Obviously, you didn't read the part that said the X-37 needs t be carried to orbit by another craft. It's a test bed for propulsion and reentry technologies. It was originally designed to test technologies for use in the orbital space plane. Now it's being used by DARPA.
Space ship one, while not an orbital vehicle, actually travels under its own power.
Okay, first of all, if I never read the word "strawman" again, it will be too soon. Second of all, that term refers to a specific type of argument, and does not refer to "choosing a highly specific, specialized case, and using that to try and show that private industry is always better than government" it refers to choosing an argument that is weaker than the presented argument, and proving it wrong, in order to prove your own argument right in all cases. In a sense, you create a "straw man" and defeat it. Of course, with all the misusage, and over usage around here, your confusion is understandable. One thing is for certain, simply calling some one else's argument a straw-man does not prove it wrong. That, in itself is a kind of straw man argument.
Furthermore your attempt to assert your intellectual authority is even less credible because you failed to notice that the person to whom you've responded was also the original poster. Not very observant of you.
"I could cherry-pick dozens of cases where the government has done a better job than private industry"
I'd like to see you try. Almost anything the government does now is not done by private industry. This isn't because the government does it better, necessary, but because the government is able to obtain funding for any project that has enough political capitol. I can't think of a single case where a government operation has proven more innovative or efficient than private industry. The only cases where a government solution could be considered "better" are the ones where private enterprise is not an option at all.
It's probably safe to say that if Burt Rutan could get together enough funding, he could probably do anything NASA does, at significantly lower cost.
The problem is many-fold. Pork, for one thing, prevents any government operation form being particularly efficient. Politicians see government projects as a way of providing welfare to their constituency, withought paying the political price of trying to do that outright.
Culture is another problem, though that comes into play with any large institution. Management and bureaucracy costs balloon. Individual units waste money trying to secure funding for themselves. In the case of private industry, the lack of efficiency that results form excessive size causes companies to spin-off units or hold individual units accountable for their own self-sufficency. Unfortunately, with government this can not happen. The result is an ever ballooning government budget, and continually decreasing government efficiency to boot. Fortunately, many elected representatives, who have an understanding of neo-classical economic theory, recognize the problem, and try to cut existing government programs whenever possible. Of course, this can not really be done in a fair and balanced way, and the cost cutting does not necessary reflect the reality of the situation (important institutions are often cut, bloated institutions are often left in place).
"Not even considering the fact that Burt Rutan is hardly typical of "private industry" as a whole. He's more of an enthusiast."
That's just absurd. Burt Rutan runs a company called Scaled Composites, they develop aircraft, and sell rights to the technology and design. He is not an enthusiast, because he makes money running his own business (enthusiasts spend money on their hobby, they don't make money at their job). Calling him an enthusiast is almost an insult, and it is certainly a huge understatement. He's an entrepreneur if he is anything.
The solution is simple, make the card reader tied to a certain account at the credit card company, to which cards may debit only. Then you'll always know where the money ends up, and the security problem becomes one of bank security. Unless criminals have some reason to want to debit from someone else's card into someone else's account.
It sounds like you've never heard of html, or txt, or rtf documents.
Don't wine to me about "software incompatibilities" I've been using a mac for over a decade, I know all about them. You can get around them without pirating software.
What you're whining about is inconvenience. You pirate software because you're a selfish bastard, and there's nothing more to it. You can make the excuses that it doesn't hurt anybody, or that they started it, but that doesn't mean that you're not a sniveling little weasel who is completely unworthy of your pampered, meaningless existence.
I'm not talking about whether or not a patent is legit. The thing here is how the company uses the patent. If a company has a patent in a particular field, doesn't use it, but does prevent other companies from using the patent through legal action, that's anticompetitive behavior.
Of course at the time, the guilds would keep such technology secret, so the only their members could profit by its use. Is this what you want to happen with software? It could be done with any software invention that is not obvious to the user.
Part of the idea of patents is that it gives people an incentive to share their invention, rather than keep it secret.
Even if you did, I don't see how that would be a bad thing. What is wrong with placing an advertisement here, where it is safe to say most/all readers would be interested in it. Certainly it is beneficial to the readers to have this information here, and also to the business to have the readers see that information. It's a win-win situation.
"Eventually, yes, unless the big labels manage to lock up the sales channels and keep artists from selling direct to consumers."
I don't know, it seems like they've missed the boat on that one. They should have been looking at internet distribution a decade ago if they wanted to do that.
Exit polls are almost always taken in large population centers, and do not necessary reflect the trends in voting across an entire state. It might be meaningful if you could compare the exit poll results at a certain polling station to the actual results at that station, but you can't.
In order to account for this, news agencies "normalize" their results once the election is in. This means that exit poll data is only useful to access what issues swung the election, and which demographics voted which way. They do not necessary reflect the actual outcome of the election. If you wanted to predict that, you would need to poll at every place of voting, and then normalize that with the number of people who voted at that station.
People should not have been surprised that the poll results differed from the election results. In a close election, this has a pretty good chance of happening. This is especially true when you consider that people living near large population centers (where most exit polls are taken) are more likely to vote democrat.
"but one thing I've become certain of is; the current system doesnt do what we'd like it to do. It desperately needs to be changed, because the costs it's incurring are starting to get painful."
This is true of the entire (civil) legal system. It consists in large part of people who are profiting by exacerbating the disagreements of others. It is almost completely unacceptable. I think there should be actual criminal liability associated with bringing a frivolous case before a court. Both for the plaintiff and for the lawyer.
Furthermore, in order for a patent to be honored, the patent holder must actually make an effort to develop the product described by the patent.
"Think pharmaceutical corporation R&D money with generics price structure."
The only way something like what would be possible is if pharmaceutical companies were forced to license their patents. The problem is that most of them are willing to do this, but ask a price other companies are unwilling to pay. I don't see how you could develop a rational system to determine the fair value of a patent license. Companies will usually ask for a price that would allow them to make a similar amount of money to what they would earn with the complete monopoly, which is quite a lot of money. I haven't found a solution to this problem, but I have come up with a slightly more holistic approach to the problem.
The way I see it, most scientists and engineers aren't really in the kinds of jobs where they should be salaried or paid by the hour. Most of them work on projects, they get that project done, then move on to another project. So, realistically there's no reason they should be tied to a particular company. It would be more realistic for them to be self-employed and move form project to project at their own discretion. If an engineer or group of engineers develop a patentable idea, they could take a patent out with all of their names on it. If the project was funded by a corporate entity, they would work out an agreement such that the corporation would get a preferential price on the IP (free), but the engineers would be legally entitled to set the licensing price for other people who might want access. This way, the engineers would a set a price for the license that would maximize their profit, which would almost certainly be less than what a corporation would ask, since they can't leverage their monopoly to push products.
I don't know, that's pretty far reaching. But I think that if they just changed patents so that they were owned by individuals only, and legally those individuals were entitled to sell the IP, it would go a long way.
I don't care about copyright, that's more of an entertainment thing (frivolous) and I don't think revising it would be of any benefit to society in general. Besides, that kind of revolution is about to happen in the music industry already.
"You might have a point if IP was actually tied to R&D costs, but as it is constructed today it isnt."
This is not exactly true. The less novel, and hard to arrive at an invention is, the less people are willing to pay for access. This means that the more expensive a new idea is to develop, the more money can be earned from selling it.
"And many indicators suggest the vast oversupply of intellectual material, from the existence of free software to the refusal rate of artists and writers"
While these are an indicator of the vast oversupply of intellectual material, they do not indicate a vast oversupply of worthwhile intellectual material. There is a difference.
"and do note, those cost differences are not even close to explained by R&D costs. Take a look at a pharmcorp financials and ask yourself why 'sales and administration' costs twice what 'R&D' costs, and why patent money is paying for that."
That is absurd, sales and administration is a large cost that all sizable institutions aimed at selling products incur. It is meaningless to compare this cost to R&D costs. First of all, in encompasses all of the businesses operations, not only their IP. Second of all, even if the company owned no IP, and did no R&D, it would still incur these costs at a similar rate. The extra money the can earn due to their IP is used to offset the costs of the R&D. Without that, they would not have the extra revenue to finance their R&D.
The fact is, only by selling products at a premium price, or licensing technology can a company recoup the costs of R&D. It is relatively easy to see that companies which sell products at a higher price than their competitors usually do so because they incur a higher R&D cost.
This effect is also noticeable with brand name items. A company may spend millions of dollars developing its brand image, but it is able to make them back by selling at an inflated price.
"If you still doubt that argumentation, take a look at statistics related to patents and technical development. The patent rate in countries correlates heavily with the density of the legal system (judges per capita, divorce rate, etc), while the innovation rate correlates far more with education and telecom."
Well that's just silly. I've never seen a good way to quantify "innovation rate" but I do know that any country with good education and telecom also usually has a dense legal system, so it's not reasonable to try to separate the two.
I'm all for eliminating lawyers, but I don't think eliminating laws is a good way to do that. Perhaps it would be better to simplify the draconic legal system, and encourage everyone to have a decent amount of education regarding the legal system. In fact, the current system where only a portion of the population knows anything about legal matters is morally reprehensible, but that's a rant for another day.
The important thing is that IP exists whether or not there is a legal structure in place to enforce it, so long as everyone acknowledges and respects it.
"R&D isnt that expensive"
Well, that depends how you look at it. If you consider that many ideas must be developed to yield a few money-making ideas, then it starts to look more expensive. It is not reasonable to expect companies or wealthy investors to invest money into new ideas without being able to make back their money (plus some extra to make it worth their while). In fact, they just plain won't do it. Big companies and wealthy investors didn't get that way by giving away money.
"The reality that if someone else takes it I no longer have the use of it."
Well, the reality of intellectual property is that if you spend $2.0 billion developing a new technology, and some one else takes the development work you've done and uses it, he doesn't have to pay the $2.0 billion you had to pay to get access to the information. The result is that the two of you are on a level playing field technologically, but you have $2.0 billion in debt. To be fair to the reality of the situation, the development cost must be spread over all of the users. That is the purpose if IP.
"Land is, indeed, a grey area. Culturally I think you'll find land property rights appear as land attains scarcity in particular cultures."
Not really. Land resources are pretty much always scarce, because people will reproduce until they fully use all of the available resources. The difference is that some people eventually realized that it was easier to acknowledge someone else's domain over a piece of land, than to be perpetually fighting over resources. This mutual recognition of access rights eventually evolved into the notion that land could be property.
"Property is one method of mediating access to limited resources. "
Wrong, property is a concept which exists to make that possible, it is not a method. Capitalism is one method of mediating access to limited resources. Property exists for the purpose of facilitating capitalism. Since I have proven that intellectual property is a scarce resource, it is reasonable to assume that intellectual property is necessary to facilitate capitalism as well. This is easy to understand once one realizes that no expensive research and development could take place in a capitalist economy without IP unless it was kept secret.
What do you mean "Once the cats out of the bag with information"? We've had intellectual property for hundreds of years. It's nothing new. Sure IP lay is always evolving, but property law changes from time to time as well.
"The thinking behing slavery is that it costs allot of money to import slaves from affrica, and the plantation masters need to be insured that they can recoop their investment before the slave leaves."
You say that something is wrong purely because the social standards today says that it is wrong, but you haven't considered the social context at the time, or what economic pressure lead to slavery in the first place. You're basically parroting back a commonly used societal meme without really considering what it means.
"Well my point is the thinking is irrelavent, and just because someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is. It's not about thinking"
You can not detach concepts from thought, thought comes first, then concepts. Property as a concept is derived from thought. If you'd give what I'm saying due consideration, you'd realize that property is a very abstract concept.
What I meant is that it opens up the possibility of licensing, where it did not exist before. That means that it reduces the "reinventing the wheel" problem. Obviously, licensing is not always the most profitable option, but it would never be without IP.
So, if you had a car, and you weren't using it, it would be okay for me to use it? Do you use anything you own all the time? Why is it still yours once you're done using it?
The thinking behind patents is that it costs a lot of money to develop new technologies. This means that the free market would reward new research and development with bankruptcy were it not for patents.
The thinking behind copyright is that creative professionals would not be able to make a living were it not for copyright.
The thinking behind "physical" property is that none of us would get anything done if we were all constantly fighting about what can be done with which object at what time.
It's all about living in an efficient, productive, free society rather living in an inefficient, unproductive, and potentially totalitarian society. Some people think that property is evil and wrong, but it sure as hell beats the alternative.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
You talk about "natural" limiting factors in terms producing physical goods, well I can tell you that it is hard to produce (worthwile) ideas as well.
So, now lets think about physical property. What is it, intrinsically, that makes something physical yours? There are some societies who think it is rather unnatural to believe that physical objects are the sole property of an individual. This is an understatement, to these cultures, the entire concept makes no sense. How can some claim to have dominion over a pice of land? They simply don't understand the concept.
This is much the same way you do not understand how an idea can be someone else's property. If you are raised to believe that intellectual property is real, than you will believe it.
It's easy to see that any property (including "physical" property) exists only because of the common agreement amongst individuals that it does. So, if everyone respected intellectual property as they do physical property, there would be no dispute.
"Copyrights are simply people coercing limits on things that have no natural limit for the sake of greed and monopoly."
You say that at though it's a bad thing.
"If someone said "lets limit food to the 3rd world more than it already is because we want to get more profit" most people would see this as the pure evil that it is."
The problem with this argument is that it almost never is profitable to do something that most people would consider evil when all costs are taken into account. How would limiting the sale of food to the third world bring about profit?
I know: 1) limit sale of food to third world 2) ??? 3) Profit!!!
You might say environmental damage and all that, but the problem with that argument is that environmental damage is a negative extremity that should be paid by the polluter (since it certainly costs someone a lot of money). It is bad, then, because the polluter is using a resource (the environment) which they are not paying for.
"As things are now, we reinvent the wheel way too much because of the way Intellectual Property is implemented. It hinders progress and innovation."
What are you talking about? At least when something is patented there's no reason an inventor shouldn't release information on the invention, and charge a fee for use of the invention.
As things are now, many companies will keep an invention secret, choosing to call it a trade secret. They do this because they figure that they can benefit more from having the advantage over the competition in perpetuity (essentially) than from announcing and licensing the technology. The result (especially in the microelectronics industry) is that each company has its own proprietary technology. This is very wasteful, and the solution would be more intellectual property rights, not less.
I don't know what leads you to believe that people need to reinvent the wheel because of IP.
"You charge people more and they would use them less."
That's true to some extent, but people need to use roads, so the usage wouldn't drop much, even with a fairly large price increase. Besides, if rural roads use more resources to maintain, it's deceptive to subsidize their cost with taxpayer dollars. A less resource intensive method of transpiration may exist (like light rail, trains, bicycles, aircraft) and would take over from roads in rural areas, since they are more efficient. With roads subsidized as they are now, that can never happen.
As far as universal service goes, I can't think of any universal needs that still need to be government subsidized. When highways were built, it was to allow for massive movement of people in the event of a nuclear war. Now, though, the need for a federally funded highway system is less clear, after all, people can still get around. Universal access to telephones is now possible (thanks to satellite) without any government subsidies. In my opinion, this means that it should no longer be government subsidized (you'll probably see this happen soon, anyway). I'm sure that there are contemporary examples of where universal access is still necessary, but I think there aren't nearly as many as the government pays for.
Right, that's my point, the idea is tied to the person who created it. It is their intellectual property. This isn't fucking rocket science, maybe you're the one who's dense.
"From a commercial standpoint research ventures generally fail becuase they require long-term investment with low payback."
Part of the problem here is the fact that people don't realize when expensive research had been performed, and are unwilling to pay for it. For example, many people are saying that the government should claim imminent domain and claim the patents that certain drug companies hold. The problem is that for each successful drug a company develops, 10 fail.
This is why you see much more commercial development in fields that are considered "non-essential" like entertainment or consumer electronics. Developing new technologies in these fields is no less expensive and risky, but people are more willing to pay for the R&D because they don't have this absurd notion that it is bad for a company to profit from their inventions.
Fundamentally, I don't see why a medical related or food related company is less entitled to make a profit. Indeed, this notion is what slows development in these fields. I wish more people would realize this, we'd all be a lot better off.
"The same idea applies to cleaning up the environment, building a complete road infrastructure, millitary and so on. "
I agree with points one and three, but how is the benefit of a complete road infrastructure transparent? Would it be so hard to charge people a fee to use roads? We all use them, it's not some kind of abstract need that is hard to grasp. That way, we'd get a better idea of how much transportation costs, which is good because we all pay for it.
This isn't about taking away peoples rights and freedom, it's about bookkeeping and bureaucracy. National ID cards would greatly reduce the need for archaic paperwork and needless form-filling. The result is a more efficient government. You already need to prove your identity to get anything done, this just makes that easier.
There's no reason this can't be at least as secure as a credit card, and we all use those.
What we really need is for the government to stop printing currency, and just issue accounts to people that they can credit into and debit out of. Then you could do away with income tax and property tax, and just tax a percentage of each transaction. You could tax each end of the transaction, that way inter-state commerce could be taxed differently on each end depending on the state and local taxes. I don't think it would really allow for anonymous transactions, but that's what barter is for, right.
If you're afraid of identity theft, bear in mind that with the government, you wouldn't necessarily be liable for spending done by someone else, and it'd be a lot easier for them to track down the perpetrator if all monetary transactions had to happen through the government accounts.
"Plagiarism is wrong because it is lying, not because some implied ownership."
Why is plagiarism lying? I thought you said that I ideas don't belong to anyone, doesn't that mean that I have as valid a claim to a piece of writing as anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you didn't read the part that said the X-37 needs t be carried to orbit by another craft. It's a test bed for propulsion and reentry technologies. It was originally designed to test technologies for use in the orbital space plane. Now it's being used by DARPA.
Space ship one, while not an orbital vehicle, actually travels under its own power.
Okay, first of all, if I never read the word "strawman" again, it will be too soon. Second of all, that term refers to a specific type of argument, and does not refer to "choosing a highly specific, specialized case, and using that to try and show that private industry is always better than government" it refers to choosing an argument that is weaker than the presented argument, and proving it wrong, in order to prove your own argument right in all cases. In a sense, you create a "straw man" and defeat it. Of course, with all the misusage, and over usage around here, your confusion is understandable. One thing is for certain, simply calling some one else's argument a straw-man does not prove it wrong. That, in itself is a kind of straw man argument.
Furthermore your attempt to assert your intellectual authority is even less credible because you failed to notice that the person to whom you've responded was also the original poster. Not very observant of you.
"I could cherry-pick dozens of cases where the government has done a better job than private industry"
I'd like to see you try. Almost anything the government does now is not done by private industry. This isn't because the government does it better, necessary, but because the government is able to obtain funding for any project that has enough political capitol. I can't think of a single case where a government operation has proven more innovative or efficient than private industry. The only cases where a government solution could be considered "better" are the ones where private enterprise is not an option at all.
It's probably safe to say that if Burt Rutan could get together enough funding, he could probably do anything NASA does, at significantly lower cost.
The problem is many-fold. Pork, for one thing, prevents any government operation form being particularly efficient. Politicians see government projects as a way of providing welfare to their constituency, withought paying the political price of trying to do that outright.
Culture is another problem, though that comes into play with any large institution. Management and bureaucracy costs balloon. Individual units waste money trying to secure funding for themselves. In the case of private industry, the lack of efficiency that results form excessive size causes companies to spin-off units or hold individual units accountable for their own self-sufficency. Unfortunately, with government this can not happen. The result is an ever ballooning government budget, and continually decreasing government efficiency to boot. Fortunately, many elected representatives, who have an understanding of neo-classical economic theory, recognize the problem, and try to cut existing government programs whenever possible. Of course, this can not really be done in a fair and balanced way, and the cost cutting does not necessary reflect the reality of the situation (important institutions are often cut, bloated institutions are often left in place).
"Not even considering the fact that Burt Rutan is hardly typical of "private industry" as a whole. He's more of an enthusiast."
That's just absurd. Burt Rutan runs a company called Scaled Composites, they develop aircraft, and sell rights to the technology and design. He is not an enthusiast, because he makes money running his own business (enthusiasts spend money on their hobby, they don't make money at their job). Calling him an enthusiast is almost an insult, and it is certainly a huge understatement. He's an entrepreneur if he is anything.
no, that wouldn't work. Never-mind.
The solution is simple, make the card reader tied to a certain account at the credit card company, to which cards may debit only. Then you'll always know where the money ends up, and the security problem becomes one of bank security. Unless criminals have some reason to want to debit from someone else's card into someone else's account.
It sounds like you've never heard of html, or txt, or rtf documents.
Don't wine to me about "software incompatibilities" I've been using a mac for over a decade, I know all about them. You can get around them without pirating software.
What you're whining about is inconvenience. You pirate software because you're a selfish bastard, and there's nothing more to it. You can make the excuses that it doesn't hurt anybody, or that they started it, but that doesn't mean that you're not a sniveling little weasel who is completely unworthy of your pampered, meaningless existence.
I'm not talking about whether or not a patent is legit. The thing here is how the company uses the patent. If a company has a patent in a particular field, doesn't use it, but does prevent other companies from using the patent through legal action, that's anticompetitive behavior.
Of course at the time, the guilds would keep such technology secret, so the only their members could profit by its use. Is this what you want to happen with software? It could be done with any software invention that is not obvious to the user.
Part of the idea of patents is that it gives people an incentive to share their invention, rather than keep it secret.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but those sound like pretty specifically defined activities, why not just pass laws against them?
I'm sure that if patent holders were criminally liable for this kind of anticompetitive behavior, they might be less likely to engage in them.
Even if you did, I don't see how that would be a bad thing. What is wrong with placing an advertisement here, where it is safe to say most/all readers would be interested in it. Certainly it is beneficial to the readers to have this information here, and also to the business to have the readers see that information. It's a win-win situation.
"Eventually, yes, unless the big labels manage to lock up the sales channels and keep artists from selling direct to consumers."
I don't know, it seems like they've missed the boat on that one. They should have been looking at internet distribution a decade ago if they wanted to do that.
Exit polls are almost always taken in large population centers, and do not necessary reflect the trends in voting across an entire state. It might be meaningful if you could compare the exit poll results at a certain polling station to the actual results at that station, but you can't.
In order to account for this, news agencies "normalize" their results once the election is in. This means that exit poll data is only useful to access what issues swung the election, and which demographics voted which way. They do not necessary reflect the actual outcome of the election. If you wanted to predict that, you would need to poll at every place of voting, and then normalize that with the number of people who voted at that station.
People should not have been surprised that the poll results differed from the election results. In a close election, this has a pretty good chance of happening. This is especially true when you consider that people living near large population centers (where most exit polls are taken) are more likely to vote democrat.
"but one thing I've become certain of is; the current system doesnt do what we'd like it to do. It desperately needs to be changed, because the costs it's incurring are starting to get painful."
This is true of the entire (civil) legal system. It consists in large part of people who are profiting by exacerbating the disagreements of others. It is almost completely unacceptable. I think there should be actual criminal liability associated with bringing a frivolous case before a court. Both for the plaintiff and for the lawyer.
Furthermore, in order for a patent to be honored, the patent holder must actually make an effort to develop the product described by the patent.
"Think pharmaceutical corporation R&D money with generics price structure."
The only way something like what would be possible is if pharmaceutical companies were forced to license their patents. The problem is that most of them are willing to do this, but ask a price other companies are unwilling to pay. I don't see how you could develop a rational system to determine the fair value of a patent license. Companies will usually ask for a price that would allow them to make a similar amount of money to what they would earn with the complete monopoly, which is quite a lot of money. I haven't found a solution to this problem, but I have come up with a slightly more holistic approach to the problem.
The way I see it, most scientists and engineers aren't really in the kinds of jobs where they should be salaried or paid by the hour. Most of them work on projects, they get that project done, then move on to another project. So, realistically there's no reason they should be tied to a particular company. It would be more realistic for them to be self-employed and move form project to project at their own discretion. If an engineer or group of engineers develop a patentable idea, they could take a patent out with all of their names on it. If the project was funded by a corporate entity, they would work out an agreement such that the corporation would get a preferential price on the IP (free), but the engineers would be legally entitled to set the licensing price for other people who might want access. This way, the engineers would a set a price for the license that would maximize their profit, which would almost certainly be less than what a corporation would ask, since they can't leverage their monopoly to push products.
I don't know, that's pretty far reaching. But I think that if they just changed patents so that they were owned by individuals only, and legally those individuals were entitled to sell the IP, it would go a long way.
I don't care about copyright, that's more of an entertainment thing (frivolous) and I don't think revising it would be of any benefit to society in general. Besides, that kind of revolution is about to happen in the music industry already.
"You might have a point if IP was actually tied to R&D costs, but as it is constructed today it isnt."
This is not exactly true. The less novel, and hard to arrive at an invention is, the less people are willing to pay for access. This means that the more expensive a new idea is to develop, the more money can be earned from selling it.
"And many indicators suggest the vast oversupply of intellectual material, from the existence of free software to the refusal rate of artists and writers"
While these are an indicator of the vast oversupply of intellectual material, they do not indicate a vast oversupply of worthwhile intellectual material. There is a difference.
"and do note, those cost differences are not even close to explained by R&D costs. Take a look at a pharmcorp financials and ask yourself why 'sales and administration' costs twice what 'R&D' costs, and why patent money is paying for that."
That is absurd, sales and administration is a large cost that all sizable institutions aimed at selling products incur. It is meaningless to compare this cost to R&D costs. First of all, in encompasses all of the businesses operations, not only their IP. Second of all, even if the company owned no IP, and did no R&D, it would still incur these costs at a similar rate. The extra money the can earn due to their IP is used to offset the costs of the R&D. Without that, they would not have the extra revenue to finance their R&D.
The fact is, only by selling products at a premium price, or licensing technology can a company recoup the costs of R&D. It is relatively easy to see that companies which sell products at a higher price than their competitors usually do so because they incur a higher R&D cost.
This effect is also noticeable with brand name items. A company may spend millions of dollars developing its brand image, but it is able to make them back by selling at an inflated price.
"If you still doubt that argumentation, take a look at statistics related to patents and technical development. The patent rate in countries correlates heavily with the density of the legal system (judges per capita, divorce rate, etc), while the innovation rate correlates far more with education and telecom."
Well that's just silly. I've never seen a good way to quantify "innovation rate" but I do know that any country with good education and telecom also usually has a dense legal system, so it's not reasonable to try to separate the two.
I'm all for eliminating lawyers, but I don't think eliminating laws is a good way to do that. Perhaps it would be better to simplify the draconic legal system, and encourage everyone to have a decent amount of education regarding the legal system. In fact, the current system where only a portion of the population knows anything about legal matters is morally reprehensible, but that's a rant for another day.
The important thing is that IP exists whether or not there is a legal structure in place to enforce it, so long as everyone acknowledges and respects it.
"R&D isnt that expensive"
Well, that depends how you look at it. If you consider that many ideas must be developed to yield a few money-making ideas, then it starts to look more expensive. It is not reasonable to expect companies or wealthy investors to invest money into new ideas without being able to make back their money (plus some extra to make it worth their while). In fact, they just plain won't do it. Big companies and wealthy investors didn't get that way by giving away money.
"The reality that if someone else takes it I no longer have the use of it."
Well, the reality of intellectual property is that if you spend $2.0 billion developing a new technology, and some one else takes the development work you've done and uses it, he doesn't have to pay the $2.0 billion you had to pay to get access to the information. The result is that the two of you are on a level playing field technologically, but you have $2.0 billion in debt. To be fair to the reality of the situation, the development cost must be spread over all of the users. That is the purpose if IP.
"Land is, indeed, a grey area. Culturally I think you'll find land property rights appear as land attains scarcity in particular cultures."
Not really. Land resources are pretty much always scarce, because people will reproduce until they fully use all of the available resources. The difference is that some people eventually realized that it was easier to acknowledge someone else's domain over a piece of land, than to be perpetually fighting over resources. This mutual recognition of access rights eventually evolved into the notion that land could be property.
"Property is one method of mediating access to limited resources. "
Wrong, property is a concept which exists to make that possible, it is not a method. Capitalism is one method of mediating access to limited resources. Property exists for the purpose of facilitating capitalism. Since I have proven that intellectual property is a scarce resource, it is reasonable to assume that intellectual property is necessary to facilitate capitalism as well. This is easy to understand once one realizes that no expensive research and development could take place in a capitalist economy without IP unless it was kept secret.
What do you mean "Once the cats out of the bag with information"? We've had intellectual property for hundreds of years. It's nothing new. Sure IP lay is always evolving, but property law changes from time to time as well.
"The thinking behing slavery is that it costs allot of money to import slaves from affrica, and the plantation masters need to be insured that they can recoop their investment before the slave leaves."
You say that something is wrong purely because the social standards today says that it is wrong, but you haven't considered the social context at the time, or what economic pressure lead to slavery in the first place. You're basically parroting back a commonly used societal meme without really considering what it means.
"Well my point is the thinking is irrelavent, and just because someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is. It's not about thinking"
You can not detach concepts from thought, thought comes first, then concepts. Property as a concept is derived from thought. If you'd give what I'm saying due consideration, you'd realize that property is a very abstract concept.
What I meant is that it opens up the possibility of licensing, where it did not exist before. That means that it reduces the "reinventing the wheel" problem. Obviously, licensing is not always the most profitable option, but it would never be without IP.
So, if you had a car, and you weren't using it, it would be okay for me to use it? Do you use anything you own all the time? Why is it still yours once you're done using it?
The thinking behind patents is that it costs a lot of money to develop new technologies. This means that the free market would reward new research and development with bankruptcy were it not for patents.
The thinking behind copyright is that creative professionals would not be able to make a living were it not for copyright.
The thinking behind "physical" property is that none of us would get anything done if we were all constantly fighting about what can be done with which object at what time.
It's all about living in an efficient, productive, free society rather living in an inefficient, unproductive, and potentially totalitarian society. Some people think that property is evil and wrong, but it sure as hell beats the alternative.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
You talk about "natural" limiting factors in terms producing physical goods, well I can tell you that it is hard to produce (worthwile) ideas as well.
So, now lets think about physical property. What is it, intrinsically, that makes something physical yours? There are some societies who think it is rather unnatural to believe that physical objects are the sole property of an individual. This is an understatement, to these cultures, the entire concept makes no sense. How can some claim to have dominion over a pice of land? They simply don't understand the concept.
This is much the same way you do not understand how an idea can be someone else's property. If you are raised to believe that intellectual property is real, than you will believe it.
It's easy to see that any property (including "physical" property) exists only because of the common agreement amongst individuals that it does. So, if everyone respected intellectual property as they do physical property, there would be no dispute.
"Copyrights are simply people coercing limits on things that have no natural limit for the sake of greed and monopoly."
You say that at though it's a bad thing.
"If someone said "lets limit food to the 3rd world more than it already is because we want to get more profit" most people would see this as the pure evil that it is."
The problem with this argument is that it almost never is profitable to do something that most people would consider evil when all costs are taken into account. How would limiting the sale of food to the third world bring about profit?
I know:
1) limit sale of food to third world
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
You might say environmental damage and all that, but the problem with that argument is that environmental damage is a negative extremity that should be paid by the polluter (since it certainly costs someone a lot of money). It is bad, then, because the polluter is using a resource (the environment) which they are not paying for.
"As things are now, we reinvent the wheel way too much because of the way Intellectual Property is implemented. It hinders progress and innovation."
What are you talking about? At least when something is patented there's no reason an inventor shouldn't release information on the invention, and charge a fee for use of the invention.
As things are now, many companies will keep an invention secret, choosing to call it a trade secret. They do this because they figure that they can benefit more from having the advantage over the competition in perpetuity (essentially) than from announcing and licensing the technology. The result (especially in the microelectronics industry) is that each company has its own proprietary technology. This is very wasteful, and the solution would be more intellectual property rights, not less.
I don't know what leads you to believe that people need to reinvent the wheel because of IP.
"You charge people more and they would use them less." That's true to some extent, but people need to use roads, so the usage wouldn't drop much, even with a fairly large price increase. Besides, if rural roads use more resources to maintain, it's deceptive to subsidize their cost with taxpayer dollars. A less resource intensive method of transpiration may exist (like light rail, trains, bicycles, aircraft) and would take over from roads in rural areas, since they are more efficient. With roads subsidized as they are now, that can never happen. As far as universal service goes, I can't think of any universal needs that still need to be government subsidized. When highways were built, it was to allow for massive movement of people in the event of a nuclear war. Now, though, the need for a federally funded highway system is less clear, after all, people can still get around. Universal access to telephones is now possible (thanks to satellite) without any government subsidies. In my opinion, this means that it should no longer be government subsidized (you'll probably see this happen soon, anyway). I'm sure that there are contemporary examples of where universal access is still necessary, but I think there aren't nearly as many as the government pays for.
Right, that's my point, the idea is tied to the person who created it. It is their intellectual property. This isn't fucking rocket science, maybe you're the one who's dense.
"From a commercial standpoint research ventures generally fail becuase they require long-term investment with low payback."
Part of the problem here is the fact that people don't realize when expensive research had been performed, and are unwilling to pay for it. For example, many people are saying that the government should claim imminent domain and claim the patents that certain drug companies hold. The problem is that for each successful drug a company develops, 10 fail.
This is why you see much more commercial development in fields that are considered "non-essential" like entertainment or consumer electronics. Developing new technologies in these fields is no less expensive and risky, but people are more willing to pay for the R&D because they don't have this absurd notion that it is bad for a company to profit from their inventions.
Fundamentally, I don't see why a medical related or food related company is less entitled to make a profit. Indeed, this notion is what slows development in these fields. I wish more people would realize this, we'd all be a lot better off.
"The same idea applies to cleaning up the environment, building a complete road infrastructure, millitary and so on. "
I agree with points one and three, but how is the benefit of a complete road infrastructure transparent? Would it be so hard to charge people a fee to use roads? We all use them, it's not some kind of abstract need that is hard to grasp. That way, we'd get a better idea of how much transportation costs, which is good because we all pay for it.
This isn't about taking away peoples rights and freedom, it's about bookkeeping and bureaucracy. National ID cards would greatly reduce the need for archaic paperwork and needless form-filling. The result is a more efficient government. You already need to prove your identity to get anything done, this just makes that easier.
There's no reason this can't be at least as secure as a credit card, and we all use those.
What we really need is for the government to stop printing currency, and just issue accounts to people that they can credit into and debit out of. Then you could do away with income tax and property tax, and just tax a percentage of each transaction. You could tax each end of the transaction, that way inter-state commerce could be taxed differently on each end depending on the state and local taxes. I don't think it would really allow for anonymous transactions, but that's what barter is for, right.
If you're afraid of identity theft, bear in mind that with the government, you wouldn't necessarily be liable for spending done by someone else, and it'd be a lot easier for them to track down the perpetrator if all monetary transactions had to happen through the government accounts.
Okay, what does it imply that isn't true?
"Plagiarism is wrong because it is lying, not because some implied ownership."
Why is plagiarism lying? I thought you said that I ideas don't belong to anyone, doesn't that mean that I have as valid a claim to a piece of writing as anyone else?