Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[PvK]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
What about a tax rate of 0.1% per employee?
Don't hire more than 1000 employees, or you're in trouble.

Encourage small, friendly mom & pop home businesses.

Sounds like a better system than megacorps taking over the world!

PvK

[geoschmo]

[quote]Originally posted by PvK:

The problem with anti-piracy laws is that they're obsolete and unenforceable...... Which empire is going to have better research and happiness Ratings? The one where the average citizen can only afford to access 0.01% of the media?

If copyright were limited and reasonable then it wouldn't have to result in 99% of the population not having access. But simply not enforcing copyright because it is to hard to do is a bad solution. A reasonable copyright strictly enforced will incentivise inovation, creative production and cause a greater rate of research.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Sounds like motivating your public with threats and surveillance to me. I think you will end up generating a revolutionary faction.

BTW, my personal policy is to buy games I respect enough to want (which ends up being a short list), though I often shop around, wait for price drops, and/or buy used.

PvK

[deccan]

Originally posted by rdouglass:
http://global.bsa.org/usa/press/news...-17.1667.phtml

Well, that particular case certainly didn't involve EULA issues. It involved outright software piracy which is a copyright infringement. Copyrighted products are protected by copyright laws and have nothing to do with the EULA, after all books don't come with EULAs, but that doesn't mean that it's legal to copy and distribute copyrighted books.

In a sense this is a straw man issue. The real issue, as most people have realized judging by the direction in which the discussion has moved, is the issue of intellectual property, i.e. patents, trademarks, copyrights and such. Products simply don't need EULAs to be protected from unauthorized copying.

However, in cases where the EULA purports to specify ways in which the product may be used, , or to specify that the product can't be decompiled or analyzed to see how it works, or to restrict the right of the buyer to re-sell the product, then it's on doubtful legal grounds.

[ July 17, 2003, 00:18: Message edited by: deccan ]

[deccan]

The Economist is known for being a bastion of liberal free entreprise and is considered pro-business. But for the past few months, The Economist has taken a decidedly skeptical attitude towards the issue of intellectual property. Here are some excerpts:

Markets for ideas
http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=574263

Excerpt:

POPULAR discussion about intellectual-property rights is bedevilled by a recurring confusion. Few people any longer insist that “property is theft”, as Proudhon claimed. The centrality of property rights in a well-ordered market economy is so much taken for granted that the idea has seeped below the level of mainstream consciousness. So when owners of intellectual property say they are being robbed—as the record companies said they were, by Napster, or as big pharmaceutical companies say they are, by producers of cheap drugs in poor countries—one’s instinct is to see things their way. Property comes in many forms, one supposes, but whatever form it takes, stealing it must be wrong.

Not so fast. The urge to possess may be a basic human instinct, but the legal idea of property—and what, precisely, this complicated notion entails—is a human invention, developed down the years (and still being revised) to serve economic and social goals. The law on intellectual property, in particular, is everywhere both comparatively new and in flux. This is not a question of black and white, of right or wrong, as rich-country owners of intellectual property insist. It is a matter of striking a balance—and it is possible that owners are getting too much of a good deal.

Patently absurd?
http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=662374

Excerpt:

Innovation does not happen by accident. It takes long hours and a great deal of investment—often many millions of dollars. By conferring a monopoly to exploit a particular technology for a fixed period of time (increased recently in America from 17 to 20 years to bring it into line with Europe), patents create incentives for investors to put money into risky new ideas. But monopolies create problems of their own. Firms or individuals holding patents must register and defend them, risking potentially crippling lawsuits. Those without patents must license them, or engage in inefficient and anti-competitive alliances.

Economists have tussled for decades over ways to balance these costs and benefits. That debate is now taking a fresh turn. Growing numbers of economists are unearthing evidence that America’s patent regime is out of step with precisely those values it was designed to promote. Some believe that, in certain industries, strengthening intellectual-property protection accomplishes nothing positive. Others think that it may actually do some harm. If these economists are correct, patent-holders themselves may soon start clamouring for weaker, and not stronger, protection.

“Everything under the sun made by man is patentable,” asserted the American Supreme Court in a landmark decision in 1980 that left inventors scrambling to stake out their places in the sun. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of patents issued each year in America doubled from 55,000 to almost 110,000. “We are the patent office, not the rejection office,” said Bruce Lehman, the PTO’s commissioner at the time.Computers led the patent surge, with the number of related patents tripling between 1982 and 1992. Semiconductor patents increased fivefold over the same period (see chart).

As a result, Carl Shapiro, an economist at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says that computing, semiconductor and information-technology firms now encounter a “thicket” of patents that constrain their inventiveness. This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Tragedy of the Anti-Commons”—in contrast to the classic “Tragedy of the Commons” that described how free resources such as fresh air and clean water could be over-used and destroyed by selfish agents. Here, the opposite occurs: when lots of property owners have to grant permission before a resource can be used, the result is that the resource tends to be chronically under-used. “In the case of patents,” says Mr Shapiro, “innovation is stifled.”

Do firms become more innovative when they increase their patenting activity? Studies of the most patent-conscious business of all—the semiconductor industry—suggest they do not. Rosemarie Ziedonis at Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania and Bronwyn Hall at Haas found that investment in R&D (a reasonable proxy for innovation) did not substantially increase during the industry’s most feverish period of patenting. Instead, semiconductor firms simply squeezed more patents out of each dollar they spent on R&D. From 1982 to 1992, the chip makers doubled their output of patents from 0.3 to 0.6 for every million dollars of R&D. That was at a time when the patent yield in other industries had barely budged.

[deccan]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
I have a strong sense of what is right and wrong. For me morality is an absolute issue by definition. Stealing is one of the things my sense of morality says is wrong. Call me archaic, call me whatever you want but I believe what I believe. I can acknoledge that some people don't agree with me and even be civil towards them, but I am not going to accept that stealing is ok just because their "definition" of morality doesn't have a problem with it.

I'm not sure whether or not it's okay to bring this up again, but I really feel like bringing a number of things to Geo's attention.

There are heaps and heaps of books written on the subject of morality in particular and value theory in general, so any summarized description of the issue is clearly lacking in many ways.

However, one thing that is clearly unresolved is that there are deep, logical problems with the concept of "absolute morality".

This article is a good description:

On the Nature of Morality
http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/morality.htm

Note in particular these excerpts:

"... by objective morality is meant a moral view which claims that there exists a morality which is external to human beings. Much like the existence of a law of gravity, there is a moral law which exists independently of any conscious being. Hence, morality is not a human fabrication - it merely awaits to be detected. In contrast, subjective morality denotes the view that moral views are nothing but human opinions, the origin of which is biological, social, and psychological. Without conscious beings, there would be no such thing as morality. Furthermore, on the subjective view, it is not possible to deem a moral opinion "true" or "false" - since such assessments require some objective standard against which to assess."

"... it is important to distinguish subjective morality from moral relativism, which claims that moral views differ between different contexts or cultures, and from moral nihilism, which states that there is no morality or that morality does not matter. One possible implication of moral relativism, which is quite often wrongly inferred as being contained in the general class of subjective meta-ethics, is the view that moral statements can only be considered applicable in the context in which they are uttered."

I can't really comment further on Geo's position without knowing more specifics about his beliefs, but I do hope that he realizes that he won't be able to convince anyone of the rightness of the beliefs without advancing some logical argument in its support rather than relying on some subjective, personal moral intuition.

Furthermore, Geo, don't you think it would be good to know that your beliefs are right because they are grounded in reason rather than simply because you have an unassailable confidence in your intuition that they are right?

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by deccan:
I can't really comment further on Geo's position without knowing more specifics about his beliefs, but I do hope that he realizes that he won't be able to convince anyone of the rightness of the beliefs without advancing some logical argument in its support rather than relying on some subjective, personal moral intuition.

Yes, I do realize that. But I do not feel compelled to convince anyone of the rightness of my beliefs. It is sufficent to me that I believe them.

Originally posted by deccan:
Furthermore, Geo, don't you think it would be good to know that your beliefs are right because they are grounded in reason rather than simply because you have an unassailable confidence in your intuition that they are right?

If I felt compelled to convince you logically that I was right then yes that would be good to know. Since I do not, it is not neccesary.

Geoschmo

[ July 17, 2003, 02:23: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
I shall not post my opinion on the matter for a while.

Well, it's been ten days or so since you said that, four or so since the Last post in this thread, and you don't seem to have posted your opinion on the matter.

[Fyron]

Why are you so concerned with what I do Jack?

[Jack Simth]

Tesco - good point.

[ July 22, 2003, 01:15: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]