And stealing a product is still theft. Copying information, however, is not. At best, it's a neutered version that's missing the one and only thing that makes real theft objectionable.
Whatever dude -- you paid for a pattern. You can be pedantic about it in one context but see the bigger picture in another. Real convenient. No, once again, what I pay the power company for is not the pattern. I can draw a 60 Hz waveform and share that drawing with as many people as I want, and the power company won't complain. I can build a battery-powered device to generate exactly the same waveform, and again, they won't complain. What I'm paying them for is the electrical power, not the right to use a particular shape.
I recommend you try to walk out of Barnes and Noble with your next book -- but just pay them the actual cost of the paper and printing -- 5 cents (perhaps less). After all, the words are not property in your universe.. The book is property, and they can charge whatever they want for it: it's a physical object, and I can't take it without depriving them of it.
You still don't have the right to download stuff illegally. And you can't sell these limitless burned copies without the express consent of the copyright holder. Or give them away, presumably. So those discs, which I bought and burned myself, somehow stop being my property as soon as I burn them, because I'm allowed to give them away (or sell them) before I burn them but not afterward. Funny how that works.
They created the product -- they have the exclusive right to profit from it -- simple. I suppose you think Newton's heirs should have an exclusive right to profit from anything that was developed using calculus too, then. What a dismal world that would be.
Of course, copyright isn't limited to profit anyway. Noncommercial sharing is also illegal, but I'm sure you knew that.
* So they can lay down terms and conditions to the sale: but only on their product, and only in ways that don't trample your rights
* And you are free to do as you please, as long as you don't trample on their rights
Now do you get it? Nope. You still haven't explained what gives them the "right" to tell me what I can do with my internet connection, or how imposing their will on me counts as "terms and conditions to the sale" when I'm not their customer and haven't bought anything from them.
The actions you lose is to download Photoshop without paying Adobe which isn't anything major Well, it's arguable how "major" that is, but that's not the only restriction. For example, if I run a web hosting service and one of my customers chooses to upload a copy of Photoshop to his account, I have to take time out of my day to enforce Adobe's copying policy for them, even if I've never been an Adobe customer and I have no interest in Photoshop myself.
This is merely a different way of representing the same thing. One can have the price P and that subjective "value" V and they will form a relation of V - P = VD, where VD is the "difference", positive or negative. But one can also write V = P + VD, which is equally true, but which gives V as a result of P and VD, instead of VD being computed as a difference of V and P. I chose the latter method to better illustrate the unquantifiable nature of VD, and thus by extension of V. By treating "VD" as a separate quantity, you're saying its value is a constant on top of (or below) the market price. But when the market price changes, the subjective value doesn't automatically change with it.
If I value a cake at $1.51 (P=$1.50, VD=+$0.01), and then the price jumps up to $2.50, I'm not suddenly going to be willing to buy it for $2.51 (P + VD). I'm going to stop buying cakes because the price is now higher than the value I receive.
I suppose you could say that the value of "VD" suddenly drops from +$0.01 to -$0.99 when the price changes, but that doesn't seem like a useful way to think about it. My valuation of that cake hasn't changed at all, so why should the variable representing my valuation change?
That is also why all retailers guard their cost figures jealously as to not let customers become aware of them as, rightfully or not, the customers expect the "fair" value of "profit" to be zero. I must say, I don't think this is an accurate representation. Everyone knows that the price you pay for something at the store is higher than what the store paid for it. That's why the store is in business. They may not know exactly how much the store is making from it, but they know it's making some profit - and certainly more than one penny.
Which could, for all intents and purposes, be a value infinitely approaching the price paid. Greater then the price paid (technically) but by an infinitely small amount (such things are possible in mathematics) and utterly useless for any market valuations. You've defined away its usefulness by looking at this strange "VD" value, a delta over the market price which must be constantly updated when the market price changes. Yes, an infinitesimal "VD" value isn't very handy; I'd say that's just another reason you should be looking at the "V" value instead.
Yes, they would. Software companies would still sell software, but they would find some other way to protect their investment. What investment? If they got paid for developing it, there is no investment. The money has changed hands and the job is done.
You still have no viable reason for abolishing copyright besides this selfish view of the world where you seem to think you are owed everything for free. That is so completely opposite from what I've been saying that I can only conclude you haven't been reading the thread at all.
As I've stated repeatedly, my opposition to copyright comes from the fact that copyright drags unwilling participants into a flawed business model, restricting everyone's freedom for the benefit of a relative handful of copyright holders.
I've never said anyone is "owed" anything for free, and personally I have no objection to paying for production (or even for recordings, on occasion). The proposals I've laid out here and elsewhere are designed to help artists keep making money without having to seize anyone else's rights -- if I were as cheap and selfish as this caricature you've invented, I wouldn't be concerned about that.
If a company wants to invest a million dollars into the development of software, only to be "subsidized" by the people that purchase it, so be it. They are also the ones that lose that million dollars if there is no market for it or it just doesn't sell (but you never seem to talk about this fact). Selling movies or albums also carries that same risk. Yes, that's true, they face the unnecessary risk of losing their investment. That risk would go away if they'd charge for production, of course.
If it were only that company's fortunes at stake, then I'd have no objection. But the problem is, they're not the only ones who lose. Everyone is forced to play along, facing restrictions on their speech and actions just so this company with the broken business model can roll the dice and pray to strike it rich. Even if the company wins, everyone else still loses: we don't get our freedoms back when the company recoups their investment. They're gone forever (well, for life + 70 years, as long as the copyright terms aren't retroactively extended before then).
And like I've been saying, you are free to sell your own songs that way if you want, but you have no right to insist that all other artists in the world do that, and you certainly have no right to rip them off by downloading free copies of their songs, unless they said it was ok. So, it's the same old double standard. They get to impose their will on me, supposedly, by telling me what I can or can't download, but I don't get to impose my will on them. Sounds like a cushy deal, as long as you're on their side of it.
It deprives me of the income you should have paid me. Begging the question. That money isn't owed to you just because you want it. You can't be deprived of my money.
Not at all -- just that you owe me money for my song. And if I don't give you that money... you presume you're entitled to tell me not to download it. Like I said.
No, it's completely wrong. Did you just equate piracy with free speech?!? Sharing information is free speech. If you want to stop me from sharing certain information in order to make money, that means you care more about your bottom line than my freedom to communicate.
So is the power in your mains - an AC signal of known amplitude and frequency. You still owe the power company for that pattern. So are the words in a book - just a pattern of charachters. Your argument is hollow -- the program is property. I owe the power company for the service of pushing electrons through a wire, not for the information contained in the waveform.
The words in a book are a pattern, yes, just like software. And that means they aren't property either.
No, it only gives them the right to set terms on the sale of their property. Oh, so now you agree that I have the right to burn whatever sequence of bits to a disc I want, regardless of whether any third party gives me permission? After all, that only involves my property, not theirs, and certainly doesn't involve any kind of sale.
MS makes an OS called Windows. Windows may or may not have a monopoly in OSes. Right, but they obviously do have a monopoly in the particular OS known as "Windows". No one else is allowed to sell a disc containing the same number that's on a Windows disc. When only one firm is allowed to sell a certain product, that's a monopoly no matter how you dress it up.
Except the "value" of the cake here is composed of two elements (according to your reasoning): the empirically observable "market value", equivalent to the price, i.e. $1.50 and the esoteric "preference value" of my "preference of one cake over the other" which is added to the "market value" to form your "total subjective value". No, there's no adding. The subjective value of that cake is the most you'd be willing to give up in order to get it, independent of how much it's being sold for (the price). It may be more or less than the price at which you can actually buy the cake. If the price is lower than the value you place on it, then you'll buy it, otherwise you won't.
Should the total exceed $1.51 the purchase is made. Should it exceed $1.500000001 the purchase is made. But as I described earlier it won't. The very suggestion of a price greater than $1.50 (the purchase price of the cake) by any amount would result in an emotional reaction and accusations of ripoff from the owner of the other cake. Why is an individual buying a cake for $1.50 and selling it for $1.51 any worse than a store buying it for $0.75 and selling it for $1.50?
In other scenarios where a trade does occur this nebulous "value" would then supposedly be again in excess of the "market value" (i.e. price) by some unspecified amount (different for each trader) making them believe that they are both better off. But any attempt at measurement of this value would require another transaction, which would only occur if the "value" was still in excess of the new "market value" of this "test" transaction and so on, ad infinitum. Not quite. Here's one way to measure it to the nearest cent: I offer you the cake for $10. You say no. I offer it to you for $9.99. You say no again. I keep lowering the price by one cent until you buy it. Then I conclude that the value of that cake to you is between 0 and 1 cents above the price you paid.
If AllOfMP3 were forwarding a cut of the profits to the artists, and have prior written consent, then and only then are they authorized to actually sell the songs. Uh huh.. and if they did that, the labels would take such a big cut that AllOfMP3 was no longer competitive. That's what happens when someone gets a monopoly: they keep the price artificially high.
Competition my ass. This would just mean that artists have a choice between starvation and an alternate career choice. Well, no. Like I've been saying, they can choose to get paid for making art instead of for making copies, and then they won't have to worry about who's downloading free copies, because they will have already been paid for the time they put into making it.
If you don't like the price, you still can't download the song for free -- that violates my rights Not under any reasonable definition of your "rights", it doesn't. Downloading the song doesn't affect you. It doesn't take anything away from you, it doesn't require you to get involved or do any extra work, and there's no way for you to even know that it happened without looking at my hard drive.
Claiming that it still "violates your rights" presumes that you're somehow entitled to tell other people what they can or can't download -- which is begging the question, since that's exactly the subject of debate here.
The DRM scheme can be used to enforce that, again, preventing you from violating my rights Again, you presume that you have the right to tell me what I can or can't listen to in the first place.
You never had the right to get a free copy from 'anyone who chooses to offer' it. This 'anyone who chooses to offer it' never had the right to offer it to you for free, unless they have the express, written consent of the copyright holder. This is the fundamental sense of entitlement you seem to have where you're conferring upon yourself rights that you simply don't have. Ah, I see. You don't believe in a right to free expression and communication. You'll tolerate other people's speech, as long as it doesn't interfere with your bottom line. Is that about right?
The program was never your property. Get this into your head -- the program is not your property until you buy it. The program isn't anyone's property. It's a sequence of bits, a number, a pattern. To treat it as something that can belong to anyone is as absurd as saying you can own the number 31337, the color burnt sienna, or the word "blog".
It's an idea, which everyone can freely use at the same time without interfering with any other use, not an object that can only be in one place at a time and thus needs an owner to decide how it'll be used.
The computer, however, is undoubtedly my property. Copyright means giving third parties veto power over what I'm allowed to do with that property.
Then agree to the terms, and buy Windows. Or disagree, and don't use that application. So then, we agree that copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly on Windows? Glad that's cleared up.
That's not the point. The point is whether you recognize that you're ripping people off, and are on the wrong side of the law in every way. I'm quite aware of the current status of copyright law, but thanks for the concern.
The barber doesn't need to pay for all the haircuts he gave that no one complimented. Likewise, the game publisher doesn't need to pay for all the copies that people downloaded illegally. All they need to pay for, other than the cost of producing the physical copies that they sell, is the one-time cost of developing the game. That cost has already been incurred by the time anyone has a chance to download the game.
(And actually, a barber does pay for those haircuts... he pays with his own time. For each one. Unlike a game publisher, which has zero marginal cost for every additional copy.)
We were talking about the unquantifiable "subjective value" which only exists in the other guy's head not the "market value" as measured in money. We cannot know that "subjective value" by definition, thus what you said makes no sense. What makes you think we can't know it by definition? Just because it's subjective doesn't mean it's inscrutable. Your preference for ice cream flavors is subjective, but if I put 31 flavors in front of you and let you pick, I'll get a pretty good idea of which one you like best.
Any attempts at "testing" of this value by engaging in trade would, by definition, come short as some (an unquantifiable amount) of that "value" must remain to form the "incentive" for trade. Er... so your complaint boils down to "subjective value is useless because we can only measure it to the nearest cent"? Don't we have the same problem with any other definition of value, since prices are always rounded to the nearest cent?
If you'll buy a cake for $1.50 but you won't buy it for $1.51, we can conclude your subjective value of that cake is greater than $1.50 (where you'd rather have the cake) and less than $1.51 (where you'd rather have the money). That's as much precision as you're going to get from any other kind of measurement.
Here is an example where copyrights might help you and your web hosting company (call it web hosting X). You are running a.com. Another company decides to call themselves web hosting X and buy up the.net. They are now selling the exact same service as you, but with very poor service (and your reputation is now gone as a hosting provider).
Copyrights allow you to get them shutdown or change their name. Actually, that'd be a trademark, not a copyright.
I have no objection to trademarks, because they prevent fraud more than restricting speech. That competitor would be essentially lying to their customers by using my name, implying that my reputation is attached to their service, and a trademark would prevent that. But the trademark only lets me interfere with their speech when it's misleading and fraudulent. (For example, they could compare their service to mine in an advertisement, calling me out by name.)
Sharing proprietary software illegally != freedom of speech. Sure it is. If I'm speaking or transmitting something, that's my speech. And if the law says I can't say a certain thing, it's restricting my speech.
And what are these certain numbers that are deemed illegal? The 1-billion binary numbers that may make up a piece of software? Yup. Those are numbers too.
If they are forced to because copyright goes away, they will find a way to make their application a service. Turbo tax did (and any other have followed). You're making my point for me. TurboTax did that because they thought they could get away with it. No one forced them, and copyright law didn't change.
If copyrights and patents were gone, our world would be even more protected and proprietary than before. Mainly because companies would have to go to great lengths to protect their property. No, they wouldn't. It's only treated like "property" in the first place because copyright subsidizes the business models that treat information as property. But if you've already been paid for writing something, because you asked for money when you did the work instead of praying to earn some money later by selling copies, you don't need to "protect" it anymore.
How is everyone forced to participate? company X comes out with a new game. Customers that want the game are involved in the business model..and customers that don't aren't. Let's say I run a web hosting service, and one of my users uploads a copy of that new game to his public folder. Now I have to enforce Company X's copying policies on their behalf, even though I don't give a rat's ass about the game. They've dragged me into their business model against my will.
But everyone is dragged in, to some extent. Everyone is forced to limit their speech and actions, whether they buy the game or not, because copyright makes it illegal to say certain things to other people or burn certain numbers to a disc without permission.
hint: it's through donations, which only works in certain situations. I guess there could be a new model. You "donate" $10 to a company and they give you a copy of their software. Huh. From your other comment, I thought you understood the difference between donating and paying for a service, but I guess not.
Anyway, the model you overlooked is this: programmers offer their services and name a price, and then thousands or millions of people pay (or agree to pay) a small amount toward that goal, until the programmers have collected enough money to start. (They find their paying customers before the software exists, obviously; you can't pay someone to go back in time and write something that's already been written.) Once the software is finished, there are no restrictions on sharing it.
With no copyrights, 99.9% of all commercial software would immediately go to service/web-based within a couple of months. If they thought they could get away with that, they would've done it already.
Again, we covered this already. The law should protect against overreaching restrictions. That would mean abolishing copyright. Copyright is the restriction. Does this mean I've convinced you, or are you suggesting there's some way to enforce copyright without restricting anyone's speech or actions?
No, you are not -- you stated multiple times that you think you are entitled to a free copy of the 'ordering of bits'. You want your rights protected, but you're happy to tread on theirs. No, that's not what I've been saying. Let me try to clear up your misconception: I'm only entitled to a free copy if someone is willing to give me one. I can't force anyone to give me a copy against their will.
That isn't treading on anyone else's rights. It's asking them to stop treading on my rights and the rights of anyone who chooses to offer me a free copy. I won't tell them what data they're allowed to send over their internet connection, and in return I ask for them not to tell me what data I'm allowed to send over my internet connection.
You don't have any right to use their product without paying. How many different ways do you need this explained? It's not that you haven't explained it enough, it's that what you're claiming runs counter to common sense. I do have the right to run any program that comes into my possession. A program is a number, which no one owns; and if I happen to know that number, I'm entitled to input it into my computer, which I own.
To say otherwise is to give someone else the power to restrict what I can do in my own home with my own property - something you just said you were against.
You can compete -- you just have to write your own program that does the same thing, instead of copying mine. Thereby, you avoid violating my copyright. You're assuming that there's always a perfect substitute, but that's not always the case. If I feel like playing Doom, I'm not going to settle for Duke Nukem. If I need an OS to run some Windows applications, I'm not going to install Linux.
So let me just caution you that if you practice what you've been posting here, you might end up getting sued by someone (and you'll lose that case). i.e. you're ripping people off, and you need to at least be cautious so you don't get caught. The odds of being sued for file sharing are ridiculously low, about the same as dying in an accidental fall. Frankly, downloading a torrent might be safer than driving to the store to buy a legal copy.
Isn't the usual response to that that people get what they pay for and if they decide to pay for fewer rights but more certain products that's their decision? Well, the problem is the convenience is carved from the rights of everyone, including but not limited to the people who choose to buy that convenient software morsel. Even if I don't buy Photoshop, my speech and actions are still restricted for the sake of Adobe's profit margin.
All the people I know would have become very angry since they would be fully aware of the price we both paid for the cakes and would find the idea extremely offensive and would rather destroy their whole $10 of cake as a weapon just to express that anger or at the very least they would have eaten it (even if they preferred the other) after some loud "fuck you"s. Yes, real people tend to get upset when the extraction of profit is shoved in their faces like that, especially in a friendly situation.
But economically speaking, if we assume the two people are rational actors who are more concerned with getting delicious cake than playing nice, there's nothing unusual. If you want something I have, and I try to make a profit instead of giving it to you for free, that's just the market at work.
There's nothing inherently more "unfair" about me selling you that $1.00 cake for $1.01 than there was about the store selling it for $1.00 in the first place - after all, they bought it for less than a dollar and sold it at a profit.
Which only goes to show that such "value" is wholly useless for the purposes of economic analysis. No, it's quite useful. If you want to buy or sell anything, it helps to know how much it's worth to the other guy.
Either the subjective value "isn't unquantifiable" in which case the religious loon can claim his paradise on his balance sheet, or it is not quantifiable in which case the only thing which counts in economic measurements is monetary value. Which is it? It's not a dichotomy. Balance sheets are about buying power, not subjective value, but that doesn't mean subjective value is a worthless measurement. Economics != accounting.
Look at qt/gtk if necessary I could code an app using nothing but notepad and gcc. WIth windows.forms I'd spend half my dev time just mocking up the gui. Er... not really. There's nothing hard about writing "Button btn1 = new Button(); b.Location = new Point(10, 20); b.OnClick += btn1_Click;".
The guy you're arguing with here is kind of nutty, and his tone sure isn't helping his case. But I have to agree that you're wrong about value.
A thing doesn't have an inherent value. Value is defined subjectively - there's nothing controversial about saying that, and it's not some made-up definition he pulled out of nowhere. What you're talking about, the quantifiable dollar amount we can place on an object, isn't "value", it's price. (Which is usually the same as cost, but cost can be subjective too.)
If I buy a chocolate cake and you buy a vanilla cake, each for $1.00, that's evidence that we both value a cake more than we value a dollar (right now). If we then decide that we'd each rather have the other flavor, then yes, that's evidence that we could trade our cakes and get even more value.
But value is different from cost. If I demand your cake plus one cent in exchange for my cake, you'd be right to reject that offer - not because you wouldn't be getting value out of that trade, but because you'd be able to get the same thing at a lower cost by exchanging it at the store.
To illustrate further, suppose that the store closed when we left. Your only options are to trade your cake plus one cent to me, or find a different store and pay a whole dollar for a second cake, or keep the penny and eat the cake you have. Which do you choose? If you choose to trade with me, then that must mean you're getting more than one cent of value out of the trade.
As for the lunatic who has $2 to his name and yet is completely happy... you're right, it would be foolish to compare people's wealth in terms of happiness (or subjective value), rather than in terms of buying power. The lunatic can buy two junior bacon cheeseburgers, even though he may not want them; Bill Gates is wealthier because he can buy billions of junior bacon cheeseburgers.
Finally, subjective value isn't unquantifiable. You can measure it by offering trades and seeing which ones are accepted. If the cake store burns down, and the only one left in town is selling them for $5, but you're still willing to buy them, that means you value cakes at >= $5.00 (and you must've thought you were getting a great deal before).
Most people aren't investors and don't plan to be. They don't want to shoulder all the risks that development brings, especially since they aren't in a position where they can properly research what the contracted company will do with the money. [etc.] Indeed. There's a niche that could be filled there: middlemen sifting through all the proposals out there and finding the good ones, coordinating payments, monitoring progress, and so on.
You could just go out and start a project with up-front payment right now, let's see how far you get. There's no reason you have to wait until copyright gets changed, test your theory NOW. Well, Sellaband is already doing something similar for music. I don't expect that model to take off while copyright still exists in its present form, though. It's more convenient and familiar for people to buy prepackaged units of entertainment, even though that convenience is carved from the rights of those same people.
You can repeat it as much as you want -- you still have no right to demand a service if someone is trying to sell a product. The seller has terms, and you can accept or reject. Simple. Yes, that would be simple. But the current reality isn't that simple, because the seller gets to impose his terms on everyone whether they choose to accept them or not.
I'm not demanding that anyone provide a service. I'm only asking them to mind their business and avoid restricting my rights in order to prop up their ill-conceived business model. Selling their labor as a service is merely one way in which they could continue making money at what they do without having to restrict those rights. If I've been unclear about that, I apologize.
Sorry to repeat that, but your arguments are just shocking. I'm sorry you're so shocked by the idea that someone might be opposed to copyright. You'll get over it soon enough. That's no excuse for the personal attacks, though, and the fact that you keep having to resort to those doesn't say much for your confidence in your argument.
And you're free to conduct business under that model. You still have no right to demand that every other business do so. And you still have no right to help yourself to illegal, unpaid downloads of software and games. Look at what you just wrote. I have no right to demand that other people follow my model, you say, and in the next breath you let those same people demand that I follow their model by only exchanging information that they approve of?
By making those "unpaid downloads" illegal, they're forcing their model on everyone. If your company's rule is that only paying customers get access to a certain file, you can enforce it at your expense, on your time and property. You wouldn't expect other businesses to accept Disney Dollars just to help Disney; why should they accept Disney's sharing policy?
It already did! There are many multitudes of business models in existance, and almost no industries have chosen the model you proposed. The market has already spoken. A market with government-granted monopolies is hardly a place where different models can battle it out on equal footing.
You keep confusing unrelated issues -- so far, pricing, restricting competition, and now monopoly. They're not unrelated; they're all related to copyright, which is a government-granted monopoly that restricts competition, keeping prices high.
If you're selling discs with the number "123" burned onto them, I can legally compete with you. You don't have a monopoly on that product. I can start selling those "123" discs for less than you, and eventually we'll settle on a price just over the cost of burning a copy.
However, if you're selling discs with a different number burned onto them -- a number representing a copyrighted program, let's say -- then you do have a monopoly, and I'm not allowed to compete in the market for that particular product. You're the only supplier, so there's no competitive pressure on your prices. See how that works?
And who are the "rest of them"? The "millions (if not billions) of people" you mentioned (quoting from me) in the part I quoted immediately before writing that. When they sell products, they do it without the government assurance that no one else will be allowed to compete.
(Well, trademarks and patents are also monopolies, and they apply to at least some of those products. But trademarks aren't objectionable, as long as they serve only to prevent fraud, and I'll withhold my views on patents to avoid shocking you even more.)
this is exactly how sports stars get paid. They get paid a fortune by their employers, who recoup the money from TV companies, who.... (drum roll) CHARGE PEOPLE TO WATCH THE GAME. They charge for entry into the stadium, and they sell advertising space. They don't try to charge everyone who ever catches a glimpse of the game.
And copyright doesn't RESTRICT PEOPLES FREEDOM. It makes certain things illegal to say. That's a restriction.
In a country that has the patriot act, guantanomo bay and the TSA, you really think not being able to legally steal Spiderman 3 is the biggest threat to your freedom? get real. No one said it was the biggest. Surely you don't think there can only be three things restricting a person's freedom at once, do you?
The machine (SUV) was built for the purpose of being a sports utility vehicle. If you need large passenger seating, there are minivans. If you need to haul load, there are trucks. If your commuting, there are sedans and compacts. An SUV can do all those things - but none of them very well. It's more of a Spork Utility Vehicle.
I know, silly me... Software as a product! It'll never work... Indeed, the fact that people keep complaining about piracy is evidence that it isn't working.
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Of course, copyright isn't limited to profit anyway. Noncommercial sharing is also illegal, but I'm sure you knew that.
* And you are free to do as you please, as long as you don't trample on their rights
Now do you get it? Nope. You still haven't explained what gives them the "right" to tell me what I can do with my internet connection, or how imposing their will on me counts as "terms and conditions to the sale" when I'm not their customer and haven't bought anything from them.
If I value a cake at $1.51 (P=$1.50, VD=+$0.01), and then the price jumps up to $2.50, I'm not suddenly going to be willing to buy it for $2.51 (P + VD). I'm going to stop buying cakes because the price is now higher than the value I receive.
I suppose you could say that the value of "VD" suddenly drops from +$0.01 to -$0.99 when the price changes, but that doesn't seem like a useful way to think about it. My valuation of that cake hasn't changed at all, so why should the variable representing my valuation change? That is also why all retailers guard their cost figures jealously as to not let customers become aware of them as, rightfully or not, the customers expect the "fair" value of "profit" to be zero. I must say, I don't think this is an accurate representation. Everyone knows that the price you pay for something at the store is higher than what the store paid for it. That's why the store is in business. They may not know exactly how much the store is making from it, but they know it's making some profit - and certainly more than one penny. Which could, for all intents and purposes, be a value infinitely approaching the price paid. Greater then the price paid (technically) but by an infinitely small amount (such things are possible in mathematics) and utterly useless for any market valuations. You've defined away its usefulness by looking at this strange "VD" value, a delta over the market price which must be constantly updated when the market price changes. Yes, an infinitesimal "VD" value isn't very handy; I'd say that's just another reason you should be looking at the "V" value instead.
As I've stated repeatedly, my opposition to copyright comes from the fact that copyright drags unwilling participants into a flawed business model, restricting everyone's freedom for the benefit of a relative handful of copyright holders.
I've never said anyone is "owed" anything for free, and personally I have no objection to paying for production (or even for recordings, on occasion). The proposals I've laid out here and elsewhere are designed to help artists keep making money without having to seize anyone else's rights -- if I were as cheap and selfish as this caricature you've invented, I wouldn't be concerned about that. If a company wants to invest a million dollars into the development of software, only to be "subsidized" by the people that purchase it, so be it. They are also the ones that lose that million dollars if there is no market for it or it just doesn't sell (but you never seem to talk about this fact). Selling movies or albums also carries that same risk. Yes, that's true, they face the unnecessary risk of losing their investment. That risk would go away if they'd charge for production, of course.
If it were only that company's fortunes at stake, then I'd have no objection. But the problem is, they're not the only ones who lose. Everyone is forced to play along, facing restrictions on their speech and actions just so this company with the broken business model can roll the dice and pray to strike it rich. Even if the company wins, everyone else still loses: we don't get our freedoms back when the company recoups their investment. They're gone forever (well, for life + 70 years, as long as the copyright terms aren't retroactively extended before then).
The words in a book are a pattern, yes, just like software. And that means they aren't property either. No, it only gives them the right to set terms on the sale of their property. Oh, so now you agree that I have the right to burn whatever sequence of bits to a disc I want, regardless of whether any third party gives me permission? After all, that only involves my property, not theirs, and certainly doesn't involve any kind of sale. MS makes an OS called Windows. Windows may or may not have a monopoly in OSes. Right, but they obviously do have a monopoly in the particular OS known as "Windows". No one else is allowed to sell a disc containing the same number that's on a Windows disc. When only one firm is allowed to sell a certain product, that's a monopoly no matter how you dress it up.
Claiming that it still "violates your rights" presumes that you're somehow entitled to tell other people what they can or can't download -- which is begging the question, since that's exactly the subject of debate here. The DRM scheme can be used to enforce that, again, preventing you from violating my rights Again, you presume that you have the right to tell me what I can or can't listen to in the first place. You never had the right to get a free copy from 'anyone who chooses to offer' it. This 'anyone who chooses to offer it' never had the right to offer it to you for free, unless they have the express, written consent of the copyright holder. This is the fundamental sense of entitlement you seem to have where you're conferring upon yourself rights that you simply don't have. Ah, I see. You don't believe in a right to free expression and communication. You'll tolerate other people's speech, as long as it doesn't interfere with your bottom line. Is that about right? The program was never your property. Get this into your head -- the program is not your property until you buy it. The program isn't anyone's property. It's a sequence of bits, a number, a pattern. To treat it as something that can belong to anyone is as absurd as saying you can own the number 31337, the color burnt sienna, or the word "blog".
It's an idea, which everyone can freely use at the same time without interfering with any other use, not an object that can only be in one place at a time and thus needs an owner to decide how it'll be used.
The computer, however, is undoubtedly my property. Copyright means giving third parties veto power over what I'm allowed to do with that property. Then agree to the terms, and buy Windows. Or disagree, and don't use that application. So then, we agree that copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly on Windows? Glad that's cleared up. That's not the point. The point is whether you recognize that you're ripping people off, and are on the wrong side of the law in every way. I'm quite aware of the current status of copyright law, but thanks for the concern.
(And actually, a barber does pay for those haircuts... he pays with his own time. For each one. Unlike a game publisher, which has zero marginal cost for every additional copy.)
If you'll buy a cake for $1.50 but you won't buy it for $1.51, we can conclude your subjective value of that cake is greater than $1.50 (where you'd rather have the cake) and less than $1.51 (where you'd rather have the money). That's as much precision as you're going to get from any other kind of measurement.
Copyrights allow you to get them shutdown or change their name. Actually, that'd be a trademark, not a copyright.
I have no objection to trademarks, because they prevent fraud more than restricting speech. That competitor would be essentially lying to their customers by using my name, implying that my reputation is attached to their service, and a trademark would prevent that. But the trademark only lets me interfere with their speech when it's misleading and fraudulent. (For example, they could compare their service to mine in an advertisement, calling me out by name.) Sharing proprietary software illegally != freedom of speech. Sure it is. If I'm speaking or transmitting something, that's my speech. And if the law says I can't say a certain thing, it's restricting my speech. And what are these certain numbers that are deemed illegal? The 1-billion binary numbers that may make up a piece of software? Yup. Those are numbers too. If they are forced to because copyright goes away, they will find a way to make their application a service. Turbo tax did (and any other have followed). You're making my point for me. TurboTax did that because they thought they could get away with it. No one forced them, and copyright law didn't change. If copyrights and patents were gone, our world would be even more protected and proprietary than before. Mainly because companies would have to go to great lengths to protect their property. No, they wouldn't. It's only treated like "property" in the first place because copyright subsidizes the business models that treat information as property. But if you've already been paid for writing something, because you asked for money when you did the work instead of praying to earn some money later by selling copies, you don't need to "protect" it anymore.
But everyone is dragged in, to some extent. Everyone is forced to limit their speech and actions, whether they buy the game or not, because copyright makes it illegal to say certain things to other people or burn certain numbers to a disc without permission. hint: it's through donations, which only works in certain situations. I guess there could be a new model. You "donate" $10 to a company and they give you a copy of their software. Huh. From your other comment, I thought you understood the difference between donating and paying for a service, but I guess not.
Anyway, the model you overlooked is this: programmers offer their services and name a price, and then thousands or millions of people pay (or agree to pay) a small amount toward that goal, until the programmers have collected enough money to start. (They find their paying customers before the software exists, obviously; you can't pay someone to go back in time and write something that's already been written.) Once the software is finished, there are no restrictions on sharing it. With no copyrights, 99.9% of all commercial software would immediately go to service/web-based within a couple of months. If they thought they could get away with that, they would've done it already.
That isn't treading on anyone else's rights. It's asking them to stop treading on my rights and the rights of anyone who chooses to offer me a free copy. I won't tell them what data they're allowed to send over their internet connection, and in return I ask for them not to tell me what data I'm allowed to send over my internet connection. You don't have any right to use their product without paying. How many different ways do you need this explained? It's not that you haven't explained it enough, it's that what you're claiming runs counter to common sense. I do have the right to run any program that comes into my possession. A program is a number, which no one owns; and if I happen to know that number, I'm entitled to input it into my computer, which I own.
To say otherwise is to give someone else the power to restrict what I can do in my own home with my own property - something you just said you were against. You can compete -- you just have to write your own program that does the same thing, instead of copying mine. Thereby, you avoid violating my copyright. You're assuming that there's always a perfect substitute, but that's not always the case. If I feel like playing Doom, I'm not going to settle for Duke Nukem. If I need an OS to run some Windows applications, I'm not going to install Linux. So let me just caution you that if you practice what you've been posting here, you might end up getting sued by someone (and you'll lose that case). i.e. you're ripping people off, and you need to at least be cautious so you don't get caught. The odds of being sued for file sharing are ridiculously low, about the same as dying in an accidental fall. Frankly, downloading a torrent might be safer than driving to the store to buy a legal copy.
But economically speaking, if we assume the two people are rational actors who are more concerned with getting delicious cake than playing nice, there's nothing unusual. If you want something I have, and I try to make a profit instead of giving it to you for free, that's just the market at work.
There's nothing inherently more "unfair" about me selling you that $1.00 cake for $1.01 than there was about the store selling it for $1.00 in the first place - after all, they bought it for less than a dollar and sold it at a profit. Which only goes to show that such "value" is wholly useless for the purposes of economic analysis. No, it's quite useful. If you want to buy or sell anything, it helps to know how much it's worth to the other guy. Either the subjective value "isn't unquantifiable" in which case the religious loon can claim his paradise on his balance sheet, or it is not quantifiable in which case the only thing which counts in economic measurements is monetary value. Which is it? It's not a dichotomy. Balance sheets are about buying power, not subjective value, but that doesn't mean subjective value is a worthless measurement. Economics != accounting.
The guy you're arguing with here is kind of nutty, and his tone sure isn't helping his case. But I have to agree that you're wrong about value.
A thing doesn't have an inherent value. Value is defined subjectively - there's nothing controversial about saying that, and it's not some made-up definition he pulled out of nowhere. What you're talking about, the quantifiable dollar amount we can place on an object, isn't "value", it's price. (Which is usually the same as cost, but cost can be subjective too.)
If I buy a chocolate cake and you buy a vanilla cake, each for $1.00, that's evidence that we both value a cake more than we value a dollar (right now). If we then decide that we'd each rather have the other flavor, then yes, that's evidence that we could trade our cakes and get even more value.
But value is different from cost. If I demand your cake plus one cent in exchange for my cake, you'd be right to reject that offer - not because you wouldn't be getting value out of that trade, but because you'd be able to get the same thing at a lower cost by exchanging it at the store.
To illustrate further, suppose that the store closed when we left. Your only options are to trade your cake plus one cent to me, or find a different store and pay a whole dollar for a second cake, or keep the penny and eat the cake you have. Which do you choose? If you choose to trade with me, then that must mean you're getting more than one cent of value out of the trade.
As for the lunatic who has $2 to his name and yet is completely happy... you're right, it would be foolish to compare people's wealth in terms of happiness (or subjective value), rather than in terms of buying power. The lunatic can buy two junior bacon cheeseburgers, even though he may not want them; Bill Gates is wealthier because he can buy billions of junior bacon cheeseburgers.
Finally, subjective value isn't unquantifiable. You can measure it by offering trades and seeing which ones are accepted. If the cake store burns down, and the only one left in town is selling them for $5, but you're still willing to buy them, that means you value cakes at >= $5.00 (and you must've thought you were getting a great deal before).
I'm not demanding that anyone provide a service. I'm only asking them to mind their business and avoid restricting my rights in order to prop up their ill-conceived business model. Selling their labor as a service is merely one way in which they could continue making money at what they do without having to restrict those rights. If I've been unclear about that, I apologize. Sorry to repeat that, but your arguments are just shocking. I'm sorry you're so shocked by the idea that someone might be opposed to copyright. You'll get over it soon enough. That's no excuse for the personal attacks, though, and the fact that you keep having to resort to those doesn't say much for your confidence in your argument. And you're free to conduct business under that model. You still have no right to demand that every other business do so. And you still have no right to help yourself to illegal, unpaid downloads of software and games. Look at what you just wrote. I have no right to demand that other people follow my model, you say, and in the next breath you let those same people demand that I follow their model by only exchanging information that they approve of?
By making those "unpaid downloads" illegal, they're forcing their model on everyone. If your company's rule is that only paying customers get access to a certain file, you can enforce it at your expense, on your time and property. You wouldn't expect other businesses to accept Disney Dollars just to help Disney; why should they accept Disney's sharing policy? It already did! There are many multitudes of business models in existance, and almost no industries have chosen the model you proposed. The market has already spoken. A market with government-granted monopolies is hardly a place where different models can battle it out on equal footing. You keep confusing unrelated issues -- so far, pricing, restricting competition, and now monopoly. They're not unrelated; they're all related to copyright, which is a government-granted monopoly that restricts competition, keeping prices high.
If you're selling discs with the number "123" burned onto them, I can legally compete with you. You don't have a monopoly on that product. I can start selling those "123" discs for less than you, and eventually we'll settle on a price just over the cost of burning a copy.
However, if you're selling discs with a different number burned onto them -- a number representing a copyrighted program, let's say -- then you do have a monopoly, and I'm not allowed to compete in the market for that particular product. You're the only supplier, so there's no competitive pressure on your prices. See how that works? And who are the "rest of them"? The "millions (if not billions) of people" you mentioned (quoting from me) in the part I quoted immediately before writing that. When they sell products, they do it without the government assurance that no one else will be allowed to compete.
(Well, trademarks and patents are also monopolies, and they apply to at least some of those products. But trademarks aren't objectionable, as long as they serve only to prevent fraud, and I'll withhold my views on patents to avoid shocking you even more.)
CHARGE PEOPLE TO WATCH THE GAME. They charge for entry into the stadium, and they sell advertising space. They don't try to charge everyone who ever catches a glimpse of the game. And copyright doesn't RESTRICT PEOPLES FREEDOM. It makes certain things illegal to say. That's a restriction. In a country that has the patriot act, guantanomo bay and the TSA, you really think not being able to legally steal Spiderman 3 is the biggest threat to your freedom? get real. No one said it was the biggest. Surely you don't think there can only be three things restricting a person's freedom at once, do you?