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Samizdata quote of the day The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.
– The artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, explaining why he isn’t getting down with the tubes.
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Apparently the artist is not very bright.
That will be the Pauper formerly known as Prince soon then will it?
While not agreeing with the man’s claim that the Internet is ‘completely over’, I do feel that he partly has a point in that a very large part of the Internet is CFU and a stone waste of electrons.
His comments relate specifically to making money from music via the Internet. Since he has made more money than God in the music business, I take leave to assume that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to making money in the music business, and he may very well be right when he says that the Internet is (presently, at least) an extraordinarily-poor way to make money in the music business. As a writer, performer, producer and impresario, he is a money-making machine the like of which has seldom been seen. Who would know better?
llater,
llamas
Llamas, you are making the same mistake he’s making. Whatever you see as waste, other people don’t – supply and demand and all that. Unless he is saying that those people are themselves a waste – but that would be something quite different from mere stupidity.
Sure but by the same merit the internet has destroyed the business model he used to make his money. The ‘music industry‘ is what is ‘completely over’… ‘music’ is not over but the ‘music-as-an-industry’ is going the way of the dinosaur. In the long run I wonder if even the iTunes style model is viable.
Release it for free on the net and make your money from live performances. That is the future, and that is just fine by me. In not more than 5 years I think the very notion of physical media will seem… quaint… a bit like rotary-dial landline telephones.
Alisa wrote:
‘Llamas, you are making the same mistake he’s making. Whatever you see as waste, other people don’t – supply and demand and all that.’
Well, his terms is over-simplistic and I took it as-was. Let me be more clear. We’ll come back to his point in a minute.
You make the mistake of assuming that all value judgements are equal. A large part of the Intertubes is a vast wasteland of useless crap and more-or-less total dreck, which has absolutely no value to anyone except to the one individual who put it there, and maybe one other – burning his or her time, synapses and energy in doing so. I would guess that 99% of the content on the Interweb is at this sort of pseudo-charity level. A lot of what it is used for ends up being anet negative for the user – a waste of their time and resources. Much of it is vastly-overpowered for what it is actually used for. It’s like using the printing presses of the New York Times to make a shopping list – one copy – that gets crumpled and thrown in the trash as you leave the store. It’s a waste.
Take Facebook as another example. Petabytes of storage, uncountable squillions of operations of computing power, technology of transmission that would have made the Apollo astronauts blink in amazement- all so that Heather can tell Sydny “OMG did U C what she was wring? I tht I wd DIE!” Does this have ‘value’ to the teens that use it? Sure, it does. But I suggest that the value judgements of teenagers are – questionable. And we are all being eagerly pressed to apply those same value judgements to all aspects of our daily lives. It’s new, it’s hip, all the yoof are using it, it must have value!
Wrong. Most of it is clueless waste. And pr*n, of course – make your own judgements about that.
Prince knows how to make bank making and distributing music – he’s in a class with a few dozen, maybe a few hundred people on the planet. The history of the Information CartTrack is littered with the rotting corpses of those who misjudged the ‘value’ it might bring to them and to its users. I think his judgement is more to be trusted that the voices of those who predict his demise – people whose argument amounts to saying ‘well, it’s the Intertubes, innit? It’s new, it’s hip, it must be the right thing to do!’ Contrary to popular belief, the Internet is not the single solution for any and all problems, and the urge to see it as such has produced an uncountable mass of waste – waste of time, waste of resources, waste of opportunity.
llater,
llamas
No, we are not – and that is a big part of my point. The argument you are making is similar to something an old friend of mine quoted many years ago: “What, you are driving all this distance, wasting all this gas, time and energy just for a piece of cake?” My friend’s reply was: “No, not for the piece of cake – for me.” For your own sake, I hope you can see the point.
Regarding the music business and the former artist, you could well be right – although my money is still on Perry’s point of view or something along those lines.
Our overly-charitable host wrote:
‘Sure but by the same merit the internet has destroyed the business model he used to make his money. The ‘music industry’ is what is ‘completely over’… ‘music’ is not over but the ‘music-as-an-industry’ is going the way of the dinosaur. In the long run I wonder if even the iTunes style model is viable.
Release it for free on the net and make your money from live performances.’
Real-world experience suggests that you are – mistaken.
The number of bands that can make a living solely from live performances is low – like, zero. The cost of taking it on the road is so vast that many bands tour at or near a loss, solely in order to promote the sales of recordings. The only band in living memory who could make a living this way for any extended period may have been the Grateful Dead, and it was as much as anything a lifestyle choice for them – or a tacit acceptance of the fact that their music was being stolen wholesale by their fans.
The business model of the music industry that you so airily dismiss not only made Prince a boatload of money in the past, but continues to do so today – completely unencumbered by the Intertubes.
The suggestion to ‘release it for free on the net and make your money from live performances’ is equivalent to suggesting that writers release their works for free on the net and make their money from live readings. Name me an author who is making fat bank doing that. Just one would be fine.
I’m getting really tired of these ‘way of the dinosaur’ analogies. In truth, the entities that have most-resembled the dinosaurs – brief, dead-end evolutionary excursions – have been the myriads who have tried to make money on the Internet and found that it doesn’t work. There’s been one stiff dot-com bubble already, and there may well be another one soon.
Even the Sloane Ranger of the original tale, by a second delicious irony, points out how the supposed ‘new’ model of the music industry that you so earnestly believe is coming – is doomed to fail. She’s going to BitTorrent Prince – which is well-nigh impossible to do legally. If we were talking about a writer, and her response had been “I’ll go down to W H Smith and steal a copy of his book and see if I like it – would you be touting this as a sustainable model for dsitributing writings? Most of the ‘new’ model of music distribution is grounded in theft, either overt or tacitly-accepted – and theft is never a good basis for any sustained human enterprise.
For a look at the real future of music distribution as an industry, suggest you take a peek at the leaders in the techno/trance genre, who have made a very-successful fusion of live performance, hard-media distribution and carefully-selective use of the Internet as a marketing tool. Those wily Dutchmen . . . .
llater,
llamas
llamas:
Given that the popularity of live reading is much lower than the popularity of live music, I don’t think it’s a particularly strong analogy. I think a better comparison would be with a stand-up comedian who also releases written material for free.
I think that comparison is a bit off. Stealing a book would involve the permanent taking of a physical object from its owner. A better comparison would be if she’d said “I’ll go down to the library, borrow a copy of his book and see if I like it.” Given that public libraries and writers have co-existed for decades, we know it is a sustainable model for distributing writings.
Copyright infringement, maybe, but certainly not theft.
Paul, I do think Llamas is correct on the theft point, and I’ll use your library analogy to explain why: books are obtained (purchased?) by libraries with the full consent of authors, which is not the case with torrents, at least not (yet) for most musicians. Indeed, where such consent does exist, it ceases to be theft.
And, BTW, I am not big on copyright law myself.
But I do agree with your first point about live performances.
Then many bands are going to need to also have a day job if they want to make music. However in fact a great many bands make “a living” from live performance… the difference is the days of people making “a living” like Prince did back in the day are soon to be seen as a historical oddity. Music is destined to be a cottage industry with the occasional mega star, not a global musical sausage factory mega-business in the way it currently is.
I am not ‘touting’ it, I am just saying what I think will inevitably happen, Is it ‘theft’? Well maybe, but that is (sadly?) irreverent to my prediction because if the intertubes makes the recordings-on-physical-media business untenable, then it makes it untenable and there is no use acting as it music-as-an-object is a viable economic model. Will this also destroy the publishing industry? Perhaps it will but there are several differences.
Ok I have done my one liner, now time to dip my toe into the main subject, as I know a little bit about the music business.
Like Perry said, the Music business as we have known it is dead, but music is definately not.
And let us get the former Prince latterly to be known as Fuckwit out of the way first.
He is a great musician, who made some great music, but he didn’t make money, his record company did that for him, because on his own he wouldn’t know how.
The fact that the Record Company kept by far the largest chunk of the money he generated is of course beyond him. He still has millions in the bank after all.
It used to work like this…
You are a struggling band, practicing in your bedrooms and garages. You want to be superstars, how do you go about it?
Well you get yourselves a gig, any gig, be it a wedding or a church fete and build yourselves a following. Gradually you will be running up and down the motorways of England playing crappy little clubs and Students Unions for next to nothing, hoping an A&R man for a record company notices you (you invite millions, but they seldom come, especially if the gig is outside London) and signs you up to a record contract. At this point you are making no money, in fact spending your own, or more likely your parents, in the hope of future fame and fortune.
Oh bliss! you finally get that record contract and the big £100,000 advance. You think you’re sorted and can buy a big car etc, well look at the small print sonny, that advance is to cover your living expenses, travel, recording costs, wage bills etc etc. You have in effect sold your soul to the Company Store for 2pence a copy in royalties for every record sold, and the record company keep the rest.
But now you have a record out, and you have access to the radio, you are getting played and your sales are going up and up and even with the crappy deal you signed as a spotty innocent youth, the money and the fame feels good.
That’s if you are successful that is. Most don’t get beyond this point, being one or two hit wonders before the Record company gets bored with you, or more likely your decreasing sales of the second album, and you’re dropped cold. Heh, but still probably oweing them money.
That was the monopoly situation of old. No record company no record. No record no airplay. No airplay no sales. A tight little circuit of people who made money out of you a damn sight faster than you could.And dont forget your manager and lawyers 10%
But then came Punk and Independendent Labels like Rough Trade , or just start your own, where you could keep a bigger share of the profits for yourselves.
Then comes the internet.
Yes people will file share for free they always have. My generation taped off the radio and from our friends LPs after all, but we still, if we really liked the music, would buy a copy of it in the end.
So the way it goes now is still the same to start with. You have to play gigs in crappy places to get a following, but you can also record stuff in your bedroom on very cheap machines that would put Abbey Road to shame at the height of the Beatles. Then you can release a few tracks on your own website or You Tube and once you have a dedicated following you can charge for a full online exclusive, or sell CDs at your gigs. You will be far better off than with the old monopoly system that was only interested with the fickle whims of fashion and not your music or career.
Oh and as to the Grateful Dead, well I know a bit about then too.Some of them were aquaintances of mine. They were about as Libertarian a band as you can get in the ever leftie world of the music biz.
Their fans didn’t steal their music, they gave it them for free. Around the time of American Beauty, which is reconed to be their best studio album, they noticed that they were selling fuck all records, so as they loved to play live they decided to go with that. They provided access points for the audience to plug in their recorders and take the feed right off the mixing desk. Those tapes got passed around, and increased the audience and around and around it went till Jerry died.
Hell, they even kept the road crew on wages, gigging or not. You’d never find with the Rolling Stones for instance.
They had an ethos I find hugely admirable, and after all, one of their main songwriters was this guy. A pioneer of the Internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
Alisa:
Theft is the taking of property with the intention of permanently depriving the owner of it. When a copy of information is made or shared, that doesn’t happen, so it can’t reasonably be described as theft.
Just as with library books, the information shared via torrents will generally be sourced from CDs purchased with the full consent of the owner. In both cases, the information on that medium is shared with other people by the purchaser. That raises a question; if an author said they didn’t want libraries to share their books as it deprives them of money (which undoubtedly some would, if they thought they could get away with it), would you then view libraries as being guilty of theft?
Paul: yes, I would. My definition of theft is making use of something (tangible or not*) that belongs to another person without their consent. In fact, in my view, all relationships between humans hinge on consent or the lack of it.
*Conversely, you could reasonably argue that the term ‘theft’ can only apply to tangible objects. If so, then we’d have to find a different term for what we are talking about here. But that would only make a semantic difference and have no bearing on the moral issue, because such behavior, in my view, would still be just as immoral as “regular” theft.
They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.
If only the Internet filled one’s head with numbers; that is, more math. Prince is radically po-mo with the idea that numbers are bad for you. Perhaps he should get down with Kaplinsky and Latour. Make a hell of band.
I’ve a number of points for a number of people…
* Not only did the Grateful Dead encourage tapeheads and not only were they fairly libertarian in outlook… some of them were also early supporters of the L5 Society, which is now the National Space Society. I’ve been with this crowd since 1979. (Oh and on another angle, some very good friends of mine recorded on Relix)
* Is copying digital data theft? Here’s a thought experiment for you. Literally. As a musician, when I hear a song, I have recorded it in my brain. I can play it back and sometimes am stuck with a catchy one to the point of wanting to get rid of it. Within the next 20 years we are going to have direct brain interfaces that are implantable gazillion gigabyte backup storage. So if I listen to a song and it is recorded in my brain-extensions, is that theft? If I let a girl friend snuggle up and we share thoughts through our direct brain interfaces (we are going to have ESP of the digital sort by then) is that theft?
* Prince and his business model. Whether he knew how to make money or not is irrelevant. The business model has collapsed. I told people in the music trade about this over a decade ago.
Alisa,
If you apply that point consistently, it would lead you to conclude that libraries are theft. Do you really mean that?
Various things :
RAB wrote ;
“And let us get the former Prince latterly to be known as Fuckwit out of the way first.
He is a great musician, who made some great music, but he didn’t make money, his record company did that for him, because on his own he wouldn’t know how.
The fact that the Record Company kept by far the largest chunk of the money he generated is of course beyond him. He still has millions in the bank after all.’
This airy dismissal completely ignores the fact that Prince IS his own record company – he famously broke with Warners many years ago, and the Paisley Park empire was founded and is run primarily by Prince. He is, in a sense, doing much of what is being described here as the future of the music business – taking control of the making and distributing of his products, and keeping more of the profits for himself. And his own personal music product, while significant, is by no means the sole basis of that success.
Regarding theft – oh, how libertarrians love to slice that garlic thin.
Are libraries “theft”? No, of course they are not. Their contents were bought and paid for, and serial use of a properly-purchased product is not theft. Libraries do not ‘share’ books – they permit the serial use of books by many users.
Is our Sloane Ranger with her BitTorrent analogous to using a library? No, it is not – the library doesn’t let you keep the books you borrow, and borrowing a library book does not give you the right to make a photocopy of it..
Is what she proposes to do analagous to stealing a book from W H Smith? Not quite – I could have crafted that description better. What she actually doing is going to W H Smith, taking a book off the shelf, making a photocopy of the book, and then putting it back. It’s still theft – of the intellectual property of the author.
Many here seem not to want to accept the idea that intangible property or intellectual property is property nonetheless, and that copying it without the owner’s consent is no different than taking their tangible property without their consent. If the Grateful Dead willingly consent to give their property away – good luck to them. It’s theirs to give. But that doesn’t make their choices a viable business plan that should be enforced upon everyone else, overtly or otherwise.
Most ideas for making money pubslishing (anything) on the Internet go like this
1. create desirable content
2. something happens, not quite sure what
3. bank profits
Most people are still working on #2. One thing’s for sure – ‘giving it away’ is not a sustainable model.
Dale Amon wrote:
‘The business model has collapsed. I told people in the music trade about this over a decade ago.’
Another ‘way of the dinosaur’ analogy. When, oh when, will they realize that their business model has collapsed as you predicted?
The fact is, it hasn’t “collapsed” – it’s changing. Leaving aside the outliers like the Grateful Dead, mechanisms are being developed that will ensure a steady flow of tangible income to the producers of intangible property – because that’s the only reason that they’ll keep doing it. The ways of the 50’s and 60’s have gone, as RAB describes, but that doesn’t mean that the new business model has to be based in theft simply becasue the new technology makes theft easier or more-palatable for the thief.
You know when you download ( = copy) a song for free, that it’s more-than-likely without the permission of the owner. Rationalize it any way you like, it’s still theft, and the fact that you could do it from the comfort of your easy chair and at low risk of being caught doesn’t change that fundamental concept. You took what doesn’t belong to you without paying for it. Tell me how that can be the basis for a sustainable system for producing music. Or writings, or any other intangible property that is hard to create but easy to copy.
llater,
llamas
What Llamas said (except for the Prince bit, because I have no clue there).
Paul, just to strengthen the library point: libraries purchase books with the obvious purpose of lending them out. Authors/publishers are fully aware of that and agree to it.
That said, and to address Dale’s second point plus to make a general one of my own: the fact that people freely consent to something does not mean that what they consented to is ideal from their perspective – in fact, most of the times it is very far from ideal, usually it is merely something that they can realistically live with. The reason they consent to it is that reality forces them to do so. Note: physical reality does – like the futuristic one Dale described, not artificial limitations imposed on physical reality by people who think they know what’s best for everyone else. And this is the reality as I see it (in the absence of any impositions by people who know what’s best for the rest of us, AKA ‘laws’): if I have a new and wonderful tune in my head, I have three options. One is to sing it all over the place, have other people overhear it and spread it further – no profit. The second one is to shut up and keep it to myself – no profit. The only way to make a profit (other than to charge for live performances) is to attach the tune to some physical medium made available to potential customers (a plastic disk, a piece of digital memory, someone’s brain cells in Dale’s scenario – whatever), under certain conditions.
Llamas, to be clear,
Breaching copyright is not theft, no matter how much pretending it is makes for an easier argument.
Taking somebody’s tangible property is nothing like copying somebody’s “intellectual property” as there is no permanent deprivation.
Genuine property and “intellectual property” are not equivalent in any meaningful sense. The former is justifiable as a means to resolve disputes over the use of rivalrous goods. The latter is a tax.
Alisa,
In general, authors don’t agree to allow libraries to lend their books, they just aren’t granted the legal means to prevent it. Given that you point to consent as part of the basis of your position, that is a vital distinction.
Paul Lockett – you can say it all you like, ‘just to be clear’, but that doesn’t make it so.
Intellectual property is not a tax – it is property, in which the owner has rights. Copyright (and patent, and trademark, and so forth) are simply easily-understood ways to codify the exact nature of the property.
Taking someone’s tangible property is exactly like taking their intellectual property – you deprive them of their control of it, and their ability to benefit from it, and you take both those things unto yourself.
If I write a book (let us say), there are two ways you can steal it from me.
You can take the physical book – the paper and the ink – and thereby deprive me of the right to control my property and to benefit from it in whatever way I see fit. In doing so, you steal two things – the physical materials and the intellectual content that gives that paper and ink their added value.
Or you can take the contents only – leave the paper and ink behind, but steal the very essence of it, that gives the paper and ink their value.
Either way, you take my property (whether tangible or not) and you dilute or destroy my ability to benefit from my property in whatever way I see fit. The outcomes are identical (if we disregard the trivial instrinsic value of paper and ink) for both you and I, regardless of which form of taking you employ. Ergo, if one form of taking is theft, then so is the other.
You can try and redefine terms all you like, but I will not indulge you. Instead, I ask you to describe in what manner you feel that intangible, intellectual property (music, writings, designs, formulae, trademarks ASF) should be treated, and how you see that treatment playing out in commercial endeavour.
llater,
llamas
Fair enough, Paul, but are you really arguing that they would actually want to prevent that?
Another general point: aside from some very basic things, namely: food, shelter and clothing – no tangible property has any value (mind you, not the same thing as ‘cost’ or ‘price’) to almost anyone above the very trivial. Most of the real wealth is anything but the tangible things we possess. The real value of my computer, my car, my electrical appliances, my CDs and books, my jewelery, my purchased artwork and so on, and so on, is not in the bits of plastic and wood and metal they are made of, and not even in the labor that was put into making them – it is in the things I can do with them (including just staring at them), in the pleasure I can derive from doing it, and in additional such wealth I can generate by doing it. And that is what non-tangible (call it ‘intellectual’) property is all about.
Thanks Llamas, airy dismissal is a speciality of mine. 😉
And of course I didn’t know Prince had his own company, he not being one of my faves, but that changes nothing does it? He is still operating on the old model.
All he did was wise up that Warners were ripping him off and now he has a much larger slice of the pie for himself, providing he can sell the pie that is.
What I’m talking about is giving a little to get a lot. It goes back to the Sloane on the thread above. She has never heard of Prince and if she cant find any of his music on the internet, then she isn’t going to enquire further.
Let me give you a couple of examples here.
A few weeks ago, the students who rent the house next to mine were having a BBQ. I took the dog out our back garden for a pee around 10 oclock and couldn’t help noticing that the music they were playing was Love’s Forever Changes.
Well I was curious to know how 19 year olds, who presumably you would think would be listening to the Kaiser Chiefs or the Scissors Sisters came across something as old an pretty obscure as that.
Oh, said the guy I asked over the back wall, I was round my best mates house one night and his dad was talking about all the great bands he loved in his youth, and Love was his all time favorite. Well I had never heard of ’em, so I looked on You Tube and found Alone again or and went wow! and went out and bought the CD next day. Brilliant isnt it?
I happily agreed.
And even me, who is supposed to be an expert. My wife came home one night saying she’d seen an ad for Richard Bona, who was playing St Georges Hall (probably the best accustics in Britain) He’s supposed to be an amazing bass player, she said.
Well I’d never heard of him, so I went to You Tube and sure enough there he was, and he was brilliant.
“Right get your coat on lady, we are off to the gig!”
Now you see that would never have happened without the Internet. Love sold another copy of Forever Changes, Richard Bona got two more bums on seats than he would have had before, and I went out and bought a couple of his CDs an the back of an amazing performance.
I’ll skip the cockwaffle about Intellectual propery rights and theft if you dont mind. I am a practical person who deals in realities not high falutin theory.
Which of these two do you think is costing the old model music industry the dearest? File sharing and CD copying among enthusiasts and friends, or flat out Piracy?
I travel quite a lot and believe me, walk into any music store in Turkey, Egypt, India, China and Africa and you can guarantee that 99% of the stock is pirated, and there’s bugger all the Music Industry can do about it.
But even that has a silver lining you see, because if you were ever to tour in these countries you would be guaranteed an audience because the people putting their bums on the seats know who you are and what you do.
So it is often good to give a little in the hope of getting a lot more. Ok?
I bloody knew I would be smited again. This is getting silly! You know me better than that.
Get it up as soon as you can eh?
Alisa,
I don’t believe all authors would want to prevent libraries from lending their books, but I have no doubt some would. Given the opportunity, I have no doubt that many would try to replicate the silly arguments of other media and claim that every individual who reads their book must pay personally, or is a thief.
You can see the tendency coming out with electronic books.
Paul: I have no problem with that. It may be silly business-wise, but it is not silly on principle, and I believe this should be their prerogative.
I’m sure I would see his album flying off the shelves at the record store if I knew how to find one.
llamas:
Functionally it is. It is a compulsory levy on specific activities, enforced by the state, for the purposes of paying people in order to give them an incentive to perform work that the state has deemed to be worthy of subsidising. The fact the cash is paid directly to the recipent, rather than collected by the state and paid out, doesn’t change the basic nature of what is happening.
Let’s put the tangibility issue to one side and say that is true. The problem with the argument you’ve put forward is that, at no point have you actually talked about somebody taking another person’s copyright, just somebody infringing another person’s copyright. In the way you’ve described it, in order to steal your copyright, I would have to take it away from you, by claiming to be the rightful holder of the state granted copyright in your work and asserting the right to prevent others using the work without my permission. Merely copying does not do that. The closest example I can think of is the way in which Edwyn Collin’s former record label issued a take-down notice to Myspace, in spite of the fact that Collin’s held the copyright in all his songs.
Compare it to a house. If I were to take your state granted land title away from you, have you thrown out of your house and move in, I would be stealing your house. On the other hand, if instead of taking those state granted rights away from you and using them myself, I merely ignore them and wander around your garden, in breach of those state granted rights, I would be trespassing and I’ve never heard anybody describe trespass as theft.
So, if people really want to compare copyright infringement to another act, trespass is far more accurate than theft. Of course, accuracy isn’t the issue; the main reason people call it theft is propaganda and “copyright trespassers” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “copyright thieves.”
+1 to what Paul’s saying. You can debate the morality of it if you want but copyright infringement is not theft. You can even analogize it to theft if you want but to claim an identity is incorrect and will lead one to draw conclusions based on the realities of actual theft rather than the actualities of copyright infringement (which is what certain people would like of course).
And Alisa, so using without consent is theft. So if I am in the background of your holiday photos, you are stealing my image? How about if I am standing (on public property) behind a building using it for shelter without permission of the owners? Theft requires depriving the original owner of something.
It is others who are seeking to change the definition of theft (and no “My definition” is not good enough, words have meaning), not Paul and judging by how ingrained the misconception is, they have largely succeeded. However, the internet is now shining the spotlight on an area that once enjoyed the advantage of there being practically no difference, hard to copy, tangible, physical media being a prerequesite to distribution.
Paul Lockett:
1 – note that I never refer to ‘infringing copyright’ – that is your choice of construction, probably becasue it’s the only way that your argumet makes much logical sense. My poiunt refers to the taking of intellectual property.
You should note that copyright (and so forth) is not ‘enforced by the state’, as you claim, and so it cannot be a ‘tax’, as your convoluted construction claims.
If you actually knew anything much about this, you’d know that defending your rights in your intellectual property is your problem to address – the state merely provides the venue. Copyright infringement (and so forth) are not crimes and the state will not enforce your property rights for you, or punish an infringer with any criminal sanction. An action for copyright infringement (and so forth) is a civil action for damages.
2 – leaving all that aside – I don’t have time to waste with these camels-on-pinheads games of semantics – will you answer the question I asked you?
llater,
llamas
Richard, if you actually read my comments, you will see the answer – not that this is really what you are looking for.
It is simply amazing the length to which people will go to rationalize their moral conflicts. And Llamas, this is absolutely not unique to libertarians – I hear the same lame arguments and semantic gymnastics from free-riders of all political stripes.
llamas:
The problem with your approach is that ‘intellectual property’ is a meaningless propaganda term which seeks to create false equivalence between a number of different state granted privileges and while you talked about the taking of those privileges, the examples you gave didn’t involve the taking of them. That’s why, in order to cut through the confusion you were seeking to create, I referred to the specific act you were giving examples of.
It is, for the reasons I outlined.
All fairly irrelevant to the point I was making, but in any case wrong, as copyright infringement can attract criminal sanctions.
I find it quite amusing that when you were incorrectly describing an act as theft, even though it had its own description, you felt it was a point worth defending to the hilt, but now it’s been explained to you why it isn’t theft, you dismiss the issue as semantics.
Paul Lockett wrote:
‘All fairly irrelevant to the point I was making, but in any case wrong, as copyright infringement can attract criminal sanctions.’
You merely demonstrate how little you actually know about this subject.
The mere act of copyright infringement (SFAIK) does not attract criminal sanctions in any significant jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, profiting from copyright infringement may attract criminal sanctions – as any theft should. This is somewhat-the-case in the UK and the US, for example – but the mere manufacture of an infringing copy, for personal use only, is not a crime but a matter in equity, between you and the owner of the copyright.
Try and keep up.
Your trespass analogy is a fine example of misdirection. Stealing my intellectual property is not comparable to wandering around in my back yard, admiring the begonias. A better example would be if you moved into my back bedroom without paying rent, or if you snuck into a live concert without buying a ticket. Both start as simple trespass, but both end up taking, reducing or diluting the ability of another to profit from his property or labours – And That’s Theft.
But all of this is a really a waste of electrons, because I think we will have to accept that you simply do not recognize the idea that a person can possess intellectual property and have property rights in it, and leave it at that. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to respond your increasingly-convoluted arguments based on such a premise. I note that you will not provide any alternative idea of how such matters should be handled. It’s fairly obvious that you have never had to consider these issues on a personal level. You’re merely seeking to rationalize what amounts to a license to steal. Sorry, find someone else to persuade.
llamas
llamas, in your desperation, you are descending into the absurd. If I point out that copyright infringement can attract criminal sanctions and you tell me that is a sign of how little I know, but then go on to acknowledge the circumstances in which copyright infringement can lead to criminal sanctions, I can only assume that you are undertaking an experiment in surrealism.
As you are insistent on knowing how I think things should be handled, I believe that if people want to profit from intangible non-rivalrous items, they should be able to do so only in a way which doesn’t infringe my liberty, which would mean they would not be able to rely on state granted privileges and subsidies, but could use consensual methods, such as contract.
It is true, as Llamas says, that personal experience is important. For instance, at the firm I work at, we charge people for certain articles written with our firm’s name on it, partly to avoid having our stuff being plagiarised by our competitors, and also to protect our brand from misuse.
Brand protection is important: firms invest millions, even billions, in creating brands. Brands are an important part of a market in terms of protecting the consumer. If a brand is built up over many years and becomes associated with quality, then understandably, the firm in question will want to prevent interlopers from stealing it and offering a crap service.
This is why the IP issue is such a tricky one. I haven’t really been persuaded by the “death to IP” people because so much economic value is now attached to brands non-physical assets. It is a bit glib, I think, for people to imagine that if we get rid of this, that we’ll be able to get by reasonably well. I am not fully convinced of the case.
All right, I’ll bite.
Paul Lockett wrote:
‘llamas, in your desperation, you are descending into the absurd. If I point out that copyright infringement can attract criminal sanctions and you tell me that is a sign of how little I know, but then go on to acknowledge the circumstances in which copyright infringement can lead to criminal sanctions, I can only assume that you are undertaking an experiment in surrealism.”
You wilful failure to comprehend the subtle differences is duly noted.
But this – like the man in the Dirty Harry movie – I just gotsta know!
“As you are insistent on knowing how I think things should be handled, I believe that if people want to profit from intangible non-rivalrous items, they should be able to do so only in a way which doesn’t infringe my liberty, which would mean they would not be able to rely on state granted privileges and subsidies, but could use consensual methods, such as contract.’
I’m just aching to know how this works.
I write a book (let’s say). I print it, and offer it for sale.
A person buys copy #1. I may have some ability to contract with that person, by applying conditions of sale – not to copy it, for example.
You borrow that book from the buyer. It’s his to lend to you. But I have no contract with you. You claim that your ‘liberties’ entitle you to make a copy of that book (if I understand you correctly), and indeed, since I have no contract with you that prevents you from doing so, absent any other means of sanction, you are right.
If (as you claim) your ‘liberty’ allows you to make a copy of that book, then that copy would belong to you and you may do with it as you wish.
What is to prevent you from making 100,000 copies of that book, and selling them? No contract inhibits you, and by your description I have no other means whatever to prevent you from doing so.
I gotsta know how that’s going to work. Enlighten me.
llater,
llamas
For myself, I’m don’t have much of a problem with the copyright laws as they stand (other than that I believe they are a bit too long). I just believe that characterising copyright infringement as theft leads to some poor conclusions and legislation (including the overly-long copyright terms but also stupid restrictions on what may do with properly licensed material).
Our culture is being commoditized by those who would have us think that way. I’d just like people to think about the terms they’re using. I’m not going to go over and over the explanations, they’ve been done to death elsewhere. This time, I just want to make the point that the “copyright infringement is not theft” does not imply that one is pushing for some kind of “free for all”, just the correct use of language. Words mean things. Assault is not theft either but to claim so does not mean one is in favor of assault.
Llamas,
So, copyright infringement does not attract criminal sanctions.
Theft attracts criminal sanctions.
Therefore….
Richard Thomas wrote:
‘Llamas,
So, copyright infringement does not attract criminal sanctions.
Theft attracts criminal sanctions.
Therefore….’
Your wilful failure to comprehend is duly noted.
In order to clarify, for those more interested in nitpicking than debate.
Mere copyright infringement – the sole act of copying the copyrighted work of another – is not a criminal matter and does not attract criminal sanctions. Neither should it. If I purchase a book, or a record, and then proceed to make a copy of what I already own, that act, by itself, does not harm the copyright owner or destroy/dilute his ability to profit from his property. No crime has been commtted. It is purely a matter in equity between the copyright owner and me. He can sue if he wants – he does, after all, enjoy the exclusive property right, which I did infringe – but he will have to prove actual loss in order to recover anything from me.
As soon as I do anything more than that – sell it, lend it, broadcast it, put it on the Internet – that potentially destroys or dilutes the right of the copyright owner to profit from his property, it may become a criminal matter. Because it is then – guess what – effectively identical to theft. Just because intellectual property (like copyrighted work) is non-rivalrous, does not mean that taking it and using it does not harm its owner.
Microsoft allows you to make one back-up copy of their copyrighted software, as part of their EUA. You can keep that copy till the cows come home – no crime there. Try and sell that same copy – a legally-made copy – and you commit a crime. Try and grasp the differences here. It’s not hard. Every Doberman is a dog, but not all dogs are Dobermans.
The problem here may be in the terms. Copyright infringement, strictly defined, is any act that misappropriates the copyright of another, regardless of motive, intent or outcome. The instant you press ‘record’, or ‘download’ or ‘print’, you are infringing – but not yet necessarily committing a crime. But ‘infringing’ is now being used to describe a wider range of actions that flow from the initial infringement, many of which are potentially criminal.
I didn’t narrow this discussion to the single matter of copyright infringement. If you (and others) choose not to grasp the clearly-described degrees of difference between various acts, and simply call everything ‘infringement’, and then assume that anything that applies to one level of ‘infringement’ therefore applies equally to all others – well, like I said, your wilful failure to comprehend is duly noted.
Your point about the precise use of language is (ironically) noted, and in that vein I will clarify by saying
‘Any copyright infringement that proceeds beyond the mere act of making a copy of copyrighted material, and which does not benefit (where applicable) from protections for fair and ‘de minimis’ use, is almost-certainly theft; but no doubt some tortuous chain of reasoning can be devised by which a specific set of circumstances can be described in which it is not.’
Happy now?
llater,
llamas
It is interesting to compare Prince’s comments with those of Mick Jagger recently – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8681410.stm
Jagger’s very insightful point is that the very big money available to the most popular musicians from the 70s to the 90s was the exception not the norm. If it is at an end, that does not mean we are taking an enormous step into the dark.
Prince has a track record as both artist and entrepreneur, and if he says it is not worth his while to make music for the new distribution channels, he may well be right. So be it – the consumer is surely better off in the new environment, even without new Prince recordings.
On the copyright/theft argument, copying is not so much stealing someone’s property as defying their right to exclude people from it – it’s a much closer analogue to trespass than to theft. I made a more detailed argument on by blog five years ago:
http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2005/08/copyright-property-and-theft.html
The issue is that the debate cannot proceed without the nitpicking. You are asking that the pretext be that copyright infringement is theft and let’s proceed from there. Your whole position hinges on that bit of nit-pickery and yet you want us to pretend that it isn’t there. “The details are not worth bothering about” is really not worthy from anyone who posts to this site regularly. If nothing else, at least recognize that there are others who are coming at it from a different basis to yourself and that they have done so from a valid analysis, not merely because it is convenient. Anything else is merely a “Won’t somebody think of the children” (“Think of the artists?”) type argument.
You already jumped on Perry’s “This is how I think it is” argument, mistaking it for a “This is how it should be” argument. I think emotion may be clouding your analysis.
That is pretty much how I see it too… an historical oddity. I do not think the music industry will ‘adapt’ to the new environment so much as largely disappear forever. Music will not disappear of course, particularly given the plunging cost of actually making (and not just distributing) sophisticated music… no, it is just music-as-an-industry (certainly as currently understood) that is heading for dodo land.
In the past music makers survived by playing live or getting patronage from someone with dosh… I suspect that is what will happen now as well. Back to the future.
Perry, I largely agree. I think there’s still going to be a bit of slack there for those who are smart enough to take the margins but it’ll be slim. I think there’s a market for some way to introduce people to new music. There’s so much out there and, personally, I appear to be fairly picky about what I like. I’ve tried Pandora but it never really drew me in or suggested much that I liked.
What it will do for musicians will be to flatten the market. The very few will be a fair bit poorer and the vast majority will be a little bit richer with the cut the music industry middlemen shared out between them on top. Possibly more local bands will even be able to make a living out of it. It’s an exciting time to be sure.
So, with every post, you highlight ways in which copyright infringement is far more comparable to trespass than theft, but still insist that copyright infringement is theft and that my analogy with trespass was misdirection?
Do we really need to remind you that it is you who has been attempting to obscure any degrees of difference by insisting on using the fairly meaningless catch-all term of “the taking of intellectual property” and then insisting that any activity which you care to claim fits that description is theft.
Oddly, this is one area where you’ve shown a fairly sound understanding, but you feel the need to ask me to explain it to you. Given that you’ve provided a fairly reasonable example yourself, I’m not sure what you want me to tell you.
Here’s a link to a page that sums up my own ideas about so called “intellectual property”.
A possibly germane quotation: “The intellectual monopolist faces less competition, and thus he can charge higher prices and not improve so diligently the quality of his products.”
Strikes me as self-evident with regard to popular music.
I find it interesting, Endivio, that you and others of your ilk make a categorical distinction between items crafted by one’s hands and items crafted by one’s mind. If I build a chair, you wouldn’t claim any right to take it (even if you were merely “borrowing” it, with every intention of eventually returning it), yet if I design a new type of chair, which has never before been seen in the world, you somehow think that’s a lesser activity and claim a right to take my design for your personal benefit.
The primary distinguishing characteristic of the human species is our brains and our ability to reason. Surely it is the intangible expression of that capacity for rational thought which is more valuable, and more worthy of societal protection, than a mere tangible assemblage of bits of wood. Yet you argue to the contrary.
I read your silly post on intellectual property. In your example, Richard’s development (and his reservation of the right to the exclusive use of) a new method of crop irrigation has absolutely no effect on George. George remains perfectly free to continue to use his land just as he has always done. What he is not free to do is appropriate Richard’s idea for his own personal enrichment (i.e., by making his land more productive, and therefore more valuable, through the use of Richard’s idea). If he thinks the idea has value he will arrange to pay Richard for its use, and both will be better off. Or not, and then neither will be in any different position than before. Why is the idea that the product someone’s mind has value, and is not properly subject to unilateral appropriation by anyone who happens to wander by, so difficult for some people to grasp?
Laird,
In your chair example, there clearly is a difference; if you somebody takes your chair, you aren’t able to use it yourself, but if somebody makes their own chair, you still have your own chair and can sit on it as you please.
The rest of you post is the same old attempt to excuse state granted privilege and parasitism which has already been addressed.
And your post, Paul, is a lame attempt to excuse the theft of the product of someone else’s mind. Which, in my opinion, is of far greater value than mere tangible objects. What you are (conveniently?) forgetting is that before I created my new idea it never existed anywhere in the world. So my refusal to permit you to use it without compensation denies you nothing you previously had, it merely denies you any “right” (sneer quotes intentional) to appropriate the fruits of my intellectual labors.
Whether I still “have” my design after your appropriation of it is irrelevant; you took my creation without consent. That’s theft, your shallow sophistry notwithstanding. And to characterize societal protection is intellectual property as “parasitism” is truly bizarre. You have it exactly backward; by taking someone’s idea for yourself it is you who are the parasite, deriving personal benefit from someone else’s work.
You clearly do not attach any value to brainwork. That’s a profoundly anti-human philosophy.
On the contrary, the thing that denies me any “right”, with or without quotes, to appropriate the fruits of your intellectual labors, is not any refusal on your part, but simply the nature of reality. Short of extensive neurosurgery, I cannot remove an idea from your brain, even with the worst will in the world (which I don’t actually have); yet without somehow doing so, I would have no way of “appropriating” your idea in the normal sense of the word, i.e. depriving you of the use of it and transferring the exclusive use thereof to myself. I might still make non-exclusive use of your idea: but this would presuppose your having made it available for such use in the first place. If you don’t want people to use your ideas, the simple solution is to keep them to yourself. However, history shows again and again that an idea whose time has come generally finds such obstacles trivial to surmount. If Gutenberg had kept the idea of the printing press to himself, five to ten years would probably have seen someone else claiming the credit. Maybe fifty at a long shot.
Neither I nor the page I linked to argues the relative “value” of the tangible and the intangible. The distinction is between the scarce and the non-scarce, or to put it another way, between that which can simultaneously be made use of by any number of people, on the one hand, and on the other, that which cannot be used by one without depriving another. The distinction can be grasped without making any prejudgments about “value”.
Laird,
Endivio has already demolished you post quite effectively. As was said, the concept of value is an irrelevant red herring. As for
That is clearly wrong. You are denying me the right to independently discover and use the idea without you demanding payment.
I take it you practice what you preach and you went out and sought the agreement of everybody who had contributed to the English language before using it to make your post, rather than just stealing their creation.
As before, your post as a whole is a weak attempt to justify parasitism.
Not quite irrelevant, Paul. Laird is clearly basing his arguments on a crypto=Marxist theory of value, which posits that “value” is something that is created by human “labour” (sorry about the Brit spelling). If this is so, then there is nothing wrong with extending the notion of “labour” to “intellectual effort”. In other words, per Marx, you takes some raw materials, mix in an hour of huffing and puffing, and hey presto, more value. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a cure for cancer or putting together a booby-trap bomb to hide in a stolen car in a Madrid plaza, it’s the huffing and puffing that we have to measure. It goes without saying that I don’t subscribe to this. Value derives from the satisfaction of human needs and desires in ever better ways. I wonder how many human needs and desires would be better satisfied if the formulas for various lifesaving drugs were free to be replicated by laboratories in poor countries without having to pay millions to Glaxo. Just a thought.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever been called a Marxist (“crypto” or otherwise) before. Thanks for the chuckle.
“I wonder how many human needs and desires would be better satisfied if the formulas for various lifesaving drugs were free to be replicated by laboratories in poor countries without having to pay millions to Glaxo.” To which the obvious answer, of course, is none, since without some confidence in its ability to make sufficient profit on the few of its drugs which prove to be beneficial Glaxo would conduct no drug research at all. So there would be no such “lifesaving drugs” for those “poor countries” to appropriate. Yeah, you’re really helping a lot of people with that one.
“You are denying me the right to independently discover and use the idea without you demanding payment.” That is a fair point, Paul, and assuming that you actually would have independently developed the same idea (rather than being a lazy sort who has never come up with a novel idea in his life, and who prefers instead to sponge on the work of others) illustrates why we place temporal limitations* on the legal monopoly on intellectual property. It’s a balancing act between providing some incentives to, and protections of, the creative process and unduly stifling the implementation of new ideas. Without some means of profiting from the work, at least temporarily, there would be precious little in the way of new invention, which of course you know.
We can argue about the specifics of how it is implemented, but there is no question that the Framers of the US Constitution got the concept right when they authorized Congress to enact laws “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I’m certainly glad they (and their political descendants) understood the concept of rewarding brainwork better than you do.
I also understand why llamas has bailed out of this thread.
* The “proper” duration of such limitations is beyond the scope of this debate, and is irrelevant to it anyway since what we’re discussing is the principle of intellectual property. However, I would offer that in my opinion the current US copyright laws extend that protection far too long.
And guess what: that is absolutely true, no matter if it was Marx or anyone else who thought it. The problem with Marxism is the idea that the “laborer” has the exclusive right to measure this value and to impose the result of that measurement on others.
Once again, the misdirection of “appropriate”. I’ve already explained why in following Auntie Madge’s recipe for lemon meringue pie I am not depriving Auntie Madge of anything at all: rather, I am probably garnering her some new fans. But you just threw that in for effect.
The argument that Glaxo, a drug company, would “conduct no drug research at all” without all the current guarantees, is pretty silly. In fact, Glaxo has recently (Feb 2009), and encouragingly, announced a decision to pool some patents with anyone who can use them to come up with cures for “neglected diseases”. In other words, they voluntarily waived a few of the current guarantees, yet I don’t see an accompanying announcement that they plan to suspend all their research programs. Perhaps that’s because their quarterly profits run to well over 2bn pounds.
Bottom line, if their HIV drugs patent weren’t enforcible, and a generic version of same could be made, then poor old GSK would simply have to compete with other companies in selling their version of the drug to customers at a price which reflected what people were willing and able to pay, rather than, as at present, selling it to governments at an inflated price which is then passed on to the taxpayers (plus a commission for the kind politicians). I think most drug companies could handle that, without cutting back on research. More to the point, patent pooling or relinquishing would allow a lot more people to go into the drugs business, thus allowing a lot more research to be done – a point which GSK’s own CEO acknowledges in the above linked article.
“And guess what: that is absolutely true”
Suggestions: Bohm-Bawerk (he who turned Marxist value theory into a laughing stock). If you’re short of time, wikipedia on Subjective Theory of Value, followed by Socialism by Von Mises.
I used the word “appropriate” to avoid the somewhat harsher term “steal”. But since you don’t appreciate the effort I’ll just go back to that clearer, and more accurate, verb.
“Bottom line, if their HIV drugs patent weren’t enforcible [sic], and a generic version of same could be made, . . . “ Once again, you assume the irrational as the basis for your flight of fancy. If drug patents were unenforceable there would be no new HIV drugs from which to produce generic versions. No one would spend the money developing them if the only reward was their theft by those oh-so-deserving “poor countries”.
And the fact that in some circumstances patent pooling makes economic sense is irrelevant, because implicit in that concept is the existence of the very patents which you have spent many electrons arguing against.
Neither of you has offered a single moral justification for the uncompensated taking of the product of someone’s time, effort, skill and money for the benefit of another. And you can’t, because at heart it’s a socialist argument, and socialism is inherently and irredeemably immoral. Whether or not that use deprives the inventor of his own concurrent use of his creation is a complete red herring, because to take someone’s work product is to claim a right to enslave him. That’s just about as far from a libertarian position as one can get.
Laird,
Your argument has shifted dramatically from being a deontological argument, attempting to justify a monopoly on the basis of a moral right of the author to have it, to a utilitarian argument, attempting to justify a monopoly by arguing that it creates incentives for people to carry out acts which serve the common good.
Your new position is deeply flawed (assuming that without state granted monopoly, there would be no way to profit from intellectual endeavour, being a major one), but at least, unlike your previous argument, it has some consistency.
The fact that you’ve switched approach so dramatically seems to indicate that you’re searching for any argument which justifies the parasitism you’re attempting to excuse, rather than approaching the issue with any consistent principle.
Laird:
You appear to have forgotten your new position. You have been arguing that restricting people’s liberty is justifiable on utilitarian grounds because it creates effects which serve the greater good. You are the one who is offering the irredeemably immoral socialist arguments.
So maximum liberty is as far from a libertarian position as one can get. You’re giving llamas a good run for his money in the surrealism stakes.
Endivio: I thought we were presenting arguments, not exchanging suggestions?
“Once again, you assume the irrational as the basis for your flight of fancy. If drug patents were unenforceable there would be no new HIV drugs from which to produce generic versions. No one would spend the money developing them if the only reward was their theft by those oh-so-deserving “poor countries”. ”
A statement for which you provide absolutely no evidence. The reason I directed you initially to an article on fashion design (not my article, BTW, as you seem to have assumed at some point) is that fashion is, or was, one of the few remaining areas where we can test such a theory empirically, since such an empirical test depends upon there being an area of research or innovation where no copyright protection exists. In the case of fashion design, in spite of the quoted complaints of designers about being ripped off, there has never been any evidence of lack of innovation or creativity. An idea, however brilliant, has no value (as per the subjective theory, anyway) until it is incarnated in a thing that can be bought and sold, ie something that someone might want. The chord sequence to He’s So Fine was just that, a chord sequence, of no use to anyone, until it was incarnated in the Chiffons’ song. Then George Harrison came along and used it in My Sweet Lord. Another song, more value. The lawyers rubbed their hands in glee on seeing Harrison follow Em7 with A repeatedly across eight bars. Yet it’s hard to see how his take on a couple of boring chords deprived the Chiffons, or their songwriter, of anything they would otherwise have had – not even profits (nor is it clear he could not have come up with those chords on his own). Most patent litigation is like that: pointless, dog in the manger stuff. Whether you’re writing songs or researching HIV drugs, the thing you’re planning to sell is the song or the drug, not the idea. Ideas are a necessary prerequisite, but they only acquire value in being instantiated, and the more instantiations there are, the more value is created. Contrary to your assertions, I believe that a drugs market without patents (and without government regulation and interference) would be far more innovative, since it would be more competitive, and competition is what drives innovation, whereas monopoly – over anything – is a guarantee of stagnation and mediocrity.
Alisa, sorry about that, I just thought it would save time if you could see where I was coming from. I don’t have to make the arguments re theories of value, since Von Mises does it so much better. But thank you anyway for not taking the opportunity of accusing me of actual or intended theft. (In my case the flow of ideas has been clearly the other way, since every song or poem or piece of VB code I’ve ever written has been put out there with clear instructions along the lines of “feel free to take, copy, adapt or whatever the hell you want: I’d be nothing but flattered if I ever found out”. All except the latest VB/SQL code project, which was on a backup hard drive I had stolen from my house recently, else it would have found its way into the public domain in due course. )
Laird: are the quotes around “poor countries” also sneer quotes? Just a point of information.
Paul: the point you made earlier about independent discovery deserves repeating. Recently I was amused to see that a US band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, had initiated legal proceedings against a TV producer for “intellectual property theft” on the grounds they had put out a series called “Californication”, previously a title of one of the band’s albums. I was tickled because a quick date check convinced me that I had used that word in a newsgroup post well before the Peppers presumably thought of it – as I could probably have demonstrated if Google had not trashed several terabytes of old posts (1996-7 ish) when they took over dejanews. Obviously I wouldn’t have dreamed that a throwaway piece of casual wordplay could be regarded as “intellectual property”, but we live and learn. I’m also tickled that McDonalds has gamely taken out a registered trademark on “me encanta” (Spanish for “I’m lovin’ it”), a phrase which has probably been uttered several billion times over the last few hundred years in this language. All grist to the ambulance chasers’ busy mill, I suppose.
No, Endivio, I put quotation marks around “poor countries” was because I was directly quoting your phrase. The sneer was in the modifier “oh-so-deserving”.
Paul, am I not permitted more than one argument in support of a position? Anyway, I wasn’t making a dramatic shift; I was merely demonstrating the illogic of an argument Endivio had raised, claiming that in a magic world without patent rights pharmacutical companies would nonetheless continue to spend billions of dollars developing new medicines for which they would not be paid. To state that “argument” is to refute it. But don’t for a moment think that I have abandoned the deontological argument for a moral basis of the right of authorship. That’s the foundation argument; the other is merely a practical application.
Also, upon further reflection I withdraw my earlier concession of merit in your point about independent development of an idea. Because the plain fact is that you did not develop it before someone else did. If someone homesteads a piece of land you cannot come along later and make a claim to that same land on the assertion that you would have homesteaded it if only you had gotten there first. “First in time is first in right” is an old equity maxim with many applications. Intellectual property is one of them.
Laird:
This is an example of why attempting to create false equivalence between rivalrous tangible goods and non-rivalrous intangible concepts falls apart. I could be somewhere miles away, never having met you or heard of you idea, come up with the idea completely independently and then find that I can’t use it because you also thought of it before me. Now, you might think that you have a moral right to that power (I don’t), but in any case, it destroys the idea that it is an issue of “appropriation” or “theft,” because, however broadly choose to define them, you can’t realistically claim I’ve done either if I’ve never encountered your idea.
The reasoning behind applying the homesteading principle to material goods isn’t that the first person to touch, think, say or do something deserves an absolute monopoly over it, just that it is felt to be the most justifiable way of of allocating exclusive rights over objects given that those objects are rivalrous and cannot be used by all people simultaneously.
Also, if we go back to the point when you initially agreed with me:
If you withdraw your reason for agreement, you must also presumably withdraw the reason for any limitations on the “intellectual property” rights you argue for. After all, other property rights are not time limited.