That's not the point... the point is, intellectual property of any kind is not comparable to real property because it does not exist. You can't own an idea or a particular string of bits; you can't own abstract things like a song or a story. That's like saying you can own the colour blue, or the word 'asinine'. Copyright and intellectual properties are, above all else, bargains between creators and society; it creates incentives where there would be none otherwise, by giving creators a monopoly on the copying of their creation for a limited time, so that they may profit from it. It developed in the 16th century with widespread printing of books. It was completely unknown before that. It is a cultural and social construct, not an inherent right that is universally recognizable by most human societies, like the concept of personal or collective property and ownership.

I believe that withholding something from people on the basis of copyright, and using that to sell something of little value at appalling prices is more immoral than looking the other way and allowing some people to make use of certain particular very long numbers for their own purposes rather than persecuting them for not wanting to pay ridiculous prices for something of almost no intrinsic value.

Unfortunately, your simple-minded morality does not work in real life. Please return to the elementary school yard from whence you came.

Information wants to be anthropomorphised!

I'm sorry, but Software exists. Software is not the same as a color. A color is a pure concept, software is not.

It is the same as Music. Music is just vibrations you can say, Oil even is just "Atoms" Atoms are free, atoms are everywhere.

Software takes up "space" if software was just a pure concept, there would be an infinite amount of "space" for it to take up, but there isn't.

Software exists as a state of the matter on my hard disk or in some equivalent media. State is not matter; an object can be either upright or not, for example, but that state does not 'exist'; rather, the object displays, or contains, or whatever inevitably inadequate word you want to use, the state of being upright or not. State != Matter. You can't own a state of matter, much less a particular set of states of matter that produce equivalent output when read through appropriate filters (Like a piece of software).

Music is even dodgier than software here, because you can own a song, which can be represented recognizably in a very wide variety of arrangements. It's like pretending you own a platonic ideal of something; Led Zeppelin, along with their recording company, purport to 'own' the Platonic ideal of Stairway to Heaven.

That's like saying colors take up space. There isn't an infinite amount of matter to 'hold' the colour mauve, so it must be real and not just a particular frequency of light? Actually, a colour is an inherent property of most objects, and not a state, so it's a bad example. But could you own the state 'on'? Does the fact that there is a limited amount of relays and switches in the world make the on-state something ownable or 'real', as opposed to a wholly abstract concept encoded through some generally agreed-upon means?

When you are writing your software, and then your computer crashes, and you can't recover the data, you are suggesting nothing was lost but time?

To say that it is just the "state" is to say that Water is just the state of the quarks that make up the electrons and protons. Everything can eventually be broken down into "information" that doesn't mean that nothing exists? (or does it? *starts a meditative chant*)

Pretty much. To put it another way: If I topple a chain of dominoes accidentally while trying to break the world record of domino-toppling, what was lost? Just time and the state of the dominoes. I can set them back, I can even set them back exactly the same, but what was lost?

That's deep, man.

But truth is that we live here in middle world, where we have a distinction between information (Which can only be codified as the state of matter) and matter, and for practical reasons, that's where we derive our ethics from.

Ah, the Ad Hominem.

Funny, the basic tenants of the golden rule has worked for many centuries. Things like this and other concepts such as Natural Law is one of the basic founding blocks of Western Culture.

You really REALLY overuse the word "Evil", with a capital E, when describing things like Microsoft. I'm surprised you can trivialize things like property and yet have a hard "moral" compass when discussing things like the "evil capitalists".

I've actually seen this behavior from many young people, I even had similar views when I was younger, I used to hate the "big guys" in some of the hobby industries, but I can say that a lot of these "little battles" mean nothing in the larger scheme of things. Overall, while some of the notions of copyright and patents are overused, I see this new movement against it as having some radicals who want to reduce artists and creative types to busking and cottage industries. And that will mean a reduction in the arts and creativity in general.

Some industries wouldn't exist today if we had that attitude. When Gary Gygax started D&D, when it was still a minor thing, he found out that people were taking the little rulebooks and photocopying them, so he ended up getting some people to find the bootlegs at conventions and they would rip them up. If little steps like that weren't done, I'll bet D&D might have failed. Which would have had a major effect on our little society--I doubt Sarapis and Estarra, or you and I, would be here right now in this forum if it wasn't for D&D's influence on the culture.

The Golden Rule is like Newtonian physics... it works fine for our daily necessities, but breaks down under stress (IE, under more extreme situations). SImple-minded following of the Golden Rule doesn't work in real life; for examples, see medical triage and the incarceration of criminals.

There's nothing evil about capitalism; I believe firmly in free markets. I also believe that when free-market capitalism is hurting people, we have the right to tell free-market capitalism to go royally screw itself. It's not an universal law, it's not an ideal, it's a damn fine way of running an economy that does not work under all circumstances. Just because I attack some corporations doesn't mean I think capitalism is a bad thing, in moderation. That's like saying someone thinks alcohol is immoral because they don't like Jack Daniel's. As for using the word evil, it's just a easy-to-type synonym for immoral. Just because I don't live in black-and-white land doesn't mean I don't think certain actions and organizations and yes, even people, aren't evil.

You're not old enough to be that self-righteous and condescending. Come back when you're over 50.

Also, nobody is talking about killing copyright... the FSF can't exist without copyright law, nor can Creative Commons. Artists do deserve and need some protection to create - But that doesn't mean intellectual property is anything but a social contract, one that has been abused a lot lately.

If Gary Gygax had decided to kill all derivative works on D&D, or if the law forced people to ask for licenses when making works that used notions and concepts from D&D, I doubt we would be here either. It's not black and white; culture depends on protecting authors' ability to gain from creating as much as it depends on artists being able to create upon that content years later. Currently, there is an imbalance there with the public domain being 'frozen' by copyright extenions in Some Countries, with fair use being quashed, and with draconian laws regarding derivative works.

What about freeware developers then?

Having played with legos (I think thats close enough to dominoes) and having done programming, and having have made pieces of artwork, I would say that when my friend destroyed my complex lego models, I lost less then when my Artwork got burned, and when my artwork got burned, I lost less than when I lost my unsaved Program.

The design of the dominoes is ment to be created and destroyed, its part of the design of it, and only time is lost, because the designs for the layout of the dominoes are elsewhere and easily recreated.

The artwork, once made, although having no real set design is ingrained in my self, and often times its the process more than the final piece that matters. The building materials of the painting (i.e. the colors) are not lost and I can re apply them.

The software is thought about, designed and implemented, all within the context of the coding space. The logic behind each function and the syntax of each line of code is not written down anywhere else and must be reconstructed. The building blocks of the code, that is, other pieces of code, is also lost. Its as if I had lost a painting, and forgotten what the painting was of.

Data storage and backups are a big problem and they need to be solved well, especially for businesses. Often if a piece of data is lost or corrupted it is almost impossible to retrieve again. Its a very real thing. Just as music is.



Thats wonderfull charity work those people do.

Just because I give free money to some people on the street corner, doesn't mean its ok for you to come to my house and take all the money on my bookshelf.




Note the court case from today that I just refrenced a few posts ago. Issues of bad patents are being adressed and discussed. However, none of those are currently for consumer software.

It only shows that 'golden rule' doesn't always apply as it's subjective, that's all.


I wonder, is it just a coincidence that it's being raised right when Red Hat applied for a DRM patents which could hit some huge companies hard?

You'd be surprised how much one can age in a single decade--I'm not yet 40 and I have some greying hairs.

And if you're going to throw that at me, what's your excuse?

(And we're starting to get close to personal attacks here).



If somebody decides to do something for free, that's their choice, but it is the choice of the creator. I don't begrudge those who choose that as a way of life. I'm not against Open or Free source programming, freeware, or anything like that.

But, if somebody decides to sell there stuff for a price, I don't want to cheat them. If I feel I'm being "cheated", there are other alternatives in most cases. I don't care how "wrong" MS products are, I would never copy it because I would feel guilty, simply because I know I am doing something wrong.



That doesn't break the golden rule at all. If somebody is being charitable, you may want to be charitable back and put something in the tip jar, but since the freeware developer stated "this is free", he is basically saying "I don't care about getting paid". That's still the creator's choice.

If there's a price tag on software, the author is saying "this is my price". And nobody wants to be stolen from. Nobody wants anybody to steal from them.

But that's arbitrary. If you had a lego model of complexity and economic value to you comparable to your program, wouldn't you feel the same way about it being toppled? Can you own the configuration in question?

Some domino configurations that have been toppled on occasion are bizarrely complex, with tens of thousands of pieces. So you're saying that because it's easy to destroy, it's fundamentally different from another type of state? Well then. Let's say I have a Go board that is tens of thousands of squares to a side. Can I own a particular configuration on that board, and control who can and can not configure their Go boards of similar size in the same way?

The building materials of your program (I.E, algorithms and statements and fundamentally, bits) aren't lost either, and you can reapply them.

Good programmers can apprehend a notion of what their software does. I don't think you're so stupid as to actually forget what your program did, and how it did it in general terms. Of course as complexity increases, it becomes harder to keep track of, but again, let's try the gigantic Go board analogy: If someone topples my gigantic Go board, have I lost something besides the time spent arranging it?

It is. Doesn't make data a real thing that can be owned; you can't own a number, no matter how long it is.

You can't analogize intellectual property to real property, for reasons I've gone over already.

I'll have "stupid patents screwing people over" for $200, Alex.

It's happened. MPEG is a prime example; the MPEG video format is patented. This gives the people who own the patents control over how the content encoded in their format is used. This is not good for users, not good for content providers, and not good for anyone - Except the handful of people who 'own' the Platonical ideal of an MPEG-encoded file.


You start saying I'm just being a rebel out of some fuzzy unfounded desire to be against "the Man" (Seriously, who says that anymore?) and I'll start pointing out you're not old enough to be patronizing...

What a profoundly stupid thing to say.

I didn't say dominoes are easy to knock over, I said they are meant to be knocked over. Just like food is meant to be eaten, but appliances are not.

I've been watching the food network lately, and there are some pieces of food that are just amazing to see, and its depressing thinking about the fact that the people they make it for are just going to eat it all up and destroy it. But thats the nature of making food, just like thats the nature of making dominoes.

Dominoes and Go boards don't actually DO anything. Software does.

If what you are saying about software is true, than I should be able to come over to your house and delete any software you have on your computer thats pirated and anything that piece of software created, and you should be fine with that. You might be a bit miffed, but you shouldn't be any more angry than a person who builds a giant sand castle on the beach and some kids come over and destroy it.

All I can say if IP is not real property, than this company is just one fabulous dream, with having "credits" for "virtual property" and marketing the rapture engine to third parties and signing license agreements for things like the proposed Mikidemia MUD.

If I have a 'player' that moves the pieces in my gigantic Go board according to some constant, deterministic rules... would my Go configuration be ownable then?

It would be inconvenient for me because I would no longer have media with that software, so I'd have to go and pay the software pirate again for his time and media, and install again, and so on. So yes, you can own media, and you can 'own' the value accrued in that media by the presence of a particular state in it - But you can't own the particular state in itself, dissociated from media, in absolute terms - You can because of a social contract that exists because we have found that it is beneficial for us to have such protection, but it's not any sort of natural or inalienable or universal right that should extend any further than it actually benefits society.

Aiakon: It is profoundly stupid to actually believe intellectual and material property are the same thing, or to assume that saying something doesn't exist automatically means saying it doesn't exist on all possible senses including abstract existence. But Santa exists abstractly; reindeers exist materially. If you can't see the fundamental difference between the two types of existence...


They're selling A) A service (Ultimately performed by moving strings of bits around in particular ways) and The right to use material which is protected by a particular social contract under normal circumstances, respectively. All I'm saying is you can't own an abstract concept, but that you can, through a social contract, be granted exclusive use of it so that you may be able to sell something which, ultimately, only exists as the particular configuration of material objects and as abstract concepts that cannot be owned and can be copied without loss as far as resources allow. You people keep putting up straw men, and I keep cringing.

Absolutely.

Parker Brothers exists just for that reason.

Yes, and you have no inalienable right to keep your material goods either, except for the social contracts that we abide by.

Why shouldn't Belarus be allowed to siphon off some oil coming through their country?

Why shouldn't poor people in Nairobi be allowed to cut open the power lines and take free electricity and free cable to their homes?

Poor people should be allowed to walk through any farm land they see and take any food they want.

IP exists. Is it comparable to physical property in most ways? Not at all.

My morality says that open standards are far better for the world than patent encumbered standards. As such, people making money from the mp3 format, for example, are immoral.

Thats exactly what saying something doesn't exist means..... Unless you specify otherwise. :roll:



I'm glad you think so. Now go invent something for people. While you are at it, give me all your zmud scripts.

Grey hair != age or maturity.

I probably have more grey hair than you, and I am 23.