4 ms·

Here's a crazy thought experiment. Instead of copying some music track, how about copying a dollar bill? What happens to the dollar bill? Instead of sites that

Here's a crazy thought experiment. Instead of copying some music track, how about copying a dollar bill? What happens to the dollar bill? Instead of sites that distribute torrent files, we'll have sites that distribute blueprints on how to build a printer that can print out perfect copies of dollar bills. Totally not illegal! Of course, in the same way that owning a music track makes me more likely to go out and buy said music track, owning a copied dollar bill makes me more likely to go out and actually work to earn a real dollar bill. So in a sense, the same way copying music helps the music industry, copying dollars helps the economy! The logic makes perfect sense!

malka 11y ago
yeah. Data and physical good are the same thing.
- DougN7 11y ago
  The dollar bill's value has nothing to do with its physical properties.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    Which is also true for an mp4 file of a movie or mp3 file of a song or a CD of shrinkwrap software.
    - DougN7 11y ago
      Exactly. So the person's example seems to hold: duplicating dollars isn't a good idea economically, and would have a negative impact like duplicating mp4 movies - it reduces the value of the thing being duplicated.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  There's approximately 75 trillion dollars worth of money on this earth. Only 5 trillion of that money is paper dollars. The rest is data! http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth
  - malka 11y ago
    Yes. I'd venture that copying this data would not have the effect of creating money. Altering it, however would.
tjallingt 11y ago
So in your analogy what about the guy who wants a dollar bill but because of he lives outside the United States can't "go out and actually work to earn a real dollar bill"?
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  Right now only the united states is allowed to copy dollar bills, if you live outside of the united states you'd have to go into these underground exchange markets to get your dollars. The united states government needs to get with the times. Digital distribution is the wave of the future. Why should the united states be the sole entity allowed to print dollar bills? If people from other countries need US dollar bills then, they should have the right to print out dollar bills. There's a new thing emerging on the piracy scene called a superdollar. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar. North Korea is, apparently, on the tip of the spear for this new technology; bravely paving the way of a glorious future! The US needs stop using old archaic ways of distributing money and get with the program! If the world was more like North Korea, the world would be a better place.
  - gozo 11y ago
    "Right now only the united states is allowed to copy dollar bills" Usually anyone can copy currency as long as you clearly indicate that it is a copy. "The united states government needs to get with the times. Digital distribution is the wave of the future. Why should the united states be the sole entity allowed to print dollar bills?" Not a unreasonable question if you equate "print dollar bills" with issuing currency, which is what they actually do. "If the world was more like North Korea, the world would be a better place" Is it really that much fun to make these sarcastic ignorant comparisons rather than discuss the real issues and maybe learn something?
    - crimsonalucard 11y ago
      >Usually anyone can copy currency as long as you clearly indicate that it is a copy. Would a copy of a dollar still be a copy if it was clearly marked indicating it was a copy? Strange loop!
gozo 11y ago
Not really relevant since bills are protected as a result of laws regarding forgery and fraud, not copyright. It's a lazy rebuttal without foundation in discourse or law.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  Gozo, why discuss written laws? Written laws are fabrications made to infuse artificial restrictions on things that exist in reality. Let's talk about intrinsic laws. Like the law of gravity or the Law Of Supply And Demand: When you increase demand you increase the value of a product, when you increase supply you decrease the value of a product. Basic economics. Let's take this concept and apply it to money. If you print money you increase the money supply. When you increase the money supply you decrease the value of money. Thus the action of counterfeiting is actually theft. By printing money you lower the value of other peoples' money and thus you are stealing value from other people. That's why counterfeiting is bad. Written laws on forgery and fraud don't cause this phenomenon they are a consequence of it. The same academic principle works for piracy. Get it? You copy a product you devalue the product by increasing supply. These are principles of Basic economics and Intrinsic law that permeates the fabric of reality. In essence: When you pirate a product you are stealing it, there is no way around it. Why is it not ok to pirate money but it's totally ok to pirate music? I'll tell you why. The issue touches the roots of humanity's morally ambiguous nature: When you pirate money, you harm everyone who owns money and face the ire of the entire population. When you pirate music you harm only the creator of the music and you probably got a lot of friends who do the same thing. Significantly easier to do from an ethical standpoint. But how do you face yourself? What does a typical weak, cowardly human tell himself when he commits a crime? A typical human will create an overly-complicated and sophisticated logical delusion in order to justify the action to himself. Stupid logic like "downloading an mp3 makes me more likely to buy the track" are typical examples. In fact, you can likely witness a version of this overly-complicated logic in your response to this post. Is that enough discourse for you? Yours is the lazy rebuttable without foundation in reality.
  - gozo 11y ago
    You clearly don't have much experience with debating copyright instead your trying to shoehorn in your argument where they don't make sense. "You copy a product you devalue the product by increasing supply" A digital product already has infinite supply. The question isn't if copying affects supply, but if it affects demand. If someone copy something they would never have bought the economic damage to the author is theoretically zero. Copyright doesn't even deal with "increasing supply" as a intrinsic thing. If you spend year creating recipes for a restaurant that become successful and someone opens a restaurant next door serving the same things (and thereby increasing supply) the original restaurant has little to no copyright claim. The same is true in other fields. Even universal human rights doesn't deal with intellectual property in this way. There's simply little basis for this view. "When you pirate music you harm only the creator of the music" That you "only harm the creator" is objectively false, since even if you prescribe to great harm being done by piracy it's not only the creator, but the rightsholder that gets hurt. "What does a typical weak, cowardly human tell himself when he commits a crime?" It's when you don't have good arguments nor is well read you have to resort to this type of name calling. "Yours is the lazy rebuttable without foundation in reality" My arguments are absolutely based in the current discourse.
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Here's a crazy thought experiment. Instead of copying some music track, how about copying a dollar bill? What happens to the dollar bill? We don't need all the baggage of monetary policy here. Let's get to the heart of what you're after: How about copying a gift certificate? The only point you're making is that it's possible for a forged copy to be the instrument of a fraud. When you redeem the forged gift certificate you're effectively stealing inventory from the store. So you're really just making the spurious claim that copying is stealing, using a detour through currency forgery to disguise the nature of your claim. > So in a sense, the same way copying music helps the music industry, copying dollars helps the economy! Do you understand why the government prints money during a recession?
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  >Do you understand why the government prints money during a recession? Yes I do! Do you? The term is called quantitative easing and it is a mechanism of last resort! Amazing! And totally irrelevant to the debate! Speaking of irrelevancy, do you know what the government usually does during a recession before they resort to actually printing money? If you do you win! >So you're really just making the spurious claim that copying is stealing, using a detour through currency forgery to disguise the nature of your claim. No I'm not! No disguises. I am illustrating an isomorphism. Copying is stealing and the concept is EXACTLY the same as printing money.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > Yes I do! Do you? The term is called quantitative easing and it is a mechanism of last resort! Amazing! And totally irrelevant to the debate! So you understand how quantitative easing stimulates the economy but you don't see the analogy to creating more copies of information goods? > Speaking of irrelevancy, do you know what the government usually does during a recession before they resort to actually printing money? If you do you win! They... lower taxes and increase/maintain government spending. Which you can't do at the same time as each other without either borrowing or creating money, and government borrowing money increases interest rates, hence the printing. > No I'm not! No disguises. I am illustrating an isomorphism. Copying is stealing and the concept is EXACTLY the same as printing money. Then just claim copying is stealing directly so people can better understand why you're wrong. The analogy is unnecessary and it doesn't even hold in that context. If you use forged currency to "buy" a loaf of bread, the store is out one loaf of bread. If you copy some information the store's balance sheet is unchanged. The two are not equivalent and trying to ignore the difference is exactly what leads to the crazy conclusions the law makes about the calculation of damages for copyright infringement. Notice that this is not saying that copyright infringement causes no damages. It is merely saying that the damages are not equal to the cost of the product, unlike the situation of an actual theft. I'm not sure you would even like a direct analogy to theft. A store buys a loaf of bread for $1 and aims to sells it for $1.50 (or whatever). If you steal it, the loss they take on their books is their cost, not the retail price. Calculating damages that way wouldn't be very favorable to copyright holders.

malka 11y ago

yeah. Data and physical good are the same thing.

DougN7 11y ago
The dollar bill's value has nothing to do with its physical properties.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Which is also true for an mp4 file of a movie or mp3 file of a song or a CD of shrinkwrap software.
  - DougN7 11y ago
    Exactly. So the person's example seems to hold: duplicating dollars isn't a good idea economically, and would have a negative impact like duplicating mp4 movies - it reduces the value of the thing being duplicated.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
There's approximately 75 trillion dollars worth of money on this earth. Only 5 trillion of that money is paper dollars. The rest is data! http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth
- malka 11y ago
  Yes. I'd venture that copying this data would not have the effect of creating money. Altering it, however would.

tjallingt 11y ago

So in your analogy what about the guy who wants a dollar bill but because of he lives outside the United States can't "go out and actually work to earn a real dollar bill"?

crimsonalucard 11y ago
Right now only the united states is allowed to copy dollar bills, if you live outside of the united states you'd have to go into these underground exchange markets to get your dollars. The united states government needs to get with the times. Digital distribution is the wave of the future. Why should the united states be the sole entity allowed to print dollar bills? If people from other countries need US dollar bills then, they should have the right to print out dollar bills. There's a new thing emerging on the piracy scene called a superdollar. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar. North Korea is, apparently, on the tip of the spear for this new technology; bravely paving the way of a glorious future! The US needs stop using old archaic ways of distributing money and get with the program! If the world was more like North Korea, the world would be a better place.
- gozo 11y ago
  "Right now only the united states is allowed to copy dollar bills" Usually anyone can copy currency as long as you clearly indicate that it is a copy. "The united states government needs to get with the times. Digital distribution is the wave of the future. Why should the united states be the sole entity allowed to print dollar bills?" Not a unreasonable question if you equate "print dollar bills" with issuing currency, which is what they actually do. "If the world was more like North Korea, the world would be a better place" Is it really that much fun to make these sarcastic ignorant comparisons rather than discuss the real issues and maybe learn something?
  - crimsonalucard 11y ago
    >Usually anyone can copy currency as long as you clearly indicate that it is a copy. Would a copy of a dollar still be a copy if it was clearly marked indicating it was a copy? Strange loop!

gozo 11y ago

Not really relevant since bills are protected as a result of laws regarding forgery and fraud, not copyright. It's a lazy rebuttal without foundation in discourse or law.

crimsonalucard 11y ago
Gozo, why discuss written laws? Written laws are fabrications made to infuse artificial restrictions on things that exist in reality. Let's talk about intrinsic laws. Like the law of gravity or the Law Of Supply And Demand: When you increase demand you increase the value of a product, when you increase supply you decrease the value of a product. Basic economics. Let's take this concept and apply it to money. If you print money you increase the money supply. When you increase the money supply you decrease the value of money. Thus the action of counterfeiting is actually theft. By printing money you lower the value of other peoples' money and thus you are stealing value from other people. That's why counterfeiting is bad. Written laws on forgery and fraud don't cause this phenomenon they are a consequence of it. The same academic principle works for piracy. Get it? You copy a product you devalue the product by increasing supply. These are principles of Basic economics and Intrinsic law that permeates the fabric of reality. In essence: When you pirate a product you are stealing it, there is no way around it. Why is it not ok to pirate money but it's totally ok to pirate music? I'll tell you why. The issue touches the roots of humanity's morally ambiguous nature: When you pirate money, you harm everyone who owns money and face the ire of the entire population. When you pirate music you harm only the creator of the music and you probably got a lot of friends who do the same thing. Significantly easier to do from an ethical standpoint. But how do you face yourself? What does a typical weak, cowardly human tell himself when he commits a crime? A typical human will create an overly-complicated and sophisticated logical delusion in order to justify the action to himself. Stupid logic like "downloading an mp3 makes me more likely to buy the track" are typical examples. In fact, you can likely witness a version of this overly-complicated logic in your response to this post. Is that enough discourse for you? Yours is the lazy rebuttable without foundation in reality.
- gozo 11y ago
  You clearly don't have much experience with debating copyright instead your trying to shoehorn in your argument where they don't make sense. "You copy a product you devalue the product by increasing supply" A digital product already has infinite supply. The question isn't if copying affects supply, but if it affects demand. If someone copy something they would never have bought the economic damage to the author is theoretically zero. Copyright doesn't even deal with "increasing supply" as a intrinsic thing. If you spend year creating recipes for a restaurant that become successful and someone opens a restaurant next door serving the same things (and thereby increasing supply) the original restaurant has little to no copyright claim. The same is true in other fields. Even universal human rights doesn't deal with intellectual property in this way. There's simply little basis for this view. "When you pirate music you harm only the creator of the music" That you "only harm the creator" is objectively false, since even if you prescribe to great harm being done by piracy it's not only the creator, but the rightsholder that gets hurt. "What does a typical weak, cowardly human tell himself when he commits a crime?" It's when you don't have good arguments nor is well read you have to resort to this type of name calling. "Yours is the lazy rebuttable without foundation in reality" My arguments are absolutely based in the current discourse.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

> Here's a crazy thought experiment. Instead of copying some music track, how about copying a dollar bill? What happens to the dollar bill? We don't need all the baggage of monetary policy here. Let's get to the heart of what you're after: How about copying a gift certificate? The only point you're making is that it's possible for a forged copy to be the instrument of a fraud. When you redeem the forged gift certificate you're effectively stealing inventory from the store. So you're really just making the spurious claim that copying is stealing, using a detour through currency forgery to disguise the nature of your claim. > So in a sense, the same way copying music helps the music industry, copying dollars helps the economy! Do you understand why the government prints money during a recession?

crimsonalucard 11y ago
>Do you understand why the government prints money during a recession? Yes I do! Do you? The term is called quantitative easing and it is a mechanism of last resort! Amazing! And totally irrelevant to the debate! Speaking of irrelevancy, do you know what the government usually does during a recession before they resort to actually printing money? If you do you win! >So you're really just making the spurious claim that copying is stealing, using a detour through currency forgery to disguise the nature of your claim. No I'm not! No disguises. I am illustrating an isomorphism. Copying is stealing and the concept is EXACTLY the same as printing money.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > Yes I do! Do you? The term is called quantitative easing and it is a mechanism of last resort! Amazing! And totally irrelevant to the debate! So you understand how quantitative easing stimulates the economy but you don't see the analogy to creating more copies of information goods? > Speaking of irrelevancy, do you know what the government usually does during a recession before they resort to actually printing money? If you do you win! They... lower taxes and increase/maintain government spending. Which you can't do at the same time as each other without either borrowing or creating money, and government borrowing money increases interest rates, hence the printing. > No I'm not! No disguises. I am illustrating an isomorphism. Copying is stealing and the concept is EXACTLY the same as printing money. Then just claim copying is stealing directly so people can better understand why you're wrong. The analogy is unnecessary and it doesn't even hold in that context. If you use forged currency to "buy" a loaf of bread, the store is out one loaf of bread. If you copy some information the store's balance sheet is unchanged. The two are not equivalent and trying to ignore the difference is exactly what leads to the crazy conclusions the law makes about the calculation of damages for copyright infringement. Notice that this is not saying that copyright infringement causes no damages. It is merely saying that the damages are not equal to the cost of the product, unlike the situation of an actual theft. I'm not sure you would even like a direct analogy to theft. A store buys a loaf of bread for $1 and aims to sells it for $1.50 (or whatever). If you steal it, the loss they take on their books is their cost, not the retail price. Calculating damages that way wouldn't be very favorable to copyright holders.