On Sat, 2008-09-27 at 01:23 -0400, Lawnun wrote: > So by that logic, since i'm not in fact depriving you of your credit card > when I steal it, you won't mind posting the numbers on Silk?
of course you're depriving me of my credit card if you take it from me. i suppose you mean you're not depriving me of my credit card number when you take my number. stealing my credit card number is not a big deal. but taking $5000 from my bank account with that number is, and it'll be harder to stop that if i post my number here. > If theft is to steal, and stealing can be defined both as a (physical) > taking, and an *appropriation of ideas*, *words, credit*, etc., *without > right or acknowledgment*, then it seems pretty clear to me that to infringe, > or appropriate another's ideas without right or permission, is in fact, a > theft. it's amusing but unhelpful to use recent definitions of words - which can mean many things - to try to mix up concepts. so - "intellectual property" is not, and has never been, in legal or economic terms, equivalent to property. it is, and has always been, implemented as a state-granted temporary monopoly. there has never been any sense of implied ownership, for the simple reason that - to use economic jargon - information is "non-rivalrous", meaning that when someone takes information from you, you don't lose the information. state intervention is required to artificially make rival constructs around information, through the use of state-granted monopolies. state intervention is not required, for instance, to make the chair i sit on a rival good - when someone takes that chair, i don't have it, whatever the state says about it. > Copyright > law isn't designed to protect business models. It's designed to protect > creative works. And it works beautifully in that regard, and protects all > works, big or small, and regardless of the relative effectiveness or > ineffectiveness of the business model they may or may not be attached to. you know why discovery channel only shows programmes on sharks or nazis? because the current copyright regime, "working beautifully", makes it impossible to show documentary films. the purpose of copyright, as an instrument of state intervention in the free market, is to support creativity. this is an economic (or if you wish, social) purpose, it is not an issue of ownership, since there is none. unfortunately, to quote from one of my presentations at WIPO, copyright does not actually protect or support creativity, or "protect" creative works. copyright "protects" control over past works, at the expense of future works. in theory this could work to support creativity, which is why copyright has always been tinkered with to try to find the best "balance". > change? Make copyright less important by educating people on the other > alternatives, instead of scaring them into clinging more closely to what > they feel is their only option. Not only is it more effective, but its > already starting to happen. um. educate as in the WIPO comics [1]? the funny thing is that people don't need to be educated to think that copying music is not stealing. they do this anyway. the dogmatic copyright-ists desperately try instead to teach children that "sharing is wrong". like IPpy, from the australian govt[2]; they were embarrassed into abandoning their plans to brainwash kids in schools. and WIPO's sheepish discovery that their pro-IP comics were perfect self-parody made them pull it off their website, which is why the link is to the ministry of trade in lebanon. incidentally, the "blood sweat and tears" argument has never really worked as a justification for IP protection. there's lots of stuff you work hard on and don't have any guaranteed protection for, and when you working hard on creating a painting, say, there are many things you might want as a reward more than the exclusive right to copy. copyright doesn't give most creators any reward at all. hey - not even nirvana, as courtney love said so lucidly in a lengthy speech 8 years ago: "What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. " [3]. -rishab 1. http://www.economy.gov.lb/MOET/English/Navigation/News/MoreNews/ThisYear/WIPOComicsOnIntellectualProperty.htm 2. http://www.innovated.gov.au/Ippy/html/p01.asp 3. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/
