Human action.
Erroneously and dogmatically.
Do you have an argument to contribute?
Frankly I’m a bit disappointed. I expected that people would post new fallacies in this thread, not rehash the same ones.
No, honest and respectful discussion clearly does not interest you.
Stranger, I would like to commend you for your rational and eloquent attempt at defending copyright. I agree with many of your arguments.
I may try to dissect or support your arguments in a later reading, but would just like to comment for now that seeking to identify a distinguishable characteristic between knowledge and information is going to undermine your argument. It shouldn’t have any bearing.
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It’s an arbitrary distinction. Why protect information but not knowledge? To avoid implications that party X can voluntarily and contractually exercise a partial ownership claim over party Y’s brain or will? To avoid the discussion of what the contract is, how it can end, and how it actually lasts forever, even if it was never agreed to in the first place? In other words, is it a contract for consumers or simply a warning to possible redistributers?
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It’s immeasurable - there is no standardized unit of knowledge. Given the different mental capabilities of individuals, the amount of precise information any person can remember is highly varied among individuals. What should be protected by copyright? That which a common man cannot remember, or a savant?
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It’s ultimately obsolete. I’m not claiming to be an accurate futurist, but it seems that there will be a gradual integration of computational technologies with the human will to a point where there is no distinction between knowledge and information. We get to a quasi-slavery argument. Can an individual contractually agree to limit the activities of his brain? I say sure - this is the essential fabric of a labor contract. But what are the terms of termination? Here, the labor contract is much simpler. No more work, and no more payments. What of the futuristic mind’s memory? Can someone compell another to “forget” information?
Ultimately, if the brain is the storage area for knowledge, which is an abstract representation of information, this is still a controllable property of the individual whose brain it is. He may not be able to erase the memory, but he can control his brain’s use of it. IE - he cannot claim his mass reproduction and sale of such information/knowledge was “outside of his control”.
Similarly, if I download a work and can make a strong claim that I sincerely did not know I was receiving copyrighted information, it is obviously within my control to not redistribute the information. After being made aware that one is violating copyright, he should have no excuse to continue that doesn’t amount to a full-scale attack on copyright’s validity. I even have the power to erase it from whatever mediums I have reproduced it upon, although it is likely impossible to verify that this occurs without access to beliefs inside the mind of another, or access to all his property. I believe that would be overstepping legitimate boundaries, even if copyright is indeed legitimate. A sensible position today would be to use a warrant to search certain property, likely computational devices - once such devices compose one’s mind, can there be warrants for memories?
In any case, attempting to prevent unlawful consumption is a much more difficult battle, both practically and theoretically, than preventing unlawful commercial redistribution. When the argument focuses on this particular case, it does not seem unreasonable at all, even though I am generally anti-IP.
I think it’s obvious what’s Stranger’s talking about. If I finance a car purchase, I do not have full property rights to the car if it is collateral for the loan. I cannot purposefully destroy it. He is saying the same thing with the medium anyone places a copyrighted work upon. The IP owner does not allow full property rights in the media they embed their information and sell to consumers - the media cannot be used to create copies and/or redistributions.
This point is moot, in any case. As said in Fallacy 7:
There is the assumption that information is already considered property, and thus violations do not depend upon entering a voluntary contract. For example, if I find a DVD on the ground, or someone gives me a DVD, I have not entered into a contract with the IP owner. Or let’s say I go up to a retailer with a DVD and before I purchase it I tell the employee that I’m going to copy the movie and put it on the internet as soon as I go home, and he still sells it. Obviously I am not making any understanding with the IP owner. If anyone, it is the person who lost the dvd, gave it to me, or sold it to me even after I admitted I would not abide by the copyright condition who has violated a contract.
Clearly there are dozens of ways I can obtain media without agreeing to a copyright contract. Stranger is claiming that no contract is necessary - that I am still bound by the copyright contract, even though I have not agreed to it. I am still bound by property rights of others, even if I refuse to recognize them.
The property right being claimed is not over any physical resource - it is to an exclusive right to commercial distribution, more than anything else. Of course, the product is much more specific than one covered by a patent, but why should that matter?
The answer is as simple as it is obvious: scarcity. There is no scarcity of knowledge. Once something is known, it propagates across humanity like lightning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb cites as an example the announcement in a journal that a proof for a theorem has been discovered and will be published in the next issue. In the meantime, many different mathematicians announce the same proof. How is this possible? Because the knowledge that the solution exists is part of the solution, and once this knowledge propagates the solution, being non-scarce, is discovered independently.
We expect math students to solve problems on their own, but we don’t expect history students to find their own history. That is because history is information.
Information is specific to time and place. It records a unique event in the history of the universe. This is what makes a technique like watermarking possible. You can’t unwatermark information because the process of producing information is irreversible.
The same principle applied to money can be applied here. How do we know that someone is not counterfeiting money for his own personal use? We can’t, and it doesn’t even matter. What matters is that he does not redistribute his counterfeit money to other people.
People can make copies of media for their own personal use, and as long as they keep the media to themselves, it will both never be known and never impact the IP owner.
That’s a pretty ridiculous logic. You said that information is scarce because it is limited by the size of the physical devices that can store it. Yet “knowledge” is limited by the same - it also requires scarce brains to exist. To say one is scarce and the other non-scarce is nonsense. Simply because certain forms of knowledge can be discovered independently or transmitted without non-human materials doesn’t mean they fall under a different definition of scarcity. The “scarcity” of information is purely created by property rights in information. In other words, it is artificially invented. Information can’t claim that it deserves to be treated as property because it is scarce when it is scarce because it is treated as property. Again…more nonsense.
History surely isn’t purely informational. Two independent historians can easily come to the same conclusions about what events took place in the past. Moreover, surely you aren’t suggesting that “history” is ownable?!??!
…I’m not sure how to respond. Yes…I…can? Especially if I know what the watermark is. I can’t prevent every instance of the information from containing a watermark. So what? Am I missing the point here…?
No - you missed the entire argument. It revolves around property rights in one’s person. If I find information, make a perfect copy of it into my “brain”, is the redistribution of that information a legitimate use of my property? If copyright prevents me from doing so, is not copyright an ownership claim over every other person?
Let me give you a different example. Let’s say you steal a tattoo machine, and use it to tattoo yourself. You get caught and are forced to return the machine, plus restitution. What about the tattoo? Should the tattoo machine’s owner have the right to decide what you can now do with that tattoo? Can he compell you to remove it? Or to prevent you from showing it to others? Can he compell you to keep it forever, and continually exercise a limited amount of control over your actions?
The point I’m trying to make is that ultimately there is a conflict of self-ownership involved. If party X owns information that exists in party Y’s brain, party X is exercising limited ownership over Y under copyright. I believe you are trying to avoid this problem by differentiating between knowledge and information - between media and brains - between perfect copies and personalized abstractions. It is intellectually inconsistent. Your defense of it makes your argument sound kind of ridiculous.
On one hand you say it’s ok because it was voluntarily contracted. On the other you say that if it wasn’t voluntarily contracted, it doesn’t matter because somewhere a voluntary contract was violated. But simply because one’s property is benefited from some crime or contract violation doesn’t mean it is no longer his property or that the value-additions must be nullified.
If someone steals my property, I am prevented from using it. If I am the rightful owner, I can prevent others from using it. Either the rightful owner or some other party will use it to the exclusion of others. Obviously, the rightful owner has a better claim to use than others. In the case of IP, however, use is not exclusive. If I copy and watch a movie, I am not preventing anyone else from watching. If I redistribute the movie commercially, I am not preventing anyone else from commercial redistribution.
The entire case rests on the requirement to use scarce resources to create the information - that somehow this is a source of rights. It does come close to LTV. The claim that exclusive distribution is a required motive to create information is obviously false. As is the claim that it is required to earn income is false. The claim that it is necessary to recoup costs obviously is case-specific - certain copyrighted works will still fail to turn a profit, certain works can easily earn profit without copyright.
There is only a moral case that the information’s creators have a better claim to income derived directly from consumption of the information than those who simply reproduce and distribute it. I would agree with this claim. I think there is also a decent utilitarian claim that allowing legal unlicensed commercial redistribution will destroy current business models, and that others are not as feasible at serving consumers, simply because they could have already been implemented but purposefully were not. Of course, allowing authors copyright of infinite length seems non-utilitarian.
I’m really not sure that I disagree with your end results, but the arguments are a mess. Actually, I’m not sure I agree that the creator should be able to monopolize distribution, only that he should be entitled to his non-creative competitors’ revenues.
That’s not why information is scarce, it is a consequence of its scarcity. Information is scarce by its physical nature.
You can destroy a watermark but you cannot remove it. Pirates often blur out watermarks to protect their source, but that still leaves a blur in the picture or a cropped picture.
That is fallacy 13, appeal from miracle.
Most discussion of property involves scarcity because it cannot be alleviated. Goods are allocated to be controlled by those with the best claim, because otherwise an inferior claim excludes a better claim from use of the good. In the case of information and current technology, this is not the case. The resources required to create the information are scarce, but that does not necessarily entitle the creators to exclusive distribution privileges.
You can try to extract the watermark, invert it, and “add” it to the picture (or song, etc). There might be some data loss, but many watermarks are designed to be transparent. Cropping/blurring is a crude method.
No, let me give you an example. Let’s say I take a high resolution picture of a billboard ad and post it on my blog. I’m violating copyright, but I’m not claiming that the information magically fell into my hard drive. I made no contract with the copyright holder not to take photographs of what I see. No one broke a contract with the copyright holder for me to reproduce the information.
Similarly, if I have a computer brain, read a book, and remember every letter perfectly, what is the copyright contract and the terms of its termination? Using your knowledge/information distinction, this becomes relatively easy - just destroy the instances of information in the possession of the violator. But when these copies are arguably part of a person’s consciousness, there are ethical considerations of not only destroying but simply accessing the information.
Preventing commercial redistribution is seemingly ethical in some cases, but this is not absolute in my mind. In some ways it can be considered a violation of free speech.
To compliment what your saying meambobbo I mentioned above
It would be interesting to compare global population growth in comparison to physical disk space, like in a HDD. I think it’s a safe assumption to say that one grows exponentially faster then the other. I think it’s an easy guess which one. [:)]
Given that there are a limited number of keys on the keyboard, the answer is yes.
Have you never seen a five act play with a very small cast? Thousands of people routinely memorize 100+ pages daily. That’s not even taking into account much shorter works. Ask any teenage girl the lyrics to her favorite song or ten. She will recite them perfectly.
Shouldn’t even matter - a poor reproduction can still be considered a derivative work.
Are you claiming that the public reading of a novel, the public singing of a song or the public performance of a play are not violations of copyright? If that’s not your claim, what “media right” has been violated by these activities?
It’s right that it doesn’t matter because the act is still copying and the original media is used, hence the act is still illegal.
The fact that it is impossible to make a copy of a media through one’s brain is a consequence and explanation of its scarcity. (And no, a play is not a significant amount of information. It is less than 1/10,000th of the information on a DVD.) It is not relevant to the argument.
In a world where the brain could perfectly and costlessly reproduce information, it may be the case that information would be non-scarce. In that case the entire structure of society would be different. There would not be a black market for information. People would live entirely differently. But this is not this world.
There are infinite combinations of those keys, just like there are infinite combinations of strings of 0 and 1. You could try random combination for the entire lifetime of the universe and never achieve the same event.
A billboard ad is not copyrighted.
Then say a magazine cover, or a set of photographs inside a magazine. And I am not the buyer - I just found it somewhere.
Then it is not your property. Just leave it there.