Copyright Infringement

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

I was refuting a claim Night Ripper made to the effect that copying the idea takes "nothing" from the idea's author.

Copying the idea leaves the idea in tact. Nothing is "taken". You can say I've diminished its value, just like giving away lemonade for free diminishes your lemonade business but so what?

As EmperorNero already pointed out, we can diminish the value of things all the time and nothing can be done about it. I can diminish the value of your novel by writing a similar novel and selling it at a cheaper price, again so what?

2 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Quote:

I can diminish the value of your novel by writing a similar novel and selling it at a cheaper price, again so what?

No, you can't Night Ripper.

One of 2 things will happen. Your novel will be crap and no one will buy it. Or your novel will be too close to the first novel and will violate copyright laws and it won't be able to be sold.

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

EmperorNero wrote:
Night Ripper wrote:
This is where we disagree and I don't see any way of you convincing me to agree with you since the only reason why I allow that physical property is legitimate is because it is scarce.

Immaterial property is scarce as well. We pay for it, so it's per definition scarce.

Uh, no. If I steal a CD from the store, there's one less CD for others. If I copy a song, there isn't one less copy of that song for others. That's what I mean by scarce.

Let me try to explain, respectfully, what I think the error in this line of thinking is: The immaterial form is not the same as it's instances. What the programmer creates is not what you download or buy on a CD. The programmer creates a form, a spirit or structure, and what you buy or copy is a material instance of that immaterial form. Instances are indeed abundant, you can arrange your harddisk to represent any form almost for free. But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object. Therefore the same economic necessities that justify property rights of objects apply to immaterial forms as well: They are scarce and we have to expense resources to create them. Programmers need to eat.

Ownership of anything means that you have the exclusive right to control it. Therefore ownership of a form implies the the exclusive right to control that form. When you copy an instance of a form, the owner of the form does no longer control it. Thus in the immaterial world copying is the equivalent of what carrying physical stuff away is in the material world, stealing. Of course I don't agree with any kind of property intangible property right, and this should not be enforced by the state, but through a voluntarist organization.

That intellectual property can be copied is not an argument against intellectual property rights, but an argument for them. A shrinking share of the cost of a car is the cost of metal and plastic, while a growing share is the labor of engineers that design the engine and the computer system. I can imagine a future in which the instances of a car are inexpensive to produce, and most of the cost goes into designing the form. The same has happened for music, 200 years ago you had to have an orchestra in your house, today producing music is the design of a form, and you buy a inexpensive instance. So we are "immaterializing" our economy. And commodification of forms is therefore necessary to continue to practice capitalism. It would be nice if car engineers work for free, but sadly they don't.

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

Copying the idea leaves the idea in tact. Nothing is "taken". You can say I've diminished its value, just like giving away lemonade for free diminishes your lemonade business but so what?

The bottom line is that if you diminish the value of their asset you have taken something away.

You can't pretend that you take nothing from someone by taking their ideas. Just like you can't pretend that copying money is a victimless crime. Just like we shouldn't allow people to diminish the value of all of our money through limitless copying of our currency we protect intellectual property.

Do you support protections of our currency against counterfeiting?

Quote:

As EmperorNero already pointed out, we can diminish the value of things all the time and nothing can be done about it.

That is an argument about the right to take value (which you like to pretend is "nothing") and not whether or not copying does the "nothing" you claim it does and I made perfectly clear when I said "arguing that you should have the right to do so is one thing, but claiming that you take nothing from someone by taking their ideas is patently false" that I am disputing your silly notion that you take "nothing" from people through copying intellectual property.

EmperorNero correctly points out that we often have the right to diminish the value of someone else's asset, but that is not what I am arguing. You made the absurd claim that copying an idea takes "nothing" from them but we have long established that it can take away real-world value.

Quote:

I can diminish the value of your novel by writing a similar novel and selling it at a cheaper price, again so what?

This is, again, an argument to the effect that you have a right to diminish the value of the asset, but once again you should note that I am disputing your claim to have taken nothing from someone through copying their idea. Your claim to have the right to is predicated on the notion that you take "nothing" by copying ideas but when we talk about how absurd that notion is you circle back to arguments about the right to do so.

One step at a time here, you claimed that you take "nothing" away from someone by copying their ideas and you claim that property rights are based on physical scarcity but if you diminish their asset's value this is real-world value that can be represented in real-world tangible things they can exchange the it for.

Unless you are also arguing against all sorts of financial instruments that represent value but are not themselves tangible this simply is real-world tangible value that you are taking away from them, and it is not "nothing" as you conveniently like to portray it. Whether or not you have the right to is one thing but you assert the right to based on the notion that copying takes nothing from the victim and this is demonstrably false. You take away their property rights and it can have a direct impact on the real, tangible property they can exchange their intangible asset for.

I don't think you are willing to take this argument to the stubborn extreme that all intangible financial instruments are not legitimate property so upon what basis do you exclude intellectual property from protection? You can't possibly be archaic enough to reject all intangible financial instruments as legitimate, in an increasingly electronic world lots of value is represented intangibly, why can't intellectual property intangibly represent legitimate value?

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

The bottom line is that if you diminish the value of their asset you have taken something away.

I don't think that all copyright infringement necessarily diminishes the value of an asset. Only that which replaces what would have been a valid purchase.

I would point out that the movie and video game industries are currently enjoying huge, record profits - despite the fact that both constantly complain about piracy diminishing the value of their product.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I don't think that all copyright infringement necessarily diminishes the value of an asset. Only that which replaces what would have been a valid purchase.

I don't agree with your reasoning (there are ways that it can diminish value without directly replacing a valid purchase) but that isn't as important as your core concept that copying doesn't necessarily diminish the value of an asset, which I agree with. In cases like copying open-source software you can actually increase the value of the intellectual property.

But it clearly can represent value lost, and when it does so it certainly isn't "nothing".

Quote:

I would point out that the movie and video game industries are currently enjoying huge, record profits - despite the fact that both constantly complain about piracy diminishing the value of their product.

Yeah, and **** the RIAA and all that jazz. But none of those arguments against the stupid arguments they use support the extreme position Night Ripper has staked out for himself.

In short, arguing against bad arguments against piracy doesn't support bad arguments for piracy, and yes, they make piss-poor arguments in support of the old-world gatekeeper role over content distribution they are clinging to, but bad arguments don't cancel each other out and that does nothing to support Night Ripper's bad arguments.

0 Replies

parados wrote:

One of 2 things will happen. Your novel will be crap and no one will buy it. Or your novel will be too close to the first novel and will violate copyright laws and it won't be able to be sold.

That's a false dilemma. It's also possible that one can write a novel without infringing but is still good enough to diminish the value of others.

EmperorNero wrote:

Let me try to explain, respectfully, what I think the error in this line of thinking is: The immaterial form is not the same as it's instances. What the programmer creates is not what you download or buy on a CD. The programmer creates a form, a spirit or structure, and what you buy or copy is a material instance of that immaterial form. Instances are indeed abundant, you can arrange your harddisk to represent any form almost for free. But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object. Therefore the same economic necessities that justify property rights of objects apply to immaterial forms as well: They are scarce and we have to expense resources to create them. Programmers need to eat.

Ownership of anything means that you have the exclusive right to control it. Therefore ownership of a form implies the the exclusive right to control that form. When you copy an instance of a form, the owner of the form does no longer control it. Thus in the immaterial world copying is the equivalent of what carrying physical stuff away is in the material world, stealing. Of course I don't agree with any kind of property intangible property right, and this should not be enforced by the state, but through a voluntarist organization.

That intellectual property can be copied is not an argument against intellectual property rights, but an argument for them. A shrinking share of the cost of a car is the cost of metal and plastic, while a growing share is the labor of engineers that design the engine and the computer system. I can imagine a future in which the instances of a car are inexpensive to produce, and most of the cost goes into designing the form. The same has happened for music, 200 years ago you had to have an orchestra in your house, today producing music is the design of a form, and you buy a inexpensive instance. So we are "immaterializing" our economy. And commodification of forms is therefore necessary to continue to practice capitalism. It would be nice if car engineers work for free, but sadly they don't.

You replied to a post where I explained why intangible property isn't scarce but failed to address that fact. As such, my argument stands. I don't recognize intangible property as legitimate because it's not scarce. Address that point if you hope to have any progress made with me.

Robert Gentel wrote:

The bottom line is that if you diminish the value of their asset you have taken something away.

Right but if I copy something I haven't diminished the value of anything. I never intended to pay money anyways. Therefore copying isn't taking anything away from the artists.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I don't think that all copyright infringement necessarily diminishes the value of an asset. Only that which replaces what would have been a valid purchase.

That's my point exactly. The mere act of copying something doesn't diminish it since I had no intention of purchasing it anyways. The only possibilities were, (1) I buy nothing and I get nothing or (2) I buy nothing but I get a copy of the artwork anyways. Either way, the artist gets the same amount of money, nothing. Therefore, nothing has been diminished. Robert has utterly failed with his argument. I'm glad someone else can see that as well.

Robert Gentel wrote:

copying doesn't necessarily diminish the value of an asset, which I agree with

That was my point. I'm sorry I didn't phrase it in a way you can understand it but nevertheless you agree with me so there's no point in debating it anymore.

2 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

Right but if I copy something I haven't diminished the value of anything. I never intended to pay money anyways. Therefore copying isn't taking anything away from the artists.

This is not the only scenario for copying intellectual property in the world and there are plenty where there is demonstrable value lost. You conveniently prefer to ignore them instead of admitting that your claim that copying takes "nothing" suffers from less-than-perfect veracity.

Quote:

That's my point exactly. The mere act of copying something doesn't diminish it since I had no intention of purchasing it anyways. The only possibilities were, (1) I buy nothing and I get nothing or (2) I buy nothing but I get a copy of the artwork anyways.

That is some absurd reductionism, no those are not the only possibilities. To debunk this I only have to offer one more:

As an example, I will use websites as intellectual property. When we buy websites on website marketplaces we check for duplicate copies of the website. If they exist we value the website we are purchasing less than if the intellectual property is unique on the web.

In this case, those who copied the website had no intention of purchasing the intellectual property but they diminish the value of the intellectual property by copying it because we value scarcity, even in intellectual property.

Quote:

Either way, the artist gets the same amount of money, nothing. Therefore, nothing has been diminished. Robert has utterly failed with his argument. I'm glad someone else can see that as well.

Strength of conviction is no substitute for a sound argument. Instead of spending so much time posturing about winning your arguments and how others have "utterly failed" why not just make better arguments and address theirs?

This isn't high-school, we aren't impressed by how convinced you are that you are winning arguments.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

This is not the only scenario for copying intellectual property in the world and there are plenty where there is demonstrable value lost. You conveniently prefer to ignore them instead of admitting that your claim that copying takes "nothing" suffers from less-than-perfect veracity.

We're talking about me. I don't buy intangible property, period. My claim was that my copying doesn't take anything away from the author. Since you've already agreed with me on this, there's nothing else to argue about.

Robert Gentel wrote:

That is some absurd reductionism, no those are not the only possibilities. To debunk this I only have to offer one more:

As an example, I will use websites as intellectual property. When we buy websites on website marketplaces we check for duplicate copies of the website. If they exist we value the website we are purchasing less than if the intellectual property is unique on the web.

Again, I'm talking about me, not you. The fact you have other possibilities means absolutely nothing to me.

Robert Gentel wrote:

Strength of conviction is no substitute for a sound argument. Instead of spending so much time posturing about winning your arguments and how others have "utterly failed" why not just make better arguments and address theirs?

This isn't high-school, we aren't impressed by how convinced you are that you are winning arguments.

Instead of trying to posture about how much more mature you are than me, (since I guess I'm still stuck in high school according to you) why don't you address the arguments yourself? All you're doing is trying to insult my character but it's transparent so it doesn't work well.

Let's summarize, you've already capitulated that not intending to buy artwork and then copying it anyways doesn't diminish the value. I've pointed out that I never intend to buy artwork. Therefore, anything I copy never "takes anything away". If that's not winning the argument then tell me why. Otherwise, stop wasting my time with your personal attacks that do nothing more than comfort your fragile psychology due to Internet tough guy syndrome.

2 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

We're talking about me. I don't buy intangible property, period. My claim was that my copying doesn't take anything away from the author. Since you've already agreed with me on this, there's nothing else to argue about.

I haven't agreed with you on this. In fact I spent some time disputing this notion.

Quote:

Again, I'm talking about me, not you. The fact you have other possibilities means absolutely nothing to me.

You claimed that intellectual property is illegitimate as a concept earlier, now you are moving the goal posts to claim you are only talking about your own limited usecases.

Quote:

Instead of trying to posture about how much more mature you are than me, (since I guess I'm still stuck in high school according to you) why don't you address the arguments yourself? All you're doing is trying to insult my character but it's transparent so it doesn't work well.

This kind of automatic gainsay and mimicry is undermined by the fact that this conversation is archived and that anyone can see that I have been addressing what arguments you are able to come up with.

Quote:

Let's summarize, you've already capitulated that not intending to buy artwork and then copying it anyways doesn't diminish the value.

No, I have not. A more careful read would reveal that I have agreed that it doesn't necessarily do so but maintained that it can and often does do so.

Quote:

I've pointed out that I never intend to buy artwork. Therefore, anything I copy never "takes anything away". If that's not winning the argument then tell me why.

I don't care a whit about whether you think you have won your argument or not and have no interest in convincing you that you are or are not the "winner".

This is the part that I am calling sophomoric, you seem to care about saving face more than the actual argument and seem to need some kind of closure that involves you "winning".

As for me, I can live with failing to convince you, and only care about your arguments, not whether or not you think they have granted you some kind of victory in your mind.

Quote:

Otherwise, stop wasting my time with your personal attacks that do nothing more than comfort your fragile psychology due to Internet tough guy syndrome.

Ok, then as internet tough guy I say: Man up Nancy! You beg off on the pretext of people being mean to you instead of addressing their arguments but are as quick to try to insult as anyone else. The whining about mistreatment is as pathetic as it is an obvious deflection from addressing the arguments.

Nobody cares if you think you "win" this or not, so these proclamations about winning arguments because you are not treated with kid gloves is only granting you victory in your victory-obsessed mind.

You use the dim view I hold of your intellectual honesty as a pretext for evading my arguments. Grow a pair, you've already begged off arguments with about almost everyone in this thread who has argued with you. It's transparent evasion.

I'm no "internet tough guy", you are merely another internet whiner who can't man up to being wrong.

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

EmperorNero wrote:
Let me try to explain, respectfully, what I think the error in this line of thinking is: The immaterial form is not the same as it's instances. What the programmer creates is not what you download or buy on a CD. The programmer creates a form, a spirit or structure, and what you buy or copy is a material instance of that immaterial form. Instances are indeed abundant, you can arrange your harddisk to represent any form almost for free. But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object. Therefore the same economic necessities that justify property rights of objects apply to immaterial forms as well: They are scarce and we have to expense resources to create them. Programmers need to eat.

Ownership of anything means that you have the exclusive right to control it. Therefore ownership of a form implies the the exclusive right to control that form. When you copy an instance of a form, the owner of the form does no longer control it. Thus in the immaterial world copying is the equivalent of what carrying physical stuff away is in the material world, stealing. Of course I don't agree with any kind of property intangible property right, and this should not be enforced by the state, but through a voluntarist organization.

That intellectual property can be copied is not an argument against intellectual property rights, but an argument for them. A shrinking share of the cost of a car is the cost of metal and plastic, while a growing share is the labor of engineers that design the engine and the computer system. I can imagine a future in which the instances of a car are inexpensive to produce, and most of the cost goes into designing the form. The same has happened for music, 200 years ago you had to have an orchestra in your house, today producing music is the design of a form, and you buy a inexpensive instance. So we are "immaterializing" our economy. And commodification of forms is therefore necessary to continue to practice capitalism. It would be nice if car engineers work for free, but sadly they don't.

You replied to a post where I explained why intangible property isn't scarce but failed to address that fact. As such, my argument stands. I don't recognize intangible property as legitimate because it's not scarce. Address that point if you hope to have any progress made with me.

That post explained why immaterial property is scarce. Ignore those other posters in this thread, they are wrong. Read my post again please, it makes sense.

1 Reply

@EmperorNero,

Quote:

. It would be nice if car engineers work for free, but sadly they don't.

A serious question: is there actually evidence showing that pirating/copying of intellectual property, in real world situations, has led to a loss of income for anyone?

For example, let's say that I completely steal all the technical specs for building a Ford Fiesta. What good does that do me? I still have to build the damn thing, and the likelihood of that being cheaper than buying from the manufacturer is somewhere around zero.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

EmperorNero wrote:

That post explained why immaterial property is scarce. Ignore those other posters in this thread, they are wrong. Read my post again please, it makes sense.

Scarcity means that I can't make unlimited copies of X without depriving others of that same ability. Clearly this is not the case.

Night Ripper wrote:

If I take your ideas, you can still use them. I've deprived you of nothing.

Robert Gentel wrote:

copying doesn't necessarily diminish the value of an asset, which I agree with

Since I was only ever talking about myself that's all I needed you to agree to. I never said that no one else can recognize intangible property as legitimate. If I had said that then you would be catching me moving goal posts. I only ever said that I do not recognize it as legitimate. Please admit defeat and move on if you wish to be seen as intellectually honest.

Robert Gentel wrote:

You beg off on the pretext of people being mean to you instead of addressing their arguments but are as quick to try to insult as anyone else.

I only show disrespect to those that have shown it first. If you can't take it don't dish it out. Please take note of how my other exchanges with polite people don't devolve into name calling.

2 Replies

@Night Ripper,

The way I think about it is: it's not whether anything is taken away from the author. It's about what you'd like to see present in your world.

Your money is like fertilizer.

The internet is a crazy phenomenon. To some extent, it has replaced the traditional intellectual market. But I think it's gone past replacing to creating connections that never would have happened in the past.

I've spent a lot of money on books and music that I just wouldn't have been exposed to pre-internet. And some of them have been horizon-broadening experiences for me... opening up even more of the same. I value that and I have payed for stuff that I could have gotten for free, hoping the money would find it's way into the pockets of the people responsible for the cool stuff so they can live to make more cool stuff.

On the other hand: the notion that the consumer is responsible for protecting the merchant is crap. The merchant would screw the consumer if he had the chance, so why shouldn't the consumer look at it the same way? I'm not bound by that mind-set, though. Nobody is.

0 Replies

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:
. It would be nice if car engineers work for free, but sadly they don't.

A serious question: is there actually evidence showing that pirating/copying of intellectual property, in real world situations, has led to a loss of income for anyone?

No, there is no such evidence. How much money they would be making is a non-empirical question, we can't ever measure what income they would be making if... Pirating might even have been beneficial to the industry in the long run, because people have the tendency to want to own a physical copy. Piracing might have gotten us across that hurdle where we are willing to accept data as "the real thing". And now that we are hooked they can sell it for money. The newspaper industry, for example, still has the problem that people just aren't willing to pay for it online because they don't consider it real when they don't get a physical item. 10 years ago, I think, that same was the case for music as well, we wanted to own a CD to consider it real. Now we are fine with just data.

But you can notice now that discussion is irrelevant, observing property rights is not a matter of whether it harms the owner. Otherwise the argument could be made that I have the right to drive your car at night, as long as I don't scratch it and fill the gas back up. The music industry is arguing from a self-destructive angle by making it about lost income, they should be saying "we own this stuff, and you have to observe our property right".

Cycloptichorn wrote:

For example, let's say that I completely steal all the technical specs for building a Ford Fiesta. What good does that do me? I still have to build the damn thing, and the likelihood of that being cheaper than buying from the manufacturer is somewhere around zero.

Imagine everyone had a matter replicator and the value of the car was entirely the technical specs, the thousands of hours of work that went into designing the brake system and the fuel-efficiency of the engine. Somebody has to pay the guy who produced the coffee that those engineers drink in their lunch break. If immaterial forms can't be owned, how could such a modern economy work?

1 Reply

@EmperorNero,

Quote:

If immaterial forms can't be owned, how could such a modern economy work?

Um, if everybody has matter replicators, we don't need an economy at all. We would be in the Star Trek realm where money was an outdated concept.

Cycloptichorn

0 Replies

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

EmperorNero wrote:
That post explained why immaterial property is scarce. Ignore those other posters in this thread, they are wrong. Read my post again please, it makes sense.

Scarcity means that I can't make unlimited copies of X without depriving others of that same ability. Clearly this is not the case.

My post explained why forms are scarce:

Let me try to explain, respectfully, what I think the error in this line of thinking is: The immaterial form is not the same as it's instances. What the programmer creates is not what you download or buy on a CD. The programmer creates a form, a spirit or structure, and what you buy or copy is a material instance of that immaterial form. Instances are indeed abundant, you can arrange your harddisk to represent any form almost for free. But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object. Therefore the same economic necessities that justify property rights of objects apply to immaterial forms as well: They are scarce and we have to expense resources to create them. Programmers need to eat.

1 Reply

@EmperorNero,

EmperorNero wrote:

But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object.

Again, by copying the immaterial form I'm not depriving anyone of that form. You're just trying to sidestep the issue here namely, that my copying of X doesn't mean there's any less of X. It's not scarce.

1 Reply

The problem here is that, while Night Ripper has, up to this point, been clear on what he considers to be the basis for property laws, he hasn't articulated any position on the purpose of property laws. He argues that property laws are based on scarcity, but scarcity doesn't provide a purpose for those laws. In other words, even if tangible things are scarce, there's no reason why those things need to be protected by property laws.

Presumably, NR would argue that we need property laws because otherwise people would be deprived of their scarce things. That may be true, but then NR also supports trespass laws, and those laws protect the owner's use of property, not the owner's ownership of that property. It's clear, then, that property laws do more than just protect the owner from being deprived of property, and that, furthermore, even NR is in favor of property laws doing more than that.

Now, NR has made some feeble arguments about opportunity costs and such, but then that doesn't provide a justification for trespass laws. After all, why should the law protect someone's potential or hypothetical use of property? Moreover, that just takes us another step further from the whole scarcity argument. In other words, how can one justify trespass laws based on a thing's scarcity? It's not just difficult to reconcile trespass laws with NR's scarcity argument, it hardly makes any sense to try.

Clearly, trespass laws have a purpose that transcends the mere scarcity of the thing which might be subject to trespass. NR understands this, on a very basic level, because he understands that the right to exclusive possession (which trespass laws protect) is valuable in its own right. Furthermore, by endorsing trespass laws, NR also recognizes that the law should protect that right. Indeed, NR even recognizes the right to exclusive possession of intangible property -- at least so long as that property is (artificially) scarce. The question, then, is why NR doesn't endorse the equivalent of trespass laws with regard to intangible property.

1 Reply

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

EmperorNero wrote:
But immaterial forms are not abundant, they are as scarce as any physical object.

Again, by copying the immaterial form I'm not depriving anyone of that form. You're just trying to sidestep the issue here namely, that my copying of X doesn't mean there's any less of X. It's not scarce.

Night Ripper, forms are scarce. Why else would we spend millions on creating them? If forms weren't scarce, every single computer programmer, engineer and actor would be out of a job. What's the point of creating something that's abundant?
Forms are not instances! Instances (like a particular mp3 file on your computer) can be copied and are thus abundant. But forms are not abundant, they have to be produced in painstaking labor. That the instances of a form are abundant does not imply that the form is abundant.

1 Reply

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