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> Me having a cup necessarily means you don’t have it. That’s not how ideas and pictures work. You can infinitely perfectly duplicate them. This is a stupid ar

• kweingar 2y ago
  This isn't really an argument though. It's an assertion that not honoring a commission agreement (or an employment contract) is equivalent to not paying for a license to an existing work. I tend to disagree. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I'd need to hear an argument other than "clearly these are the same thing."
  • cxr 2y ago
    > This isn't really an argument though. It's an assertion that not honoring a commission agreement Wrong. It's that (not honoring an agreement negotiated beforehand) and an argument against treating past-action-thing as inherently zero-cost and/or zero-value; the fact that a prior agreement is an element in the offered scenarios doesn't negate or neutralize the rest of it (just like the fact that a sandwich shop is an element in one of the scenarios doesn't negate or neutralize the broader reality for non-sandwich-involving scenarios). And that's before we mention: there _is_ such an prior agreement in the case of modern IP—you can't not contend with the fact that if Alice is operating in the United States which has existing legislation granting her a "temporary monopoly" on her creative output, and then she generates the output on the basis that she'll be protected by the law of the land, and then you decide that you just don't agree with the idea of IP, then Alice is getting screwed over by someone not holding up their end of the bargain.
    • trinsic2 2y ago
      I'm sorry, the two are not even remotely the same. Saying it over and over again doesn't make it so.
      • cxr 2y ago
        You wanna, like, actually digest what I wrote there? The second comment here is so unlike the first that your "Saying it over and over again" remark can only lead to the conclusion that you either didn't read it or didn't grok it. They're two different comments about two different things. > I'm sorry Are you? I think you mixed up the words "insincere" and "sorry".
    • ramblenode 2y ago
      Agree with the sibling: committing fraud by intentionally not honoring a contract is not morally or logically the same as duplicating a piece of media under copyright. That is not to say that copyright violations are harmless (the scale and intent matter), but details can't be ignored. A material difference between fraud and copyright violations as categories is the presence of lost profit. With fraud one has lost the time value of their work, but with media piracy there is some research (funded by the EU of all things) that it doesn't trade off with sales and may even help some sales.
• tolmasky 2y ago
  I'm answering in reverse order because I think a lot of this comment covers stuff that we don't really disagree with. Thus I will answer the conclusion and then I put my responses to everything else because I find them interesting, but not required for what I want to convey. > Copyright duration is too long. But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about. I would argue that it is perhaps the opposite of tired: ironically less relevant in the past and more relevant as technology advances and mere thought experiments become practical reality. I think many of these issues weren't dealt with in the past because these edge cases existed as mere hypotheticals. Kind of like a mathematician saying that copyright doesn't make any sense because he could write a program that iterates through all books. Lawyers just roll their eyes not because they have a counter-argument, but because they don't think that scenario exists as something they'd ever have to deal with. I think the idea of a computer that reads all the text in the world and learns from it is definitely tied to the questions of unresolved issues with the nature of data, but would have until very recently been considered an annoying hypothetical in a serious discussion about copyright, allowing us to actual dismiss it and continue not addressing it. We all agree that copyright is too long. And I also think this would just become a non-issue if we had a reasonable duration for copyrights. Even if you philosophically disagreed with it, it wouldn't be worth arguing over vs. just waiting it out. > This is a stupid argument, no matter how often it comes up. I knew bringing this up would rekindle these arguments from 20 years ago, but it was necessary for a later point, so I was hoping I was making it value-neutral enough that it wouldn't trigger this, but I guess I was wrong. To be clear, I am not making the same argument you have seen several times before. I am making a strictly weaker argument. The only goal of this distinction is to demonstrate that these properties are "different", and that the law aims to make "intellectual property" behave like physical property. Notice for example that I didn't then assert that IP thus doesn't exist. I didn't even argue whether this goal of matching the behavior was good or bad. I am simply stating that it doesn't by default behave the way we seem to want it to, and, people don't seem to intuitively ascribe the same morality to it either. My only intention is to make the point that this goal thus requires work, and (as I'll explain in more detail below), more work than in the physical case. So far I don't think there is anything necessarily unreasonable about this as a set of premise conditions for establishing the terms under which the public at large agrees to take on the costs of maintaining said system. > A bunch of stuff about Alice making sandwiches and drawing pictures Disclaimer: I don't think we're really in disagreement about the important points, and I don't think this section is relevant to the important points which I return to below, however I find it intellectually interesting to talk about, so I have a retort here, which I believe is just an unrelated digression These analysis of Alice making sandwiches and drawings (IMO) misses the actual meaningful differences in these scenarios since it (IMO) focuses on the uncontroversial, but also irrelevant, breach-of-contract issues. In both these scenarios, the issue is not really the "property," it is the refusal to comply with a previously agreed arrangement. You can see this if we add a third scenario where I pay Alice to do jumping jacks for a week, she does them, and then I refuse to pay at the end of the week. No need to pay you, you already did the jumping jacks. No one "got" anything here, other than I guess "satisfaction" or "exercise". We can make the example even more abstract by having me pay Alice to do nothing all week, and she once again does a great job by sitting quietly in her room all week, and then I once again don't pay her. The sandwiches and drawings are just props in the original examples -- they're not actually necessary since this is a contract question, not a theft question. The actual interesting aspects around the sandwiches and drawings are 1) what happens much after this transaction, and 2) what happens with third parties. With the sandwiches, "what happens after" is straight-forward. I either the sandwiches, resell them immediately, or they go bad. There's not much interesting there. No one needs to think hard about the "ramifications" of the sale of the sandwiches. Compare this to the drawing. What if after I have paid you, just like we agreed, I proceed to make my infinite copies. You might think that's not fair, you thought you'd have a repeat customer. I assumed I was free to do as I please with the drawing. In fact, ironically enough, in this instance if I treat the drawing like physical property, where the expectation is I can do as I please with it, it ironically creates this conundrum because "putting the paper in the photocopier" is in the set of "do as I please". But let's go one step further, what if I make all those copies and then sell them. I'm sure you'll now respond that the royalties or usage rights were all implied in your original story. Great! But that's my point. Those were required. You needed a supremely complex web of laws and binding contracts (and litigation if they aren't followed) as a necessary component of that transaction due to the existence of degrees of freedom that simply don't exist for the sandwiches. You can write up a contract around the resale of a sandwich, but most sandwich shops don't because me eating sandwiches for the rest of my life by copying the original sandwich isn't a realistic scenario (so no need to price that into the original cost of the sandwich), and me out-sandwiching you by carbon-cloning the sandwich isn't feasible, and even if it was it would still have material ingredient costs that would bound its effect on my shop, and even "figuring out the recipe" isn't that much of a worry since you still need to like buy ingredients and make sandwiches as opposed to hitting paste over and over. These scenarios are dramatically different, and that's why sandwich shops usually don't employ lawyers but design shops do. And again, we didn't even go into third parties. What if someone manages to somehow make a copy of your image just as you're handing it to the client. Now both of you are in compliance with your deal, neither of you is angry at each other, but there's this weird situation where you were never expecting to get money from me, but I have a copy of the picture now, and it's really hard to reason about what that means in terms of "gain" and "loss" if I never do anything other than hang it up in my room. This is simply not possible with the sandwich, no one could quickly "copy the sandwich" in transit and potentially introduce an entirely new threat to your business. Again, my only point here is that it seems very strange to insist that there physical property is identical to intellectual property, and that it isn't fairly complicated to make intellectual property approximate the relationships we have with physical property. And to be clear, nothing even derogatory has been said about this goal yet. You could take everything I've written in this comment so far, and use it as part of argument for copyright. However important is it precisely because of the explosion of complexity in possibilities that simply don't exist for the vast majority of physical items.
• account42 2y ago
  If you hire Alice that means there is a contract you both have agreed to and need to honor. If alice just shows up in your kitchen making burgers she doesn't get to tell you what to do with the burgers after you kick her out. With copyright there is no explicit contract you can choose to enter. Instead everyone is effectively forced into a contract with every creator. A contract that is unconciably biased to benefit the creator. Do you think it would be reasonable for Mallory to sell burgers and then demand that if you share some of them with your friend you need to seek her permission? And of course since the burger becomes part of your body then perhaps Mallory should have a say in what you can do with that too and can extract some fee for you existing after eating her burgers. That's how copyright is usually (mis)used - to extract rent in perpetuity for work that was done long ago. This kind of business model just doesn't exist out of IP. It's entirely artificial. > But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about. On the contrary, it is a very important point. We don't burgers just sitting around to feed everyone for their entire lives. We do have all kinds of art and entertainment as well as productivity tools that have essentially infinite free copies. We don't really NEED to artificially encourage more creation for a lot of these whereas if people stopped producing food everyone would be in big trouble.