It is interesting you list patents. Patents are time limited. They are another government mandated monopoly with the exact same intent. Do you think we should remove that time limit and make them into a permanent sort of property?
That question is not for me to decide. The current law imposes a 20 year limit, so be it until the law is changed. My personal opinion is that the originator of an idea should retain their rights for the remainder of their life. Whether or not there should be rights of inheritance is a open question.
Imagine for a second if every physicist in the world had to pay Dirac's family 5c for a license to use a new book on quantum theory. Now 50c isn't that much, and I'm imagining Dirac's family being generous. But Dirac was hardly alone in his work. Now comes 50c for Hilbert (after all you are using a Hilbert space). Schoedinger will want a cut, as will Heisenberg, and Einstein. Bohr shouldn't miss out, neither should de Broglie, Bohm. Which interpretation are we using? Maybe Everett deserves a cut, or Feynman. Probably both since I would imagine we will use whichever is most conceptually or mathematically useful. Of course the cheap publishers will just opt not to talk about more than one interpretation, saves money after all. Lets say we are studing a modification of the Ising model and pick ourselves up a book on that, well there is 50c for Ising, and better pay up 50c for Onsager too (we may well be using his exact solution or some result derived there of, we aren't sure, better pay up to be safe). And so on, this list of people you would need to pay would be immense. We have a system that is expensive beyond measure and a legal minefield. Now this just in a book. What about if I want to publish my work. What if I want to make a product. Well that had best be on a per unit basis (or some more expensive bulk licence). Everything from TVs to through computers to digital wrist watches depends on countless discoveries.
Except that you and I both know science works by publication and reference. We are paid for our work ahead of time (via grants, salaries, etc.) with the mutual understanding that our ideas will be published for the use of others. We must always carefully reference prior work so that interested individuals can follow the references back at least to the originating paper. The reference chain is, in a limited sense, the currency with which we pay each other and those upon whose work ours is built. The idea, the thoughts, are the commodities in science.
The problem with making ideas into property is that you create massive scarcity. We go from a world where a TV costs a few hundred dollars to a world where a ordinary TV costs thousands of dollars because it depends on thousands and thousands of ideas, each of which has a price.
There is no problem, because you do not make ideas into property... they already are. You do not have access to my ideas unless you pay me for them, or I offer them to you, or you threaten me in some way that forces me to give them up. If I come-up with a new way of making my home more energy efficient and decide not to offer that idea to others (either by sale or gift), you are left with two possibilities if want that invention. Either create it yourself (without studying what I've done), or steal it from me in some way (which includes looking at what I did and duplicating it).
Now if you time limit control of ideas (like we do with patents), then eventually all the above problems go away (and you incentivise new discovery). But if you make ideas into property then the problem remains in perpetuity.
As I said above, there is no problem. We are fortunate that clever people are willing to create and sell useful and fun things. Suggesting that we all have rights to what others produce is wrong. We have rights only to the things we produce and the things for which we trade.
Copyright amounts to the right to levy and keep a tax on the reproduction of something. It even allows one to choose the tax rate.
The government cannot grant a right to something it does not own. The rights to the products of my mind and my hands are my own, unless I grant them to someone else. I do not need anyone to grant me that right. The government, however, can help me protect those rights, i.e. copyright law.
Let me give you an example to show you how very absurd your idea is. I'm a particle physicist by profession.
Interesting... so am I (high-energy nuclear physics, hence the tag heavyion).
At some point in the future my discoveries will probably be used in some new fangled gadget or other. Do I (or my sponsor, or whoever) have the right to claim anyone who uses my discoveries should pay me (or my descendants) for the privilege?
Absolutely! It happens every day. It's called a patent. Although, if you are funded by one of the typical agencies for particle physics (DoE, NSF, etc.), then it is indeed your funding agency or your institution that has rights to what you produce. That was in the agreement you signed when you took the grad appointment or postdoc, or faculty position, whatever applies to you. Given that DoE and NSF are taxpayer funded, it is the taxpayers that have bought the rights to your work.
I don't think so. You would effectively set up scientific dynasties. The offspring of Dirac or Boltzman would be would rich beyond measure (or more likely, technology would have stagnated). Are you really suggesting that if I think of or produce something first then that idea is my property in the strictest sense of the word? Do you not see where that leads?
Yes, that is what I am suggesting. If you are able to produce something then do so. It and the rights to it are yours, unless you give or sell them to someone else. As scientists, you and I are paid for our work by the agencies that fund us. They, in turn, were setup to pass our ideas and work to the world and to future generations. Others who develop ideas independent of government funding patent their ideas and make money from them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Explain to me how, exactly, technology stagnates when there are significant profits to be made by producing something new.
What I see in a future where everyone claims rights to the ideas and property of others is a world in which those who can think creatively and produce new and better things no longer see a reason to do so. Their ideas and products will be seized by the masses claiming "rights" with no return for their efforts. Why bother to be productive when there is nothing to be gained?
Exactly, nothing gives me the right to your house unless I buy or you give it to me. It is the house that is the subject. Now, carry that over to the world of software. It is the code that is now the subject. The difference is the amount of work required to make a copy. If you are willing and able to sit down and write the code for the game from scratch, then do so. That is something you have a right to do. If you are not able or willing, then buy it from those who are. If you buy it and don't like it then give your copy to someone else. But you cannot claim a right to the code itself and the free distribution of it. You didn't create it, just as I did not create your house.
Also, you didn't explain what about a copyright constitutes a subsidy.
(re-posted because I did not realize I had been logged-out)
It is true that if making games wasn't profitable then EA wouldn't do it. Thats why I support limited copyright (way more limited than it is now).
But they do not have a right to make money (if they can all well and good, but they don't have a right to it). We subsidies them via copyright.
That's why class action lawsuits like this one are legitimate and ethical. When copyright is abused it should be reigned in. And it is widely and massively abused.
I never said they have a right to make money. The may produce something creative and offer it for sale. You give them your money in exchange if you wish. But what, exactly, is it about a copyright that you feel is a subsidy?
Furthermore, are you suggesting that if you built your house with your own hands that I somehow have a right to claim it as my own? If not, how is the example I cite different from proposing that we all have "rights" to EA's products?
Software is easy to duplicate but it is otherwise no different from any other product. It takes ingenuity, creativity, and effort to produce. If we are not willing to pay for that it will most certainly go away.
You and I certainly have some common ground in as much as I agree that there are cases where companies claim more control over a purchased product than they are entitled to. I would also agree the courts should decide where to draw the line between protecting the company's ability to make a profit (so they can make more games) and the consumer's rights (yes rights) to use products they purchase. But please do not suggest that anyone has a right to the creative output of another. There is no such right.
I have no right to something created by someone else. If they wish to keep it private then no court should be able to make them hand over what they have created.
But if they don't keep it secret, if they published it, well that's a different matter. Once you sell something to some it becomes theirs, and assuming they don't use it to do something unpleasant to someone else then they can do what they darn well like with it. Including replicate it. Including giving away those replicas.
Everyone has a right to experience their national culture. Not just because that is a fine idea in principle, but because preventing them from doing so is an unnecessary restriction. You might just as well ask what gives me the right to drink coffee or dance in the rain. I have those rights because no one else is harmed when I exercise them.
I would never question your right to enjoy the things that are yours. The sticky point comes when you bring-up the question of harm. Does it harm EA to spend lots of money paying people to develop a great game only to sell a single copy for $50 and have the rest of the world get it for free? Why should they do that? Why bother making a great game in the first place? Or perhaps they should ask the same amount of money for that single copy as what they invested in making the game?
My point is simply that if we, the gamers, do not make it worthwhile for the software companies to make good games, they won't. I don't like the draconian measures used to protect a company's ability to make money. They are often an inconvenience. But I certainly do not have any rights to their products unless I pay them.
What gives YOU the RIGHT to something created by someone else?
The fact that they offered it to me in exchange for my money, and then they confirmed that offer by accepting my money. If they weren't giving up something as part of an exchange, then what gave them the right to my money?
Exactly, it's money. You trade your money for their product. You do not have a "natural right" to anything anyone else produces, only your own "products" and those for which you trade. You do not get a right to copy it and give it away to all your friends unless you are granted that right by the producer. I do have issues with producers' assertions that you may not copy something you have bought for your own archival purposes.
If there is an issue that interferes with your ability to use the product you have paid for in the future, then I am strongly on your side. After all, you paid for that ability. But the idea that you have some God-given right to anything anyone else makes is absurd and should be called such.
I just don't get this attitude. Copyright is a social contract. It isn't part of a capitalist economy. It is defacto a subsidy for production of culture in the form of a government mandated monopoly. In a pure capitalist society you wouldn't have rights to control the replication of bits. Copyright IS by definition a form of socialism.
Here is the deal. We give companies and people a time limited, government mandated monopoly on the reproduction of a good because the cost to develop the good is large and the cost to reproduce it is very small. We throw in a few caveats to try to stop them abusing that monopoly. We do this with a good everyone has a right to have access to (national culture), and in return we expect a few things.
This post is logically more twisted than an Escher print. Let me ask one simple question in response to your post. What gives YOU the RIGHT to something created by someone else?
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting you list patents. Patents are time limited. They are another government mandated monopoly with the exact same intent. Do you think we should remove that time limit and make them into a permanent sort of property?
That question is not for me to decide. The current law imposes a 20 year limit, so be it until the law is changed. My personal opinion is that the originator of an idea should retain their rights for the remainder of their life. Whether or not there should be rights of inheritance is a open question.
Imagine for a second if every physicist in the world had to pay Dirac's family 5c for a license to use a new book on quantum theory. Now 50c isn't that much, and I'm imagining Dirac's family being generous. But Dirac was hardly alone in his work. Now comes 50c for Hilbert (after all you are using a Hilbert space). Schoedinger will want a cut, as will Heisenberg, and Einstein. Bohr shouldn't miss out, neither should de Broglie, Bohm. Which interpretation are we using? Maybe Everett deserves a cut, or Feynman. Probably both since I would imagine we will use whichever is most conceptually or mathematically useful. Of course the cheap publishers will just opt not to talk about more than one interpretation, saves money after all. Lets say we are studing a modification of the Ising model and pick ourselves up a book on that, well there is 50c for Ising, and better pay up 50c for Onsager too (we may well be using his exact solution or some result derived there of, we aren't sure, better pay up to be safe). And so on, this list of people you would need to pay would be immense. We have a system that is expensive beyond measure and a legal minefield. Now this just in a book. What about if I want to publish my work. What if I want to make a product. Well that had best be on a per unit basis (or some more expensive bulk licence). Everything from TVs to through computers to digital wrist watches depends on countless discoveries.
Except that you and I both know science works by publication and reference. We are paid for our work ahead of time (via grants, salaries, etc.) with the mutual understanding that our ideas will be published for the use of others. We must always carefully reference prior work so that interested individuals can follow the references back at least to the originating paper. The reference chain is, in a limited sense, the currency with which we pay each other and those upon whose work ours is built. The idea, the thoughts, are the commodities in science.
The problem with making ideas into property is that you create massive scarcity. We go from a world where a TV costs a few hundred dollars to a world where a ordinary TV costs thousands of dollars because it depends on thousands and thousands of ideas, each of which has a price.
There is no problem, because you do not make ideas into property... they already are. You do not have access to my ideas unless you pay me for them, or I offer them to you, or you threaten me in some way that forces me to give them up. If I come-up with a new way of making my home more energy efficient and decide not to offer that idea to others (either by sale or gift), you are left with two possibilities if want that invention. Either create it yourself (without studying what I've done), or steal it from me in some way (which includes looking at what I did and duplicating it).
Now if you time limit control of ideas (like we do with patents), then eventually all the above problems go away (and you incentivise new discovery). But if you make ideas into property then the problem remains in perpetuity.
As I said above, there is no problem. We are fortunate that clever people are willing to create and sell useful and fun things. Suggesting that we all have rights to what others produce is wrong. We have rights only to the things we produce and the things for which we trade.
I
Copyright amounts to the right to levy and keep a tax on the reproduction of something. It even allows one to choose the tax rate.
The government cannot grant a right to something it does not own. The rights to the products of my mind and my hands are my own, unless I grant them to someone else. I do not need anyone to grant me that right. The government, however, can help me protect those rights, i.e. copyright law.
Let me give you an example to show you how very absurd your idea is. I'm a particle physicist by profession.
Interesting... so am I (high-energy nuclear physics, hence the tag heavyion).
At some point in the future my discoveries will probably be used in some new fangled gadget or other. Do I (or my sponsor, or whoever) have the right to claim anyone who uses my discoveries should pay me (or my descendants) for the privilege?
Absolutely! It happens every day. It's called a patent. Although, if you are funded by one of the typical agencies for particle physics (DoE, NSF, etc.), then it is indeed your funding agency or your institution that has rights to what you produce. That was in the agreement you signed when you took the grad appointment or postdoc, or faculty position, whatever applies to you. Given that DoE and NSF are taxpayer funded, it is the taxpayers that have bought the rights to your work.
I don't think so. You would effectively set up scientific dynasties. The offspring of Dirac or Boltzman would be would rich beyond measure (or more likely, technology would have stagnated). Are you really suggesting that if I think of or produce something first then that idea is my property in the strictest sense of the word? Do you not see where that leads?
Yes, that is what I am suggesting. If you are able to produce something then do so. It and the rights to it are yours, unless you give or sell them to someone else. As scientists, you and I are paid for our work by the agencies that fund us. They, in turn, were setup to pass our ideas and work to the world and to future generations. Others who develop ideas independent of government funding patent their ideas and make money from them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Explain to me how, exactly, technology stagnates when there are significant profits to be made by producing something new.
What I see in a future where everyone claims rights to the ideas and property of others is a world in which those who can think creatively and produce new and better things no longer see a reason to do so. Their ideas and products will be seized by the masses claiming "rights" with no return for their efforts. Why bother to be productive when there is nothing to be gained?
Exactly, nothing gives me the right to your house unless I buy or you give it to me. It is the house that is the subject. Now, carry that over to the world of software. It is the code that is now the subject. The difference is the amount of work required to make a copy. If you are willing and able to sit down and write the code for the game from scratch, then do so. That is something you have a right to do. If you are not able or willing, then buy it from those who are. If you buy it and don't like it then give your copy to someone else. But you cannot claim a right to the code itself and the free distribution of it. You didn't create it, just as I did not create your house.
Also, you didn't explain what about a copyright constitutes a subsidy.
(re-posted because I did not realize I had been logged-out)
It is true that if making games wasn't profitable then EA wouldn't do it. Thats why I support limited copyright (way more limited than it is now).
But they do not have a right to make money (if they can all well and good, but they don't have a right to it). We subsidies them via copyright.
That's why class action lawsuits like this one are legitimate and ethical. When copyright is abused it should be reigned in. And it is widely and massively abused.
I never said they have a right to make money. The may produce something creative and offer it for sale. You give them your money in exchange if you wish. But what, exactly, is it about a copyright that you feel is a subsidy?
Furthermore, are you suggesting that if you built your house with your own hands that I somehow have a right to claim it as my own? If not, how is the example I cite different from proposing that we all have "rights" to EA's products?
Software is easy to duplicate but it is otherwise no different from any other product. It takes ingenuity, creativity, and effort to produce. If we are not willing to pay for that it will most certainly go away.
You and I certainly have some common ground in as much as I agree that there are cases where companies claim more control over a purchased product than they are entitled to. I would also agree the courts should decide where to draw the line between protecting the company's ability to make a profit (so they can make more games) and the consumer's rights (yes rights) to use products they purchase. But please do not suggest that anyone has a right to the creative output of another. There is no such right.
I have no right to something created by someone else. If they wish to keep it private then no court should be able to make them hand over what they have created.
But if they don't keep it secret, if they published it, well that's a different matter. Once you sell something to some it becomes theirs, and assuming they don't use it to do something unpleasant to someone else then they can do what they darn well like with it. Including replicate it. Including giving away those replicas.
Everyone has a right to experience their national culture. Not just because that is a fine idea in principle, but because preventing them from doing so is an unnecessary restriction. You might just as well ask what gives me the right to drink coffee or dance in the rain. I have those rights because no one else is harmed when I exercise them.
I would never question your right to enjoy the things that are yours. The sticky point comes when you bring-up the question of harm. Does it harm EA to spend lots of money paying people to develop a great game only to sell a single copy for $50 and have the rest of the world get it for free? Why should they do that? Why bother making a great game in the first place? Or perhaps they should ask the same amount of money for that single copy as what they invested in making the game?
My point is simply that if we, the gamers, do not make it worthwhile for the software companies to make good games, they won't. I don't like the draconian measures used to protect a company's ability to make money. They are often an inconvenience. But I certainly do not have any rights to their products unless I pay them.
The fact that they offered it to me in exchange for my money, and then they confirmed that offer by accepting my money. If they weren't giving up something as part of an exchange, then what gave them the right to my money?
Exactly, it's money. You trade your money for their product. You do not have a "natural right" to anything anyone else produces, only your own "products" and those for which you trade. You do not get a right to copy it and give it away to all your friends unless you are granted that right by the producer. I do have issues with producers' assertions that you may not copy something you have bought for your own archival purposes.
If there is an issue that interferes with your ability to use the product you have paid for in the future, then I am strongly on your side. After all, you paid for that ability. But the idea that you have some God-given right to anything anyone else makes is absurd and should be called such.
I just don't get this attitude. Copyright is a social contract. It isn't part of a capitalist economy. It is defacto a subsidy for production of culture in the form of a government mandated monopoly. In a pure capitalist society you wouldn't have rights to control the replication of bits. Copyright IS by definition a form of socialism.
Here is the deal. We give companies and people a time limited, government mandated monopoly on the reproduction of a good because the cost to develop the good is large and the cost to reproduce it is very small. We throw in a few caveats to try to stop them abusing that monopoly. We do this with a good everyone has a right to have access to (national culture), and in return we expect a few things.
This post is logically more twisted than an Escher print. Let me ask one simple question in response to your post. What gives YOU the RIGHT to something created by someone else?