It's not very hard to control kids... a leash works well as a low tech device and I have read of them being used on kids (on slashdot no less)... the issue is that these things are a major violation of privacy.
To make matters worse, the kind of control-freak parents who tend use these kinds of tracking devices tend to be overly punitive. I wouldn't be surprised if the kid gets 3 weeks grounding for leaving the cell phone on the floor. I also wouldn't be surprised if the kid gets 3 weeks every time the school calls home about anything (even when the kid is in the right... schools make even more mistakes than our justice system as the kid doesn't even get a fair trial).
Punishing kids inappropriately or excessively, aside from violating the golden rule, generally shows up either with a rebellious attitude -> defeatism once punished enough or it shows up in the kid becoming a selfish person who looks out only for themselves.
Morally, I wouldn't find it so bad if it were consentual and reciprocal - if the kids could track wherever their parents went... including one parent cheating on another or visits to strip joints. After all, if you have nothing to hide...
Over 50% of drug research money (and well over 50% of breakthroughs) come from government funding and charities. There will be no shortage of pharmaceutial breakthroughs if patents were abolished.
What's so bad with using the randomly fluctuating voltage in a wire or the current in a conducting loop as a source of random data. This could be implemented as part of an integrated circuit and could cost a fraction of a cent per copy.
If you need protection against willful interference, put a faraday cage around it, which is not hard at all to do using lithography.
An added advantage is that random bits can be generated by the billions per second, and is limited only by the sampling rate of the voltmeter.
The record industry is an oligopsony as well as an oligopoly. It's like saying that competing oil producers entered into free and fair contracts with Standard Oil controlled railroads.
In my book, a contract isn't 'free and fair' if it's with an entity with market-distorting power. Record industry contracts are about as free as the EULA for MS Windows. Not suprisingly, both are about equally one-sided.
If you want to find fair contracts, look at peer-to-peer contracts or contracts made in highly competitive and open industries.
How about setting up a card catalog for the books? Get numbered labels and number them from 1 to 3,500 and stick them on the spine of each book. Then take 10,500 index cards (3 for each book), and write the title, author, subject, and number (that you assign) of each book on it. You can also include any other relevant info or comments on the cards. Sort one set by title, one by subject, and one by author.
You can also set up an electronic equivalent of such a catalog, but since it takes a lot of work to organize that many books, make sure you keep good backups.
There's absolutely no way that a person can go live a normal life and actually read everything they sign. 99% of the time a perfectly rational person would have to refuse the contract ('subject to change with no notice', waiving the right to a trial, and giving up the right of choosing the jurisdiction probably being the worst offenders - clauses that are generally missing from a contract between peers). 90%+ of the time no supplier at all can be found offering a product on sane terms, and you would have to set up a cottage industry in your house, assuming that you are able to navigate patent law (and other laws) and make yourself a 100% legal product - often at a huge expense in capital equipment and training that will hardly be used.
Here's one example: Find me a sane contract to buy or license software. Unless you can find GPL'ed software, the contracts are extremely lopsided and non-negotiable. If there isn't any free software to do the job, your only alternative generally is to hire someone (or a company, if you're willing to pay a premium and negotiate reasonably) to write the program for you, which can easily cost thousands to millions of dollars.
Another is anything that must be bought over the phone or internet. This generally requires a credit card, none of which can be had under what I would consider fair terms.
Personally, I feel that business to consumer contracts should be heavily regulated by government. There's an obvious inbalance of negotiating power, and corporations have obviously shown no hesitation in leveraging it.
Most clauses are either ways to hide costs from the consumer (like excessive fees subsidizing low credit card teaser rates), are power grabs (no reverse engineering software, can be changed without notice), or make it hard to impossible to get justice served if there is a legimate grievance (juristiction clauses, binding arbitration clauses).
'Windows' is another case where the trademark should not have been granted. Same with 'word'. They're terms used in the industry before the the trademark filer started using it. According to the letter of trademark law (but not how judges interpret it), these would not qualify for a trademark just like "hot rolled steel" shouldn't qualify for a trademark.
Trademarks on things that shouldn't be trademarkable are mostly the result of judges and lawyers, not legislation (though legislation is responsible for other nasty aspects of trademarks, such as trademark dilution).
The real problem is that you have far more candidates than jobs. If you had 1 job opening for every person seeking work, or even several openings per person seeking work, then employers would be far more lenient because it would seriously effect their ability to find employees or would force them to pay a large salary premium to attract people from the limited pool meeting their requirements.
Admitting to shoplifting, are you? You're probably looking for the work "infringe copyright", unless you actually did give yourself the five finger discount. I should summarily ignore you, but you aren't the only one who reads this board.
I personally have eliminated my P2P downloads of bootleg computer games, but not out of any love of copyright (I feel it should be abolished). Modern games are too great a security risk as many contain malware. Also why bother downloading a game if it won't run on Linux (no MS Windows here). The Linux stuff (at least the stuff I've found) is all legal, so it might be P2P, but alas it fails to qualify as bootleg.
Now I'm much more into TV shows on the computer. Standardized, secure, runs on Linux, and no headaches. My TV tuner cost $50, about the cost of a single game. For more popular content, I can get it off of P2P and not have to worry about viruses and trojans or the copy restriction software of an uncracked copy (not that under WINE it would infect much).
For someone who might not buy a computer game all year (and hasn't since Loki went bust), 2 games is a lot. My latest purchase was Sim City 3000. Copy restrictions such as Starforce means:
1 - WINE won't play it, which means I won't buy it as I don't have MS Windows.
2 - It would be too great a security risk to let such a program anywhere near my machine. My spyware-infested installation of MS Windows ME was why I switched to Linux in the first place.
And I used to be a big computer game addict, but between bloated games with worse gameplay than older games and copy restrictions, I essentially don't buy games anymore. If I do download a game, it's either an open source game (like freeciv) or an old one where I lost the CD quite some time ago and I'm feeling nostalgic.
It's because there were far fewer cows before. Also, cows are only a small part of the whole global warming picture, with deforestation (often to feed those cows) and fossil fuel consumption being the number 2 and 1 sources of global warming.
Also, it should be painfully obvious that refining the grain directly into alcohol will be more efficient than feeding to an animal, which will use much of the energy internally.
Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas and definitely increase temperatures. Clouds can work both ways, cirrus clouds generally warm the planet, while low-level clouds cool the planet.
The GPL pretty much bound IBM to not settle. If there are patent restrictions on the code, then it cannot be used, therefore IBM had to fight it. Just another reason why I prefer stronger copyleft licenses over weaker ones.
Those people shouldn't be keeping secrets in the first place. I cannot think of anything in this world requiring more than a cursory amount of security.
- nuclear weapons -> should be dismantled and made into reactor fuel, like the former USSR is doing.
- trade secrets -> should be made open, to improve competition and make a freer market.
- military secrets -> Shouldn't be carrying out assasinations and offensive wars. In case of an imminent or actual defensive war, I can see the point though.
- privacy -> done on one's equipment. These chips will lower ones privacy.
- financial information -> Once again, should be public. Fraud (both financial and mob) is nearly impossible when any concerned group can peer into anyone's or anything's (refering to corps/govt/military) financial info.
PS: I'm not in favor of much financial privacy, so long as it's applied very, very equally. I'd rather know every last movement of Delay's money and have my money movements universally known than not.
Not in this market. Mortgage payments are sometimes double rental payments in this environment. Wait a few years when you can get the house at half price, and then it might be a wise move. Renting also means no need to pay over 6% of the property value every time you move (greedy real estate agent cartel). 6% of 500k is $30,000 - enough money to cover over a year's rent even in a pricey district.
because every month instead of paying a landlord, you are paying a bit to a bank and the rest to yourself
Every month you're paying mostly the bank, and a bit to your self. If you have an I/O load, it's all going to the bank. If you have a negative amortization loan, you're piling on more debt with every payment. Your 'rent' on the bank's money is the interest, but that money is now the bank's and you built up no equity with it.
A simple formula is that if the interest payments exceed rent, renting is the cheaper long-run choice. This is assuming appreciation about matches property taxes and maintainance (it probably won't).
Also don't forget that any savings from renting can be invested. Long term stock returns are around 10% and bonds 6%.
Tor is unlikely to go mainstream so long as P2P is kept off of it. My guess is that mp3s would create the largest demand for a highly secure network due to the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits. Mp3s are also small enough to accept a 3-1 or so overhead, but big enough to put a heavy load on the system.
Porn (particularly highly illegal types) would also be a strong demand driver. Anything else that a substantial amount of people want and is sufficiently prosecuted or sufficiently taboo will drive demand.
These tools aren't answers in and of themselves though, as they themselves can be banned and filtered out, even if the contents cannot be looked at. Also, monkey-in-the-middle attacks can work if enough nodes are controlled, which major ISPs/government agencies can do.
Tor + a decentralized network would be far more resiliant to attempts to flat out ban Tor.
Sorry, no studies offhand. The economics is mostly my own divination, the morals is a composite of all the stuff I see posted to slashdot.
Software industry -> Many people are salaried and paid to service/support software. Much of the actual developers would be paid regardless of copyright, because their client needs the software written anyway to conduct their business. Consumer software is the minority of the job market and is an atrociously inefficient way of getting money from consumers to developers (hence why it costs so much).
Music -> Most musicians do not bring in nearly enough. A few hundred a year from a dozen or two events is common among the several musicians I know in person, which doesn't even cover the cost of their equipment. Of that, it's mostly performance money and tips and in person sales of CDs/tapes (all of which would work just fine without copyright). They can count themselves lucky not to have been offered a record label contract, if you ask me.
Publishing -> I didn't mention publishing (unless blueprints count as publishing).
As far as inequality goes, the bigger effect is on the spending side than the collecting side. It takes many (often over 10) dollars to get one dollar into the hands of a software writer or artist. The dollars in can easily be gotten from SEC filings. The dollars to artists is harder to track down, but studies have been posted on slashdot before. A good rule of thumb is that a development house has about a 2-1 overhead-developers ratio. Add in taxes, profits, cost of sales, marketing (often more expensive than development), and other expenses needed to run a full consumer product line, and we easily get to a 10-1 ratio or worse.
A 10-1 ratio means the purchasing side of the equation is 10 times more powerful than the royalties/salaries side. Poor people by a lot of software (at least video games) and videos and music as a fraction of their income.
The royalties side still plays a small part though. Copyrights give monopoly pricing and fat margins for companies like Microsoft.
PS: The only money I've ever been paid to program was for programs used internally by my employer, and would have been written anyway without copyright. I have never gotten paid for any code targeted for consumer use (it's all in the form of patches to open source software).
Like it or not, copyright violation is against the law.
If one is going to teach law, one had better teach it fully and avoid moralizing. The letter of copyright law is complex enough that many adults will have trouble understanding it.
But if one is going to 'teach' the morals of copyright, then one had better present every side, and the math/economics required to properly analyze this subject are hairy indeed.
I will attempt to do a rought attempt at this:
First off, there are moral and economic factors, which I will list and then go into more detail: moral:
- (pro) It is a basic right to control how one's idea is used.
- (con) It is a basic right engage in acts where all parties involved consent.
Many people believe that when they share a copy of something, only the recipient and themselves are involved in the transaction. Others believe that the copyright holder has a rightful interest in this transaction. While copyright might seem perfectly okay to a person believing in the (pro) argument, it strikes as a serious encroachment on one's freedoms for believers of the (con) argument.
- (pro) Copyright gives a reward to creative people, who deserve it.
- (con) Copyright steals from the poor and gives to the rich.
The (con) statement is true, statistically the biggest payers are collectively the poor, while rich people, who own most corporate stock or are celebrities, collect most of the rewards; however, believers in (pro) believe that copyright results in a just distribution, even if it is far from equal.
Both arguments say exactly the same thing, but couch it in very different words. The commons include everything that is open to everyone, so creating property in the same operation destroys the commons. It comes down to what one values more.
economic:
- (pro) Copyright encourages the production of more works.
- (con) Copyright discourages the production of more works.
- (con) Copyright creates monopolies.
- (con) Copyright creates enormous economic friction.
- (con) Copyright increases economic inequality and decreases social mobility.
The economics are very much against copyright. The common (pro) argument that it encourages the production of more works is very leaky and in certain fields such as software programming, encyclopedias, and music, is probably flat wrong.
The common error is assuming that dollar sales or employment numberes are a fair measure of value. This is obviously false if one looks at copylefted works such as Wikipedia and Apache. Wikipedia is the largest and most used encyclopedia, and probably generates the most benefit to humanity, but has an annual budget of under $1M per year and zero sales. Apache is the most used web server in the world, yet again it has no sales and a tiny operating budget compared to smaller copyright-embracing rivals. They are paragons of economic efficiency, savings people billions a year while giving them arguably better products than those offered by copyright embracing firms.
Copyright is, by definition, a monopoly. As can be expected, sales are much lower and prices are much higher than the free market price. In a free market, there are no constraints to production, and the price will settle when marginal cost = marginal price. This is generally a few cents when done online (reflecting the cost of bandwidth), or about $1 for CDs/DVDs (physical printing and sales costs money), or perhaps a few hundred dollars for architectural blueprints (they must still be reviewed). As most products contain copyrighted works, this effect will show up in large part as a diffuse rise in the general price level, production levels, and corporate profits, and is extremely hard to measure accurately.
Collection of money and the use of DRM (digital restrictions management) both add substantial fr
Slashdot Mirror
It's not very hard to control kids ... a leash works well as a low tech device and I have read of them being used on kids (on slashdot no less) ... the issue is that these things are a major violation of privacy.
... schools make even more mistakes than our justice system as the kid doesn't even get a fair trial).
... including one parent cheating on another or visits to strip joints. After all, if you have nothing to hide ...
To make matters worse, the kind of control-freak parents who tend use these kinds of tracking devices tend to be overly punitive. I wouldn't be surprised if the kid gets 3 weeks grounding for leaving the cell phone on the floor. I also wouldn't be surprised if the kid gets 3 weeks every time the school calls home about anything (even when the kid is in the right
Punishing kids inappropriately or excessively, aside from violating the golden rule, generally shows up either with a rebellious attitude -> defeatism once punished enough or it shows up in the kid becoming a selfish person who looks out only for themselves.
Morally, I wouldn't find it so bad if it were consentual and reciprocal - if the kids could track wherever their parents went
Here's the citation, if you're so interested.4 .pdf
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m100
Over 50% of drug research money (and well over 50% of breakthroughs) come from government funding and charities. There will be no shortage of pharmaceutial breakthroughs if patents were abolished.
What's so bad with using the randomly fluctuating voltage in a wire or the current in a conducting loop as a source of random data. This could be implemented as part of an integrated circuit and could cost a fraction of a cent per copy.
If you need protection against willful interference, put a faraday cage around it, which is not hard at all to do using lithography.
An added advantage is that random bits can be generated by the billions per second, and is limited only by the sampling rate of the voltmeter.
The record industry is an oligopsony as well as an oligopoly. It's like saying that competing oil producers entered into free and fair contracts with Standard Oil controlled railroads.
In my book, a contract isn't 'free and fair' if it's with an entity with market-distorting power. Record industry contracts are about as free as the EULA for MS Windows. Not suprisingly, both are about equally one-sided.
If you want to find fair contracts, look at peer-to-peer contracts or contracts made in highly competitive and open industries.
We already have worse, 10 years in jail and a $500,000 statutory fine under certain (fairly easy to meet) conditions.
This baloney smells so bad I'm smelling it from the other coast.
How about setting up a card catalog for the books? Get numbered labels and number them from 1 to 3,500 and stick them on the spine of each book. Then take 10,500 index cards (3 for each book), and write the title, author, subject, and number (that you assign) of each book on it. You can also include any other relevant info or comments on the cards. Sort one set by title, one by subject, and one by author.
You can also set up an electronic equivalent of such a catalog, but since it takes a lot of work to organize that many books, make sure you keep good backups.
CATO is very influential with the current administration. They're very powerful.
I generally hate their opinions, but in this case I guess they figured that even big business (their prime constituency) can get bitten by the DMCA.
There's absolutely no way that a person can go live a normal life and actually read everything they sign. 99% of the time a perfectly rational person would have to refuse the contract ('subject to change with no notice', waiving the right to a trial, and giving up the right of choosing the jurisdiction probably being the worst offenders - clauses that are generally missing from a contract between peers). 90%+ of the time no supplier at all can be found offering a product on sane terms, and you would have to set up a cottage industry in your house, assuming that you are able to navigate patent law (and other laws) and make yourself a 100% legal product - often at a huge expense in capital equipment and training that will hardly be used.
Here's one example: Find me a sane contract to buy or license software. Unless you can find GPL'ed software, the contracts are extremely lopsided and non-negotiable. If there isn't any free software to do the job, your only alternative generally is to hire someone (or a company, if you're willing to pay a premium and negotiate reasonably) to write the program for you, which can easily cost thousands to millions of dollars.
Another is anything that must be bought over the phone or internet. This generally requires a credit card, none of which can be had under what I would consider fair terms.
Personally, I feel that business to consumer contracts should be heavily regulated by government. There's an obvious inbalance of negotiating power, and corporations have obviously shown no hesitation in leveraging it.
Most clauses are either ways to hide costs from the consumer (like excessive fees subsidizing low credit card teaser rates), are power grabs (no reverse engineering software, can be changed without notice), or make it hard to impossible to get justice served if there is a legimate grievance (juristiction clauses, binding arbitration clauses).
'Windows' is another case where the trademark should not have been granted. Same with 'word'. They're terms used in the industry before the the trademark filer started using it. According to the letter of trademark law (but not how judges interpret it), these would not qualify for a trademark just like "hot rolled steel" shouldn't qualify for a trademark.
Trademarks on things that shouldn't be trademarkable are mostly the result of judges and lawyers, not legislation (though legislation is responsible for other nasty aspects of trademarks, such as trademark dilution).
The real problem is that you have far more candidates than jobs. If you had 1 job opening for every person seeking work, or even several openings per person seeking work, then employers would be far more lenient because it would seriously effect their ability to find employees or would force them to pay a large salary premium to attract people from the limited pool meeting their requirements.
Admitting to shoplifting, are you? You're probably looking for the work "infringe copyright", unless you actually did give yourself the five finger discount. I should summarily ignore you, but you aren't the only one who reads this board.
I personally have eliminated my P2P downloads of bootleg computer games, but not out of any love of copyright (I feel it should be abolished). Modern games are too great a security risk as many contain malware. Also why bother downloading a game if it won't run on Linux (no MS Windows here). The Linux stuff (at least the stuff I've found) is all legal, so it might be P2P, but alas it fails to qualify as bootleg.
Now I'm much more into TV shows on the computer. Standardized, secure, runs on Linux, and no headaches. My TV tuner cost $50, about the cost of a single game. For more popular content, I can get it off of P2P and not have to worry about viruses and trojans or the copy restriction software of an uncracked copy (not that under WINE it would infect much).
For someone who might not buy a computer game all year (and hasn't since Loki went bust), 2 games is a lot. My latest purchase was Sim City 3000. Copy restrictions such as Starforce means:
1 - WINE won't play it, which means I won't buy it as I don't have MS Windows.
2 - It would be too great a security risk to let such a program anywhere near my machine. My spyware-infested installation of MS Windows ME was why I switched to Linux in the first place.
And I used to be a big computer game addict, but between bloated games with worse gameplay than older games and copy restrictions, I essentially don't buy games anymore. If I do download a game, it's either an open source game (like freeciv) or an old one where I lost the CD quite some time ago and I'm feeling nostalgic.
It's because there were far fewer cows before. Also, cows are only a small part of the whole global warming picture, with deforestation (often to feed those cows) and fossil fuel consumption being the number 2 and 1 sources of global warming.
Also, it should be painfully obvious that refining the grain directly into alcohol will be more efficient than feeding to an animal, which will use much of the energy internally.
Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas and definitely increase temperatures. Clouds can work both ways, cirrus clouds generally warm the planet, while low-level clouds cool the planet.
It's the part of Antarctica west of the Transantarctic Mountains. West means closer towards Hawai`i, whereas east would mean closer to Australia.
The GPL pretty much bound IBM to not settle. If there are patent restrictions on the code, then it cannot be used, therefore IBM had to fight it. Just another reason why I prefer stronger copyleft licenses over weaker ones.
Considering that microwave ovens use the same frequency yet deal with far greater powers, he aught to be banning them too.
Truly, this guy is totally clueless. Then again, if Bush could get to such a high position, what's stopping this guy.
Those people shouldn't be keeping secrets in the first place. I cannot think of anything in this world requiring more than a cursory amount of security.
- nuclear weapons -> should be dismantled and made into reactor fuel, like the former USSR is doing.
- trade secrets -> should be made open, to improve competition and make a freer market.
- military secrets -> Shouldn't be carrying out assasinations and offensive wars. In case of an imminent or actual defensive war, I can see the point though.
- privacy -> done on one's equipment. These chips will lower ones privacy.
- financial information -> Once again, should be public. Fraud (both financial and mob) is nearly impossible when any concerned group can peer into anyone's or anything's (refering to corps/govt/military) financial info.
PS: I'm not in favor of much financial privacy, so long as it's applied very, very equally. I'd rather know every last movement of Delay's money and have my money movements universally known than not.
Not in this market. Mortgage payments are sometimes double rental payments in this environment. Wait a few years when you can get the house at half price, and then it might be a wise move. Renting also means no need to pay over 6% of the property value every time you move (greedy real estate agent cartel). 6% of 500k is $30,000 - enough money to cover over a year's rent even in a pricey district.
because every month instead of paying a landlord, you are paying a bit to a bank and the rest to yourself
Every month you're paying mostly the bank, and a bit to your self. If you have an I/O load, it's all going to the bank. If you have a negative amortization loan, you're piling on more debt with every payment. Your 'rent' on the bank's money is the interest, but that money is now the bank's and you built up no equity with it.
A simple formula is that if the interest payments exceed rent, renting is the cheaper long-run choice. This is assuming appreciation about matches property taxes and maintainance (it probably won't).
Also don't forget that any savings from renting can be invested. Long term stock returns are around 10% and bonds 6%.
It's a minority government. Less than 50% voted for it (officially, a bit over 50% did, but there was substantial vote fraud.).
Personally, I voted for Nader (not that it made a difference, Kerry won NY in a landslide).
Tor is unlikely to go mainstream so long as P2P is kept off of it. My guess is that mp3s would create the largest demand for a highly secure network due to the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits. Mp3s are also small enough to accept a 3-1 or so overhead, but big enough to put a heavy load on the system.
Porn (particularly highly illegal types) would also be a strong demand driver. Anything else that a substantial amount of people want and is sufficiently prosecuted or sufficiently taboo will drive demand.
These tools aren't answers in and of themselves though, as they themselves can be banned and filtered out, even if the contents cannot be looked at. Also, monkey-in-the-middle attacks can work if enough nodes are controlled, which major ISPs/government agencies can do.
Tor + a decentralized network would be far more resiliant to attempts to flat out ban Tor.
Sorry, no studies offhand. The economics is mostly my own divination, the morals is a composite of all the stuff I see posted to slashdot.
Software industry -> Many people are salaried and paid to service/support software. Much of the actual developers would be paid regardless of copyright, because their client needs the software written anyway to conduct their business. Consumer software is the minority of the job market and is an atrociously inefficient way of getting money from consumers to developers (hence why it costs so much).
Music -> Most musicians do not bring in nearly enough. A few hundred a year from a dozen or two events is common among the several musicians I know in person, which doesn't even cover the cost of their equipment. Of that, it's mostly performance money and tips and in person sales of CDs/tapes (all of which would work just fine without copyright). They can count themselves lucky not to have been offered a record label contract, if you ask me.
Publishing -> I didn't mention publishing (unless blueprints count as publishing).
As far as inequality goes, the bigger effect is on the spending side than the collecting side. It takes many (often over 10) dollars to get one dollar into the hands of a software writer or artist. The dollars in can easily be gotten from SEC filings. The dollars to artists is harder to track down, but studies have been posted on slashdot before. A good rule of thumb is that a development house has about a 2-1 overhead-developers ratio. Add in taxes, profits, cost of sales, marketing (often more expensive than development), and other expenses needed to run a full consumer product line, and we easily get to a 10-1 ratio or worse.
A 10-1 ratio means the purchasing side of the equation is 10 times more powerful than the royalties/salaries side. Poor people by a lot of software (at least video games) and videos and music as a fraction of their income.
The royalties side still plays a small part though. Copyrights give monopoly pricing and fat margins for companies like Microsoft.
PS: The only money I've ever been paid to program was for programs used internally by my employer, and would have been written anyway without copyright. I have never gotten paid for any code targeted for consumer use (it's all in the form of patches to open source software).
Like it or not, copyright violation is against the law.
If one is going to teach law, one had better teach it fully and avoid moralizing. The letter of copyright law is complex enough that many adults will have trouble understanding it.
But if one is going to 'teach' the morals of copyright, then one had better present every side, and the math/economics required to properly analyze this subject are hairy indeed.
I will attempt to do a rought attempt at this:
First off, there are moral and economic factors, which I will list and then go into more detail:
moral:
- (pro) It is a basic right to control how one's idea is used.
- (con) It is a basic right engage in acts where all parties involved consent.
Many people believe that when they share a copy of something, only the recipient and themselves are involved in the transaction. Others believe that the copyright holder has a rightful interest in this transaction. While copyright might seem perfectly okay to a person believing in the (pro) argument, it strikes as a serious encroachment on one's freedoms for believers of the (con) argument.
- (pro) Copyright gives a reward to creative people, who deserve it.
- (con) Copyright steals from the poor and gives to the rich.
The (con) statement is true, statistically the biggest payers are collectively the poor, while rich people, who own most corporate stock or are celebrities, collect most of the rewards; however, believers in (pro) believe that copyright results in a just distribution, even if it is far from equal.
- (pro) Copyright creates property.
- (con) Copyright destroys the commons.
Both arguments say exactly the same thing, but couch it in very different words. The commons include everything that is open to everyone, so creating property in the same operation destroys the commons. It comes down to what one values more.
economic:
- (pro) Copyright encourages the production of more works.
- (con) Copyright discourages the production of more works.
- (con) Copyright creates monopolies.
- (con) Copyright creates enormous economic friction.
- (con) Copyright increases economic inequality and decreases social mobility.
The economics are very much against copyright. The common (pro) argument that it encourages the production of more works is very leaky and in certain fields such as software programming, encyclopedias, and music, is probably flat wrong.
The common error is assuming that dollar sales or employment numberes are a fair measure of value. This is obviously false if one looks at copylefted works such as Wikipedia and Apache. Wikipedia is the largest and most used encyclopedia, and probably generates the most benefit to humanity, but has an annual budget of under $1M per year and zero sales. Apache is the most used web server in the world, yet again it has no sales and a tiny operating budget compared to smaller copyright-embracing rivals. They are paragons of economic efficiency, savings people billions a year while giving them arguably better products than those offered by copyright embracing firms.
Copyright is, by definition, a monopoly. As can be expected, sales are much lower and prices are much higher than the free market price. In a free market, there are no constraints to production, and the price will settle when marginal cost = marginal price. This is generally a few cents when done online (reflecting the cost of bandwidth), or about $1 for CDs/DVDs (physical printing and sales costs money), or perhaps a few hundred dollars for architectural blueprints (they must still be reviewed). As most products contain copyrighted works, this effect will show up in large part as a diffuse rise in the general price level, production levels, and corporate profits, and is extremely hard to measure accurately.
Collection of money and the use of DRM (digital restrictions management) both add substantial fr