Every zMUD script of of mine of any real value is posted on the forums. If you want the rest, PM me.

Basically, it's ok to screw others, if you advance yourself? How should we balance the needs of the many with the needs of the few? That's the core question of public domain, and by extension, piracy and IP laws.

Those two groups are one and the same at one point in time or another.

Sometimes I am the many, sometimes I am the few.

Here, let me get you today's court ruling.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...ws/16420694.htm

IP Laws where it matters... life and death.

Through the medium of money.

Well, in many cases, the "needs" are nothing more than a want. People who pirate games for instance. In many cases, there are programmers in "sweatshop" conditions, working 80-100 hour weeks for a couple of years, and then they have their work placed on Warez sites.

When we talk about the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few, that can be turned around. If we used that logic, then perhaps in the US we could change our laws so you'd instead of "Innocent until proven guilty" it's the opposite, to protect "the public good". Civil Liberties are important. So too is the right to own private property and make capital.

I don't want to argue about this anymore, but in many of the arguments I've seen, some of the "abolish IP" camp seem a little too close to socialism and communism for my tastes. I've studied history and economics and that economic model was a failure.

I have a feeling that if that camp was granted their wish, the quality of software development, creative development, etc., would really go way down. So, while I agree with some of that camp, I am opposed to some of the extremists on that level--at least the ones who want to abolish patents and copyright in toto.




Capitalism's major strength is it's most akin to a meritocracy--it rewards creative people. People out of nowhere can create a major work, like J.K. Roland's Harry Potter. The copyright, trademark, patent, and other items protect that, give incentives for people to do that.

You're not getting my analogy. I'm not talking about the particular rules or the gigantic Go board itself, but rather about a possible way of arranging Go pieces on the board. Is that ownable?

Because then there's less oil, electricity, and food for other people, respectively. The analogy does not carry to software.

You can argue that software piracy hurts software developers, but paying appalling amounts of money for an operating system hurts the local commerce that could be taking that money a lot more - Several orders of magnitude more. Under the right circumstances, pirating software can have a positive net effect, just as under the right circumstances, the appropriation of real property can.

Real objects can be possessed, and ownership is almost always immediately assigned to them - In fact, with objects that might have their ownership dissociated, we create methods to associate them with their owners - Like car plates, land ownership deeds, and writing the names of children on stuff they're expected to be carrying around and losing. When we find something whose owner is unknown, in fact, there are two approaches - Going after the owner, or taking it for oneself (The latter can be rather immoral). Ownership is a property we assign to objects without thinking, and it's present in all cultures (Some cultures subscribe to collective ownership of things, but whenever a culture says or thinks something isn't owned by anyone, that usually just means nobody uses it - Important things tend to be owned by everybody, or by representative fictional entities.)

Ownership of ideas, on the other hand, is a wholly different type of possessiveness, and actual protection of it by the law is almost unheard of except in the last 400 or so years of our particular civilization. There is obviously a fundamental difference between the two forms of ownership - One is an universal right, the other is a social convention we find beneficial.

Hmm, you don't have a complete system to just give everybody? You could stop Ciaran from being so immoral and give out a better system for free. That way everybody will be able to fight really well. Its the morally correct thing to do. After all, the many don't have fully functional systems, and the few do.

You're not getting my analogy. I'm not talking about the particular rules or the gigantic Go board itself, but rather about a possible way of arranging Go pieces on the board. Is that ownable?

Because then there's less oil, electricity, and food for other people, respectively. The analogy does not carry to software.

You can argue that software piracy hurts software developers, but paying appalling amounts of money for an operating system hurts the local commerce that could be taking that money a lot more - Several orders of magnitude more. Under the right circumstances, pirating software can have a positive net effect, just as under the right circumstances, the appropriation of real property can.

Real objects can be possessed, and ownership is almost always immediately assigned to them - In fact, with objects that might have their ownership dissociated, we create methods to associate them with their owners - Like car plates, land ownership deeds, and writing the names of children on stuff they're expected to be carrying around and losing. When we find something whose owner is unknown, in fact, there are two approaches - Going after the owner, or taking it for oneself (The latter can be rather immoral). Ownership is a property we assign to objects without thinking, and it's present in all cultures (Some cultures subscribe to collective ownership of things, but whenever a culture says or thinks something isn't owned by anyone, that usually just means nobody uses it - Important things tend to be owned by everybody, or by representative fictional entities.)

Ownership of ideas, on the other hand, is a wholly different type of possessiveness, and actual protection of it by the law is almost unheard of except in the last 400 or so years of our particular civilization. There is obviously a fundamental difference between the two forms of ownership - One is an universal right, the other is a social convention we find beneficial.

I understood that, and my reply is the same.

For example, Suduko puzzles.

Lets look at software again. You buy a license that allows you to put the software on your computer. What is being sold here are Computers devoid of your software. If you pirate the software, then there is one less computer devoid of the software on it. Its a physical thing. Or if you don't want to worry about the computer persay, then you can have a license regarding the number of users. And if you pirate it, then there is one less user who doesn't have access to your software. There is more to it than that, but the amount of eletricity that is not available to other people is about the same as the amount of computers that now have no need to pay for the software.

I program a lot of "free games." These games are free to the consumer, however the person who owns the website has to pay per how many people access that site. They hope however that every person who plays the game also does other things at the site which out weighs the cost of giving out "free games."


The Bushmen of Batswana had no concept of ownership of any kind.
http://www.kalahari-san.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Your Parker Brothers example made me think you didn't, since Parker Brothers sells rule-sets (Along with the designed sets of tokens needed for use with those rule-sets) while I'm talking about a particular state for that rule set. Can you own, say, the position in chess after 1. e4; 2.c5; 3.Qh5?

But you're talking about putative profit again. If I take away someone's market share by selling some cheaper version of what they're selling, what am I taking away from them but putative profits? And, is it really that unacceptable that the profits of a large corporation be dented when it'll benefit the public a lot more than it hurts the corporation? Are you really incapable of seeing the difference between actually depriving someone of goods, and depriving them of market share?

A gift economy still relies on concepts of ownership; sharing and collective ownership does not preclude having a concept of ownership. Also, most stories about societies with 'no concept of ownership' are dodgy at best - It seems to be a stereotypical myth propagated because those societies, due to their nomadic nature, don't attach value to land.

Technically, you're right. But I don't care. OMG, he's doing something I consider immoral! The world will end!

How about we stop debating, because this is going nowhere, except cementing in people's minds that some people are immoral pricks, while they're perfect and right?


As for the biotech article, I'm still not sure what they're suing about, but there's a simple solution: For processes required to produce life saving medication, the government should buy the patent and release it to public domain. They do it with real property, and this is much more important.

What if they don't want to sell the patent? And so basically by the government paying for it, we all pay for it through taxes, and then once again the question is asked: Why are we all paying for monopolistic patents?

If they don't want to sell, that's too bad. Why should one company be able to jack up the prices on medicine that is saving lives? The same way they can take your house and build a road, they should be able to take your patent for the public good. You'd still be paid.

It's like with cable companies in the US. Cable companies pay a license to be able to retransmit network programming - The license is statutory (Set by law) so that the networks couldn't jack up licensing costs to stall the development of cable television.

If you can accept that sometimes someone's home gets bulldozed to make a bypass, then you can certainly accept that sometimes a patent needs to be prematurely terminated to save lives.

Okay, let me add something:

Here in the Philippines, pirated videos are seen almost everywhere (mostly in front of the Shopping Malls, heck, there are some in the Malls doing pirated copies and sell it and nothing is done to kick them out.)

The pirated videos they're selling are the currently hit and newly released movies (I saw an Eragon copy being sold a week prior to its release in the cinemas) plus they sold Porn, lots of them and people just don't care and report it to the authorities about this stuff.

So yeah, now I know why Philippine Peso value is going down and I take back what I said in regretting buying Original Cds. Guess probably a walk along the road did help me see things are going around here.

Bro, Php is going up currently, $1=P47 compared to last year's $1=P55
It still suck but hey... its a good start for the year.
Only the music industry is still in deep waters, so now they are pumping their advertising and live-shows.

But uh.. what about sites like Youtube where you can watch MTVs and anime episodes online? Isn't uploading copyrighted things there also illegal? Shouldn't Youtube be closed down for those videos?

YouTube removes copyrighted stuff as soon as they find it, like Anime episodes. There is work being done to implement an audio/video "fingerprint" like Napster did to help with that.

But they also have a deal with Sony/BMI, Universal Music Group, Warner Music, and CBS to allow Music Videos to be used on-line.

Music Videos have become an orphan industry, because VH1 and MTV turned away from showing, y'know, music videos, and Music Video collections are hard to find. The labels tend to use them as promotional tools more than actual things you can buy. So it makes sense for Music Videos to become part of a Video Jukebox.

Verithrax, I second callia. I don't know software but I know economics. Let's think about this. If I put Ethelon's system on a website and did not tell him it was me, and posted all his updates for everyone, you think people would pay for it? Probably the ones who feel morally obligated to pay for something someone put hard work into, and more so cause they can put a human face on it, but still I garuntee lots of people would DL it and Ethelon would probably stop making it/raise price to make it worth while. -gasp- just like a coorperation going out of business or raising it's price! Who would have thought?

What about I make a decent system, and put it up on the forums under the condition that people who modify it send me the modifications they made?

Of course, that wouldn't really work because Lusternia's community is very small, and because there is a big incentive not to share your system with others as it gives you an advantage. But the thing is, comparing Ethelon's system to MS Windows isn't really appropriate, for reasons I can't be arsed to explain again now.

That's called competition. Your system would compete with ethelons. What I said was pirating. Pirating windows is rather different then making Linux for free. It would, in theory, lower the price, all external factor equal. Why doesn't linux lower the price of microsoft? Linux, in the eyes of the consumer sucks and has bad advertising, but this is a tangent. The point is making your own system has -nothing- to do with what I said and is a complete red herring, as are most your points.

Ultimately your reply adressed no issues, other then "I can't be arsed to bother." You completely failed to respond to my statement.

Because I have a life. I could write explaining the difference, but I think it's upthread. If it isn't, I'm not really going to bother right now.