Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[geoschmo]

Pvk, how do you determine who qualifies as an artist/author able to receive the "stipend" you talked about? What's to stop everyone form declaring themselves an artist and getting a free check even if they produce nothing worthwhile?

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
...
From the perspective of the author of the work what is the difference if another company makes a million copies and sells them without compensating him, or if a million people all make one copy without compensating him. Either way that is one million copies he doesn't get paid for.

As to your other point I will plead ignorance. I have never heard of a company patenting an idea the way you are describing it. In fact to my knokwledge you have to have some sort of diagram to get a patent. How do you diagram an idea?

Geoschmo

In the one case, the public decided to buy a million copies of the work, and someone else got the money. (Reminds me of the current corporate model.)

In the other case, no one thought the work was worth the price, but a million people thought it was interesting enough to copy.

Seems like a big difference to me.

You patent an idea by having a moronic patent office. There are all sorts of patented ideas, including for many computer algorithms which are quite easy to independently develop without any foreknowledge, but would be against patent law to use if you did. E.g. I believe I have seen the patent for Huffman encoding, which is essentially the extremely basic idea that you could store something like:

abcEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEe

as:

abc(10xEEEe)

Oh boy, let's reward the sleezes who thought of a clever but fundamental idea (or whose employees did) and then decided to get the goverment to let only them use it.

PvK

[PvK]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Pvk, how do you determine who qualifies as an artist/author able to receive the "stipend" you talked about? What's to stop everyone form declaring themselves an artist and getting a free check even if they produce nothing worthwhile?

Geoschmo

You can only give stipends to people who receive a certain amount of the voluntary approvals from the consumers.

PvK

[Loser]

I'm not sure I have a nice rational argument with which to confront your ideas, PvK, but they sound far to socialist to me. Establishing this central agency... well... sometimes such things are necessary, but it's to be avoided as much as possible.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
In the one case, the public decided to buy a million copies of the work, and someone else got the money. (Reminds me of the current corporate model.)

In the other case, no one thought the work was worth the price, but a million people thought it was interesting enough to copy.

Seems like a big difference to me.

Actually in the second it may have been worth the price. But why pay for it if you can get it for free and not be breaking the law?

I think I agree with Tesco. If he is saying that after five years you can freely copy it as long as you don't sell it, but before five years you aren't allowed to copy it. I think that is reasonable. Five years is a LONG time for software.

But Pvk if I understand you correctly, you are advocating changing the law so that there is no recrimination whatsoever for copying the software at any time as long as it's not being sold. If it wasn't agasist the law to make a copy of software why would anyone ever buy it? Even great software that you love and would pay for if you had to. You'd be stupid to pay for it if you could get it free wouldn't you?

Just because copying is easy and stopping it is hard doesn't mean it's ok and we shouldn't try.

Basically all software would be shareware. And how often do shareware authors make any money? Of course a few have made some. Aaron did himself with SE3. But not enough to do this full time.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
You can only give stipends to people who receive a certain amount of the voluntary approvals from the consumers.

So why not just cut out the inefficent middle man and just let the buyers buy what they want from the sellers they like. If the seller doesn't make something the buyer wants he'll get it from someone else. There's your voluntary approval right there.

Capitalism, what a concept.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:03: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

---

Originally posted by PvK:
You can only give stipends to people who receive a certain amount of the voluntary approvals from the consumers.

So why not just cut out the inefficent middle man and just let the buyers buy what they want from the sellers they like. If the seller doesn't make something the buyer wants he'll get it from someone else. There's your voluntary approval right there.

Capitalism, what a concept.

---

You're just ignoring the points and the topic. There are many reasons. Two are:

1) Like your previous suggestion, your solution doesn't address unauthorized copying. My system authorizes all copying. Your system retains incentive to copy without paying, but technology makes such copying trivial and costless (except to the creator who loses compensation). Nonetheless, your suggestion works to a limited extent, as evidenced by Shrapnel.

2) Your suggestion doesn't include how to eliminate the current megacorporate leeches which dominate the industry.

PvK