It's not theft doofus, it's copyright infringement.
So you're arguing on the basis of law. It's a circular argument as a response to my own comment, since my own intent was to question the justice of the very law that you are basing your argument on.
Different issue. You can't duplicate the camera and send it to 10,000 of your closest friends
Economically I don't think it's so different. Ritz Camera has a business plan, and if you somehow make the $10 camera into your own camera, they lose (1) your business, (2) the use of the camera when you return it, so that their business plan is undermined. They do lose business. Not as much, maybe, as the music company, but a simple difference in amount doesn't obviously change things legally. If copying the music 10,000 times is theft on a massive scale, then why isn't taking the camera contrary to Ritz's wishes theft on a minor scale?
I suppose you could just argue "it's the law" in the case of the music and there simply isn't a law protecting Ritz. But that's a different argument.
Doesn't this [you can delete bad shots] seem like a bit of a semi-useless feature?
I don't know about the current camera, but in the near future if there's enough memory, then you can just take a ton of shots, then back at the store they can pop them all up on a screen and you can choose the ones you like. Seems doable.
Thanks for the list. I'm always on the lookout for the latest musical trends. Any advice on how input this list to Kazaa en masse so I don't have to spend hours keying in individual songs?
That time-to-completion no doubt ignores future generations of pirates. The war on music piracy will in reality never end (sort of like the war on terrorism).
My point is that you can do the same for any point of view. You can't simply take an example, then make an unsupported assertion that it's representative of the whole -- there's just no useful data that you've put on the table.
My point is that the assertion is so well known and accepted that you only need a reminder of it. It's like you're asking me to defend the idea that the Earth is not flat. I may give you an example - e.g., how boats disappear over the horizon - but the example is not meant as proof, since proof of something like the roundness of the Earth is not needed. The idea that free markets foster innovation and that government control of the economy hinders innovation is just so basic that if you're going to dispute it then discussion with you would have to start at a very, very low level - we'd end up on agreeing that matter is made of atoms and maybe disagreeing on everything more complicated.
Mmmmfff. This is true, but I'm also thinking that there's economic theory to support almost anything. There were a lot of people sure that a government-controlled economy would be far more effective and efficient, and how the Soviets had things made.
Just because some people insist on being idiots doesn't mean economics is crap. There really is a serious theory of economics which is not crap, which we've had since Adam Smith (actually he had predecessors but he was the great popularizer).
There are also people who believe in creationism. That doesn't mean biology is crap.
Oh, that's silly. You took a single point that's a particular sticking issue and using it to represent the whole.
No, it is only a randomly picked illustration of the extremely well known and accepted fact that free markets encourage innovation. It's not cherry-picked at all.
And there have also been Nobel economics winners that have favored government regulation
No, it's not a matter of "favoring" anything, it's a matter of empirical discovery.
OK, this is kind of pointless because the readership must be just you and me right now. I'm treating this like a Usenet debate but I'll quit for now. Thanks for the discussion.
But nobody knows exactly what would happen if we threw out the patent system.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen if we keep the patent system either. But we do see the patent system at the center of a great deal of harm. And we also see that people do in fact innovate even when they do not gain temporary monopolies from patents. We do have plenty of economic theory that supports the idea that monopoly is bad.
the US is a world leader in research, and it's a pretty plausible argument to make that the patent system is a big contributor.
The US has an economy that is especially capitalist, i.e., non-socialist, not state run. Our medicine, for example, is more private than European medicine. That's one area where we excel in innovation.
We know that patents work, at least reasonably well. They've been around for a long time, and the US hasn't collapsed.
The second sentence is true, but it is not evidence for the first sentence. Just because tainted food didn't kill you, doesn't mean that it was good for you. It only means that the harm it caused didn't reach the point of killing you.
A patent attorney would probably look at you and say that arguments that the world would be better without patents are equally unfounded.
A patent attorney would be an interested party. But the attorney would be conceding too much., because the burden of proof really always is on the shoulders of the person advocating government intervention.
But that's also because most ideas that uproot fundamental ideas *are* flawed -- there's a reason most existing ideas and social structures are in place.
There's a good reason for social structures that arise out of society. For example, human speech and writing. But when the state creates something out of nothing, for example patents and copyright, then there is much less reason to expect it to be a good thing. The Nobel economist Coase described empirical work assessing the impact of government.
Economists (along with others) are beginning to take a more critical look at the activities of government, and the kind of study which I have suggested as desirable is now being made. Certainly there have been more serious studies made of government regulation of industry in the last fifteen years or so, particularly in the United States, than in the whole preceding period. These studies have been both quantitative and nonquantitative. I have referred to studies of the regulation of natural gas and drugs. But there have also been studies of the regulation of many diverse activities such as agriculture, aviation, banking, broadcasting, electricity supply, milk distribution, railroads and trucking, taxicabs, whiskey labeling, and zoning. I mention only studies with which I am familiar; there are doubtless many others. The main lesson to be drawn from these studies is clear: They all tend to suggest that the regulation is either ineffective or that, when it has a noticeable impact, on balance the effect is bad, so that consumers obtain a worse product or a higher-priced product or both as a result of the regulation. Indeed this result is found so uniformly as to create a puzzle: One would expect to find, in all these studies, at least some government programs that do more good than harm.
Essays on Economics and Economists, pp 60-61.
A general attitude of distrust toward government-imposed "social structures" (as opposed to naturally arising social structures, like language) therefore seems justified.
There are very few things I'd like to see state-run, but medicine is one of them. Medicine is something that simply should not be denied people on the basis of money.
You are heartless. Only medicine? Surely people should not be denied food on the basis of money, because they would starve. Obviously, then, agriculture should be state-run. Why didn't you mention this? And housing. Surely people should not be denied shelter on the basis of money, so housing should be state-run. No private homes allowed. If someone builds his own house, shoot the selfish fuck.
And just throwing out the patent system has other problems. I'm not sure that, say, RSA encryption would *ever* have been developed without a patent system to provide encouragement.
That argument is FUD. You don't know, you think. You fear. You are uncertain. So why was it inserted into the discussion, which was mostly not FUD but actually informative? It is the de rigueur "I am not a crackpot" afterthought, the one step back from the precipice of an overturning fundamental assumptions.
This concern (in the broader case of labor-saving devices) was raised and settled long ago and goes by the name of Luddism. The short answer is that rather than putting humans out of work, labor-saving devices make humans more productive.
An example of this is agriculture. Agriculture once employed most of humanity. Now it employs only a small fraction of humanity (at least in the developed countries) because advances in agriculture meant that fewer and fewer people were needed to produce the same amount of food. What happened to all these other people? They turned to other forms of production. Think about all the things you spend money on nowadays aside from food. Very little of that would have been possible if everyone were still employed in agriculture.
Re:Liberal/Convervative mumbo jumbo
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
How is it meaningless? There are wide-ranging, noticeable differences in our society depending who's in power.
One reason is that opinion is not divided along liberal/conservative lines. National Review, a main conservative journal, advocated drug legalization for many years (I haven't checked its current stance). Other conservatives favor continuing the war on drugs.
It's silly to say, "OK, here's the difference between liberals and conservatives." and then give one or two lines. It shows you're ignorant.
Lakoff is cited in the article. But Lakoff's take on conservatives is laughable.
Re:Liberal/Convervative mumbo jumbo
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Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
You meant Federal power, not State, right? Both of those events limited State power and increased Federal power.
I meant "state" generically, not in the sense of the US has 50 states. Webster distinguishes between these two meanings. Your meaning:
7 a : one of the constituent units of a nation having a federal government
My meaning:
5 a : a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially : one that is sovereign
Re:Liberal/Convervative mumbo jumbo
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
Well, for what's it's worth, it's the conservatives in the ascendancy in the US right now. If you have the power, you get the blame...
Only people with no sense of history give significant credit or blame for the economy to the current President and congress. The notion that the state "runs" the economy from day to day and that every hiccup is due to something the President ate this morning is a myth. Things happen, and then years, decades, centuries later we experience the results. We can trace back many of our problems to events set in motion at the Civil War (which expanded state power) and the New Deal (which expanded state power).
Re:Liberal/Convervative mumbo jumbo
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
Before this quote, in the article, the author explained how conservativism idealizes and rewards success.
Exactly. The article presented an inaccurate and simplistic account of conservatism, and then blamed our current troubles on conservatives. It is silly in the extreme. To his credit, the author almost managed to clue himself in to the truth. National Review is the premier conservative magazine, and the author quotes it supporting his own, allegedly "anti-conservative", position. Think. Stop for a moment and think. If conservatives are arguing against big business, then maybe it's incorrect to say that they support big business. Ya think?
Re:Liberal/Convervative mumbo jumbo
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
It didn't look all that polarizing to me. It looked like he assayed pros and cons of both camp's views of the issues.
Here's a key statement: "The gradual destruction of the Net is getting political protection by two strong conservative value systems."
That's your whole reply? Okay... Your problem is your view of what constitutes valuable property.
No, the previous writer expressed a fundamental difference between IP and physical property. That difference is crucial, for the reason that the justification of physical property turns on the very thing that IP does not share with it! It is precisely the impossibility of many people using the same thing that is the reason we have physical property laws in the first place. So the fact that this is not true of IP is key. It would be hard to overstate the importance of that difference.
What about time? When a plumber fixes your house, should he be paid. He hasn't lost anything tangible
Whether the plumber should be paid does not depend on property rights or on whether we should cry for him for losin valuable time, but on the contract you have with him. The reason you should pay him is that you promised to pay him. If he fixed your plumbing without extracting that promise, then he does not have any right to claim compensation.
If I spend a year formulating an idea and you take it, you've taken advantage of my time just as you have for the plumber (or lawyer, or any service profession).
If you are serious about the plumber analogy, then you have just argued that copyright should be abolished. For, only those who have contracted with the plumber owe him anything. So, if your analogy is correct, then only those who have contracted with the idea man owe him anything.
Probably because others have come to realize the unreasonable extremism of your stance. I concede that the current state of the copyright and patent systems is absurd and insane, but Ifind nothing wrong with reasonable copyrights and patents.
We tend to accept what we're used to. Many people accept the war on drugs, many people accepted slavery, many people accepted witch trials. In any given age there are certain things which are "common wisdom" which turn out to be utterly, hopelessly wrong. The reason they are common wisdom is mainly that poeple tend to rationalize the conditions they live under.
unreasonable extremism
That's not an argument. It is nothing but the voice of common wisdom crushing dissent as usual. What does "extremism" mean? Extremely what? Extremely true? Extremely correct? How are those criticisms? "Extremism" isn't a valid criticism; it only implies a criticism by appealing to the reader's sense that anything very different from today's common wisdom is foolish or dangerous.
I think the reason the IP situation has gotten so bad is that the very idea is fundamentally flawed. There is no core sanity in the idea, and therefore there is nothing putting the brakes on increasing insanity. If there were some sane, sensible compromise between zero IP and insane IP, then justice would tend to find it. But justice is not finding it.
The defense of IP is fundamentally different from the defense of ordinary property rights. Ordinary property rights are unavoidable, they are necessary, because at most one person (or a few people) can use one thing (one toothbrush, one bicycle, one house, one shirt) at a time, and so there inevitably will be a rule resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise when two people try to use the same thing. Intellectual property is utterly different, because it is entirely physically possible for any number of people to play the same song at the same time.
IP must justify itself. People who defend IP must present their justification. They don't realize it, but they do. The only serious defense of IP that I am aware of is economic - i.e., that IP must be defended for society's good because it encourages creation. However, while there is superficial plausibility to the argument, there are many arguments against it, and so there must be some calculation to weigh the benefits of IP to the economy against the costs of IP to the economy. I have never seen a good attempt to demonstrate this.
Consider the case of Linux. Linux is created and given freely. Its existence demonstrates that a first-class piece of software can be, and will be, created for free. Its very existence seriously undermines the economic case for IP.
I can't even make any sense of that. What are you talking about? All I caught was mention of "levelling the playing field", which is a favorite little bit of rhetoric that is quite popular among enemies of freedom (e.g., protectionists, "boo hoo, the foreign imports are too cheap, the state needs to impose tariffs to level the playing feel, waaaa").
Slashdot Mirror
It's not theft doofus, it's copyright infringement.
So you're arguing on the basis of law. It's a circular argument as a response to my own comment, since my own intent was to question the justice of the very law that you are basing your argument on.
I have 3 Linux boxen
A humble request for info. Does "boxen" mean or connote anything aside from "boxes"?
Different issue. You can't duplicate the camera and send it to 10,000 of your closest friends
Economically I don't think it's so different. Ritz Camera has a business plan, and if you somehow make the $10 camera into your own camera, they lose (1) your business, (2) the use of the camera when you return it, so that their business plan is undermined. They do lose business. Not as much, maybe, as the music company, but a simple difference in amount doesn't obviously change things legally. If copying the music 10,000 times is theft on a massive scale, then why isn't taking the camera contrary to Ritz's wishes theft on a minor scale?
I suppose you could just argue "it's the law" in the case of the music and there simply isn't a law protecting Ritz. But that's a different argument.
If its a purchase, not a rental, than it can't be stealing to use it any way I want to.
Tell it to the RIAA.
Doesn't this [you can delete bad shots] seem like a bit of a semi-useless feature?
I don't know about the current camera, but in the near future if there's enough memory, then you can just take a ton of shots, then back at the store they can pop them all up on a screen and you can choose the ones you like. Seems doable.
Thanks for the list. I'm always on the lookout for the latest musical trends. Any advice on how input this list to Kazaa en masse so I don't have to spend hours keying in individual songs?
I'll need a moment to download Excel from Kazaa.
That time-to-completion no doubt ignores future generations of pirates. The war on music piracy will in reality never end (sort of like the war on terrorism).
My point is that you can do the same for any point of view. You can't simply take an example, then make an unsupported assertion that it's representative of the whole -- there's just no useful data that you've put on the table.
My point is that the assertion is so well known and accepted that you only need a reminder of it. It's like you're asking me to defend the idea that the Earth is not flat. I may give you an example - e.g., how boats disappear over the horizon - but the example is not meant as proof, since proof of something like the roundness of the Earth is not needed. The idea that free markets foster innovation and that government control of the economy hinders innovation is just so basic that if you're going to dispute it then discussion with you would have to start at a very, very low level - we'd end up on agreeing that matter is made of atoms and maybe disagreeing on everything more complicated.
Insert joke about choking your ___ leading to blindness.
Mmmmfff. This is true, but I'm also thinking that there's economic theory to support almost anything. There were a lot of people sure that a government-controlled economy would be far more effective and efficient, and how the Soviets had things made.
Just because some people insist on being idiots doesn't mean economics is crap. There really is a serious theory of economics which is not crap, which we've had since Adam Smith (actually he had predecessors but he was the great popularizer).
There are also people who believe in creationism. That doesn't mean biology is crap.
Oh, that's silly. You took a single point that's a particular sticking issue and using it to represent the whole.
No, it is only a randomly picked illustration of the extremely well known and accepted fact that free markets encourage innovation. It's not cherry-picked at all.
And there have also been Nobel economics winners that have favored government regulation
No, it's not a matter of "favoring" anything, it's a matter of empirical discovery.
OK, this is kind of pointless because the readership must be just you and me right now. I'm treating this like a Usenet debate but I'll quit for now. Thanks for the discussion.
He didn't get moderated; he has a karma bonus. STUPID!
Talk about "troll", your informative reply turns into flamebait with the pointless parting insult.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen if we keep the patent system either. But we do see the patent system at the center of a great deal of harm. And we also see that people do in fact innovate even when they do not gain temporary monopolies from patents. We do have plenty of economic theory that supports the idea that monopoly is bad.
the US is a world leader in research, and it's a pretty plausible argument to make that the patent system is a big contributor.
The US has an economy that is especially capitalist, i.e., non-socialist, not state run. Our medicine, for example, is more private than European medicine. That's one area where we excel in innovation.
We know that patents work, at least reasonably well. They've been around for a long time, and the US hasn't collapsed.
The second sentence is true, but it is not evidence for the first sentence. Just because tainted food didn't kill you, doesn't mean that it was good for you. It only means that the harm it caused didn't reach the point of killing you.
A patent attorney would probably look at you and say that arguments that the world would be better without patents are equally unfounded.
A patent attorney would be an interested party. But the attorney would be conceding too much., because the burden of proof really always is on the shoulders of the person advocating government intervention.
But that's also because most ideas that uproot fundamental ideas *are* flawed -- there's a reason most existing ideas and social structures are in place.
There's a good reason for social structures that arise out of society. For example, human speech and writing. But when the state creates something out of nothing, for example patents and copyright, then there is much less reason to expect it to be a good thing. The Nobel economist Coase described empirical work assessing the impact of government.
A general attitude of distrust toward government-imposed "social structures" (as opposed to naturally arising social structures, like language) therefore seems justified.
Who says it has to be entirely state-run?
The previous poster. It's funny how you actually get modded up for not bothering to read.
There are very few things I'd like to see state-run, but medicine is one of them. Medicine is something that simply should not be denied people on the basis of money.
You are heartless. Only medicine? Surely people should not be denied food on the basis of money, because they would starve. Obviously, then, agriculture should be state-run. Why didn't you mention this? And housing. Surely people should not be denied shelter on the basis of money, so housing should be state-run. No private homes allowed. If someone builds his own house, shoot the selfish fuck.
And just throwing out the patent system has other problems. I'm not sure that, say, RSA encryption would *ever* have been developed without a patent system to provide encouragement.
That argument is FUD. You don't know, you think. You fear. You are uncertain. So why was it inserted into the discussion, which was mostly not FUD but actually informative? It is the de rigueur "I am not a crackpot" afterthought, the one step back from the precipice of an overturning fundamental assumptions.
Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?
This concern (in the broader case of labor-saving devices) was raised and settled long ago and goes by the name of Luddism. The short answer is that rather than putting humans out of work, labor-saving devices make humans more productive.
An example of this is agriculture. Agriculture once employed most of humanity. Now it employs only a small fraction of humanity (at least in the developed countries) because advances in agriculture meant that fewer and fewer people were needed to produce the same amount of food. What happened to all these other people? They turned to other forms of production. Think about all the things you spend money on nowadays aside from food. Very little of that would have been possible if everyone were still employed in agriculture.
How is it meaningless? There are wide-ranging, noticeable differences in our society depending who's in power.
One reason is that opinion is not divided along liberal/conservative lines. National Review, a main conservative journal, advocated drug legalization for many years (I haven't checked its current stance). Other conservatives favor continuing the war on drugs.
It's silly to say, "OK, here's the difference between liberals and conservatives." and then give one or two lines. It shows you're ignorant.
Lakoff is cited in the article. But Lakoff's take on conservatives is laughable.
You meant Federal power, not State, right? Both of those events limited State power and increased Federal power.
I meant "state" generically, not in the sense of the US has 50 states. Webster distinguishes between these two meanings. Your meaning:
7 a : one of the constituent units of a nation having a federal government
My meaning:
5 a : a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially : one that is sovereign
Well, for what's it's worth, it's the conservatives in the ascendancy in the US right now. If you have the power, you get the blame...
Only people with no sense of history give significant credit or blame for the economy to the current President and congress. The notion that the state "runs" the economy from day to day and that every hiccup is due to something the President ate this morning is a myth. Things happen, and then years, decades, centuries later we experience the results. We can trace back many of our problems to events set in motion at the Civil War (which expanded state power) and the New Deal (which expanded state power).
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
Before this quote, in the article, the author explained how conservativism idealizes and rewards success.
Exactly. The article presented an inaccurate and simplistic account of conservatism, and then blamed our current troubles on conservatives. It is silly in the extreme. To his credit, the author almost managed to clue himself in to the truth. National Review is the premier conservative magazine, and the author quotes it supporting his own, allegedly "anti-conservative", position. Think. Stop for a moment and think. If conservatives are arguing against big business, then maybe it's incorrect to say that they support big business. Ya think?
It didn't look all that polarizing to me. It looked like he assayed pros and cons of both camp's views of the issues.
Here's a key statement: "The gradual destruction of the Net is getting political protection by two strong conservative value systems."
In two words: blame conservatives.
That's your whole reply? Okay... Your problem is your view of what constitutes valuable property.
No, the previous writer expressed a fundamental difference between IP and physical property. That difference is crucial, for the reason that the justification of physical property turns on the very thing that IP does not share with it! It is precisely the impossibility of many people using the same thing that is the reason we have physical property laws in the first place. So the fact that this is not true of IP is key. It would be hard to overstate the importance of that difference.
What about time? When a plumber fixes your house, should he be paid. He hasn't lost anything tangible
Whether the plumber should be paid does not depend on property rights or on whether we should cry for him for losin valuable time, but on the contract you have with him. The reason you should pay him is that you promised to pay him. If he fixed your plumbing without extracting that promise, then he does not have any right to claim compensation.
If I spend a year formulating an idea and you take it, you've taken advantage of my time just as you have for the plumber (or lawyer, or any service profession).
If you are serious about the plumber analogy, then you have just argued that copyright should be abolished. For, only those who have contracted with the plumber owe him anything. So, if your analogy is correct, then only those who have contracted with the idea man owe him anything.
Probably because others have come to realize the unreasonable extremism of your stance. I concede that the current state of the copyright and patent systems is absurd and insane, but Ifind nothing wrong with reasonable copyrights and patents.
We tend to accept what we're used to. Many people accept the war on drugs, many people accepted slavery, many people accepted witch trials. In any given age there are certain things which are "common wisdom" which turn out to be utterly, hopelessly wrong. The reason they are common wisdom is mainly that poeple tend to rationalize the conditions they live under.
unreasonable extremism
That's not an argument. It is nothing but the voice of common wisdom crushing dissent as usual. What does "extremism" mean? Extremely what? Extremely true? Extremely correct? How are those criticisms? "Extremism" isn't a valid criticism; it only implies a criticism by appealing to the reader's sense that anything very different from today's common wisdom is foolish or dangerous.
I think the reason the IP situation has gotten so bad is that the very idea is fundamentally flawed. There is no core sanity in the idea, and therefore there is nothing putting the brakes on increasing insanity. If there were some sane, sensible compromise between zero IP and insane IP, then justice would tend to find it. But justice is not finding it.
The defense of IP is fundamentally different from the defense of ordinary property rights. Ordinary property rights are unavoidable, they are necessary, because at most one person (or a few people) can use one thing (one toothbrush, one bicycle, one house, one shirt) at a time, and so there inevitably will be a rule resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise when two people try to use the same thing. Intellectual property is utterly different, because it is entirely physically possible for any number of people to play the same song at the same time.
IP must justify itself. People who defend IP must present their justification. They don't realize it, but they do. The only serious defense of IP that I am aware of is economic - i.e., that IP must be defended for society's good because it encourages creation. However, while there is superficial plausibility to the argument, there are many arguments against it, and so there must be some calculation to weigh the benefits of IP to the economy against the costs of IP to the economy. I have never seen a good attempt to demonstrate this.
Consider the case of Linux. Linux is created and given freely. Its existence demonstrates that a first-class piece of software can be, and will be, created for free. Its very existence seriously undermines the economic case for IP.
I can't even make any sense of that. What are you talking about? All I caught was mention of "levelling the playing field", which is a favorite little bit of rhetoric that is quite popular among enemies of freedom (e.g., protectionists, "boo hoo, the foreign imports are too cheap, the state needs to impose tariffs to level the playing feel, waaaa").