Bullshit. Books, music, movies, games, and so on are not necessities, and you are in no way, shape, or form "forced" to buy them at any price. You are completely free to decide they aren't worth it, and vote with(out) your dollars.
I am also completely free to point out that the price of those products is being set artificially high by IP laws instead of being allowed to be set by a free market, that those IP laws violate _MY_ (and yours) basic property rights, and IP laws discourage innovation in our society, preventing us from being as competitive economically with countries that ignore IP laws. Our society would be much better off without IP laws.
The point you seem unwilling or unable to grasp is that all of this stuff requires an unfront investment in time, talent, energy, and dollars that needs to be recouped, and no one is going to make that investment if they're unable to do so and if their market decides en masse to steal their work the second it's released. Just because the first disc costs a buck, and the second costs a buck, doesn't mean that it didn't take $100 million to produce.
Oh, I understand all that just as well as you do, and probably better. I just don't think it's relevant.
In a free market, it doesn't matter how much effort you put into making something. It only matters at what price people are willing to buy. If you try to sell a product at a price that people aren't willing to buy, then your product isn't worth that much, no matter how much time & effort you put into it.
If someone tries to make a business out of selling things at a price too high, then that's called a BAD BUSINESS MODEL - and such a business, like the dot.coms, will eventually go out of business.
If you spent $100Mil to develop something that can be copied easily, then the free market sez: "You chose unwisely." People don't _deserve_ to make money just because they worked hard or spent a lot of money. They have to create stuff that people want to buy, and sell it at a price they are willing to pay.
If I spent a lot of time & effort breaking big rocks into little rocks with a sledgehammer, and then somehow (good lobbyist?) got a law passed saying that people HAD to buy little rocks for $100 a piece, would you say that I have a right to sell little rocks for $100? Because that's the same type of reasoning that IP proponents are using.
Such work is the property of those who create it, and their property rights, and their wishes, should be respected. Just as I (probably) would respect yours if you wrote some software and released it under the GPL.
About the only "respect" I would require from you would be to ask that you tell people where you got the code, i.e., don't pretend you wrote it. Other than that, I wouldn't feel that I have any right to tell you what to do with your own private property - and if I really wanted to do that, then I'd make you sign a contract with me spelling out all the terms up front before handing over my code.
Society would be much healthier if more people respected the rights of others, and worried more about their responsibilities than whatever it is they think they're entitled to today.
I completely agree, although not in the way you mean.
I think people should respect the private property rights of others, and to make a living by providing goods or products at a price people are willing to pay. Creative people who think they somehow "deserve" to get more money than any other craftsperson are just being greedy.
Under such a model, creative professionals would have to add to their risk analysis the serious risk of rampant copying. As a result, when making pricing decisions, they'd have to price the product higher in order to recoup the desired return on their time and money. Assuming that (as you keep repeating) the currently artificially inflated prices will be lowered, the return from creative work is less likely to recoup its cost (including opportunity cost).
Or they'd have to figure out how they can repackage the product or service in a way that people would be willing it to purchase it regularly at a particular price level. I have only vague ideas of what the market might look like, but that's really the point: if you let a free market work those issues out, evolutionary feedback will cause a good solution to occur. If you try and manage the market, then you are engaging in central-control economics - which, at the best, is going to be inefficient, and at the worst will let the people in charge loot the economy at the overall expense of society.
Now, there are ways around this dilemma - you can offer software as a service rather than a packaged product (which is how I make my living)
The CONCEPT of overriding private property rights for the benefit of the IP owners are the same between the two domains. If you can't see this, then your arguments aren't going to be that relevant no matter which domain you're arguing about.
The implementations are different, but the primary instrument of control is the same: allowing IP owners to override the private property rights of their "customers".
As a slightly more direct argument about copyright, I will also add that "cultural innovation" is not that different from scientific & engineering progress - most of it is highly dependent on previous cultural developments.
A lot of innovation comes from people trying variations something already existing or synthesizing multiple existing things together to form something new. Even things which are considered to be "absolutely unlike anything ever done before" are defined by a deliberate attempt to avoid being "unlike anything every done before".
So the same arguments I used for scientific & engineering progress are completely applicable to cultural innovation as well. Placing control over the accumulation & distribution of cultural "data" into the hands of a well-monied subset of the population will only slow the pace, variety & distribution of "cultural innovation".
I'm talking "intellectual property", which covers both copyrights & patents. The concepts I'm arguing are applicable to both, although the examples may differ.
how is the author, artist, producer, or programmer supposed to "make a buck in a free market" when there are no buyers?
Figure out a good or service at a price that people are willing to pay for - just like every other normal craftsperson on the planet.
Programming is easy - you write programs for people. People pay you when you write programs for them. I'm a CAD developer at a large electronics firm - they pay me to write code, and I earn a pretty comfortable living without demanding that I have absolute control over the code that I'm generating.
I would imagine that musicians/actors could perform for money, just like they've been doing for millenia.
I'm sure authors/producers can find their own niches - as long as there's a demand for entertainment, there will be a niche for people who can provide it - although that niche might not be in the large, corporate-controlled form that our society is used to.
That's the fun thing about a free market - you don't need some "central planning bureau" to tell everyone how they're supposed to make a living. People compare their skills against demand, and find themselves a niche to make a living - all without government intervention.
The only problem is that the words in a book, the music on a cd, and the images on a dvd are not your personal private property.
Yes they are. IP laws just prevent you from exercising all of your private property rights.
You purchased the rights to enjoy that copy, not to reproduce it.
That's just a legal fiction that the *IAA organizations want to make a reality, but unless you've signed a contract with the seller, that disc/book is your own private property & you would be able to do anything you want with it - if it weren't for IP laws.
All rights belong to the authors, musicians, producers.
The only right they have is the right to try and sell their goods & services. If nobody is willing to buy it at the price they are offering, then their goods/services weren't worth that much.
That's one of the annoying things about a free market: the seller doesn't get to decide how much the buyer is going to pay for the goods & services. IP laws distort the normal valuation that a free market would otherwise determine.
You know, the people who actually spent their time, efforts, talent, and dollars creating the work.
I could spend a lot of time, effort, talent & dollars carving a completely banal sculpture out of a mountain. That doesn't mean that I can force people to pay me if they happen to catch sight of it while they're driving along the road.
Similarly, just because somebody spends a lot of effort writing a song or book doesn't mean that they are _entitled_ to be able to force people to pay any more than they would in a normal business transaction. They have to offer a desired good or service at a price that people are willing to pay. And (unless they've convinced their customer to sign a contract), once they've sold their product or provided the service, they should not expect to continue to get money unless they _keep_ producing.
Normal craftspeople understand that if they want to keep on getting paid, they have to keep making product (or providing service). What's so special about musicians/authors that they have to be given special privileges under law (privileges which permit them to restrict other peoples' normal private property rights) in order to make a living? I don't see anything special about what they produce (and I make my living developing software).
Society would be much healthier without IP laws. People could do what they want with their private property, learn what they want, use what they learned, without worrying that they're going to have their lives ruined by a litigious control-freak who thinks they "deserve" more money than a free market would give them.
And our move from an industrial economy into a more knowledge based economy is only going to make this the all more important. So you're right, the laws in this capacity are going to become stronger... not weaker.
Then I suggest you prepare for a future where the U.S. & other "First Word" economies have fallen stagnant and collapsed into a pale shell of their former selves, while countries who ignore or at the most pay lip service to IP laws like China completely dominate the global economy.
You should study a little U.S. history. One of the main reasons that the U.S. became such an economic powerhouse is because it "stole" a LOT of industrial technology from Europe, over and above the European countrys' protests about "patented technology". The same situation is setting itself up again, except that the U.S. & its friends are going to be on the losing side.
So you are arguing that without copyright, there would be MORE content overall?
Yes. It would be incremental, and not tracked via a global registry, but removing the strangehold that IP "owners" have over the engineering market would greatly increase innovation.
Tell me, how does me preventing you from using MY creation prevent you from creating your OWN creation?
Do you honestly think that anyone can create anything significant that isn't based on something somebody else has already thought of? Can you think of _any_ useful invention that was made entirely from scratch?
What's the first thing you would think of doing to me if you learned that I had created a product that was based on yours, but with improvements? Try to stop me (or at least try to extort money from me), right? Isn't that a direct example of retarding my creativity?
The entire history of human technological, scientific & cultural progress is based the free accumulation & distribution of information. IP laws, by their inherent nature, directly oppose the type of information flow that encourages human progress.
So you don't believe that making a copy hurts the original author, by reducing the work's sales potential?
The keyword in your statement is "potential". I could potentially win the lottery, but I'm sure not going to sue someone for buying a winning lottery ticket on the basis that they've deprived me of future lottery winnings that I will somehow, inevitably receive.
Using the "losing potential sales" argument is just a justification for making money off artificially-imposed control over other peoples' private property.
certainly the opposite end of the spectrum - that copying does no harm to the author - is incorrect as well.
That's because you're stuck with the notion that the author somehow "deserves" to get money, regardless of whether a free market would award them that money for providing a given goods or service. Give up on that notion & let the free market decide what the value of something is.
Every single publisher online is using copyright and I assure you they see the bennefit of it.
They see the benefit of it for _themselves_. They don't care whether it provides a net societal benefit or not.
Yes, these protections are needed to encourage protection and creativity.
No they aren't. People will naturally be creative & problem-solvers. Artificial restrictions on the transfer of information serve only to put limits on peoples' creativity & ability to solve problems.
I can think of one thing the original owner is deprived of, specifically, the profit that might be gained from selling that which is produced by the use of his idea.
You can't deprive somebody of something they didn't have to begin with. It _is_ as simple as calling it "not theft".
To take the point a little further, what would you call somebody who thinks they somehow _deserve_ to get money from people who wouldn't ordinarily want to do a financial transaction with them? I heard some pretty bad names directed by right-wingers at "welfare mothers", but "welfare mothers" have nothing on how much has been sucked out of the economy by "intellectual property" owners.
What property rights do the buyers have if they didn't buy the product to begin with?
They bought a disc. The disc is their private property. They should be able to do anything they want with it that doesn't hurt anyone else. That includes making copies of that disc and handing them out to anyone they want.
I don't want to pay X hundred dollars for some good pro audio software, but that doesn't mean I have the right to make a copy of it from my friends disk for use in my recording business because I never paid for it.
Yes you WOULD have that right, because that disc is your personal property. "Intellectual property" laws prevent you from exercising your private property rights.
Working in a CS research group has allowed me to see how important commenting code actually is.
Working in several corporate software development environment has shown me how _BAD_ commenting can fubar a development process beyond belief. You've got some people spending hours of otherwise-productive time mindlessly writing 3-page header comments for every single little utility function to satisfy some corporate "commenting" policy, which end up being out-of-date a few days later. If you're lucky, the out-of-date information will just be slightly confusing - if you're really unlucky, the comment will be so misleading it will introduce fundamental misunderstandings into the development/design process.
If you've got to rely on comments to understand code, then either the code is really complicated, or you or the coder are incompetent. Good software should use the minimum comments necessary to explain how things work/how to use things to a competent reader, keep them up to date, and not much more.
One of the most important purposes of writing code is so it can be reused, and if you don't write good comments it will be very hard to reuse.
No, the best way to make sure your code is easy to reuse is to define a simple interface with easy-to-understand usage rules. If you've got that, then you'll be able to describe the interface to a competent programmer with simple documentation.
You really should comment every line of assembly, even when you just increment a register,
As long as you're commenting the _real_ effect of the instruction, and not just mindlessly repeating what the mnemonic already tells the reader. I've seen lots of stupid assembly-language comments like "increments the A register". Gee, thanks - I couldn't have figured that out from the "INC A" mnemonic.
can you be more specific about what your criteria are for being a bloodsucking parasite?
Someone who insists that they need special "laws" to protect a business model that would not be viable in a normal free market.
I don't think many people would pay for anything if they could get it all for free with no consequences and no effort.
Right, and that's the nature of a free market. Honest business people would take a look at that market and say: "Can't make money in that market. Better find something else to do that can." A greedy businessperson says: "Better use my contacts in the legislature, get a few laws passed put arbitrary restrictions what people can do with their own private property, and make money off of resultant artificial scarcity."
It is not the company's duty to satisfy its customers.
Yes it is. If a company can't convince customers to buy its products or services at a certain price level, then it should either change its products or services or change its price level. It is NOT the customer's duty to buy at that price level, and it is certainly not the company's "right" to force the customers to buy at a certain price level. And if the company doesn't understand that, then they should go out of business.
Stealing is not supposed to be an alternative in a capitalist marketplace.
And as has been often quoted, "copyright infringement" is not stealing, neither literally nor legally (patent infringement is not "stealing" either). So your remarks & emotional responses about "thieves" are completely misplaced.
I'd suggest you redirect your ire toward people who think it's OK to have special laws passed to protect their nonviable business models by violating your private property rights.
That doesn't mean that the people who aren't willing to pay for it are somehow entitled to it anyway.
Sure it does - normally, those people would be _entitled_ to do whatever they want with their own private property - including making copies of it to give to other people. "Intellectual property" laws do what they do by violating people's normal private property rights.
If the product is not worth the asking price, then say "no" and walk away.
You're talking free market terms, but are completely failing to take into account (or willfully ignoring) that by creating _artifical_ scarcity, "intellectual property" laws distort the pricing levels of the products from where they normally be if buyers & sellers were participating in a true free market.
If a seller can't make a buck in a free market, then why in the hell should the buyers be forced to give up their private property rights to support those sellers' failed business models?
you have to admit that if people weren't pirating things, there'd be no need for DRM.
Nah, if "content providers" weren't such greedy bloodsucking parasites, then there'd be no need for DRM.
how can you blame companies for trying to protect their profits when thousands of people are ripping them off every day?
Because those companies didn't actually EARN those profits by providing a desired good or service at a price that buyers were willing to pay? Like what would happen in a _real_ capitalistic market instead of a government-mandated one.
Stopping the US government from sucking money out of the economy in the form of Taxes is 'looting the government'??
No, getting the government to give lots of money to themselves & friends while at the same time cutting taxes to themselves is "looting the government".
Tool.
Riiigght...thanks for demonstrating your superior debating skills.
_That_ would be the difference from "intellectual property" laws - the parties involved have agreed to all terms up front, including waiving their own private property rights. "Intellectual property" laws override private property rights without requiring agreement from any of the parties involved.
And unlike with "intellectual property", if someone else saw those chairs, didn't sign a contract, but decided to make their own variations of the chairs, then the original carpenter wouldn't be able to do anything about it. That might be annoying to the carpenter, but it's a lot less intrusive on people's rights & closer to a true market economy than the attempt to control other peoples' property.
Let me know when you find an embryo capable of caring, although without a nervous system I'd be pretty skeptical that you'll ever find such a creature.
Living in China is probably great _IF_ you are one of the _RICH_, well-connected people.
If you're a poor person - well, let's just say that poor people in China are an object lesson about what you get when you let pure, undiluted capitalism run amuck.
Yes, China's economic system is a lot more capitalistic than any other First World country's economic system right now - the U.S.'s economic structure is positively socialistic compared to China's (although I'm sure the U.S. rightwing-nuts are trying hard to fix that - apparently by looting the U.S. government until it financially collapses).
but recieving a free copy of something someone else has invested time and money to produce is not a "right."
Doing what you want with your own private property, including making copies of it available for other people, _IS_ a right. That's why they call them "private property rights". "Intellectual property laws" put restrictions on everyone's normal private property rights, supposedly to encourage innovation in the society (although all the anecdotes I've seen lately seem to indicate that they're used primarily to retard innovation).
If a carpenter spent a lot of time and money creating a fancy piece of furniture, and sold it to someone else, they wouldn't expect to be able to control how that buyer (or any future buyers) used that piece of furniture. How does it provide a net benefit to society to allow "intellectual property" owners that kind of control over other peoples' private property rights?
The way that the FCC's auctions are set up is almost completely corrupt. You have to be mind-bogglingly rich to participate, you end up winning huge markets of what is supposed to be public property, and the government ends up pocketing the proceeds.
To make them more like my patent auction idea, you'd have to give the winning amount of money from each auction to the citizens whose "public" property you just auctioned off. Somehow, I don't see the special interests inside the government giving up that source of revenue.
Actually, I read about an alternative way of allocating frequencies that sounded pretty interesting (and took the decision making out of the hands of the government).
Basically, you let people buy & sell the privileges to particular segments of the airwaves just like property - they sell each other the privilege to broadcast in a particular geographic area, with a particular type of signal, at a particular power level, at a particular time, etc.
The sole function of the FCC would be to keep track of who has purchased what privilege, to make sure that those privileges don't conflict with anyone else's frequency allocation, and to make sure that no one is violating the technical conditions of what they have purchased.
The author of the paper was of the opinion that Congress set up the FCC in its highly-centralised control form so that the Congresscritters could use the FCC to control who got access to the "public" airwaves, and given the regular news of their shenanigans, I don't have any reason to disbelieve his analysis.
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I am also completely free to point out that the price of those products is being set artificially high by IP laws instead of being allowed to be set by a free market, that those IP laws violate _MY_ (and yours) basic property rights, and IP laws discourage innovation in our society, preventing us from being as competitive economically with countries that ignore IP laws. Our society would be much better off without IP laws.
Oh, I understand all that just as well as you do, and probably better. I just don't think it's relevant.
In a free market, it doesn't matter how much effort you put into making something. It only matters at what price people are willing to buy. If you try to sell a product at a price that people aren't willing to buy, then your product isn't worth that much, no matter how much time & effort you put into it.
If someone tries to make a business out of selling things at a price too high, then that's called a BAD BUSINESS MODEL - and such a business, like the dot.coms, will eventually go out of business.
If you spent $100Mil to develop something that can be copied easily, then the free market sez: "You chose unwisely." People don't _deserve_ to make money just because they worked hard or spent a lot of money. They have to create stuff that people want to buy, and sell it at a price they are willing to pay.
If I spent a lot of time & effort breaking big rocks into little rocks with a sledgehammer, and then somehow (good lobbyist?) got a law passed saying that people HAD to buy little rocks for $100 a piece, would you say that I have a right to sell little rocks for $100? Because that's the same type of reasoning that IP proponents are using.
About the only "respect" I would require from you would be to ask that you tell people where you got the code, i.e., don't pretend you wrote it. Other than that, I wouldn't feel that I have any right to tell you what to do with your own private property - and if I really wanted to do that, then I'd make you sign a contract with me spelling out all the terms up front before handing over my code.
I completely agree, although not in the way you mean.
I think people should respect the private property rights of others, and to make a living by providing goods or products at a price people are willing to pay. Creative people who think they somehow "deserve" to get more money than any other craftsperson are just being greedy.
Or they'd have to figure out how they can repackage the product or service in a way that people would be willing it to purchase it regularly at a particular price level. I have only vague ideas of what the market might look like, but that's really the point: if you let a free market work those issues out, evolutionary feedback will cause a good solution to occur. If you try and manage the market, then you are engaging in central-control economics - which, at the best, is going to be inefficient, and at the worst will let the people in charge loot the economy at the overall expense of society.
Yeah, I do software for service as well.
The RULES only describe implementation.
The CONCEPT of overriding private property rights for the benefit of the IP owners are the same between the two domains. If you can't see this, then your arguments aren't going to be that relevant no matter which domain you're arguing about.
The implementations are different, but the primary instrument of control is the same: allowing IP owners to override the private property rights of their "customers".
As a slightly more direct argument about copyright, I will also add that "cultural innovation" is not that different from scientific & engineering progress - most of it is highly dependent on previous cultural developments.
A lot of innovation comes from people trying variations something already existing or synthesizing multiple existing things together to form something new. Even things which are considered to be "absolutely unlike anything ever done before" are defined by a deliberate attempt to avoid being "unlike anything every done before".
So the same arguments I used for scientific & engineering progress are completely applicable to cultural innovation as well. Placing control over the accumulation & distribution of cultural "data" into the hands of a well-monied subset of the population will only slow the pace, variety & distribution of "cultural innovation".
I'm talking "intellectual property", which covers both copyrights & patents. The concepts I'm arguing are applicable to both, although the examples may differ.
Figure out a good or service at a price that people are willing to pay for - just like every other normal craftsperson on the planet.
Programming is easy - you write programs for people. People pay you when you write programs for them. I'm a CAD developer at a large electronics firm - they pay me to write code, and I earn a pretty comfortable living without demanding that I have absolute control over the code that I'm generating.
I would imagine that musicians/actors could perform for money, just like they've been doing for millenia.
I'm sure authors/producers can find their own niches - as long as there's a demand for entertainment, there will be a niche for people who can provide it - although that niche might not be in the large, corporate-controlled form that our society is used to.
That's the fun thing about a free market - you don't need some "central planning bureau" to tell everyone how they're supposed to make a living. People compare their skills against demand, and find themselves a niche to make a living - all without government intervention.
Yes they are. IP laws just prevent you from exercising all of your private property rights.
That's just a legal fiction that the *IAA organizations want to make a reality, but unless you've signed a contract with the seller, that disc/book is your own private property & you would be able to do anything you want with it - if it weren't for IP laws.
The only right they have is the right to try and sell their goods & services. If nobody is willing to buy it at the price they are offering, then their goods/services weren't worth that much.
That's one of the annoying things about a free market: the seller doesn't get to decide how much the buyer is going to pay for the goods & services. IP laws distort the normal valuation that a free market would otherwise determine.
I could spend a lot of time, effort, talent & dollars carving a completely banal sculpture out of a mountain. That doesn't mean that I can force people to pay me if they happen to catch sight of it while they're driving along the road.
Similarly, just because somebody spends a lot of effort writing a song or book doesn't mean that they are _entitled_ to be able to force people to pay any more than they would in a normal business transaction. They have to offer a desired good or service at a price that people are willing to pay. And (unless they've convinced their customer to sign a contract), once they've sold their product or provided the service, they should not expect to continue to get money unless they _keep_ producing.
Normal craftspeople understand that if they want to keep on getting paid, they have to keep making product (or providing service). What's so special about musicians/authors that they have to be given special privileges under law (privileges which permit them to restrict other peoples' normal private property rights) in order to make a living? I don't see anything special about what they produce (and I make my living developing software).
Society would be much healthier without IP laws. People could do what they want with their private property, learn what they want, use what they learned, without worrying that they're going to have their lives ruined by a litigious control-freak who thinks they "deserve" more money than a free market would give them.
Then I suggest you prepare for a future where the U.S. & other "First Word" economies have fallen stagnant and collapsed into a pale shell of their former selves, while countries who ignore or at the most pay lip service to IP laws like China completely dominate the global economy.
You should study a little U.S. history. One of the main reasons that the U.S. became such an economic powerhouse is because it "stole" a LOT of industrial technology from Europe, over and above the European countrys' protests about "patented technology". The same situation is setting itself up again, except that the U.S. & its friends are going to be on the losing side.
Yes. It would be incremental, and not tracked via a global registry, but removing the strangehold that IP "owners" have over the engineering market would greatly increase innovation.
Do you honestly think that anyone can create anything significant that isn't based on something somebody else has already thought of? Can you think of _any_ useful invention that was made entirely from scratch?
What's the first thing you would think of doing to me if you learned that I had created a product that was based on yours, but with improvements? Try to stop me (or at least try to extort money from me), right? Isn't that a direct example of retarding my creativity?
The entire history of human technological, scientific & cultural progress is based the free accumulation & distribution of information. IP laws, by their inherent nature, directly oppose the type of information flow that encourages human progress.
The keyword in your statement is "potential". I could potentially win the lottery, but I'm sure not going to sue someone for buying a winning lottery ticket on the basis that they've deprived me of future lottery winnings that I will somehow, inevitably receive.
Using the "losing potential sales" argument is just a justification for making money off artificially-imposed control over other peoples' private property.
That's because you're stuck with the notion that the author somehow "deserves" to get money, regardless of whether a free market would award them that money for providing a given goods or service. Give up on that notion & let the free market decide what the value of something is.
They see the benefit of it for _themselves_. They don't care whether it provides a net societal benefit or not.
No they aren't. People will naturally be creative & problem-solvers. Artificial restrictions on the transfer of information serve only to put limits on peoples' creativity & ability to solve problems.
You can't deprive somebody of something they didn't have to begin with. It _is_ as simple as calling it "not theft".
To take the point a little further, what would you call somebody who thinks they somehow _deserve_ to get money from people who wouldn't ordinarily want to do a financial transaction with them? I heard some pretty bad names directed by right-wingers at "welfare mothers", but "welfare mothers" have nothing on how much has been sucked out of the economy by "intellectual property" owners.
They bought a disc. The disc is their private property. They should be able to do anything they want with it that doesn't hurt anyone else. That includes making copies of that disc and handing them out to anyone they want.
Yes you WOULD have that right, because that disc is your personal property. "Intellectual property" laws prevent you from exercising your private property rights.
Working in several corporate software development environment has shown me how _BAD_ commenting can fubar a development process beyond belief. You've got some people spending hours of otherwise-productive time mindlessly writing 3-page header comments for every single little utility function to satisfy some corporate "commenting" policy, which end up being out-of-date a few days later. If you're lucky, the out-of-date information will just be slightly confusing - if you're really unlucky, the comment will be so misleading it will introduce fundamental misunderstandings into the development/design process.
If you've got to rely on comments to understand code, then either the code is really complicated, or you or the coder are incompetent. Good software should use the minimum comments necessary to explain how things work/how to use things to a competent reader, keep them up to date, and not much more.
No, the best way to make sure your code is easy to reuse is to define a simple interface with easy-to-understand usage rules. If you've got that, then you'll be able to describe the interface to a competent programmer with simple documentation.
As long as you're commenting the _real_ effect of the instruction, and not just mindlessly repeating what the mnemonic already tells the reader. I've seen lots of stupid assembly-language comments like "increments the A register". Gee, thanks - I couldn't have figured that out from the "INC A" mnemonic.
Someone who insists that they need special "laws" to protect a business model that would not be viable in a normal free market.
Right, and that's the nature of a free market. Honest business people would take a look at that market and say: "Can't make money in that market. Better find something else to do that can." A greedy businessperson says: "Better use my contacts in the legislature, get a few laws passed put arbitrary restrictions what people can do with their own private property, and make money off of resultant artificial scarcity."
Yes it is. If a company can't convince customers to buy its products or services at a certain price level, then it should either change its products or services or change its price level. It is NOT the customer's duty to buy at that price level, and it is certainly not the company's "right" to force the customers to buy at a certain price level. And if the company doesn't understand that, then they should go out of business.
And as has been often quoted, "copyright infringement" is not stealing, neither literally nor legally (patent infringement is not "stealing" either). So your remarks & emotional responses about "thieves" are completely misplaced.
I'd suggest you redirect your ire toward people who think it's OK to have special laws passed to protect their nonviable business models by violating your private property rights.
Sure it does - normally, those people would be _entitled_ to do whatever they want with their own private property - including making copies of it to give to other people. "Intellectual property" laws do what they do by violating people's normal private property rights.
You're talking free market terms, but are completely failing to take into account (or willfully ignoring) that by creating _artifical_ scarcity, "intellectual property" laws distort the pricing levels of the products from where they normally be if buyers & sellers were participating in a true free market.
If a seller can't make a buck in a free market, then why in the hell should the buyers be forced to give up their private property rights to support those sellers' failed business models?
Nah, if "content providers" weren't such greedy bloodsucking parasites, then there'd be no need for DRM.
Because those companies didn't actually EARN those profits by providing a desired good or service at a price that buyers were willing to pay? Like what would happen in a _real_ capitalistic market instead of a government-mandated one.
No, getting the government to give lots of money to themselves & friends while at the same time cutting taxes to themselves is "looting the government".
Riiigght...thanks for demonstrating your superior debating skills.
_That_ would be the difference from "intellectual property" laws - the parties involved have agreed to all terms up front, including waiving their own private property rights. "Intellectual property" laws override private property rights without requiring agreement from any of the parties involved.
And unlike with "intellectual property", if someone else saw those chairs, didn't sign a contract, but decided to make their own variations of the chairs, then the original carpenter wouldn't be able to do anything about it. That might be annoying to the carpenter, but it's a lot less intrusive on people's rights & closer to a true market economy than the attempt to control other peoples' property.
Let me know when you find an embryo capable of caring, although without a nervous system I'd be pretty skeptical that you'll ever find such a creature.
Living in China is probably great _IF_ you are one of the _RICH_, well-connected people.
If you're a poor person - well, let's just say that poor people in China are an object lesson about what you get when you let pure, undiluted capitalism run amuck.
Yes, China's economic system is a lot more capitalistic than any other First World country's economic system right now - the U.S.'s economic structure is positively socialistic compared to China's (although I'm sure the U.S. rightwing-nuts are trying hard to fix that - apparently by looting the U.S. government until it financially collapses).
Doing what you want with your own private property, including making copies of it available for other people, _IS_ a right. That's why they call them "private property rights". "Intellectual property laws" put restrictions on everyone's normal private property rights, supposedly to encourage innovation in the society (although all the anecdotes I've seen lately seem to indicate that they're used primarily to retard innovation).
If a carpenter spent a lot of time and money creating a fancy piece of furniture, and sold it to someone else, they wouldn't expect to be able to control how that buyer (or any future buyers) used that piece of furniture. How does it provide a net benefit to society to allow "intellectual property" owners that kind of control over other peoples' private property rights?
The way that the FCC's auctions are set up is almost completely corrupt. You have to be mind-bogglingly rich to participate, you end up winning huge markets of what is supposed to be public property, and the government ends up pocketing the proceeds.
To make them more like my patent auction idea, you'd have to give the winning amount of money from each auction to the citizens whose "public" property you just auctioned off. Somehow, I don't see the special interests inside the government giving up that source of revenue.
Actually, I read about an alternative way of allocating frequencies that sounded pretty interesting (and took the decision making out of the hands of the government).
Basically, you let people buy & sell the privileges to particular segments of the airwaves just like property - they sell each other the privilege to broadcast in a particular geographic area, with a particular type of signal, at a particular power level, at a particular time, etc.
The sole function of the FCC would be to keep track of who has purchased what privilege, to make sure that those privileges don't conflict with anyone else's frequency allocation, and to make sure that no one is violating the technical conditions of what they have purchased.
The author of the paper was of the opinion that Congress set up the FCC in its highly-centralised control form so that the Congresscritters could use the FCC to control who got access to the "public" airwaves, and given the regular news of their shenanigans, I don't have any reason to disbelieve his analysis.