Intellectual property law

[TCO]

Colon,

1. (Style) Your logic and prose could be tightened up.

2. (Content)

A. WRT point one, there is nothing stopping artists who choose to circulate their work for free, from doing so with computer files. Same thing wrt radio. Doesn't justifying illegal copies of work.

B. WRT point two, you are wrong both ethically and practically. Ethics: just because a crime is prevelant (insurance claim padding) does not mean that it should be allowed. Practice: First, legalizing currently illegal practices will lead to increases. Second, there is plenty that can AND IS being done to eliminate illegal copies of music. The record industry won some battles last year or two.

C. WRT point three, hard to really discuss it becuase you haven't clearly stated your argument. But first the points in B still apply to this issue. Secondly, there is no guarantee that artists will make the added income from live performances, etc. And a very easy argument to say they may make less. (Why pay for something that you get for free.)

3. (Aside) I wonder if your argument is a justification for your own behavior patterns. Do you have illegal music copies?

[GePap]

Re: Re: Big whoop!

Originally posted by Echinda


So you're in favor of IP laws? What you've described is essentially what copyright currently gives. Mozart had none of the protections you describe (other than the ability to walk away from his patron and starve).

I do favor limited IP laws, yes. If Mozart didn't want to starve then he could have worked elsewhere. Honestly, there are many ways of life in this world that pay little, but people ollow them because they love them. ery few musicians ever manke much money, and the real money does go to the middlemen. The real problem is not that musicians starve, but that we let anyone starve at all- though that is best kept to a different thread.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Vanguard



Well it makes no sense to offer economic incentives to people who own the rights to music that has already been produced. What are they going to do, produce more music in the past?

But if you make a habit of jerking the rug under people's ffet like that, you will discourage enterprise. This is why developing countries pay such high rates for loans and why pharma companies are already cutting research. Think about it...

[Vanguard]

Actually I'm in favor of having consistent laws consistently applied. That's part of the reason I think intellectual property law is generally a bad idea. It is almost impossible to apply it consistently and is expensive to enforce.

On the general question of artists being hurt, I ask IP supporters how they deal with the parallel issue. Enforcing IP laws hurts and impoverishes billions of people around the globe who can't afford music.

Why isn't this a far worse crime than forcing people to pay for cds which they don't want in order for a tiny trickle of money to flow from buyers to artists by way of fat record companies?

[TCO]

WHat about patents? Noone would do pharma research without a financial reward. generics companies do not research new drugs...

[Vanguard]

Sure they would. There is almost always a financial incentive to make something useful, whether you have exclusive rights to it or not.

Eliminating patents would reduce some pharma research, no doubt. But mostly it would just reduce research to find drugs that do the same thing as current drugs, but are "new" and therefore patentable.

[TCO]

So how much would it be reduced?

[Vanguard]

How the heck should I know? Some.

But valuable inventions remain valuable whether you get exclusive rights to them or not. Usually protected inventors just piss away their rights anyway though inefficiency and asking too high a price.

[TCO]

hold on buddy. Who is it valuable to? An entrpeneur makes a bet that his work will be repayed. So the more copyable and invention is and the more the cost of development, and the smaller the market size, the less someone will choose to make that bet.

Now, any idea how much money goes into developing 1 new drug? Any idea how easy it is to copy the chemical formulation?

[Vanguard]

Sure. So what? If developing new drugs is such a good idea, why doesn't the government throw hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a cure for aging or wrinkles or that keeps hair from growing out of your nose?

How much is enough? How do we know that the money we will be spending on drug research wouldn't have been better spent developing new computers that makes drug research easier? Or software that unravels genetics? Or that stops global warming?

You can't pick out one economic consequence and assume that it proves something. Economic consequences are a tangled skein of unknowable potentialities. Trying to reduce inefficiencies is about the best you can achieve.

[TCO]

In cases where patent law is insufficient, it may be worthwhile to have government subsidized research. The problem is that the individual copies of songs or drugs are very cheap...but the development costs expensive. It's simlar to telecom where the infrastructure costs are huge (big fixed cost) but negligeable variable cost. (Telecom is a "natural monopoly" as such.) You can either offer a monopoly for intellectual content or can subsidize or can just do without. I think patent law is a reasonable compromise.

[moomin]

Question, class!

Malaria is one of the largest diseases internationally. It's well known, insofar that we know more or less accurately how it spreads, parameters such as hosts, incubation time, and actual biological mechanisms disrupted by it.

1) Why don't we have a vaccine in place? [This is the leading question, yeah]

2) What would you do about it, if you think IP laws are somehow evil and need to be retracted?

[Ned]

Colon, Echinda has it right on the general question concerning piracy of the machine plans. You could proceed under any number of legal theories. The best would be a trade secret misappropriation action that begain with a TRO. Regardless of the remedy chosen, the wise inventor would also file for patent protection and register his copyrights ASAP. Even if the plans have been published, one could still get a patent in the US for up to a year. US patents are by far the most valuable in the world.

On the issue of MP3's, I would be in favor of studying how we could maximize the freedom of distribution we have today with maintianing the right of compensation to the composer, singer or other copyright holder.

I could envision a system where every song had a code that could only be decoded by a computer with a license. Depending on how the composer wanted to be paid, the song could tell the computer that this is a pay-per-play song, free, or subject to a blanket license.

In fact, I believe I read that Microsoft may have something like the above in the works already.

[moomin]

Hmm, Ned. How are you going to deal with the plethora of MP3 encoders and decoders that's out there already? Have them forbidden by law? Authorize the FBI to break into people's houses to search their computers in the middle of the night?

It sounds like cheap melodrama, but I'm quite serious. It's not like any tech fix applied now is gonna work unless you take to quite draconian measures to repress the technology - without any such controls - that's already out there.

[Ned]

moomingparatrooper, We don't have to do anything, anyting at all. The next edition of Windows, Solaris or Linux could simply refuse to play or encode unlicensed MP3's. Over time, the problem would vanish as people upgraded.

In addition, non computer MP3 or equivalent encoders could be banned.