I work better at work, I believe in meetings, and I'm terrible on the phone. But I'd love this type of schedule. I'd still come in to the office to do most of my work and I'd still be a big believer in once a week meetings. But I'd come in less than 40 hours most weeks, and I'd be able to work my schedule around the times my wife isn't able to take care of our son. The phone thing might be bad if my co-workers are never around when I need to ask questions, but I think they'd be willing to deal with me, and I would too - a little extra effort asking and answering questions would be worth it to eliminate those times I'm too tired or have my mind on too many other things to focus at work.
if nobody is keeping any kind of regular hours, and you can't schedule a meeting, how can any sufficiently large group of people collaborate on anything?
I don't see where it says you can't schedule a meeting. If you need to collaborate with someone face-to-face, then two of you figure out a time that you can both be in the same place to collaborate. If you're both being stubborn asses and can't agree on a time and place - well, that's what middle management is there to sort out.
You completely misread my post. I explicitly said that you do not need to make your money back in one year. Rather, I said that within a year the product should either be improved or you should be able to make it cheaper than someone who has to start from scratch. In reality it should be both.
In any case, yes, companies which can rely on copyrights, and to a lesser extent patents, tend to be much more lazy than they would be if they had to keep innovating instead of just coming up with an idea and watching the money pour in "for a decade or more" without doing any additional work.
You wouldn't have to recoup all your development costs within a year, you'd just have to improve the product or production line so that it was better or more efficient than someone who is a year behind. That's not much to ask for, and if you can't do it then you deserve to be out of business.
A new type of plastic is not at all what I was talking about when I said a "new style of cell phone". You also are contradicting yourself. If it takes 3-5 years from patent to product, then it's going to take at least that long for your competitors too. And that's from the time they get the details of the patent, which will be closer to the product release time if you don't let the customer samples leak. You've gotta be pretty incompetent to let your competitor to get a product out before you. That's not to say it won't happen, but there's no need to reward such incompetency.
In the end, it's just annoying to see descendents of creative people making money off of hoarding their ancestor's copyright.
Yes, it is. Although this I see as more an issue with the excessive length of copyright, not that it extends beyond death. If copyright only lasted 10 years, for instance, while there would be occassional instances where ancestors hoard their inherited copyrights, it probably wouldn't be that bad. Is 10 years long enough to make a decent profit off your hard work? In almost all instances I'd think yes, it is.
Remember the Goya (I think it was) Google logo, commemorating his birthday? It was shot down by the Goya estate. Copyright troll or reasonable business model?
I vaguely remember an incident over a Google logo. And yeah, that's one of the problems with copyright - it can be used not only to request due compensation for a copyrighted work, but in practice the copyright holders can just about shut down use of the work altogether. Fair use law should come into play in instances like this, in theory, but in practice not everyone has the guts to roll the dice hoping they'll win.
The thing is, if copyright is for the life of the author and that's it, then where is the incentive for people who don't have many years left to create copyrighted work?
Art made for money is usually not as interesting as art made out of fun, obsession, etc. If money is your muse, this will be clear in your art.
OK, valid point. But then why bother having copyright at all?
If the purpose of copyright law is not to provide equity but rather to create an incentive for people to produce new works, then why should the length of the copyright have anything to do with the length of the life of the author?
Because after the creator dies, no matter what incentive, he won't produce anything anymore.
I have to object to that line of reasoning. The point of copyright is to provide incentive *before* the work is created, by promising something in return in the future. To tell the person they can't direct the return to someone else if they die before receiving it doesn't make sense.
Let's say you write a software program for me. To compensate you, I give you $10,000 and agree to pay you an additional $10,000 a year for 30 years. But say I want to put in a clause that if you die, I get to keep the software and don't have to pay the rest of the money to your heirs or to anyone else. After all, once you die, you won't be able to write any software programs for me. Does that agreement make sense?
You are missing the point. People created stuff before the copyright and they'll do so after it too.
I'm not missing that point at all. All I'm saying is that the length of copyright shouldn't have anything to do with the life of the author. 0 years is an amount of time which isn't based on the life of the author.
Here is something more realistic: Your company makes cell-phones. You find that SuperPlastic, from Chemical Company X works great - but it is pretty pricey. So you send some to your firm's analytical department (or one of the many for hire), reverse engineer it, and then either start manufacturing it yourself or contract some cheap Chinese firm to do it for you. This would take less than a year in most cases. Without IP to protect it, Chemical Company X is out of luck. All the money it spent on R&D, as well as the free development samples it likely gave away, are now wasted.
One year of monopoly power for an "innovation" as bland as a new style of cell phone is good enough, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, what about you? Let's say that you put your savings into a bank in 1955. Should "society" have free rights to that money after 50 years? After all, you should have still have been working, right?
But...that was your savings to begin with. Copyright, on the other hand, is something that you only have because society has granted it to you in the first place.
I know that was tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth noting. You can always make the same arguement at any time, so it leads to totally unlimited copyright. What about the grand-children benefiting from the creations and hard work of their grand-parents?
The thing is, if copyright is for the life of the author and that's it, then where is the incentive for people who don't have many years left to create copyrighted work?
If the purpose of copyright law is not to provide equity but rather to create an incentive for people to produce new works, then why should the length of the copyright have anything to do with the length of the life of the author?
Software from the 'phone can be copied off it relatively easily.
Software, of course, is one of the major exceptions. That said, software which is protected by DRM technologies can take quite a while to access. Witness how long it took for the X-Box to be hacked via software.
For a modern handset, built primarily with off-the-shelf components, I would imagine it would take less than a week for a good team to extract the designs, and perhaps another week to get the factory producing them.
If that's true it's pretty amazing. Imagine what an incredible world we could have if anyone could start up a cell phone manufacturing company in a week's time. I think I'm moving to China.
Your statement that innovation will not happen without "value in IP" is verifiably false. Just look at the vast majority of human history.
Care to give an example?
Sign language, the alphabet, numbers, the globe, beer, the boomerang, the button, the tie, calculus, the candle, playing cards, chocolate, money, the compass, dentures, the encyclopedia, glass, the wheel, gunpowder, ink, the lock and key, nails, paper, the pocket watch, the saddle, soap, the flush toilet, the vending machine, wine...
Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
Problem is, that doesnt work - sure, the product is stale, but if you invest money improving it, theres someone out there that can take that improvement and produce it for less than you can because they have no investment to recoup.
At which point you improve it again! Taking someone else's idea and building a manufacturing plant to produce a similar product takes time. Building a plant to produce a similar product at a cheaper price takes even longer, and doing so when you're trying to hit a moving target takes even longer than that.
That's the whole point of this article. Virtually nothing is hard to copy, any more. Hell, cell phones? That's not a simple device, by any means, but it's being done. I get emails from China on a daily basis offering to manufacture short runs of just about any product I can imagine, and all it takes is an email.
Umm, OK, I'll give you a bunch of plastic and silicon, and my cell phone, and you give me a replica of it. You must have a seriously different definition of "hard to copy" than I do.
But, since you say there's no argument, can you come up with a single example of a company innovating something, and knowing full well that it was going to be pirated? Hell, I can't even imagine of a situation in which that would happen.
Well, every company in this story knows that their products are going to be pirated. Pretty much everyone who creates anything that *can* be pirated knows that it *will* be pirated. I think you're going to have to rephrase the question.
Whats the market going to look like when the market innovator has no recourse on those undercutting them and they cant afford to lower the prices, eat the R&D costs and fight them on that front? Whats it going to look like when they decide to leave the market?
It doesn't seem to me that the market will look any different. What did the video cassette industry look like after Betamax failed? What happened to PCs after IBM left? How is UNIX doing now that Bell Labs isn't involved in it? What would chicken sandwich industry look like without Chick-Fil-A? How would the photocopying industry be doing if Xerox wasn't involved?
Are you seriously under the impression that the copiers are suddenly going to grow a backbone and magic their own top class R&D department out of thin air?
Any company which intends to stay in business in the absence of "IP law" needs to spend a portion of their profits on R&D. Otherwise, someone is just going to copy their copy, add a little bit of innovation, and take away all the market share.
You think the copiers would be able to sustain their own low pricing in that circumstance?
It seems to me you're imagining a world in which any item can be replicated perfectly and instantaneously without doing any work at all. In such a world perhaps you'd have a point, but we don't live in such a world. Copying someone else's product generally takes time, and during that time the company who first created the product will enjoy limited monopoly power. That's where corporate profits come from, and after that limited monopoly runs out the company either has to continue to innovate or take its profits and leave (to enter a different market, for instance).
That's two people now who've misread what I wrote. I guess I should have hyphenated "better-selling". My post, like the headline of this article, is using the word "better" to modify the word "selling". It's quite debatable whether or not Microsoft products are "better" than the product which was "embraced and extended", but 9 times out of 10 the Microsoft product does have more copies sold.
You're conveniently leaving off the important part of the logic in his argument.
I just double-checked, and I don't see any logic in his argument. In fact, I don't really see much of an argument at all.
Sure, innovation is important to compete. That's what makes or breaks most companies. But if a company is going to innovate, only to see their competition copy their products, but without spending one red cent in R&D, than the original company is already in the hole, and that company will either A. no longer innovate in that market or B. get out of that market altogether.
So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets? That doesn't make any sense. Companies have existed longer than copyright law. Companies innovate because without innovation there is no company. Sure, eventually other companies will copy those innovations, but that just means the company has to keep innovating to stay in business. They can't just create a product and collect royalties.
Now some products are easier to copy than others, of course. And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy. And you'll likely also see companies paying much more attention to keeping its trade secrets from leaking. But that's a far cry from saying that innovation will stop completely.
Why innovate? Where is the incentive to innovate? I create a new product, it gets stolen from right under me. I improve my process, but can't add any new features to my product because I've spent it on the process, so now the product is stale, and no one wants it.
Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
My post was intended to be a satire of the weak arguments I see on this site opposing IP protection.
Also known as a strawman argument.
Without value in IP, there is no economic reason to innovate.
Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
It's hard to say. Certainly there would be more innovation if anyone was allowed to use the data of these images willy-nilly, but would the images themselves ever have existed?
Some of them would. Some of them probably wouldn't.
Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.
So get together with your neighbors and form a homeowners association, if you don't already have one. Then figure out the costs to map your hometown and propose it at your next association meeting. If your neighbors agree with you that the benefits are worth the costs, then you'll get the data. If not, then you won't.
In the case of books, it's even darker. The only material value a fiction book has is in the paper it's printed on (or the cost of bandwidth, if I release it online).
Fiction books would probably suffer more than any other type of work from a lack of copyright protection (mega-pop singer/songwriters would be a close second). Fiction authors who weren't independently wealthy would probably have to rely on non-profit organizations to pay them for their work, or else get a day-job and write only in their spare time for the fun of it. Personally I don't think this would be such a bad thing, but I'm not a big fan of fiction books (or mega-pop singers for that matter, I'd just as well listen to a hometown singer/songwriter whose self-produced CDs you pay for out of courtesy rather than because of copyright law).
For movies and music which typically have an up front, material cost, things change a bit, but still largely hold true.
Watermarking and contractual agreements with movie theaters should be enough to pay for the low to medium budget films. The high budget blockbusters might be a thing of the past, though, especially if trademark/merchandising laws went out along with the copyright laws.
I haven't mentioned the benefits, because I think we both know what they are. And in the end, I think the benefits would outweigh these negatives. At the least I'd like to see copyright law go away for software and non-fiction (which would include GIS data/imagery). For more creative rather than productive works I'm more open to merely modifying copyright law.
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I work better at work, I believe in meetings, and I'm terrible on the phone. But I'd love this type of schedule. I'd still come in to the office to do most of my work and I'd still be a big believer in once a week meetings. But I'd come in less than 40 hours most weeks, and I'd be able to work my schedule around the times my wife isn't able to take care of our son. The phone thing might be bad if my co-workers are never around when I need to ask questions, but I think they'd be willing to deal with me, and I would too - a little extra effort asking and answering questions would be worth it to eliminate those times I'm too tired or have my mind on too many other things to focus at work.
I don't see where it says you can't schedule a meeting. If you need to collaborate with someone face-to-face, then two of you figure out a time that you can both be in the same place to collaborate. If you're both being stubborn asses and can't agree on a time and place - well, that's what middle management is there to sort out.
You completely misread my post. I explicitly said that you do not need to make your money back in one year. Rather, I said that within a year the product should either be improved or you should be able to make it cheaper than someone who has to start from scratch. In reality it should be both.
In any case, yes, companies which can rely on copyrights, and to a lesser extent patents, tend to be much more lazy than they would be if they had to keep innovating instead of just coming up with an idea and watching the money pour in "for a decade or more" without doing any additional work.
You wouldn't have to recoup all your development costs within a year, you'd just have to improve the product or production line so that it was better or more efficient than someone who is a year behind. That's not much to ask for, and if you can't do it then you deserve to be out of business.
A new type of plastic is not at all what I was talking about when I said a "new style of cell phone". You also are contradicting yourself. If it takes 3-5 years from patent to product, then it's going to take at least that long for your competitors too. And that's from the time they get the details of the patent, which will be closer to the product release time if you don't let the customer samples leak. You've gotta be pretty incompetent to let your competitor to get a product out before you. That's not to say it won't happen, but there's no need to reward such incompetency.
Yes, it is. Although this I see as more an issue with the excessive length of copyright, not that it extends beyond death. If copyright only lasted 10 years, for instance, while there would be occassional instances where ancestors hoard their inherited copyrights, it probably wouldn't be that bad. Is 10 years long enough to make a decent profit off your hard work? In almost all instances I'd think yes, it is.
I vaguely remember an incident over a Google logo. And yeah, that's one of the problems with copyright - it can be used not only to request due compensation for a copyrighted work, but in practice the copyright holders can just about shut down use of the work altogether. Fair use law should come into play in instances like this, in theory, but in practice not everyone has the guts to roll the dice hoping they'll win.
OK, valid point. But then why bother having copyright at all?
I have to object to that line of reasoning. The point of copyright is to provide incentive *before* the work is created, by promising something in return in the future. To tell the person they can't direct the return to someone else if they die before receiving it doesn't make sense.
Let's say you write a software program for me. To compensate you, I give you $10,000 and agree to pay you an additional $10,000 a year for 30 years. But say I want to put in a clause that if you die, I get to keep the software and don't have to pay the rest of the money to your heirs or to anyone else. After all, once you die, you won't be able to write any software programs for me. Does that agreement make sense?
I'm not missing that point at all. All I'm saying is that the length of copyright shouldn't have anything to do with the life of the author. 0 years is an amount of time which isn't based on the life of the author.
Keep shortening it until people stop making stuff, then extend it back a little?
One year of monopoly power for an "innovation" as bland as a new style of cell phone is good enough, as far as I'm concerned.
But...that was your savings to begin with. Copyright, on the other hand, is something that you only have because society has granted it to you in the first place.
The thing is, if copyright is for the life of the author and that's it, then where is the incentive for people who don't have many years left to create copyrighted work?
If the purpose of copyright law is not to provide equity but rather to create an incentive for people to produce new works, then why should the length of the copyright have anything to do with the length of the life of the author?
Software, of course, is one of the major exceptions. That said, software which is protected by DRM technologies can take quite a while to access. Witness how long it took for the X-Box to be hacked via software.
If that's true it's pretty amazing. Imagine what an incredible world we could have if anyone could start up a cell phone manufacturing company in a week's time. I think I'm moving to China.
I find it intriguing that you know how much time I imagine it takes to get a manufacturing plant online.
However, if "IP laws" were eliminated then manufacturing technology would cease improving, along with all other innovation, right?
Sign language, the alphabet, numbers, the globe, beer, the boomerang, the button, the tie, calculus, the candle, playing cards, chocolate, money, the compass, dentures, the encyclopedia, glass, the wheel, gunpowder, ink, the lock and key, nails, paper, the pocket watch, the saddle, soap, the flush toilet, the vending machine, wine...
At which point you improve it again! Taking someone else's idea and building a manufacturing plant to produce a similar product takes time. Building a plant to produce a similar product at a cheaper price takes even longer, and doing so when you're trying to hit a moving target takes even longer than that.
Umm, OK, I'll give you a bunch of plastic and silicon, and my cell phone, and you give me a replica of it. You must have a seriously different definition of "hard to copy" than I do.
Well, every company in this story knows that their products are going to be pirated. Pretty much everyone who creates anything that *can* be pirated knows that it *will* be pirated. I think you're going to have to rephrase the question.
It doesn't seem to me that the market will look any different. What did the video cassette industry look like after Betamax failed? What happened to PCs after IBM left? How is UNIX doing now that Bell Labs isn't involved in it? What would chicken sandwich industry look like without Chick-Fil-A? How would the photocopying industry be doing if Xerox wasn't involved?
Any company which intends to stay in business in the absence of "IP law" needs to spend a portion of their profits on R&D. Otherwise, someone is just going to copy their copy, add a little bit of innovation, and take away all the market share.
It seems to me you're imagining a world in which any item can be replicated perfectly and instantaneously without doing any work at all. In such a world perhaps you'd have a point, but we don't live in such a world. Copying someone else's product generally takes time, and during that time the company who first created the product will enjoy limited monopoly power. That's where corporate profits come from, and after that limited monopoly runs out the company either has to continue to innovate or take its profits and leave (to enter a different market, for instance).
That's two people now who've misread what I wrote. I guess I should have hyphenated "better-selling". My post, like the headline of this article, is using the word "better" to modify the word "selling". It's quite debatable whether or not Microsoft products are "better" than the product which was "embraced and extended", but 9 times out of 10 the Microsoft product does have more copies sold.
I just double-checked, and I don't see any logic in his argument. In fact, I don't really see much of an argument at all.
So believe that without copyright law there would be no companies in any markets? That doesn't make any sense. Companies have existed longer than copyright law. Companies innovate because without innovation there is no company. Sure, eventually other companies will copy those innovations, but that just means the company has to keep innovating to stay in business. They can't just create a product and collect royalties.
Now some products are easier to copy than others, of course. And in the absence of copyright law you may very well see R&D spending shift away from the easiest products to copy and toward the harder ones to copy. And you'll likely also see companies paying much more attention to keeping its trade secrets from leaking. But that's a far cry from saying that innovation will stop completely.
"Better" modified "selling", not "product".
Is this the question and the answer? You innovate because when your product becomes stale no one wants it.
Stealing someone else's technology and creating a better selling product with it? Microsoft practically invented the concept.
Also known as a strawman argument.
Sure there is. Without innovation a company has no advantage over its competitors. To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
Some of them would. Some of them probably wouldn't.
So get together with your neighbors and form a homeowners association, if you don't already have one. Then figure out the costs to map your hometown and propose it at your next association meeting. If your neighbors agree with you that the benefits are worth the costs, then you'll get the data. If not, then you won't.
Fiction books would probably suffer more than any other type of work from a lack of copyright protection (mega-pop singer/songwriters would be a close second). Fiction authors who weren't independently wealthy would probably have to rely on non-profit organizations to pay them for their work, or else get a day-job and write only in their spare time for the fun of it. Personally I don't think this would be such a bad thing, but I'm not a big fan of fiction books (or mega-pop singers for that matter, I'd just as well listen to a hometown singer/songwriter whose self-produced CDs you pay for out of courtesy rather than because of copyright law).
Watermarking and contractual agreements with movie theaters should be enough to pay for the low to medium budget films. The high budget blockbusters might be a thing of the past, though, especially if trademark/merchandising laws went out along with the copyright laws.
I haven't mentioned the benefits, because I think we both know what they are. And in the end, I think the benefits would outweigh these negatives. At the least I'd like to see copyright law go away for software and non-fiction (which would include GIS data/imagery). For more creative rather than productive works I'm more open to merely modifying copyright law.