Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[Erax]

Patents were created to allow inventors to benefit from the fruit of their creative work, while allowing their knowledge to be released to the public. Scientific knowledge must be shared to benefit society as a whole, but those who provide such knowledge must be compensated for it. Otherwise they would use their knowledge for themselves only, creating a series of technology-based secret societies.

So how is this different from books or music ? Well, entertainment content has no value unless it is shared, it can't really be hoarded for one's own benefit.

As for trademarks, they embody the 'brand value' that a name holds. If you market anything at all with the name 'Star Wars' on it, you know it will attract millions of fans, some of which may actually buy the product. The brand name adds value to your product, and you must compensate Lucasfilm for it.

Now I know very little about actual trademark legislation, other than that they have no expiration date. However, I feel they should work like mining rights : if you don't exploit them over a given period of time, you lose them.

[tesco samoa]

geo you can patient the idea for a train.... There are companies that just patient ideas and only ideas. Major corp's push this all the time.

You no longer have to beat someone to producing a product people like and purchase. You just have to beat the company who builds it by only coming up with a concept and prooving it in court.... That is it.

And the copy would fall under non commerical use. Commerical use would be for another company / person to use the code and sell it for profit...

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by tesco samoa:
And the copy would fall under non commerical use. Commerical use would be for another company / person to use the code and sell it for profit...

So copying a game to sell it to make money is commercial use and wrong, but copying the game for personal use to simply avoid paying the purchase price is non-commercial and is ok? That makes no sense to me.

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

[PvK]

I entirely agree that it would be a big help to restore copyrights to 5-20 year limits.

However, it doesn't really address piracy before that period is up. It would help in the case of things like business applications software. I actually prefer 5-year old Versions of MS Office, for example, because it lacks the overblown crud and unwanted features.

Of course, existing megacorps will fight this tooth and nail, since it will make many of their products even less appealing than they currently are.

There are certain things which technology has made trivial and easy, which society's obsolete conceptions are keeping us from using. The longer humans take to realize this, the more sad we are. Some people seem to take capitalism as a moral principle, but for some things, thanks to technology, it wouldn't really need to be relevant any more except through the oppression of corporations and governments. Is it really a good thing for most of the population to feel that they must spend most of their time and energy doing work that they don't enjoy, or face homelessness and hunger (not to mention reduced access to entertainment media) even if there is plenty for everyone, even if thanks to technology, only the people who enjoy working in construction and food production do so? Is it good that when technology makes certain professions unneeded, that the corporations get all the benefits, while the obsolete workers get nothing but a sudden need to find new careers, or go homeless?

Some people seem to think that my idea for compensating digital content creators is unrealistic. Under the current system, many people develop computer games for corporations. For a major title, most of the money goes to Wal-Death and other chain retail stores, some goes to other vendors, the publisher makes or loses depending on how well the mass market responded, and the actual developers generally get a small slice. If games were distributed essentially for free over the net, then most of the money the public pays to the retail/distribution/publisher etc engines doesn't exist. If the public paid an agency for the right to all media in a catalog (which ideally, would be most/all media, in my opinion), much less would be needed to support the same amount of content.

Some have objected to the idea of paying for unwanted or disapproved content, but it seems like they've missed (dismissed?) the part about people being able to indicate which works and creators they appreciate (equally, they could say which ones they disapprove), and this would determine the amount of compensation.

This is not an abandonment of free enterprise, but a further liberation of enterprise and artistry from the yoke of megacorporations and the threat of starvation for struggling artists.

PvK

[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 ]