[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
So I am curious. Don't take this as sarcastic cause I am honestly asking to know. What is a fair method for a person who makes software to make sure he is properly compensated for his time and effort? It's not like all of us could go write our own game. Or even if we could we don't. So what should be the process involved so the developer can make a living producing software that we use and enjoy?

Geoschmo

Copyright is a fine system for encouraging creative activities. In exchange for publishing your work, whether it is art or science, you get an exclusive right to control it -- for a while. Unfortunately, we don't have copyright anymore. We have 'intellectual property' -- which is a complete fraud.

Information. Cannot. Be. Property.

Period. Full stop.

As already observed here, if you 'take' information the previous 'owner' is not deprived of its use.

Similarly, once someone knows something you can't take it back.

Information is fundamentally different from property, which is why a fundamentally different legal concept was created to deal with it. Copyright. And copyright recognizes that information is different from property by setting a limit on how long the original producer of the information may continue to claim the right to control it. This is common sense. As people keep using the information it gets more and more assimilated into daily life until it is part of the culture. Letting anyone claim a 'perpetual' right to control information is the same as letting someone claim the right to control the public discourse.

Yet, the corporations think they can force this unreal concept on us by buying laws. It doesn't matter to them that the REAL WORLD doesn't work that way, they are gonna buy politicians and PR campaigns until they get what they want. And then try to get the government they purchased to enforce it.

So here we are, several decades into the regime of 'intellectual property' -- I don't know when the term was first written into a law... does anyone here know? But the concept of making copyright perpetual by indirection dates back to the early years of this century when the retro-active extensions started being passed on a regular basis to protect the corporate stockpile of money making copyrights. Everything written/recorded/filmed since 1923, well before you or anyone else here was born, is still 'private property' to some suit who spends his/her life trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of it. So we get the 'anthologies' with one or two new stories and a dozen old ones, the 'music compilations' and 'greatest hits collections' with one or two new songs and a dozen old ones, the 'Special Editions' and 'Directors Cuts' with 5 minutes of new footage in a 2 1/2 hour movie...

Of course, only a small fraction of the works published in all media since 1923 are still worth trying to make any money off of. Hardly anyone wants to listen to music from the early days of vinyl or early black and white films. The other 95+ percent of 'commercial' works, whatever their historical or cultural value, are simply dead weight that no librarian dares to re-copy for fear of a copyright lawsuit. Ah yes... because then these 'worthless' copyrights would suddenly be worth something. You could then sue some hapless librarian for 'violating' your copyright and suck some money out of them and the library they work for. So the history and culture of the 20th century is slowly crumbling away in our libraries, under the glare of hungry copyright -- erm, 'intellectual property' -- lawyers.

Beyond the large-scale damage done to history and culture, though, is the simple violation of common sense.

Did you know you are breaking copyright law when you sing 'Happy Birthday' at your private birthday party? It's more than a century old, by now. It's part of the culture -- the way we live our daily lives. Shouldn't the general public be allowed to continue what has become a folk tradition? They can't enforce this at present, but you can damn well bet they are working on ways to do so, what with all the 'surveillance' technology developing as fast as communications in general. I'm wondering when Coke will try to assert copyright on Santa Claus and sue everybody who's ever used the now 'universal' image of the bearded fat guy in the red suit. Santa as we know him now was first used in a Coke Ad in the 1920s so I expect the copyright is still legally valid.

The 'intellectual property' fraud has had an ugly effect on the actual producers of art and science, too. They've been hypnotized by the suits -- who are cheating them too -- into thinking it's those evil 'pirates' out there who are restricting their income. George Lucas is a good example of the 'artist' who should have been a lawyer. He sued over 'Battlestar Galactica' claiming that it was somehow infringing Star Wars simply because it was a space show with fighter craft flying around. And some poor sap got sued by Lucas in the 80s for creating a spreadsheet tutorial called 'The Templates of Doom' -- yes, he was 'infringing' on the Indiana Jones franchise by using a cute name for his tutorial and including a few references in the lessons.

Corporate GREED has blown the concept of copyright so completely out of proportion that it cannot be reasonably complied with anymore. Just like otherwise 'law abiding' people during Prohibition simply ignored the law and went on drinking, just like ordinary people (not 'religious fanatics' because the fanatics were the ones in power) during the most insanely rigid phases of Medieval 'religion' went on having their own opinions and getting murdered for it, people will continue incorporating new experiences into the 'public domain' -- the CULTURE -- because it's the natural thing to do. The human mind naturally retains experiences and organizes them together into patterns without stopping to think who owns what and pay the fees.

Computer software is a slightly different case than most art but it has suffered due to the abuse of copyright in the other areas I've described. Because the law has been so outrageously abused people have ceased to respect the law. Add to this the problem of uncertain expecations and it's no surprise that computer software copyrghts have been so meaningless to most people. With most consumer products you at least know what you're buying and you can judge whether the price is worth what you want. A car is a car, and you know what it is supposed to do and what it cannot be reasonably expected to do. The same goes for scads of small applianes from blenders to cell phones. A computer is a completely different animal. Software is incredibly mutable and can utterly transform the machine on your desk (or lap, as the case my be) from a game machine to a busines management system to a communications device. And each 'application' can be completely transformed from one Version of the software to another. So if you pay $500 for your spreadsheet program and six months later there's another 'Version' with bug fixes and a jillion new features, which you have you buy at some steep 'upgrade price'... what did you pay for? This is a very different relationship than we have to any other consumer product I am aware of. It's not surprising that people are so willing to ignore copyright in this case and just copy things because it's so easy to feel cheated a few months later. But as I said, thanks to the abuse of copyright in other ways the situation is even worse than it would otherwise have been.

If we could restore copyright -- a reasonable expectation that all new information will eventually become public domain -- we could cut down the piracy problem dramatically. It's the old fistful of sand problem. The harder you squeeze the more you lose.

[ July 16, 2003, 02:32: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]