Should Intellectual Property Exist?

Aside from identifying marks (trademark, et cetera), I'd say the answer is "no". Copyright and patent laws are effectively used as a means to maintain market dominance and to leverage continued revenue without having to continue to work for it. Such laws represent a failure in the task of encouraging innovation, end up being used as a means of creating new revenue schemes based on litigation rather than distribution and service, and claim ownership of the contents of other people's minds.

My opinion of the matter doesn't change based on audience. I might phrase things differently under some circumstances (such as avoiding getting into pointless arguments with family members), and I don't go around breaking copyright and patent laws just because I believe they shouldn't exist, but I won't pretend I support "intellectual property". While I don't see anything ethically wrong with trading MP3s over P2P networks, I don't do so myself.

I support trademark enforcement, however. The reason for it is that, aside from "fair use" (such as in satire or in references to the company to which an identifying mark refers), unauthorized use of established identifying marks is essentially a means of fraud. By acting to confuse others as to one's business identity, one basically lies about who is identified by something understood to identify another, or misrepresents oneself as being that other.

by too old for it Feb 28, 2005

... and will keep their "electronic rights" unold, if they are intelligent.

By the way, I'm an author/writer.

Why we need patent protection.

Reality:
Edwin land had an idea for self-developing film. He patented the idea and founded Poloroid. Without patent protection, Kodak could have produced instant cameras and put Poloroid out of business. Kodak would profit from Land's idea not Land.

Possiblity:
Bristol Meyers spends $800 million developing and testing an aids vaccine. Galaxo pruduces the vaccine without the need to revcover any research expenses. They will be able to sell the vaccine for less, putting Bristol out of bussiness.

by liame Mar 1, 2005

Alternatively Bristol Meyers produces an aids vaccine and reaps monopolistic for the duration of the patent.

Meanwhile in Africa another 100 million die of aids.

Not quite so clear cut now, is it?

Why we need patent protection.

Sorry, TR site acting up again.

by mgordon Mar 1, 2005

What's on the table is about software patents. Nobody (that I know) is arguing that Edward Land cannot patent the self-developing film. Industrial processes require large investment and that won't happen without investors and that won't happen without some form of monopoloy protection.

Software is different. Nobody starts cold-turkey and invents ANYTHING in this realm. Every single thing ever done since Babbage is "derivative" in some form or other, with perhaps a nod to Dr. Schottky and some others who had brilliant insights -- but what is the industrial investment in "insight"? None. Bringing it to market may be a different thing; but INTELLECTUAL property is brought to market for $19 a month on a website. It's an idea. It is a way of doing things.

Can you really argue that Microsoft's patenting of the "tab key to navigate from one web form field to another" is in the same league as patenting an AIDS vaccine? The vaccine very likely requires millions of dollars of investment; deciding to use the tab key to go from field to field was thought up a hundred years ago while Tom sat on the toilet for all we know. Applying a well-known typewriter function to a computer is NOT INVENTION and should not be patentable.

Since the Patent Office obviously cannot tell a good patent from a bad one, I agree that there ought not to be ANY "intellectual property" patents whatsoever. Copyright still exists; you cannot copy en-masse or entire my programs (books, or any other work of art) but you can sure use the same heap-sort algorithm in your programs that I use. We ALL use the same basic algorithms -- where exactly is the INVENTION?

I am arguing against patenting self-developing film.

Granted, software patents are the worst of a bad breed, but that doesn't make the rest of the breed any less bad.

I partially agree, however, there is a world of difference between copyright and patent.
A patent gives the author a monopoly right to an invention for a strictly LIMITED period of time ( 14 years in the US, I think ). It can be built on prior art, but needs to add something new. Royalties may need to be paid for the prior art.
Ideas cannot be patented, there must be a concrete item produced, ie I could not patent a faster than light spaceship, because I thought of it, I must actually be able to describe the method of producing, or demonstrate a faster than light spaceship.
A similar concept would apply to software. You would need to demonstrate an "office" package.
The problem with software patents would be that if I develop an office package and get a valid patent, no one else would be able to produce an office package, without my agreement ( and paying royalties ) for the life of the patent.

However, with copyright, I only have rights to my original work, though for a much longer time ( Don't know US law, but in Australia it used to be for 50 years after the authors death, consider a corporation that "lives" indefinitely). Anyone who takes a copy of my original work is infringing my rights.
If you produce, independently of my work, something that does the same or looks the same as my work, without copying anything of mine, you are not infringing my copyright. As an example, if I take a photo of, say, a cathedral and you use that photo to produce postcards, without my permission, you are infringing my copyright. If, however, you go and take your own photo, from the same point and produce an identical photo for your postcards, it is not infringing my rights.
Ultimately, what constitutes a valid patent or copyright is decided in a court of law!

by patpawlowski2000 Feb 28, 2005

I fail to see how the current use of copyright law benefits society as a whole. Especially where it concerns the extreemly overpaid movie and music industry. Now there are some that will argue that is promotes creative effort in scientific research. While I don't have the data necessary to back it up, I don't beleive Pasteur, Einstine, or Newton were working for any big drug companies or under a bloated defense contract.

Actually Einstein did refuse a bloated government contract. He refused to advance his theory because of the implication of nuclear weapons.

But where he refused, others continued on.

by tony hopkinson Mar 1, 2005

Wonder if he could have sued anybody who cracked one off without his permission, if he'd patented it.

Hi,

Firstly the overpaid movie etc industries only exist because we pay to go and see what they produce. Don't like it, don't go.

Now both Einstein & Newtown discovered natural principles, which are not and never have been patentable or copyrightable. They exist for anybody to see ( if they have the brains ). However, any device that uses those principles is patentable and copyrightable. Any future remuneration they might have received because of their discovery of those principals was due to someone's hope that a device could be made that did something with that principle.

Now Pasteur, on a least one occassion, did get paid to do research. A wine manufacturer commissioned him to find out why wine turned to vinegar.

One of the problems is that there are a lot more Pasteurs, Einsteins, and Newtons than there used to be, thus there is less need for "encouragement".

by tony hopkinson Feb 28, 2005

Everybody uses their current intellect to expand the knowledge base therefore generating more intellect. As soon as it's distributed it's public. That's not to say I can reword someone's idea and claim ownership. That's not intellect it's theft. But if i take idea one and use it to generate idea two and achnowledge those who thought of one I've stolen nothing, and they can't lay claim to two simply because it required one.
Stange phrase "allowed to be proprietry", current state of affairs whould suggest that it should be "allowed to be public". The original idea of intellectual property might have been to stop theft, now it's used to justify it.

Claiming owership of ideas you got from someone else isn't theft: it's fraud. Lying about the origin of an idea is fraud. If you do a sufficiently bad job of covering your tracks, it's also plagiarism, which is yet another tick in the "fraud" column.

by stress junkie Feb 28, 2005

I support copyrights but I do not support patents for intellectual property.

Copyrights give the creator of some specific work a means of legal recourse to protect their investment of time, money, and their own creativity in their product. Copyrights protect authors from having their works stolen. For instance, if someone writes a book and gets it published somewhere in that process the author will obtain a copyright to that book. That protects the author and the publisher from having a rogue book publisher from creating and selling their own copies of the book. If books could not be protected in this way then Steven King and John LeCarre and other authors would have their work stolen from them. They and their authorized publisher would lose money and eventually the whole business of book publishing would become unprofitable. Notice that I avoided using an example from the IT world.

Patents, on the other hand, protect a concept that may not even be implemented. Ideas like relational databases and operating systems should not be patentable. If the person that originally thought of storing data in a format that allowed related pieces of information to be logically tied together could have patented that idea then we might have had only one relational database system created. The fact that there are numerous database systems created by competing vendors has lead to improvements and enhancements to the original idea. Each of these implementations can be protected by copyright. In the same way, if the person who originally thought of making a common BIOS for a computer system that applications would all use were able to patent that idea then we would probably not have operating systems. Instead, computer applications would have to incorporate their own BIOS code and multitasking wouldn't exist. The idea of having a BIOS should not be patentable, but each implementation of a computer BIOS can be copyrighted.

The list goes on ad infinitum, particularly in the IT field. The idea of storing binary information by using magnetic fields is too broad in its scope to be patentable. The idea of storing information by using groups of binary values is too broad to be patentable. However, the specific implementations of these ideas in the form of software should be copyrightable. How could a software developer like, for instance, Veritas, afford to develop and market its backup applications if anyone could buy a copy of their product, make copies of it, and sell it as their own? Veritas needs protection from that sort of thing. The protection comes in the form of copyrights. Notice that I avoided using a different software vendor.

The idea that a producer of copyrighted material is too rich does not justify taking their idea without compensating them. Stealing is wrong. That doesn't change just because the victim is rich. So IP needs to be covered by copyrights to protect the developer of the IP. Patents, on the other hand, simply prevent ideas from being developed though competing implementations. Patents can prevent any implementation of an IP if the patent holder wishes to keep the idea from being developed. An example of this would be the old urban legend that oil companies have patents on inventions that would allow cars to run on water.

So, patents for IP = bad; copyrights for IP = good.

How is copying something "theft"? Everybody keeps saying it, but nobody has any logical support for that statement.

Putting a lot of work into something doesn't automatically make the idea of someone else benefitting into theft. The fact that someone paints a mural on the side of a building and other people enjoy its presence doesn't constitute "theft" of the guy's "property" in any sane definitions of the terms.

by stress junkie Feb 28, 2005

If Steven King writes a book that is then published then both the author and the publisher count on money from the sale of copies of the book to compensate them for creating and making the book available to people. If someone then purchases one copy of the book and makes a thousand copies and gives them all away then the book publsher and the author are denied the compensation that they would have received from the sale of copies of the book. It's not calculus. It's just inconvenient for people that don't want to pay for things.

Hi,

Enjoying looking at a mural or music or the sweet functioning of a software program, is totally different to scanning or copying and then distributing to all and sundry, for their use.

by jdmercha Feb 28, 2005

If ideas were not patentable or copywritable, many a researcher would loose the incentive to conduct research. Technological advances would slow to a halt.

Sure there are a handful of idealists who would continue to conduct research. But the billions spent by companies in the hopes of recovering their investment with a patent, would be gone.

There are a number of ideas and practical proofs of concept that make what you've said ludicrous, and obviously so: free and open source software, for instance, involves hundreds of thousands of people putting their time and energy into generating code that is distributed freely. Wikipedia involves tens of thousands of writers adding to a central store of human knowledge. Einstein, Newton, Galileo, and countless others have contributed to the field of scientific knowledge without expecting any recompense (and, in some cases, actually being persecuted for their work).

Far from advances coming "to a halt", removing the fetters would free researchers to pursue their ideas. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been used to [b]suppress[/b] research, and it's the biggest piece of "intellectual property" protection legislation in recent memory.

Most tangible technological advances come from two sources: military research and schools. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with some of what's going on in scientific circles before you start making up lies about what will happen to research if nobody gets to extort money from the innocent.

by erich1010 Feb 28, 2005

There are many companies which would be out of business if they weren't allowed to profit from the ideas they come up with. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with profitting from your own ideas.

Open Source is a poor example. Name one Linux company that isn't having financial problems. There is a place for open source software, but it is mostly as an alternative to corporate products. The only incentive that people have for adding to open source is dissatisfaction with what is commercially available, either because it doesn't do exactly what they want or it costs too much.

Let me use an analogy... I like spaghetti. There are two ways I can get spaghetti. I can buy it, or I can make it. If I buy it, I'll get a decent spaghetti that is convenient, but costs more. If I make it, I'll get a spaghetti that might be better or worse, depending on my ability to cook, but it may cost less. Open source is like home-made spaghetti. Microsoft is like Chef Boyardee. There is a place for both.

If I come up with a widget and try to put it to market, how unfair would it be if Megacorp sees my idea and suddenly creates a few billion of them? There is practically no difference between a software program and a machine. When a person patents an idea, they are claiming ownership to a piece of information. They can leverage that ownership to make a profit from that information. This is a good thing. People should be able to make profits from their work. Making money is NOT a bad thing. It's what keeps people incented to work.

Even when you have a government fully behind the idea of common ownership of all property, it doesn't work. The USSR proved that.

by jaqui Feb 28, 2005

patents on software I don't agree with.
copyrights on the code I do.

that, far more so than the gnu-gpl, is what has legal standing to stop someone from selling the application and claiming it as thier own.
( proof of original code copyright date will always be sufficient. )

not that there has been any attempts, that I know of, to do that. it's the basis for all eula and software licenses.

by jdmercha Feb 28, 2005

"Maybe you should familiarize yourself with some of what's going on in scientific circles before you start making up lies about what will happen to research if nobody gets to extort money from the innocent."
Maybe you should ask if I am familiar with research. Since I work at a major research University, I'd say I'm quite familiar with it.

"Einstein, Newton, Galileo, and countless others have contributed to the field of scientific knowledge without expecting any recompense (and, in some cases, actually being persecuted for their work)."

Bad examples. These are people who were specifically paid to do research. They expected to get paid for their research. They were not doing it in their spare time, while they worked at their real jobs.

"Most tangible technological advances come from two sources: military research and schools."
That is true, because these researches expect to profit from it.

All you have to look at is a comparison of Capitolist and Communist countries. Nearly all ground-breaking research is done in capitolist countries, where the researchers are rewarded for their efforts.

by maxwell edison Feb 28, 2005

.
Albert Einstein was very well paid relative to the value of the dollar of that day. And comparing to contributions of Newton and Galileo to today's world is rather meaningless; it's an entirely different world. Besides, I don't think Newton would ever be granted a patent on gravity, not even today. (Unless, of course, he had a dang good patent lawyer!)

Only the ones driven by capitalism would lose interest. MAybe that's not all bad.

by tony hopkinson Feb 28, 2005

Was this the original intent of copyright ?. I don't think so. For a start it pre-supposes that those who received a copy for free would have purchased the legitimate distribution. This bastardization of the original intent is only in the interest of the publisher. Certainly in the case of books, anyone who reads a lot will go buy a copy of it on paper anyway if they liked it, it's just not the same in eletronic format. Half the time they make their own bed anyway. I've lost count of the amount of crap I've been sold, especially when the author is on some sort of 3 books a year type contract. The music industry is even worse now. It used to be that singles were used to promote an album, nowadays they are the only thing worth listening to on the album, it at all.

by maxwell edison Feb 28, 2005

.
If a person or a company did not have the opportunity to hold onto the rights to intellectual property, then people and companies would have no incentive to create intellectual property in the first place.

Without it, you and I would not be conversing in this very forum.

Everything I do, if I have the option, is open for copying and redistribution. I don't stop doing it because I'm not willing to force people to either pay or do without. I do what I do for the love of it, and I get paid to do work (not to provide pregenerated work). I'll write software and keep the copyright, which I use to release the source under a FOSS license (specifically, the CCD CopyWrite distribution license). This hasn't yet caused anyone to be less pleased with what I provide. If I want to make more money, I do it with support, with more software, or with more clients. I don't do it by going back to the same client a year later and saying "You have to stop using this now unless you pay me again."

Can you post a site where I can download all your work and sell it as my own?

.
If you want to give away your software, that's all fine and dandy. I won't presume to suggest you do otherwise. Give away your software; give away your time; give away all of your possessions, for all I care. But neither should you presume to suggest others do the same thing.

by tony hopkinson Feb 28, 2005

there was a good deal of very high grade research to come out of the USSR, those who came up with it were rewarded, though occasionally it was with a winter holiday in siberia if they were foolish enough to tell an american about it.
LOL

by mrafrohead Feb 28, 2005

I think that Intellectual Property should be open for all to use and benefit from. And I think that those that can contribute should...

Sadly though, we live in a world run by the dollar and people just aren't content "giving away" their ideas.

I think if people could remove themselves from their material things and grow further, we would not have all of the rude and hostile people that are greedy and 0wn3d by the almighty .

I'm going to disagree with you.

I have no problem at all with people "selling" ideas. In fact, I sell software all the time. Once I sell you software I've created, though, you own what I've sold you. I have my copy, and you have yours. You can sell yours, and I can sell mine. We can both make copies and sell them or give them away. There's no rule against keeping it, selling it, or giving it as a gift.

That's how I do business: if you want something from me that you can't get anywhere else, you may have to pay for it, but if I sell a copy of something to you it's yours. You can do whatever the hell you want to with it, aside from committing fraud.

It's not about property, and it's not about obligation. It's about liberty.

.
You said that you "think that Intellectual Property should be open for all to use and benefit from. And I think that those that can contribute should..."

Well I disagree.

So you live life your way, and I'll live life my way. And the disturbing aspect of this is that you presume to tell other people how to live.

You're living in la-la land.

.
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor...Would you be mine? Could you be mine?...It's a neighborly day in this beautywood, a neighborly day for a beauty...

Gee, can't we just all get along? Let's help each other all we can. No, don't charge someone for your work, just give it away. No, don't get wealthy. That wouldn't be nice; and that would only make others feel bad. No, don't try to achieve more than others; that would only make them feel inferior. (Inferior - that's another word for feeling bad.) Let's all try to have the same outcome. Wouldn't that be nice? We need to make a the world a better place to live. And let's all do our part to make it happen. Okay?

In fact, let's all sing a song. Are you ready? Here we go....

I'd like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to hold it in my arms and keep it company
I'd like to see the world for once
All standing hand in hand
And hear them echo through the hills "Ah, peace throughout the land"
(That's the song I hear)
I'd like to teach the world to sing (that the world sings today)
In perfect harmony
(Lead singer and background singers singing simultaneously)
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
Id like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves

Gee, don't we all feel good?

---------- End of sarcasm ----------

May the late, great Fred Rogers rest in peace. He did indeed make a great contribution - AND HE WAS WELL PAID FOR IT!

by bfilmfan Mar 1, 2005

I hope one day we are all going to be livin' large in Fred Roger's hood.

by mrafrohead Feb 28, 2005

"(Unless, of course, he had a dang good patent lawyer!)" + "it's an entirely different world"

Those two things above are true. And that is the problem right there...

We are in a world of GREED!

$$$ is what makes this world go round, and it is NOT the answer.

I'm sure your wallet disagrees with that I am saying, I know mine sure as shit does, but my heart tells me otherwise.

There is no need to have IP on something. You should share it so that yourself and your fellow man can advance further in life.

It sickens me to think that we will be hung up on petty things like cold fusion and other fantastic things of the like because some selfish people are more worried about the "rights" to it.

It should the the right of all people to have access to these intellectual advancements. Whether you like it or not, we are all the same, and we all work together. It's time for the people of the world to stop being so selfish and start giving instead of just taking.

.
You suggest that greed is the same as self-interest. It's not.

You suggest that "$$$...making the world go round" is "not the answer". Yes it is.

Go ahead, help your fellow man advance in life all you want. But don't presume to tell others to live by your standards.

Get off your high-horse presuming to tell other people to "work together" and all that crap. (Throwing up, right now.)

And you - you are starting to look very weird. On one hand you spout off about how virus writers should be given a free pass. But on the other hand you suggest that people who write software to combat it should also give their time for free. If you want to work for free, knock yourself out. But don't judge others for not wanting to. (Gee, can't we just all get along? - Gag me.)

There's another one of those answers that actually just dodges the question. The fact that Stephen King [b]expects[/b] money doesn't mean that failing to get money equates to being robbed. You're talking about the "right" of an author and a publisher to sit back and collect money when no more work is being done. I don't recognize that as a right.

Hi,

So what you are saying is that if Stephen King writes a book and takes his manuscript to a publisher, who then copies the manuscript, gives it back to King saying " Sorry, not interested " and then goes and prints and sells the book, without any compensation to King, is an OK activity?
How long do you think King, or anybody, would continue to write for public consumption? They might continue to write for their own artistic needs and then burn the manuscript, having satisfied their creative urge.
The whole purpose of copyright & patents is to ensure things are made available to the public, and not lost.

In the real world, successful authors get paid in advance, then write a book after the fact. Any author can typically expect that, if they write good material, publishers won't rip them off like that anyway because if a publisher does so they'll never have that author's business again.

If the publisher promises compensation and doesn't deliver, that's fraud. If King just hands them a copy with no restrictions or prior agreements, and they mass-produce it, that's bad planning on King's part. C'est la vie.

Your examples are, to put it kindly, flawed. I can think of more insulting, but completely accurate, things to call them.

"Intellectual property" isn't an "asset", no matter how many times you say it. Repeating yourself doesn't make what you say any more true.

No company gets to stay in business if it can't earn its place in business. The pervasive belief that people are "owed" some kind of recompense for something they're no longer doing is the only thing keeping many businesses afloat, which artificially skews the market and keeps honestly innovative companies from succeeding. Check out the software patent drama in Europe for an example.

I haven't been watching the stock prices on publicly traded Linux vendors. Last I checked, Novell/SuSE seemed to be doing well, what with all of Munich's municiple systems switching from Windows to SuSE Linux. It's odd that you seem to equate all of FOSS with Linux, though: have you noticed how well Mozilla is doing? I'm under the impression that Progeny is doing well, as a Linux and FOSS services company. IBM, actually, is going like gangbusters with its Linux endeavors. EmperorLinux seems to be turning a tidy profit.

Your very short-range view of what makes the FOSS community tick is indicative of your existence outside of it. I write free and open source software and one of my two jobs is for a nonprofit organization that manages one of the highest-traffic websites in existence, all run on Fedora Core Linux.

FOSS is more like a good potluck that's open 24/7. You can show up and just eat, or you can cook and contribute. Because everybody that cooks and contributes makes enough for several people at least, there's always enough to go around, even though a lot of people aren't contributing any food. Because people are using homecooking recipes, the food is a lot better than what you'd get out of a can. You can pay if you want to, perhaps to get someone to bring your food to your table and serve drinks to you (since some enterprising individuals are sure to start doing that at a 24/7 potluck, eventually), but if you're willing to serve yourself you don't have to; with Chef Boyardee, you are forced to pay to get the canned food, you're forced to do at least minimal cooking yourself unless you want to just eat it cold and straight out of the can, and you're guaranteed to get something that tastes like ass.

Sure, there's a place for both, but even Chef Boyardee isn't trying to drive a potluck out of business by claiming they've patented sauce of a particular shade of red.

Of course making money isn't a bad thing. Extorting money is. Nobody has a "right" to my money just because they created something six years ago. If you want my money, provide value. I'll pay for value. I won't pay for something no better than the free stuff, though, and in fact I'd rather write my own than use a lot of the junk out there being sold as a product (and I sometimes [b]do[/b] write my own).

I never said anything about "common ownership of all property". I'm a dyed-in-the-wool free market capitalist. The key phrase there is "free market", though, which means nobody gets to point a gun at my head and claim they own its contents.

If you think trying to call me a communist is going to get you anywhere, you're sadly mistaken. You probably look like a soviet propagandist compared to me. I'm about as free-market capitalist as you can get without actually being an anarcho-capitalist. In point of fact, I'm a libertarian minarchist: if it doesn't involve force or fraud, it shouldn't be prohibited by law. So-called "intellectual property" law is, by and large, threat and application of force to leverage market dominance to eke maximum profits out of minimum contribution. Microsoft has pretty much led the pack in that area, making obscene profits by subtracting value from the market, and most of what they do is predicated upon extortionary monopolistic tactics that wouldn't be possible without copyright and patent law.

Are you really so far out in left field that you don't know how modern theories of physics came about? I suppose you didn't hear all the stories about Albert Einstein conceiving of the general theory of relativity [b]while working as a clerk[/b]. Yes, he was later paid to do research, but he got his start by brainstorming while at his day job, which had nothing to do with scientific research.

He parlayed something he did without expectation of remuneration into a paying gig, because people recognized his value and wanted to keep him fed. He didn't patent relativity and try to sell it. Hell, it wasn't even marketable.

was that you were a liberal democrat.

But anyway I would agree with you in a perfect world. But we do not live in a perfect world. As several other posts have pointed out, money makes the world go round. I would agree that it shouldn't, but in reality it does.

Given that, most research is motivated by money. The average research professor, makes more money on research than they get in salary. Have you seen the movie Real Genius? That portrayal of a college professor is not far off the mark. Without the money, most eould not do research.

They get paid a decent salary from their College, but most could get paid more if they worked in industry. But at a research institution they are only expected to work 10-20 hours per week teaching, and only 30 weeks per year. They are also expected to do research. And from the research grants they receive, they pay themselves fisrt. Then they pay graduate students to do the research.

Sometimes they release the intelectual property to the world for free and sometimes they do not. If they have a patentable idea the institution patents it and shares the royalties with the professor.

Money is a means of keeping score. Nothing more. Money isn't what makes the world go 'round: wealth, production, and value do. Those who focus on the capital, rather than the valuables, are doing it wrong. It has nothing to do with a "perfect world" and, what you seem to be missing, is the fact that it's entirely possible to make a living without using extortionary "intellectual property" protection rackets to squeeze blood from a stone.

Ultimately, all this discussion of what would or would not work is moot, anyway. It is [b]unethical[/b] to make your living by attempting to control the disposition of other people's stores of knowledge. I have no right to the contents of your brain, and you have no right to the contents of mine. It's that simple. Information is "free" because the moment it leaves your possession it is no longer yours.

by caestelle Mar 1, 2005

For anyone who thinks that intellectual property should not be able to be copyrighted.....Just think for a moment if you were in a position to profit from your "Intellectual Property" by copyrighting it, would you not do it?? Just a thought

by liame Mar 2, 2005

Not only was good ole Albert working as a clerk when he did his most ground breaking work, he was working as a clerk in a PATENT OFFICE.

Finally some good can be proven to have come from patents. It kept a roof over Einstein's head and food on his table while he was changing the world.

It's the only real good patents have done, I suppose.

. . . though I'm sure he could have gotten a job somewhere else. Where one industry exists because of the existence of patents (the patent office itself being a monopolistic industry by definition), another (probably less monopolized) industry would surely exist with the different profit models necessary in the absence of patents.

Newton and Galileo were brilliant, and they used their brilliance. They didn't do it because they expected to get paid: they did it because that's what they wanted to do. The same is true of Einstein, and when Einstein got started he was working as a clerk, not a scientist. It was only after relativity that people started wanting to pay him for his brilliance.

The truth of the matter is that there are two types of people doing research: there are those who will do the research whether paid or not, but who think it's neat that they can get paid for what they'd do anyway, and there are those who just follow orders for money. Sure, getting paid certainly makes it easier to do research, but it's not a necessity, and it's not the motivation that drives those who really innovate.

I'm not saying people shouldn't get paid for their work. Far from it. I'm just saying they shouldn't be able to extort money for what happens long after their work is done.

.
It sounds as though you are suggesting that people follow the money to find success, and I disagree. Most successful people follow their passion, and the money just happens as a result.

Quite frankly, I'm sick of people who think anything money-related or wealth-related is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. And the people who judge others just because they've achieved a certain level of financial success are, in my opinion, the ones with the real problem.

I just got finished saying that people follow their passions. You've been arguing that people follow the money, and thus the money must be provided through use of extortionary means like patents and copyrights or they won't innovate.

If you think I'm saying money is a bad thing, by the way, you haven't been paying attention. As I've said before, I'm a free market capitalist, through and through.

"they shouldn't be able to extort money for what happens long after their work is done."

How long is long after? Are you saying it's OK to extort money shortly after their work is done?

Let's not play the "intentionally dimwitted response" game. Pretend you have a brain for a moment. I said nothing of the sort, and in fact insinuated nothing of the sort. Extortionary practices are wrong, period.

If Brystol can't profit from their research, they won't do it. The vaccice is never developed and another 300 mllion people in Africa die of aids.

Everything you say here for some reason assumes that things like trade secrets don't exist. Not having a patent doesn't mean you have to go around passing out memos with the development process for your product explained in excrutiating detail.

But how do you protect a trade secret without a patent or copywrite? In a perfect world employees would not sell trade secrets to the highest bidder. But without legal protections, what can stop them?

by liame Mar 2, 2005

Firstly you assume that only private industry develops drugs. Thats patently (excuse the pun)wrong. Charitable and government / educational funding is responsible for more drugs than you might imagine.

Secondly it is not necessary for a company to reap monopolistic profit from drugs for them to stay in business. Merely to make a profit is sufficient. Monopolistic practices never lead to the innovation we all desire as there is a huge incentive not to 'rock the boat'. Necessity is the mother of invention and competition the father. Sitting on your butt collecting excess profit doesnt get a look in, I'm affraid.

Thirdly, who exactly has the right to watch another human being die to protect their 'itellectual property' or bottom line? I certainly dont feel I have that right. Could you put your hand on your heart and say that you have?

Forthly certainly in the UK and probably elsewhere in the world you cant patent a drug and never have been able to. What is patented are the production methods.

Hi,

A good point about patenting drugs, I'd forgotten it.

by jdmercha Mar 2, 2005

"Firstly you assume that only private industry develops drugs."
I don't know where you get that, but OK I agree with your point.

"Merely to make a profit is sufficient."
I disagree, when it comes to companies that perform research. Aside from making a profit they need to fund their next research project. And then who is to say what "enough profit" is.

"Monopolistic practices never lead to the innovation"
Again I agree, but this is why patents have a limited life.

"Thirdly, who exactly has the right to watch another human being die to protect their 'itellectual property' or bottom line? I certainly dont feel I have that right. Could you put your hand on your heart and say that you have?"
I do not have the right to watch people die, but I certainly have the right to allow them to die.
Why should they have the right live off of my hard work.

"Forthly certainly in the UK and probably elsewhere in the world you cant patent a drug and never have been able to. What is patented are the production methods."
I'm not actually sure, but I think that what is patented in the US would be the method to produce a drug. If I patent a drug based on combining certain chemiclas, that does not prevent anyone from marketing the same drug if they extract it from a plant.

because I haven't collected everything in one place. Besides, selling it as your own (claiming you wrote it) would be a form of fraud (in this case, plagiarism). You can resell any software I write if you want to, if you have a copy, but you can't legally or ethically claim to have written it yourself.

One of these days, I'll organize what I've written into a single repository. In the meantime, if you want to sell software other people have written, I recommend you start at freshmeat or sourceforge, or that you put together a Linux distribution to sell.

I'm thinkin' you don't get the way FOSS works.

I don't just give everything away. The fact that I won't show up with a SWAT team to lock you up if you copy something I wrote doesn't mean I'm just giving everything away. I sell software. If the people to whom I sell it want to give away or sell copies of it, that's their business, not mine. With things like value-added packaging, support contracts, and later updates and customizations of something I produce, I can make more money.

How do you think web designers make any money? It's not like you can't just "view source" and copy everything they've done, y'know. Oh, gee, I do web development, too.

"How do you think web designers make any money? It's not like you can't just "view source" and copy everything they've done, y'know. Oh, gee, I do web development, too."

Many web sites are developed with backend programming that you can't see. And much of it, along with the graphics are protected by copywrite.

You make a point, in regards to back-end programming, but only insofar as casual browsing is concerned. The people to whom I sell my web development services have full access to the back-end code I write, and they can do whatever they want to with it, including selling it or copying it.

As for graphics copyrights, that's sort of not the point. Besides, I don't copyright graphics that I produce (trademark issues notwithstanding).

You keep it [b]secret[/b]. Who says there aren't legal protections? Haven't you heard of nondisclosure agreements? Contractual obligations are quite useful for protecting information.

I believe that I agree with you in theory, but theory does not always work in practice.

People are driven by their passions, as you have said. When you speak of an individuals creativity and ideas, I will agree that most will continue with their research without the lure of money. Are we agreed here?

Where I think we diverge is in the means, methods and resources to continue this research. For an individual conducting research that takes little capitol, it is easy to release the results free to the world. Your earlier example of open source software shows this well.

But when research requires a large investment of capitol and resources it might not be so easy. (Still possible, but not easy.) Many a reasearch project funded by philanthopists and government agencies are in fact released as public information. But many research projects, such as new pharmacuticals are very costly to research, and 'free' money is not available.

Patent and copywrite protections don't neccessarily drive the researcher, but they do drive the investor. It is the investeor who is looking for a return on their money by protecting their investment with patents and copywrites.

My contention is then, without the patent and copywrite protection, investrors would not put their money into firms that conduct research. Meaning less money for research, rusulting in less research.

So I can protect my intellectual property with a non-disclosure agreement, but not with a patent. How does that stop me from "extorting" profits?

You seem to have a particularly unflattering view of the innovative capabilities of those who have an entrepreneurial spirit within them. There are a great many ways to make money on research that don't involve extortion. Yes, investors are currently very much motivated by patents and copyrights, but that's in large part because patents and copyrights exist. By the same token, people running a protection racket in the south Bronx are very much motivated by the ability to get money from people by doing nothing but threatening them, and burglars are very much motivated by the ability to get money by selling stuff they've pilfered from others' houses.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, simply keeping your technology a secret through obfuscation and nondisclosure agreements can ensure some profitability for new research just as easily as patents, and unlike patents it does so without resorting to institutionalized protection rackets.

The original reason for the patent system was to induce innovators to release details of their research to the public, by making it possible to do so without losing exclusivity. What that didn't take into account was the possibility for abuse and the fact that it effectively imposes a contractual agreement on people who would never have agreed to it.

Without patent and copyright protection, investors would find other ways to make money than extortion. There wouldn't be less research, but there might be [b]different[/b] research.

Extorting profits involves putting a gun to someone's head and saying "You don't get to act as you wish. You have no choice in the matter. The choice has been made for you." Nondisclosure agreements allow one to opt out: "No, I don't want to sign, and I'm willing to remain ignorant of your trade secrets as payment for not signing."

1. I am in a position to profit from my "intellectual property". I choose to do so by other means than extortion.

2. Even if the only way to make money off what I wrote was to enforce strict copyright, I still wouldn't do it, because that would be highly unethical.

by batmang8 Mar 1, 2005

Property is a product of the intellect.

We are surrounded by stuff and create valuable
property out of it. In so doing become the
owners of that property.

Who values it? The creator of it does.
Sometimes others do -- immediately or later on --
in which case s/he can trade and sell it.

In the general sense, this creation of property
has been called "materializing the coin"
(pronounced quan, because in the specific sense
it stands for the quantum of value one must
create to cover the costs an employer has to pay
to employ you).

Nice job with the word games.

.
This discussion was opened with the simple question, "Should Intellectual Property Exist?"

You were the first to answer with a "big fat no".

If there's something about your answer that I missed, I believe the onus would be on you, not me to explain. Moreover, you went on to say that you "don't see anything ethically wrong with trading MP3s". Well I do see something wrong with it because it's tantamount to stealing someone's intellectual property without paying for the right -- a right you don't think a person should have in the first place based on your "big fat no" answer. And when I posted my message that stated people do indeed have a right to (and a right to be paid for) their own intellectual property, you replied with "nonsense".

Now granted, in subsequent messages, various tangents were taken, but it sounds as though your premise was pretty well established.

And you have indeed said before that you're "a free market capitalist, through and through."

So why the apparent contradiction?

And what am I missing here? (And I don't care what YOU do with YOUR intellectual property; the initial question is much broader in scope.)

Hi,

You are against patents and have used non disclosure agreements as "protection" for trade secrets, in another post. A trade secret only remains a secret until a large enough offer is made for disclosure. Once disclosed it is openslather, though the discloser might get a legal slap across the wrist.

The whole idea of patents (actually their full name is letters patent )is so the society is given details of processes so that they are not lost, because it is secret.
Imagine if Stradivarius could have availed himself of the legal protection of a patent for his process of manufacturing violins, we would still know, today, how to make superb violins. True, his originals wouldn't be worth the millions they are, but many people could have one.
A trade secret is lost as soon as those that know it become senile or die.

So eventually someone will reverse-engineer your product or process, or corrupt someone. So what? Eventually your patent will run out, too. Some trade secrets will last longer than patents, and some will last a shorter time. Such is life.

If an individual gets sued for millions of dollars, I don't think I'd call that a "slap across the wrist", by the way.

I really don't care about your Stradivarius example. Yes, trade secrets are sometimes lost to mankind. So, too, are all the discoveries that are prevented by effectively outlawing research that might infringe on a patent. There's always a give and take. I prefer the ethical choice rather than the instant gratification choice, myself.

Hi,

In your posts you are taking the attitude that someone is pointing a gun at your head and say "you can't use what you know". Of course you can, and no one is going to get uptight about it.
You can go and look at anything and work out how its made and go and make one for yourself, ie use what you know. But, and here is the crunch, if you take what you see and just copy it and make it available to others you and expect to be allowed to do this, then you are the one holding a gun to someone elses head and saying "I'm allowed to use what you know for my ends"

How about if you have friends visiting and you play the music for them? What if you ask for compensation to help defray costs of electricity? What if you get money from someone and use that to buy a CD, with the understanding that this person can come listen to it on your CD player in the future because you have a better CD player but you get to keep the for going to the trouble of ordering the CD and maintaining the CD player? What if they pay you after the fact? What if the person doesn't have the money to pay for the whole CD at once, and offers to pay a quarter each time he or she listens to it instead?

There's no ethical difference between these various scenarios. Ultimately, what you're talking about is a copyright holder trying to control what you do with something you bought. If you own it, you should be allowed to do what you like with it. If not, you don't own it. I guess you'd better go give your CDs back to the RIAA now.

Hi,

To pick on another of your statements "If you own it, you should be allowed to do what you like with it. If not, you don't own it."
You can. You can use it and let others listen to it. You can burn it, jump on it, use it as a frisby, even give it away.
What you can't do is make a copy and then give the copy away.

Elsewhere you state that once you have sold a piece of software you don't care what happens. I get the impression that this software is written to a client's requirements and that you then write it for him, for a fee. This is commission work that satisfies a need, and, unless otherwise agreed, the ownership of the material vests in the commissioner, because he has paid for it.

Authors and publishers don't have a commission from the public to produce a book, they do it in the hope that it will sell. No guarantee of any remuneration.

Give me a logically valid explanation of some ethical basis for not making a copy and giving it away. You can give it away, you say. You can make a copy you say. How is it that the copy is less transferable than the original? How is it that I have more rights to the original than I do to something I've created? Why is it that something into which I've invested time and money (the copy) [b]isn't mine[/b]?

A practical definition of ownership requires that I be able to control the disposition of what I own insofar as I can control my own actions. If I can't dictate the disposition of a given CD, whether original or copied, there are two ways to explain this: either someone else owns the CD, or someone else owns [b]me[/b]. Pick one. Which is it?

I also write in English, not just in Perl, PHP, Object Pascal, or whatever other language of the day I have in front of me. If I sell a book, a technical reference, an article, or anything else I write in English, I don't try to dictate what is done with it after the fact without an agreement made in advance. Such things are written and provided under CCD CopyWrite, which allows free distribution and requires that derivative works be released under similar license.

I'm theoretically in the same boat as the authors and publishers to which you refer (though many of them deal with different materials than I do). Guess what: I still won't try to extort money from others for something I've already sold. Once I put it in someone else's hands, without an explicit agreement about its disposition, I relinquish rights to it (discounting attribution, as with anything else attributable, since fraudulent claims of origins are another matter entirely). The fact that some authors aren't working on a commission basis is a sign of a broken profit model, anyway.

Maybe you aren't aware of this, but first editions are what make the publishing industry go 'round. If you hold exclusive copyright on something that has already been published, and it's not a bestseller with fans clamoring for another copy, no publishing house is going to want to publish your book. Publishers want first publication rights, or they won't buy your work. Once it's released into the wild, the value of your copyright drops significantly, anyway, unless you're lucky enough to be Stephen King (or the equivalent) with fifteenth edition royalties coming to you. In other words, you may as well not have a copyright on it anyway, in terms of the likelihood you'll get paid for a work. If you can sell first publication access to what you've written with copyrights, you can do so without.

By the way, I'm proof there's a market for originals. I have a lot of books. I have hardcopy printings of books that are available on the web, because sometimes a physical book is just better. Maybe you're not aware of it, but there are a great many books out there available both for free on the web and for purchase at the bookstore. Swing by the O'Reilly and Associates website some time and have a look around: they have a whole section devoted to freely redistributable books. Somehow, they still manage to sell the things at Barnes and Noble, even though these things are printed under the GNU Free Documentation License (and similar licenses).

Yes, someone's holding a gun to my head. If I happen to have an eiditic memory and end up accidentally memorizing a copyrighted haiku, I'm suddenly constrained from passing that haiku on to others. There's now someone pointing a metaphorical gun at my head and telling me what I am and am not allowed to do with the contents of my own brain.

Every time I view a webpage, there's a copy of the copyrighted code on that page resident on my computer. If I duplicate my hard drive as a drive image on another digital recording medium, I've just created an illegal duplicate. I now have someone holding a gun to my head and telling me I'm not allowed to sell used backup tapes to others because they have copyrighted material on them.

I'm not telling anyone that I get to use what's in their heads however I like. What's in their heads is theirs. What's in my head is mine. I don't go around downloading data from other people's brains against their will, and if I make copies from my memory it doesn't affect what exists in your own. When someone gives or sells me a copy, it's mine, ethically. That's all there is to it.

I'm a free market capitalist.

I don't recognize intellectual property as ethical (intellect isn't property), just as I don't recognize human property as ethical (humans aren't property). You can own a CD, or a book, or a computer, but the ideas encoded within these things are just that: ideas. They're not property.

If you can make money off ideas, go for it, but don't use the government to declare those ideas property and make money off your alliance with a greater force of arms. What it boils down to is this: You can ethically defend physical property because you can place yourself between others and that property, and defend yourself. If you loan it out, it's still yours because an agreement is in place, and to violate that agreement is to engage in fraudulent behavior. Ideas don't work that way, though, and there's no basis in defense of the proprietary nature of an idea by way of self-defense. It's not property because it's not something physically defended. "Intellectual property" can only be defended by going to others who have it and threatening them.

Contractual obligations to refrain from disclosing it are roughly equivalent to loaning out a physical object such as, for instance, a chair. If someone borrows your chair and sells it to another person, that's effectively theft. If someone borrows it, makes a copy, and gives the original back, [b]that's not theft[/b]. The same is true of ideas: all you can really loan out is the physical medium. The idea is non-reclaimable, and there's no ethical justification for prohibitions of duplication.

Hi,

You state "If King just hands them a copy with no restrictions or prior agreements, and they mass-produce it, that's bad planning on King's part. C'est la vie."

Restrictions - prior agreements, this is what copyright is!!

Copyright isn't a prior "agreement" because an agreement presumes the opportunity to disagree. Copyright is a condition of US law. Without copyright, other forms of agreement can be made to protect the interests of an author.

If copyright were the only way for an author to protect his interests, you still wouldn't have a valid point about ethics, but at least your argument wouldn't look completely like smoke. The fact that there are other means, about as easy as copyright, that don't involve a huge system of restriction on the intellectual activities of others, eliminates what meager scraps of the appearance of a point you might have had going for you.

by maxwell edison Mar 2, 2005

.
Because that's exactly what you're spewing.

If you make a copy of a CD, it is indeed theft, both legally and ethically, unless you purchased whatever is contained on that CD in a different form, and your copy is to keep and use yourself. You may not like it, and you may disagree, but that's the way it is - and I disagree with you. Legally speaking, you are wrong, there's no question about it; but what makes you ethically correct and me ethically incorrect?

If I put something that I created on a CD, whether it be music or a book or photographs or computer code or software or anything else, and if I intend to sell those CDs, you have absolutely no right to deny me that opportunity by buying one, making copies, and distributing them on your own terms. The unmitigated gall of such an attitude is absolutely disgusting to me. And that is indeed theft, my friend; and that is anything BUT being "a good capitalist" - and that is where you are contradicting yourself.

And your chair analogy is either silly or too narrow in scope. Not all chairs are created equal. Go ahead and create all the chair designs you can possibly conceive, and build your chairs based on your design. But if you "copy" my UNIQUE design for a chair that also slices and dices and mows the lawn, and/or sell your chair using my name, that is also denying me the right to market my product. You would be STEALING my design.

Taking your silly analogies one step further, you must also condone "borrowing" someone's copy of the James Michener book, Texas, copying it either electronically or by hand, reprinting it with your own resources, maybe even claiming yourself as the author, and selling it as YOUR BOOK. After all, that book is no more than a representation of Michener's "ideas". And, as you said, "The idea is non-reclaimable, and there's no ethical justification for prohibitions of duplication".

Yep, you are indeed the one spewing nonsense.

by jdmercha Mar 2, 2005

I agree with what you are saying insofar as that is the way it should be.

But put into practice it won't work.

I contend that without patent and copywrite protections, innovation would slow down. Not to a halt, but not at the same pace.

I point out Communist countries, not to label you as a communist but to point out that those nations that do not recognize patents and copywrites have not been able to maitain the pace of innovation, compared to the rest of the world.

Let me get this straight:

I'm "spewing" nonsense because you say so.

Making a copy of a CD is "theft" in an ethical sense just because it's theft in a legal sense.

I don't have a right to copy what I've purchased because you want to make more money.

I'm contradicting myself because I disagree with you.

My chair analogy is too narrow in scope because you say so (sorry, I really couldn't find any better explanation than that in your post, unless this is a duplicate of the "because you want to make money" thing).

That paragraph about [u]Texas[/u] is so far out there it's not even worth addressing.

If there are more substantive explanations for these apparently flatulent opinions of yours, please pass them along, but you certainly haven't provided any. In the meantime, you asked a direct question: "but what makes you ethically correct and me ethically incorrect?"

Aside from the fact that I'm the only one that has been offering logically valid supporting arguments for the ethicality of my position all along, there's the simple fact that you can't very well ethically call me a thief without some evidence that a crime is committed. If I copy a CD and sell the copy, that's certainly provable as a crime by US copyright law, but I have yet to see a logically valid argument from anyone (including you) that makes it a crime ethically. Trying to appeal to my pity for the poor widdle artist's desire to make a buck doesn't work: it's irrelevant to the question of the ethicality of his methods.

By the way, I never under any circumstances indicated that there was anything okay with marketing anything under someone else's name without permission. That's dishonest, and falls under the heading of "fraud". This is one reason that it's useful to distinguish between types of intellectual property law: trademark actually has some logically valid ethical basis, because fraud constitutes a form of initiation of force (keep in mind that "force" and "violence" are not necessarily synonymous).

by jdmercha Mar 2, 2005

If you invest your own time and money to create a product that you can sell in order to make a living, is it ethical for the first person you sell it to to make a copy and provide it free to the world, thereby denying you the ability to recover your investment?

You disagree with me about the likelihood of loss of momentum in innovation. That's clear. It's difficult to offer a solid argument for either side, though I've done some arguing for my side of it to be sure.

The communist example, however, is less than useful. For one thing, there [b]is[/b] "intellectual property", in practical terms, in any major communist/socialist governments we've seen in the last couple hundred years: The government owns everything, including ideas. Rather than letting corporate entities control and stifle innovation, these nations let governments do so. That's tangential to the matter of innovation and intellectual property law, at best.

by maxwell edison Mar 2, 2005

.
Your "because you say so" retort is disingenuous and stupid, and most likely a result of your inability to offer a reasonable rebuttal to my message.

The bottom line is this:

If I create something and put it in digital form to sell, you believe it's perfectly ethical and should be legal to make digital copies of that product for yourself to further distribute however you see fit. I don't believe it should be legal, and it's not legal, nor do I believe it's ethical.

You believe that you have a right to take something created by someone else, and I don't.

It's obvious that we live by a different set of ethics. Unfortunately, your "ethics" (or lack thereof) trample on the individual rights of others, while my "ethics" do not.

I'm not going to play your silly word games, but rather simply agree to disagree. You're beginning to be an enormous waste of my time and effort.

jdmercha: "If you invest your own time and money to create a product that you can sell in order to make a living, is it ethical for the first person you sell it to to make a copy and provide it free to the world, thereby denying you the ability to recover your investment?"

Yes. Sure. Why not? Give me a reason why not, other than "'Cause I was EXPECTING MONEY!" If you make bad business decisions, I don't owe you the courtesy of also making bad business decisions to give you an opprotunity to recover your investment.

----------

maxwell: "You believe that you have a right to take something created by someone else, and I don't."

Let's not misrepresent the facts. It would be more accurate to say that I believe that I have the right to distribute what I have come to possess by ethical means, and you don't. I'm not taking it from you. Not only am I not stealing the physical recording medium (I'm buying it or being given it), but I am not depriving you of the data over which you're claiming ownership. I'm just creating more copies of it.

Your argument, so far, consists of avoiding logical support and misrepresenting my beliefs. I don't believe it's okay to take something from someone, but I don't believe it's okay to give something to others then demand that they not use it how they see fit, either.

Your conception of individual rights is only enforceable at the point of a gun, while mine involves no violence, fraud, or threat to occur at all. Until you can solve that little problem with copyright and patent law, I will utterly reject both as unethical.

Tough question.

One problem is the occurrence of simultaneous ideas. If an idea occurs to two seperate people at the same time, it seems unfair that it "belongs" to the first one to get the recognition of some bureaucratic element!

Patents are designed to reward hard work, but if you work hard and get to the patent office just in time to see that someone else just patented the same thing, it seems to me that it might be discouraging innovation.

when you patent it, it's not a "secret" any more.

by maxwell edison Mar 2, 2005

.
You said, "It would be more accurate to say that (you) believe that (you) have the right to distribute what (you) have come to possess by ethical means".

Okay, fine and dandy. Those are your words, not mine. Now consider that you "have come to possess by ethical means" both a hardcover book and a digital book (and yes, they do indeed exist) of James Michener's Texas. You then decide to copy the book, and distribute it to others however you see fit. Which book did you copy? Well, the copy medium doesn't matter. Or are you suggesting that it does matter?

If you buy the __________ version of a book and you subsequently make a __________ copy of that book, whether you give it away or sell it, it's tantamount to stealing from the person who owns the rights to distribute that book.

That's about as "logical" as I can put it, but yet you insist on suggesting that I'm not being logical. But your word games continue.

And just because a thief doesn't call it theft, it doesn't mean it isn't thievery.

Even the most heinous criminals find ways to justify their actions, so people who steal digital books, digital music or digital software are probably no different.

Justify it all you want, but this guy ain't buying it.

by dc_guy Mar 2, 2005

The formula for Coca-cola is not patented. If it were, chemists would try altering the ingredients just slightly until they got another formula that was indistinguishable from the original to most consumers, and was at least ten percent different. That would allow the imitator to sell his own cola -- and even patent it.

The Coca-Cola company has the formula locked up and guarded, and only a handful of trusted personnel know it by heart and are able to direct the manufacturing.

Patents aren't necessarily all that useful.

But as for copyrights, I don't see how that particular kind of artistic creativity would flourish without them. Sure, some people are so creative that they can just sit at a desk and crank out songs or novels or poetry like draftsmen crank out blueprints. Those people could get jobs working for a salary or perhaps patronage. But the vast majority of creative people labor for quite some time before they produce that one stunning song, novel, or poem. They may need to be paid the equivalent of six months' salary for it in order to come back the next day and work six more months in the faint hope that they might ever do it again. It's worth it, the record company A&R department that buys it could make millions of dollars off of it, but at worst they'll easily recoup their costs.

How do we keep those people working? In your model, they'll all have to get brain-numbing jobs flipping burgers because when they sell that one hit song they'll only get paid hourly wages for the three or four days it took to write it.

I agree that the copyright laws are being horribly abused. But the culprit is the corporation, not the law. Corporations are "artificial persons" in the eyes of the law, but they have many of the most important rights of real persons. They also have a lot more lobbying power and they have a lot more lawyers.

Don't throw out the concept of copyrights just because corporations have finally gotten around to figuring out how to abuse it.

If you want to protest a concept, how about the corporation? Talk about an idea whose time has come but has now passed.

That begs an interesting question. What is the purpose of buying a book? Is it to read (and hopefully enjoy) it?

If so, what am I to do once I have read it? Destroy it? Can I sell it? Give it away? Is the person who buys or gets the book from me obligated to pay the publisher or author?

Why or why not?

I'm not being facetious, I really want to understand.

So, since I work for the government, which is, of course "of the people, by the people, and for the people", and I have a truly innovative idea while on the clock, is it mine? the government's? "public" domain?

Kinda like a cold. You can give it to someone, yet still have it :)