, median, and mode are all averages. The use of median is standard in demographic statistics.
Anyway, who really cares about income distribution? It doesn't hurt me to know that others make more income than I do, or own more property than I do. What you should care about is changes in the median purchasing power—how much the "average person" can buy with their income. I am aware of no indication that shows this to be decreasing. However, given the modern glorification of spending and consumption as an end in themselves, to the detriment of wealth-producing saving and investment, I wouldn't be all that surprised if it were.
It's not difficult to become rich; one merely needs to save and invest reasonably well, and teach your kids to do the same; eventually (over the course of a few generations), barring unforeseeable disasters, your descendants will become wealthy. Those currently rich, for the most part, simply had ancestors who understood this and started on it earlier.
If you can buy a device that can do any manual labor that a human can do for $100,000, then why hire a human.
So true. So why not plan ahead, and purchase shares in the companies that employ machines? That way you would own the machines (as assets of the company), along with a portion of any profit derived from their work. Just think—we could ultimately end up trading shares in human-free manufacturing plants as hard currency. Those who own shares from the beginning would be in on the ground floor, so to speak.
Slashdot Mirror
The express purpose for granting an artist exclusive copy right for a limited period was to encourage the production of more art.
Actually the terms are "sciences" and "useful arts". These terms have changed somewhat since the text was written, but that basically translates to "writings for the purpose of knowledge and/or instruction" (the basis of copyright) and "techniques or processes of production" (the basis for patents). In other words, not entertainment, or "art" in the modern sense.
It's a pure example of Occam's Razor...
Not that I disagree with your conclusion, but to call this "a pure example of Occam's Razor" you would first have to show that it is simpler for someone to be right than it is for them to be wrong. Given that the simplest way to answer "are the United States' copyright laws good or bad" would be a random flip of the coin, and that a uniformly random binary result is just a likely to be "right" as "wrong" (however you define those terms), I would say that it is no simpler for the majority to be right and the minority wrong than visa-versa. You would have to bring in other observations, such as the premise that human beings are mostly rational and tend to come to the right conclusion more often than not, such that some additional influence would be required for the majority to be wrong. That is a perfectly reasonable premise, but by including it you no longer have a pure example.
But yeah, I don't really understand the tele-part of this. It seems like it would only be useful in the scenario that a remote hospital has a state-of-the-art medical facility with robotic surgeons and for some reason doesn't have a heart surgeon on hand.
There are specialties among heart surgery as with anything else. No hospital can afford to employ every kind of specialist full-time, even assuming there were enough of each to go around. The ability to operate remotely allows a hospital to obtain the help of a specialist from another hospital on short notice, as may be required in an emergency—even mid-surgery, in the even something unexpectedly goes wrong.
Even in the cases where the specialist would have had enough time to travel to the patient's hospital (assuming the patient can't travel to them), why should they waste their valuable, life-saving time on the road, between hospitals, when they can just perform the operation remotely and move on to the next patient, who may also be half-a-world away?
Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?
That depends. What does your contract say? If the contract states that you give him a certain amount of money on the condition that he plays for you, and after he plays you refuse to turn over the money, then you are indeed stealing from him—that's his money you're withholding. One can envision other circumstances, including the absence of any contract (not necessarily written), where refusal of payment would not be theft. The expectation is not enough, by itself.
If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.
In the second case you explicitly did not agree in advance to pay him. This changes matters. If you did agree to such in the first case then the situations are not analogous.
he was deprived of the use of his time
Perhaps, but not by you. The decision to spend his time playing or recording his performances was his own. You have not deprived him of any additional time by listening. He was under no obligation to make his recordings available to you without first arranging for payment. Only the existence of a voluntary contract would create an obligation on your part for payment after the fact.
Yeah, Tor isn't designed for bulk data transfers. If you want to use BitTorrent anonymously, via onion routine, try I2P instead—but make sure to configure your client properly. The actual peer connections need to go through I2P, not just the communication with the tracker. There's a built-in web-based client that's correctly configured by default. All the peers have to be inside I2P, of course; you couldn't join a non-I2P swarm without giving away your real IP address anyway.
You skipped over the "would otherwise have been earned" part in order to make your point.
I didn't "skip it"; I considered it irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is that, copyright was created in order to create a support a market for intellectual goods.
Yes, that was it's (stated) purpose. It doesn't matter. Those who created copyright had no just authority to do so. Their motives are irrelevant.
Saying it's theft is convenient shorthand. It's close enough to the truth to be a rounding error.
No, copyright infringement and theft are as different as two actions can be, when considering whether the action justified forcible retaliation. One is a violation of natural property rights, the other is not. Only violation of natural property rights can justify the same in return.
If someone snuck into a concert, and the bouncer threw them out saying "sneaking into a concert without paying is the same as theft", I don't think anyone would really waste their time splitting hairs about whether is was or was not technically theft.
I agree. However, in this case you would be trespassing, which is a violation of the property owner's natural rights. Trespassing can be considered theft, in a general sense, or one could simply say that the definition of "theft" doesn't matter here; you were still guilty of trespassing, and as such they have the right to evict you.
And, if it's not theft, what if some store started creating their own copies of copyrighted material and selling it (without paying the creator)? What if they priced it lower than the average price on the street? Would you say this is "theft", that they have "deprived the owner of sales"? Would you say it is wrong? ... Would you have a problem if Netflix or Blockbuster started burning their own copies of movies, paying no money back to the original creators?
No, on all counts.
Personally, I wouldn't have any problem calling what that "theft", but I guess you'd disagree.
You guess correctly. They would merely be receiving an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else; that is not theft.
theft (always unlawful) ... steal (sometimes unlawful)
Which is why I used the term "theft" rather than the GP's term "stealing". Who cares whether copyright infringement is "stealing", when "stealing" is not only not always illegal, but is not even always wrong? Clearly the GP mean "stealing" in the sense of "theft". Theft, not "stealing", has been the subject of this thread from the beginning. If the GP meant something other than theft then that comment is nothing but meaningless noise.
BTW, you left out other obvious uses like "stealing a base" in baseball, or "stealing a kiss", or "stealing time", etc. Obviously you would prefer those definitions which imply something shady or immoral, but not all of them do. "Stealing" is simply too broad a term for this discussion.
For your sake, however, I will state my conclusion more generally, without reference to "stealing" or theft:
To violate any property right one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. That which does not violate any property right does not justify the use of force in response—defined as any deliberate violation of property rights—and consequently should not be illegal (as anything illegal must be prevented or punished via a violation of the practitioner's property rights). Ergo, copyright infringement, which does not deprive any owner of the use of any property, should not be illegal.
Theft is one way to deprive an owner of the use of their property; murder, extortion, slavery, etc. are some of the other ways. Copyright infringement is not among them.
So? I do agree to all of that. Note that it doesn't mean that I have to give anyone my information, any more than a content creator is required to publish or mass-market their work. But if someone can get that information without violating anyone's property rights, and without agreeing to an NDA (or are willing to pay the required compensation for breaking it; contracts only extend to forfeiting alienable property, not inalienable freedom of action), then they are free to do what they wish with it.
If you want to keep that data private, keep it to yourself, or at least insist on an NDA where disclosure will cost them more than the information is worth.
By you downloading, you now have in your posession a copy of the material which you never purchased. ... Stealing
Hardly. One can possess something one never purchased without having stolen it. In fact, this is the origin of all property, via homesteading: the appropriation of that which has no owner for one's own private use. Homesteading, of course, requires an actual scarce resource, and thus does not apply to information. Still, it is established that the act of theft requires more than possession without purchase. Gifts would be another example of possession with neither purchase nor theft. Agriculture, likewise; one does not purchase the food one grows—or even provide most of the energy required to produce it, which comes from the sun—but it belongs to one nonetheless. Your definition is far too broad.
To steal—more precisely, to commit the property-right violation commonly known as theft—one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. Duplication gives you a copy of the desired pattern (newly imprinted onto your own property) without depriving anyone else of the use of theirs. As no one has been deprived of the use of their property, no theft has occurred. You have merely received an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else.
Did you mean to reply to some other comment? I don't see where I made any claims concerning how most people behave. I simply said that copyright infringement and choosing to go without have precisely the same effect on the income of the copyright holder.
As for official, ad-laden torrents: do you really think anyone would watch the ads if their player didn't force them to?
If they did release a player which enforced the ads, do you think it would be (a) cross-platform; (b) secure (e.g. not spyware); (c) and used in preference to ad-free, standard-format video torrents playable in standard malware-free media programs? I admit that they'd have a bit of a time advantage—assuming they did away with separately-timed releases in different countries.
If you're arguing that copyright could be transmuted into a contract governing access to the physical copy—not the abstract pattern which copyright currently covers—then I agree with you in theory but do not believe this transmutation to be likely, or effective. The contract would be similar to an NDA, with the same weaknesses. NDAs are only effective when distribution of the information is limited; copyright must cover the case where content is to be distributed to the public at large. Enforcement (tracking) costs would be high, and recovery limited to the individual who first broke the contract. Buyers would be skeptical of agreeing to formal contracts over a mere few hours of entertainment. Content providers are welcome to try it, but I don't think it would work.
If you are instead saying that there is a property right in the value of a secret, such that duplication (devaluation) becomes a violation of the owner's property rights—just think about that for a moment. That would mean that all production (and all decreases in demand) must violate the property rights of existing owners in the values of their goods. This way lies madness.
Property rights can only apply consistently to the goods themselves, not their values.
However, even taking the value-as-property approach, the change in market value of that copy, or any additional copies, is no different than if I had simply decided against having/using the "thing" entirely, or even created something which competes against it. If not-buying and competition do not infringe on this "property right" in the value of the good, then neither can the making of a copy, since the effect on the value is identical.
On the other hand, accepting that property rights apply to the goods themselves rather than their market values, the statement "You got value at his expense" is false; I did receive value, but there was no expense to him. He has exactly as much as he had before: the original copy.
Finally, if there is no objective harm then force is not a proportional, or appropriate, response. (Speak up if you disagree...) A rule-of-thumb in determining the existence of objective harm is thus: if you could not determine, by any theoretical means, that an action had taken place simply by observing your own property, then that action does not objectively harm you. When the "property" is the pattern embedded in some physical object, and the action mere duplication, then there is no change in your "property" which would indicate that the action had taken place. Ergo, there is no objective harm, and no justification for the use of force.
After all, what is the difference in outcome which would justify making the production of a deliberate copy illegal, but not the creation of an identical copy by random convergence? Surely the "harm" is the same in either case? Accidental harm is still harm, but accidental creation of a copy is not considered copyright infringement.
If you sneak into a drive-in then you're trespassing, violating the drive-in owner's property rights in the physical land. If you can see and/or hear the movie without trespassing then no, you haven't stolen anything. Care to try again?
What the content producer wanted, or expected, is not the issue. No one is obligated to ensure that others get what they want or expect. They are only obligated to avoid preventing others from making use of their property. Which copyright enforcement—not copyright infringement—does. Copyright enforcement is immoral; infringement is neutral.
The router is physical, and the GP presumably doesn't have the owner's permission to interact with it and thereby influence its behavior. The radio signals are also physical, albeit transient. Apart from that, you're quite right (disregarding the sarcasm): if there were nothing physical involved then no theft could have taken place.
Copyright infringement, on the other hand, concerns patterns, which may describe an arrangement of physical matter (fixed or transient) but are not themselves physical. It's the different between the shape of a wave and a mass of water (or sand or photons or whatever) of that shape. The former is abstract, whereas the latter is physical (concrete).
What if the file is copyrighted, but not by them? They would themselves be infringing on others' copyrights, by their own rules. Of course, they might not be uploading, but still...
The enlightened argument is not that the act of copying is theft, but that illegal copying deprives the copyright owner of monetary gains which would otherwise have been earned.
So does simply choosing to go without. Should that be illegal now as well?
You can't "steal" the expectation of income. Only that which is owned is subject to theft, and theft only occurs when one is deprived of its use. If one cannot be deprived of the use of a thing—as is the case for everything subject to copyright, since mere duplication cannot deprive anyone of use of the original copy—then that thing cannot be stolen.
YOU are denying the person who created the content the sale. YOU have denied them the money they would have made. YOU have TAKEN from them something that was rightfully theirs. THE SALE.
<sarcasm>Just think of how much you've stolen by not-buying all those CDs you don't own! You must owe the RIAA more than the GDP of the United States by now!</sarcasm>
Choosing not to buy something is not theft. No one owns "THE SALE". They own their physical property, because it is scarce. And they have not been deprived of that property.
Sure, provided you're not relying on unverified self-signed certificates. HTTPS would work fine for securing the Search Bar—but I was responding to the more general solution proposed by the OP. "Encryption for everything" covers more than just HTTP.
This would only be true in a society where "the rich" are an even cross-section of society at large.
So you say. Care to provide an example of how others being rich per se—while still respecting my property rights, of course—hurts me? Note that I have a very strict definition of "hurts", which amounts to violating my property rights. In this case I will relax that restriction; anything which significantly reduces my own absolute wealth (inverse of discomfort; somewhat analogous to purchasing power) may serve as an answer.
... long lecture attempting to justify theft by appeal to tradition and utilitarian calculus ...
You should note that I am not a utilitarian; I do not base my principles on what "makes for a better society"—which is inherently subjective anyway; different people will have different opinions on what a "good" society looks like. Mine starts from the premise that rightfully-acquired property rights are secure, regardless of wealth, status, etc. Ergo, to me, taxes and the like cannot result in "a better society", regardless of how they are applied.
Appeal to tradition is equally useless; I do not support behavior contrary to my principles just because it has been employed in the past, particularly by (failed) societies as notoriously populist as the Romans were. (Remember the phrase "bread and circuses"?)
You are attempting to say that theft is sometimes justified, if you approve of the ends or if enough people agree with you. I disagree: theft is always wrong, for whatever ends, and no matter how many people would approve.
Sure, but do you want to take the risk? Costs can be justified. The marginal overhead of decryption and re-encryption may not be significant compared to scanning plain-text traffic for key URLs and editing them on-the-fly. The risk of discovery for MiTM is no worse than it would be without the encryption, given their goal of redirecting requests to another search provider. It would be a different matter if they were just eavesdropping, of course.
Remember that encryption won't help without authentication; your ISP will just MITM all your encrypted traffic. You need to know who you're really talking to.
After redistribution you would be competing for those rooms against millions of others, all equally wealthy. The rooms you'd receive would barely be any better than the rooms you can get now.
Sorry about the self-reply, but I felt this required qualification. I was speaking of the short-term only. In the long-term, due to consumption of capital and the consequent drop in productivity (of labor and materials) you're likely to get much worse rooms than you can get now, if you can get them at all. Leisure and vacation would become a thing of the past; all your efforts would be required just to survive. You can just forget about rare comic books and dates with celebrities; there would be no margin left over for such frivolities.
If the rich make $1 mill a year and you make $100k a year, then they can afford to bid 10x as much for a hotel room as you. If you *really* want to, you can still afford to stay at that hotel (or buy that comic, or date that model).
Sure they can. However, I'm not competing with them for that specific hotel room. They can have it. The rich can only use so many rooms, after all, being a small percentage of the population, and the hotels are happy to make a smaller but steadier profit margin renting out ordinary rooms to ordinary people like me, in addition to the better suites for those who can afford their upkeep. Or did you really think that redistribution would make you rich? Allow you to rent the high-class suites frequented by the rich? After redistribution you would be competing for those rooms against millions of others, all equally wealthy. The rooms you'd receive would barely be any better than the rooms you can get now.
But they show you lots of nice things on Fox (and CNN) and you hear nice things on the radio and you rail in favor of the rich while they think of you as less than the dirt on their $4000 shoes.
I don't know what the very rich think of me, if they think of me at all—and I don't really care, either. I wouldn't expect most of the poor or middle-class to care about my interests either; that's my job. In fact, I expect that my interests would weight much more lightly in a truly poor stranger's mind than the state of their only pair of worn, $10, off-brand tennis shoes, and rightly so.
The rest, however, is pretty far off the mark; I don't watch Fox or CNN, or pay much attention to talk radio. I don't "rail in favor of the rich"; I simply consider them no different than any other set of human beings. All human beings, including the rich and poor alike, are entitled to keep or spend their rightfully-acquired property as they choose, subject to respecting the same rights of others. If nothing else, on what rational basis, aside from threat of force, could I expect the rich to respect my just property claims if I did not respect theirs? I may not be rich myself, in comparison to some, but neither do I wish to lose what property I have.
What would be the point of using a band name on a fake if you were going to announce that it's fake? Why wouldn't you just sell it unbranded?
You might find this surprising, but people actually do buy brand-name goods knowing that they're fake, just to be able to show them off. There is a legitimate market for this sort of thing.
More to the point, though, Windows is a licensed product, not a durable good. If you want to sell an OS, feel free, but you can't take Windows and sell it with no brand on it, because it's Windows and you don't own the rights to sell Windows.
Were you following the thread at all? Yes, Windows is currently covered by copyright. We were discussing counterfeiting, not copyright. Counterfeiting Windows—selling a modified version with the Microsoft Windows brand name—would only be fraud if the buyer was not informed. If the sale is not fraudulent then the act of counterfeiting it shouldn't be illegal per se. The sale may be illegal for other reasons; for example, the copies themselves may be stolen goods.
As an aside, I consider copyright enforcement to be immoral, so your argument wouldn't get very far with me even if it was on-topic.
If everyone rich is being taxed, then the $6.5 million left over has as much purchasing power for that rare comic book (or night at a luxury resort). as the $10,000,000 did.
Sure, if every dollar was taxed equally, and said taxes were taken permanently out of circulation. Obviously that isn't the case; taxes take money from some to be spent by others, usually the government, and are unevenly distributed (vs. dollars owned). They don't increase the purchasing power of the dollar. There are just as many dollars in the economy after taxes as there were before.
How long will the propaganda keep fooling you into voting against your own self interest?
Um... it never did? I oppose the application of political (aggressive) means toward any goal. That would naturally include voting. And taxes.
To answer your real question, though: others being rich relative to me, or society at large, does not hurt me in any way. In fact, the capital investment practiced mainly by the rich is quite beneficial to me. Their capital goods magnify the productivity of labor, which both increases my wages and decreases the costs of the goods and services I buy. Redistribution would promote capital-consumption, with the not-so-long-term consequence that ordinary people like me would be left with nothing more than our own unassisted manual labor in, at best, a subsistence-level society. More likely we would be starving; without the aid of capital goods we can't keep producing enough food for the number of people currently alive.
So much for the reasons based on pure self-interest. More importantly to me, their rightfully-acquired property is theirs to do with as they will, provided they in turn respect the property rights of others. How much property they might have, relative to me or others, is entirely irrelevant. What's theirs is theirs, and that's the end of it.
"A median is not an average..."
Incorrect; mean, median, and mode are all averages. The use of median is standard in demographic statistics.
Anyway, who really cares about income distribution? It doesn't hurt me to know that others make more income than I do, or own more property than I do. What you should care about is changes in the median purchasing power—how much the "average person" can buy with their income. I am aware of no indication that shows this to be decreasing. However, given the modern glorification of spending and consumption as an end in themselves, to the detriment of wealth-producing saving and investment, I wouldn't be all that surprised if it were.
It's not difficult to become rich; one merely needs to save and invest reasonably well, and teach your kids to do the same; eventually (over the course of a few generations), barring unforeseeable disasters, your descendants will become wealthy. Those currently rich, for the most part, simply had ancestors who understood this and started on it earlier.
If you can buy a device that can do any manual labor that a human can do for $100,000, then why hire a human.
So true. So why not plan ahead, and purchase shares in the companies that employ machines? That way you would own the machines (as assets of the company), along with a portion of any profit derived from their work. Just think—we could ultimately end up trading shares in human-free manufacturing plants as hard currency. Those who own shares from the beginning would be in on the ground floor, so to speak.