Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[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