I've seen candidates misuse subclassing so many times
Dunno whether I would use that as a litmus test for candidates - I consider myself a reasonably experienced programmer, but for some problems deciding when to subclass or composite isn't always straightforward. I usually end up trying what I think will make my code the simplest, then refactor to one or the other depending on what I run into during the enhancement & maintenance phases.
Open Source Software just wasn't meant to make money.
Open Source software is not meant to make money by selling the software - if somebody wants to base a business model on Open Source software, then it has to be primarily based on service.
Patent law would apply to most manufacturing firms.
Patent law is another form of "intellectual property", and therefore is included in my statement about IP requiring special government enforcement overriding private property rights.
Contracts involve upfront agreements on terms between two private parties, which might involve voluntarily waiving specific private property rights for the purpose of reaching the agreement, and with the tacit acknowledge between both parties that the government will be the "enforcement agent". This is different than IP law, where the IP owner uses government enforcement power to override private property rights against the wishes or agreement of the property owner, and without any prior agreement or arrangement.
I'm not exactly sure what scope you mean by "liability laws", so I can't comment on that.
You can either have absolute freedom to do with property in your possession what you choose or freedom of contract...
snip...But there is nothing unique to IP about the conflict between contract law and freedoms based on possession (what you are calling "your property") in the first place.
Yes there is - as I just stated, contracts are _voluntary_ agreements between private parties to waive private property rights. IP laws allow the IP "owners" to override private property rights without the consent of the property owners.
I am assuming that, by default, a "legitimate" government enforces private property rights.
In order for a company to use a business model which depends on "intellectual property" to be successful, it must have cooperation from the government to override at least some of those private property rights, otherwise people will ignore its attempts to control their private property, and its business model will fail.
How does your modification of my original statement relate to these concepts?
In that 10 year scenario, we (society) didn't _have_ to give authors even those 10 years. We could've just insisted free market principles and required that people earn money the "old-fashioned" way: by providing desired goods & services. If you don't provide a good or service that someone desires at a price they're willing to pay, then you won't get paid, no matter how hard you worked.
Every craftsperson understands this concept - that they will continue to get paid only if they continue to provide desired goods & services. They don't expect to keep getting paid if they create one thing & then sit on their duff while other people pass it around. Only IP "owners" (not even necessarily the people who did the original creation) seem to think they "deserve" special laws to allow them to override private property rights & sidestep free-market forces.
"Intellectual property" owners should be grateful that they are allowed _any_ control over works at all once the works have left their hands.
How are you supposed to sell the 2015 version of your dictionary if you've got to compete against the 2005 edition of your own bloody dictionary, except that edition is free?
You've got to provide enough value that people will be willing to buy it at a price that you can afford to sell it at. If the old product has so much value that you can't make an effective competing product with it after 10 years, then there's really no point either for yourself or for the benefit of society to try and come up with the new product. It would serve both you & society much better to spend your resources on something else.
Disney might decide that actually developing original ideas was forever beyond its reach and just start reaching back into the 10+ year archive for concepts which had falled into the public domain
So? As much as people love to hate Disney, if an author hasn't made a buck off their work in 10 years, then I don't see why they should have the right to stop someone else from doing it. About the only condition I would think is justified, is that Disney should not be allowed to pretend that THEY wrote the story (i.e., they shouldn't be allowed to commit fraud).
Copyright was intended as a way of protecting the rights of a person to their works.
Actually, copyright was intended as a way for kings (i.e., the government) to control what was being published with the new-fangled printing presses. It was only later that somebody thought that a potential social benefit might be a good justification for it.
which is produced by a completely market-oriented company
No company which depends on "intellectual property" for its business model is "completely market-oriented" - by definition, they depend on government enforcement to override individuals' private property rights to support their business model.
errors in the spreadsheets can be just as good as bad.
Can be. But I'd argue that the probability of a bad result is usually much higher than the probability of a good result, and even with a good result it's usually not _that_ much better than the desired result. If you're playing the odds, it's almost a no-brainer to try and reduce unintentional errors (yes, I'm saying "unintentional errors" deliberately) as much as possible.
Normal life will usually provide enough chaos to keep a system perturbed without having to add it on purpose.
Of course, you could too, if you could guess the URL.
The obvious problem is that people don't NEED to know precisely what the URL is - they just have to crack your web server, then they'll have access to everything on it no matter what you've named it.
An immoral act doesn't justify another immoral act.
Sure, if copyright infringement were actually immoral. It is _illegal_, but that is not the same thing as immoral.
But what the MPAA is alleged to have done (bribing law enforcement agents) is definitely immoral, and damaging to society (as is any type of corruption in law enforcement). And if they're willing to act in such an immoral fashion, then why should anyone listen to them seriously when _they_ complain that other peoples' behavior is immoral?
Why bother with IP? Since the goal of IP is to promote useful & beneficial works for the good of society, why not just use normal tax monies & pay for arts/culture/research & development directly?
It seems like a much more straightforward solution: anybody could use the resultant works without worrying about their private property rights being stomped on, any smart entrepreneurs could figure out the best way to take advantage of the public-domain research & go make a bundle based on selling goods & services.
Not exactly, but you can still treat a society as a massively complicated system, and do a systems analysis on it. In the case of government, I would say that legislators are the programmers, the law is the source code, the executive branch runs the program & the judicial branch tries to disambiguate run-time conditions.
Now, of course, the source code is written in an ambiguous language, many generations of legislators have been patching the legacy system for a hundred years or so (and there is no systemic feedback requiring regular refactoring of the code), they are doing their patches on a "running system", the data being operated on (the members of society) can behave in irrational ways, the judges can make irrational decisions, and the members of all three branches have a vested interest in assuming as much control as they can over society.
Small wonder the system is getting f*cked up - any sane programmer would probably throw up their hands in despair & decide they needed to do a clean rewrite. Except for the fact that a whole lot of people would be hurt during the "reboot" (i.e., period of utter lawlessness).
Better yet, create IP "auctions", where the owners of IP can put their IP up for bid, they get the money from the winning bidder & the winning bidder gets the exclusive rights to the IP.
The bidders will perform due-diligence to decide a reasonable value for the IP (taking into account things like the possibility that the IP might be overturned for obviousness or prior art, or how many people have already licensed the use of the patent from the previous owner).
There might even be a rule that if the owner of the IP is not actively using their patent (and thereby bringing its benefits to society), they are FORCED to put the patent up for auction so that someone else (presumably somebody who can use the patent) will have access to it.
Of course, my personal preference is to abolish patents, since I feel that they trample on private property rights and have not been shown to have a net societal benefit, but I thought that an auction might be an interesting alternative.
Fair is if the reward matches the amount of effort that went into creating the invention.
Gee, I sure wish there was a market where I could choose the selling price based on how much work I put into the product. But most "free markets" are based on what the BUYER is willing to pay, not what the seller wants the buyer to pay.
Well, by definition, patents prevent development of ideas. If I wanted a society policy to stimulate innovation, I would've thought the obvious solution was for the society to collectively pay for it (publicly-financed research & development, with results available for any entrepreneurs to take it & run), but some people seem to prefer the counter-intuitive attempt.
I hear too much rhetoric and NO hard data from either side.
I would agree with this, but would respond that in the absence of hard data, general policies should be structured in favor of something that we KNOW is good: private property rights. As the legal system stands now, "intellectual property" laws are allowed to ride roughshod over normal peoples' private property rights without any solid justification of the overall societal benefit.
Yes, balancing the rights of authors to their works and the right of the public to access those works free of charge for fair use or after a 'reasonable' length of time makes sense.
Not to me. After you go and say there is no solid evidence either way, why do you turn around & say that enforcing copyright "makes sense"? From who's viewpoint?
The issue of what constitutes 'fair use' and what is 'reasonable time' should once again be backed up with data that shows that under a given copyright system 1) authors are being remunerated fairly, 2) the creation of new works are not being unduly stiffled and 3) the public is not being hampered in their fair usage.
Too complicated, and allows too many ways for people who are good at gaming the system to trample all over peoples' private property rights.
Why don't you just stick to basic free market principles: assume that people should be fairly compensated when they have provided a desired good or service? Why do things have to be more complicated than that?
If you can't provide a good or service at a better value than your competitors, then the free market sez that you shouldn't stay in that business. People who believe that businesses need the government to trample over peoples' private property rights so that those failing businesses can stay afloat are actually fascists, although they tend to wrap themselves in the "capitalism" flag.
Who decides what "values your country is built on", and whether they're worth keeping or not? Christian fundamentalists? Muslim fundamentalists? You? Me?
The whole point behind letting criminals vote is as a systemic (not based on individual peoples' judgements or opinions) negative feedback on an overly-repressive legal system. Any mechanism to limit peoples' voting rights will be exploited by demagogues &/ tyrants to disenfranchise possible opponents. About the only reason I can think of for really not allowing someone to vote is true mental incompetence (like for young children) - although unless this limitation is carefully defined, it could still be used to disenfranchise important voting blocs.
If your legal system is not repressive, then you won't have many criminals, and the effects of their vote will be insignificant. If your legal system _is_ repressive, then the votes of the criminals WILL be significant, and there should be some kind of blowback against the legal system.
This is a GOOD thing, and is necessary to try and keep the legal system working for the bulk of the society instead of for a privileged subset.
You don't need to make any exceptions for this to work. Even among the criminal population, there is only a small percentage of people who _prefer_ a violent lifestyle (although they are sometimes forced into it). They will not be able to have a statistically significant effect on the results of voting (although the propaganda will be interesting if an issue is close:-).
Of course, if someone feels strongly that the rest of the population should be controlled in a certain way, and the rest of the population doesn't agree with them, then I would argue that the would-be-controller needs to be strongly "put in their place".
Without protection from theft, production companies will loose the monitary incentive to invest money if films and music.
You mean without the ability to control other people's private property, production companies will have to find a way to make money based on free market principles. Yes, I agree.
Prisons are the next 'big business'. More and more tax dollars are going to be diverted into this industry. The more over-crowding, the better, (in the eyes of the politicos).
I firmly believe that prisoners should have the right to vote, and that the various state laws preventing them from voting is a big mistake. I figure that allowing prisoners to vote provides a valuable negative feedback against bad laws, since 1) in a healthy society where the laws accomodate most of the population, voting by prisoners won't have a significant effect on voting outcomes, and 2) if the lawmakers are passing so many laws that a significant portion of your population ends up in jail, then their influence should provide valuable negative feedback against the responsible lawmakers to get the system back on track.
To really solve the problem, you just get rid of the "intellectual property" laws & let the free market & private property rights do their thing. After the fallout, society would be a lot better off.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno whether I would use that as a litmus test for candidates - I consider myself a reasonably experienced programmer, but for some problems deciding when to subclass or composite isn't always straightforward. I usually end up trying what I think will make my code the simplest, then refactor to one or the other depending on what I run into during the enhancement & maintenance phases.
Open Source software is not meant to make money by selling the software - if somebody wants to base a business model on Open Source software, then it has to be primarily based on service.
Patent law is another form of "intellectual property", and therefore is included in my statement about IP requiring special government enforcement overriding private property rights.
Contracts involve upfront agreements on terms between two private parties, which might involve voluntarily waiving specific private property rights for the purpose of reaching the agreement, and with the tacit acknowledge between both parties that the government will be the "enforcement agent". This is different than IP law, where the IP owner uses government enforcement power to override private property rights against the wishes or agreement of the property owner, and without any prior agreement or arrangement.
I'm not exactly sure what scope you mean by "liability laws", so I can't comment on that.
Yes there is - as I just stated, contracts are _voluntary_ agreements between private parties to waive private property rights. IP laws allow the IP "owners" to override private property rights without the consent of the property owners.
I still don't see what you're trying to get at.
I am assuming that, by default, a "legitimate" government enforces private property rights.
In order for a company to use a business model which depends on "intellectual property" to be successful, it must have cooperation from the government to override at least some of those private property rights, otherwise people will ignore its attempts to control their private property, and its business model will fail.
How does your modification of my original statement relate to these concepts?
Again, I say: so?
In that 10 year scenario, we (society) didn't _have_ to give authors even those 10 years. We could've just insisted free market principles and required that people earn money the "old-fashioned" way: by providing desired goods & services. If you don't provide a good or service that someone desires at a price they're willing to pay, then you won't get paid, no matter how hard you worked.
Every craftsperson understands this concept - that they will continue to get paid only if they continue to provide desired goods & services. They don't expect to keep getting paid if they create one thing & then sit on their duff while other people pass it around. Only IP "owners" (not even necessarily the people who did the original creation) seem to think they "deserve" special laws to allow them to override private property rights & sidestep free-market forces.
"Intellectual property" owners should be grateful that they are allowed _any_ control over works at all once the works have left their hands.
I guess that means all the poor bastards sleeping in doorways during the middle of winter are "virtually non-existent".
You've got to provide enough value that people will be willing to buy it at a price that you can afford to sell it at. If the old product has so much value that you can't make an effective competing product with it after 10 years, then there's really no point either for yourself or for the benefit of society to try and come up with the new product. It would serve both you & society much better to spend your resources on something else.
So? As much as people love to hate Disney, if an author hasn't made a buck off their work in 10 years, then I don't see why they should have the right to stop someone else from doing it. About the only condition I would think is justified, is that Disney should not be allowed to pretend that THEY wrote the story (i.e., they shouldn't be allowed to commit fraud).
Actually, copyright was intended as a way for kings (i.e., the government) to control what was being published with the new-fangled printing presses. It was only later that somebody thought that a potential social benefit might be a good justification for it.
Whether or not a "brilliant" person votes is a very small effect on society versus what other kinds of contributions their brilliance might achieve.
Besides, finding reasons to stop people from voting is completely against my desired viewpoint of allowing even criminals to vote.
What are you trying to say? That Microsoft isn't a software development company?
No company which depends on "intellectual property" for its business model is "completely market-oriented" - by definition, they depend on government enforcement to override individuals' private property rights to support their business model.
Can be. But I'd argue that the probability of a bad result is usually much higher than the probability of a good result, and even with a good result it's usually not _that_ much better than the desired result. If you're playing the odds, it's almost a no-brainer to try and reduce unintentional errors (yes, I'm saying "unintentional errors" deliberately) as much as possible.
Normal life will usually provide enough chaos to keep a system perturbed without having to add it on purpose.
The obvious problem is that people don't NEED to know precisely what the URL is - they just have to crack your web server, then they'll have access to everything on it no matter what you've named it.
Sometimes those people are right, and the people who don't listen to them really are either idiots or in denial.
Sure, if copyright infringement were actually immoral. It is _illegal_, but that is not the same thing as immoral.
But what the MPAA is alleged to have done (bribing law enforcement agents) is definitely immoral, and damaging to society (as is any type of corruption in law enforcement). And if they're willing to act in such an immoral fashion, then why should anyone listen to them seriously when _they_ complain that other peoples' behavior is immoral?
Why bother with IP? Since the goal of IP is to promote useful & beneficial works for the good of society, why not just use normal tax monies & pay for arts/culture/research & development directly?
It seems like a much more straightforward solution: anybody could use the resultant works without worrying about their private property rights being stomped on, any smart entrepreneurs could figure out the best way to take advantage of the public-domain research & go make a bundle based on selling goods & services.
Not exactly, but you can still treat a society as a massively complicated system, and do a systems analysis on it. In the case of government, I would say that legislators are the programmers, the law is the source code, the executive branch runs the program & the judicial branch tries to disambiguate run-time conditions.
Now, of course, the source code is written in an ambiguous language, many generations of legislators have been patching the legacy system for a hundred years or so (and there is no systemic feedback requiring regular refactoring of the code), they are doing their patches on a "running system", the data being operated on (the members of society) can behave in irrational ways, the judges can make irrational decisions, and the members of all three branches have a vested interest in assuming as much control as they can over society.
Small wonder the system is getting f*cked up - any sane programmer would probably throw up their hands in despair & decide they needed to do a clean rewrite. Except for the fact that a whole lot of people would be hurt during the "reboot" (i.e., period of utter lawlessness).
Better yet, create IP "auctions", where the owners of IP can put their IP up for bid, they get the money from the winning bidder & the winning bidder gets the exclusive rights to the IP.
The bidders will perform due-diligence to decide a reasonable value for the IP (taking into account things like the possibility that the IP might be overturned for obviousness or prior art, or how many people have already licensed the use of the patent from the previous owner).
There might even be a rule that if the owner of the IP is not actively using their patent (and thereby bringing its benefits to society), they are FORCED to put the patent up for auction so that someone else (presumably somebody who can use the patent) will have access to it.
Of course, my personal preference is to abolish patents, since I feel that they trample on private property rights and have not been shown to have a net societal benefit, but I thought that an auction might be an interesting alternative.
Gee, I sure wish there was a market where I could choose the selling price based on how much work I put into the product. But most "free markets" are based on what the BUYER is willing to pay, not what the seller wants the buyer to pay.
Well, by definition, patents prevent development of ideas. If I wanted a society policy to stimulate innovation, I would've thought the obvious solution was for the society to collectively pay for it (publicly-financed research & development, with results available for any entrepreneurs to take it & run), but some people seem to prefer the counter-intuitive attempt.
I would agree with this, but would respond that in the absence of hard data, general policies should be structured in favor of something that we KNOW is good: private property rights. As the legal system stands now, "intellectual property" laws are allowed to ride roughshod over normal peoples' private property rights without any solid justification of the overall societal benefit.
Not to me. After you go and say there is no solid evidence either way, why do you turn around & say that enforcing copyright "makes sense"? From who's viewpoint?
Too complicated, and allows too many ways for people who are good at gaming the system to trample all over peoples' private property rights.
Why don't you just stick to basic free market principles: assume that people should be fairly compensated when they have provided a desired good or service? Why do things have to be more complicated than that?
If you can't provide a good or service at a better value than your competitors, then the free market sez that you shouldn't stay in that business. People who believe that businesses need the government to trample over peoples' private property rights so that those failing businesses can stay afloat are actually fascists, although they tend to wrap themselves in the "capitalism" flag.
Who decides what "values your country is built on", and whether they're worth keeping or not? Christian fundamentalists? Muslim fundamentalists? You? Me?
:-).
The whole point behind letting criminals vote is as a systemic (not based on individual peoples' judgements or opinions) negative feedback on an overly-repressive legal system. Any mechanism to limit peoples' voting rights will be exploited by demagogues &/ tyrants to disenfranchise possible opponents. About the only reason I can think of for really not allowing someone to vote is true mental incompetence (like for young children) - although unless this limitation is carefully defined, it could still be used to disenfranchise important voting blocs.
If your legal system is not repressive, then you won't have many criminals, and the effects of their vote will be insignificant. If your legal system _is_ repressive, then the votes of the criminals WILL be significant, and there should be some kind of blowback against the legal system.
This is a GOOD thing, and is necessary to try and keep the legal system working for the bulk of the society instead of for a privileged subset.
You don't need to make any exceptions for this to work. Even among the criminal population, there is only a small percentage of people who _prefer_ a violent lifestyle (although they are sometimes forced into it). They will not be able to have a statistically significant effect on the results of voting (although the propaganda will be interesting if an issue is close
Of course, if someone feels strongly that the rest of the population should be controlled in a certain way, and the rest of the population doesn't agree with them, then I would argue that the would-be-controller needs to be strongly "put in their place".
You mean without the ability to control other people's private property, production companies will have to find a way to make money based on free market principles. Yes, I agree.
I firmly believe that prisoners should have the right to vote, and that the various state laws preventing them from voting is a big mistake. I figure that allowing prisoners to vote provides a valuable negative feedback against bad laws, since 1) in a healthy society where the laws accomodate most of the population, voting by prisoners won't have a significant effect on voting outcomes, and 2) if the lawmakers are passing so many laws that a significant portion of your population ends up in jail, then their influence should provide valuable negative feedback against the responsible lawmakers to get the system back on track.
To really solve the problem, you just get rid of the "intellectual property" laws & let the free market & private property rights do their thing. After the fallout, society would be a lot better off.