I DO believe in supporting companies that do good work.
Interesting case? The role playing game industry. Wizards of the Coast, owner of Dungeons & Dragons, came out with what they called the Open Gaming License. It basically made 95% of their rules open source. People still bought their games.
It gets better. People are free to modify their rules under the licence, so long as they make the modifications open source as well. So when WotC decided to create the travesty that is Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, another company called Paizo made a few rules tweaks and released a counter-game called Pathfinder. It is OGL compliant. Because it is OGL compliant, the entire rule set can be found online. Very nearly every single rule, statistic, mechanic, etc. that is in the Paizo book is available online.
And yet, I purchased PDF versions of two of their books for a total of $40. They don’t really get me anything - they are only of use if I don’t have Internet, which is a rare occasion. I bought them because I am impressed with Paizo’s work and want to see them succeed, and make more products in the future I will like. I’m not paying them for a product, so much as I am paying to keep them in the creative line of work.
Yes there is, it is called intellectual property rights.
You are still not getting it. Without IP rights, any other company could make a Blu-Ray of the movie and never pay the filmmakers anything, because they have no rights over the data. It would be impossible to make money from investments in movies, the capitalist filmmaking industry would be destroyed.
Of course, there is the problem that they would have to wait until the creators put the original on the market in order to get a good copy. Filmmakers wouldn’t make as much off the DVD market, but they would make some. Guess they would have to make up for the loss some other way. Like charging more for product placement, or charging theatres more for film reels.
They would make the marginal cost of their product, which is zero. It would only take one employee leaking a master copy to a competitor to eliminate all profits from their investment and ruin them.
Marginal profits tend toward zero in the long term in a free market, anyhow. As for one employee ruining things, sounds like a good reason to screen employees carefully and make sure good security measures are in place. (Like making sure nobody but the director and producer have access to a master copy in the entirety.) This is the principal-agent problem, really.
This is beyond ridiculous as an argument. A half-billion dollar investment will not be protected by screening employees. Wal-Mart can barely protect itself from petty theft with that.
Wal-Mart needs a lot more employees. It also doesn’t trust most of them with half-billion dollar investments. Those who deal with that level of responsibility are screened more heavily… and subjected to much tighter security protocols.
Stranger/Z135 you two are ridiculous for derailing this thread back to Pro-IP argument. Didn’t we hash out 14 pages of it on another thread? GO and post there.
Still absurd and grasping at straws. On the one hand, we have IP, which is a functional, clean solution to the problem of capitalist investment in information. On the other hand, we have the possibility of firing employees who are going to make millions by stealing half-billion investments, and that is supposed to be a workable system?
If these are the last straws you can grasp to attack IP, I think I can safely let this lie.
Sell identical products without ever paying anything to the investor, hence not having to cover any fixed costs, hence destroying any way to make profits from investment in these fixed cost, hence investments will not be made.
The situation is akin to a company surveying for gold. Suppose that the law is such that whoever discovers a gold strain owns it. That means that investing in exploration can be turned into profit by exploiting a mine. Now of course word will spread that gold was discovered there, and some people may come in to try to forage gold from rivers with their bare hands. That is not a problem the gold company considers material. However, if the company does not own the gold it discovered, then any other company can come around and build a competing mine on the same strain. Then it becomes a race between everyone to strip mine the strain as fast as possible, whatever the loss in long-term value that may cause. It’s the tragedy of the commons once again.
IP is not an argument about piracy. Piracy is just an annoyance that can be more or less ignored and the system still works. IP is an argument about capitalism itself. Who will invest in the commons if anyone will just race to take everything they have invested? The only solution is to privatize the commons.
any definite, singular,meaningful piece of information is not scarce and rival as is a definite and particular mass of gold, so what good is your analogy from gold?
your bold claims about ‘capitalism itself’ is merely rhetoric and hyperbole and teaches nothing.