Posting this is mostly coincidental, but considering the recent 16chan.org drama over the copied database, I feel like it's somewhat topical.
Copying is not Theft!
Posting this is mostly coincidental, but considering the recent 16chan.org drama over the copied database, I feel like it's somewhat topical.
Hell yeah!
LII-Ne with strong EII tendencies, 6w7-9w1-3w4 so/sp/sx, INxP
WRT the copied database, there was a threat that the copied forum would become a competitor to the16types, which is unfair as it uses material directly copied from the16types to be valuable. Forum posts are copyable, but human attention is not; the split would damage both sites overall.Originally Posted by Capitalist Pig
As a related issue to the thread topic in general, consider plagiarism: passing off a copied copyable resource as your own work. What is being stolen here? Only human attention, reputation, etc. Naturally, attention and reputation must be factored in as commodities in a free market.
Now let's get back to the copyable resources. Does a copyable resource have more value when it has been copied more times? Yes, it does, though the utility for a single person to obtain more copies drops off sharply. The issue is that the production cost per copy is negligible, and nearly the entire cost is in overhead. This makes the cost-benefit ratio of the product directly dependent on how many people it can be distributed to. In a communal environment (by why I mean, an environment in which only the average benefit to everyone involved is considered and the person causing the benefit does not need to be repayed), then immediately distributing the copied product to everyone in the community who would gain any utility from it is ideal. However, in a free market the source generally does need to be repaid - if the source cannot be repaid with utility to equal his cost, then we must reason that he should not have created the copyable resource. However, if the communal benefit of the copyable resource is greater than his cost, then theoretically the resources to pay him should be available - there only remains the question of how to transfer them from the person receiving the benefit to the person providing the benefit.
Now that I've established that the issue of payment remains the same for copyable and noncopyable resources, what is causing the desire to not pay for these copies? The issue is that each copy of the copyable good provides the full benefits of the overhead. With that in mind, possibly the most sensible payment method would be for the first buyer to pay the full value of the information, then gradually get his money back as the product is sold to more people.
Example:
Artist - Creates music at a cost of $10,000, including the value of time.
First buyer - Pays $5,000 to the artist
Second buyer - Pays $3,333, which is divided evenly between the artist and first buyer
Third buyer - Pays $2,500, which is divided evenly between the artist and first two buyers
Fourth buyer - Pays $2,000, which is divided evenly between the artist and first three buyers
The problem with this system is that the first buyer may not want the risk involved in paying $5,000 for a song and hoping that enough copies sell that he gets most of it back. However, anyone who isn't willing to pay the real value of his share of the overhead should not receive the power to prevent the author from receiving the full value of his work. That means, anyone who pays only $10 for a song must agree not to distribute any copies until the price according to this model drops below $10... otherwise the first buyer may simply pay $10 and distribute it to the world, depriving the author of his profits.
Now, what if buyer #3 chooses to give away the product for free, thus making it impossible to make any further profits? Well, at least he lost as much as the other two did. To prevent this, the author could conceivably sell only the copyright and not individual copies, though this puts even more of the risk on the buyer.
In conclusion, I seem to have established that the value of a copyright reflects an actual expenditure of resources that must be accounted for in a free market. Such a deficit cannot be arbitrarily disposed of; if it is paid in full, or if the esteem and recognition will be sufficient (Einstein's Relativity would be a case of this), then the author ought to release it into the public domain, but only then. Of course, the question of whether it has been paid in full is a fuzzy one, as the free market can do strange things to prices...
LII-Ne
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and the Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare!"
- Blair Houghton
Johari
I'll leave C-Pig to present the "property 'rights' only exist as a necessary response to scarcity" argument. The basic premise of which is that it is nonsensical to engage in "ownership" and prohibit a person's use of an object (or, in this case, idea) when said person's use does not in any way interfere with another person's use of the object. Rather, I'll focus on addressing the one in the post I've quoted.
The essential idea I'm seeing in this post is a utilitarian argument: that the 'system' (presented as a sort of 'free-market' for ideas) cannot function optimally without intellectual property. Setting aside the possible concern that the ideas of a 'free-market' and 'necessity of a monopoly' cannot simultaneously held without a contradiction, I'll address the actual utility of Intellectual Property.
As is a common fact, Intellectual Property, as an idea, has not come around until the past few centuries, and, arguably, this absence did not negatively affect creativity or the functioning of the economy at the time. (I'll give the widely-known fact that the essential plots of Shakespeare's plays were taken from previous stories and later retooled for the Bard's purposes) Of course, I'm sure most people here are aware of an "idea-expression" divide, and the most "reasonable" view of Intellectual Property consists of limiting the "copying" of an idea's expression, not the idea itself. Prohibiting the spread of an idea itself is, naturally, censorship and a few other things I don't think anyone here is going to try to defend. Thus, the concern here is over the legitimacy of "stealing" an expression of an idea.
(to be finished)
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