Yep
Do you disagree with the concept of the social contract, then - do you think it would actually be preferable to live in the natural state, or do you accept the social contract but disagree with the way the government is constructed?
I agree largely with the social contract, I just think that the state has legislated itself into irrelevance, and doesn’t really exist anymore than as a dying decaying artifact that one learns to overcome and transcend, and then it becomes very easy for one to avoid those who get some nurture from the state.
I’m not out trying to tear down the state other than by sharing my opinion that I think it’s already dead, that it was killed by the people who derive the most power from it.
It’s kind of like Christian missionaries, you can only murder so many people in the name of a utopian ideal before people begin to stop believing in that utopian ideal.
Erek
I’d say that largely I believe that the state is at the place where it is just now beginning to do more harm than good.
Erek
And rape still occurs, despite anti-rape laws being firmly in place. That hardly strikes me as a good argument against copyright protection or laws against sexual assault.
Good thing I didn’t come on to this thread to argue against copy-write. No, I posted that simply to point out that Steak seems to not have thought through the issue very ell.
Exactly. I’m more than happy to pay someone for their talent at selecting good music, writing, movies, etc… for example, I pay $12.95 a month for satellite radio precisely because I’d rather let professional DJs select music in the genres I like than wade through all the music out there myself. It’s only when they start staking a claim to the stuff they select that I have a problem.
I’ve heard you can easily buy bootleg DVDs on the streets of major U.S. cities. I’ve never had the opportunity (or desire) to look for them, so I can’t confirm it firsthand.
I don’t know if I’d really call P2P “underground”. An MPAA study last year estimated that one out of four internet users has downloaded at least one feature film. P2P file sharing accounts for about two-thirds of all internet traffic. It’s no further underground than spam is.
Also, big legal sticks are still only partially effective. Networks such as Freenet have shown that it’s possible to make a system where information can’t be traced to its source or destination, or examined along the way, or forcibly removed. You can’t remove a popular file from Freenet once it’s been inserted, unless you find and confiscate every computer connected to the network, and if the Chinese government can’t do that to silence political dissidents, I doubt the content industries could do it to stop copyright infringement. Now, all that anonymity comes at a price, and there are more convenient alternatives for people who just want to trade music and movies… but if the alternatives are ever successfully shut down (which is unlikely in itself), those people will fall back on the “nuclear option” of slow, anonymous, unstoppable networks.
Well, even with music, that problem arises. A 32 kbps MP3 version of Britney Spears’s song sounds noticably worse than the original - it’s not the same information, but how different is different enough?
Yes, I believe we still would have lightbulbs today if Edison hadn’t been able to patent them. They might’ve been invented by someone else who either did the experiments just to push the boundaries of technology, or found another way to get paid for his research.
For a small modern-day example, look at message boards like videohelp.com and doom9.org, where you can find people testing hundreds of combinations of audio/video filters, compression settings, etc. and publishing their findings, just because they care about that sort of thing. They’re not making a dime from it, and in most cases, they couldn’t sell the resulting video even if they wanted to.
Some of that can be attributed to the fact that there are 10 times as many people in the world today, and the tools for creating and distributing literature and music are available to average folks.
There’s certainly more quantity, but I’m not convinced there’s more quality than can be explained by new artists simply building on the work of their predecessors.
Nor am I convinced that having a greater quantity of art is worth sacrificing free speech or the basic human desire to share our experiences with friends and strangers. If I started a company and got the city council to grant me a monopoly on helping people cross the street, so that I could make a profit by charging for that service and it were illegal for anyone else to provide it without my consent, you can bet I’d have a man at every busy intersection eager to help any little old ladies who came by… but would it be worth it?
Every time I see Mr2001 post his pseudo-mystical bullshit about intellectual property, I realize that I would hate to own a restaurant he ate in.
Restaurateur: “Mr2001, my waiter tells me you refuse to pay your bill. Was there anything wrong with your meal?”
Mr2001: “On the contrary, the dishes were exquisite to the last one.”
R: “Then why will you not pay?”
M: “Well, all the parts of the meal were really just arrangements of food on the plate, weren’t they? If your restaurant hadn’t put them together this way tonight, it’s not impossible to imagine that I might eventually encounter or even create the same arrangement of the same foods one day, so why should you get the credit or any profit?”
R: “Well, you couldn’t be sure that that would ever happen in your lifetime, much less anytime soon. The fact that you enjoyed this meal here on this night is the direct result of the time and effort put in by my kitchen and waitstaff, not to mention the creation of the dishes by my master chef, who spent years honing his craft at the expense of all other employable activities.”
M: “I still don’t see why I owe them anything. I could have grown that food, gathered it, prepared it and cooked it myself if I’d been of a mind to. What’s so special about the people that work here that I should pay them?”
R: “Why on earth would any of them go to all that effort if not to be compensated? Why should I keep this building maintained or pay its bills, if I can’t turn a dollar for my troubles?”
M: “Look, if that’s the sort of thing you want to spend your time doing, that’s great, more power to ya, but no one should expect that I should help support your desire to make a living off it. Who do you think you are?”
R: “Don’t you see that if everyone thought as you did, there would be no restaurants? You yourself said you enjoyed your experience here, wouldn’t you like to see this sort of thing go on?”
M: “Look, I have a right to eat, even if it puts you and every other restaurant out of business. Sure, maybe really tasty, well-prepared meals will be a little harder to come by, but I just know there will be plenty of people who will still pay for cooking school and enough ingredients to experiment with, and the gas and the pots and pans, just for the sheer thrill of providing professional-level meals for others. And if we’re all lucky, they’ll leave some recipes lying around where we can get at them, and we can all share them with each other without exchanging filthy lucre. Either way, the public’s inherent right to food will no longer be infringed. Turnips want to be free!”
Groucho Marx couldn’t think up this level of absurdity. And even if he did, Mr2001 wouldn’t want to pay to see the movie.
Kudos, sir! That’s a hilarious story, and all you have to do to appreciate it is ignore the huge differences between food–a physical object that can only be in one place at a time, i.e. the steak that’s in my stomach can’t also be in your freezer–and information. I look forward to seeing your compilation at the top of the bestseller list.
Let me expand on my thought, and see if you think it makes sense. People may violate copyright fairly often, music seems to be the biggest forum for this. However, there is a vast difference between getting fairly easy illegal copies of a work, and getting a legal (non-copyright) copy. Here’s why.
To get an illegal copy, you either need to search out and physically copy a work, or go online and download a potentially crappy copy. Without copyright, you wouldn’t even need to do that, you’d go to Wal-Mart and pick up a perfectly legal, high quality, copy for $1. You wouldn’t have to go to an underground website to download a free copy of Windows to put on your home built computer, because a free copy would come with every Dell machine. Having 25% of people downloading one film is a far cry from having the new King Kong show up with a dirt cheap top notch copy in every major US retailer two days after release. This is my vision of a world without copyright.
Get rid of copyright, and I fail to see how any original artists are going to get compensated for their efforts. Don’t compensate people, they have to feed themselves somehow, that time won’t be spent creating.
On the lightbulb example, how much longer would it have taken to invent it? 5 years? 10? Edison tested thousands of filament types and pushed HARD because he wanted to be first with the patent. Leave it up to scientific hobbyists and it lingers, instead of being invented. Hell, some inventions could be delayed longer than the length of patent in the first place. I fail to see how society is benefitted by having innovation delayed like this.
Understand also, that I’m making a conceptual argument, not exactly defending the current laws. I think copyright in particular has gone off the deep end, and the RIAA is run by schmucks, but the general idea is good.
And the haircuts, which are presumably also physical objects, or at least artifacts of labour and innovation, according to your earlier post, which can also only be in one place at one time?
The only difference is the economics of the supply side. What you have shown yourself time and again to be willfully blind to is that the creation of the final product that you consume is the result of someone’s time, effort and expertise. You continuously defend the ridiculous notion that the people who put in the time, made the effort, and developed the expertise have earned nothing from you for their troubles.
Certainly, one could develop an algorithm to generate random MP3 files. They are just numbers after all, as you say. And eventually, it would generate every piece of your favorite music exactly as it sounds now. The infinite number of monkeys will eventually generate, on their infinite number of typewriters, every work in the Library of Congress as well, if given infinite time.
Yet you constistently fail to recognize your debt to the work of people who shortened that wait for you to something less than infinity.
I take that saying a lot further back then most of you. To the library of Alexandria, which some predict, if not destroyed, would have advanced civilization to the point that we would have been to the moon 300 years ago, and have established bases on mars. We would all have those Back to the Furture Mr. fusion thingies.
Making information available (free) allows information to grow much faster then restricting it, which benifits humanity as a whole, not just the RIAA.
While agree with your sentiment, I think you are trying hand-wave past the reality of digital information, the ease of info transfer, and human nature. The fact is, it is incredibly easy to move information. So, how do you deal with it? It seems you, and others, are only suggesting punitive measures on the part of creators to protect their product. What some of us are suggesting is a new economic model that 1)allows people to make a living making ‘art’ and 2) allows that information to be shared without fear of reprisal.
“Information wants to be free” = “Bend over, and give to me your website content, Monkey-Boy.”
What’s ridiculous about it? There are many things that can’t be copyrighted or patented, yet are the product of “someone’s time, effort, and expertise”.
As I’ve already posted, this is not so. Information is non-rival in consumption.
Haircuts, BTW, are another “classic example” good in economics: hair cuts - unlike (say) wheat - can’t be traded across borders, nor resold. Again, this makes a difference to the performance of markets that is not captured by a slogan.
Again, this does not in anyway affect the right of those who created and published the information to benefit from their efforts. The lack of physical consumption in the exchange of information is balanced by the need to create new information to stay afloat financially. Remove the financial incentive, and there is no reason to produce new information for distribution.
What you are calling a “haircut” seems to be the physical appearance of your head after receiving a haircut, which, of course, is not a commodity. A haircut is a service. An MP3 file of a song is not.
The fallacy here is the notion that digital information transfer creates something new under the sun.
The threat to the impetus to create new works has been plain since the creation of the printing press allowed information to be duplicated and transferred at lightning speed (compared to what was available before).
Copyright laws recognize the creators right to control a work for a limited space of time. You can argue that the time is too long or too short, but its the only workable compromise.
The concepts are the same. Only the hardware, its speed, and its relative price have changed.
And what, pray tell, is this model?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know. It would be an interesting discussion, though, and more fruitful than what we’ve been having.
But when you have the volume of violation that we currently have, it seems like you’d at least think of revisiting your model, especially since the model has been in place for such a long time. Isn’t that what happens in other industries?
I think the basic disconnect is with the level of harm you are projecting. Too many of us grew up in the age of making mix tapes, taping off the radio, copying audio cassette and vhs tapes without the iron fist of the law coming down on us. Somehow, we all still purchased various forms of media, whether tapes, cds, or else merchandise and concert tickets. So the idea that art production will simply cease just doesn’t make sense. A reduction in the volume of art? Perhaps. But perhaps the volume has been artificially inflated due to our current model?