The fundamentals of capitalism is ownership of property, and the ability to protect property.
Your definition is partial - it doesn't include compensation for the act of providing services. The more general definition is to apply the law of supply & demand to "things of value", which includes both property (by the commonly understood definition) and services.
Property is a legally defined term by goverment.
Technically, but I think most people would refuse to accept it if the government something like the color "red" as someone's private property. It might be LEGAL, but that doesn't make it really "property" by a moral, society-beneficial or even common-sense standard.
I think that most people would accept the basic idea of property as something that can be counted or measured. They also understand that this implies that only one person can have a piece of property at a time - if someone else gets the property, then the original person doesn't have it anymore. Even "intellectual property" law doesn't try to apply real property conventions to "ideas", since the people drafting the laws knew that would never fly. Instead, they've set up a bastardized system of a special "legal status" of being a copyright or patent holder as legally-defined property, and let people buy & sell those.
The recording industries have been using extensive propaganda to try and get people to confuse real property with "ideas", but if you start showing people examples of how "intellectual property" law lets people they don't know arbitrarily stop them from doing whatever they want with their own private property, almost everyone except the most die-hard "intellectual property" fanatics get annoyed. People who work out solutions to thorny problems, try to sell a product or service based on those solutions, then get slapped down by bozos abusing the patent office also tend to get annoyed with the so-called "intellectual-property" laws. The main reason some people LIKE intellectual property laws because they see a way where they force people to pay for stuff that people wouldn't ordinarily want to pay for.
You confuse performance with service.
I'm not confusing anything - a performance _IS_ a service, with the expectation that if the service pleases the audience, they will compensate the performer somehow. A song on a CD is NOT a performance - it is a hunk of plastic whose value has been increased by encoding something on it which can be converted to pleasing sound waves.
Probably the easiest way to understand the importance of intellectual property is to look at trademarks (which is a form of property protection).
No, trademarks are an intended form of FRAUD protection - to prevent people from fraudently selling product or services associated with another person or company's. They were never intended to be a "product for sale", although a few people have been abusing the trademark laws that way.
They are the same thing. It's breaking the fundamentals of capitalism you are consuming without contributing.
No they aren't. You don't appear to know what the "fundamentals of capitalism" really are. Clue: law of supply & demand. People will pay for goods & services when they think they're worth it. They won't pay for them if they don't think the goods or services are worth it. Important point: getting laws passed to MAKE people pay MORE than they would otherwise for a good or service, or to make people pay for a service they are not directly receiving, is _NOT_ capitalism on matter how much you try to redefine the term.
Everytime you listen to a song you receive a service, I'm sure the RIAA wishes it had a system to charge you for each individual listening
Not sure what you're trying to say here, except you seem to be confusing the service of playing a song for someone to listen to, or providing a copy of the song on a piece of media, versus the service of actually creating the song.
Claiming to have a right to something you didn't pay for is greedy.
Sorry, you seem to be confusing ideas with real private property again. If you buy a real product, you have a full moral right to do anything you want with it (that doesn't harm someone else of course) - including the right to make copies. If you come up with an idea of your own, you have a full moral right to be able to make a product based on that idea.
It takes greedy people to say: "not only should we get money when we sell a product, but we should get money over and over every time that product is copied, even though we didn't actually provide the service of copying!" And other greedy people say: "I don't care if you came up with the idea on your own, I came up with it first (or bought it from someone who did), and I have more money than you, so I can stop you from using your own idea."
Nice troll. There are a _lot_ of programmers on Slashdot, and like musicians, we create "works" which are used & appreciated by non-programmers.
And some of us (who actually understand capitalism better than the so-called "intellectual property" advocates) believe that if we want someone to pay us money, then we should actually have to WORK for it - by providing the service of programming in return for compensation.
Only greedy people think they should get paid every time their work is copied, and not just the first time they sell it to someone.
I don't give a damn about your moral system until you try and impose it on me, e.g., use the government to force me to pay you money to do stuff with my own private property that I would ordinarily be able to do for free.
As far as "God-given property rights" are concerned, even if I weren't agnostic, I'd dearly love to hear you quote the Scriptures which define ideas as property, especially since a great deal of the Scriptures emphasize getting their own message distributed as widely as possible.
Patent and copyrights don't have _anything_ to do with private property, and have everything to do with greedy people who have a greatly-self-inflated idea of the worth of their own ideas trying to force people to give them money they don't deserve.
Let's flip this on its head, shall we? Morally and legally, stealing somebody's physical property and stealing somebody's creating property are exactly the same thing.
Your flip is a logical failure. Morally, they are NOT the same thing. Legally, greedy people WANT them to be the same thing (and keep trying to redefine reality so that they are treated the same).
The only people who could possibly argue that they're different are people who really, really want to take other people's work without paying for it.
BS. Or people who believe who in real capitalism, where you get paid for providing desired goods or services. Creating something for someone else is a service. You should get paid appropriately for that service _when you deliver the service_. To demand to get paid _every_time_ someone makes a copy of that creation, even though it doesn't require any additional effort on your part, is just greedy.
The only people who could possibly argue that they're the same are people who think they should be able to control what others do with their own physical property, all in the name of forcing those people to give them money that they wouldn't have been willing to give otherwise.
Another idiot misapplying a car analogy. If you had a car where it would run only on gasoline that you had to buy from the dealer (or authorized agent), then your analogy might actually be worth discussing.
The store will just write it off as a loss, and recover the money as a tax break so they aren't losing anything either.
That's stupid - tax breaks only reduce the amount of the loss a bit, they don't eliminate it entirely. Real stealing costs people money, period. They might have theft insurance, but their premiums will go up over time as well.
Real stealing & copyright infringement can't be compared, except by people who are living in such an alternative reality that they really, really, want copyright infringement to be the same thing as true theft.
The idea behind copyright is that these "puffs of electrons and sequences of integer numbers" took time and effort to produce,
It takes a lot of effort for me to do sculpture by banging rocks against each other, but I don't hear anyone arguing that I should be paid for it. People should be paid for providing goods & services.
those who do the work to create it should be rewarded by the people who use it.
That's fine - but why should they be paid over and over every time the work is transferred after the initial sale, when they did the effort to create the work only once?
People should be compensated for providing desirable goods or services. There's no reason to force people unrelated to that initial sale to continue compensating the creator (or speculative middlemen who "buy" the ownership of the "intellectual property" from the creator) when no additional value is being created for each additional payment.
"Intellectual property" is really anti-property rights - it allows people who you did not have a financial or legal transaction with to limit what you can do with your own physical property. There had better be some damn compelling societal reason to have laws like that, and I think that modern society is currently proving that such laws hinder rather encourage "innovation".
Copyright is a law of property. Creators of works --writings, paintings, whatever --have natural property rights over their creations. Copyright law is the legal recognition and protection of those rights by the government.
No it's not. No they don't. And no it isn't.
Come back when you've actually read the Constitution. You might want to also lookup up a few of the concerns that some of the early leaders of America had about allowing people to use the government to stop the free expression of ideas.
It might actually be pretty useful if you could receive a web page + embedded media all in one bundle via BitTorrent (optimized to receive text+images first, of course).
What we don't know is where and how Long Term memories are stored.
Why do they have to be stored in a localized portion of the brain? Wouldn't it be more likely that they would be stored & interconnected through large chunks of the brain, which might not be located in the exact same spaces between different people?
Hairbrained ideas from engineers to proud to back down and change their designs to make the machines more durrable and easy to build.
I firmly believe that the engineers should be forced to "follow" their designs through the manufacturing & maintenance processes so that they get direct experience with the way their decisions make life difficult for the people who have to use & maintain the product.
I think the same will happen again when people realize where the policies of the current administration are taking this country.
I'm not confident that the country WILL recover, especially since Dubya seems intent on making the overall government debt as large as he possibly can during his second term.
I'm reminded of a historical program I was watching where some historians being interviewed talked about how just before every large civilization in history that has collapsed, the spending on their military was out of control, and their government's debt had become unsustainable.
Patents provide the incentive for people to engage in economic activity by protecting their investment, whether you call it discovery or invention, it makes no difference practically.
That's what people keep claiming they're supposed to do, but no one has actually done effective studies to see whether the net effect is a benefit for a society or a detriment. In absence of such proof (and with many stories of how the system is being abused), we should err on the side of more market freedom & allow people to do what they wish with their own private property instead of giving other people the power to restrict the expression of arbitrary ideas.
If a society wants to encourage inventions, then it would be a _lot_ more straightforward to just pool money together and pay people to do research on useful things. Then anybody smart enough could take the fruits of that research & make a buck based on it.
People, everyone one of us, is self-serving by our very nature.
In a literal sense, maybe - but some people get their kicks by helping other people. And some other people get their kicks by doing "public service". In both cases, they are "self-serving" since they are doing something which make themselves feel good, but the end result is still for the benefit of the society that they are a part of.
If you _don't_ think that there are people like this, then I can only offer my condolences for your miserable luck at meeting decent acquaintances.
Some people _do_ actually take the idea of "civil service" seriously - performing to the best of their abilities to improve the general lot of society. It probably depends on how they were "brainwashed" while growing up to actually give a damn about things like that.
Unfortunately, it's really, really hard for a typical voter (who gets to know them only through the well-managed media) to tell these "saints" apart from the liars & scumbags who go into "public service" to scam as many people as possible.
There seems to be a lot of companies who you think it would be a good idea to get an opinion from them on something, but either don't want to give you an opinion (because of potential liability if the thing they gave you an "opinion" on turns out not to be such a good idea), or their "opinion" ends up being based more on some kickback they're getting from a manufacturer.
think men who paid for the super muscles instead of working out (and didn't have any missing limbs in the first place) would just be a laughingstock to people like me.
If the final product were better in all ways than the natural, then from my viewpoint I'd laugh at somebody who spent all their time working out to enhance their natural muscles and still failed to reach the performance & reliability of the artificial ones.
Then again, until we can make self-repairing prosthetics (at least able to repair themselves as well as normal limbs), I'm highly doubtful that replacing perfectly good normal limbs with prosthetics will be very popular.
That is why tort reform is such a big issue over here.
It's funny how most "tort reform" ends up being "protect the rich guys from the opportunistic greedy little guys", but does very little to address companies/individuals who use the legal system to crush the lives of not-so-powerful folks.
Slashdot Mirror
Your definition is partial - it doesn't include compensation for the act of providing services. The more general definition is to apply the law of supply & demand to "things of value", which includes both property (by the commonly understood definition) and services.
Technically, but I think most people would refuse to accept it if the government something like the color "red" as someone's private property. It might be LEGAL, but that doesn't make it really "property" by a moral, society-beneficial or even common-sense standard.
I think that most people would accept the basic idea of property as something that can be counted or measured. They also understand that this implies that only one person can have a piece of property at a time - if someone else gets the property, then the original person doesn't have it anymore. Even "intellectual property" law doesn't try to apply real property conventions to "ideas", since the people drafting the laws knew that would never fly. Instead, they've set up a bastardized system of a special "legal status" of being a copyright or patent holder as legally-defined property, and let people buy & sell those.
The recording industries have been using extensive propaganda to try and get people to confuse real property with "ideas", but if you start showing people examples of how "intellectual property" law lets people they don't know arbitrarily stop them from doing whatever they want with their own private property, almost everyone except the most die-hard "intellectual property" fanatics get annoyed. People who work out solutions to thorny problems, try to sell a product or service based on those solutions, then get slapped down by bozos abusing the patent office also tend to get annoyed with the so-called "intellectual-property" laws. The main reason some people LIKE intellectual property laws because they see a way where they force people to pay for stuff that people wouldn't ordinarily want to pay for.
I'm not confusing anything - a performance _IS_ a service, with the expectation that if the service pleases the audience, they will compensate the performer somehow. A song on a CD is NOT a performance - it is a hunk of plastic whose value has been increased by encoding something on it which can be converted to pleasing sound waves.
No, trademarks are an intended form of FRAUD protection - to prevent people from fraudently selling product or services associated with another person or company's. They were never intended to be a "product for sale", although a few people have been abusing the trademark laws that way.
No they aren't. You don't appear to know what the "fundamentals of capitalism" really are. Clue: law of supply & demand. People will pay for goods & services when they think they're worth it. They won't pay for them if they don't think the goods or services are worth it. Important point: getting laws passed to MAKE people pay MORE than they would otherwise for a good or service, or to make people pay for a service they are not directly receiving, is _NOT_ capitalism on matter how much you try to redefine the term.
Not sure what you're trying to say here, except you seem to be confusing the service of playing a song for someone to listen to, or providing a copy of the song on a piece of media, versus the service of actually creating the song.
Sorry, you seem to be confusing ideas with real private property again. If you buy a real product, you have a full moral right to do anything you want with it (that doesn't harm someone else of course) - including the right to make copies. If you come up with an idea of your own, you have a full moral right to be able to make a product based on that idea.
It takes greedy people to say: "not only should we get money when we sell a product, but we should get money over and over every time that product is copied, even though we didn't actually provide the service of copying!" And other greedy people say: "I don't care if you came up with the idea on your own, I came up with it first (or bought it from someone who did), and I have more money than you, so I can stop you from using your own idea."
This is not capitalism. This is greed.
Nice troll. There are a _lot_ of programmers on Slashdot, and like musicians, we create "works" which are used & appreciated by non-programmers.
And some of us (who actually understand capitalism better than the so-called "intellectual property" advocates) believe that if we want someone to pay us money, then we should actually have to WORK for it - by providing the service of programming in return for compensation.
Only greedy people think they should get paid every time their work is copied, and not just the first time they sell it to someone.
My preferred method: drive a P.O.S. car that looks like it will fall apart if you sneeze too hard.
Also helps keep people from parking too close, since they _know_ you won't care about their car.
I don't give a damn about your moral system until you try and impose it on me, e.g., use the government to force me to pay you money to do stuff with my own private property that I would ordinarily be able to do for free.
As far as "God-given property rights" are concerned, even if I weren't agnostic, I'd dearly love to hear you quote the Scriptures which define ideas as property, especially since a great deal of the Scriptures emphasize getting their own message distributed as widely as possible.
Patent and copyrights don't have _anything_ to do with private property, and have everything to do with greedy people who have a greatly-self-inflated idea of the worth of their own ideas trying to force people to give them money they don't deserve.
Your flip is a logical failure. Morally, they are NOT the same thing. Legally, greedy people WANT them to be the same thing (and keep trying to redefine reality so that they are treated the same).
BS. Or people who believe who in real capitalism, where you get paid for providing desired goods or services. Creating something for someone else is a service. You should get paid appropriately for that service _when you deliver the service_. To demand to get paid _every_time_ someone makes a copy of that creation, even though it doesn't require any additional effort on your part, is just greedy.
The only people who could possibly argue that they're the same are people who think they should be able to control what others do with their own physical property, all in the name of forcing those people to give them money that they wouldn't have been willing to give otherwise.
Another idiot misapplying a car analogy. If you had a car where it would run only on gasoline that you had to buy from the dealer (or authorized agent), then your analogy might actually be worth discussing.
That's stupid - tax breaks only reduce the amount of the loss a bit, they don't eliminate it entirely. Real stealing costs people money, period. They might have theft insurance, but their premiums will go up over time as well.
Real stealing & copyright infringement can't be compared, except by people who are living in such an alternative reality that they really, really, want copyright infringement to be the same thing as true theft.
It takes a lot of effort for me to do sculpture by banging rocks against each other, but I don't hear anyone arguing that I should be paid for it. People should be paid for providing goods & services.
That's fine - but why should they be paid over and over every time the work is transferred after the initial sale, when they did the effort to create the work only once?
People should be compensated for providing desirable goods or services. There's no reason to force people unrelated to that initial sale to continue compensating the creator (or speculative middlemen who "buy" the ownership of the "intellectual property" from the creator) when no additional value is being created for each additional payment.
"Intellectual property" is really anti-property rights - it allows people who you did not have a financial or legal transaction with to limit what you can do with your own physical property. There had better be some damn compelling societal reason to have laws like that, and I think that modern society is currently proving that such laws hinder rather encourage "innovation".
MS Word & large, formatting-rich documents don't go together. Such documents will become inevitably corrupted.
No it's not. No they don't. And no it isn't.
Come back when you've actually read the Constitution. You might want to also lookup up a few of the concerns that some of the early leaders of America had about allowing people to use the government to stop the free expression of ideas.
It might actually be pretty useful if you could receive a web page + embedded media all in one bundle via BitTorrent (optimized to receive text+images first, of course).
Why do they have to be stored in a localized portion of the brain? Wouldn't it be more likely that they would be stored & interconnected through large chunks of the brain, which might not be located in the exact same spaces between different people?
If the conviction is overturned because the person wasn't guilty, then what's the problem?
I firmly believe that the engineers should be forced to "follow" their designs through the manufacturing & maintenance processes so that they get direct experience with the way their decisions make life difficult for the people who have to use & maintain the product.
I'm not confident that the country WILL recover, especially since Dubya seems intent on making the overall government debt as large as he possibly can during his second term.
I'm reminded of a historical program I was watching where some historians being interviewed talked about how just before every large civilization in history that has collapsed, the spending on their military was out of control, and their government's debt had become unsustainable.
I don't get your point - what does that have to do with real economics?
Or are you talking about the "fake" economics created by trying to treat so-called intellectual property like real property?
That's what people keep claiming they're supposed to do, but no one has actually done effective studies to see whether the net effect is a benefit for a society or a detriment. In absence of such proof (and with many stories of how the system is being abused), we should err on the side of more market freedom & allow people to do what they wish with their own private property instead of giving other people the power to restrict the expression of arbitrary ideas.
If a society wants to encourage inventions, then it would be a _lot_ more straightforward to just pool money together and pay people to do research on useful things. Then anybody smart enough could take the fruits of that research & make a buck based on it.
That doesn't sound like anything _I_ learned in any economics class. Try more like: price is a function of supply & demand.
In a literal sense, maybe - but some people get their kicks by helping other people. And some other people get their kicks by doing "public service". In both cases, they are "self-serving" since they are doing something which make themselves feel good, but the end result is still for the benefit of the society that they are a part of.
If you _don't_ think that there are people like this, then I can only offer my condolences for your miserable luck at meeting decent acquaintances.
Some people _do_ actually take the idea of "civil service" seriously - performing to the best of their abilities to improve the general lot of society. It probably depends on how they were "brainwashed" while growing up to actually give a damn about things like that.
Unfortunately, it's really, really hard for a typical voter (who gets to know them only through the well-managed media) to tell these "saints" apart from the liars & scumbags who go into "public service" to scam as many people as possible.
Huh - that must explain the multimillion dollar executive contracts, with golden parachutes - 'cause they're willing to take the risks.
There seems to be a lot of companies who you think it would be a good idea to get an opinion from them on something, but either don't want to give you an opinion (because of potential liability if the thing they gave you an "opinion" on turns out not to be such a good idea), or their "opinion" ends up being based more on some kickback they're getting from a manufacturer.
If the final product were better in all ways than the natural, then from my viewpoint I'd laugh at somebody who spent all their time working out to enhance their natural muscles and still failed to reach the performance & reliability of the artificial ones.
Then again, until we can make self-repairing prosthetics (at least able to repair themselves as well as normal limbs), I'm highly doubtful that replacing perfectly good normal limbs with prosthetics will be very popular.
It's funny how most "tort reform" ends up being "protect the rich guys from the opportunistic greedy little guys", but does very little to address companies/individuals who use the legal system to crush the lives of not-so-powerful folks.