Pirated Music and Intellectual Property

[buzzingrobot]

You assume that the natural environment is the best system to support the species...

Don't believe I did. You're reading too much into my comment.

Deer do not grow crops; they won't truck in loads of walnuts to neighboring counties during a famine.

No, but a deer population can over-populate itself beyond of the capacity of the system that supports it to provide enough food. It's self-evident that we alter that system in ways other animals cannot, but that doesn't mean we can get away with everything.

[ZarathustraDK]

I'd argue that intellectual property (not property, mind you) is bunk.

If I bake a pie tonight, it's my pie. It doesn't belong to any of the other several billion people on the planet.

The pie is material, ie. composed of a depletable resource which you would have to reacquire in order to make more pies. This, in my mind, would justify demanding payment for a pie.

An information-based "thing", however, is a non-depletable resource. It is, once created/arranged, impossible to exhaust. Several reasons why such a creation should be free and not "for money" presents itself:

• The capitalistic reason. Since the product is infinitely reproducible at basically no cost, the supply will go towards infinity and consequently the price will go towards zero.
• The Utilitarian reason. If the information is useful in any way to somebody (we're talking benevolent ways here, not stuff like fraud with personal information), and costs nothing to reproduce, then it should be spread as much as possible to do the most good.
• The Deontological reason. Information can be considered intrinsically good and good without qualification as it is just another word for wisdom. Because of this, it should be spread for no other reason than that it is morally correct to do so.
• Lack of labor and materials. People pay for labor and materials. Hand-crafted furniture costs more than Ikea-furniture since it generally requires more labor and more exotic materials. Copied information is, by extension, the most extreme Ikea you'll get; while handcrafted furniture would be analogical to, say, a live performance.
• Spoiled child argument. Many other occupations do not enjoy the ability copy their own work and sell it for money, should they be outraged?
• Well of Eternity. Would we have the same discussion if this was about an oven that could copy infinite amounts of bread, thus solving the worlds famine-related problems? How about a non-depletable medicine-cabinet? Information simply happens to be a directly (not indirectly) non-essential (to life) aspect that we can succesfully copy at no cost, that doesn't necessarily mean we should treat it any differently.
• You'd make Jean Luc Picard a sad puppy if you can't copy things...

There's a plethora of moral philosophies out there, and I'm having a hard time finding any of "the greats" arguing against free information as moral good when applying their philosophies to the problem at hand. Verily, the few philosophical advocates I could think of that would support such a construct are not benevolent examples; stuff like Macchiavelli, assorted war-philosophies and economic philosophies that work on an "our country (aka. the good guys) vs. their country (the guys we want to give us their money)"; not really good inputs for a debate since it would assume a premise of mutual distrust in a forum perpetrated to doing the Right Thing(tm) (well, at least I assume we want to figure out what the right thing to do is, and that's why we're having this discussion).

In the end, the only obstacle to the horn of plenty liberally mentioned above and conducting ourselves in a benevolent manner towards our fellow man, is having the inventor benefit/receive recognition for his work. How hard can it be?

We're already creating information "for free" at places like universities. People are paid to do so, usually funded by the government through tax (at least where I live), or through tuition. The software equivalent for production-software would be open source software. We're almost doing it right (IMHO) with Kickstarter, implementing a bounty-based (demand-based) development of stuff/information. I just wish this mode of development spilled into arts/music/movies too. Let people decide what they wish to see made, not the other way around.

Contrast that with the pains we're currently have to endure: DRM, software phoning home, millions if not billions down the lawyer-well in frivolous IP-lawsuits, people being financially ruined for downloading a couple of cd's, locking up information beneficial (hell, even life-saving) to other people because they can't pay the fee (roundup-ready GMO-seeds for instance), the list goes on. All these things we could be rid of if people would just secure the demand before they go and create the supply and THEN retroactively acquire the payment.

But no. Not gonna happen. As a whole we're entitled buggers who all believe that whatever we put our minds to, our solution is the best, and people should pay for us going out of way to do so after the fact. Add to that an already well-entrenched system that reinforces the former with lobbyists, armies of lawyers and other assorted scum in order to control the politics relating to their business-field, and you have the recipe for an informational dark age. /rant

But people like to just call me a pirate :-/

[buzzingrobot]

The pie is material,,,

So is a book or a song or whatever.

Authors don't sell ephemeral and no-physical thoughts. They sell things they make. Sometime those things are made of ink on paper. Sometimes those things are made of electrons.

Ditto music.

[eriktheblu]

Don't believe I did. You're reading too much into my comment.

I don't know how "Our knack as a species seems to be adopting ways to improve our own individual living conditions at the cost of damage to the system that supports the species." could be a reference to the highway system, or grocery logistics train. My understanding has been that employing those systems generally contributes to their further improvement (as markets tend to shift supply toward demand). But, I will concede you did not specify the natural environment. What system then were you referencing and in what way does improving our living conditions damage said system?

No, but a deer population can over-populate itself beyond of the capacity of the system that supports it to provide enough food. It's self-evident that we alter that system in ways other animals cannot, but that doesn't mean we can get away with everything.

We can't get away with everything, but we can tolerate more with technological improvements than we could without. This increases the likelihood of perpetuation of the species as a whole.

[buzzingrobot]

What system then were you referencing and in what way does improving our living conditions damage said system?

Climate change, to name the most obvious.

Technology -- use of tools -- is, at heart, a way to alter the natural system. The results can be beneifical, or not. The ways I leverage technology to improve my life do not necessarily improve the life of anyone else. They may, or they may not, or they may make someone else's life worse.

I'm not a tecnhnological Luddite, by any means, But, I don't see any reason to have blind faith that technology, in and of itself, is a panacea. Tools are used as humans see fit, and humans don't always make good decisions.

[ZarathustraDK]

So is a book or a song or whatever.

Authors don't sell ephemeral and no-physical thoughts. They sell things they make. Sometime those things are made of ink on paper. Sometimes those things are made of electrons.

Ditto music.

Yet it is not the paper, binding, ink nor electrons you and I wish to obtain, but the information that those things convey. If that wasn't true it'd follow that we'd be content with a blank book, a cup of ink and a blank harddrive, which I gather we are not.

Information is ephemereal. If it wasn't there'd be a limit to how much information you could potentially copy before using up your store of pre-information-matter (whatever that looks like).

[buzzingrobot]

Yet it is not the paper, binding, ink nor electrons you and I wish to obtain, but the information that those things convey. If that wasn't true it'd follow that we'd be content with a blank book, a cup of ink and a blank harddrive, which I gather we are not.

Information is ephemereal. If it wasn't there'd be a limit to how much information you could potentially copy before using up your store of pre-information-matter (whatever that looks like).

Talking about "information" isn't particularly useful.

That kind of "information" only exists in our heads. The only way to transfer what's in my head to another head, short of jabbering on about it, is to create a physical thing that uses some sort of symbology or coding to represent that "information". The only way to *preserve* the "information" that's in my head is also to create that thing.

[ZarathustraDK]

Talking about "information" isn't particularly useful.

That kind of "information" only exists in our heads. The only way to transfer what's in my head to another head, short of jabbering on about it, is to create a physical thing that uses some sort of symbology or coding to represent that "information". The only way to *preserve* the "information" that's in my head is also to create that thing.

And that's what you do when you copy something. But if I decide to use my own paper, ink or harddisk to do so then those physical things belong to me. How I arrange my ink on the paper or the magnetic field on my harddisk should be of no concern to you, even if it has a 1:1 semblance of similar objects in your possession.

[WinterMadness]

As I said, by accepting payment for labor, the employee agrees that the results of that labor belong to the employer.




Says who, other than you?

One can create all sorts of imaginary ways to live. But, the only ones that count, the only ones that exist, are shaped by the actual behavior of actual people. Otherwise, we're trying to impose an ideology, by persuasion or by force, on other people.

the only reason your world view exists is because its forced on everyone. When the state exists, it creates property ownership essentially in an arbitrary way.

Also, you said something about self ownership. Self ownership does not exist because ownership does not exist. If self ownership existed, then slavery is justified by selling oneself. If you cant sell yourself, then can you really claim to own yourself?

[eriktheblu]

Climate change, to name the most obvious.

So then it is the natural environment you were referencing.

Climate change is actually quite discrete. Average temperature fluctuation seems to be less than 1 degree over the last 100 years. Extreme weather patterns are not unknown to the regions currently effected. Any predictions of future climates cannot possibly be obvious because the future cannot be observed, and the predictions based on concepts that are unknown to most.

Further the potential damage cause has not been sufficiently demonstrated (to me at least) to be more detrimental to the perpetuation of our species then the complete elimination of the climate impacting behavior, and the likely subsequent complete societal breakdown.

Technology -- use of tools -- is, at heart, a way to alter the natural system. The results can be beneifical, or not. The ways I leverage technology to improve my life do not necessarily improve the life of anyone else. They may, or they may not, or they may make someone else's life worse.

I'm not a tecnhnological Luddite, by any means, But, I don't see any reason to have blind faith that technology, in and of itself, is a panacea. Tools are used as humans see fit, and humans don't always make good decisions.

Examples of true malice are rare in contrast examples of mutually beneficial labor. All tools are designed to improve living conditions (yes, I actually mean all). Most humans behave in a manor that will perpetuate the species; those that do not are generally removed from the community in some fashion in accordance with the social contract.