It is different from Android, actually. Android runs each app under a separate user ID, and one app can't access another app's data unless the other app explicitly allows it to. Typically this access will go through the standard Android permission system, so the user will see when they install the app that it's requesting permission to read their SMS logs or whatever.
Also known as "selling the information to you". You are just playing stupid semantic games to push an agenda.
No, I'm pointing out a distinction that you seem to have trouble understanding.
This is as stupid as saying that when you buy a book, you are paying for the service of me handing you the book, rather than the book itself.
Yes, that would be stupid. The difference is that when I buy a book, I become the owner of the book.
When I pay you to give me information, I do not become the owner of that information. You could say I own a mental copy of the fact that my wife is sleeping with your mother, but I don't own that fact: it would be ludicrous for me to tell you, or anyone else, that you aren't allowed to do certain things with that fact because it's mine now.
You are not paying me a for a service, you are paying me because you want the information.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. I'm paying you for the service because I want the information.
Actually, copyright and patent laws do give you the ability to stop people from "doing whatever they want" with it.
The legal entitlement, yes, but not the ability. Calling yourself the owner of a song doesn't actually give you the power to stop someone halfway around the world from burning that song to a CD for his buddy. At best, it gives you the power to sue him after the fact, if you somehow find out what happened, which you probably won't.
How does that make it not ownership? If I download a piece of FOSS software, I own that copy, despite the fact that plenty of other people own copies.
Yes, you own that copy. You don't own the software itself. Downloading Ubuntu does not make you the owner of Ubuntu.
Copyright holders don't just claim to own particular copies of, say, a song. They claim to own the song itself.
Your argument makes no sense from a linguistic or logical perspective, unless you redefine how "ownership" is commonly meant. Hint: nothing about "ownership" requires it to be exclusive.
You're the one trying to redefine the term, pal. The common meaning of ownership is all about exclusivity.
For example, all Americans "own" the National Parks - but by your initial logic, this is impossible.
Yes, and in fact, it's not true. You and I are not the owners of any national parks. The federal government owns them. When someone says national parks belong to all Americans, they're speaking metaphorically.
Not surprising, really, because you've been twisting the language this entire discussion.
What's not surprising is that you started trying to substitute your own definitions the moment you realized you were losing the argument. Unfortunately, it isn't surprising that you'd project your own behavior onto me, either.
Creating artificial limits on a gas that exists in nature and is produced by every animal on the planet is ludicrous. A gas that is REQUIRED for the plant life on this planet, which is required for the animal life. That should be really simple to see.
You wouldn't mind drinking 100 gallons of water right now, then, right? After all, water exists in nature and is required for humans to live.
How about salt? Would you like to eat fifty pounds of salt? After all, it exists in nature and is required for human life!
But control is a strong urge. We... must.... control.... others....
If I save money by lowering my emissions, I will do so even if there aren't limits and brokers making billions off of trading them. I don't need the "incentive" of a government tax
You're proving his point. Without limits or a trading system, you don't save money by lowering your emissions, so you won't do it.
Pollution is an externalized cost: your emissions might cost a total of $1 million for those who are affected by it, but its impact on your bottom line might only be a few pennies. As a result, you pollute far more than you should, because other people are bearing the true cost of your decisions. Taxes and trading systems force polluters to pay for their own decisions.
It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose.
It does help companies offer their product for less than they would if they had to pay the true costs of propping up their business model.
Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement?
The cost isn't entirely monetary. We also subsidize the copyright lottery by giving up our rights, and by giving up the works and technical innovations that could be created if not for copyright. What is the value of being able to create backup copies of DVDs? What is the value of the ghost works that are never released or created? I'm not sure how to put a number on that, but whatever that cost is, we're paying it.
I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on.
Er... sure there is. If I give you $10,000 to buy a car, and you choose a $20,000 model and pay the difference out of your own pocket, that doesn't mean I didn't give you $10k. Your cost doesn't cancel out my cost.
I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.
Actually, in effect, it does. Money is fungible. Every dollar a company doesn't have to spend propping up their business model is an extra dollar they can spend on production. There's ultimately no difference between (1) giving a company $10,000 to pay for production and letting them pay for enforcement on their own, (2) giving a company $10,000 for enforcement and letting them pay for production on their own, and (3) giving them $10,000 worth of enforcement services for free and letting them pay for production on their own.
If a company that relies on selling copies had to pay the true cost of maintaining its position as the sole provider of copies, it would have to pass those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for each copy. The cost we all pay for copyright law -- in terms of dollars spent on enforcement as well as lost rights and works -- results in lower prices per copy. That's a subsidy.
Simply untrue. In its most basic form, ownership is simply to possess something. Since I can possess information, I can own it. And somebody else also owning it doesn't make me a non-owner.
When I take a book from the shelf at Borders and hold it in my hands, I "possess" it. Does that make me the owner? No, not until I give Borders some money to convince them to relinquish their ownership.
But if I keep the information to myself, I own it exclusively, and you can't use it. I could sell it to you.
No, you can't sell it to me. What you can do is charge me for the service of disclosing that information to me. But once I hear it, I won't be the owner. I'll know that information, but I won't have control of it; I'll have no ability to stop anyone else who knows that information from doing whatever they want with it.
Even the laws are unnecessary. If I see your wife sleeping with somebody, I could say "do you want to know who's sleeping with your wife? Give me two goats and a piece of cheese."
Again, that's not ownership. You don't "own" the fact that my wife is sleeping with your mother. You know it, but you only control your own actions; you have no control over what anyone else does with that information once they learn it.
No, inventions are implementations. They may use facts and principles, but it is odd to call them "facts". "Devices" would be a more useful term.
You seem to have confused an abstract invention (which is an idea, an observed fact about how things can be made to work) with the physical embodiment of that invention (which is a device, an implementation, which puts that observed fact into practice).
You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.
If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.
There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. [...] You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work.
It's hardly fair to expect the two models to compete head-to-head when one is heavily subsidized and the other isn't.
How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?
When I brought this up before, your answer seemed to be "who cares, I like the subsidy." Well, fine, but don't expect your point about competition to be taken seriously when you're the one encouraging a subsidy for one model and not the other.
Uhh, what? How is information not subject to ownership? Owning information can be a very lucrative business.
Ownership is a means to resolve usage conflicts, and it only applies to things for which those conflicts exist.
You can't drive my car to Chicago at the same time I'm driving it to Seattle, because the car can only be in one place at a time. You can't build a garage on the same land where I'm building a pool, because only one thing can be there at a time. That is the nature of physical property. It would be better if we could both get our way, but we can't: someone has to decide how the property can be used, and in our society, that person is the owner. (Private ownership isn't the only way to resolve the conflict. We could fight for it, and let whoever's stronger get his way, or we could let some bureaucrat decide who gets to use it at any moment. But the conflict exists regardless, and it has to be resolved somehow.)
Information, on the other hand, is not subject to any of these conflicts. I can listen to a song without interfering with your ability to listen to it. I can watch a movie while you're re-editing it. I can run a program while you're disassembling it. Assigning "ownership" of something where one use cannot conflict with any other use is unnecessary, and assigning "ownership" of something which has no physical location -- no place where you can station guards to enforce your rights as an owner -- is nonsensical.
Software is not a product of nature. It is the fruit of human labor and intellect. It must be written, you don't just discover it.
That's a meaningless distinction.
Suppose you want to calculate the prime numbers up to 1 million. There is a number (actually, many numbers) that you can feed into your CPU to make that happen -- that number exists even if you don't yet know what it is. Writing software is a way to discover what that number is. But it's not the only way: you could iterate through all possible numbers until you found one that worked, if you had the time.
Likewise, there is a number that represents the speed of light (actually, many numbers, since there are many systems of measurement). One way to discover that number would be to set up an experiment that assumes a particular speed, and run it repeatedly, plugging in different numbers until the experiment succeeds. But again, that's a very time-consuming way to do it: the measurement of the speed of light that we have today is the fruit of human labor and intellect.
So software is an invention, not a a fact.
You say that as if they're two separate things.
Inventions are facts. It's a fact that if you set up a particular combination of gears, pulleys, shafts, etc., you'll get an elevator. That fact is no more true today than it was a thousand years ago -- the only difference is we didn't know it yet, and we didn't know a lot of other things that are necessary to actually make a working elevator.
It's a fact that if you run a particular sequence of mathematical operations on a matrix representing an image, you'll get a smaller matrix that still contains enough information to reproduce an image that the human eye thinks is the same. Again, that fact was true even before the JPEG algorithm was discovered.
It's a fact that if you connect a needle to an amplifier and run it through a groove with a particular shape, you'll hear a sound that that we recognize as the song "Yesterday". That fact was true before the Beatles were born, and it was true before record players were invented.
You don't even need the PC - you can download apps with the Android browser. But most authors of paid apps on the Android Market won't be in the habit of sending out links to (easily copied).apk files.
Your profits dive by half as consumers now have more choices.
Gasp! More choice for consumers? We can't have that, now, can we?!
So without patents, your competitor gets to eat your lunch while you do all the hard work.
Boo hoo.
Laser distance measurements wouldn't work without knowing the speed of light. Someone in the past worked very hard to measure the speed of light, and now those LIDAR manufacturers are eating their lunch! Shall we impose a fine on everyone who uses the speed of light without paying a license fee?
In addition, the design around incentive is also beneficial because the public will then have an entirely new innovation.
Broken window fallacy. If we have to expend more effort developing an alternate way to do things because the existing way is patented, that's a net loss to society. That effort could've been spent moving us forward, but instead we're just moving sideways.
If you are against the patent system entirely, I invite you to compare the economies of nations with strong IP law with the economies of those countries that have weak or no IP law.
Correlation is not causation. (Try comparing the economies of majority-white, majority-Christian nations to the economies of other countries.)
In fact, I'd say the causation is more likely the other way around in this case: strong economies lead to concentrated wealth, which influences government to pass laws that let it extract rents.
But securing a large land area, or, say, a factory? You'd need a private army on short notice, and then, again, the scale isn't really that far from what you'd need to enforce IP rights.
A security force large enough to secure a factory is still much, much, much, much, much, much smaller than a security force large enough to monitor all copying.
A key difference between physical property rights and copyright is that physical property rights have a known place where they need to be enforced. You know where you need to station guards to protect your factory: at the factory! But copying is not tied to any location. You'd need a guard in every home.
I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.
The books had sold 100 million copies before the movies ever came out, and inspired countless other works, from tabletop and video games to school plays. Fifteen years ago, if you ran a poll of books that should be given movie adaptations, LOTR surely would've been near the top.
I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie.
How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket.
Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright.
Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?
(Come to think of it, how can you objectively measure the value of anything without market-based data? A 20 ounce soft drink costs pennies to produce but regularly sells for $1.50 or more. The value is all subjective.)
However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable.
Exposure to ideas and concepts is valuable. Producing ideas and concepts is valuable. But the ideas and concepts themselves, not so much, at least in terms of dollar value. What is the Pythagorean Theorem worth? What is the number 69,105 worth? Those questions barely even make sense.
the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value
Not at all. The fact that I'm unwilling to pay for a second copy proves that it doesn't have actual value! In fact, if I have a good enough memory, I might not even need the first copy once I've seen it.
Again, if it "just doesn't make sense" to assign no dollar value to information, then what is the dollar value of the number 69,105? What is the dollar value of the fact that Albany is the capital of New York? What is the dollar value of the comments in this thread?
There are situations where I might be willing to pay someone to tell me what the capital of New York is, but it would be insane to suggest that anyone owns that information and deserves to be compensated whenever it's copied or used.
and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.
Actually, I want to reward people for creating it even though it has no inherent value, much like I want to reward people for hauling my garbage away even though they're technically making me poorer. The service itself is what I find valuable.
These designs need protection because they take a lot of time, money, and ingenuity to develop and many of them would never be developed, much less published, if there weren't an incentive like a temporary monopoly.
Almost right. You're missing a comma before "like a temporary monopoly" -- a temporary monopoly is just one possible example of what that incentive could be.
There's no requirement that the incentive has to be a temporary monopoly, or even be like a temporary monopoly. Making money by selling products based on the invention is a fine incentive already! If I'm selling hot dogs, I can gain a leg up on my competitors by inventing a tastier hot dog -- I don't need any monopoly, all I need is a basic profit motive.
(On the other hand, a tastier hot dog could actually be a legitimate subject for patents, because it's hard to know how a hot dog was made just by tasting it. The patent would let other hot dog makers know how to make their own hot dogs tastier. That's not necessary with software, since you can learn how software works just by disassembling it.)
A machine that can easily be cloned without examining somebody else's invention is obvious and ineligible for patent protection.
A machine that can easily be cloned (and its method of operation understood) after examining it should also be ineligible for patent protection, for the reasons I stated earlier. Patents should be reserved for inventions that can't be reverse engineered. We don't need inventors to explain how their easily-understood inventions work; we can see that for ourselves.
But a machine that a person skilled in the art can't think of when faced with the same problem is not obvious and society will reward somebody for inventing a solution and making it obvious to the rest of us.
Yes, absolutely. Society will reward such a person even without a patent system, because he's providing a valuable service and/or because he's selling a product that wasn't available before he came along.
Nonsense. No one is forced to invent anything, and no one who invents something is forced to give it away. If someone voluntarily chooses to do either of those things, he accepts the consequences. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
and the socialists and commies are salivating at that prospect.
You sure do go on about socialists and commies. When's the last time you looked at a calendar?
Not having patents or other IP protections would mean that effectively, the property belongs to The People - society as a whole. Quite a socialistic/communistic idea, wouldn't you say?
Uh... no. Does the number 123 belong to The People? How about the fact that Albany is the capital of New York, does that belong to The People?
The answers are no and no. They don't belong to anyone, because they aren't property. They're information, which is not subject to ownership at all.
In truth, all property is "government-enforced monopoly".
Not really. Yes, the government enforces physical property rights, but you can enforce physical property rights without any government help: you just need a shotgun, or some electrified razor wire, or a few security guards, etc.
Patents (and copyrights), on the other hand, are only enforceable by siccing the government on someone. Without the threat of a lawsuit, there is no way of preventing someone from sharing or using information that you've given them (short of killing everyone who Knows Too Much).
It creates the incentive for inventors to bring those types of inventions to market, which benefits society.
Does it really?
1. Patents don't require you to bring anything to market. In fact, a common use of patents is to simply obtain the patent and use it extract money from someone else who wants to bring the product to market. As long as you're the first person to apply, you get money without having to actually sell anything.
2. There's already an incentive to bring new inventions to market: namely, the money you get from selling them. If you design a better mousetrap, you'll sell a lot of mousetraps before your competitors catch on.
My point is that those types of inventions would never be revealed to the public because the inventor will not waste resources on them.
If there's an opportunity to make money by inventing something and selling it, people will do that on their own. Patents aren't necessary to motivate them.
Patents give the inventor a reason to reveal those inventions to the public, which in turn, allows other inventors to build on them and obtain new patents.
... 20 years later, sure. The problem is, innovation is stalled for 20 years in the meantime.
Patents are supposed to be a way to share the details of your invention. But many companies forbid their employees to look at patents, which is completely backwards! Why? Because the penalties for willful patent infringement are higher. The company is better off saying "we never looked at your patent" and continuing their own R&D process based on things that were free to use 20 years earlier.
There's nothing wrong with the patent system other than a few greedy idiots abusing it by publishing obvious patents, and you/.ers want it abolished for some naive socialist agenda where the inventors simply hand over their hard work for free to companies and general public.
No one here is asking inventors to work for free, so you can lose that strawman.
By the way, you realize patents are government-enforced monopolies, right? Walling off sections of the free market through legal force? If you think opposing patents is "socialist", you don't know what the word means.
Patents are required on physical objects because they are not covered by copyright, and so absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
An invention that can easily be examined and cloned doesn't need patent protection.
The term "patent" comes from the use of the word that means "apparent to everyone", as in "patently obvious". Patents further the useful arts not by enticing people to invent new things (when there's a problem that needs solving, people will solve it anyway), but by enticing inventors to share their knowledge: before patents, inventors were reluctant to share details of their inventions because they feared competition, so patents grant a temporary monopoly in exchange for disclosing those details.
This rationale for patents rarely applies to software. A program has to be executable, and if a CPU can figure out how to make it work, so can a person. Even intentionally obfuscated software can be understood with moderate effort (see any warez site).
The thing is some countries have copyright laws that explicitly allow copying for backup purposes. I'm pretty sure the UK is one of these, pretty certainly for software.
The US is also one of these. 17 USC 117 applies to any "computer program", even one for a special-purpose computer like a game console.
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet?
The same way anyone else gets started in a market where they have no established reputation: by charging less than established players, and/or demonstrating their skill for free (which most graphic artists already do with their portfolios).
The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have.
Most people reap rewards proportionate to the value of the labor they perform (and that includes labor whose "true value" isn't known until after it's performed - you just estimate the value up front, or offer a low base rate with bonuses for quality work). Why do artists need an entirely different system of compensation?
Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses.
If someone else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because the ideas are already out there.
If no one else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because they'll have no competition.
The only potential harm is if they're so slow to start selling their new product that a competitor rises up before they've recouped their costs. And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.
Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years.
The years when copyright worked well were years in which it was practical for a few wealthy entities to mass-produce copies, but impractical for individuals to do it on their own. It was easy (and tolerable to the masses) to police copying when that only meant physically inspecting a handful of factories.
Now, everything can be digitized and reproduced at home by people who do it just for the sake of sharing, and copyright isn't working quite so well. Now enforcing copyright means keeping technology out of consumers' hands, snooping on private communications, and going after individuals who have no profit motive.
What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it.
Once in a while, sure, but you'd be just as much of a fool to make a career out of it. If you have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning $1.5 million, the odds are in your favor, but most players will still lose. Expected value is not the same as actual value: that's why the insurance industry exists.
Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?
Because in reality, people aren't only happy with things that already exist. They're happier with new things that they haven't seen before. People who can provide pleasant surprises will have no difficulty earning a living from it.
Don't think copyright solves this problem, though. Read any critique of the film industry and you'll see complaints that studios are too conservative, investing too much in predictable, lowest-common-denominator crap that sells a lot of tickets but doesn't innovate.
To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it.
No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.
In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for.
Not necessarily. The world is full of examples of hiring people to provide a service without knowing exactly what it'll be, from restaurants to CEOs. You can hire someone to use their own judgment, not just to go through a checklist of tasks you've laid out for them.
The consumers don't have to provide the ideas at all, in fact. If an artist has an idea he'd like to develop, he can go out looking for customers instead of waiting for them to come to him.
How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR?
Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!
At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced.
Don't forget the lost technological innovations, the cost of buying works in one new format after another because there's no simple and legal way to transfer them, and of course the cost of buying copies of works whose production has long since been paid for.
And don't forget that IP laws have never been suitably balanced, and certainly aren't today, so the cost of works that aren't created due to infringement risks is quite high in reality. That cost doesn't only apply to new works, either: many old works are no longer in print, but since the copyright holder is unwilling to reprint them, they're basically unavailable. Some works are also only available in modified form because of licensing issues (e.g. TV shows released on DVD without the original soundtracks).
Well, that is what we have today, except today you even get to listen to the work you're about to pay for BEFORE you pay for it.
No, it isn't what we have today. An artist doesn't know whether he'll get paid a fair price for his work until after he performs the work -- maybe even decades after. And the price he eventually gets paid has absolutely no relation to his standard of fairness: he can set the price per copy, but he has no control over how many copies he sells.
That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.
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It is different from Android, actually. Android runs each app under a separate user ID, and one app can't access another app's data unless the other app explicitly allows it to. Typically this access will go through the standard Android permission system, so the user will see when they install the app that it's requesting permission to read their SMS logs or whatever.
Also known as "selling the information to you". You are just playing stupid semantic games to push an agenda.
No, I'm pointing out a distinction that you seem to have trouble understanding.
This is as stupid as saying that when you buy a book, you are paying for the service of me handing you the book, rather than the book itself.
Yes, that would be stupid. The difference is that when I buy a book, I become the owner of the book.
When I pay you to give me information, I do not become the owner of that information. You could say I own a mental copy of the fact that my wife is sleeping with your mother, but I don't own that fact: it would be ludicrous for me to tell you, or anyone else, that you aren't allowed to do certain things with that fact because it's mine now.
You are not paying me a for a service, you are paying me because you want the information.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. I'm paying you for the service because I want the information.
Actually, copyright and patent laws do give you the ability to stop people from "doing whatever they want" with it.
The legal entitlement, yes, but not the ability. Calling yourself the owner of a song doesn't actually give you the power to stop someone halfway around the world from burning that song to a CD for his buddy. At best, it gives you the power to sue him after the fact, if you somehow find out what happened, which you probably won't.
How does that make it not ownership? If I download a piece of FOSS software, I own that copy, despite the fact that plenty of other people own copies.
Yes, you own that copy. You don't own the software itself. Downloading Ubuntu does not make you the owner of Ubuntu.
Copyright holders don't just claim to own particular copies of, say, a song. They claim to own the song itself.
Your argument makes no sense from a linguistic or logical perspective, unless you redefine how "ownership" is commonly meant. Hint: nothing about "ownership" requires it to be exclusive.
You're the one trying to redefine the term, pal. The common meaning of ownership is all about exclusivity.
After all, if information could be owned by everyone who heard it, that "would mean that effectively, the property belongs to The People - society as a whole. Quite a socialistic/communistic idea, wouldn't you say?"
For example, all Americans "own" the National Parks - but by your initial logic, this is impossible.
Yes, and in fact, it's not true. You and I are not the owners of any national parks. The federal government owns them. When someone says national parks belong to all Americans, they're speaking metaphorically.
Not surprising, really, because you've been twisting the language this entire discussion.
What's not surprising is that you started trying to substitute your own definitions the moment you realized you were losing the argument. Unfortunately, it isn't surprising that you'd project your own behavior onto me, either.
Creating artificial limits on a gas that exists in nature and is produced by every animal on the planet is ludicrous. A gas that is REQUIRED for the plant life on this planet, which is required for the animal life. That should be really simple to see.
You wouldn't mind drinking 100 gallons of water right now, then, right? After all, water exists in nature and is required for humans to live.
How about salt? Would you like to eat fifty pounds of salt? After all, it exists in nature and is required for human life!
But control is a strong urge. We ... must .... control .... others....
Must... only... think... in... black... and... white...
Can... never... have... too... much... of... a... good... thing...
If I save money by lowering my emissions, I will do so even if there aren't limits and brokers making billions off of trading them. I don't need the "incentive" of a government tax
You're proving his point. Without limits or a trading system, you don't save money by lowering your emissions, so you won't do it.
Pollution is an externalized cost: your emissions might cost a total of $1 million for those who are affected by it, but its impact on your bottom line might only be a few pennies. As a result, you pollute far more than you should, because other people are bearing the true cost of your decisions. Taxes and trading systems force polluters to pay for their own decisions.
It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose.
It does help companies offer their product for less than they would if they had to pay the true costs of propping up their business model.
Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement?
The cost isn't entirely monetary. We also subsidize the copyright lottery by giving up our rights, and by giving up the works and technical innovations that could be created if not for copyright. What is the value of being able to create backup copies of DVDs? What is the value of the ghost works that are never released or created? I'm not sure how to put a number on that, but whatever that cost is, we're paying it.
I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on.
Er... sure there is. If I give you $10,000 to buy a car, and you choose a $20,000 model and pay the difference out of your own pocket, that doesn't mean I didn't give you $10k. Your cost doesn't cancel out my cost.
I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.
Actually, in effect, it does. Money is fungible. Every dollar a company doesn't have to spend propping up their business model is an extra dollar they can spend on production. There's ultimately no difference between (1) giving a company $10,000 to pay for production and letting them pay for enforcement on their own, (2) giving a company $10,000 for enforcement and letting them pay for production on their own, and (3) giving them $10,000 worth of enforcement services for free and letting them pay for production on their own.
If a company that relies on selling copies had to pay the true cost of maintaining its position as the sole provider of copies, it would have to pass those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for each copy. The cost we all pay for copyright law -- in terms of dollars spent on enforcement as well as lost rights and works -- results in lower prices per copy. That's a subsidy.
Simply untrue. In its most basic form, ownership is simply to possess something. Since I can possess information, I can own it. And somebody else also owning it doesn't make me a non-owner.
When I take a book from the shelf at Borders and hold it in my hands, I "possess" it. Does that make me the owner? No, not until I give Borders some money to convince them to relinquish their ownership.
But if I keep the information to myself, I own it exclusively, and you can't use it. I could sell it to you.
No, you can't sell it to me. What you can do is charge me for the service of disclosing that information to me. But once I hear it, I won't be the owner. I'll know that information, but I won't have control of it; I'll have no ability to stop anyone else who knows that information from doing whatever they want with it.
Even the laws are unnecessary. If I see your wife sleeping with somebody, I could say "do you want to know who's sleeping with your wife? Give me two goats and a piece of cheese."
Again, that's not ownership. You don't "own" the fact that my wife is sleeping with your mother. You know it, but you only control your own actions; you have no control over what anyone else does with that information once they learn it.
No, inventions are implementations. They may use facts and principles, but it is odd to call them "facts". "Devices" would be a more useful term.
You seem to have confused an abstract invention (which is an idea, an observed fact about how things can be made to work) with the physical embodiment of that invention (which is a device, an implementation, which puts that observed fact into practice).
You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.
If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.
There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. [...] You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work.
It's hardly fair to expect the two models to compete head-to-head when one is heavily subsidized and the other isn't.
How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?
When I brought this up before, your answer seemed to be "who cares, I like the subsidy." Well, fine, but don't expect your point about competition to be taken seriously when you're the one encouraging a subsidy for one model and not the other.
Uhh, what? How is information not subject to ownership? Owning information can be a very lucrative business.
Ownership is a means to resolve usage conflicts, and it only applies to things for which those conflicts exist.
You can't drive my car to Chicago at the same time I'm driving it to Seattle, because the car can only be in one place at a time. You can't build a garage on the same land where I'm building a pool, because only one thing can be there at a time. That is the nature of physical property. It would be better if we could both get our way, but we can't: someone has to decide how the property can be used, and in our society, that person is the owner. (Private ownership isn't the only way to resolve the conflict. We could fight for it, and let whoever's stronger get his way, or we could let some bureaucrat decide who gets to use it at any moment. But the conflict exists regardless, and it has to be resolved somehow.)
Information, on the other hand, is not subject to any of these conflicts. I can listen to a song without interfering with your ability to listen to it. I can watch a movie while you're re-editing it. I can run a program while you're disassembling it. Assigning "ownership" of something where one use cannot conflict with any other use is unnecessary, and assigning "ownership" of something which has no physical location -- no place where you can station guards to enforce your rights as an owner -- is nonsensical.
Software is not a product of nature. It is the fruit of human labor and intellect. It must be written, you don't just discover it.
That's a meaningless distinction.
Suppose you want to calculate the prime numbers up to 1 million. There is a number (actually, many numbers) that you can feed into your CPU to make that happen -- that number exists even if you don't yet know what it is. Writing software is a way to discover what that number is. But it's not the only way: you could iterate through all possible numbers until you found one that worked, if you had the time.
Likewise, there is a number that represents the speed of light (actually, many numbers, since there are many systems of measurement). One way to discover that number would be to set up an experiment that assumes a particular speed, and run it repeatedly, plugging in different numbers until the experiment succeeds. But again, that's a very time-consuming way to do it: the measurement of the speed of light that we have today is the fruit of human labor and intellect.
So software is an invention, not a a fact.
You say that as if they're two separate things.
Inventions are facts. It's a fact that if you set up a particular combination of gears, pulleys, shafts, etc., you'll get an elevator. That fact is no more true today than it was a thousand years ago -- the only difference is we didn't know it yet, and we didn't know a lot of other things that are necessary to actually make a working elevator.
It's a fact that if you run a particular sequence of mathematical operations on a matrix representing an image, you'll get a smaller matrix that still contains enough information to reproduce an image that the human eye thinks is the same. Again, that fact was true even before the JPEG algorithm was discovered.
It's a fact that if you connect a needle to an amplifier and run it through a groove with a particular shape, you'll hear a sound that that we recognize as the song "Yesterday". That fact was true before the Beatles were born, and it was true before record players were invented.
Can't you install an app on android from a PC?
You don't even need the PC - you can download apps with the Android browser. But most authors of paid apps on the Android Market won't be in the habit of sending out links to (easily copied) .apk files.
Your profits dive by half as consumers now have more choices.
Gasp! More choice for consumers? We can't have that, now, can we?!
So without patents, your competitor gets to eat your lunch while you do all the hard work.
Boo hoo.
Laser distance measurements wouldn't work without knowing the speed of light. Someone in the past worked very hard to measure the speed of light, and now those LIDAR manufacturers are eating their lunch! Shall we impose a fine on everyone who uses the speed of light without paying a license fee?
In addition, the design around incentive is also beneficial because the public will then have an entirely new innovation.
Broken window fallacy. If we have to expend more effort developing an alternate way to do things because the existing way is patented, that's a net loss to society. That effort could've been spent moving us forward, but instead we're just moving sideways.
If you are against the patent system entirely, I invite you to compare the economies of nations with strong IP law with the economies of those countries that have weak or no IP law.
Correlation is not causation. (Try comparing the economies of majority-white, majority-Christian nations to the economies of other countries.)
In fact, I'd say the causation is more likely the other way around in this case: strong economies lead to concentrated wealth, which influences government to pass laws that let it extract rents.
But securing a large land area, or, say, a factory? You'd need a private army on short notice, and then, again, the scale isn't really that far from what you'd need to enforce IP rights.
A security force large enough to secure a factory is still much, much, much, much, much, much smaller than a security force large enough to monitor all copying.
A key difference between physical property rights and copyright is that physical property rights have a known place where they need to be enforced. You know where you need to station guards to protect your factory: at the factory! But copying is not tied to any location. You'd need a guard in every home.
I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.
The books had sold 100 million copies before the movies ever came out, and inspired countless other works, from tabletop and video games to school plays. Fifteen years ago, if you ran a poll of books that should be given movie adaptations, LOTR surely would've been near the top.
I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie.
How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket.
Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright.
Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?
(Come to think of it, how can you objectively measure the value of anything without market-based data? A 20 ounce soft drink costs pennies to produce but regularly sells for $1.50 or more. The value is all subjective.)
However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable.
Exposure to ideas and concepts is valuable. Producing ideas and concepts is valuable. But the ideas and concepts themselves, not so much, at least in terms of dollar value. What is the Pythagorean Theorem worth? What is the number 69,105 worth? Those questions barely even make sense.
the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value
Not at all. The fact that I'm unwilling to pay for a second copy proves that it doesn't have actual value! In fact, if I have a good enough memory, I might not even need the first copy once I've seen it.
Again, if it "just doesn't make sense" to assign no dollar value to information, then what is the dollar value of the number 69,105? What is the dollar value of the fact that Albany is the capital of New York? What is the dollar value of the comments in this thread?
There are situations where I might be willing to pay someone to tell me what the capital of New York is, but it would be insane to suggest that anyone owns that information and deserves to be compensated whenever it's copied or used.
and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.
Actually, I want to reward people for creating it even though it has no inherent value, much like I want to reward people for hauling my garbage away even though they're technically making me poorer. The service itself is what I find valuable.
Unless Nintendo manages to get a judge to rule that one of its games is primarily an "audiovisual work" rather than primarily a "computer program".
That would be an interesting feat, since other laws already recognize console games as computer programs.
These designs need protection because they take a lot of time, money, and ingenuity to develop and many of them would never be developed, much less published, if there weren't an incentive like a temporary monopoly.
Almost right. You're missing a comma before "like a temporary monopoly" -- a temporary monopoly is just one possible example of what that incentive could be.
There's no requirement that the incentive has to be a temporary monopoly, or even be like a temporary monopoly. Making money by selling products based on the invention is a fine incentive already! If I'm selling hot dogs, I can gain a leg up on my competitors by inventing a tastier hot dog -- I don't need any monopoly, all I need is a basic profit motive.
(On the other hand, a tastier hot dog could actually be a legitimate subject for patents, because it's hard to know how a hot dog was made just by tasting it. The patent would let other hot dog makers know how to make their own hot dogs tastier. That's not necessary with software, since you can learn how software works just by disassembling it.)
A machine that can easily be cloned without examining somebody else's invention is obvious and ineligible for patent protection.
A machine that can easily be cloned (and its method of operation understood) after examining it should also be ineligible for patent protection, for the reasons I stated earlier. Patents should be reserved for inventions that can't be reverse engineered. We don't need inventors to explain how their easily-understood inventions work; we can see that for ourselves.
But a machine that a person skilled in the art can't think of when faced with the same problem is not obvious and society will reward somebody for inventing a solution and making it obvious to the rest of us.
Yes, absolutely. Society will reward such a person even without a patent system, because he's providing a valuable service and/or because he's selling a product that wasn't available before he came along.
Oh, but eliminating patents is exactly like that
Nonsense. No one is forced to invent anything, and no one who invents something is forced to give it away. If someone voluntarily chooses to do either of those things, he accepts the consequences. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
and the socialists and commies are salivating at that prospect.
You sure do go on about socialists and commies. When's the last time you looked at a calendar?
Not having patents or other IP protections would mean that effectively, the property belongs to The People - society as a whole. Quite a socialistic/communistic idea, wouldn't you say?
Uh... no. Does the number 123 belong to The People? How about the fact that Albany is the capital of New York, does that belong to The People?
The answers are no and no. They don't belong to anyone, because they aren't property. They're information, which is not subject to ownership at all.
In truth, all property is "government-enforced monopoly".
Not really. Yes, the government enforces physical property rights, but you can enforce physical property rights without any government help: you just need a shotgun, or some electrified razor wire, or a few security guards, etc.
Patents (and copyrights), on the other hand, are only enforceable by siccing the government on someone. Without the threat of a lawsuit, there is no way of preventing someone from sharing or using information that you've given them (short of killing everyone who Knows Too Much).
It creates the incentive for inventors to bring those types of inventions to market, which benefits society.
Does it really?
1. Patents don't require you to bring anything to market. In fact, a common use of patents is to simply obtain the patent and use it extract money from someone else who wants to bring the product to market. As long as you're the first person to apply, you get money without having to actually sell anything.
2. There's already an incentive to bring new inventions to market: namely, the money you get from selling them. If you design a better mousetrap, you'll sell a lot of mousetraps before your competitors catch on.
My point is that those types of inventions would never be revealed to the public because the inventor will not waste resources on them.
If there's an opportunity to make money by inventing something and selling it, people will do that on their own. Patents aren't necessary to motivate them.
Patents give the inventor a reason to reveal those inventions to the public, which in turn, allows other inventors to build on them and obtain new patents.
... 20 years later, sure. The problem is, innovation is stalled for 20 years in the meantime.
Patents are supposed to be a way to share the details of your invention. But many companies forbid their employees to look at patents, which is completely backwards! Why? Because the penalties for willful patent infringement are higher. The company is better off saying "we never looked at your patent" and continuing their own R&D process based on things that were free to use 20 years earlier.
There's nothing wrong with the patent system other than a few greedy idiots abusing it by publishing obvious patents, and you /.ers want it abolished for some naive socialist agenda where the inventors simply hand over their hard work for free to companies and general public.
No one here is asking inventors to work for free, so you can lose that strawman.
By the way, you realize patents are government-enforced monopolies, right? Walling off sections of the free market through legal force? If you think opposing patents is "socialist", you don't know what the word means.
Patents are required on physical objects because they are not covered by copyright, and so absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
An invention that can easily be examined and cloned doesn't need patent protection.
The term "patent" comes from the use of the word that means "apparent to everyone", as in "patently obvious". Patents further the useful arts not by enticing people to invent new things (when there's a problem that needs solving, people will solve it anyway), but by enticing inventors to share their knowledge: before patents, inventors were reluctant to share details of their inventions because they feared competition, so patents grant a temporary monopoly in exchange for disclosing those details.
This rationale for patents rarely applies to software. A program has to be executable, and if a CPU can figure out how to make it work, so can a person. Even intentionally obfuscated software can be understood with moderate effort (see any warez site).
The thing is some countries have copyright laws that explicitly allow copying for backup purposes. I'm pretty sure the UK is one of these, pretty certainly for software.
The US is also one of these. 17 USC 117 applies to any "computer program", even one for a special-purpose computer like a game console.
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet?
The same way anyone else gets started in a market where they have no established reputation: by charging less than established players, and/or demonstrating their skill for free (which most graphic artists already do with their portfolios).
The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have.
Most people reap rewards proportionate to the value of the labor they perform (and that includes labor whose "true value" isn't known until after it's performed - you just estimate the value up front, or offer a low base rate with bonuses for quality work). Why do artists need an entirely different system of compensation?
Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses.
If someone else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because the ideas are already out there.
If no one else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because they'll have no competition.
The only potential harm is if they're so slow to start selling their new product that a competitor rises up before they've recouped their costs. And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.
Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years.
The years when copyright worked well were years in which it was practical for a few wealthy entities to mass-produce copies, but impractical for individuals to do it on their own. It was easy (and tolerable to the masses) to police copying when that only meant physically inspecting a handful of factories.
Now, everything can be digitized and reproduced at home by people who do it just for the sake of sharing, and copyright isn't working quite so well. Now enforcing copyright means keeping technology out of consumers' hands, snooping on private communications, and going after individuals who have no profit motive.
What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it.
Once in a while, sure, but you'd be just as much of a fool to make a career out of it. If you have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning $1.5 million, the odds are in your favor, but most players will still lose. Expected value is not the same as actual value: that's why the insurance industry exists.
Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?
Because in reality, people aren't only happy with things that already exist. They're happier with new things that they haven't seen before. People who can provide pleasant surprises will have no difficulty earning a living from it.
Don't think copyright solves this problem, though. Read any critique of the film industry and you'll see complaints that studios are too conservative, investing too much in predictable, lowest-common-denominator crap that sells a lot of tickets but doesn't innovate.
To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it.
No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.
In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for.
Not necessarily. The world is full of examples of hiring people to provide a service without knowing exactly what it'll be, from restaurants to CEOs. You can hire someone to use their own judgment, not just to go through a checklist of tasks you've laid out for them.
The consumers don't have to provide the ideas at all, in fact. If an artist has an idea he'd like to develop, he can go out looking for customers instead of waiting for them to come to him.
How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR?
Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!
At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced.
Don't forget the lost technological innovations, the cost of buying works in one new format after another because there's no simple and legal way to transfer them, and of course the cost of buying copies of works whose production has long since been paid for.
And don't forget that IP laws have never been suitably balanced, and certainly aren't today, so the cost of works that aren't created due to infringement risks is quite high in reality. That cost doesn't only apply to new works, either: many old works are no longer in print, but since the copyright holder is unwilling to reprint them, they're basically unavailable. Some works are also only available in modified form because of licensing issues (e.g. TV shows released on DVD without the original soundtracks).
Well, that is what we have today, except today you even get to listen to the work you're about to pay for BEFORE you pay for it.
No, it isn't what we have today. An artist doesn't know whether he'll get paid a fair price for his work until after he performs the work -- maybe even decades after. And the price he eventually gets paid has absolutely no relation to his standard of fairness: he can set the price per copy, but he has no control over how many copies he sells.
That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.