[exratione]

And this is an example of one of the many, many reasons why intellectual property in the age of the leviathan state is a terrible idea, terribly executed.

As a practical matter you can't own public, unencrypted arrangements of bits. All attempts to enforce ownership of public, unencrypted arrangements of bits are forms of rent-seeking or forms of begging or, at the pleasant best, forms of politely asking other people to go along with your view of the world for a while.

[forrestthewoods]

I could not possibly disagree with that viewpoint more. I'm just going to paste my favorite statement from the internet loved Judge Posner.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection."

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html

[phaemon]

That quote doesn't support your viewpoint. There's nothing in that quote that I would say is wrong, and I would happily get rid of copyright entirely.

[mangoman]

What? Not everything on the Internet is public domain. Just because I put a photo on the internet that's not encrypted doesn't make it fair game to go sell my photo.

Maybe I just didn't understand what you were trying to say...

[logic]

His position, I'm guessing, is that when a good has no natural scarcity (pictures and music in digital form, for example, or compiled code), society should not be creating an artificial scarcity in its stead (ie. compelling others not to reproduce it through force of law). He views the idea of this compelled scarcity to be, basically, rent-seeking behavior codified into law.

I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect the "you can't own" portion of his statement was a point of possession and direct control, not necessarily law.

exratione, please let me know if I'm misrepresenting your position here at all, and I'll correct my post. (I'm intentionally leaving out my opinion, just trying to clarify yours. :))

[snowwrestler]

The thing is, most physical goods no longer have natural scarcity in rich western societies like the UK or US. A bottle of water is not at all scarce, but it's still illegal to take it from a store and use it without permission.

[Dylan16807]

That's not what scarcity means. There is a limited supply of bottles, and it costs real pennies to get some and transport them full of water.

Low-cost is not no-cost, and digital copies made by someone else are actually no-cost.

[snowwrestler]

For any practical purpose, there is no limit on our supply of plastic bottles. They are incredibly cheap to make and the raw materials are incredibly abundant.

> Low-cost is not no-cost, and digital copies made by someone else are actually no-cost.

They're not actually no-cost, it's just that the costs are indirect so it's easy to lose track of them. For example, I'd be interested to see someone make and use a digital copy without a computer and electricity, both of which cost money. Distribution takes an Internet connection and servers, which cost money too.

[Dylan16807]

>For any practical purpose, there is no limit on our supply of plastic bottles. They are incredibly cheap to make and the raw materials are incredibly abundant.

The raw resources for bottles are abundant, but it requires labor to make and transport them. Labor is not free, so bottled water remains scarce. If robot swarms will refill and restock bottles for you, then you can take one off a shelf.

>They're not actually no-cost, it's just that the costs are indirect

None of those come out of the pocket of the person being copied. I guess I was too unclear about specifying made by someone else. When we're talking about a '''theft''' scenario, the burden imposed on the person being '''stolen''' from is very important, and when it comes to digital copies they are uninvolved in the action and have no costs at all.

[exratione]

Yes, you have the correct interpretation.

[nitrogen]

I tend to agree with your point, but apart from the obvious question of paying creators, there is another question: what do we do with scarce, intangible resources, like creators' reputations? Suppose we abolished copyright. Should a creator be able to prevent the WBC from using their creations in a way that might defame the creator, or to promote a cause that is highly offensive to the creator?

[gnaritas]

> Just because I put a photo on the internet that's not encrypted doesn't make it fair game to go sell my photo.

But it should. Copying is not theft, and shouldn't be treated as such by law, even though it is now. IP is just wrong, we just haven't adjusted to that truth yet; we will eventually.

[millstone]

When you say "IP is wrong," do you mean that it's morally wrong, that you have a natural right to copy and sell any photo that you find on the Internet? Or do you mean that it's wrong policy, in the sense that we would all be economically better off without any IP? Or both?

I view IP as a useful tool that allows content creators to earn a livelihood from their work. If you oppose IP and support legal file sharing, you forfeit the right to complain about the quality of TV, movies, video games, etc.

[gnaritas]

I mean creating artificial scarcity is wrong; ideas are not property, digital content is not property. Property exists because of scarcity, absent scarcity, there should be no notion of property or ownership of something.

Content creators should not be using law to create markets that can't exist naturally. If they can't find a way to fund their work in a world where distribution is effectively free, then their work isn't worth paying for. That distribution used to be a profit center is a historical accident that's been fixed by the Internet.

You cannot prevent copying, and copying does not take something from you, it is not theft, you have not lost any property, anything that can be digitally copied has no right to be called property to begin with. It's a legal fiction created to manipulate people into associating copying to theft when nothing has actually been stolen.

I oppose all forms of IP, the world would be vastly better without it. Patents were not created for inventors, they were created to make that knowledge public.

When a law attempts to prevent something that cannot be prevented and that a majority of the population will do anyway; that law is wrong.

IP has created an environment where people expect to work once and then rent seek and be paid over and over again rather than just for the time they worked; this is wrong and artificial and leads to disparity of wealth distribution where people live forever off the work of others.

[hippich]

I believe he is talking about common sense vs. you talking about law.

[mgraczyk]

To put your "arrangement of bits" trivialization into a more realistic perspective: A 3x2 true color bitmap with just 6 pixels requires 144 bits to store. There are thus 2^144 such possible images.

Lets pretend that every computer connected to the internet today starts randomly generating images. Lets optimistically say they can generate 1 million per second each, and optimistically assume there are 3 billion such computers. For any particular image as described above, these computers have an expected time to generate the image of around 2^24 years. That's almost the age of the universe so far. Increase the image size to 3x3 and those computers will effectively never generate the image (expected time something like 2^75 times the age of the universe).

Those bits in an image aren't arbitrary. Do not trivialize the importance of digital content by equating a picture to an "arrangement of bits." Even a seemingly very small arrangement of bits is extremely special.

[indrax]

I don't think that the non- arbitrariness of content changes the assertion - that attempting to own content is rent seeking or begging.

[gnaritas]

The uniqueness of an image is meaningless, it doesn't in any way stop it from being a simple arrangement of easily copied bits and absent such scarcity, the notion of property is meaningless. Property only makes sense when something is scarce.