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The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

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Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#41

Post by antiterra »

Jach wrote: post #22
michael_dorfman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not quite the argument. If I compose a poem or a play, and contract with a publisher to publish said poem and pay me a portion of the proceeds (or contract with a theater company to perform the play, and similarly pay me a portion of the proceeds), and some third party takes the poem/play and publishes/performs it without paying me, I have, in fact, been deprived of something, i.e., income. And, if my read…

Interesting you chose the word 'deprived' instead of the more typical 'stole'. I think it's hard to justify stealing when only a copy was copied. So then 'deprived of income' in the sense of withheld income. Who is doing the withholding, and why do you think you're entitled to what they're withholding? And how much? (While the third party didn't have to write your work, they nevertheless would have to do a lot of wor…

(While the third party didn't have to write your work, they nevertheless would have to do a lot of work themselves to make a profit from it.)

This is both bad and wrong. I will attempt to explain why for each.

It is bad on the level that it creates an exchange of sweat of the brow work with originality. That is to say if I copied someone else's book in the more laborious way, I'm more allowed to copy it and make profit. As Justice O'Connor said in Feist, "The sine qua non of copyright is originality." Hard work does not equal good or useful work-- ask Sisyphus.

It is wrong for two reasons. The first is that roll-your-own publishing options are available to an author, and all someone would have to do to make a profit is copy your book from lulu, blurb or whatever ebook publisher you use and post it again with a lower price. The second is that, even if republishing was its own difficult endeavor, the gain a copycat has is simply waiting for success. A publisher who spends money on editing, typesetting, marketing and binding must print a number of books before turning a profit. A copycat publisher can simply wait until it appears a book will be successful before undercutting. This is a drastic reduction in cost and income risk, and it's definitely unfair.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#42

Post by antiterra »

Zigurd wrote: post #35
jvandonsel wrote: post #24

The quote by John Perry Barlow: "Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales." leaves a lot to be desired. OK, so how do writers make their living? By giving live readings? I think not.

The way I earn a living is the same way most musicians earn a living: By working for hire or teaching (consulting). There are about 10,000 books that make any measurable money at all, at any given time, and only a small fraction of those earn the authors enough to live on. Even famous authors of widely read books often have a "day job." Books I have co-authored are "pirated," mainly in markets where wages are lower t…

What if you wrote fiction?

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#43

Post by olavk »

Intellectual property at least makes a certain sense, since it is something you create yourself out of thin air, and therefore can decide to make available to others under certain conditions if both parties agree. If you don't make it available, nobody suffers, and if you do, you have created value without depriving others, so it is only fair to receive compensation.

Owning land, on the other hand is clearly immoral. You didn't create the land, so how could you own it? Oh, you bought it from someone else. Well they didn't own it either. Someone stole it from the community a long time ago. Owning land is theft exactly because it is a limited resource.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#44

Post by tzs »

sp332 wrote: post #5

Here's the rest of that letter from Thomas Jefferson. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.... It's interesting to realize that even such a fierce supporter of personal rights in our country didn't recognize ideas as something that should be "protected" like personal property.

He didn't think there was a natural right to ideas. He didn't say that they shouldn't be protected--just that whether to do so or not was up to society which could weigh the benefits vs. the harms.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#45

Post by hxa7241 »

dctoedt wrote: post #31
slowpoke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you accept the premise that the author of a work is entitled to be remunerated for the production of said work Then please elaborate why we should accept said premise. You just state it like it's an universal law of the universe. It isn't. No artisan (or actually, no one at all) is entitled to a successful business modell. And by the way, the "problem" aren't the people who are unwilling to pay for anything (whic…

> [The problem is] the people expecting to make money with art. It's cool if you can. If you can't, then you're not entitled to laws or monopolies that protect your failed business modell. Agreed that there's no entitlement to laws or monopolies. And I grant you that some ultra-libertarians oppose any restriction on their personal economic freedom, citing moral reasons. But society sometimes decides , for pragmatic r…

> Technically, "monopoly" is a misnomer when applied to IP

Whatever the technical rectitude of non-monopoly assertions, they really ought to sound fairly shady when one considers the very intent and mechanism of IP: to increase profits of the producer, by raising prices through restricting supply. IP is certainly supposed to quack like a duck.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#46

Post by grandpa »

olavk wrote: post #43

Intellectual property at least makes a certain sense, since it is something you create yourself out of thin air, and therefore can decide to make available to others under certain conditions if both parties agree. If you don't make it available, nobody suffers, and if you do, you have created value without depriving others, so it is only fair to receive compensation. Owning land, on the other hand is clearly immoral.…

> Owning land is theft exactly because it is a limited resource.

Would you say the same is true of gold?

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#47

Post by praptak »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #25
slowpoke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you accept the premise that the author of a work is entitled to be remunerated for the production of said work Then please elaborate why we should accept said premise. You just state it like it's an universal law of the universe. It isn't. No artisan (or actually, no one at all) is entitled to a successful business modell. And by the way, the "problem" aren't the people who are unwilling to pay for anything (whic…

I'm not stating that the premise (that the author of a work is entitled to be remunerated for the production) is a universal law of the universe. In fact, I'm not even stating that I agree with the premise. I'm just pointing out that it is an unstated assumption in much of the discussion surrounding IP. In other words, the account given of the "ethical problems of intellectual property" above is dependent upon one re…

"If one is prepared to argue (as you apparently are), that Tolkien had no moral right to the proceeds of the sale of his books [...]"

It is possible to believe that he had the moral right to the proceeds but only on the basis of the copyright policy that existed at the time he wrote the books. This doesn't mean you cannot at the same time argue that such policy should be abolished.

In other words the Tolkien case is a red herring here.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#48

Post by bch »

nextparadigms wrote: post #23

I've seen many people say that if RIAA and MPAA keep trying to introduce new censorship laws like that, eventually the "camel's back will break", and people will demand a total overhaul of the copyright system, or perhaps completely eliminate it. I tend to agree. The more they will push this, the more people will rise up and speak against it, and many people will start questioning if copyright should even exist in th…

See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0 "Lessons from Fashions Free Culture."

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#49

Post by T_S_ »

gvb wrote: post #4

What I consider to be intellectual property is between my ears - it is my intellect and my property. I have an arrangement with my employer to rent my intellect for nominally 8 hours per day. What that arrangement produces are artifacts (ink on paper, magnetic domains on disk drives, charge on floating gates) of my intellect. My employer owns those artifacts, but not the intellect that created them. Companies can tal…

IP is a catch-all term for a variety of legal situations (patents, copyright, trade secrets, even non-compete). Your comment is a very nice legal theory, but I don't know if the courts decide things this way in every case.

Re: The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

#50

Post by SigmundA »

hxa7241 wrote: post #40
SigmundA wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethically it simply comes down to giving credit where credit is due. If you discuss a new idea that you have spent time formulating with a co-worker that is good for the company and the co-worker presents this idea to your common boss as their own and receive a promotion for it, is this ethically wrong?

Yes, that is wrong -- it seems covered by the ethics of lying/truth-telling (from Kant, it is contradictory: if lying were a universal rule, it would destroy the possibility of communication in general). But IP is about more than just clear attribution. And clear attribution is not dependent on IP -- we can have it without the other IP features. So a justification of attribution is not sufficient to support IP too.

You haven't explained how they are different, what is the difference between a co-worker stealing your idea for personal gain and someone else in society doing the same?

In IP it's essentially about someone lying to society about the source of the idea.

The only difference I see is the organizational entities scope, but the ethic is the same.

IP is basically contractualized attribution.

Owning an idea as property is simply a societal contract that guarantee's you attribution for your idea.

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