Then I resubmit my question about software development. Computers, of course, would be useless without it and there’s no denying the tremendous productivity boost provided by our software-driven computer/information age. Without IP, where would the incentive be to develop software?
Example: I spend 2 years developing a personal finance program (like Quicken) and offer it for sale. A day later, Geeks Inc has reverse engineered my product by extracing its code, changing a few lines in it to put their company name on it and put it up for sale at 1/5 my price. My company invested 2 years of labor developing this while Geeks Inc spent a day. What law would I have to protect against this? If there is no law, what possible incentive would I have to produce this software?
Not quite. It just takes knowledge of how the interventions effect the economy.
What you are trying to do is use the “real world example” of a bowling ball falling faster than a feather to prove that gravity effects heavier objects more. All that is required to understand why your example does not prove what you claim it does is an understanding of air resistance.
Well, first off, Apple shot themselves in the foot by refusing to license their OS on anything other than their own hardware.
Without IP how exactly could MS charge $700 per seat of their office suite? All you would need to do is buy one copy and the whole office could run it – something they take into account with their program to tell on your company if they are running unlicensed software and the licensing agreement that they can audit an office if they chose. The name of this program slips my mind at the moment but every so often they put out radio ads.
I’m not really saying that’s the only reason but is the basis from which they leveraged their monopoly position.
Why would they not exist today?
Nothing so far has stopped the free software movement from competing against MS. DOJ or no DOJ, it is here to stay.
Sun sees this (openSolaris and soon to be Java) as does the Mozilla Foundation.
As I pointed out before, all MS has is their giant warchest of software patents to go against the competition. Gone are the days where they can muscle them out or buy them up because their main competition these days either has always been open or has recently come to the conclusion that open source is the way to go.
They could buy up Mozilla if they wanted and the next day the free browser version would be called something silly like Iceweasel.
Also like I said before, the only thing stopping Dell from shipping winders is copyright law.
One can’t reverse engineer MS software because of the DMCA to produce a viable competitor and can’t ship it without an official holographic sticker pasted on the side of the box.
Without these clubs they wouldn’t be able to beat their customers over the head, would they?
You seem to refuse to believe that the ‘excessive economic power’ is the direct result of state market intervention and is not some natural condition that will inevitably happen without the impartial bureaucratic watchdogs ensuring ‘perfect competition’.
You want to see a counter-example, just look how the GNU/Linux OSes have pretty much killed off all the proprietary UNIX distros. With some help from the BSDs of course.
You want to know why this was possible, the different UNIXes were designed to run under a single standard that was free and open. All they had to do was develop their own implementation that conformed to the posix standard and they were peachy.
Now contrast this with Microsoft’s not fully published or documented API (or document structure for that matter) that is protected by patents and from reverse engineering by the DMCA to prevent someone coming along and implementing a stand-alone compatible version that could directly compete with them.
The ‘excessive economic power’ is a direct result of State granted monopoly power in the form of IP. Wait a few years until linux starts to get more than a trivial share of the desktop market and then watch them swing around that IP club to stifle competition.
Ideals getting in the way of practical reality again. There are no such things as “impartial bureaucratic watchdogs” at least none that can be human. Economic and political collusion are inevitable.
Compare the overall productivity of open source (freely contributed labor, BTW – Marx would be proud) vs. private, IP-protected software. The market has decided already that the latter is far more desireable. Funny you mention BSD. How does FreeBSD compare to Mac OS 10.5 in usability, features and overall productivity? OS 10 is built on a BSD core, just that it has a profit motive behind its development. You think that would have happened if Apple knew that they couldn’t make their money back?
I wanted to deal with this as well. What’s at issue here is practicality vs ideology. Did Microsoft’s coercive actions promote productivity and innovation in the market or hinder them?
Then please answer my questions about software development above. For a software firm to negotiate contracts with every company it wants to do business with (forget individuals – there goes the entire non-business software market) would create much larger barriers to entry than reasonable IP laws.
Can we leave the red herrings at the door? Every conflict, ultimately escalated, would end in the elimination of at least one of its participants. How about you give some practical examples to back up your arguments?
And why would that be? All it would do is attach a contract stipulating it retains the right to copy the good. Perfectly “reasonable”. Or maybe they’d find new ways to deliver their product, rather than relying on sterile, archaic methods of distribution. It’s as if you want to confer a monopoly of sorts and at the same time balk at its effects.
I used to use freeBSD and it did everything I wanted it to do once you import the ‘illegal’ software to play DVDs and such. I just find linux has superior hardware support so that’s what I run these days.
You do know that Apple pushes most (maybe all?) of the changes it makes to the Darwin code base back to the community when they have absolutely no legal obligation to do so? Plus the fact that they have been able to capitalize an open codebase doesn’t really support your argument about closed source being the ‘best’.
I haven’t used OSX so can’t make any comparison between that and the Gnome desktop that I do use but overall Gnome does everything that I want out of a desktop on a day to day basis.
And your whole ‘profit motive’ argument falls flat (as well as the red baiting) as can be attested to by RedHat, Ubuntu and a whole lot of FOSS companies that are profit seeking ventures. I forget the exact figures but something like 40% of all the labor expended on open source projects is paid by the companies who use (and sell) open source software. They have found that it is better (more profitable) to use and develop on FOSS than the other alternatives so that’s what they do.
I don’t know which ‘market’ you have been observing but the wave of the future is open source and software as a service. The farther and farther the computers as a commodity road we go the less margin the propritary vendors will be able to get from the software that runs these commodity computers. You can go out today and buy a brand new computer for less than the cost of a Vista license.
Again, I’m hearing appeals to idealogical faith than practical application. I propose the same question, as a software company, if I have to negotiate many elaborate contracts with multiple entities (all who’ll want different things) before I even start developing said software, will I have more or less incentive to produce software than the current system of IP laws?
I’ll elaborate further because I think IP is new and far from perfect. I think the government mainly needs to acknowledge its existence as actual property and let the private sector (through civil court, etc) determine what can reasonably be considered IP. I think a lot of people have a problem (myself included) when it’s the government that decides what does and does not qualify as intellectual property.
The “market” I’m observing is the 99% that still chooses to spend more money for a Mac or PC, even though RedHat and Open Office (for example) are available to them for a lot less. I’ve used RedHat and many others myself and you’re kidding yourself if you think it offers anywhere near the usability or refinement of Vista or OS 10.
Apple does release a few tidbits but try selling their entire OS with your own brnad name on it and see how much they like it.
Bottom line: The more $$$ I have to invest in develping my resources the better they will be – but I need to be able to make my $$$ back to make it worth my while.
In the MS vs. Dell example a business failure would mean that Dell gave in rather than escalated. An escalatioin would be something like Dell continues to sell copies of Windows in defiance to MS and the escalation would continue from there. Eventually, some law will be violated and the government will get called in. See what I mean? Continue to escalate even the most benign business disputes and, because it still involves physical human beings, you will eventually end up with one or more being destroyed.
Interestingly, you want the government to prevent Dell from violating Microsoft’s IP rights and at the same time to prevent Microsoft from being able to bargain with Dell over the use of its IPs.
But your reply had nothing to do with Anti-trust laws.
First, Microsoft’s actions were not coercive. It was bargaining. I suggest you read up on the Non-Aggression principle. Threats of boycott are not aggression.
Second, you have the causality reversed. Microsoft did not cause the uncompetitive climate. It is the symptom of the current regulatory regime.
Destroying Microsoft would not create competition, because the economic atmosphere would be unchanged. Its likely that Microsoft represents the best allocation of resources possible under our terrible system of regulations. If you want a better market, fix(ie remove) the regulations.
I see. Except I already mentioned they can just retain the right to copy it, stipulate this in the terms of sale of the product and punish violations of this contract as is necessary. The difficulty you speak of is not insurmountable, at all.