I completely agree. However, I do think the whole idea of being able to connect with other creatures to control them is pretty cool.
I believe he was joking.
Somehow I doubt he was.
We’ll find out when he replies. 
I most certainly was. Some folks here need to take a chill pill [:p]
I won’t name names [:D]
Okay, so let us consider the possibility that ideas can be property. Now, if I own a parcel of land, there is no time limit on it. I don’t lose it after 20, or even 70 years. So, if ideas are property, then the arbitrary time limits in IP law are infringement on property rights.
OTOH, if I abandon my land, or die and leave no survivors, anybody can come along and homestead it. So the same should apply to ideas. Any idea that exists, but that the original thinker and all his heirs are long dead and gone, have abandoned their property. So, someone should be able to come and homestead it.
By that logic, I’m announcing that I now own, oh, let’s say all of Mozart’s music. I’m claiming it. Now everyone who uses it has to pay me a lisence fee.
Of course, that is ridiculous. I suppose we could say that you have to take action on the idea. Of course, in that case Disney COULD sue over Pocahontas. After all, they homesteaded the story.
No one is suggesting that.
At what point does an idea become IP?
It has elements of green washing, but only elements. It is more anti-empire than anything else. But yes, it is a landmark in visual effects.
I will do my best to watch this one from time to time. It is well worth watching more then once!
When it is written onto media and sold with restricted rights, but then only as information.
Look I’m not taking sides on this one but you evaded Astra’s question simply because he used “IDEA” instead of “information”. You seem to have gotten caught up in semantics. Could you go back and answer his questions. But this time, if you must, replace “IDEA” with “Written information” if it makes you feel better?
They are not interchangeable. Information has distinct physical properties.
Sigh. Ok I’ll do it for you.
Don’t be petty please. Also your doing a good job of making yourself look evasive. By all the rhetoric you’ve provided in countless posts over the past week I think Astra’s question should be easier enough for you to answer. Like I said, don’t be petty.
Really, the only physical properties information has is the way it is encoded. In that case, if I encode the same thing in a different way, does it cease to become the creator’s property? For example, if I had the technology, and took a DVD and transferred it to a DNA sequence, could I sell the DNA sequence? If someone had created a bioplayer, which could read DNA as a form of information storage, is it still intellectual property?
The fact is, it isn’t the medium you refer to as property, but the idea which the medium transfers. All means of transferring information are simply ways of exchanging ideas.
For some reason intellectual communists keep building up the strawman that copyright is about owning ideas. It’s not. Copying is an act of taking information from one medium and transforming another medium to hold the exact, precise same information. This is bound to physical property, and this property can be owned, meaning that the owner has the right to define what action is or is not allowed on his property.
If you are accessing the DVD in order to do that, then you are violating property rights.
Is it a property right to look at someone else’s property? If I find a book in my neighbor’s house, and he allows me to read it, I have violated no property rights - my neighbor may have, if he agreed not to let others read it when he purchased it, but that contract doesn’t bind me. Now, if I have a good enough memory (or perhaps it was a children’s book - fewer words = easier to remember) and I go home and use my own publishing software to make an identical copy of the book’s information content, I am only using my own property. Again, no property right violations. So, what property laws have I broken? Now, let us say that I didn’t have my neighbor’s permission to read the book, I simply read it over his shoulder while he read it. Now I have not violated property rights, because people don’t have a right not to have their property looked at, but he also didn’t violate anybody’s rights because he was simply using the book as intended.
The only way to have such property rights as you describe is for the original author of the information to have everyone who buys the medium to agree not to redistribute it, only to use it in secret, and to bind any future purchasers to the same agreement. But this doesn’t make the information property, it simply represents a voluntary contractual obligation on what the buyer can do with his property.
That’s irrelevant! It is not your property. Unbelievable the sense of entitlement you people have.
That is utterly, inevitably impossible. That excuse will always be laughed out of court.
First, copyright is not simply for precise arrangements. If so, it could be rendered sterile by adding a watermark. The only real standard is whether you can convince most of a jury that some piece of work depended upon the copyrighted work to exist, and the piece was not protected by fair usage standards.
But as far as IP rights go - sure, there can be a contract not to copy. But what theory of contract do you prescribe to? Particularly, what happens when the contract is broken? The “owner” cannot remove unauthorized instances of the copied information from anyone’s brains. It is likely difficult to impossible to “recall” all instances and derivative works. From a property transfer context, the violation would be rectified by returning the physical implementation of the information the “owner” sold him, and having the IP owner return the buyer’s money - those are really the only properties being exchanged. We could say the violator “stole” the owner’s IP, but how do we return it? We simply tell him to stop? Or we go on a thousand year search for the chain of unauthorized copies?
From the standpoint of simply trying to attain justice, IP fails miserably. Thus, we have, as in current IP law, draconian penalties meant to frighten others into obeying copyright. There is an implicit understanding only a small minority of violators will be punished. Only large-scale, domestic, commercial operations are really denied. Yet the necessary capital to copy en masse is cheap and widely accessible. IP becomes a monopoly grant, pure and simple. Individual acts are impossible to prevent and tolerated by the government and IP owners. Between the grant itself, and “damages” by a minority of random violators, IP is a scheme to make money, unconcerned about its own conception justice. Violations render no harm onto the owners’ property - their quality of life is unchanged. Violations, to some threshold, are encouraged (patent trolls are 100% about collecting off violations). Why are there few other libertarian/capitalist arguments concerning one’s property rights to an exclusive market position? Why not rights in reputations or values?
Without IP law, I’m sure some ideas wouldn’t get made or would be different, etc. Yet I still think it’s the moral and likely more utilitarian path.
It is fairly easy and possible. I will reiterate, for the millionth time, that this argument isn’t about piracy. It is about the capitalist structure of the media industry itself. One media company can seize the property of another. There is no problem enforcing that.
Does trespassing law fail because some kids will always walk their dog on your lawn? Some infringement tolerated by the owner does not invalidate the property right. If you tell the judge that you hosted a garden party in my garden because you saw that I allowed some kids to pass through, you will be laughed out of court.
What possible consequence would it have that it is cheap and accessible to trespass? The whole point of a justice system is to make it costly and difficult to violate property rights and thus minimize the occurrence of these violations.
As I stated before, intellectual communists always end up resorting to their confusion between ideas and information in order to legitimize their right to steal. There is nothing to respond to an argument this fallacious.