If you read what I wrote, I was talking about the incentives you brought up. I quoted your statement about the incentives in order to address those incentives.
I agreed that those incentives exist, and that the existance of copyright and patent have in fact helped large quantities of money to be made. Just as the existence of the regulation of railroads created incentives which allowed some people to make vast profits in railroads.
I then state that the making of large ammounts of money is not, to me, reason enough to support patent and copyright.
Yes. Are you aware that those suits had nothing to do with copying the software, charging money or not charging money?
The suits involve taking the code written by someone else and claiming it as ones own, or failing to abide the LICENSE TERMS that come with the OpenSource software.
You might want to read Stallman’s argumentation about using copyright to defeat copyright.
I would rather not have it in the first place.
I’ll gladly rephrase anything you want me to rephrase, since it’s clear that you still think I’m saying things I am not saying.
The point Max is making here is one I’m also trying to make, and seems to be our only real disagreement. If innovation, superior service, and other value-added activities were enough to outcompete the copycats then why do we see companies (even open source) use copyright, trademark, and patent laws?
Check out the vBulletin license: https://www.vbulletin.com/order/license_agreement.php “vBulletin (‘the Software’) is a copyrighted work of authorship and is also protected under applicable database laws. Jelsoft retains ownership of the Software and any copies of it, regardless of the form in which the copies may exist.” And that’s by no means unique to vBulletin.
I’m not advocating current government law. All I’m saying is that the fact companies decide to use those laws almost universally indicates that there’s great demand for the functions they perform. If the government were gone, the demand would still be there. It would just manifest itself differently in a voluntary framework. Sometimes people just want the basic product. They don’t really care about the bells & whistles or customer service, so it becomes important to protect the core product.
I sometimes feel like I’m talking to two different people. I like the guy who wrote the last post a lot more. Thanks for being respectful.
I’m still trying to nail down exactly what the nature of our disagreement is. I don’t have any problem with a company filing suit for violating license terms. I’m all for that and think it would be important in the free market as well. What I am saying is that software companies, including open source, also use trademark, copyright, and patent laws. You mentioned Red Hat, check this out: http://www.redhat.com/legal/legal_statement.html Whether or not they enforce it, I’m not concerned with. If you put up a copyright notice, that’s using it. It’s essentially a threat of force (not that I fault them for that in the world we live in). Like I said in my last post to LS, I’m just trying to show that there’s demand for protection and that demand won’t disappear in the free market. Companies will just develop other solutions.
No trust me, you’re making a point. Max is trying to argue. Huge difference.
Because copyright is automatic on creation. It’s not up to you.
Trademark and patent can be used against you if you do not use them.
The game is rigged. What I am saying is, phpBB has created no transgression against vB. In fact, they are very similar, and they have an open source model. What differs is all of the value add behind vB. That is how it is able to compete as a for profit model. People prefer to pay for more than free if they are getting more. Now for some people, free might be all they can afford (why the web is so great because barriers are low) or free might be all they need.
While I don’t support the patent, trademark and copyright laws, this is a great example of a company that has been able to compete with a comparable, free and legal competitor by not relying solely on their creation, but on adding additional value to their product. vB is commercially successful regardless of the laws, not due to them. Anyone who wanted a free vB wouldn’t have to steal it. They could just go use phpBB.
What they can’t get for free, is the server optimization help by a pro, the professional modification community, the professional 24-7 support and the community of people who care enough about the software to pay for it. The tone of a forum of payers as opposed to a bunch of free riders is very different. But then we know that ownership is the best way to preserve value.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean the market would respond to it. Just about everyone exhibits a demand for fiat currency controlled by the state/Fed alliance. If you go to ten people and ask them whether we should have taxes, I would bet that nine of them would exhibit demand for taxes by saying we should. Yet none of those would exist under a free market.
If so, it would be so fundamentally different that it would no longer be the same thing.
I think the Tannehill’s (who are Randians, in case JParker is interested) imagining of “inventor’s insurance” may well be what would happen. An inventor would buy a policy on his invention, guaranteeing a certain amount of profit within a given period of time. The insurer would, guided by their preference for not having to indemnify the insurant, sell the plan/prototype/whatever to the manufacturer whom they believe would be most capable of producing it, and in competing with emerging copycat manufacturers.
They would look at the manufacturer’s ability to prevent or dissuade reverse engineering, their ability to market, and other things. The manufacter would give the inventor royalties on their sales. Eventually, if the insurer chose wisely, the inventor would recieve the guaranteed amount in royalties, and his policy would “mature”. If the insurer chose poorly, they would have to pay the inventor the amount promised at the end of the specified period of time.
A further role of this process would be to guarantee to the manufacturer that the product idea is worth purchasing in the first place.
But no such process has anything to do with intellectual property (which is a non-concept in the first place). It is simply an insurance policy, having no more to do with an inventor’s right to profit than fire insurance has to do with the right of a homeowner not to have their house burn down.
What I find absurd are those people who argue that without government monopoly grants, innovation and production won’t occur. Which is all I tried
Or as RedHat demonstrates, even with the basic product being given away there could be enough customers who will pay for extras to support core development.
Yes, all the present rules are being used by everyone. But we also live in an environment where those rules exist. I think it is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to speculate about an environment without those rules by projecting forward the present situation where those rules apply.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that nothing like our present commercial software environment would exist. I believe it would be much more like the F/OSS environment, with many small tools brought together as people need them, rather than a monolythic Microsoft/Apple which tries to provide everything to everyone.
Id actually like to hear what/if LS, Giles, et all have problems with the idea Macfall showed above, or some variant thereof. If an inventor could take his idea to a middleman, and present his ideas under a confidentiality agreement (which would be in the interest of the middleman to keep clients and build a reputation that he is more reliable than his competitors), the inventor could be paid a sum or given an ‘insurance policy’ on his invention. The middleman could then sell, at a profit, the idea to the manufacturers who would produce it. Sure, the invention could be copied and stolen etc, but the inventor would be paid. Not as much as if there were IP laws, but still he could negotiate an amount he was satisfied with. And he could always shop around his ideas, assuming that the non-disclosure contracts would be honored.
I understand that these contracts prevent an action, and thus if I strictly interpret your positions, they shouldnt be honored. But, if as I demonstrated above, it is in the interest of the middleman to honor them, he’d be making that choice, and it would be valid correct?
I’m convinced you are, and I’ve said so repeatedly.
This post by you confirms it, because you’re not telling me anything that I would disagree with. Somehow, you got an impression that I was disagreeing with you on something which I never disagreed with you about.
It may be that my bringing up OpenSource as “without coercive monopoly grants” caused you to think I meant they tried to exist completely outside of copyright. That is impossible to do under present circumstances, and I did not mean to assert that anyone was doing the impossible.
If you see no coercion in it, then I have no problem with it. As long as the agreement to the contract is voluntary, I’m good.
Now, that doesn’t mean I think it will be successful. Libertarians talk a lot about insurance, but I don’t think many of them understand risk premiums. For example, how would the insurance company price in the potential that someone else finishes the discovery first? I don’t know that they would be able to accumulate enough knowledge about conditions, to do more than shoot in the dark on that. At least until they had a statistical precedent to work off, in which case they could make informed guesses.
Insurance in a sense is arbitrage. Both sides are looking to make a profit from when an event occurs. One wants it to happen quickly, the other far in the future. It’s less of an exchange, and more like a competition. There is a small chance that the event happens and no one makes any money, but that’s not probable. Someone will win and someone will lose.
That’s reasonable. In fact, just as an observation, most inventors don’t have the production or marketing knowledge to bring a good to market, cheaply and profitably, without creating an enormous opportunity for copycats. An inventor should be looking for buyers or partners in the production, distribution, marketing etc chains that can more efficiently and capably handle the minutiae that will make it unprofitable or barely profitable for copy cats to come along.
Imagine if an inventor came up with the most brilliant thing, say a cure for cancer. But he couldn’t bring it to market, and when he finally does, it’s insanely expensive and constantly in short supply due to production issues. Is this how a market should work? Where is the efficiency?
There is none without competition.
As long as the agreement is voluntary… Both are taking a risk. The middleman that what he pays the inventor is less than what he will make, and the inventor, that the middleman’s payment will be more than he could have made if he produced it himself or with someone else.
Which brings me back to one of my first points, which is that in order to see what people would do under anarchy, it’s important to look around and see what they are doing now.
Innovation occurs. …which is a much better sentiment than poop happens, but just as self-evident.
How would you be physically harmed by someone revealing a secret? This is a counter-factual scenario.
And yes, I do think that parents have obligations to their children. I agree with Long where he explains his position here. It is an obligation derived from the fact that the mother gave birth voluntarily. It is not contractual.
That’s a fair point, although I’d ask if it’s for purely defensive reasons, then why bother displaying copyright notices? As you said, the copyright is automatic on creation. The task you’d face in court would be to demonstrate that you were the original creator, not whether or not you had a copyright notice up. Anyone can copy someone’s work and replace the copyright notice with their own. But maybe I’ve overlooked something, let me know if I have.
I see copyright notices as threats: “This is protected by law, we’ll come after you if you violate that law”. I don’t blame them for doing that in this environment, but I don’t see how it’s anything other than that. And no matter what their intention, that’s how people will interpret it.
So if open source software generally uses copyright, patent, and trademark laws, then how are commercial packages any more advantaged?
Sure, so how do you think a free market would change the dynamics of selling intellectual works? I see a profit motive in protecting intellectual work from unauthorized use, and I don’t see that changing in a free market. I think we’d still see Windows, PhotoShop, Mac OS, Flash, etc., just protected in different ways.
You mentioned some type of “inventor’s insurance”. As Curt said, I think this would serve the same function as venture capitalists do now, so I’m not sure how much that would change the market. But I do appreciate the idea, that’s really the spirit of this whole thread.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret Peter. I’ve displayed the copyright notice. Not because I ever intended to enforce it.
Because it made me look more “professional” to my customers and visitors and readers. Particularly a copyright notice that says (C) 1999-2007. Makes it look like you have been in business a long time. [;)]
My point exactly. My argument against IP isn’t that it hurts open source and GPL or favours commercial software. My argument is that IP is not property, and the only reason it is treated as such, is because of a state edict.
Food for thought. If you write a book, and I reprint and sell it with my name on it, that’s fraud if I didn’t write it. Now if I leave your name on, you don’t get any money from the sale of the book, but you are building any audience for your next release, which if better marketed and managed, can diminish the influence of copy cats. Maybe every book is signed and numbered. Maybe each official book comes with some mail-in incentive for something else.
Once IP is abolished at the state level, and returned to the market, I think you are not going to see people creating stuff and then using modern costs of distribution (which are trending to zero) to monetize it over and over and over again ad infinitum. I think people will have to add some labour or material value to each copy they distribute, in order distinguish it from cheap or zero cost knockoffs.
I agree with you. I could even list other successful companies using the same model. But this model just isn’t as profitable in many cases. Sometimes people care more about the product than the service. Take a look at all of the software products you have installed on your computer. How many of them have you needed to use customer service for, and how often? Most people will find a large number of programs that they don’t need to or want to use customer service with. This makes it necessary to protect the product to see the greatest revenues.
I still see Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, etc. as major players in the free market. I do see the value in what you’re saying, and I think companies do as well. There’s actually a lot of “free” going on at Microsoft these days (free developer software, database software, webcasts). They’re also making some pretty generous offers to developers and independent software vendors. They’re even starting to embrace open source (http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/) and have even left their own source code open for debugging (Visual Studio). I see it as providing for the demand of open and free, and at the same time providing for users who want more and are willing to pay more.
Then I guess this is a good time to confess I’ve done the same [;)]
This is where our opinions diverge. I buy a ton of books. I would say that for 95% of them, the only thing I really want is that book, and I can’t really think of anything else the publisher could do to get me to buy their version over a basic copy for half the price. The core content of the book represents most of the value, at least to me, but I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
An example:
I leave a pile of cash on my living room table in plain view of anyone passing by, and my door doesn’t have a lock. In which case do you think I’d end up with the most money?
A) Buy a lock for my door and put my money in a safe place, out of the view of the general public.
B) Leave a note on my door: “Now that I’ve got your attention…Got a leaky faucet? Clogged toilet? Broken pipes? Call me for all your plumbing needs: 555-5555”
Leaving your money like that is begging for it to be stolen. Sometimes complimentary services just aren’t enough to make up for that. That which has the greatest value needs to be protected most. Companies in a free market will continue to directly protect their investments or they’ll lose them.