That's like saying "I see the car on the lot... I can drive it whenever I want!". Actually, it's more like "I see the car on the lot, and whenever I ask the salesman about driving it, he gives me the keys and tells me to have fun." People aren't breaking into the web server to get content; they're asking for a page and the server is happily returning it.
Look at his response to #4. He didn't answer the question at all, he just talked about the good ol' days and snuck in a couple references to piracy. Will homebrew developers be able to access the PS3's 3D hardware "officially" or not? If not, and if someone manages to find a way to access it "unofficially", will Sony release a firmware update to block it or won't they? We still don't know.
["Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits."] No, it does not. It says that if you are not the creator of said digits, you do not have the right to redistribute them, and the government has designated a party which does have that authority.
Um.. yes, exactly. You've simply restated what I said. I'm not allowed to "redistribute" those digits to anyone else, whether I do it by email, BitTorrent, or simply reading them over the phone. Clearly a restriction on my speech.
A binding agreement for a product you can't sell. Take that agreement to a court. You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute.
Apparently you don't understand how contracts work. Look, if you promise to pay me to mow your lawn, it doesn't matter whether a "mowed lawn" is a product either of us can sell. You still have to pay me if I perform the service, and it's no different with any other labor.
Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time.
Again, the law disagrees with you. If you contract me to perform a service, and I do it, then I'll have no problem suing you if you don't hold up your end of the deal.
Bullshit. There is very little new material in software--it's all assembling provided blocks into functions and assembling those functions into a program.
And apparently you don't understand how programming works either. What are you doing on Slashdot, anyway?
Why should you get paid for rearranging some characters but someone else shouldn't get paid for repeating a performance?
Repeating a performance? I've got no problem with that. If you want to give two concerts and charge for tickets to each one, that's fine. You're doing twice as much work as giving a single concert.
Professors publish works to supplement lower salaries than they'd earn in the business sector. They don't have time to publish on a weekly basis to accomplish same without IP, and so universities would lose professors by the boatload.
All right. Now what happens next? Just like in any other market, salaries for teaching would rise until they're attracted back. Tuition would rise, but as it's mostly paid for with grants and loans anyway, that won't have much impact on availability. Furthermore, I think you're overestimating the number of teachers who rely on copyright for their own incomes in the first place.
What, specifically, would you do, specifically? That's the question.
I can't believe you need me to spell this out for you. Open up any newspaper and look at the classified listings for jobs, and you'll find plenty that have nothing to do with copyright - although I'm eagerly awaiting your bizarre explanation of how no one would be able to deliver Chinese food, work a retail cash register, or answer phones in a world with no copyright.
What do you call environmental policy, employment law, subsidies, tariffs and trade barriers, resource price controls, and certification criteria? These are just a selection of mechanisms designed to regulate physical labor and production businesses.
I call those regulations, and most of those nothing to do with artificially limiting supply in order to create more jobs than are really necessary.
You've said no less than three times that artists should create because they enjoy it, and by implication that artists who do it for a profit don't deserve to be successful at it.
Bullshit. Let's see a quote.
I also think you're not seeing the hypocrisy in that you don't seem to think that mechanics or accountants are undeserving for sitting on a single skillset and never doing anything new.
First of all, no, and second "freedom of speech" does not apply to the work of others. It's not free speech to duplicate a painting.
You seem confused about what speech is. I can digitize a painting (or a song, a book, etc.), reducing it to a sequence of digits. Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits. That's a restriction on my speech, plain and simple.
["They become public the moment they're shared or sold."] Under what philosophy? Certainly not existing law, and not even categorically in your fantasy world of "private vs. public with no IP."
Under the definition of "public". If you're sharing something with whoever asks, or pays, then it's not private anymore. And if it's not private, it's public.
Broadened how? You're the one insisting that on real property should have any sort of protections. Stock isn't real property. You seem quite confused about what property even is.
Property is a scarce resource: if one person has it, someone else can't, so it can and must be owned. Information doesn't fit the bill, because everyone can be using the same information simultaneously without conflict.
Stock does, however, because each share represents a fraction of the company. If I own half the company, and you own half the company, then someone else can't own a third half. It's true that a share isn't a tangible thing, but it still has more in common with a car than with a number.
How long does it take you to write 55 programs? How long does it take you to do 55 oil changes? The current cost of a typical software title is about the same as the price of an oil change. Is your labor worth more?
Yeah, it probably is. Changing oil is something anyone can do. That's beside the point, though, because the more important difference is the amount of labor involved.
What makes you think people would pay you up front for your software? I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends. You wouldn't have a market if you charged individuals the full expected price.
As I've explained, it isn't necessary to charge individuals the full price. I don't need $40 million from you, it'll work just as well to collect $40 from you and a million other people. And as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay, I don't necessarily need the money up front either, just like a mechanic doesn't.
What exists for people to move into, since we'd be dumping tens of millions of jobs?
New service and manufacturing jobs that we may not have even thought of yet. Existing jobs in new locations. It's ridiculous to think there just won't be anything left for people to do.
What if someone took your "only get paid the first time" to the extreme you want for art and music? Your customer wants to see your source code. He's only going to pay you for the funtions you've never written before (changing variable names won't count). After all, performing those functions again is effortless and instant, just like providing another copy of a song you've already recorded.
Sounds fine to me. Like any good programmer, I don't like spending my time rewriting the same stuff over and over either, so this wouldn't really affect me.
OTOH, this aspect is already rolled into the price. Cutting and pasting takes a lot less time than writing new code, so you're naturally going to get paid less for doing it.
Publishing, printing, information collection services, commercial film, professional photography, universities, major recording acts, software development, and museums, to name a few.
I've already addressed at least two of those, but... wow. Would you mind explaining how, exactly, you think abolishing copyright would make universities obsolete? (I have a feeling this is go
Freedom of speech. Copyright says that there are certain sequences of words I'm not allowed to say to another person because someone else has a monopoly on speaking them.
In addition, copyright limits the ways we can use the works which are available - a CD that I can only (1) buy, (2) play, and (3) throw away isn't as useful to me as one that I can download for free, remix, share, include in another project, etc.
The works protected by IP laws aren't public works. They are private works which are shared with the public through the protections of IP.
They become public the moment they're shared or sold, and there's no reason to think most of them wouldn't become public even without copyright. As I've pointed out before, people don't write and record songs just so they can listen to those songs themselves. Art is designed to be shared.
Painters would still paint, because they love doing it. Society wouldn't be bettered by it, though, since the painter would have to finance his hobby by working a physical labor job.
Only if he's not good enough to get people to pay him to paint.
You might still write software because you enjoy it, but you'd probably have to do something else to make money because there'd be too many programmers competing for too little money.
No, the reason why I might have to do something else is because less programming would need to be done. Each person's work would be more useful, and the system as a whole would be more efficient because the same software wouldn't need to be written over and over.
No, but a mechanic gets paid every time he does a repair. If he changes oil 55 times a day, he gets paid 55 times, not just the first time he figures out how to do it. He also doesn't have to be the first one to figure out how to change oil in order to profit from it.
A programmer gets paid every time he writes code. If he writes 55 programs, then he gets paid 55 times, not just for the first one. Do you really think there's going to be a time when no more software needs to be written?
Is your company publicly traded? If so, it relies on selling IP (stock certificates).
If you're going to keep broadening the definition of "IP" like this, is it any wonder why I insist on only discussing copyright?
Are you salaried? Then your work relies on the company's IP product being sufficient to support its employees. Unless you are paid per-project on an individual basis, and unless your customers are buying software with a free software license (indicating that they cannot sell it or control its distribution), then your income is dependent on IP.
I am paid per hour to work on various projects. The software I write either supports hardware which is manufactured by my company or others, or is directly useful to the people paying for it.
If a technology were invented tomorrow that could instantly produce anything that had been built just one time before it (from apples to steak to Ford trucks to houses to the freakin' space shuttle), how would people make money? What would the billions of production line workers do?
I'm confident that they'd find something to do, just like displaced workers in obsolete fields have always done. We didn't have to come up with a plan for the buggy-whip manufacturers before deciding to allow automobiles. Why should we have to come up with a plan for factory workers before deciding to replace them with something more efficient?
It is rather the opposite, since a minimal-IP system with only privacy as you seem to desire would produce a mountain of proprietary information and no sharing, except in strategic alliances (cartels).
Once again, this simply does not apply to the information that is covered by copyright today. People don't write songs and books for their own use.
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. How is this different from lobbying in any other capacity? Abolishing legal frameworks because there's a group gaming the system is not the answer.
That group gaming the system is the very reason why the system exists. The majority didn't volunteer to give up their freedom of speech in order to help a minority make money by selling copies.
If A and B cannot convince C to split the cost, then they cannot bear the risk, because paving the road will put them out of business, and not paving the road might do the same. A and B should not have to relocate because they have one asshole competitor.
Shouldn't they? It seems to me that having a few people switch professions or locations, in the rare event that they encounter a competitor who's determined to sabotage the industry like this, is better than taking away everyone else's freedom in order to support a new, unenforceable kind of property right.
I'm not sure why I have to keep explaining this to you, since you're the one who thinks IP should be wiped off the face of the earth. If you don't have IP, you wouldn't have a job.
Believe me, I know more about my job than you do. My income simply does not depend on selling copies. It's not that hard to understand.
Companies would pay only the bare minimum to accomplish their goals, and they would shop the lowest bidder and the earliest bidder.
Yes, that's what everyone already does in every other field. If you need your car fixed, you don't go with the most expensive mechanic, do you? Has that destroyed the industry? I think not.
I sincerely doubt you have ever created something that has not been created before or that you are uniquely suited to produce.
As far as I know, the software I get paid to write hasn't been written before, but you're right that I'm not the only person who's capable of doing it. Just like my mechanic isn't the only one capable of fixing my car. So what? Someone has to write it, and that person happens to be me.
How would you compete with your tens of millions of fellow programmers for being 1) the lowest bidder and 2) the first to create a given software solution?
The same way anyone competes for any job! Why do you think this is a new concern?
If everything created was freely accessible to all, you would have nothing to offer, except maybe the occasional code tweak.
I think it'll be a long, long time before every piece of software the world will ever need has been written. There will always be demand for new software, just like there'll always be demand for new books and music.
No, you've demanded that someone foot the bill (up front) for the entire cost of your services sufficient to generate a living wage. But very few people make money that way now, and even fewer consumers are willing to pay in advance for material of questionable quality to be delivered at an uncertain time.
The time, quality, and payment arrangement can all be agreed upon beforehand. When I get my car serviced, I get an estimate of when it'll be done and how much it'll cost, and I still don't know for sure how well it'll turn out. Doesn't stop me from doing it, though.
You've suggested that individuals might group together to purchase a service, but again you face the problem of "why should anyone pay you when they can simply wait for someone else to do it and reap the benefit for free?"
Because they know that if they don't pay, it won't get done. If my favorite band asked me to give them $15 so they could make their next album, I wouldn't think twice about it.
Why do people contribute to candidates when they know they can sit back and let someone else do it? That thermometer graph is pretty good at motivating people, I guess.
If your product costs $6 million to create, where are you going to find a
If by "some people" you mean six centuries of legislators and courts and by "their idea" you mean "laws" then absolutely, I agree with you. Society's interests have been determined, individual judgments notwithstanding.
By "some people", I mean members of the various copy-selling industries and those who represent them in government. These laws benefit a minority which can effectively lobby in its own favor, at the expense of a majority which cannot. We shouldn't be surprised at the result, but neither should we think that it represents the interests of society as a whole.
Ding ding ding! The road goes unpaved, to the detriment of all, because C is a bastard.
It only goes unpaved until A and B explain to C that paving the road will benefit all three of them. If C is a rational actor, he'll go along with the plan. If he isn't a rational actor, then we can't predict much about his behavior anyway.
Now imagine a situation where A and B *could* pave the road by themselves and benefit from it without allowing freeloading. Gosh, what a wonderful system that would be.
If that system of paving roads required every single person in the country to sacrifice essential freedoms, and resulted in roads that were only marginally useful, compared to roads paved through some other means, for a century after they were built... then we'd be better off driving on dirt.
Surprise! You've already got one of those magical jobs. Your only labor is thinking. You could say that you get paid to type and to speak, but unless you're handed the content to type and/or speak verbatim, you are engaging in intellectual labor, not physical labor.
Aha, now I get it. You're drawing a distinction between "intellectual" and "physical" labor.
I'm not drawing that distinction, because as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. If I get paid for spending my time at some task, then I'm doing labor, period.
You can't sell something you don't own. No IP==no control over information==no way to demand payment.
Which is exactly why I'm not selling information. I'm selling my labor. I most certainly can charge people to write code for them, because I have control over how I spend my time, and if they won't pay me to write code then I'll spend my time doing something else.
But ARTISTS should create works of art and release them to the world for nothing. Why can't you give your contributions to society for free like you demand of them?
I've demanded no such thing. If you've gotten the impression that I'm asking anyone to work for nothing, you're gravely mistaken, and I can only conclude you haven't read a single word I've written about getting paid for working instead of selling copies.
If you don't have a mechanism to collect money for your intellectual labor, you've said that you're not going to produce. This is exactly what the rest of the world would do without IP. The US economy would implode practically overnight.
No, the rest of the world can get paid for working, too. They don't need a monopoly on making copies any more than I do.
So once one person buys your software, I can have that same software for free, since you already wrote it?
Yes. But let's get the terminology right: that person isn't buying software. He's paying me for the service of writing software, with the understanding that the software cannot be controlled by either of us once it's written.
What if the software you're writing involves thousands of programmers and two years of time? Where are you going to find a single buyer to cover those expenses?
It doesn't have to be a single buyer. It can be a corporation, a government, or a group of individuals.
For an example of how this can work in practice, see the past few years of political campaigning, where candidates raise millions of dollars from many small individual donations. And
Intellectual Property is the regulation of the FLOW of information or the CONTROL of the realization of information. It is not the information itself that is controlled, it is merely the manifestation of that information
This is a meaningless distinction.
Your act of copying a file is deemed to interfere with the interests of society, since that file was provided to society for consumption on the provision that the author/producer retains distribution rights (among others).
Some people deem that act to interfere with their idea of what society's interests might be, but in fact that idea usually has more to do with their own interests than those of society in general.
Many other people believe that society's interests are better served by having access to fewer works which can be used freely--shared, remixed, built upon and torn apart--rather than an abundance of restricted works which can only be used by buying and playing copies in their original form.
As an individual, having created a work, you have two choices without IP: keep it to yourself and retain control, or share it and lose control. IP law encourages sharing by artificially enforcing author control after publicization.
Not really. It encourages "production" by tempting potential artists with potential revenue, but as I said before, I don't think there's any reason to believe that in a world without copyright, artists would simply keep their work private. More likely, some of them would stop, and the rest would keep working and release their work... because what's the point of writing a song if no one else ever hears it?
["The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in."] That isn't the case, because that's only the first half of the process.
Well, yes, it is the case, because these are real people and it actually happened. It was an anecdote, not a hypothetical. But if you want to make it into a hypothetical...
Say two of them split the costs of the road repairs, at $50,000 each. The third paid $0 for the repairs, but has full use of the road. In order to pay for the new road, the first two shop owners sacrificed their saved profits. The third shop owner didn't have to spend that money, and so he could make an equal sacrifice by reducing prices 10%. Free market that it is, everyone goes to Florist C for the lower prices, and Florists A and B go out of business.
In a case like that, it probably wouldn't make sense for A and B to pave the road themselves, knowing that C would then be able to undercut them. They have enough information to know beforehand that they'd find themselves in that situation, and decide not to go forward without getting C on board. And of course it would be in C's own interest to get on board, because paving the road brings in more customers for everyone.
The "service sector" that employs the majority of Americans? 100% reliant on IP. It produces no physical products and involves no physical labor.
This is a joke, right? If not, please tell me where I can sign up for one of these jobs where you don't have to make anything or do any work, but you still get paid.
But you've debased the labor that generates your salary. Without IP, your work can't be used to make money because it's a service (yielding intellectual property as a product)--if you can't charge money for it, you can't make money from it.
Well, you'd better rework your theory, because that's exactly what I do, and I'm hardly the first person to make a living this way. I write software that provides a benefit to the people who use it. The software doesn't exist before I write it, which means I can charge those people to write it for them. Once it's written, they use it and I move on to something else.
Your programming work without IP amounts to a hamster wheel. I can come along at an
It uses sucralose, which though its sounds an awful lot like sucrose is a completely different compound. Yes, that's how chemical reactions work: one compound becomes a different one. Sucralose is made from sucrose, so it's incorrect to say Splenda has nothing to do with sugar (besides the fact that it also contains dextrose, which is an actual sugar).
It puts sucrose into the process and also evaporates sucrose there is no sugar in the start of the process nor the end. "Evaporates"? I don't think so. The sucrose isn't removed; it's changed into sucralose.
People drink Splenda thinking that it has something to do with sugar (it doesn't) Sure it does. Splenda contains dextrose, which is a sugar, as well as sucralose, which is an artificial sweetener manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose (hence the tagline "made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar").
I live in Washington, and I successfully contested a $300 "speed too fast for conditions" ticket in 2000. I spoke to the prosecutor and he dropped it before the case was heard.
So rather than have intellectual property laws, you'd rather the government evaluate the value of information in determining whether restrictions should be placed on it. Again, deliciously arbitrary.
There's nothing arbitrary about it. I think we'd all like the government to evaluate the "value" of actions in determining whether restrictions should be placed on them, right? All you've done here is show that things sound strange when you use enough abstraction to talk about them.
The current framework, which suggests that information not produced in public is protected unless released offers a far more robust approach.
The information we're talking about here is released the moment its author decides to broadcast or sell it. You can't release something to everyone who's willing to buy it and then claim it's still private.
The controlled publicization of private information is exactly what intellectual property is about, and why it is grouped together.
It is only grouped together by people who are trying to make a political point. Patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets are very different, and no insight is gained by treating them as if they're the same.
Absent those protections, these artists wouldn't be selling anything, because to release it would be to cede control to the public.
They'd be selling their labor, like most other people. The only ones who wouldn't be recording anymore are the ones who (1) are only in it for the money and (2) cannot convince anyone that their artistic talent is worth paying for, most likely because it isn't. I can't say I'll miss them.
You keep gravitating toward copyright, but that's not the only game in town regarding the issue of stealing information.
This discussion started with music, music is only covered by copyright, and so I am only going to discuss copyright.
[R&D will be funded by...] Only to the minimum extent necessary--without any legal protections, there's nothing to stop a company from not participating in the research and simply waiting for the results, stealing them, and using them for their own gain in their production of, say, drugs or cellular phones.
Let me share an anecdote here.
There's a woman who lives on a private road, which isn't maintained by the government, and so after many years it had fallen into disrepair to the point where it was barely drivable. She and her neighbors got together to discuss paying a private company to pave the road, and they agreed to split the costs between them.
All except one neighbor, that is. He didn't want to pay. Everyone else divided the cost of hiring the pavers, and the one guy got to live on a paved road for free.
The world didn't end. Everyone got to benefit. The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in. They had an incentive to pay, because they knew that no one would be willing to pay for the whole thing himself, and so if they didn't split the costs, the road would never get paved at all.
There has to be some sort of IP framework in place for there even to BE a distinction between private and public information, and there are no market forces which could solve this problem.
Again, no, there doesn't. All there has to be is a declaration that this type of information is private (medical and financial records, personal correspondence, etc.) and that type of information is not (everything else). You don't have to say anything about ownership in order to divide public from private information.
You asked what I'm driving at with my question, and this is the answer. The US economy (and many other "first world" nations) is no longer based on labor or physical property.
I remember hearing something like that before: we called it the New Economy at the ti
So you're saying that the government has the authority to withhold access to some in the interest of protection of individuals, but they don't have the authority to limit access in the interest of fostering business and promoting the sharing of art with a greater population? That seems deliciously arbitrary.
Not really. First, copyright isn't about access anyway. Musicians have no problem blasting their songs out over the air to millions of people. Everyone who hears a song on the radio has access to it, but copyright limits what they can do with it afterward.
Second, the fundamental principle here is that I'm considering the consequences of disclosure, and "I find it a little harder to make a buck" isn't nearly as damaging as "now everyone knows I used to be a man" or "now the enemy knows where our troops are headed" (to use another example of justified suppression of information).
If your only concern is that someone might obtain this information without paying you for it, then you really aren't concerned about stopping its spread at all - it isn't private, because your own actions prove you know you won't be harmed by its disclosure. You're just hoping to get paid in the process. If you really didn't want everyone to have it, you wouldn't be selling it to everyone who shows up with cash.
What we currently consider IP is private information that has been voluntarily publicized in exchange for some measure of control over that information.
No, you're thinking of patents. Copyright is nothing like that in practice. Surely you don't think that in a world without copyright, musicians would record entire albums and then just keep their recordings to themselves.
If there are no ownership rights or access controls, you claim of authorship doesn't carry any weight. Authorship without ownership is worthless--you can't be forced to give credit to any original source if that author has no legal status.
The claim to authorship is being made to a public audience, either explicitly ("click here to see Mr2001's Web Site, designed by Leechy McPlagiarist") or implicitly (by omitting the credit altogether and letting the reader infer that the content was written by the person whose domain it's hosted on). I don't see what's so hard about stipulating that such a claim has to be true.
New scientific achievements would be relegated to weekend projects, since there would be no way to secure income without protections, and no corporate market to drive and fund research.
Of course there would be; the money would be collected differently, but it'd ultimately come from the same place, the end users.
For example, I like listening to Cake, so I'd be willing to give them $15 to fund their next album--after all, I'd happily spend $15 on the CD. What I value is their talent, not the plastic discs (which I don't need anyway), so I'm willing to pay them for it.
There absolutely must be a tradeoff--individuals cannot afford the kind of research that needs to be done, and companies won't throw away the money to handle R&D for the entire industry.
Then the R&D will be funded by industry coalitions, or the other parties who benefit from it - consumers, retailers, support providers, etc. As long as it provides a benefit, there will be demand.
It doesn't matter. I agree the scenario is tenuous, but the question is simple: if someone copied your work, and a third party offered that person a wad of cash because of it (endorsement deal, book tour, lecture circuit, even simply a gift because the content was riveting and enjoyable to some senile millionaire), but you were offered nothing, would you be upset?
Since I've established my position that lying about authorship is still objectionable, I'll assume that the copy is an exact one which properly credits me, but this mysterious, irrational third party still paid someone else for it.
I'm not talking exclusively of copyright. I'm saying that a legal framework which doesn't include intellectual property cannot have any notion of privacy. [...] What authority would you have to deny someone's use or access to information if you had no ownership rights to it? Privacy is not just an "IP control". I suppose that's one way to look at it, but it hardly seems like the most natural or logical way.
I, myself, as a private person, don't have the authority to deny someone's use or access to information - but the government does. Privacy can be enforced based not on my supposed ownership of my medical records, but on the consequences of allowing that information to become public, as in "You aren't allowed to tell anyone about that burro incident because Mr2001 deserves to keep his embarrassing past a secret" or whatever. That has the advantage of protecting not just the forms, but the facts themselves, which are what I'd want to keep private anyway.
It's essentially the same reason that it's OK to ban falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, even though no one owns the word "fire" or the concept of fire. The ban is justified because the consequences of shouting "fire" are likely to include trampling and panic, not because of any property rights.
Finally, before we get too deep into privacy issues, let me just point out the difference between public and private information. It's the difference between a song that gets played on the radio for thousands of listeners every hour and a medical record that only my doctor is allowed to see. If I mailed copies of that record out to a million strangers, I'd be in no position to complain when some of them made and shared their own copies.
How do you prove that you are the author of anything if the system is incapable of recognizing ownership? The same way we prove that anyone did anything, more or less. Authorship disputes come up even today, and we could resolve them in the future the same way we do now.
How do I prove that I wrote this comment, for example? Well, if I really cared about it, I could save a timestamped copy to disk, or print it out and have it notarized, or have a friend take a picture of me smoking a cigarette and pointing at the screen while pressing the "Submit" button. That provides proof that I had a copy at this time, and now it's up to someone else to prove that they had a copy first. If they can't, my evidence stands.
None of that depends on me being recognized as the "owner" of this comment, or granting me the right to prevent others from copying or reposting it. It simply proves that I was here typing this comment at this moment, and I didn't copy it from somewhere else.
They copied your website and sold it for profit, and the buyer isn't interested in reimbursing you at all. You really mean to tell me you wouldn't be upset about that? You wouldn't feel wronged? Before I answer that, I have a few doubts about the consistency of this scenario. Why would someone buy my web site (or a copy of it) for $100,000 when it's obviously easy enough to make a copy for free? What are they paying for, exactly?
CDs degrade over time with no scratching or mistreatment. That's a well known fact. So, in that sense, vinyl is more durable. Poorly made CDs left out in the sun, sure. Well-made, well-handled CDs will last for your entire life. And more importantly...
That's ok, your vinyl original is your backup. Rip the vinyl to a digital format, store the vinyl well, and you have a good backup that will last longer than any optical media. ... with a CD, you can make a backup that's identical to the original. Keep doing that every few decades and in a thousand years, you'll still have exactly what you started with.
Your digital rip of that vinyl record, however, is not going to be identical to the original. It's going to be an approximation of the original at one particular point in time. Rip it again the next day and you'll get something slightly different. Of course, since sound is analog to begin with, this is inevitable at some point - but better it should happen as soon in the process as possible, I'd say, so that everything from that point on is deterministic.
But if you can't own your work, then there is no legal recourse for you to take. So what if they've lied about who created it--you've just said that there's no ownership or control rights. My recourse doesn't have to depend on claiming to own the material that was copied. I have the same right as any other member of the public not to be lied to in a commercial context, and I've got no problem with extending that to certain noncommercial contexts.
Same thing with confidential records--if you can't own the information, you can't construct a legal framework to protect its privacy. Without information controls, you can't enforce any sort of privacy law whatsoever. Sure you can, you just have to base it on something other than copyright. In fact, copyright isn't very good for this purpose anyway. If I don't want anyone to know about that time I caught chlamydia from a burro in Tijuana, my interest isn't just in controlling the spread of copies of my medical forma, but in controlling the spread of the facts of the case - and facts like that can't be copyrighted anyway.
Possession - n. legal ownership, occupancy, or control. (Ownership - "legal right of control and possession;" control - "command; exercise direction over; a legal or official means of regulation or restraing")
That would include a recording of a song, an arrangement of pigment molecules or pixels, or a work of cinematography. No, it wouldn't. It might include the copyright itself, but not the copyrighted information, which cannot be controlled or owned.
Copies of data don't spring up from nowhere, either. Sure they do, given the existence of an original (i.e. once the data is known, there's no limit to the number of copies that can be made). I mean, it's true that the data has to be stored somewhere, and there's a finite amount of material to make hard drives, etc., but the data itself is an abstract concept that isn't tied to any particular finite resource.
Even if they did, you do not have any intrinsic rights to the works of others, whether in digital form or not. Do you have the "intrinsic right" to perform a calculation using the speed of light, even though other people (not you) put in a lot of hard work to come up with the value of that constant?
Do you have the "intrinsic right" to use the word "digital" in your post, even though you didn't invent it yourself?
Those questions, like your statement, rest on the faulty assumption that you need permission to make use of information you come across. But as sentient beings, we have the right to use and share information by default. ISTM the burden of proof is on those who say that they have the "intrinsic right" to censor my speech just because the words I want to say were spoken by someone else first.
Tell me, if someone decided to copy your website and assumed credit for all of your work and was offered $100,000 for it, would you say "oh well, there's nothing wrong with it because I still have my website up?" If they're taking credit, they're doing a lot more than just copying, aren't they? The problem with that act is that they're lying to everyone who sees their altered version of my web site. The copying itself is not objectionable.
Stealing, however, is just taking the possessions of another without permission. Information is not a possession.
If I have a truckload of rocks delivered to my driveway for landscaping, and you take one as you walk by, you've stolen it. I might not notice that it's gone, and I wouldn't even care. Of course. The reason that's stealing, and wrong, is because the rock I take is a rock you don't have anymore. Whether you notice it or not, whether you need it or not, the fact is you have one less rock than you did before. That's stealing.
You might say that taking an apple to feed a starving child is justified (and I'd tend to agree), but it absolutely still is stealing (even if there are an effectively infinite number of apples, since the tree will always grow more). Sure. I disagree that there are an effectively infinite number of apples, though. Apples don't spring forth from nowhere, so the soil will eventually be consumed (unless you replenish it with fertilizer that has to be taken away from somewhere else), and more importantly, apples take time to grow, so the number of apples a tree will produce each year is limited.
If there were a magical tree that produced an unlimited number of apples out of nowhere--you pick one and another immediately grows back, forever--then I don't think most people would consider it wrong, or even "stealing", to take one. I sure wouldn't, and in fact I'd say it's immoral to try to prevent people from taking one of those free apples.
The parent post is attempting to build an argument that lack of deprivation equals lack of crime or lack or injury. Incorrect. I was pointing out the flaw in jumping from "I bought this on vinyl so I can download the MP3" to "I bought a car so I can steal any other car". Namely, that stealing a car deprives others, even if you've paid for your own car; downloading MP3s doesn't deprive others of anything, especially if you've paid for the same content in another format. They're different acts with vastly different consequences, so the analogy doesn't hold.
The reply simply points out that that is not true. Bad moral behavior does not require physical deprivation of assets. It's a faulty argument. No one said it did. That's a strawman.
If certain actions are taken with what you hold dear, you WILL feel wronged even if no physical damage or property removal has occurred and all aspects of your life appear to be unchanged. Indeed, but surely you realize that not every action that causes someone to "feel wronged" is immoral or should be illegal. If my friend runs a business, he might feel hurt if I go to a cheaper competitor, but I'm not obligated to spend more for the same thing just because he's a friend of mine.
Same thing applies to a stranger selling something that I can get for free on my own. Why should I feel obligated to pay him for something I can get for free? Just because he wishes he had my money and he'll be sad if he doesn't get it? Sorry, but at some point you have to take responsibility for your own feelings. Maybe it just isn't a good idea to base your hopes and dreams on the prospect of selling people stuff they can get for free elsewhere.
Sure, an artist might feel wronged if I download bits for free instead of buying them from him on a plastic disc. But again, I'm not morally obligated to get them from him. No one, morally speaking, can own any number, whether it represents the speed or light or a digitized song.
Sorry, but that's just nuts. Copyright infringement is theft and does involve deceit That's nonsense, as we all know, but I suppose it's impossible to avoid such ridiculous claims when you're forced to defend a position that boils down to "you should give up your freedom of speech so that I can make a buck".
If I download a song, no one is deceived. The person sending it to me knows exactly what's going on, and there's no other party to the transaction. There is no deceit.
Furthermore, the essential element of theft is taking something away from its rightful owner, and the file I download is not taken away from anyone: downloading creates a new copy. There is no theft either.
The essential element of stealing is taking something away from its rightful owner. If you steal my car, I'm upset because I don't have a car anymore - whether you have one is irrelevant to me. If you could take a copy while leaving the original undisturbed, as you can with information, that wouldn't be stealing, and in fact it wouldn't even be objectionable.
You'd need to mod more than just the shape. The Wii doesn't have the same expansion ports as the GameCube, so there's nowhere to plug in the GB Player.
Doubt it. As far as I know, Nintendo is committed to 100% compatibility with GC discs, which would include this one (as well as the Action Replay, which is for cheat codes but can also be used to boot homebrew). I don't know if a firmware update could even blacklist GC discs, from what I've heard about how the backward compatibility is implemented. You can also use a mod chip to boot homebrew, but I don't have the details.
But you're depriving the company of revenue because you're not paying for the digital interpretation of the analog storage medium you just bought. No more than I'm depriving H&R Block of revenue by choosing to do my taxes myself, or depriving the oil companies of revenue by driving a 33 MPG Corolla instead of a 10 MPG Hummer. That word implies that I somehow owe them money just because they want to sell me something--that the revenue is rightfully theirs, and I'm interfering by not playing along--but in fact I'm under no obligation to buy their products, especially when I've already paid for the same thing in a different, convertible format.
Sleeping with your wife while you're at work doesn't deprive you of your wife, as long as she's there for you when you want her. Therefore, sleeping with your wife is OK! No, sleeping with your wife is "OK". Sleeping with my wife is fantastic. Sorry you're missing out, but for some reason, she only likes to sleep with guys who have enough common sense not to compare copyright infringement to theft, adultery, or other acts involving force or deceit.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at his response to #4. He didn't answer the question at all, he just talked about the good ol' days and snuck in a couple references to piracy. Will homebrew developers be able to access the PS3's 3D hardware "officially" or not? If not, and if someone manages to find a way to access it "unofficially", will Sony release a firmware update to block it or won't they? We still don't know.
["Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits."] No, it does not. It says that if you are not the creator of said digits, you do not have the right to redistribute them, and the government has designated a party which does have that authority.
Um.. yes, exactly. You've simply restated what I said. I'm not allowed to "redistribute" those digits to anyone else, whether I do it by email, BitTorrent, or simply reading them over the phone. Clearly a restriction on my speech.
A binding agreement for a product you can't sell. Take that agreement to a court. You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute.
Apparently you don't understand how contracts work. Look, if you promise to pay me to mow your lawn, it doesn't matter whether a "mowed lawn" is a product either of us can sell. You still have to pay me if I perform the service, and it's no different with any other labor.
Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time.
Again, the law disagrees with you. If you contract me to perform a service, and I do it, then I'll have no problem suing you if you don't hold up your end of the deal.
Bullshit. There is very little new material in software--it's all assembling provided blocks into functions and assembling those functions into a program.
And apparently you don't understand how programming works either. What are you doing on Slashdot, anyway?
Why should you get paid for rearranging some characters but someone else shouldn't get paid for repeating a performance?
Repeating a performance? I've got no problem with that. If you want to give two concerts and charge for tickets to each one, that's fine. You're doing twice as much work as giving a single concert.
Professors publish works to supplement lower salaries than they'd earn in the business sector. They don't have time to publish on a weekly basis to accomplish same without IP, and so universities would lose professors by the boatload.
All right. Now what happens next? Just like in any other market, salaries for teaching would rise until they're attracted back. Tuition would rise, but as it's mostly paid for with grants and loans anyway, that won't have much impact on availability. Furthermore, I think you're overestimating the number of teachers who rely on copyright for their own incomes in the first place.
What, specifically, would you do, specifically? That's the question.
I can't believe you need me to spell this out for you. Open up any newspaper and look at the classified listings for jobs, and you'll find plenty that have nothing to do with copyright - although I'm eagerly awaiting your bizarre explanation of how no one would be able to deliver Chinese food, work a retail cash register, or answer phones in a world with no copyright.
What do you call environmental policy, employment law, subsidies, tariffs and trade barriers, resource price controls, and certification criteria? These are just a selection of mechanisms designed to regulate physical labor and production businesses.
I call those regulations, and most of those nothing to do with artificially limiting supply in order to create more jobs than are really necessary.
You've said no less than three times that artists should create because they enjoy it, and by implication that artists who do it for a profit don't deserve to be successful at it.
Bullshit. Let's see a quote.
I also think you're not seeing the hypocrisy in that you don't seem to think that mechanics or accountants are undeserving for sitting on a single skillset and never doing anything new.
There's no hypocrisy there. They would
First of all, no, and second "freedom of speech" does not apply to the work of others. It's not free speech to duplicate a painting.
You seem confused about what speech is. I can digitize a painting (or a song, a book, etc.), reducing it to a sequence of digits. Copyright says it's illegal to call my friend up on the phone and read him that list of digits. That's a restriction on my speech, plain and simple.
["They become public the moment they're shared or sold."] Under what philosophy? Certainly not existing law, and not even categorically in your fantasy world of "private vs. public with no IP."
Under the definition of "public". If you're sharing something with whoever asks, or pays, then it's not private anymore. And if it's not private, it's public.
Broadened how? You're the one insisting that on real property should have any sort of protections. Stock isn't real property. You seem quite confused about what property even is.
Property is a scarce resource: if one person has it, someone else can't, so it can and must be owned. Information doesn't fit the bill, because everyone can be using the same information simultaneously without conflict.
Stock does, however, because each share represents a fraction of the company. If I own half the company, and you own half the company, then someone else can't own a third half. It's true that a share isn't a tangible thing, but it still has more in common with a car than with a number.
How long does it take you to write 55 programs? How long does it take you to do 55 oil changes? The current cost of a typical software title is about the same as the price of an oil change. Is your labor worth more?
Yeah, it probably is. Changing oil is something anyone can do. That's beside the point, though, because the more important difference is the amount of labor involved.
What makes you think people would pay you up front for your software? I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends. You wouldn't have a market if you charged individuals the full expected price.
As I've explained, it isn't necessary to charge individuals the full price. I don't need $40 million from you, it'll work just as well to collect $40 from you and a million other people. And as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay, I don't necessarily need the money up front either, just like a mechanic doesn't.
What exists for people to move into, since we'd be dumping tens of millions of jobs?
New service and manufacturing jobs that we may not have even thought of yet. Existing jobs in new locations. It's ridiculous to think there just won't be anything left for people to do.
What if someone took your "only get paid the first time" to the extreme you want for art and music? Your customer wants to see your source code. He's only going to pay you for the funtions you've never written before (changing variable names won't count). After all, performing those functions again is effortless and instant, just like providing another copy of a song you've already recorded.
Sounds fine to me. Like any good programmer, I don't like spending my time rewriting the same stuff over and over either, so this wouldn't really affect me.
OTOH, this aspect is already rolled into the price. Cutting and pasting takes a lot less time than writing new code, so you're naturally going to get paid less for doing it.
Publishing, printing, information collection services, commercial film, professional photography, universities, major recording acts, software development, and museums, to name a few.
I've already addressed at least two of those, but... wow. Would you mind explaining how, exactly, you think abolishing copyright would make universities obsolete? (I have a feeling this is go
What freedom [is taken away by copyright]?
Freedom of speech. Copyright says that there are certain sequences of words I'm not allowed to say to another person because someone else has a monopoly on speaking them.
In addition, copyright limits the ways we can use the works which are available - a CD that I can only (1) buy, (2) play, and (3) throw away isn't as useful to me as one that I can download for free, remix, share, include in another project, etc.
The works protected by IP laws aren't public works. They are private works which are shared with the public through the protections of IP.
They become public the moment they're shared or sold, and there's no reason to think most of them wouldn't become public even without copyright. As I've pointed out before, people don't write and record songs just so they can listen to those songs themselves. Art is designed to be shared.
Painters would still paint, because they love doing it. Society wouldn't be bettered by it, though, since the painter would have to finance his hobby by working a physical labor job.
Only if he's not good enough to get people to pay him to paint.
You might still write software because you enjoy it, but you'd probably have to do something else to make money because there'd be too many programmers competing for too little money.
No, the reason why I might have to do something else is because less programming would need to be done. Each person's work would be more useful, and the system as a whole would be more efficient because the same software wouldn't need to be written over and over.
No, but a mechanic gets paid every time he does a repair. If he changes oil 55 times a day, he gets paid 55 times, not just the first time he figures out how to do it. He also doesn't have to be the first one to figure out how to change oil in order to profit from it.
A programmer gets paid every time he writes code. If he writes 55 programs, then he gets paid 55 times, not just for the first one. Do you really think there's going to be a time when no more software needs to be written?
Is your company publicly traded? If so, it relies on selling IP (stock certificates).
If you're going to keep broadening the definition of "IP" like this, is it any wonder why I insist on only discussing copyright?
Are you salaried? Then your work relies on the company's IP product being sufficient to support its employees. Unless you are paid per-project on an individual basis, and unless your customers are buying software with a free software license (indicating that they cannot sell it or control its distribution), then your income is dependent on IP.
I am paid per hour to work on various projects. The software I write either supports hardware which is manufactured by my company or others, or is directly useful to the people paying for it.
If a technology were invented tomorrow that could instantly produce anything that had been built just one time before it (from apples to steak to Ford trucks to houses to the freakin' space shuttle), how would people make money? What would the billions of production line workers do?
I'm confident that they'd find something to do, just like displaced workers in obsolete fields have always done. We didn't have to come up with a plan for the buggy-whip manufacturers before deciding to allow automobiles. Why should we have to come up with a plan for factory workers before deciding to replace them with something more efficient?
It is rather the opposite, since a minimal-IP system with only privacy as you seem to desire would produce a mountain of proprietary information and no sharing, except in strategic alliances (cartels).
Once again, this simply does not apply to the information that is covered by copyright today. People don't write songs and books for their own use.
Copyrig
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. How is this different from lobbying in any other capacity? Abolishing legal frameworks because there's a group gaming the system is not the answer.
That group gaming the system is the very reason why the system exists. The majority didn't volunteer to give up their freedom of speech in order to help a minority make money by selling copies.
If A and B cannot convince C to split the cost, then they cannot bear the risk, because paving the road will put them out of business, and not paving the road might do the same. A and B should not have to relocate because they have one asshole competitor.
Shouldn't they? It seems to me that having a few people switch professions or locations, in the rare event that they encounter a competitor who's determined to sabotage the industry like this, is better than taking away everyone else's freedom in order to support a new, unenforceable kind of property right.
I'm not sure why I have to keep explaining this to you, since you're the one who thinks IP should be wiped off the face of the earth. If you don't have IP, you wouldn't have a job.
Believe me, I know more about my job than you do. My income simply does not depend on selling copies. It's not that hard to understand.
Companies would pay only the bare minimum to accomplish their goals, and they would shop the lowest bidder and the earliest bidder.
Yes, that's what everyone already does in every other field. If you need your car fixed, you don't go with the most expensive mechanic, do you? Has that destroyed the industry? I think not.
I sincerely doubt you have ever created something that has not been created before or that you are uniquely suited to produce.
As far as I know, the software I get paid to write hasn't been written before, but you're right that I'm not the only person who's capable of doing it. Just like my mechanic isn't the only one capable of fixing my car. So what? Someone has to write it, and that person happens to be me.
How would you compete with your tens of millions of fellow programmers for being 1) the lowest bidder and 2) the first to create a given software solution?
The same way anyone competes for any job! Why do you think this is a new concern?
If everything created was freely accessible to all, you would have nothing to offer, except maybe the occasional code tweak.
I think it'll be a long, long time before every piece of software the world will ever need has been written. There will always be demand for new software, just like there'll always be demand for new books and music.
No, you've demanded that someone foot the bill (up front) for the entire cost of your services sufficient to generate a living wage. But very few people make money that way now, and even fewer consumers are willing to pay in advance for material of questionable quality to be delivered at an uncertain time.
The time, quality, and payment arrangement can all be agreed upon beforehand. When I get my car serviced, I get an estimate of when it'll be done and how much it'll cost, and I still don't know for sure how well it'll turn out. Doesn't stop me from doing it, though.
You've suggested that individuals might group together to purchase a service, but again you face the problem of "why should anyone pay you when they can simply wait for someone else to do it and reap the benefit for free?"
Because they know that if they don't pay, it won't get done. If my favorite band asked me to give them $15 so they could make their next album, I wouldn't think twice about it.
Why do people contribute to candidates when they know they can sit back and let someone else do it? That thermometer graph is pretty good at motivating people, I guess.
If your product costs $6 million to create, where are you going to find a
If by "some people" you mean six centuries of legislators and courts and by "their idea" you mean "laws" then absolutely, I agree with you. Society's interests have been determined, individual judgments notwithstanding.
By "some people", I mean members of the various copy-selling industries and those who represent them in government. These laws benefit a minority which can effectively lobby in its own favor, at the expense of a majority which cannot. We shouldn't be surprised at the result, but neither should we think that it represents the interests of society as a whole.
Ding ding ding! The road goes unpaved, to the detriment of all, because C is a bastard.
It only goes unpaved until A and B explain to C that paving the road will benefit all three of them. If C is a rational actor, he'll go along with the plan. If he isn't a rational actor, then we can't predict much about his behavior anyway.
Now imagine a situation where A and B *could* pave the road by themselves and benefit from it without allowing freeloading. Gosh, what a wonderful system that would be.
If that system of paving roads required every single person in the country to sacrifice essential freedoms, and resulted in roads that were only marginally useful, compared to roads paved through some other means, for a century after they were built... then we'd be better off driving on dirt.
Surprise! You've already got one of those magical jobs. Your only labor is thinking. You could say that you get paid to type and to speak, but unless you're handed the content to type and/or speak verbatim, you are engaging in intellectual labor, not physical labor.
Aha, now I get it. You're drawing a distinction between "intellectual" and "physical" labor.
I'm not drawing that distinction, because as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. If I get paid for spending my time at some task, then I'm doing labor, period.
You can't sell something you don't own. No IP==no control over information==no way to demand payment.
Which is exactly why I'm not selling information. I'm selling my labor. I most certainly can charge people to write code for them, because I have control over how I spend my time, and if they won't pay me to write code then I'll spend my time doing something else.
But ARTISTS should create works of art and release them to the world for nothing. Why can't you give your contributions to society for free like you demand of them?
I've demanded no such thing. If you've gotten the impression that I'm asking anyone to work for nothing, you're gravely mistaken, and I can only conclude you haven't read a single word I've written about getting paid for working instead of selling copies.
If you don't have a mechanism to collect money for your intellectual labor, you've said that you're not going to produce. This is exactly what the rest of the world would do without IP. The US economy would implode practically overnight.
No, the rest of the world can get paid for working, too. They don't need a monopoly on making copies any more than I do.
So once one person buys your software, I can have that same software for free, since you already wrote it?
Yes. But let's get the terminology right: that person isn't buying software. He's paying me for the service of writing software, with the understanding that the software cannot be controlled by either of us once it's written.
What if the software you're writing involves thousands of programmers and two years of time? Where are you going to find a single buyer to cover those expenses?
It doesn't have to be a single buyer. It can be a corporation, a government, or a group of individuals.
For an example of how this can work in practice, see the past few years of political campaigning, where candidates raise millions of dollars from many small individual donations. And
Intellectual Property is the regulation of the FLOW of information or the CONTROL of the realization of information. It is not the information itself that is controlled, it is merely the manifestation of that information
This is a meaningless distinction.
Your act of copying a file is deemed to interfere with the interests of society, since that file was provided to society for consumption on the provision that the author/producer retains distribution rights (among others).
Some people deem that act to interfere with their idea of what society's interests might be, but in fact that idea usually has more to do with their own interests than those of society in general.
Many other people believe that society's interests are better served by having access to fewer works which can be used freely--shared, remixed, built upon and torn apart--rather than an abundance of restricted works which can only be used by buying and playing copies in their original form.
As an individual, having created a work, you have two choices without IP: keep it to yourself and retain control, or share it and lose control. IP law encourages sharing by artificially enforcing author control after publicization.
Not really. It encourages "production" by tempting potential artists with potential revenue, but as I said before, I don't think there's any reason to believe that in a world without copyright, artists would simply keep their work private. More likely, some of them would stop, and the rest would keep working and release their work... because what's the point of writing a song if no one else ever hears it?
["The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in."] That isn't the case, because that's only the first half of the process.
Well, yes, it is the case, because these are real people and it actually happened. It was an anecdote, not a hypothetical. But if you want to make it into a hypothetical...
Say two of them split the costs of the road repairs, at $50,000 each. The third paid $0 for the repairs, but has full use of the road. In order to pay for the new road, the first two shop owners sacrificed their saved profits. The third shop owner didn't have to spend that money, and so he could make an equal sacrifice by reducing prices 10%. Free market that it is, everyone goes to Florist C for the lower prices, and Florists A and B go out of business.
In a case like that, it probably wouldn't make sense for A and B to pave the road themselves, knowing that C would then be able to undercut them. They have enough information to know beforehand that they'd find themselves in that situation, and decide not to go forward without getting C on board. And of course it would be in C's own interest to get on board, because paving the road brings in more customers for everyone.
The "service sector" that employs the majority of Americans? 100% reliant on IP. It produces no physical products and involves no physical labor.
This is a joke, right? If not, please tell me where I can sign up for one of these jobs where you don't have to make anything or do any work, but you still get paid.
But you've debased the labor that generates your salary. Without IP, your work can't be used to make money because it's a service (yielding intellectual property as a product)--if you can't charge money for it, you can't make money from it.
Well, you'd better rework your theory, because that's exactly what I do, and I'm hardly the first person to make a living this way. I write software that provides a benefit to the people who use it. The software doesn't exist before I write it, which means I can charge those people to write it for them. Once it's written, they use it and I move on to something else.
Your programming work without IP amounts to a hamster wheel. I can come along at an
I live in Washington, and I successfully contested a $300 "speed too fast for conditions" ticket in 2000. I spoke to the prosecutor and he dropped it before the case was heard.
So rather than have intellectual property laws, you'd rather the government evaluate the value of information in determining whether restrictions should be placed on it. Again, deliciously arbitrary.
There's nothing arbitrary about it. I think we'd all like the government to evaluate the "value" of actions in determining whether restrictions should be placed on them, right? All you've done here is show that things sound strange when you use enough abstraction to talk about them.
The current framework, which suggests that information not produced in public is protected unless released offers a far more robust approach.
The information we're talking about here is released the moment its author decides to broadcast or sell it. You can't release something to everyone who's willing to buy it and then claim it's still private.
The controlled publicization of private information is exactly what intellectual property is about, and why it is grouped together.
It is only grouped together by people who are trying to make a political point. Patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets are very different, and no insight is gained by treating them as if they're the same.
Absent those protections, these artists wouldn't be selling anything, because to release it would be to cede control to the public.
They'd be selling their labor, like most other people. The only ones who wouldn't be recording anymore are the ones who (1) are only in it for the money and (2) cannot convince anyone that their artistic talent is worth paying for, most likely because it isn't. I can't say I'll miss them.
You keep gravitating toward copyright, but that's not the only game in town regarding the issue of stealing information.
This discussion started with music, music is only covered by copyright, and so I am only going to discuss copyright.
[R&D will be funded by ...] Only to the minimum extent necessary--without any legal protections, there's nothing to stop a company from not participating in the research and simply waiting for the results, stealing them, and using them for their own gain in their production of, say, drugs or cellular phones.
Let me share an anecdote here.
There's a woman who lives on a private road, which isn't maintained by the government, and so after many years it had fallen into disrepair to the point where it was barely drivable. She and her neighbors got together to discuss paying a private company to pave the road, and they agreed to split the costs between them.
All except one neighbor, that is. He didn't want to pay. Everyone else divided the cost of hiring the pavers, and the one guy got to live on a paved road for free.
The world didn't end. Everyone got to benefit. The neighbors who paid weren't ripped off; the benefit they received was still greater than the amount they paid in. They had an incentive to pay, because they knew that no one would be willing to pay for the whole thing himself, and so if they didn't split the costs, the road would never get paved at all.
There has to be some sort of IP framework in place for there even to BE a distinction between private and public information, and there are no market forces which could solve this problem.
Again, no, there doesn't. All there has to be is a declaration that this type of information is private (medical and financial records, personal correspondence, etc.) and that type of information is not (everything else). You don't have to say anything about ownership in order to divide public from private information.
You asked what I'm driving at with my question, and this is the answer. The US economy (and many other "first world" nations) is no longer based on labor or physical property.
I remember hearing something like that before: we called it the New Economy at the ti
So you're saying that the government has the authority to withhold access to some in the interest of protection of individuals, but they don't have the authority to limit access in the interest of fostering business and promoting the sharing of art with a greater population? That seems deliciously arbitrary.
Not really. First, copyright isn't about access anyway. Musicians have no problem blasting their songs out over the air to millions of people. Everyone who hears a song on the radio has access to it, but copyright limits what they can do with it afterward.
Second, the fundamental principle here is that I'm considering the consequences of disclosure, and "I find it a little harder to make a buck" isn't nearly as damaging as "now everyone knows I used to be a man" or "now the enemy knows where our troops are headed" (to use another example of justified suppression of information).
If your only concern is that someone might obtain this information without paying you for it, then you really aren't concerned about stopping its spread at all - it isn't private, because your own actions prove you know you won't be harmed by its disclosure. You're just hoping to get paid in the process. If you really didn't want everyone to have it, you wouldn't be selling it to everyone who shows up with cash.
What we currently consider IP is private information that has been voluntarily publicized in exchange for some measure of control over that information.
No, you're thinking of patents. Copyright is nothing like that in practice. Surely you don't think that in a world without copyright, musicians would record entire albums and then just keep their recordings to themselves.
If there are no ownership rights or access controls, you claim of authorship doesn't carry any weight. Authorship without ownership is worthless--you can't be forced to give credit to any original source if that author has no legal status.
The claim to authorship is being made to a public audience, either explicitly ("click here to see Mr2001's Web Site, designed by Leechy McPlagiarist") or implicitly (by omitting the credit altogether and letting the reader infer that the content was written by the person whose domain it's hosted on). I don't see what's so hard about stipulating that such a claim has to be true.
New scientific achievements would be relegated to weekend projects, since there would be no way to secure income without protections, and no corporate market to drive and fund research.
Of course there would be; the money would be collected differently, but it'd ultimately come from the same place, the end users.
For example, I like listening to Cake, so I'd be willing to give them $15 to fund their next album--after all, I'd happily spend $15 on the CD. What I value is their talent, not the plastic discs (which I don't need anyway), so I'm willing to pay them for it.
There absolutely must be a tradeoff--individuals cannot afford the kind of research that needs to be done, and companies won't throw away the money to handle R&D for the entire industry.
Then the R&D will be funded by industry coalitions, or the other parties who benefit from it - consumers, retailers, support providers, etc. As long as it provides a benefit, there will be demand.
It doesn't matter. I agree the scenario is tenuous, but the question is simple: if someone copied your work, and a third party offered that person a wad of cash because of it (endorsement deal, book tour, lecture circuit, even simply a gift because the content was riveting and enjoyable to some senile millionaire), but you were offered nothing, would you be upset?
Since I've established my position that lying about authorship is still objectionable, I'll assume that the copy is an exact one which properly credits me, but this mysterious, irrational third party still paid someone else for it.
Sure, I'd probabl
I, myself, as a private person, don't have the authority to deny someone's use or access to information - but the government does. Privacy can be enforced based not on my supposed ownership of my medical records, but on the consequences of allowing that information to become public, as in "You aren't allowed to tell anyone about that burro incident because Mr2001 deserves to keep his embarrassing past a secret" or whatever. That has the advantage of protecting not just the forms, but the facts themselves, which are what I'd want to keep private anyway.
It's essentially the same reason that it's OK to ban falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, even though no one owns the word "fire" or the concept of fire. The ban is justified because the consequences of shouting "fire" are likely to include trampling and panic, not because of any property rights.
Finally, before we get too deep into privacy issues, let me just point out the difference between public and private information. It's the difference between a song that gets played on the radio for thousands of listeners every hour and a medical record that only my doctor is allowed to see. If I mailed copies of that record out to a million strangers, I'd be in no position to complain when some of them made and shared their own copies. How do you prove that you are the author of anything if the system is incapable of recognizing ownership? The same way we prove that anyone did anything, more or less. Authorship disputes come up even today, and we could resolve them in the future the same way we do now.
How do I prove that I wrote this comment, for example? Well, if I really cared about it, I could save a timestamped copy to disk, or print it out and have it notarized, or have a friend take a picture of me smoking a cigarette and pointing at the screen while pressing the "Submit" button. That provides proof that I had a copy at this time, and now it's up to someone else to prove that they had a copy first. If they can't, my evidence stands.
None of that depends on me being recognized as the "owner" of this comment, or granting me the right to prevent others from copying or reposting it. It simply proves that I was here typing this comment at this moment, and I didn't copy it from somewhere else. They copied your website and sold it for profit, and the buyer isn't interested in reimbursing you at all. You really mean to tell me you wouldn't be upset about that? You wouldn't feel wronged? Before I answer that, I have a few doubts about the consistency of this scenario. Why would someone buy my web site (or a copy of it) for $100,000 when it's obviously easy enough to make a copy for free? What are they paying for, exactly?
Your digital rip of that vinyl record, however, is not going to be identical to the original. It's going to be an approximation of the original at one particular point in time. Rip it again the next day and you'll get something slightly different. Of course, since sound is analog to begin with, this is inevitable at some point - but better it should happen as soon in the process as possible, I'd say, so that everything from that point on is deterministic.
That would include a recording of a song, an arrangement of pigment molecules or pixels, or a work of cinematography. No, it wouldn't. It might include the copyright itself, but not the copyrighted information, which cannot be controlled or owned. Copies of data don't spring up from nowhere, either. Sure they do, given the existence of an original (i.e. once the data is known, there's no limit to the number of copies that can be made). I mean, it's true that the data has to be stored somewhere, and there's a finite amount of material to make hard drives, etc., but the data itself is an abstract concept that isn't tied to any particular finite resource. Even if they did, you do not have any intrinsic rights to the works of others, whether in digital form or not. Do you have the "intrinsic right" to perform a calculation using the speed of light, even though other people (not you) put in a lot of hard work to come up with the value of that constant?
Do you have the "intrinsic right" to use the word "digital" in your post, even though you didn't invent it yourself?
Those questions, like your statement, rest on the faulty assumption that you need permission to make use of information you come across. But as sentient beings, we have the right to use and share information by default. ISTM the burden of proof is on those who say that they have the "intrinsic right" to censor my speech just because the words I want to say were spoken by someone else first. Tell me, if someone decided to copy your website and assumed credit for all of your work and was offered $100,000 for it, would you say "oh well, there's nothing wrong with it because I still have my website up?" If they're taking credit, they're doing a lot more than just copying, aren't they? The problem with that act is that they're lying to everyone who sees their altered version of my web site. The copying itself is not objectionable.
If there were a magical tree that produced an unlimited number of apples out of nowhere--you pick one and another immediately grows back, forever--then I don't think most people would consider it wrong, or even "stealing", to take one. I sure wouldn't, and in fact I'd say it's immoral to try to prevent people from taking one of those free apples.
Same thing applies to a stranger selling something that I can get for free on my own. Why should I feel obligated to pay him for something I can get for free? Just because he wishes he had my money and he'll be sad if he doesn't get it? Sorry, but at some point you have to take responsibility for your own feelings. Maybe it just isn't a good idea to base your hopes and dreams on the prospect of selling people stuff they can get for free elsewhere.
Sure, an artist might feel wronged if I download bits for free instead of buying them from him on a plastic disc. But again, I'm not morally obligated to get them from him. No one, morally speaking, can own any number, whether it represents the speed or light or a digitized song.
If I download a song, no one is deceived. The person sending it to me knows exactly what's going on, and there's no other party to the transaction. There is no deceit.
Furthermore, the essential element of theft is taking something away from its rightful owner, and the file I download is not taken away from anyone: downloading creates a new copy. There is no theft either.
The essential element of stealing is taking something away from its rightful owner. If you steal my car, I'm upset because I don't have a car anymore - whether you have one is irrelevant to me. If you could take a copy while leaving the original undisturbed, as you can with information, that wouldn't be stealing, and in fact it wouldn't even be objectionable.
You'd need to mod more than just the shape. The Wii doesn't have the same expansion ports as the GameCube, so there's nowhere to plug in the GB Player.
Doubt it. As far as I know, Nintendo is committed to 100% compatibility with GC discs, which would include this one (as well as the Action Replay, which is for cheat codes but can also be used to boot homebrew). I don't know if a firmware update could even blacklist GC discs, from what I've heard about how the backward compatibility is implemented. You can also use a mod chip to boot homebrew, but I don't have the details.