5 ms·

Well, yeah, if course you disagree. I also think every one of millions of users of my software should pay me 100$ a month until they die and then their children

by izacus 3y ago

Well, yeah, if course you disagree. I also think every one of millions of users of my software should pay me 100$ a month until they die and then their children should take over. Carpenters would also agree that paying them rent for 200 years for each table they build would be an amazing idea. But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society.

rizky05 3y ago
[dead]
oneplane 3y ago
By that logic, nobody should own anything, or owners should not be allowed to set the rules about the things they own and on what terms they can share or transfer that ownership?
- ubercow13 3y ago
  No, that's just the opposite extreme.
jprete 3y ago
It's not rent-seeking to want to charge for one's own work through copyright.
- izacus 3y ago
  It absolutely is if they want to do that for 90 years instead of some more reasonable time. Noone is disputing the right to charge money for creative works.
  - jprete 3y ago
    The relevant quote from the great-grandpost: "As a hobby content creator, I absolutely disagree. My content is mine, if someone else wants to use it for whatever purposes, that party has to ask for, and get permission, to do so. Which I might or might not give." Your response isn't addressing what my response was addressing.
    - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
      If there is no copyright there is an incentive to monetize it as much as possible and provide as much service back to the public as possible. If there exists copyright then it should be taxed as property tax.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Let me tell you a secret: revenue from royalities is taxed as income.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        I'm no financial expert, but Googling copyright tax lead me to this: > In general, copyrights and patents generate royalty income reported on Schedule E, Supplemental Income and Loss, unless it is characterized as business income reported on Schedule C, Profit or Loss From Business (Sole Proprietorship). However, who owns the intellectual property, i.e., the creator or the party who requested its development, also determines the type of income reported. The proper classification of royalties also affects the recipient’s tax liability in other ways, including self-employment tax, investment interest deduction limitations, and the new 3.8% net investment income tax on unearned income. Seems like that is already the case.
- ben_w 3y ago
  ${Build a house, Write a book} and get money for it for $years afterwards — smells like rent to me. This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, especially given the economic realities of the world we find ourselves in, but it does seem more than a bit rent-y.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    You very likely take out a loan from the bank, give the bank possession of the deed, and you pay off a bank in a few decades. You can very much pay it off in one lump sum, but few can afford it, and those that can won't do it anyway, because future money is cheaper than present money (overtime. There are huge fluctuations like in 2008). Meanwhile, if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it. But selling a book to person B in 20 years doesn't sound like "rent", despite the fact that I have heard that "media older than 10 years is fair game to pirate". 10 years in industry can be a step for an artist, not a career's worth of time like the original copyright law time period.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it You appear to be arguing against buying a house/book when I wrote about building/writing? As in, if I write a book, and then thanks to copyright law own the right to make copies (hence the name) I and my estate get to make money from every new[0] copy sold for 70 years after death. That's what I'm saying smells like rent. [0] But not re-sold copies because first-sale doctrine, and I hope equivalents but that's a US law and I don't know what if anything is the equivalent in my jurisdiction, but I hope there is.
Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
Copyright is different from Patents, but both are forms of IP protection. If Entity A has copyright on a application nothing is stopping Entity B from writing a competing application, they just have to invest their time and effort into the application like Entity A did. If Entity B thinks they can eat Entities A lunch with a different pricing model / cheaper price they are free to do so. If Entity A has patent protection on a application then no one else can make the "same application"* (without licensing the patent) and Entity A has a monopoly on that market for the life of the patent (upto 20 years iirc). * This would all be down to how the patent is written, and personally I am against software patents, but patents can often be bypassed even if that means that the bypassed version could be incompatible with the patented version. I also think that the length of copyright protection is too long, but I don't think it should be abolished either.
lunarimiso 3y ago
Straw man much? If you want to make your software pay-to-use on a monthly basis, that is your perogative. But your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users. No one would buy tables from those carpenters... Perhaps you should understand basic market before making asinine statements such as, "But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society." If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work, without compensating you.. Then that is in fact morally wrong. It really isn't harder than that.
- vimsee 3y ago
  > Straw man much? An interesting way to start a comment. > No one would buy tables from those carpenters... There are companies owning large portions of markets where they can do exactly what you describe. Through market manipulation, political manipulation and probably other tactics I don`t know. This is a moral issue. > If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work.. While I agree with that statement, this is not the moral issue we are discussing. We are discussing the morals of rent seeking behavior, which you shrug of as "your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users" as if that will always be the case.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sneed420 3y ago
You literally can sell your software with a 100$/month license and many companies do that. Likewise artists should have the permission to refuse their work from being scanned by for-profit companies without being compensated. A more apt comparison would be that a cracked version of your software is being used by OpenAI for profit without paying you for a license at all. Would you not object to that?
- izacus 3y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CaptainFever 3y ago
Related text from https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/08/if-youre-arguing-that-someone-deserves-copyright-your-argument-is-wrong/ https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/08/if-youre-arguing-that-so...: > Julian Sanchez, who has been doing excellent work on copyright issues of late, has a nice post about how such arguments are totally irrelevant to copyright policy. He notes that it’s no surprise that artistic and creative people want greater copyright privileges, and fewer exceptions such as fair use, but that’s meaningless: > > These will often be wonderful, likeable, creative people, and the correct policy response to these objections as such is: Cry me a fucking river; now piss off. > And the reasoning why is that copyright policy is not about what someone deserves or about rewarding people based on some moral grounding. Its purpose is and has always been clear: to provide incentive to promote progress.
ozim 3y ago
Funny enough we are not that far away from that - maybe not for tables but for electronics and cars. Well maybe calling it funny is not the right take.
hef19898 3y ago
If your software has million users, cudos. Regarding monetization: - either you developed said software as an employee, than you were properly paid for it and it is not content - your user bought liscenses from you for whatever conditions you agreed upon - you sell it as a SaaS, and you get monthly subscription fees - you give it away for free Obviously, all those payments end when the conrtact with your customers end. If your next of kin runs the software 90 years from now, and customers still use it, of course cuatomers will pay, or not, as laid out above.
ethanbond 3y ago
Rent-seeking doesn’t mean “produces something and charges recurring fee for its use.” It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing the value of people’s production. Training AI on other people’s labor without paying them for it and then extracting value from it is rent-seeking. Consider what happens to AI companies’ value if they had to enter into mutual agreements with their data sources. AI company value will be almost solely determined by the AI company’s own value contribution, which is close to zero, while the data sources’ value would be unaffected or go up. If your business model relies on you leveraging the work of others without mutually agreeable remuneration, chances are good you’re the rent-seeker.
ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
Putting economy and society first is a way to put up a dystopia. This logic always comes to conclusion with things like disposing of disabled and elderly. In other words, not a great argument.
- izacus 3y ago
  What a strange statement, what else should laws put first if not society and economy (economic prosperity)?!?!
  - ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
    "Putting society and economy first" is meaningless in itself until it's clear how it's supposed to be done. Liberal democracies, for example, are supposed to put society first via personal rights and autonomy, which is the opposite of the tone of the GP's message.
    - ItsMonkk 3y ago
      It's a relatively simple argument first made by Economist Paul Samuelson a century ago. > A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse. > https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitfalls-of-economic-models/ https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitf... If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss. I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals for all to use. So let's re-imagine a system where copyrights and patents are abolished. As Samuelson argues, as this is non-excludable and has zero marginal costs, it is a perfect fit for the government to take charge. Given that the current system produces dead-weight loss bringing down the production of the entire country, if we remove this dead-weight loss than the country will have much higher productivity. That higher productivity will drive higher taxes, and those higher taxes will allow the government to expand tenure track positions in public universities. Those tenure track positions can then go on and create new works and patents. The demand that those works create will then bring students to study and allow the works to proliferate. Would you prefer a system where copyrights and patents were abolished but there were 100x more tenure track positions? Where 10% of the population held such a role?
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Creating something is literally the opposite of rent seeking.
- izacus 3y ago
  Everybody creates. Just copyright conglomerates and writers think they deserve rent until death for a thing they created vs. a limited payment.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    I know some small artists who think the same. And rightly so, because they earn their living that way. And obviously, those artists expect royalties as long as they have the rights, and as long as those rights are used by third parties.
- 4bpp 3y ago
  A landlord developer who builds and furnishes an apartment complex with the intent of collecting passive income on it for a long time also creates something, but that is close to a central example of rent seeking.
  - ChadNauseam 3y ago
    Just because rent is involved doesn't make it what is normally referred to as "rent seeking", and I don't think your example would qualify by the traditional definition. From Google: > Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
    - 4bpp 3y ago
      Ah, I see. After looking it up some more, I'm also quite convinced that I misapprehended the definition. My bad.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
jpc0 3y ago
You could do the alternative. Pay the musician $400-$500 for each song and then you don't need to pay a recurring fee for it in perpetuity. Also I'm pretty sure if your carpenter has been studing to produce the works they produce and each work takes several months to a yeah then my estimated price above is off be at least 1 but probably more factors or 10
- izacus 3y ago
  I'm happy to do that, let's start with putting copyright back to 14 years and then we can pay more :)
  - jpc0 3y ago
    These things are not mutually exclusive under current copyright law. If it wasn't expensive time wise a musician can happily give you a no-redistribution license verbally, you may want it in writing to prove they gave it to you but that is about how loose these things are. If you ask me "hey can I use this in my video for free" and you respond "yeah sure no problem" that's all it takes, if its in a text even better. Granted most musicians don't currently have redistribution rights to their own music but that is between them and their lack of hiring a good contract lawyer, and this would fall under contract law not copyright. Understand you are paying a lawyer to make intent clear in the first place since how do you define "use", we I might define it differently and the court may as well unless it is made explicit what "use" means. There is a reason that even the licensing agreement you didn't read for most software is so verbose and licensing for any creative work is about as obtuse. Intent is important though, if I intendef for you to use it to listen to at home but you instead played it tp a crowd of 20000 people and earned a fat paycheck there is a big difference there morally and under current law legally. Most musicians want their music listened to, they just want a little money back for that... Same with other art forms.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
That's not what rent seekers are. And I don't know how we went from "I don't want billion dollar corpotations scraping my IP to train their for-profit products" to "I want everyone to pay me, forever". In my mind, subscriptions imply support and/or updates, and I don't want to work on my software forever. But I don't necessarily want to give it out for free either. one lump sum sounds fine for me.

by izacus 3y ago

rizky05 3y ago

[dead]

oneplane 3y ago

By that logic, nobody should own anything, or owners should not be allowed to set the rules about the things they own and on what terms they can share or transfer that ownership?

ubercow13 3y ago
No, that's just the opposite extreme.

jprete 3y ago

It's not rent-seeking to want to charge for one's own work through copyright.

izacus 3y ago
It absolutely is if they want to do that for 90 years instead of some more reasonable time. Noone is disputing the right to charge money for creative works.
- jprete 3y ago
  The relevant quote from the great-grandpost: "As a hobby content creator, I absolutely disagree. My content is mine, if someone else wants to use it for whatever purposes, that party has to ask for, and get permission, to do so. Which I might or might not give." Your response isn't addressing what my response was addressing.
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    If there is no copyright there is an incentive to monetize it as much as possible and provide as much service back to the public as possible. If there exists copyright then it should be taxed as property tax.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Let me tell you a secret: revenue from royalities is taxed as income.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I'm no financial expert, but Googling copyright tax lead me to this: > In general, copyrights and patents generate royalty income reported on Schedule E, Supplemental Income and Loss, unless it is characterized as business income reported on Schedule C, Profit or Loss From Business (Sole Proprietorship). However, who owns the intellectual property, i.e., the creator or the party who requested its development, also determines the type of income reported. The proper classification of royalties also affects the recipient’s tax liability in other ways, including self-employment tax, investment interest deduction limitations, and the new 3.8% net investment income tax on unearned income. Seems like that is already the case.
ben_w 3y ago
${Build a house, Write a book} and get money for it for $years afterwards — smells like rent to me. This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, especially given the economic realities of the world we find ourselves in, but it does seem more than a bit rent-y.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  You very likely take out a loan from the bank, give the bank possession of the deed, and you pay off a bank in a few decades. You can very much pay it off in one lump sum, but few can afford it, and those that can won't do it anyway, because future money is cheaper than present money (overtime. There are huge fluctuations like in 2008). Meanwhile, if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it. But selling a book to person B in 20 years doesn't sound like "rent", despite the fact that I have heard that "media older than 10 years is fair game to pirate". 10 years in industry can be a step for an artist, not a career's worth of time like the original copyright law time period.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it You appear to be arguing against buying a house/book when I wrote about building/writing? As in, if I write a book, and then thanks to copyright law own the right to make copies (hence the name) I and my estate get to make money from every new[0] copy sold for 70 years after death. That's what I'm saying smells like rent. [0] But not re-sold copies because first-sale doctrine, and I hope equivalents but that's a US law and I don't know what if anything is the equivalent in my jurisdiction, but I hope there is.

Crosseye_Jack 3y ago

Copyright is different from Patents, but both are forms of IP protection. If Entity A has copyright on a application nothing is stopping Entity B from writing a competing application, they just have to invest their time and effort into the application like Entity A did. If Entity B thinks they can eat Entities A lunch with a different pricing model / cheaper price they are free to do so. If Entity A has patent protection on a application then no one else can make the "same application"* (without licensing the patent) and Entity A has a monopoly on that market for the life of the patent (upto 20 years iirc). * This would all be down to how the patent is written, and personally I am against software patents, but patents can often be bypassed even if that means that the bypassed version could be incompatible with the patented version. I also think that the length of copyright protection is too long, but I don't think it should be abolished either.

lunarimiso 3y ago

Straw man much? If you want to make your software pay-to-use on a monthly basis, that is your perogative. But your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users. No one would buy tables from those carpenters... Perhaps you should understand basic market before making asinine statements such as, "But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society." If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work, without compensating you.. Then that is in fact morally wrong. It really isn't harder than that.

vimsee 3y ago
> Straw man much? An interesting way to start a comment. > No one would buy tables from those carpenters... There are companies owning large portions of markets where they can do exactly what you describe. Through market manipulation, political manipulation and probably other tactics I don`t know. This is a moral issue. > If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work.. While I agree with that statement, this is not the moral issue we are discussing. We are discussing the morals of rent seeking behavior, which you shrug of as "your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users" as if that will always be the case.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sneed420 3y ago

You literally can sell your software with a 100$/month license and many companies do that. Likewise artists should have the permission to refuse their work from being scanned by for-profit companies without being compensated. A more apt comparison would be that a cracked version of your software is being used by OpenAI for profit without paying you for a license at all. Would you not object to that?

izacus 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

CaptainFever 3y ago

Related text from https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/08/if-youre-arguing-that-someone-deserves-copyright-your-argument-is-wrong/ https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/08/if-youre-arguing-that-so...: > Julian Sanchez, who has been doing excellent work on copyright issues of late, has a nice post about how such arguments are totally irrelevant to copyright policy. He notes that it’s no surprise that artistic and creative people want greater copyright privileges, and fewer exceptions such as fair use, but that’s meaningless: > > These will often be wonderful, likeable, creative people, and the correct policy response to these objections as such is: Cry me a fucking river; now piss off. > And the reasoning why is that copyright policy is not about what someone deserves or about rewarding people based on some moral grounding. Its purpose is and has always been clear: to provide incentive to promote progress.

ozim 3y ago

Funny enough we are not that far away from that - maybe not for tables but for electronics and cars. Well maybe calling it funny is not the right take.

hef19898 3y ago

If your software has million users, cudos. Regarding monetization: - either you developed said software as an employee, than you were properly paid for it and it is not content - your user bought liscenses from you for whatever conditions you agreed upon - you sell it as a SaaS, and you get monthly subscription fees - you give it away for free Obviously, all those payments end when the conrtact with your customers end. If your next of kin runs the software 90 years from now, and customers still use it, of course cuatomers will pay, or not, as laid out above.

ethanbond 3y ago

Rent-seeking doesn’t mean “produces something and charges recurring fee for its use.” It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing the value of people’s production. Training AI on other people’s labor without paying them for it and then extracting value from it is rent-seeking. Consider what happens to AI companies’ value if they had to enter into mutual agreements with their data sources. AI company value will be almost solely determined by the AI company’s own value contribution, which is close to zero, while the data sources’ value would be unaffected or go up. If your business model relies on you leveraging the work of others without mutually agreeable remuneration, chances are good you’re the rent-seeker.

ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago

Putting economy and society first is a way to put up a dystopia. This logic always comes to conclusion with things like disposing of disabled and elderly. In other words, not a great argument.

izacus 3y ago
What a strange statement, what else should laws put first if not society and economy (economic prosperity)?!?!
- ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
  "Putting society and economy first" is meaningless in itself until it's clear how it's supposed to be done. Liberal democracies, for example, are supposed to put society first via personal rights and autonomy, which is the opposite of the tone of the GP's message.
  - ItsMonkk 3y ago
    It's a relatively simple argument first made by Economist Paul Samuelson a century ago. > A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse. > https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitfalls-of-economic-models/ https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitf... If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss. I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals for all to use. So let's re-imagine a system where copyrights and patents are abolished. As Samuelson argues, as this is non-excludable and has zero marginal costs, it is a perfect fit for the government to take charge. Given that the current system produces dead-weight loss bringing down the production of the entire country, if we remove this dead-weight loss than the country will have much higher productivity. That higher productivity will drive higher taxes, and those higher taxes will allow the government to expand tenure track positions in public universities. Those tenure track positions can then go on and create new works and patents. The demand that those works create will then bring students to study and allow the works to proliferate. Would you prefer a system where copyrights and patents were abolished but there were 100x more tenure track positions? Where 10% of the population held such a role?

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Creating something is literally the opposite of rent seeking.

izacus 3y ago
Everybody creates. Just copyright conglomerates and writers think they deserve rent until death for a thing they created vs. a limited payment.
- hef19898 3y ago
  I know some small artists who think the same. And rightly so, because they earn their living that way. And obviously, those artists expect royalties as long as they have the rights, and as long as those rights are used by third parties.
4bpp 3y ago
A landlord developer who builds and furnishes an apartment complex with the intent of collecting passive income on it for a long time also creates something, but that is close to a central example of rent seeking.
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  Just because rent is involved doesn't make it what is normally referred to as "rent seeking", and I don't think your example would qualify by the traditional definition. From Google: > Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
  - 4bpp 3y ago
    Ah, I see. After looking it up some more, I'm also quite convinced that I misapprehended the definition. My bad.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago

jpc0 3y ago

You could do the alternative. Pay the musician $400-$500 for each song and then you don't need to pay a recurring fee for it in perpetuity. Also I'm pretty sure if your carpenter has been studing to produce the works they produce and each work takes several months to a yeah then my estimated price above is off be at least 1 but probably more factors or 10

izacus 3y ago
I'm happy to do that, let's start with putting copyright back to 14 years and then we can pay more :)
- jpc0 3y ago
  These things are not mutually exclusive under current copyright law. If it wasn't expensive time wise a musician can happily give you a no-redistribution license verbally, you may want it in writing to prove they gave it to you but that is about how loose these things are. If you ask me "hey can I use this in my video for free" and you respond "yeah sure no problem" that's all it takes, if its in a text even better. Granted most musicians don't currently have redistribution rights to their own music but that is between them and their lack of hiring a good contract lawyer, and this would fall under contract law not copyright. Understand you are paying a lawyer to make intent clear in the first place since how do you define "use", we I might define it differently and the court may as well unless it is made explicit what "use" means. There is a reason that even the licensing agreement you didn't read for most software is so verbose and licensing for any creative work is about as obtuse. Intent is important though, if I intendef for you to use it to listen to at home but you instead played it tp a crowd of 20000 people and earned a fat paycheck there is a big difference there morally and under current law legally. Most musicians want their music listened to, they just want a little money back for that... Same with other art forms.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

That's not what rent seekers are. And I don't know how we went from "I don't want billion dollar corpotations scraping my IP to train their for-profit products" to "I want everyone to pay me, forever". In my mind, subscriptions imply support and/or updates, and I don't want to work on my software forever. But I don't necessarily want to give it out for free either. one lump sum sounds fine for me.