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No sympathy for business that depends so heavily on obstructing innovation that it requires special laws. The enforcement of these laws is a clear case of socia

• bryogenic 14y ago
  See also: Car dealerships
  • astrodust 14y ago
    At least you can haggle there. Real estate brokers get a percentage cut no matter what you do if you involve them.
  • praptak 14y ago
    At least they don't request that every transport company has to police the cargo on their behalf and remove anything that the dealers say is a car (to be later decided that maybe it was not a car after all, or maybe a car but one that does not threaten their monopoly.)
• rayiner 14y ago
  Downloading copies of "Gears of War" is not "innovation", and the laws against copying aren't any more "special" than the laws against fraud or embezzlement or any of the other ways of violating peoples' property rights that aren't in the Bible. Our whole system of existence depends fundamentally on people being able to depend on the government to protect their rights. This is true even when technology renders makes it easy to violate those rights.
  • thedufer 14y ago
    Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. We need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      > Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store, leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag anyway, right? In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 plus their expected profit on the contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when the marginal cost of that good approaches zero. Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts. The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet, analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples' right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.
    • anigbrowl 14y ago
      If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. I can't pay the mortgage with stats from the Pirate Bay. 10,000 people viewing my film for free is satisfying on an artistic level, but 1000 people paying a $ for the privilege is what actually puts food on the table. I don't want to get into a long argument and Rayiner is making these points excellently, but I'd like to point out that profit and loss are not abstractions that happen only to already-rich people in Beverly Hills who will have to be content with only one Ferrari this year.
  • yk 14y ago
    The ability to distribute a OS to everyone on this planet at less cost than the annual salary of one dev is certainly innovation. Piracy is not violation of a property right, since the creator would not have any stake in what I do with my copy anymore than VW has a say in who borrows my car and technology can certainly change which laws are reasonable or not.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      The creator of a creative work does have a right to control how you reproduce his work, because the law gives him that right. Is this a wholly artificial construct? Yes. But so is any property right. In the state of nature there is no concept of "my." Animals in the state of nature don't "own" things. They merely possess subject to a bigger, stronger animal coming along and relieving them of possession. The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well. As for technology changing which laws are reasonable, that is definitely true. But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. It has simply made it easier to violate those rights. Should the ease with which a right can be violated be a criterion for deciding which rights should be granted?
      • yk 14y ago
        >> The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well. Yes, but being able to license intellectual property is a very different thing from ownership of a car, both in the effects on my rights and in the moral basis of the law. >>But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. I think the most important analogy between material and immaterial goods fifteen years ago was, that an immaterial good needed a physical medium, like a CD. And the buyer of the physical medium had after that property of a thing, and could do what he wanted ( in reasonable limits). Most importantly, as long as CDs were copied by cassettes, the buyer could supply his friends with low quality copies. So it seems to me, that the entire idea of intellectual property revolved around the inability of most people to produce a high quality copy of the medium. In contrast, nowadays everybody could easily produce and distribute a high quality copy. So I think that with the internet the physical medium vanished and with it the part of an immaterial good which made it possible to speak about 'ownership' and 'property' in the first place. So it is certainly the case that we need a consensus, what reasonable behaviour of creators and consumers is. But I think that talk about 'ownership' is just muddinging the water. And personally I find it quite frustrating that we have all these fascinating technology which create abundance of all digitial works. And we are not allowed to actually use them, because we can not figure out how to pay creators (which has not necessarily anything to do with copying in the first place).