Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[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

[Baron Munchausen]

Copyright of characters vs. stories...

That is something of a problem. A trademark is traditionally something used to identify a business to its customers. Mickey Mouse is a trademark because he's the 'face' of Disney. The other characters invented by Disney are not necessarily trademarks. Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, Goofy, Pluto, etc... Control freaks like Walt Disney, Inc. are obviously not going to be pleased with losing control of even minor characters. But then corporations are often not pleased that they have competition at all, witness Microsoft and the 'pay me for every machine you ship' license on DOS and Windows. The public has to get off its collective arse and make Congress understand that copyright has gone to far. There's no other solution to the problem.

A reasonable limit on copyright duration is just going to have to be sufficient. Give people the time to get some decent benefits from what they invent, and then have a firm end of copyright. I advocate 21 years myself. This is the traditional length of a 'generation' even though we've lowered the voting age to 18 recently. (That was because of the complaints during the Vietnam War that 18 year-olds were old enough to die in war but not old enough to vote, remember.) Anyway, 21 years after a book, song, movie is released you've got a whole new generation of people who have grown up with it. It's just 'part of the world' for them. They can't remember a time when it wasn't around. So, it's time to let it go.

Yes, corporations 'owning' patents and copyrights is a problem. It's the source of the current warping of the law, actually. Because of the direct links of stock value to the compensation of top officers of the corporation suits have an incentive to try every trick they can come up with to increase the bottom line for their corporate monster^H^H^H^H^H^H^ master. You do know that almost all employment contracts include the right of the employer to all creations of the employee on the job, and sometimes even on their own time? Many people don't realize what they are signing, but those contracts really do say that the company owns everything you do. This is something else that needs to be stopped by Congress -- i.e. the general public has to get off their arse.

A real solution to the 'making a living' problem for artists of all stripes would be to set legal limits for the percentage of price for a copyrighted work that a corporate 'distributor' could take. Thus guaranteeing the 'original creator' a certain portion of his earnings. As it is now for example, most contemporary record labels don't pay 'their artists' a red cent in royalties. They have structured the contracts in (frankly illegal) ways that guarantee them all the profits and the artists get all the charges, resulting in the artists owing the corporations money. Most acts only make money on tour. A few actually do own at least a share in their own labels (Anni di Franco, Loreena McKennit, Metallica) and actually get some of the corporate profits.

(Hint: If you buy the CD of your favorite artist directly from them AT THE CONCERT they get the share that normally goes to the retail outlet. This is orders of magnitude more than they would normally get. Don't buy the CD at the store. Wait. Go to see them on tour and buy it directly from them. This doesn't solve the corporate greed problem, but it helps the artists.)

The most evil, slimey, disgusting trick of all is the 'work for hire' clause in those contracts. According to current copyright law a 'performance' cannot be a work for hire. Yet they have had this clause defining all songs/albums as 'works for hire' in their contracts for decades. If the artist notices they get the glad-hander reply 'but that's not valid so it doesn't mean anything'... yes, but all the time they have been lobbying to CHANGE THE LAW. They nearly got it passed a few years ago (it was an amendment or 'rider' on the 1998 copyright extension as I recall). Those b*st*rd suits have been plotting to rob 'their artists' once and for all even while they are whining before congress about how this 'piracy' hurts 'their artists'. How many of the complainers (ahem, Lars from Metallica?) even know this? It was just barely kicked out of the bill before it was finalized.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:32: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[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.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by 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...

This is another facet of the 'intellectual property' fiasco. Yes there are corporate 'entities' out there whose sole purpose for existance is to litigate over copyrights and patents. And yes you can patent 'general ideas' like Amazon.com's 'one click purchase' obscenity. This is not so much a function of legal stupidity as incompetent patent officers. The process of getting a patent hasn't been legally changed in generations. The people staffing the office have just gotten stupid. There undoubtedly will have to be some reform of the US Patent office as well as strictly legal reform.

The current hassles that SCO/Caldera is causing with Linux are in this same Category. They had complete turnover of management and the new staff decided that they couldn't make money the legit way and their best chance to get some money out of the corpse of the business was to start suing people. The plan seems to be that either they extort money from IBM by lawsuit or they scare IBM into buying them out before they completely crash and get sued by the shareholders.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]