Of course not! the first definition of "sale" includes services.
Services are labour, we've been over this repatedly. The end effect is a change in the state of physical objects, i.e. child taken care of during the time you work vs. child blowing up the house when left alone.
I just said it was possible, which it obviously is. I never said it was morally right. Many things are possible that are not morally right. Is it impossible to detonate a nuclear bomb, just because it is not morally correct?
This has nothing to do with morality but everything to do with logic. If every western government and anyone you have met claimed that it was possible to detonate a devastating, city busting, weapon of mass destruction made of out of hairballs, and in all seriousness supported an "arms race" in these "bombs", and with great, unshakeable conviction appeared to believe that a "mutual assured destruction" balance needs to be achieved, and thus we need more cats so that the Soviets do not outdo us, you would be roughly looking at the state of affairs I am looking at when you claim to be "selling" or "buying" information. Something I find logically impossible, for the many reasons I outlined, you find "obviously possible" because "everybody is doing it". And so I am telling you that they are not doing it, for it is impossible, they pretend unwittingly to be doing it, because very few of them (luckily a growing number today) have examined in any detail what it is that they are "doing" or believing. This is, roughly, a form of belief equivalent to that held by some villagers of old, that the village shaman can bring down rain with a proper dance. The whole village is convinced it is the case, and here I am, trying to point out that there appears to be no corelation between the shaman's gyrations and rain, and I've got probability theory, statistical analysis and sample numbers to prove it. And you go: "Numbers, shnumbers, the shaman has done it, obviously, everyone in the village knows it to be so. Why, it rained just last Tuesdeay after that spectacular dance of his three weeks before! And it is quite moral for him to demand to be fed and housed lavishly, where would we be without rain?! Go away you unreasonable malcontent!"
I hope this clarifies things for you.
But what if the service involves no labour?
I can't think of any example not involving labour of people or that of equipment owned by people (like automated industrial machinery or computers or other similar physical objects). Please enlighten me.
But you are talking about a highly subjective thing. An orgasm is not just "neural impulses" - the same neural impulses in another person would not produce the same results in somebody else. Because my sexual preferences and experiences are different to yours. I am married to a different person than you, etc.
That does not change the fact that "an orgasm" was captured, even if it is specific to a person and it could only be played back to that person without additional processing of the data captured. The point was that the Shannon's information theory applies even in this case, its tenets like the Nyquist's theorem are in effect, etc.
Anyway, I need sleep, and cannot reply to the rest of your post tonight. The rest of this is interesting trivia - but you will not understand my posts unless you address the first points I made about morality and the semantics of "selling."
Fair enough. I hope I gave the answer you sought above.
The same can be said of Nazism, Communism, devil worship, homeopathic medicine..
And any other. I am not sure what the point is. That Capitalism is not an all-encompasing, flawless, super-system to end all economic systems? Have you got one like that?
So what? Just because something is not physical, and can be copied, does not mean it can't be sold.
I am afraid it cannot be, as the implication of its "sale" contradicts the transaction itself. Information can only be transmitted between parties. Such an act has an external appearance of a "sale" if money goes in the opposite direction but the thing being transmitted cannot be owned by anyone.
people sell software all the time, and it can be copied.
People also drive drunk off the road all the time. Husbands beat wives all the time. People also inject themselves with heroin all the time. Vast majority of people used to smoke cigarettes. The fact that "people" do something does not render it valid nor sane. What you just presented is a logical fallacy of Argumentum ad Populum.
But it obviously is possible, as it happens every day.
See above. The fact that people pretend that a sale occurred, sale it does not make. Only if such transaction can be supported by logic it would be so.
A service is just a concept, it has no physical presence. So how can one sell a service? What is the physical object that Google is selling?
As I already explained before, under the mercantile/capitalist system there are only two possible classes of things to be traded: physical private property and labour. Service falls under the category of labour. One can perform labour for pay and such labour can be measured by the change of state of physical objects, i.e. snow on the ground -> snow removed. Pile of metal -> a ship. Data not in available to you -> data entering your retinas.
When did I ever say that information should be treated like a physical object? Who is saying it should be?
That is the logical implication of you claiming that a "sale" of information is possible, which I explained several times already. You did not say this outright but as I explained, I simply take your positions to their logical conclusions. Conclusions which apparently upset you as you wish to deny them.
No. I never said that that copyright infringement was theft.
That is how it is commonly described by the media conglomerates and that is also a logical implication of the concept of "intellectual property" which is the logical implication of your stance that information can be "sold".
And listening to someone else's music in that manner is not even copyright infringement.
It is considered so in many places. An elevator playing music on you way up has to be licensed, so does a doctor's office with a CD playing on the secretary's desk.
Why are you arguing with things I never said?
I argue with the concepts which you are defending, and you seem to pretend your defense of copyright can be achieved only partially, that is you wish to talk only about the examples or implications which suit you, ignoring the rest. I am refusing to go along.
Yes, why not? It often good to pay for convenience, even if it might be available for free elsewhere.
This is getting ludicrous. "Convenience" can only be achieved by re-arranging the physical objects around you or by obtaining such physical objects. In the first case someone has performed labour (i.e. service) for you and in the second you have purchased a physical object. I assume that you are referring to the first case, where someone has arranged puffs of electrons in a way convenient for you by duplicating them from some other, similarly arranged puffs of electrons, for which service you did pay. Is there anything unclear about this?
Raw facts are not Intellectual Property.
But in accordance with copyright law, the weather report on the weather channel is copyrighted. And according to you it can be sold. Ergo it is "intellectual property". Otherwise the Startup Weather Channel 2 would simply read the report from Channel 1 and rebroadcast it, no?
Just a point of fact - feudalism has nothing to do with luck.
Yes, the offspring of the lords was simply more clever to lign up in a right queue to get born to the right parents, or perhaps more loved by whatever demented god you believe in and thus "pre-ordained" to become masters. The rest of the "inferiors" were cast down where they belonged, into abject slavery, with no chance, ever, of changing their station. This is the only way to "explain" this by not using random chance.
Those societies required quite a bit of work and human ingenuity to develop a society that has been incorrectly labeled since it's inception as dictatorial
Ingenuity to survive on the part of the serfs? True. Ingenuity on the part of the lords to make the serfs murder each other in order to take over a rival lords domain and to own and control the serfs outright? True. Dictatorial? A modern dictator is but an innocent kitten compared to lords of old who would execute maids for not serving dinner fast enough, who would impale every woman man and child in whole villages because they simply could, burn on the stake, quarter or otherwise execute hundreds for daring to object to any of the lord's actions or imperators who would murder untold millions in ways that would make the Nazis blush just because they coveted more power or riches or because they were converts to the latest nutcase religion and the ones being slaugthered were not. I guess that is what you mean by "incorrectly", as the word "dictatorial" is far too weak to describe the horrors or the subjegation or the slavery or the attrocities or the massacres.
"Feudal" is a for all intents and purposes a four letter word. Anyone advocating or glorifying feudal societies is either a demented troglodyte with no comprehension of the implications of what he is talking about or a devious bastard dreaming of enslaving all those around him. Either way, he should be treated with extreme prejudice for he is a grave danger to anyone near him.
I'm just a history buff who is sick of extreme stereotypes of incredibly modern interpretation of intuitive and progressive ideas that were expounded during the middle ages...
A History buff? Middle ages? Something does not add up here. Middle ages are but a tail end of the feudal period (although as nasty as any before it). Try something like Ancient Egypt or Gingis Khan's Mongolia or the Imperial China or the Caliphate. And yes, in all of that time some isolated individuals, who happened to be in the favour of the king de jeur or simply were lucky enough to get ignored by him, worked to advance science, culture (usually by building the kings' monuments) and phillosophy, assuming that is, that they did not in any way antagonize the Church or the Caliph, in which case they ended up on the stake or worse.
should...should...should...should...should...
And who is to be judge of what others "should" do, you?
I am expressing my opinion on how I believe things should work and trying to back that opinion with what I hope is logical reasoning. As any such opinion on societal structures, it is shared by some and disregarded by others. However in a clash of ideas, it is quite apparent that those who can back their opinions up by constructing a logical, internally consistent argument will trump those who are unable to do so. This is the only possible yardstik in such a contest, and it has little to do with who is doing the reasoning. The ideas are what counts.
There is one and only one reason that better programmers than Gates didn't end up in Gates' shoes: They didn't take advantage of the business environment of the time as Gates did. Period.
As they had no opportunity to do so, and your point is?
It is irrelevant how smart someone is, or how competent, or healthy, or any other objective measure, if they do not have the savvy.
If by savvy you mean being born to a right family and having the right connections at the right time, combined with some other, very large, wealthy and established global company behaving irrationally in your favour, then it is true. If by savvy you mean using your boundless greed coupled with a complete lack of scruples to abuse the consumers and the marketplace in general, then it is true indeed.
I don't begrudge Gates his fortune, because I grasp the economic fact that, in the nearly-free market that software was, he maneuvered, contracted, bought and sold with consumate skill.
Err, no. At least the part about the free-market in software. The whole point was that the insane decisions of IBM's PC division have destroyed the free-market in software and replaced it with a Microsoft-centric one. The rest about his shenaningas is true. He is a very competent swindler indeed. However you conveniently forgot about what I was saying before, that in a true free-market, capitalist society vastly dominant market players cannot exist, never you mind near-monopolies. My point is that irrespective of Gates' dives into the moral gutter, a far larger, systemic problem of disproprotionate accumulation of wealth exists, demonstrating critical failures of the system of which he is but a demonstration.
People who bought his product did so because they believed that they received the best value for their dollar by doing so, even if you disagree with them.
No. Vast majority of them had simply no choice in the matter, or their alternate choice was severely penalized. That is how monopolies operate. And that is in addition to their lack of understanding of what they are purchasing (another crucial failure of the capitalist model - an uninformed consumer).
Indeed, if their choices were wrong, their competition has an opportunity to step in and make better choices, thereby undercutting their costs.
No they did not. Microsoft software is irretrievably bundled with the PC hardware for a vast majority of the PCs sold on the planet. This creates a monoculture, forcing a vast majority of developers into supporting this system regardless of its merits. It is a self-reinforcing trap. Should you wish to sell a competing product, the consumer still pays Microsoft since they cannot easily obtain a PC without Microsoft software. Linux users are frequently subsidising Microsoft as they have to buy computers with Windows on them and then erase the system, thus Gates has been paid for many Linux installations. If this is "competition" in your books, I would hate to see how your version of "monopoly" looks like.
But it will takes someone with better business savvy again to make that determination and profit by it.
If by savvy you mean hiring a band of mercenaries to kill Gates, all of the top Microsoft employees and all the major shareholders, blowing up the HQ and all the servers a
As Shakespeare said, "...brevity is the soul of wit."
That is why the old master wrote all those three hour long plays.
And, with apologies to the poet, you doth protest too much, methinks.
And here I thought I was being amusing. And since we are talking Shakespeare, let us hope my attempts at humor do not provoke this reaction also: "I will bite thee by the ear for that jest."
C/PM was an option. It arrived too late and cost too much.
Microsoft was strongly positioned in language/development tools for the micro: the kind of partnership that is generallyy considered a plus when you want to introduce a new platform.
That is absolutely untrue. A large number of people and companies had BASIC for 8080. You do forget of course that the original PC did not have a DOS on it but a MS-BASIC built in in a ROM. DOS was not a Microsoft product and was simply purchased by them from a 3rd party with the money received from IBM for the BASIC license. CP/M was not a factor until then and since Microsoft did obtain an exclusive agreement to distribute DOS with the PC's, based on their ironclad contract (hello to Bill's father) CP/M was already at the same disadvantage DrDOS. GeoWorks or later OS/2 were at. That is it CP/M was an extra expense for the buyer and Microsoft got its money regardless.
The list of companies that tried and failed to bring computing to the masses based on the technology of the late 70's and 80's is a long one. Those aligned with Microsoft tended to find the right formula.
You mean those aligned with IBM? Because it was IBM's choices which produced the PC market, including the "XT Technical Manual" with its BIOS assembly listing and a complete schematic diagram of the PC which lead to the rise of the "clone" market. I am old enough to have had that manual.
Have you ever wondered why John D. Rockefeller called his company "Standard Oil?" In the wildcat days, lamp oils were expensive and had a tendency to explode. "The Standard" delivered a uniform product that was reasonably cheap and easy to handle. That was all most folks wanted in the end.
Standardisation and monopoly are not one and the same.
The break-up of the company didn't change buying patterns much.
Which only proves my point that it is possible (and in fact should be normal) for multiple vendors to supply competing products while still adhering to common standards.
But I'm of the opinion that MS did win _also_ because of delivering products users liked better than then much stronger competitors - that was just as much too fault for not doing the right things (Office vs Lotus/WP, Win3/95 vs alternatives incl.
That was far down the line when Microsoft was already an established, de-facto monopoly on the "desktop". In such scenario the battlefield was extremely heavily tilted in its favour.
And they especially won because they courted and supported the developer community far better than most, and created an ecosystem around their products that also benefited users (IMHO this is one of the core reasons for IBMs OS/2 fiasco, despite having far more resources than MS and huge marketing campaigns they were arrogant and non-responsive vs the developer community, MS was quite the opposite).
I have to completely disagree. I did write some OS/2 software and I can tell you from personal experience that IBM went way out of its way to court developers, to the point of sendng $700 retail developers kits, complete with about 20 pounds of literature for free. And I was making a tiny vetrical application, personally, not as a part of a multinational team. Microsoft's developer "friendliness" is primarily a marketing myth. Most other companies had a similar stance, where it made sense.
There is far more, this is a complex issue, but IMHO people today seem to seriously underestimate the user popularity of MS and their products (and folly of competitors), and think of them as almost born into a world dominating evil monopoly from day 1.
I agree that it is a complex issue but unfortunately I do not believe that free, informed consumer choice played a large part in it. Microsoft excells at reducing that choice and tilting the field by means other then competition on the product's merits to achieve those ends. That is Microsoft's primary strength and the key to its success.
What the hell are you talking about? Why can't one make a transaction involving information? What are these "attributes" you are talking about?
A physical object, which is subject of trade, has the following properties: it can only occupy one physical location and can be controlled by persons physically manipulating it. Thus when you sell me a chair, you no longer retain it, I walk away with it and you don't. If you sell me a house, you no longer get to live in it, unless by my permission. If you sell me a car, you do not get to drive it afterwards unless it is my desire. None of this applies to information. Information (which is another word for 'thought' or 'integer numbers' or 'abstract concepts') does not obey these rules. One can both "sell" and retain the thing being "sold", and worse, the supposed purchaser has also a natural ability to disseminate it further. That is because information can exist, from the perspective of a mind, on only two states: known and unknown. It has no physical locality which is tied to it, its relationship with our minds is far more complex. If the rules governing information were applied to physical objects, one could, at a snap of one's fingers produce a copy of the chair I spoke of and leave you with your original property while walking away with "the same" chair. Both being original and indistinguishable identical things. One could sell a house and keep living in it, the same house, in the same location, somehow managing to have multiple occupants not meeting each other in the bathroom every day. This and many other, similar characteristcs (like for example a mathematical equivalence of a song and a large integer number) are what makes trade in information, in accordance with long established mercantile rules impossible.
If I were just paying for the media - then I should be just as happy with a blank CD, as one with information on it. But I would be very angry if I did not get the information I paid for.
Then again, if you do pay for the information, then you do posess a unique, fully owned, physical object which you are entitled to, like with any other physical object you ever purchased, sell away and the vendor has no ability to dictate "after sale" conditions. Make sure you do not listen to the CD though, because if you do and then sell it, you already have two copies of the information present and, according to your convoluted logic you are a "thief", no? Same goes for playing it loud, in a non-sound proofed house as the passer bys are commiting "theft" as they walk by your window, right?
I would not be paying for the labour. What if it took no labour to produce the information? That does not make the information any less useul.
So let me get this straight, you are paying for something which took no effort to produce and which presumably existed outside the activities of the "seller" and which can be reproduced at will, which is what the "seller" does. And then you claim that further reproduction of it constitutes "theft"? Am I missing something?
And yes, information can be traded. It can be stored electronically, or on paper, and sold.
Let's consider this closer. Any information can be, as a matter of fact established long ago by Shannon's information theory, encoded as a large binary number. Which is equivalent to a large integer number. So when you "buy" that number, what did you actually get? Are you now the owner of that number? Or is the number 81234 still someone's else's "property" and you only rent it? What about the infinite number of mathematical functions which map any given integer number on to another? Are those forbidden now, since number 81234 is someone's property? Can we multiply or divide it by 4? Who owns that now? Etc and so on.
No, it does not consitute theft. Tell me where I said it would. but the fact that I can hear the weather from a friend, does not stop that information from being sold to the first person.
I was working with CP/M on 8" floppies back then. And mainfraimes, some with punch cards (coding in Fortran) before that (although not for very long). That should give you an idea.
Your assumption here is that other capitalist greats were somehow more purely meritocratic. Look at Carnegie's involvement in the 1892 Homestead strike which resulted in about half a dozen deaths or Rockefeller, Jr.'s involvement in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which 66 people were killed. The perfect competition you are describing is more an economist's model than a description of real capitalism. Gates's tactics are not unusual for a robber baron.
I did not assume any such thing and you are quite correct as to the robber baron activities. I was merely discussing the supposed functioning of the system (as proposed by its theoreticians, not its beneficiaries) and contrasting it with the excess of Gates activities.
By the way, you don't have to invent anything novel or unique to be rewarded in a capital system.
That is true of course.
Mainy billions and billions of dollars have been earned by people with very simple products or services. Look at Walton and what he did with Walmart. They have a very simple strategy. Yet he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. How? By retailing products in high volumes at low prices to rural customers that were being ignored by Kmart and other retailers.
But you have failed to spot a disastrous malfunction of the system here: in a properly working capitalist society, Walton's store would have never been able to expand to the scale it did as an abuse of foreign nationals for profit would not be possible nor would competition sit idle. Walton's "success" depended on the competitors not following him initially into morally repugnant activities and which Walmart spent a lot of time hiding, defending or propagandizing away in its early days. That is the secret of the success of Walmart, not "providing a better value". In order for Kmart to compete, it would have to abuse the system in the same way Walmart did. Is that the meritocratic component Adam Smith spoke of?
A capital system rewards people for creating value for customers. If customers feel there is a value to your product or service, they will pay for it. You will be rewarded financially.
That only applies if customers are informed about merits of their purchase rather then bamboozled into it, or in case of Microsoft, outright forced.
The problem with piracy is quite the opposite. People clearly value the product (otherwise they wouldn't steal it). But they are taking it without paying for it, which is clearly illegal. Copying bits over the internet using bittorrent is just as wrong as stealing a CD from a retailer.
Again, you engage in the quite popular sport of conflating two separate elements: attempts to force information into becoming a physical object suitable for trade (and being stolen) irrespective of actual properties of information and a system for rewarding creators. The two are not one and the same. Simply some people see an ability to control and abuse society should they succeed in creating a framework whereby, contrary to all logic, information is locked down by totalitatian measures so a pretense of it being a physical object can be made. A reward for creators can be achieved my many other, far less egregious means, by systems such as the old fashioned patronage and is not part of the discussion of the so called "intellectual property".
I am a Canadian. British spelling (if I manage to spell things right).
Those property rights include the protection of intellectual property, software, etc.
Bzzt. Wrongo. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" as I meticulously explained in many posts already.
Without this protection, individuals or companies have no incentive to invest in any sort of venture. Why would you labor and save to buy a house if it would be stolen as soon as you purchase it? The same concept applies to companies. Why would they invest in any sort of product or service if people just steal their end product?
This is only true for real products, which are physical. Thoughts and ideas and art operate on a different plane, one to which capitalist rules of trade do not apply (because they do not have the necessary attributes for being traded) and therefore a different scheme needs to be applied. That scheme exists, and is quite simple: patronage.
The bottom line is that piracy is theft. Plain and simple.
You cannot steal thoughts any more then you can steal integer numbers. And as I already explained, repeatedly, the process of attempting to treat thoughts and ideas as they were physical objects subject to trade must, inevietably lead to totalitarian measures.
It doesn't matter what your opinions on Gates or Microsoft are. Capitalism relies on property protection rights.
One has nothing to do with the other. Nor does "intellectual property" have anything to do with renumeration of creators and everything to do with a greedy scam designed to enslave us all. That on top of being in direct contradiction of the tenets of capitalism.
Capitalism works. But you need property protection rights.
It works to a degree and property protection rights apply to actual private property, which information is not, due to its fundamental nature. Capitalism breaks when some try to apply it to things with which it is not compatible, such as art or science. Capitalism is not a religion, only a clever economic system. And as such, it has well defined boundaries.
Hey, BillyBoy did write EdLin!!! Gotta give him some credit for actually writing software. Amazing what innovative and user friendly software he can create when he really puts his mind to it - and even more so that this is possibly one of 2 packages (equally as useless) that they actually wrote instead of "acquired".
I am sorry to report that "edlin" is merely a poor clone of "ed", a UNIX editor which existed for ages by then and which Bill himself used when he was fulling around with the PDP-10 (or was it 11?) in his Altair days.
Wrong, IBM gave users the option of CP/M or Basic when they bought an IBM PC. The makers of CP/M were overly greedy and asked for about 3x what Microsoft was charging. There deserved to go down because Microsoft was more in tune with their customers.
No they did not, at least not from IBM which came with MS-DOS included. Bill got paid no matter what the user did, a theme which is still ringing true today with most of the computer vendors to the point that Microsoft tries to present people buying PCs without an OS as 'pirates'. Or have you been living under a rock?
This is indeed very complex issue and the points you mentioned are part of it. Don't forget however two cornerstone pieces of a control system: exponentially progressive taxation (to create friction in case of runaway market singularity like Microsoft), change of corporations back to social charter and extremely steep estate tax (to prevent creation of feudal estates and thus destruction of the meritocracy elements of the system). And many others, like nationalization of all natural resources (but not their extraction and processing which should remain private). The prevailing theme being that all of these are simple, unversally applied (without exceptions) rules which control market as a whole, instead of individual elements of it like particular companies.
Seems to me that someone is a bit jealous of Gates' success more than anything else... Probably still banging his head against the wall for not joining Microsoft when he had the chance...
Jealous is not the word. Try "dismayed at the great deficiencies of society" is more like it. My argument is not that either I or more likely one of those far more brilliant coders I spoke of should have replaced Gates. My point is that noone, ever should have been in Gate's today's position as competition should have established a vast network of suppliers cooperating within common standards based on the quality of their work. In such a scenario, each of these people would have his/her niche and the society would be better of for being far more egalitarian, just and ended up having much greater choice and strong scientific progress instead of what we have now. I am not sure if your realise this but Microsoft has set the computing industry back 50 years. Only now its products are beginning to feature ability to use terminals and begin to approach true mutitasking and multiuser functions. If you wait a few more years, we will have the 1960s OS virtualization coming back as a built-in feature. I don't know about you but I find the way things unfolded rather sad and tragic.
CP/M by Digital Research should have been a very stuanch competitor of the early MS-Dos versions. I've heard several different stories of IBM's treatment of Gary Kildall and Digital Research, so I'm not sure what happened and why they got excluded.
I am quite aware of CP/M (having used it in the glorious days of 8" floppies) but this simply was not in the cards. Gates and Gary hailed from different societal strata, and Bill's father was instrumental in securing the IBM contract for his son amongst other factors.
Well then wouldn't it seem that all those other (much better countries than the USA) would have limited this awful capitalist pig? I'm no fan of Gates, but if other coutries have so much better systems then how did M$ infiltrate them so well and make millions/billions from their citizens?
My statemen was in no way meant to single out USA (although it seems to be the center of most extreme excesses of this kind). Other western coutries have very similar problem of their capitalist societies being warped to the point of absurdity and their governments essentially being subservient to certain business classes.
Maybe, in the capitalist way, they provided a product that people found useful and people wanted it, how horrid!
That is simply not possible for the reasons already explained. Consider this: there is a rather obvious need for water in the society and if some unscrupulous tycoon managed to use some underhanded means to become the only water supplier of consequence in the world, you would have argued the exact same point. "Look! He is fullfilling a need and people buy his stuff! Captialism at work, no?". Regardless of the fact that his actions have essentially removed the primary engine of the marketplace, the competition and he has, for all practical purposes, become a feudal lord.
Apparently there was no need to "protect" any citizens.
See above.
Sure M$ has not been the best corporate citizen and doesnt have the highest business ethics but M$ alone doesnt prove the capitalist system is week or show failure.
I already explained the relationsip of capitalist theory, competition, contribution-reward mechanisms and accumulation of great wealth in one of the other posts on threads attached to this article. Please read it.
He advocated a licesing model against what is today commonly known as 'software piracy'. Nothing wrong about that.
Well, I actually find issue with that. Forgetting for the moment the hypocrisy of his stance (he was himself responsible for questionable usage of other people's software and equipment) the whole idea of "software piracy" is essentialy a propaganda construct. That is, 'software piracy' is impossible from the logical and phillosophical standpoint. Talking about it as if existed and casting people who merely take advantage of their most basic right of exchange of ideas and thoughts (this is what the 'piracy' amounts to) as "thieves" and yourself, who is advocating thought control on the basis of greed, as a 'noble defander' of righteous causes, can be only described as vile, immoral and thoroughly evil.
I hope you continue to post here even though you will probably come under personal attacks by the mob who are unable to approach anything resembling a rational thought and therefore must attack you to sustain their value of self.
Well, I would be a hypocrite if I did not admit that I can dish out as well as I can take. Generally I try not to, but things sometimes get out of hand. I am only human.
You already covered the answer: reward artists and inventors for their labor. Example: I'll pay you to write program X. Once written, the code goes into the public domain. Why would I pay you if the code will become free? Because there isn't yet a program X that meets my needs.
Yes indeed. This is simply the arts/science patronage model of old applied to software. And it is quite logical and consistent, and it does away will all those conundrums about the nature of information vs trade. This approach can be refined into combining public participation and commercial involvement, by setting up foundations for fundamental software research such as operating systems and leaving business to run their own foundations or trade groups to participate in recruiting programers to perform this work for more specific needs. It is quite simple, does not require perverse laws and does not promote establishment of totalitarian societal and technological structures. But then, it is also not capable of creating feudal fiefdoms and it prevents some from becoming gatekeepers of all knowledge of humanity and therefore it will be vigorously opposed, in favour of the said totalitarian measures. Some people simply are evil, immoral and do not wish the rest of us well. You can easily recognise some of the most vile of them by their incessant talk about "theft" of information.
I don't know about you, but I pay for the intellectual or creative content. The paper and ink is worthless to me. When I buy eBooks, I don't pay for the DRM, or the bytes. I pay for the content. I buy books, electronic or paper, based on whether they can inform me, emotionally or factually.
That is merely your preception or perhaps your intent. In fact you do pay only for the media and the processing of it. Information simply has no attributes which would make a transaction of its sale possible.
Yes, once the copyright expires. I buy lots of Shakespeare plays - but I can reproduce Shakespeare's insight as much as I please. Even under copyright, I can tranfer what I learned from the books to others, as long as I don't copy the text outright.
Then what is the difference between the information before the expiration of the copyright and after? Does it change qualities? Does it become a different thing? Or is it perhaps that some misguided people thought that by dictating conditions of what you can do with the thing you supposedly purchased after its sale (thus violating another of basic tenets of mercantile society) is a good way to encourage artists to produce more? And that this scheme, in addition to rewarding distributors and marketers of plastic disks far more then the artists, produces wee little side effect: that any logically consistent attempt to enforce this must result in one form of totalitarian repression or another? "copying the text outright"? Didn't you do so by reading it? Did not the CD player copy the data and then the amplifier, the speakers, the air particles and finaly your ears do so? Where is a differnce between "copying outright" and "orally transmitting it"? By hand signals? Etc and so on. And then of course onto more advanced questions like "what exactly is the information itself which is so protected?" A series of ink blots on paper? Electrons in neural pathways? Dimples in plastic? What exactly?
No. I pay for the creation of the work.
No you don't. Vast majority of the money goes to mass marketers, distributors, manipulators and gate keepers of the information. The artist receives a mere fraction of that money, and ironically, is rarely the "owner" of his own work. You are simply falling a victim to another aspect of this odious scam, that is the purposeful conflation of the attempts of turning information into private property and that of providing means of rewarding artists or scientists for their labour. In fact these two are separate and wholly independent issues. What the book and CD-sales model is attempting to do is to treat the process as if all creative activities were one and the same with assembly line production of mass market goods. It is the "idea as a plastic widget" model. The resulting effect is that of the artists receiving less in compensation for their effort then that under various patronage and pay for performance schemes of the past while some forms of "art" (read: kitsch) are manipulated and abused to create "products" by means of shameless marketing.
would rather not pay for the compilation - but even if that were free, I would voluntarily pay people who provide me with unique or interesting information.
That system is called patronage and is indeed a sane aproach. But you would be paying for the labour of producing the information, not the information itself as it has no possible way of being traded. It is simply so due to its fundamental nature.
I am in favor of all methods of unlinking these, so I can give more money to people who create intellectual value, rather than those who merely package it.
The problem is not unlinking the two, which happens regardless of the wishes of the stakeholders, and is merely a result of the nature of information. The problems is that an attempt to enforce a "mass market widget" model of renumeration to artists leads inevietably, logically and unavoidably to totalitarian measures. There is simply no other way to defeat the fu
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Services are labour, we've been over this repatedly. The end effect is a change in the state of physical objects, i.e. child taken care of during the time you work vs. child blowing up the house when left alone.
I just said it was possible, which it obviously is. I never said it was morally right. Many things are possible that are not morally right. Is it impossible to detonate a nuclear bomb, just because it is not morally correct?
This has nothing to do with morality but everything to do with logic. If every western government and anyone you have met claimed that it was possible to detonate a devastating, city busting, weapon of mass destruction made of out of hairballs, and in all seriousness supported an "arms race" in these "bombs", and with great, unshakeable conviction appeared to believe that a "mutual assured destruction" balance needs to be achieved, and thus we need more cats so that the Soviets do not outdo us, you would be roughly looking at the state of affairs I am looking at when you claim to be "selling" or "buying" information. Something I find logically impossible, for the many reasons I outlined, you find "obviously possible" because "everybody is doing it". And so I am telling you that they are not doing it, for it is impossible, they pretend unwittingly to be doing it, because very few of them (luckily a growing number today) have examined in any detail what it is that they are "doing" or believing. This is, roughly, a form of belief equivalent to that held by some villagers of old, that the village shaman can bring down rain with a proper dance. The whole village is convinced it is the case, and here I am, trying to point out that there appears to be no corelation between the shaman's gyrations and rain, and I've got probability theory, statistical analysis and sample numbers to prove it. And you go: "Numbers, shnumbers, the shaman has done it, obviously, everyone in the village knows it to be so. Why, it rained just last Tuesdeay after that spectacular dance of his three weeks before! And it is quite moral for him to demand to be fed and housed lavishly, where would we be without rain?! Go away you unreasonable malcontent!"
I hope this clarifies things for you.
But what if the service involves no labour?
I can't think of any example not involving labour of people or that of equipment owned by people (like automated industrial machinery or computers or other similar physical objects). Please enlighten me.
But you are talking about a highly subjective thing. An orgasm is not just "neural impulses" - the same neural impulses in another person would not produce the same results in somebody else. Because my sexual preferences and experiences are different to yours. I am married to a different person than you, etc.
That does not change the fact that "an orgasm" was captured, even if it is specific to a person and it could only be played back to that person without additional processing of the data captured. The point was that the Shannon's information theory applies even in this case, its tenets like the Nyquist's theorem are in effect, etc.
Anyway, I need sleep, and cannot reply to the rest of your post tonight. The rest of this is interesting trivia - but you will not understand my posts unless you address the first points I made about morality and the semantics of "selling."
Fair enough. I hope I gave the answer you sought above.
And any other. I am not sure what the point is. That Capitalism is not an all-encompasing, flawless, super-system to end all economic systems? Have you got one like that?
I am afraid it cannot be, as the implication of its "sale" contradicts the transaction itself. Information can only be transmitted between parties. Such an act has an external appearance of a "sale" if money goes in the opposite direction but the thing being transmitted cannot be owned by anyone.
people sell software all the time, and it can be copied.
People also drive drunk off the road all the time. Husbands beat wives all the time. People also inject themselves with heroin all the time. Vast majority of people used to smoke cigarettes. The fact that "people" do something does not render it valid nor sane. What you just presented is a logical fallacy of Argumentum ad Populum.
But it obviously is possible, as it happens every day.
See above. The fact that people pretend that a sale occurred, sale it does not make. Only if such transaction can be supported by logic it would be so.
A service is just a concept, it has no physical presence. So how can one sell a service? What is the physical object that Google is selling?
As I already explained before, under the mercantile/capitalist system there are only two possible classes of things to be traded: physical private property and labour. Service falls under the category of labour. One can perform labour for pay and such labour can be measured by the change of state of physical objects, i.e. snow on the ground -> snow removed. Pile of metal -> a ship. Data not in available to you -> data entering your retinas.
When did I ever say that information should be treated like a physical object? Who is saying it should be?
That is the logical implication of you claiming that a "sale" of information is possible, which I explained several times already. You did not say this outright but as I explained, I simply take your positions to their logical conclusions. Conclusions which apparently upset you as you wish to deny them.
No. I never said that that copyright infringement was theft.
That is how it is commonly described by the media conglomerates and that is also a logical implication of the concept of "intellectual property" which is the logical implication of your stance that information can be "sold".
And listening to someone else's music in that manner is not even copyright infringement.
It is considered so in many places. An elevator playing music on you way up has to be licensed, so does a doctor's office with a CD playing on the secretary's desk.
Why are you arguing with things I never said?
I argue with the concepts which you are defending, and you seem to pretend your defense of copyright can be achieved only partially, that is you wish to talk only about the examples or implications which suit you, ignoring the rest. I am refusing to go along.
Yes, why not? It often good to pay for convenience, even if it might be available for free elsewhere.
This is getting ludicrous. "Convenience" can only be achieved by re-arranging the physical objects around you or by obtaining such physical objects. In the first case someone has performed labour (i.e. service) for you and in the second you have purchased a physical object. I assume that you are referring to the first case, where someone has arranged puffs of electrons in a way convenient for you by duplicating them from some other, similarly arranged puffs of electrons, for which service you did pay. Is there anything unclear about this?
Raw facts are not Intellectual Property.
But in accordance with copyright law, the weather report on the weather channel is copyrighted. And according to you it can be sold. Ergo it is "intellectual property". Otherwise the Startup Weather Channel 2 would simply read the report from Channel 1 and rebroadcast it, no?
But facts are information.
True.
You clai
Yes, the offspring of the lords was simply more clever to lign up in a right queue to get born to the right parents, or perhaps more loved by whatever demented god you believe in and thus "pre-ordained" to become masters. The rest of the "inferiors" were cast down where they belonged, into abject slavery, with no chance, ever, of changing their station. This is the only way to "explain" this by not using random chance.
Those societies required quite a bit of work and human ingenuity to develop a society that has been incorrectly labeled since it's inception as dictatorial
Ingenuity to survive on the part of the serfs? True. Ingenuity on the part of the lords to make the serfs murder each other in order to take over a rival lords domain and to own and control the serfs outright? True. Dictatorial? A modern dictator is but an innocent kitten compared to lords of old who would execute maids for not serving dinner fast enough, who would impale every woman man and child in whole villages because they simply could, burn on the stake, quarter or otherwise execute hundreds for daring to object to any of the lord's actions or imperators who would murder untold millions in ways that would make the Nazis blush just because they coveted more power or riches or because they were converts to the latest nutcase religion and the ones being slaugthered were not. I guess that is what you mean by "incorrectly", as the word "dictatorial" is far too weak to describe the horrors or the subjegation or the slavery or the attrocities or the massacres.
"Feudal" is a for all intents and purposes a four letter word. Anyone advocating or glorifying feudal societies is either a demented troglodyte with no comprehension of the implications of what he is talking about or a devious bastard dreaming of enslaving all those around him. Either way, he should be treated with extreme prejudice for he is a grave danger to anyone near him.
I'm just a history buff who is sick of extreme stereotypes of incredibly modern interpretation of intuitive and progressive ideas that were expounded during the middle ages...
A History buff? Middle ages? Something does not add up here. Middle ages are but a tail end of the feudal period (although as nasty as any before it). Try something like Ancient Egypt or Gingis Khan's Mongolia or the Imperial China or the Caliphate. And yes, in all of that time some isolated individuals, who happened to be in the favour of the king de jeur or simply were lucky enough to get ignored by him, worked to advance science, culture (usually by building the kings' monuments) and phillosophy, assuming that is, that they did not in any way antagonize the Church or the Caliph, in which case they ended up on the stake or worse.
I am expressing my opinion on how I believe things should work and trying to back that opinion with what I hope is logical reasoning. As any such opinion on societal structures, it is shared by some and disregarded by others. However in a clash of ideas, it is quite apparent that those who can back their opinions up by constructing a logical, internally consistent argument will trump those who are unable to do so. This is the only possible yardstik in such a contest, and it has little to do with who is doing the reasoning. The ideas are what counts.
There is one and only one reason that better programmers than Gates didn't end up in Gates' shoes: They didn't take advantage of the business environment of the time as Gates did. Period.
As they had no opportunity to do so, and your point is?
It is irrelevant how smart someone is, or how competent, or healthy, or any other objective measure, if they do not have the savvy.
If by savvy you mean being born to a right family and having the right connections at the right time, combined with some other, very large, wealthy and established global company behaving irrationally in your favour, then it is true. If by savvy you mean using your boundless greed coupled with a complete lack of scruples to abuse the consumers and the marketplace in general, then it is true indeed.
I don't begrudge Gates his fortune, because I grasp the economic fact that, in the nearly-free market that software was, he maneuvered, contracted, bought and sold with consumate skill.
Err, no. At least the part about the free-market in software. The whole point was that the insane decisions of IBM's PC division have destroyed the free-market in software and replaced it with a Microsoft-centric one. The rest about his shenaningas is true. He is a very competent swindler indeed. However you conveniently forgot about what I was saying before, that in a true free-market, capitalist society vastly dominant market players cannot exist, never you mind near-monopolies. My point is that irrespective of Gates' dives into the moral gutter, a far larger, systemic problem of disproprotionate accumulation of wealth exists, demonstrating critical failures of the system of which he is but a demonstration.
People who bought his product did so because they believed that they received the best value for their dollar by doing so, even if you disagree with them.
No. Vast majority of them had simply no choice in the matter, or their alternate choice was severely penalized. That is how monopolies operate. And that is in addition to their lack of understanding of what they are purchasing (another crucial failure of the capitalist model - an uninformed consumer).
Indeed, if their choices were wrong, their competition has an opportunity to step in and make better choices, thereby undercutting their costs.
No they did not. Microsoft software is irretrievably bundled with the PC hardware for a vast majority of the PCs sold on the planet. This creates a monoculture, forcing a vast majority of developers into supporting this system regardless of its merits. It is a self-reinforcing trap. Should you wish to sell a competing product, the consumer still pays Microsoft since they cannot easily obtain a PC without Microsoft software. Linux users are frequently subsidising Microsoft as they have to buy computers with Windows on them and then erase the system, thus Gates has been paid for many Linux installations. If this is "competition" in your books, I would hate to see how your version of "monopoly" looks like.
But it will takes someone with better business savvy again to make that determination and profit by it.
If by savvy you mean hiring a band of mercenaries to kill Gates, all of the top Microsoft employees and all the major shareholders, blowing up the HQ and all the servers a
That is why the old master wrote all those three hour long plays.
And, with apologies to the poet, you doth protest too much, methinks.
And here I thought I was being amusing. And since we are talking Shakespeare, let us hope my attempts at humor do not provoke this reaction also: "I will bite thee by the ear for that jest."
That is absolutely untrue. A large number of people and companies had BASIC for 8080. You do forget of course that the original PC did not have a DOS on it but a MS-BASIC built in in a ROM. DOS was not a Microsoft product and was simply purchased by them from a 3rd party with the money received from IBM for the BASIC license. CP/M was not a factor until then and since Microsoft did obtain an exclusive agreement to distribute DOS with the PC's, based on their ironclad contract (hello to Bill's father) CP/M was already at the same disadvantage DrDOS. GeoWorks or later OS/2 were at. That is it CP/M was an extra expense for the buyer and Microsoft got its money regardless.
The list of companies that tried and failed to bring computing to the masses based on the technology of the late 70's and 80's is a long one. Those aligned with Microsoft tended to find the right formula.
You mean those aligned with IBM? Because it was IBM's choices which produced the PC market, including the "XT Technical Manual" with its BIOS assembly listing and a complete schematic diagram of the PC which lead to the rise of the "clone" market. I am old enough to have had that manual.
Have you ever wondered why John D. Rockefeller called his company "Standard Oil?" In the wildcat days, lamp oils were expensive and had a tendency to explode. "The Standard" delivered a uniform product that was reasonably cheap and easy to handle. That was all most folks wanted in the end.
Standardisation and monopoly are not one and the same.
The break-up of the company didn't change buying patterns much.
Which only proves my point that it is possible (and in fact should be normal) for multiple vendors to supply competing products while still adhering to common standards.
That was far down the line when Microsoft was already an established, de-facto monopoly on the "desktop". In such scenario the battlefield was extremely heavily tilted in its favour.
And they especially won because they courted and supported the developer community far better than most, and created an ecosystem around their products that also benefited users (IMHO this is one of the core reasons for IBMs OS/2 fiasco, despite having far more resources than MS and huge marketing campaigns they were arrogant and non-responsive vs the developer community, MS was quite the opposite).
I have to completely disagree. I did write some OS/2 software and I can tell you from personal experience that IBM went way out of its way to court developers, to the point of sendng $700 retail developers kits, complete with about 20 pounds of literature for free. And I was making a tiny vetrical application, personally, not as a part of a multinational team. Microsoft's developer "friendliness" is primarily a marketing myth. Most other companies had a similar stance, where it made sense.
There is far more, this is a complex issue, but IMHO people today seem to seriously underestimate the user popularity of MS and their products (and folly of competitors), and think of them as almost born into a world dominating evil monopoly from day 1.
I agree that it is a complex issue but unfortunately I do not believe that free, informed consumer choice played a large part in it. Microsoft excells at reducing that choice and tilting the field by means other then competition on the product's merits to achieve those ends. That is Microsoft's primary strength and the key to its success.
A physical object, which is subject of trade, has the following properties: it can only occupy one physical location and can be controlled by persons physically manipulating it. Thus when you sell me a chair, you no longer retain it, I walk away with it and you don't. If you sell me a house, you no longer get to live in it, unless by my permission. If you sell me a car, you do not get to drive it afterwards unless it is my desire. None of this applies to information. Information (which is another word for 'thought' or 'integer numbers' or 'abstract concepts') does not obey these rules. One can both "sell" and retain the thing being "sold", and worse, the supposed purchaser has also a natural ability to disseminate it further. That is because information can exist, from the perspective of a mind, on only two states: known and unknown. It has no physical locality which is tied to it, its relationship with our minds is far more complex. If the rules governing information were applied to physical objects, one could, at a snap of one's fingers produce a copy of the chair I spoke of and leave you with your original property while walking away with "the same" chair. Both being original and indistinguishable identical things. One could sell a house and keep living in it, the same house, in the same location, somehow managing to have multiple occupants not meeting each other in the bathroom every day. This and many other, similar characteristcs (like for example a mathematical equivalence of a song and a large integer number) are what makes trade in information, in accordance with long established mercantile rules impossible.
If I were just paying for the media - then I should be just as happy with a blank CD, as one with information on it. But I would be very angry if I did not get the information I paid for.
Then again, if you do pay for the information, then you do posess a unique, fully owned, physical object which you are entitled to, like with any other physical object you ever purchased, sell away and the vendor has no ability to dictate "after sale" conditions. Make sure you do not listen to the CD though, because if you do and then sell it, you already have two copies of the information present and, according to your convoluted logic you are a "thief", no? Same goes for playing it loud, in a non-sound proofed house as the passer bys are commiting "theft" as they walk by your window, right?
I would not be paying for the labour. What if it took no labour to produce the information? That does not make the information any less useul.
So let me get this straight, you are paying for something which took no effort to produce and which presumably existed outside the activities of the "seller" and which can be reproduced at will, which is what the "seller" does. And then you claim that further reproduction of it constitutes "theft"? Am I missing something?
And yes, information can be traded. It can be stored electronically, or on paper, and sold.
Let's consider this closer. Any information can be, as a matter of fact established long ago by Shannon's information theory, encoded as a large binary number. Which is equivalent to a large integer number. So when you "buy" that number, what did you actually get? Are you now the owner of that number? Or is the number 81234 still someone's else's "property" and you only rent it? What about the infinite number of mathematical functions which map any given integer number on to another? Are those forbidden now, since number 81234 is someone's property? Can we multiply or divide it by 4? Who owns that now? Etc and so on.
No, it does not consitute theft. Tell me where I said it would. but the fact that I can hear the weather from a friend, does not stop that information from being sold to the first person.
Then you are being logically inconsistent. I s
That was supposed to read "mainframes", my ability to spot spelling errors goes downhill with every passing year. Sigh.
I was working with CP/M on 8" floppies back then. And mainfraimes, some with punch cards (coding in Fortran) before that (although not for very long). That should give you an idea.
I did not assume any such thing and you are quite correct as to the robber baron activities. I was merely discussing the supposed functioning of the system (as proposed by its theoreticians, not its beneficiaries) and contrasting it with the excess of Gates activities.
That is true of course.
Mainy billions and billions of dollars have been earned by people with very simple products or services. Look at Walton and what he did with Walmart. They have a very simple strategy. Yet he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. How? By retailing products in high volumes at low prices to rural customers that were being ignored by Kmart and other retailers.
But you have failed to spot a disastrous malfunction of the system here: in a properly working capitalist society, Walton's store would have never been able to expand to the scale it did as an abuse of foreign nationals for profit would not be possible nor would competition sit idle. Walton's "success" depended on the competitors not following him initially into morally repugnant activities and which Walmart spent a lot of time hiding, defending or propagandizing away in its early days. That is the secret of the success of Walmart, not "providing a better value". In order for Kmart to compete, it would have to abuse the system in the same way Walmart did. Is that the meritocratic component Adam Smith spoke of?
A capital system rewards people for creating value for customers. If customers feel there is a value to your product or service, they will pay for it. You will be rewarded financially.
That only applies if customers are informed about merits of their purchase rather then bamboozled into it, or in case of Microsoft, outright forced.
The problem with piracy is quite the opposite. People clearly value the product (otherwise they wouldn't steal it). But they are taking it without paying for it, which is clearly illegal. Copying bits over the internet using bittorrent is just as wrong as stealing a CD from a retailer.
Again, you engage in the quite popular sport of conflating two separate elements: attempts to force information into becoming a physical object suitable for trade (and being stolen) irrespective of actual properties of information and a system for rewarding creators. The two are not one and the same. Simply some people see an ability to control and abuse society should they succeed in creating a framework whereby, contrary to all logic, information is locked down by totalitatian measures so a pretense of it being a physical object can be made. A reward for creators can be achieved my many other, far less egregious means, by systems such as the old fashioned patronage and is not part of the discussion of the so called "intellectual property".
I am a Canadian. British spelling (if I manage to spell things right).
Those property rights include the protection of intellectual property, software, etc.
Bzzt. Wrongo. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" as I meticulously explained in many posts already.
Without this protection, individuals or companies have no incentive to invest in any sort of venture. Why would you labor and save to buy a house if it would be stolen as soon as you purchase it? The same concept applies to companies. Why would they invest in any sort of product or service if people just steal their end product?
This is only true for real products, which are physical. Thoughts and ideas and art operate on a different plane, one to which capitalist rules of trade do not apply (because they do not have the necessary attributes for being traded) and therefore a different scheme needs to be applied. That scheme exists, and is quite simple: patronage.
The bottom line is that piracy is theft. Plain and simple.
You cannot steal thoughts any more then you can steal integer numbers. And as I already explained, repeatedly, the process of attempting to treat thoughts and ideas as they were physical objects subject to trade must, inevietably lead to totalitarian measures.
It doesn't matter what your opinions on Gates or Microsoft are. Capitalism relies on property protection rights.
One has nothing to do with the other. Nor does "intellectual property" have anything to do with renumeration of creators and everything to do with a greedy scam designed to enslave us all. That on top of being in direct contradiction of the tenets of capitalism.
Capitalism works. But you need property protection rights.
It works to a degree and property protection rights apply to actual private property, which information is not, due to its fundamental nature. Capitalism breaks when some try to apply it to things with which it is not compatible, such as art or science. Capitalism is not a religion, only a clever economic system. And as such, it has well defined boundaries.
I am sorry to report that "edlin" is merely a poor clone of "ed", a UNIX editor which existed for ages by then and which Bill himself used when he was fulling around with the PDP-10 (or was it 11?) in his Altair days.
No they did not, at least not from IBM which came with MS-DOS included. Bill got paid no matter what the user did, a theme which is still ringing true today with most of the computer vendors to the point that Microsoft tries to present people buying PCs without an OS as 'pirates'. Or have you been living under a rock?
This is indeed very complex issue and the points you mentioned are part of it. Don't forget however two cornerstone pieces of a control system: exponentially progressive taxation (to create friction in case of runaway market singularity like Microsoft), change of corporations back to social charter and extremely steep estate tax (to prevent creation of feudal estates and thus destruction of the meritocracy elements of the system). And many others, like nationalization of all natural resources (but not their extraction and processing which should remain private). The prevailing theme being that all of these are simple, unversally applied (without exceptions) rules which control market as a whole, instead of individual elements of it like particular companies.
Jealous is not the word. Try "dismayed at the great deficiencies of society" is more like it. My argument is not that either I or more likely one of those far more brilliant coders I spoke of should have replaced Gates. My point is that noone, ever should have been in Gate's today's position as competition should have established a vast network of suppliers cooperating within common standards based on the quality of their work. In such a scenario, each of these people would have his/her niche and the society would be better of for being far more egalitarian, just and ended up having much greater choice and strong scientific progress instead of what we have now. I am not sure if your realise this but Microsoft has set the computing industry back 50 years. Only now its products are beginning to feature ability to use terminals and begin to approach true mutitasking and multiuser functions. If you wait a few more years, we will have the 1960s OS virtualization coming back as a built-in feature. I don't know about you but I find the way things unfolded rather sad and tragic.
I am quite aware of CP/M (having used it in the glorious days of 8" floppies) but this simply was not in the cards. Gates and Gary hailed from different societal strata, and Bill's father was instrumental in securing the IBM contract for his son amongst other factors.
My statemen was in no way meant to single out USA (although it seems to be the center of most extreme excesses of this kind). Other western coutries have very similar problem of their capitalist societies being warped to the point of absurdity and their governments essentially being subservient to certain business classes.
Maybe, in the capitalist way, they provided a product that people found useful and people wanted it, how horrid!
That is simply not possible for the reasons already explained. Consider this: there is a rather obvious need for water in the society and if some unscrupulous tycoon managed to use some underhanded means to become the only water supplier of consequence in the world, you would have argued the exact same point. "Look! He is fullfilling a need and people buy his stuff! Captialism at work, no?". Regardless of the fact that his actions have essentially removed the primary engine of the marketplace, the competition and he has, for all practical purposes, become a feudal lord.
Apparently there was no need to "protect" any citizens.
See above.
Sure M$ has not been the best corporate citizen and doesnt have the highest business ethics but M$ alone doesnt prove the capitalist system is week or show failure.
I already explained the relationsip of capitalist theory, competition, contribution-reward mechanisms and accumulation of great wealth in one of the other posts on threads attached to this article. Please read it.
Well, I actually find issue with that. Forgetting for the moment the hypocrisy of his stance (he was himself responsible for questionable usage of other people's software and equipment) the whole idea of "software piracy" is essentialy a propaganda construct. That is, 'software piracy' is impossible from the logical and phillosophical standpoint. Talking about it as if existed and casting people who merely take advantage of their most basic right of exchange of ideas and thoughts (this is what the 'piracy' amounts to) as "thieves" and yourself, who is advocating thought control on the basis of greed, as a 'noble defander' of righteous causes, can be only described as vile, immoral and thoroughly evil.
Well, I would be a hypocrite if I did not admit that I can dish out as well as I can take. Generally I try not to, but things sometimes get out of hand. I am only human.
Yes indeed. This is simply the arts/science patronage model of old applied to software. And it is quite logical and consistent, and it does away will all those conundrums about the nature of information vs trade. This approach can be refined into combining public participation and commercial involvement, by setting up foundations for fundamental software research such as operating systems and leaving business to run their own foundations or trade groups to participate in recruiting programers to perform this work for more specific needs. It is quite simple, does not require perverse laws and does not promote establishment of totalitarian societal and technological structures. But then, it is also not capable of creating feudal fiefdoms and it prevents some from becoming gatekeepers of all knowledge of humanity and therefore it will be vigorously opposed, in favour of the said totalitarian measures. Some people simply are evil, immoral and do not wish the rest of us well. You can easily recognise some of the most vile of them by their incessant talk about "theft" of information.
Well, it depends how you measure it. It cannot be denied that the model works, to some degree, in some areas.
That is merely your preception or perhaps your intent. In fact you do pay only for the media and the processing of it. Information simply has no attributes which would make a transaction of its sale possible.
Yes, once the copyright expires. I buy lots of Shakespeare plays - but I can reproduce Shakespeare's insight as much as I please. Even under copyright, I can tranfer what I learned from the books to others, as long as I don't copy the text outright.
Then what is the difference between the information before the expiration of the copyright and after? Does it change qualities? Does it become a different thing? Or is it perhaps that some misguided people thought that by dictating conditions of what you can do with the thing you supposedly purchased after its sale (thus violating another of basic tenets of mercantile society) is a good way to encourage artists to produce more? And that this scheme, in addition to rewarding distributors and marketers of plastic disks far more then the artists, produces wee little side effect: that any logically consistent attempt to enforce this must result in one form of totalitarian repression or another? "copying the text outright"? Didn't you do so by reading it? Did not the CD player copy the data and then the amplifier, the speakers, the air particles and finaly your ears do so? Where is a differnce between "copying outright" and "orally transmitting it"? By hand signals? Etc and so on. And then of course onto more advanced questions like "what exactly is the information itself which is so protected?" A series of ink blots on paper? Electrons in neural pathways? Dimples in plastic? What exactly?
No. I pay for the creation of the work.
No you don't. Vast majority of the money goes to mass marketers, distributors, manipulators and gate keepers of the information. The artist receives a mere fraction of that money, and ironically, is rarely the "owner" of his own work. You are simply falling a victim to another aspect of this odious scam, that is the purposeful conflation of the attempts of turning information into private property and that of providing means of rewarding artists or scientists for their labour. In fact these two are separate and wholly independent issues. What the book and CD-sales model is attempting to do is to treat the process as if all creative activities were one and the same with assembly line production of mass market goods. It is the "idea as a plastic widget" model. The resulting effect is that of the artists receiving less in compensation for their effort then that under various patronage and pay for performance schemes of the past while some forms of "art" (read: kitsch) are manipulated and abused to create "products" by means of shameless marketing.
would rather not pay for the compilation - but even if that were free, I would voluntarily pay people who provide me with unique or interesting information.
That system is called patronage and is indeed a sane aproach. But you would be paying for the labour of producing the information, not the information itself as it has no possible way of being traded. It is simply so due to its fundamental nature.
I am in favor of all methods of unlinking these, so I can give more money to people who create intellectual value, rather than those who merely package it.
The problem is not unlinking the two, which happens regardless of the wishes of the stakeholders, and is merely a result of the nature of information. The problems is that an attempt to enforce a "mass market widget" model of renumeration to artists leads inevietably, logically and unavoidably to totalitarian measures. There is simply no other way to defeat the fu