And you know what? I bet you the separate IE company wouldn't be solvent -- couldn't justify its' own expenses.
Of course it wouldn't. And if you forced them to split off a Notepad company I bet that wouldn't be solvent either. All of which seems to fly in the face of the argument that an HTML rendering engine is a separate consumer application rather than an operating system feature.
So, by your own assertion, both patronage and micropayment models are not only possible under the current system, they are widespread. They exist perfectly well alongside the mass market model. The original poster would have us do away with the mass market model without replacing it with anything new. How in the world would that be an improvement? All you are doing is taking away options from the artist. Nobody forces people to sign recording contracts, they do it because they choose to rather than play for tips. I don't see any convincing reason to take that choice away from them.
By the way, I think it is a little naive to say that art has nothing to do with business and law. Art has nearly always been created in the service of the powerful, whether that power was based on money, governmental authority, or religon. The concept of the artist as someone outside the bounds of society doing art for its own sake is a very recent development. Ironically, it is a development made possible by the exponential increases in prosperity and leisure time that are themselves direct results of the very economic system that you seem to despise.
>So music from the Classical and Romantic periods is lacking in plurality, richness and diversity. Riiiiiiiight.
Aside from the sarcasm and italics, where is your rebuttal? Do you really think that the average citizen of Vienna in 1800 had access to the quantity and range of music that even an average Wal-Mart customer has today?
>What the original poster proposes is no more than a pay-by-worth system: one pays to support music one like.
Hmmm, 'paying for music that one likes', that seems to be exactly what Metallica is asking for. We already have a pay-by-worth system, it's called the mass market. The difference between a consumer market and a patronage/commisioning system is that in a mass market, anyone who can scrape together $15 for a CD gets a vote, not just those who can afford to underwrite a band of their own.
Of course communications technlogy might enable some hybrid of mass market and patronage by allowing individuals to cooperate to underwrite works of art and other IP. For an interesting take on this, see Ray Gardener's payvoting scheme
No, you confuse using the copy for fraud with making it. If I was honest with the beer proprietor about the source of the bill, he would never agree to the trade.
First of all, counterfeiting is a crime whether you try to pass the bills or not. Second, why is it that in your mind the beer propietor would not accept a counterfeit bill (one that he could use himself elsewhere), yet hundreds of people would be willing to pay $3 for a counterfeit copy of MS Office?
Anyway, we could argue examples all night, but my post was in response to the statement: "Private ownership OF PROPERTY is *NOT COMPATIBLE* with "ownership" of information." My point is that, far from being incompatible concepts, ownership of information as property has been with us a long time. I would certainly consider the money in my checking account to be my property, yet it exists only as information in bank computers.
Let me clue you in on something. Private ownership OF PROPERTY is *NOT COMPATIBLE* with "ownership" of information. If I own this MS Windows CD, and I own this PC, and I own this CDR drive, and I own these 400 CDRs -- if all of this is my own personal private property -- then I can do with it whatever I want, including copy MS Windows to the 400 CDs and sell them for $3 each over the internet. The two concepts are simply irreconcilable
You are wrong. The fallacy in your argument is 'then I can do with it whatever I want' That is simply not true. Take this example: I have in my pocket a $10 bill. It is very clearly my personal property. However, that doesn't mean that I can make a copy of that bill and use it to buy beer. Or, more accurately, I can make copies of it and might get away with it for a while, but I am clearly in violation of the law and should expect to pay a penalty when/if I am caught.
Re:The "Open Source Movement" is a myth.
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Why Do Open Source?
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One thing economists will never understand is why hackers write Free Software. Their reductionist model of what human beings are (purely self-interested producers & consumers in a market) simply doesn't allow for action motivated by ideals. It's no wonder they're scratching their heads.
Not at all. Economists are intimately aware of the coarseness and limitations of their models. That's why politicians and others who want black and white answers get frustrated when economists use terms like 'ceteris paribus' and 'perfect market'
That said, economists are also aware that their models and theories have helped explain and build a society that has achieved a level of prosperity unparalleled in human history. Understandably, they are not ready to throw those theories out based on the sole evidence of a couple of software projects that are themselves made possible by that very prosperity.
Why does something have to be tradeable in order to contribute to wealth? I object to your limited view of what counts as wealth.
It has to be tradeable because that is how wealth is defined. You must be able to see that everything you own has two distinct 'values'. One is the value that is has to you in terms of pleasure it brings you or needs it satisfies. That is what I referred to as 'utility'. The second value is what you could get if you decided to trade it. For example, a $100 bill has no value in the sense of utility. It's just a scrap of paper. However it does have a significant value in the sense of wealth because I can trade it for food, clothes, a 3-day supply of Mountain Dew, whatever will bring me more value in the personal, utility sense. On the other hand, my favorite t-shirt has a significant value to me in the sense of utility as it makes me feel comfortable and happy. (ok, I'm a little pathetic) But it doesn't contribute much to my wealth because nobody is likely to give me much in exchange for it. This is not a personal philosophy, it's a very fundamental description of the nature of property and trade. Maybe my choice of the words was confusing. I used 'utility' and 'wealth' because they are farily standard terms, but if you want you can replace 'wealth' with 'purchasing power'. Again, understand that I'm not claiming that purchasing power equals happiness or anything like that, I'm just defining it as an attribute of property, distinct from utility.
But why should I care? If I have enough to keep me fed, clothed and housed, why should I feel wounded by having shared something? You will say, and quite rightly, "But you missed the opportunity to earn some money by making your idea artificially scarce!" to which I would reply that I don't regret the loss
Actually I wouldn't say that as long as you were free to make the choice and take whatever course of action brought you the most satisfaction. The key is that as the creator, you were free to make that choice. On the other hand, what if you desperately needed money to pay medical expenses for a family member and after your discovery someone came to you and gave you a pat on the back and took the result of five years of your life's work and gave it away. Altruism is a pretty shaky foundation to build an economy on. Should society forgo the contributions of your next door neighbor who is just as good a physicist as you but who is not nearly as altruistic and doesn't want to work on a fusion reactor unless there's something in it for him?
If there were no movies people would tell fantastic stories or write folk songs or play in garage bands. I'd much rather have that than your idea of mass-produced corporate sausage casings.
Fine, but the point is that my idea doesn't prevent people from playing in garage bands whereas your view does away with my sausage casings. It's a matter of freedom and choice.
You are limiting the value of anything to the price it will fetch at auction.
Exactly the opposite. The whole reason for my lengthy definition 'utility' as distinct from 'wealth' was precisely to separate the concept of 'value' from 'auction price' and illustrate the interaction between the two and how the abolition of IP laws would affect both.
If you view wealth as a sum of prices, and you seek wealth as an end for your society, then it makes sense to organize information as you say. But I don't agree with your definition of wealth, and if I did I wouldn't want to make that my ultimate goal.
Did you even read my post, or are you willfully misunderstanding it? I'm starting to think that this is a pure troll. I specifically said that that wealth is not an end in itself, just a means to an end.
Your definition of wealth is actually a constant. By your definition *total* wealth cannot rise or fall, so when you claim free IP would be "decreasing overall wealth" you're obviously confused.
Not at all. My definition of wealth is simply purchasing power. As you stated in your original post, it's not a zero sum game. If I create something that didn't exist before like a book or a movie, I have increased my purchasing power by whatever amount people are willing to pay for that product. Similarly, if I find a way to increase my productivity and produce more of a given good per unit of input, then I have increased my wealth. Neither case decreases anyone elses wealth, so total wealth has increased. Empirical proof is all around you. The explosion of wealth in the two centuries since the industrial revolution is the reason that people like us can afford to spend idle time debating on/.
By your terminology raising total "utility" (which is pretty much equivalent to what I call wealth) is the goal which improves mankinds economic condition.
I agree 100% with that statement. My point is that the way to achieve that goal is through trade and the ability to trade is measured by wealth. In a simplistic example, people who are good at writing books trade them with people who are good at fixing cars, that way everyone can have both books and working cars. If you make the author give away his books, then he has nothing to trade and you have decreased his wealth without increasing anyone elses and so have decreased the total wealth in the system. You have increased the mechanic's perceived utility since he now has the book, but the total utility in the system is less than under the trading scenario because the author's car is still burning oil.
Strange claim. Imagine if everyone had free access to all books, records, drugs, movies, software, artwork... Everybody would be far richer (or more "util-full" if you must).
With the exception of drugs, the bulk of the world's output of those things is consumed by the minority of the world's population that is wealthy enough to have the free time to enjoy them. The rest of the world is too busy trying to get adequate food, shelter and medical care. Even in a rich, developed country like the US, I don't think that what you propose would have as great an effect as you think. For the average American, the factor that limits their consumption of these goods is not money, but time. I really don't think that $3 rental fees are keeping people from seeing movies that they want to see. As far as drugs go, like I said, I am a proponent of patent reform, just not abolition.
When we reach a world where you go to the mechanic and he downloads and "prints" your new part instead of ordering it (possible already - www.3dsystems.com) then *most* wealth will be in the form of IP. In the future, if all IP was free then everyone would be so much richer that working to stay alive will not be necessary.
Ok, I agree that if and when technology advances to a point where everyone's material desires can be met by a virtually unlimited and free supply of nano-assembled products our society and economy will undergo a radical structural change. It is very possible that such a shift will alter the terms of the tradeoff I mentioned between IP as wealth vs. IP as utility so that it is more beneficial to have completely free IP. However I also believe that protected IP is the best way to get to that point. The investors who have provided the resources for 3dsystems have done so because of the prospect of the financial rewards that will come from developing a unique product. Call 3dsystems and ask them how many of their employees are volunteers working for status.
Even today (in Western society) everybody works long hours not in order to survive but for status.
First of all, I would dispute the assertion that everybody works long hours. The fact is that the average worker at the end of the 20th century works much less, and earns much more, than the average worker at the beginning of the century. Hours worked have decreased while the proportion of income spent on leisure has increased. There's lots of empirical evidence for this.
Second, I think that the idea of the gift economy has serious flaws. I've never heard a convincing explanation, much less seen any evidence, that a status based gift economy is viable without being subsidized by a traditional market economy. Every oss programmer I know is either a student or has a 'regular job', often one producing copyrighted software. Even if you get past that and are able to attract all the talent you need with status-based compensation, it still seems massively inefficient. A gift based economy will still have to interact with the market. The creative people on the front lines may be willing to work for status, but you still have to pay the secretaries, the film crew, the maintenance workers, etc. So instead of a single economy based on a universal and quantifiable medium of exchange (money), you have two intertwined economies, one of which is based on barter of an ephemeral quality called 'status'. And yes, I'm well aware of the various successes of the open source world, and I agree that the model can work spectacularly well for some projects. I just don't think that the success of a few subsidized software projects is enough to herald a full blown economic paradigm shift. Time will tell though . . .
You are confusing two concepts: utility and wealth. Utility is a measure of the extent to which a particular good satisfies the needs or desires of an individual. The utility of a good varies from person to person. Wealth is an aggregate measure of exchange power between individuals.
Different goods have different utilities to people depending on circumstances, personal preferences, etc. The whole idea behind trade is that the best way to maximize the overall utility in an economy is to allow people to redistribute goods between themselves so as to approach their personally optimal mix of goods. Wealth is the total value of a person's goods expressed in terms of what they could trade them for. In short, maximal utility is the ultimate goal, wealth is the power to get there.
There are 2 points of particular interest in the wealth/utility spectrum. One is where a good has worth, but no utility. The definitive example of this is money. Money has no utility whatsoever on its own, but it obviously does have worth since it can be exchanged for goods which do have utility and thus it contributes to wealth. This is not an accident since the whole reason for money is to act as a 'universal solvent' for trade.
At the other extreme are goods which have utility, but zero worth. The phrase 'Selling ice to Eskimos' comes to mind. People living in the Arctic may find snow and ice useful for water, shelter, etc., but they certainly would not trade for it. Your vision of infinitely duplicated, freely distributed IP also falls into this category. Any particular IP good has some utility to some people, but if it is ubiquitous it is not tradeable and so does not contribute anything to overall wealth.
For example, imagine that you somehow gave every person on Earth a digital copy of 'The Matrix'. Those people that had an appropriate playback device and that wanted to watch it would certainly feel that the overall utility of their belongings had increased. The other 99% of the world would look at you with a mixture of confusion and pity. Not only is their utility not increased, but neither is their wealth since you've made 'The Matrix' worthless for trading purposes.
But, you say, they are certainly no worse off than they were before, so the overall satisfaction (ie perceived utility) has increased. Yes, but overall wealth has decreased because anyone who previously owned the movie and could have traded it for other, higher utility, goods is now denied that opportunity. It's the same as if the government started to print and infinite amount of currency. With currency it's actually worse because, as I said before, money has zero intrinsic utility. (Or negligible: photos of Weimar-era Germans wallpapering rooms with deutschmarks come to mind) At least with IP you are increasing overall utility, but at the expense of decreasing overall wealth.
So, the real question is, is the tradeoff worth it? I would say no for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think that the overall increase in utility would be quite a bit less than you seem to believe. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP you would have a relatively few very happy people, that's it. The vast majority of the world would not see much of a difference. While it is true that the value of IP-based goods is large and growing, what you neglect to mention is that the vast majority of them are consumed by a tiny fraction of the world's population.
The second reason is that I believe that the cost in terms of destroyed wealth would be too great. Not only would the present wealth represented by IP be lost, but future creation would be severely dampened. Yes, I know that some people will write, sing, code, etc. because that's what they love to do, but we need to eat and pay rent too. How many books will your favorite author write if they have to work a 40 hour a week service job? And do we really want to forgo the contributions of that subset of creators who are very adept at what they do but who wouldn't necessarily do it in their free time? Also, that whole premise of spontaneous creation ignores the fact that a lot of IP products are the result of large teams of people, most of whom are not artists. I may want to write screenplays in my spare time, but good luck finding a gaffer who will work for love of the art. It's hard enough to get non-union labor, much less free labor. I'm sure that people can come up with individual counter-examples, but those cases will by definition exist whether IP is free or not. The most universal way to motivate people is by the prospect of material gain, and to believe that you can remove that motivation and still generate the amount and quality of goods flies in the face of not only economic theory, but centuries of experience.
Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.
First of all, all property is 'artificial' in the sense that it is a societal construct, IP is no different. You are correct in saying that it is made scarce, and hence valuable, by IP laws, and I believe that that is a net benefit to society. Look at it this way: In the end everyone needs material goods such as food, shelter, and really fast sports cars. Since such goods are currently scarce, prospects of starship replicators notwithstanding, the only way to acquire these goods is through trade. In a world without IP, the only tradeable goods are material goods and services. The addition of IP simply adds a whole new class of tradeable goods and thus a whole new class of professions for those so inclined. The elimination of these goods and professions is what would truly be impoverishing.
Just to clarify my position and maybe head off at least some of the flames, I believe that the current implementation of IP in the US is gravely flawed and that copyright and patent reform are some of the most important issues facing our society. I just believe that the answer is to modify the implementation, not scrap the concept altogether.
It's interesting that the majority of posts here (like this one) seem to assume that the primary targets of WAVE reporting are going to be the 'geek/outcasts'. Geeks know how to use phones too. The stated purpose of WAVE is for students to report others who they think may become violent, so what is to stop the beaten, harassed geeks you mention from reporting their tormentors?
While I find the whole concept of WAVE repgunant, I also think that it could easily be used by the traditionally isolated segments of the student population to speak out against the abuse, violent and non-violent, that they suffer. It may not be what the designers of the program had in mind, but when 75% of the students reported are from the 'popular' crowd, they will have to rethink their assumptions.
now it is enforced. If you try to copy over a system dll, the operation completes, but then W2K immediately overwrites your 'rogue' copy with the preexisting file.
From my reading of the article, the search order is not quite how you describe. System dlls are always loaded unless you:
At design time, specify version information in your component or
At install time, or thereafter, place a '.local' file in the app directory
Win2K doesn't require new software to install all of its own DLLs.
In Win2K an application has a choice of using the system dlls, which are protected and can't be written over except by a service pack, or it's own private version of a DLL. So if your app requires a specific version of msvcrt.dll, you can install it in the application directory and it will use that copy instead of the system copy.
WTF? How do you arrive at that definition of the word 'regulated'?
"militia" all the able-bodied men suitable for defensive action
OK, if you slice up the phrase like that, then you can argue that 'militia' historically had the meaning you describe. However, the you're taking the word out of context. The phrase is 'well-regulated militia' which certainly seems to restrict that to the subset of able bodied men operating as part of a well-regulated organization. If you insist on defining 'regulated' as 'armed' then I guess you have a point. I'd just like to see some justification for that definition.
The irrefutable basis for the idea being, of course, that the proclaimed "owner" need not lose his ability to use the information in question in order for the so-called "pirate" to use it.
Anything creative or thought-provoking has been squeezed out in favor of safe, easy to digest, bland, boring, profitable pablum.
For someone who has been around for oh so long, you certainly have an odd conception of what the internet is. It is not a finite space. No one is being "squeezed out" of anything. So the merchants have come to the party. So what? Last I checked nobody as being forced to take down their web pages to make 'room' for Yahoo. If you don't like corporate sites, feel free to stay away from them.
Actually, I think that they are changing their service pack policy for Win2K and separating fixes from new features. Service packs will only include bug fixes. Additional features are contained in a different series of packages. I could be wrong though.
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Of course it wouldn't. And if you forced them to split off a Notepad company I bet that wouldn't be solvent either. All of which seems to fly in the face of the argument that an HTML rendering engine is a separate consumer application rather than an operating system feature.
According to the Oxford dictionary of economics it is "laissez-faire"
By the way, I think it is a little naive to say that art has nothing to do with business and law. Art has nearly always been created in the service of the powerful, whether that power was based on money, governmental authority, or religon. The concept of the artist as someone outside the bounds of society doing art for its own sake is a very recent development. Ironically, it is a development made possible by the exponential increases in prosperity and leisure time that are themselves direct results of the very economic system that you seem to despise.
Aside from the sarcasm and italics, where is your rebuttal? Do you really think that the average citizen of Vienna in 1800 had access to the quantity and range of music that even an average Wal-Mart customer has today?
>What the original poster proposes is no more than a pay-by-worth system: one pays to support music one like.
Hmmm, 'paying for music that one likes', that seems to be exactly what Metallica is asking for. We already have a pay-by-worth system, it's called the mass market. The difference between a consumer market and a patronage/commisioning system is that in a mass market, anyone who can scrape together $15 for a CD gets a vote, not just those who can afford to underwrite a band of their own.
Of course communications technlogy might enable some hybrid of mass market and patronage by allowing individuals to cooperate to underwrite works of art and other IP. For an interesting take on this, see Ray Gardener's payvoting scheme
First of all, counterfeiting is a crime whether you try to pass the bills or not. Second, why is it that in your mind the beer propietor would not accept a counterfeit bill (one that he could use himself elsewhere), yet hundreds of people would be willing to pay $3 for a counterfeit copy of MS Office?
Anyway, we could argue examples all night, but my post was in response to the statement: "Private ownership OF PROPERTY is *NOT COMPATIBLE* with "ownership" of information." My point is that, far from being incompatible concepts, ownership of information as property has been with us a long time. I would certainly consider the money in my checking account to be my property, yet it exists only as information in bank computers.
You are wrong. The fallacy in your argument is 'then I can do with it whatever I want' That is simply not true. Take this example: I have in my pocket a $10 bill. It is very clearly my personal property. However, that doesn't mean that I can make a copy of that bill and use it to buy beer. Or, more accurately, I can make copies of it and might get away with it for a while, but I am clearly in violation of the law and should expect to pay a penalty when/if I am caught.
Not at all. Economists are intimately aware of the coarseness and limitations of their models. That's why politicians and others who want black and white answers get frustrated when economists use terms like 'ceteris paribus' and 'perfect market'
That said, economists are also aware that their models and theories have helped explain and build a society that has achieved a level of prosperity unparalleled in human history. Understandably, they are not ready to throw those theories out based on the sole evidence of a couple of software projects that are themselves made possible by that very prosperity.
Why does something have to be tradeable in order to contribute to wealth? I object to your limited view of what counts as wealth.
It has to be tradeable because that is how wealth is defined. You must be able to see that everything you own has two distinct 'values'. One is the value that is has to you in terms of pleasure it brings you or needs it satisfies. That is what I referred to as 'utility'. The second value is what you could get if you decided to trade it. For example, a $100 bill has no value in the sense of utility. It's just a scrap of paper. However it does have a significant value in the sense of wealth because I can trade it for food, clothes, a 3-day supply of Mountain Dew, whatever will bring me more value in the personal, utility sense. On the other hand, my favorite t-shirt has a significant value to me in the sense of utility as it makes me feel comfortable and happy. (ok, I'm a little pathetic) But it doesn't contribute much to my wealth because nobody is likely to give me much in exchange for it. This is not a personal philosophy, it's a very fundamental description of the nature of property and trade. Maybe my choice of the words was confusing. I used 'utility' and 'wealth' because they are farily standard terms, but if you want you can replace 'wealth' with 'purchasing power'. Again, understand that I'm not claiming that purchasing power equals happiness or anything like that, I'm just defining it as an attribute of property, distinct from utility.
But why should I care? If I have enough to keep me fed, clothed and housed, why should I feel wounded by having shared something? You will say, and quite rightly, "But you missed the opportunity to earn some money by making your idea artificially scarce!" to which I would reply that I don't regret the loss
Actually I wouldn't say that as long as you were free to make the choice and take whatever course of action brought you the most satisfaction. The key is that as the creator, you were free to make that choice. On the other hand, what if you desperately needed money to pay medical expenses for a family member and after your discovery someone came to you and gave you a pat on the back and took the result of five years of your life's work and gave it away. Altruism is a pretty shaky foundation to build an economy on. Should society forgo the contributions of your next door neighbor who is just as good a physicist as you but who is not nearly as altruistic and doesn't want to work on a fusion reactor unless there's something in it for him?
If there were no movies people would tell fantastic stories or write folk songs or play in garage bands. I'd much rather have that than your idea of mass-produced corporate sausage casings.
Fine, but the point is that my idea doesn't prevent people from playing in garage bands whereas your view does away with my sausage casings. It's a matter of freedom and choice.
You are limiting the value of anything to the price it will fetch at auction.
Exactly the opposite. The whole reason for my lengthy definition 'utility' as distinct from 'wealth' was precisely to separate the concept of 'value' from 'auction price' and illustrate the interaction between the two and how the abolition of IP laws would affect both.
If you view wealth as a sum of prices, and you seek wealth as an end for your society, then it makes sense to organize information as you say. But I don't agree with your definition of wealth, and if I did I wouldn't want to make that my ultimate goal.
Did you even read my post, or are you willfully misunderstanding it? I'm starting to think that this is a pure troll. I specifically said that that wealth is not an end in itself, just a means to an end.
Your definition of wealth is actually a constant. By your definition *total* wealth cannot rise or fall, so when you claim free IP would be "decreasing overall wealth" you're obviously confused.
Not at all. My definition of wealth is simply purchasing power. As you stated in your original post, it's not a zero sum game. If I create something that didn't exist before like a book or a movie, I have increased my purchasing power by whatever amount people are willing to pay for that product. Similarly, if I find a way to increase my productivity and produce more of a given good per unit of input, then I have increased my wealth. Neither case decreases anyone elses wealth, so total wealth has increased. Empirical proof is all around you. The explosion of wealth in the two centuries since the industrial revolution is the reason that people like us can afford to spend idle time debating on /.
By your terminology raising total "utility" (which is pretty much equivalent to what I call wealth) is the goal which improves mankinds economic condition.
I agree 100% with that statement. My point is that the way to achieve that goal is through trade and the ability to trade is measured by wealth. In a simplistic example, people who are good at writing books trade them with people who are good at fixing cars, that way everyone can have both books and working cars. If you make the author give away his books, then he has nothing to trade and you have decreased his wealth without increasing anyone elses and so have decreased the total wealth in the system. You have increased the mechanic's perceived utility since he now has the book, but the total utility in the system is less than under the trading scenario because the author's car is still burning oil.
Strange claim. Imagine if everyone had free access to all books, records, drugs, movies, software, artwork... Everybody would be far richer (or more "util-full" if you must).
With the exception of drugs, the bulk of the world's output of those things is consumed by the minority of the world's population that is wealthy enough to have the free time to enjoy them. The rest of the world is too busy trying to get adequate food, shelter and medical care. Even in a rich, developed country like the US, I don't think that what you propose would have as great an effect as you think. For the average American, the factor that limits their consumption of these goods is not money, but time. I really don't think that $3 rental fees are keeping people from seeing movies that they want to see. As far as drugs go, like I said, I am a proponent of patent reform, just not abolition.
When we reach a world where you go to the mechanic and he downloads and "prints" your new part instead of ordering it (possible already - www.3dsystems.com) then *most* wealth will be in the form of IP. In the future, if all IP was free then everyone would be so much richer that working to stay alive will not be necessary.
Ok, I agree that if and when technology advances to a point where everyone's material desires can be met by a virtually unlimited and free supply of nano-assembled products our society and economy will undergo a radical structural change. It is very possible that such a shift will alter the terms of the tradeoff I mentioned between IP as wealth vs. IP as utility so that it is more beneficial to have completely free IP. However I also believe that protected IP is the best way to get to that point. The investors who have provided the resources for 3dsystems have done so because of the prospect of the financial rewards that will come from developing a unique product. Call 3dsystems and ask them how many of their employees are volunteers working for status.
Even today (in Western society) everybody works long hours not in order to survive but for status.
First of all, I would dispute the assertion that everybody works long hours. The fact is that the average worker at the end of the 20th century works much less, and earns much more, than the average worker at the beginning of the century. Hours worked have decreased while the proportion of income spent on leisure has increased. There's lots of empirical evidence for this.
Second, I think that the idea of the gift economy has serious flaws. I've never heard a convincing explanation, much less seen any evidence, that a status based gift economy is viable without being subsidized by a traditional market economy. Every oss programmer I know is either a student or has a 'regular job', often one producing copyrighted software. Even if you get past that and are able to attract all the talent you need with status-based compensation, it still seems massively inefficient. A gift based economy will still have to interact with the market. The creative people on the front lines may be willing to work for status, but you still have to pay the secretaries, the film crew, the maintenance workers, etc. So instead of a single economy based on a universal and quantifiable medium of exchange (money), you have two intertwined economies, one of which is based on barter of an ephemeral quality called 'status'. And yes, I'm well aware of the various successes of the open source world, and I agree that the model can work spectacularly well for some projects. I just don't think that the success of a few subsidized software projects is enough to herald a full blown economic paradigm shift. Time will tell though . . .Different goods have different utilities to people depending on circumstances, personal preferences, etc. The whole idea behind trade is that the best way to maximize the overall utility in an economy is to allow people to redistribute goods between themselves so as to approach their personally optimal mix of goods. Wealth is the total value of a person's goods expressed in terms of what they could trade them for. In short, maximal utility is the ultimate goal, wealth is the power to get there.
There are 2 points of particular interest in the wealth/utility spectrum. One is where a good has worth, but no utility. The definitive example of this is money. Money has no utility whatsoever on its own, but it obviously does have worth since it can be exchanged for goods which do have utility and thus it contributes to wealth. This is not an accident since the whole reason for money is to act as a 'universal solvent' for trade.
At the other extreme are goods which have utility, but zero worth. The phrase 'Selling ice to Eskimos' comes to mind. People living in the Arctic may find snow and ice useful for water, shelter, etc., but they certainly would not trade for it. Your vision of infinitely duplicated, freely distributed IP also falls into this category. Any particular IP good has some utility to some people, but if it is ubiquitous it is not tradeable and so does not contribute anything to overall wealth.
For example, imagine that you somehow gave every person on Earth a digital copy of 'The Matrix'. Those people that had an appropriate playback device and that wanted to watch it would certainly feel that the overall utility of their belongings had increased. The other 99% of the world would look at you with a mixture of confusion and pity. Not only is their utility not increased, but neither is their wealth since you've made 'The Matrix' worthless for trading purposes.
But, you say, they are certainly no worse off than they were before, so the overall satisfaction (ie perceived utility) has increased. Yes, but overall wealth has decreased because anyone who previously owned the movie and could have traded it for other, higher utility, goods is now denied that opportunity. It's the same as if the government started to print and infinite amount of currency. With currency it's actually worse because, as I said before, money has zero intrinsic utility. (Or negligible: photos of Weimar-era Germans wallpapering rooms with deutschmarks come to mind) At least with IP you are increasing overall utility, but at the expense of decreasing overall wealth.
So, the real question is, is the tradeoff worth it? I would say no for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think that the overall increase in utility would be quite a bit less than you seem to believe. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP you would have a relatively few very happy people, that's it. The vast majority of the world would not see much of a difference. While it is true that the value of IP-based goods is large and growing, what you neglect to mention is that the vast majority of them are consumed by a tiny fraction of the world's population.
The second reason is that I believe that the cost in terms of destroyed wealth would be too great. Not only would the present wealth represented by IP be lost, but future creation would be severely dampened. Yes, I know that some people will write, sing, code, etc. because that's what they love to do, but we need to eat and pay rent too. How many books will your favorite author write if they have to work a 40 hour a week service job? And do we really want to forgo the contributions of that subset of creators who are very adept at what they do but who wouldn't necessarily do it in their free time? Also, that whole premise of spontaneous creation ignores the fact that a lot of IP products are the result of large teams of people, most of whom are not artists. I may want to write screenplays in my spare time, but good luck finding a gaffer who will work for love of the art. It's hard enough to get non-union labor, much less free labor. I'm sure that people can come up with individual counter-examples, but those cases will by definition exist whether IP is free or not. The most universal way to motivate people is by the prospect of material gain, and to believe that you can remove that motivation and still generate the amount and quality of goods flies in the face of not only economic theory, but centuries of experience.
Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.
First of all, all property is 'artificial' in the sense that it is a societal construct, IP is no different. You are correct in saying that it is made scarce, and hence valuable, by IP laws, and I believe that that is a net benefit to society. Look at it this way: In the end everyone needs material goods such as food, shelter, and really fast sports cars. Since such goods are currently scarce, prospects of starship replicators notwithstanding, the only way to acquire these goods is through trade. In a world without IP, the only tradeable goods are material goods and services. The addition of IP simply adds a whole new class of tradeable goods and thus a whole new class of professions for those so inclined. The elimination of these goods and professions is what would truly be impoverishing.
Just to clarify my position and maybe head off at least some of the flames, I believe that the current implementation of IP in the US is gravely flawed and that copyright and patent reform are some of the most important issues facing our society. I just believe that the answer is to modify the implementation, not scrap the concept altogether.
While I find the whole concept of WAVE repgunant, I also think that it could easily be used by the traditionally isolated segments of the student population to speak out against the abuse, violent and non-violent, that they suffer. It may not be what the designers of the program had in mind, but when 75% of the students reported are from the 'popular' crowd, they will have to rethink their assumptions.
From my reading of the article, the search order is not quite how you describe. System dlls are always loaded unless you:
In Win2K an application has a choice of using the system dlls, which are protected and can't be written over except by a service pack, or it's own private version of a DLL. So if your app requires a specific version of msvcrt.dll, you can install it in the application directory and it will use that copy instead of the system copy.
For a complete explanation of this: Check out this article
>meaning well-armed
WTF? How do you arrive at that definition of the word 'regulated'?
"militia" all the able-bodied men suitable for defensive action
OK, if you slice up the phrase like that, then you can argue that 'militia' historically had the meaning you describe. However, the you're taking the word out of context. The phrase is 'well-regulated militia' which certainly seems to restrict that to the subset of able bodied men operating as part of a well-regulated organization. If you insist on defining 'regulated' as 'armed' then I guess you have a point. I'd just like to see some justification for that definition.
Irrfeutable, but also irrelevant.
For someone who has been around for oh so long, you certainly have an odd conception of what the internet is. It is not a finite space. No one is being "squeezed out" of anything. So the merchants have come to the party. So what? Last I checked nobody as being forced to take down their web pages to make 'room' for Yahoo. If you don't like corporate sites, feel free to stay away from them.
Actually, I think that they are changing their service pack policy for Win2K and separating fixes from new features. Service packs will only include bug fixes. Additional features are contained in a different series of packages. I could be wrong though.