The problem is that coporations pay taxes. As such, this entitles them to those rights.
Ah, no, whether or not a not-real legally-defined entity like a corporation pays taxes is pretty much irrelevant to whether the government considers corporations people. The problem is the Supreme Court decisions giving corporations "personhood". See this link for an interesting little essay on how the Supreme Court managed to "create" corporate personhood.
They (the SC) may have successfully tied the concept of corporate personhood to enough precedents to make it "Constitutional", which means that the legislatures would have to pass a Constitutional Amendment to explicitly "undefine" corporate personhood. Of course, given corporate lobbying power, what do you think the chances of THAT happening is?
Actually, a Constitutional Amendment to restrict personhood to real-life individuals makes a _lot_ more sense to me than a stupid amendment to define marriage as "between one man and one woman". Hey, if corporations have personhood, can you marry a corporation?
The U.S. grew its industry rapidly by running roughshod over attempts by the European countries to control trade secrets & other forms of intellectual property. The U.S. wouldn't be where it is today economically if it had taken European whining about patents, copyright & such, seriously. It's only recently, as the primary economic superpower, that Americans suddenly think it's a good idea for everyone to let them control the flow of ideas & technology throughout the world.
Software & business model patents are being used to crush competition, rather than provide any kind of innovation for society's benefit. True entrepreneurs make money by providing desired goods & services, not by getting laws passed which let them earn money through extortion.
Down with Intellectual Property, Software Patents, and Copyright Law, all of which were instituted to ensure the individual the right to profit off of the production of ideas.
No, they were instituted as an _experiment _to see if they would encourage creation of more ideas for the _public domain_ by giving creators control over the distribution of their ideas for a _limited time_.
Note that the end result was supposed to provide more ideas for the public domain over time - giving individuals the means to profit off the production of ideas was just a means to the end. It's becoming pretty obvious however that, as implemented, intellectual property laws are proving more of a method to stifle the flow of ideas to the public domain rather than encourage their production.
It would be much more cost effective & have much more direct effect if the society simply allocated some of its communal funds toward basic & applied research, which could then be used without restriction by entrepreneurs at all levels of the society. That would make it difficult for centralized control of information flow, however, and the beneficiaries of such control in today's society would no doubt strongly resist such changes.
Does it really matter? Even if they eventually fight their way clear, as long as their personal lives are made hell for a long time & any personal fortune they've made is exhausted, they will have been made an example of.
However, what the civil system in this country REALLY needs is LOSER PAYS for plaintiffs - meaning that if you initiate the lawsuit and loose you have to pay restitution (damages) to the defendant plus all attorney fees, court costs, etc.
Nah, that'll just scare away poor plaintiffs, regardless of whether or not not they have a good case, and let the rich rule the field.
What the U.S. _really_ needs is 1) a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment, and 2) for government to be required to pick up the tab for _ALL_ legal services. After being presented with the 1st year's bill, the federal government would then financially collapse - whereupon all those legislators would have to completely rewrite the legal system from the ground up, taking into account the cost of providing legal services & enforcing every law.
I would hazard a guess that the U.S. legal system would get a LOT simpler - say, down to the level where any school kid could recite the important parts of the law from memory, and judgements might take about 5 minutes per case. And a lot of people who are currently lawyers would have to find something worthwhile to do instead of enabling the parasitic bureaucracy which is the U.S. legal system.
I'd rather IBM goes after the personal assets of the company officers involved, to make an example out of them. I realize that the "corporate shield" protects them from civil suits, but maybe something criminal can be thrown at them just to make them burn their own funds.
Heck, for a sub-$100 laptop, you might have to boot off a ROM, and run out of a processor's own memory cache (no DRAM or non-volatile memory involved).
Let's get those assembly-language bit-bangers back to work:-)
uh maybe i wasn't very clear. what i was trying to say is that there is not a finite amount of wealth in the world. i wasn't trying to say anything about money. steve jobs created something of value. he didn't just print money. if he just printed money, then yes, there would be a problem of inflation, but he created value.
Actually, there is. There is only a finite amount of stuff to own (no matter what monetary system you're using) - just by the fact that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe (and much fewer accessible to us on the Earth's surface). And the more stuff fewer people own, the less of it is available for everyone else to use (except by permission of the owners).
i stand by my statement. thats not really a free market that you are describing. its a perverted circumstance where there is no competition for labor or goods.
The circumstance he/she described is a natural consequence of unrestrained capitalism. There's nothing "perverted" about it.
the average over all standard of living of the world is higher now than it ever has been and productivity is growing exponentialy.
A lot of that is because of "socialistic" practices which involve the redistribution of wealth. Unrestrained capitalism would have left a small number of merchant-emperors with the rest of the population in indentured servitude.
wealth is distributed to those who are most productive. this can change. some people become poorer and others become richer. this is a good thing. it means that there are no rigid class systems. and people are rewarded according how hard they work.
You are incorrect in your overall analysis. With unrestrained capitalism, people with wealth can leverage their own resources to earn more than people without wealth, even without being more intelligent or working harder. There will always be individual exceptions & cases where a rich person loses a huge percentage of their assets because of a bad decision, but the tendency is for rich people to earn more & faster than everyone else, just because they have more resources to do so. At a certain level of wealth, rich people tend to earn money without even needing to work - they pay other people a pittance to do the work for them.
In addition, because of their wealth, they can also absorb the damage that making a bad decision will cost them, without endangering their survival. Normal people who are living hand-to-mouth & trying to feed a family just can't take those kinds of risks, so they tend to play it safe - and as a result, can't take advantage of some of the incredible payoffs that a rich person can afford to take a risk on.
Without an active mechanism to force redistribution of wealth, rich people will inevitably end up owning just about everything that can be owned, and everyone else will live at their sufferance.
the situation you describe where a minority ends up with all the wealth only happens when there is a broken justice system that allows the wealthy to steal money (for example via monopoly).
No, wealth concentration is a completely natural result of pure capitalism. No theft is required - just the diligent application of entrepreneurial principles, backed with lots of wealth.
capitalism does require a strong and fair justice system. but it certainly doesn't require redistribution of wealth!
_Capitalism_ doesn't - but a HEALTHY SOCIETY does. Pure capitalism does not lead to a healthy society. A healthy society requires an active mechanism for redistribution of wealth, to prevent economic class stratification.
BTW, I think you are making an assumption that "justice" will prevent class stratification. I'd be interesting in hearing the principles of "justice" that you are thinking of which can prevent wealth concentration without requiring the redistribution of wealth.
democracy is when the country as a whole gets to decide. freedom is when individuals get to decide. sometimes freedoms need to be sacrificed, but lets keep it to a minimum.
If you're a public leader trying to decide on public policies to maximize the overall health of your society, however, you need to come up with some systemic way of wealth redistribution. Otherwise, you will almost inevitably end up with economic stratification (the wealthy can leverage their wealth to become wealthier, the poor will have to do anything to survive, and the middle class will become poor as the wealthy take all their assets).
Government taxation & welfare is one obvious way of doing this, although it (just as obviously) can become very inefficient & corrupt. If you can propose a corruption-resistant method (using the government or otherwise) of doing this, feel free to contribute.
Dunno, if we took up a collection to hire professionals to beat the crap out of the big spammers on a regular basis, I doubt they'd be laughing much. They might even reconsider their "business" tactics.
Joking, of course. But I'd feel more empathy if that happened to a politician than I would for a spammer.
t's no more special than any other law, and it's there for exactly the same reason: overall, it is helpful to society.
It's special because it gives individuals the ability to place arbitrary restrictions on the use of real, private property without requiring a contract of some kind upfront. See one of your other responses as to why the concept of real, private property has a great deal of "common sense" definition behind it. Other legal definitions of "property" tend to be created so that some people can make money without having to participate in a straightforward compensation-for-goods-or-services market.
I fear you may have massively underestimated how much of today's economy depends on the copyright mechanism
No, I've got a good idea of how much today's economy depends on "intellectual property" - but I also think that it was a bad idea to begin with (although the "bad" effects take a long time to show up in a society), and that if we keep on encouraging it, things are only going to get worse. As a matter of public policy, before intellectual property laws destroy innovation in our society, we should really start reducing their scope (in a manner slow enough so that businesses can anticipate the changes & plan accordingly).
It would be nice if the EU ends up rejecting the concept of software patents firmly. Once U.S. companies realize how much of a competitive disadvantage they are at (and after they get tired of trying to buy EU ministers), they might start clamoring for some changes in the US Patent laws.
I believe that the point of this TCPA system is that the owner of the key can make sure that you will be able to access only what they want to let you access.
The broader question is: why should they get special protection, especially when it involves the ability to use government force to override the rights that people have with their own real, physical private property.
If you subscribe to the notion that the "intellectual property" laws exist to enhance innovation & cultural growth for the society as a whole, then I'd argue that society could get a more reliable result with less violation of personal rights by allocating some of its tax money to pay for basic research & subsidizing artistic endeavors which, when completed, would be freely available to all enterprising members of society.
You mean to make sure that the creators of the black boxes can make the vote turn out _exactly_ the way they want it to, without worrying about anyone else being able to figure out what they did?
1. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation. Enabling someone to profit from them is just the means, not the ends.
2. As currently implemented, patents seem to be a more effective means of suppressing innovation than encouraging it.
I submit that, instead of the concept of patents, you'd get more societal benefit toward innovation by using taxpayer money (or any societal mechanism designed to focus capital for the public good) to do basic & applied research, document, catalog & index it so that any entrepreneur with some business sense can stumble across it in the archives & run with it.
Kind of lost interest, although it was engaging for a while.
Suffice it to say, I believe that you are arguing from a position of what already exists, and whether it is worth changing (and by how drastically), whereas I am arguing from a position where I believe that intellectual property laws are interfering with the normal use of private real property (and that it was & is a bad idea to begin with).
Since we have strongly differing opinions on the overall benefit of intellectual property laws, I doubt we'd ever convince each other of our arguments, however I enjoyed the discussion. Thanks.
I just pointed out that, contrary to anti-GPL FUD, anyone can use GPL software without agreeing to anything. They have to follow GPL restrictions only if they want to redistribute the software.
What does this have to do with opened or closed document formats?
You do not have the "right" to hack & fix (or hire someone to do it for you) the "schemas" if you find something wrong with them or you want them to do something different.
So you're saying everyone who has rich parents is able to create a monopoly to completely dominate an industry?
Nah, just that rich people can afford to screw up over and over without having to worry about struggling for survival for the rest of their lives. So they're more likely to "take risks" that might payoff big 'cause they're not really taking as big a risk as someone who is investing their whole life savings.
If there are grapes for $1c each (a fair price), and some free... most people will choose the free ones. People are maximizers.
The sellers are maximizers as well - so your example is not realistic. Buyers will try to find the best value they can. Sellers will try to sell as high a price as they can. The balance is where you find the maximum societal benefit of true capitalism. If there is a lack of balance, then you do not receive maximum societal benefit.
So your arguement comes down to "I don't think it's really property". While I have explained (and you have agreed) that property is what is defined by social contract.
I agreed that the government has some legal terms for property. I did _not_ agree that those terms as applied to "products of intellect" are necessarily correct either by moral or common-sense standards. I further believe that people with selfish interests have perverted the original intent of the laws related to "intellectual property" (originally intended as a legal experiment to see if they would provide a net benefit to society) to the point where the laws are causing more harm to the society than good.
Property comes out of agreement, and our society has agreed that ideas are property for a limited time.
There was no agreement. The law-writers working under the direction of special interests have made it possible for greedy people to get money without working for it. The "average person" either didn't know about those laws, or figured it wouldn't affect them so didn't protest it. Now, with technology providing such broad distribution possibilities, many people ARE discovering that there are laws which prevent them from using their own private property as they see fit. This limitation is only stunting the growth of our society, all for the benefit of a small number of special interests.
When you play a song you are getting something, if what you get is not a good then by defintion it is a service.
Incorrect. When you play a song on your player, you are using your own property - there is no "sale of services" involved. You are only receiving a service when somebody else is making an effort on your behalf. I suppose if you used somebody else's player to play the song, then you are receiving the service of being allowed to use their property, but the basic concept still holds - the mere act of playing a recorded song does not constitute "a service".
How can you commit fraud with something that is public domain. Without IP a logo is just a piece of art I can use however I see fit, maybe I like to put the logo on my products, since nobody owns the logo, nobody can stop me from doing what I want.
You've got to stop confusing information with real property. Trademark law was originally intended to combat FRAUD, and that's all it's good for, although it might've become perverted under the influence of special interests. Trademarks are just symbols; they are not REAL property (in the common-sense understanding of the term).
Fraud implies the use of disinformation. In the case of trademark violation, it involves building an association yourself or your product with the public persona of another entity by using the symbols that society commonly associates which that other entity. There are no property issues involved with misuse of trademarks - it's just a case of a scam artist trying to trick people into believing something that isn't true.
As far as your "example" is concerned, as long as you aren't using that logo to pretend you are associated with the logo's originator, then there should be no issue of fraud. With today's trademark rules, however, if you use the logo _at all_, the entity "owning" that trademark will use that as an excuse to stop you, even if you didn't do anything which would confuse your identity with that of the logo's "owner".
The drafters of the Constitution recognized that there is value to the protection of ideas for the overall benifit of society and chose to treat them as property.
If you actually read some of the founder's comments about the Constitution, they were greatly conflicted about whether to put copyright & patent laws into the Constitution in the first place. In the end, they decided to try a utilitarian approach: allowing SHORT-TERM monopolies for the goal of advancing the Arts & Sciences. Note that nowhere in their language is the statement, paraphrased or otherwise, that "ideas are property". It is simply a mechanism that they thought might encourage publishing of new ideas, a mechanism which has been shown in the long term to be abused and fundamentally flawed.
People will always pay the lowest amount.
No, most people will pay what they think is fair for a good or service. Most people also figure that things like CDs are a _product_, not a service, and that they can do anything they want with it (barring harming others) after they have purchased it and it has become their own personal property.
Using your logic, laws against car theft only exist to force people to pay for something they wouldn't normally pay for.
Ooh, blatant way to misrepresent my fundamental arguments. Cars are REAL property, so your statement is irrelevant - private property laws are still good, and conform to common sense. Ideas are NOT real property, so only greedy people expect payment for use of ideas.
Certain things cost more to make the first copy and additional copies are trivial. The problem is how do you recover the money for making that first copy?
Well, society which just have to evolve a different business model than selling ideas as products, won't they? Most REAL capitalists understand that if somebody tries to make a business using an unsuccessful business model, they will be out of business quickly (witness the.com busts). The _only_ reason that ideas-as-products can be a successful business model is because greedy people have got the laws passed to help them force it down peoples' throats. I sure wish I could get laws passed to force people to give me money I didn't work for.
It is a service, like I said, a human being doesn't have to be there for something to be a service.
And you would be wrong. Partially because you are misinterpreting what is being provided as a service in your own examples.
With the CD, the service being provided is that of making the copy.
Movie Phone is an information service, yet there is no person telling you the information.
With your Movie Phone example, you are being provided the service of being connected with a database of interesting information. The _information itself_ is NOT the service - once you have that information, you can scribble it down & or carry it around in your head & use it without expecting to ask permission or pay the people who compiled the information in the first place every time. Of course, if there were a way to enforce it, I'm sure the "intellectual property" proponents would think it would be perfectly reasonable to try and make you pay money for the privilege of telling anyone else that piece of information.
A trademark is owned, has a very real dollar value, it is a property. Yes it is used for fraud protection, but that doesn't mean it isn't intellectual property. If you can use something and prevent others from using it, it is property, especially if there is a quantifiable dollar value attached.
Still doesn't meet the common-sense rule of being REAL physical property, since the "owner" of the trademark can use it an infinite amount of times without "using it up".
Which comes full circle back to pointing out how "intellectual property" laws have turned into a bunch of bullshit ways for greedy people to get money. Trademark violations are cases of FRAUD, and should be treated as such instead of property.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, no, whether or not a not-real legally-defined entity like a corporation pays taxes is pretty much irrelevant to whether the government considers corporations people. The problem is the Supreme Court decisions giving corporations "personhood". See this link for an interesting little essay on how the Supreme Court managed to "create" corporate personhood.
They (the SC) may have successfully tied the concept of corporate personhood to enough precedents to make it "Constitutional", which means that the legislatures would have to pass a Constitutional Amendment to explicitly "undefine" corporate personhood. Of course, given corporate lobbying power, what do you think the chances of THAT happening is?
Actually, a Constitutional Amendment to restrict personhood to real-life individuals makes a _lot_ more sense to me than a stupid amendment to define marriage as "between one man and one woman". Hey, if corporations have personhood, can you marry a corporation?
Actually, history indicates the exact opposite.
The U.S. grew its industry rapidly by running roughshod over attempts by the European countries to control trade secrets & other forms of intellectual property. The U.S. wouldn't be where it is today economically if it had taken European whining about patents, copyright & such, seriously. It's only recently, as the primary economic superpower, that Americans suddenly think it's a good idea for everyone to let them control the flow of ideas & technology throughout the world.
Software & business model patents are being used to crush competition, rather than provide any kind of innovation for society's benefit. True entrepreneurs make money by providing desired goods & services, not by getting laws passed which let them earn money through extortion.
No, they were instituted as an _experiment _to see if they would encourage creation of more ideas for the _public domain_ by giving creators control over the distribution of their ideas for a _limited time_.
Note that the end result was supposed to provide more ideas for the public domain over time - giving individuals the means to profit off the production of ideas was just a means to the end. It's becoming pretty obvious however that, as implemented, intellectual property laws are proving more of a method to stifle the flow of ideas to the public domain rather than encourage their production.
It would be much more cost effective & have much more direct effect if the society simply allocated some of its communal funds toward basic & applied research, which could then be used without restriction by entrepreneurs at all levels of the society. That would make it difficult for centralized control of information flow, however, and the beneficiaries of such control in today's society would no doubt strongly resist such changes.
I think that, even if I weren't doing anything wrong, I would probably destroy any small ball that was following me around & screaming all the time.
Dunno - if cancer victims knew that catching the mutated form of HIV might cure them, they might be rutting in the streets.
Twice as much as 0?
Does it really matter? Even if they eventually fight their way clear, as long as their personal lives are made hell for a long time & any personal fortune they've made is exhausted, they will have been made an example of.
Nah, that'll just scare away poor plaintiffs, regardless of whether or not not they have a good case, and let the rich rule the field.
What the U.S. _really_ needs is 1) a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment, and 2) for government to be required to pick up the tab for _ALL_ legal services. After being presented with the 1st year's bill, the federal government would then financially collapse - whereupon all those legislators would have to completely rewrite the legal system from the ground up, taking into account the cost of providing legal services & enforcing every law.
I would hazard a guess that the U.S. legal system would get a LOT simpler - say, down to the level where any school kid could recite the important parts of the law from memory, and judgements might take about 5 minutes per case. And a lot of people who are currently lawyers would have to find something worthwhile to do instead of enabling the parasitic bureaucracy which is the U.S. legal system.
I'd rather IBM goes after the personal assets of the company officers involved, to make an example out of them. I realize that the "corporate shield" protects them from civil suits, but maybe something criminal can be thrown at them just to make them burn their own funds.
Heck, for a sub-$100 laptop, you might have to boot off a ROM, and run out of a processor's own memory cache (no DRAM or non-volatile memory involved).
:-)
Let's get those assembly-language bit-bangers back to work
Actually, there is. There is only a finite amount of stuff to own (no matter what monetary system you're using) - just by the fact that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe (and much fewer accessible to us on the Earth's surface). And the more stuff fewer people own, the less of it is available for everyone else to use (except by permission of the owners).
The circumstance he/she described is a natural consequence of unrestrained capitalism. There's nothing "perverted" about it.
A lot of that is because of "socialistic" practices which involve the redistribution of wealth. Unrestrained capitalism would have left a small number of merchant-emperors with the rest of the population in indentured servitude.
You are incorrect in your overall analysis. With unrestrained capitalism, people with wealth can leverage their own resources to earn more than people without wealth, even without being more intelligent or working harder. There will always be individual exceptions & cases where a rich person loses a huge percentage of their assets because of a bad decision, but the tendency is for rich people to earn more & faster than everyone else, just because they have more resources to do so. At a certain level of wealth, rich people tend to earn money without even needing to work - they pay other people a pittance to do the work for them.
In addition, because of their wealth, they can also absorb the damage that making a bad decision will cost them, without endangering their survival. Normal people who are living hand-to-mouth & trying to feed a family just can't take those kinds of risks, so they tend to play it safe - and as a result, can't take advantage of some of the incredible payoffs that a rich person can afford to take a risk on.
Without an active mechanism to force redistribution of wealth, rich people will inevitably end up owning just about everything that can be owned, and everyone else will live at their sufferance.
No, wealth concentration is a completely natural result of pure capitalism. No theft is required - just the diligent application of entrepreneurial principles, backed with lots of wealth.
_Capitalism_ doesn't - but a HEALTHY SOCIETY does. Pure capitalism does not lead to a healthy society. A healthy society requires an active mechanism for redistribution of wealth, to prevent economic class stratification.
BTW, I think you are making an assumption that "justice" will prevent class stratification. I'd be interesting in hearing the principles of "justice" that you are thinking of which can prevent wealth concentration without requiring the redistribution of wealth.
If you're a public leader trying to decide on public policies to maximize the overall health of your society, however, you need to come up with some systemic way of wealth redistribution. Otherwise, you will almost inevitably end up with economic stratification (the wealthy can leverage their wealth to become wealthier, the poor will have to do anything to survive, and the middle class will become poor as the wealthy take all their assets).
Government taxation & welfare is one obvious way of doing this, although it (just as obviously) can become very inefficient & corrupt. If you can propose a corruption-resistant method (using the government or otherwise) of doing this, feel free to contribute.
Dunno, if we took up a collection to hire professionals to beat the crap out of the big spammers on a regular basis, I doubt they'd be laughing much. They might even reconsider their "business" tactics.
Joking, of course. But I'd feel more empathy if that happened to a politician than I would for a spammer.
It's special because it gives individuals the ability to place arbitrary restrictions on the use of real, private property without requiring a contract of some kind upfront. See one of your other responses as to why the concept of real, private property has a great deal of "common sense" definition behind it. Other legal definitions of "property" tend to be created so that some people can make money without having to participate in a straightforward compensation-for-goods-or-services market.
No, I've got a good idea of how much today's economy depends on "intellectual property" - but I also think that it was a bad idea to begin with (although the "bad" effects take a long time to show up in a society), and that if we keep on encouraging it, things are only going to get worse. As a matter of public policy, before intellectual property laws destroy innovation in our society, we should really start reducing their scope (in a manner slow enough so that businesses can anticipate the changes & plan accordingly).
It would be nice if the EU ends up rejecting the concept of software patents firmly. Once U.S. companies realize how much of a competitive disadvantage they are at (and after they get tired of trying to buy EU ministers), they might start clamoring for some changes in the US Patent laws.
I believe that the point of this TCPA system is that the owner of the key can make sure that you will be able to access only what they want to let you access.
The broader question is: why should they get special protection, especially when it involves the ability to use government force to override the rights that people have with their own real, physical private property.
If you subscribe to the notion that the "intellectual property" laws exist to enhance innovation & cultural growth for the society as a whole, then I'd argue that society could get a more reliable result with less violation of personal rights by allocating some of its tax money to pay for basic research & subsidizing artistic endeavors which, when completed, would be freely available to all enterprising members of society.
You mean to make sure that the creators of the black boxes can make the vote turn out _exactly_ the way they want it to, without worrying about anyone else being able to figure out what they did?
1. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation. Enabling someone to profit from them is just the means, not the ends.
2. As currently implemented, patents seem to be a more effective means of suppressing innovation than encouraging it.
I submit that, instead of the concept of patents, you'd get more societal benefit toward innovation by using taxpayer money (or any societal mechanism designed to focus capital for the public good) to do basic & applied research, document, catalog & index it so that any entrepreneur with some business sense can stumble across it in the archives & run with it.
Kind of lost interest, although it was engaging for a while.
Suffice it to say, I believe that you are arguing from a position of what already exists, and whether it is worth changing (and by how drastically), whereas I am arguing from a position where I believe that intellectual property laws are interfering with the normal use of private real property (and that it was & is a bad idea to begin with).
Since we have strongly differing opinions on the overall benefit of intellectual property laws, I doubt we'd ever convince each other of our arguments, however I enjoyed the discussion. Thanks.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I just pointed out that, contrary to anti-GPL FUD, anyone can use GPL software without agreeing to anything. They have to follow GPL restrictions only if they want to redistribute the software.
What does this have to do with opened or closed document formats?
You do not have the "right" to hack & fix (or hire someone to do it for you) the "schemas" if you find something wrong with them or you want them to do something different.
What do you mean? Anyone can USE a GPLed product - they just can't redistribute it without conditions.
Nah, just that rich people can afford to screw up over and over without having to worry about struggling for survival for the rest of their lives. So they're more likely to "take risks" that might payoff big 'cause they're not really taking as big a risk as someone who is investing their whole life savings.
The sellers are maximizers as well - so your example is not realistic. Buyers will try to find the best value they can. Sellers will try to sell as high a price as they can. The balance is where you find the maximum societal benefit of true capitalism. If there is a lack of balance, then you do not receive maximum societal benefit.
I agreed that the government has some legal terms for property. I did _not_ agree that those terms as applied to "products of intellect" are necessarily correct either by moral or common-sense standards. I further believe that people with selfish interests have perverted the original intent of the laws related to "intellectual property" (originally intended as a legal experiment to see if they would provide a net benefit to society) to the point where the laws are causing more harm to the society than good.
There was no agreement. The law-writers working under the direction of special interests have made it possible for greedy people to get money without working for it. The "average person" either didn't know about those laws, or figured it wouldn't affect them so didn't protest it. Now, with technology providing such broad distribution possibilities, many people ARE discovering that there are laws which prevent them from using their own private property as they see fit. This limitation is only stunting the growth of our society, all for the benefit of a small number of special interests.
Incorrect. When you play a song on your player, you are using your own property - there is no "sale of services" involved. You are only receiving a service when somebody else is making an effort on your behalf. I suppose if you used somebody else's player to play the song, then you are receiving the service of being allowed to use their property, but the basic concept still holds - the mere act of playing a recorded song does not constitute "a service".
You've got to stop confusing information with real property. Trademark law was originally intended to combat FRAUD, and that's all it's good for, although it might've become perverted under the influence of special interests. Trademarks are just symbols; they are not REAL property (in the common-sense understanding of the term).
Fraud implies the use of disinformation. In the case of trademark violation, it involves building an association yourself or your product with the public persona of another entity by using the symbols that society commonly associates which that other entity. There are no property issues involved with misuse of trademarks - it's just a case of a scam artist trying to trick people into believing something that isn't true.
As far as your "example" is concerned, as long as you aren't using that logo to pretend you are associated with the logo's originator, then there should be no issue of fraud. With today's trademark rules, however, if you use the logo _at all_, the entity "owning" that trademark will use that as an excuse to stop you, even if you didn't do anything which would confuse your identity with that of the logo's "owner".
If you actually read some of the founder's comments about the Constitution, they were greatly conflicted about whether to put copyright & patent laws into the Constitution in the first place. In the end, they decided to try a utilitarian approach: allowing SHORT-TERM monopolies for the goal of advancing the Arts & Sciences. Note that nowhere in their language is the statement, paraphrased or otherwise, that "ideas are property". It is simply a mechanism that they thought might encourage publishing of new ideas, a mechanism which has been shown in the long term to be abused and fundamentally flawed.
No, most people will pay what they think is fair for a good or service. Most people also figure that things like CDs are a _product_, not a service, and that they can do anything they want with it (barring harming others) after they have purchased it and it has become their own personal property.
Ooh, blatant way to misrepresent my fundamental arguments. Cars are REAL property, so your statement is irrelevant - private property laws are still good, and conform to common sense. Ideas are NOT real property, so only greedy people expect payment for use of ideas.
Well, society which just have to evolve a different business model than selling ideas as products, won't they? Most REAL capitalists understand that if somebody tries to make a business using an unsuccessful business model, they will be out of business quickly (witness the .com busts). The _only_ reason that ideas-as-products can be a successful business model is because greedy people have got the laws passed to help them force it down peoples' throats. I sure wish I could get laws passed to force people to give me money I didn't work for.
And you would be wrong. Partially because you are misinterpreting what is being provided as a service in your own examples.
With the CD, the service being provided is that of making the copy.
With your Movie Phone example, you are being provided the service of being connected with a database of interesting information. The _information itself_ is NOT the service - once you have that information, you can scribble it down & or carry it around in your head & use it without expecting to ask permission or pay the people who compiled the information in the first place every time. Of course, if there were a way to enforce it, I'm sure the "intellectual property" proponents would think it would be perfectly reasonable to try and make you pay money for the privilege of telling anyone else that piece of information.
Still doesn't meet the common-sense rule of being REAL physical property, since the "owner" of the trademark can use it an infinite amount of times without
"using it up".
Which comes full circle back to pointing out how "intellectual property" laws have turned into a bunch of bullshit ways for greedy people to get money. Trademark violations are cases of FRAUD, and should be treated as such instead of property.