Life In 19x19

nagano wrote:It's not ridiculous at all. The difference is that physical property is scarce, but information is not. For instance, taking the apple from you would be stealing because it would deprive you of the apple. But someone copying the information contained in a book you wrote does not deprive you of the book.

This is an important distinction, and it is tremendously important to the economics of the issue, but I have some free complications for you.

hyperpape wrote:I'm not sure whether that changes the issue, Judicata. Doesn't that just establish that in some cases, continued possession of tangible goods is not guaranteed? Whereas with copyright (in theory--since there are the Mickey Mouse laws), continued possession is not even possible.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I leave it to others whether it changes any analyses, I just like chiming in with interesting legal tidbits on occasion. And this concept (rather, the policies underlying it), definitely plays a role in IP law. It is not quite "use it or lose it" but "use it or take some action to protect it, or lose it."

hyperpape wrote:One can write a license/contract that stipulates the conditions under which the first buyer may dispose of the property. Whether that will hold up in court varies, afaik. Such a method is precisely how the GPL works.

Sure. One can write a contract that forbids people to give books that they buy as presents to others (or lend them). First, who would buy books under such contract? Second, if I have violated the said contract and lent a book to my wife, who distributed it online, she hasn't broken any contract, since she never agreed to one in the first place.

Of course the "any format" is based on a sort of folk conception of what "copying the DVDs contents" means, one which doesn't include memories. The law would not support an effort to prosecute/sue individuals for memories, as opposed to digital/tape recordings, and no one would attempt to prosecute it. It could become an interesting issue if there's some sort of future device that records everything you see and hear.

What the law would support or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether any time I copy information to any medium, you can be said to own the medium. Brain circuits is a way of disproving that using argument ad absurdum.

You keep making this error, and it is a bit silly. If the law denies me the ability to do something with an MP3 on my hard drive, that is not saying the copyright owner "owns" my hard drive. That's just a sloppy confusion. Compare: only I own the household cleaners in my laundry room, even though I'd be legally prohibited from mixing them to produce chlorine gas that disperses into my neighbor's apartment.

If you don't own something, then you have no right to tell me what to do with it, unless by doing something with it I am violating your rights to something that you own.

The reason it should be illegal to produce chlorine gas that invades your apartment is not because this is a "regulation", but because chlorine gas invades your property without permission and causes damage. It's a case of violation of your property rights in a form of trespass and damage.

You can prohibit me from plunging a knife in your chest because you own your chest. You can't prohibit me from doing anything with my knife that in no way invades your property.


So, going back to information, the reason you can't prohibit me to do whatever I want with the information on the DVD that I bought is because I own the information and I own the DVD. Now, certainly, I cannot throw the DVD at you. I cannot blast music from my apartment such that the sound waves invade your apartment and cause you disturbance or damage. But whatever I do with the music and the DVD in the privacy of my home provided I am not violating anyone's property rights is my business.

Nagano, I think you should give this some more thought. The skill to write a novel can easily be claimed to be as scarce as an apple. Also, your approach to the argument is rather immediate in nature.

nagano wrote:

Javaness2 wrote:I don't know if you're joking in what you write here, or not. If I write a book, and somebody comes along, and takes the same book and sells it as there own, they can do this as it is now their intellectual property. If I buy an apple, and a man comes by, takes it, and sells it to another man passing, he can do this as it was his physical property. You are saying that intellectual labour is different to physical labour. Frankly that sounds like a kind of derivative, ridiculous bar room philosophy.

It's not ridiculous at all. The difference is that physical property is scarce, but information is not. For instance, taking the apple from you would be stealing because it would deprive you of the apple. But someone copying the information contained in a book you wrote does not deprive you of the book.

hyperpape wrote:

nagano wrote:It's not ridiculous at all. The difference is that physical property is scarce, but information is not. For instance, taking the apple from you would be stealing because it would deprive you of the apple. But someone copying the information contained in a book you wrote does not deprive you of the book.

This is an important distinction, and it is tremendously important to the economics of the issue, but I have some free complications for you.

I think the analogy made between counterfeiting and copying works in that article is interesting, but ultimately ALSO flawed.

In counterfeiting, money is "stolen" by changing the value of the dollar. The value of a dollar is dependent on the number of dollars in circulation. They relate back (in an eldritch and arcane way) to the value of the U.S. Economy.

In copying creative works, money is "stolen" by reaching potential customers prior to the originals. The value of a work is not dependent on the number of copies in circulation but rather on the number of BOUGHT copies in circulation. There may or may not be a correlation between increase of copying and decrease of book sales. I haven't seen strong evidence one way or the other.

I think that a certain amount of theft is taking place... BUT, I also don't think the scale of the monetary damage is anywhere near what artists claim.

To some degree, lost sales are balanced by increased awareness. Awareness in a world of a large number of choices is key. Not every pirated copy IS a lost sale. (By which I mean that lots of people will get something for free, but will not pay money for it. And that some who pirate the copy, end up buying the book).

On the other hand, when it comes to movies, we have an industry getting "hit hard" by pirates. it could just be that increased awareness lets me know beforehand that Indiana Jones 4 was a steaming pile of Lucas's Leftovers.

So awareness can be a double-edged sword.


Basic econ says that when the cost of a good greatly exceeds its value to produce and publish, we create a black market. That's all that's happening here.

People like digital copies, they can take them with them and easily pass it between their laptop/desktop/Kindle/phone. Publication is cheap these days, but publishers are still trying to get the equivalent value of physical copies from digital ones. I'm sorry, but paying the same price for a digital copy is by definition overpriced.

hyperpape wrote:This is an important distinction, and it is tremendously important to the economics of the issue, but I have some free complications for you.

But in the sense that file-sharers are talking about, Barnes and Noble is not using the book. They want to make money off of it, but they are not interested in reading it, or using it to prop up a shaky table leg, or impressing people who see it left on the coffee table. In fact, holding onto that copy of the book is costing them money.

Stealing the book doesn't deprive them of the use of the item, in the primitive way that most of the analogies offered by file sharers seem to me to depend on. What it does is deprives them of one very particular use: the ability to sell the book for its set price.

Barnes and Noble staff can certainly prohibit me from holding on to a book that they own while standing in their store (usually they don't because there is a chance I may buy it, and because they want to create a nice atmosphere for their customers).

But think about this: imagine I bought a book from B&N for $30. Then I realized that it's not the book I had wanted to buy, and for whatever reason I cannot return it to B&N (let's say 30 days have passed, I damaged the book, whatever).

I go and stand outside of B&N in the mall and offer to sell this book to passersby for $20. Someone is on his way to the store to buy this exact book, sees me with the book and buys it. What just happened? I cost B&N a customer.

But I haven't stolen anything from them, have I? In fact, if I open another store in the same mall (or online), I am also costing B&N customers. To prevent such things from happening, governments back in the day would issue... patents. Grants of monopoly to selling particular goods. They figured: "Joe is selling wood. If you come in and also start selling wood, you're hurting Joe's business. Joe was there first." So, the governments would create a monopoly on wood production to "protect" Joe's business. (And it still does that today for many businesses in many areas, from medicine to electricity to food safety inspection.)

The flaw in the logic here (and why this is immoral) is not only that it reduces competition thus having adverse affect on prices and quality of product, etc., etc., but that competition is a victimless crime! How can I say this? Certainly Joe lost some of his customers when I moved in to town and opened a similar type of business. That's true. But Joe never owned the customers or their money to begin with (until they decided to part with it in his store). On the other hand, I did own my store, so if the government came in and closed it down, it made me a victim of its regulations.

So, if I were interfering with Barnes and Noble's use of the book in a way of actively restricting the sales from happening (for instance, by running into the store and grabbing books out of the customers' hands), I would be violating B&N's rights. But if I am interfering by providing competition, I am not violating B&N's rights at all.

Javaness2 wrote:Nagano, I think you should give this some more thought. The skill to write a novel can easily be claimed to be as scarce as an apple. Also, your approach to the argument is rather immediate in nature.

And yet, you could spend a lifetime in the Library of Congress and never have need for a new story...

hyperpape wrote:

nagano wrote:It's not ridiculous at all. The difference is that physical property is scarce, but information is not. For instance, taking the apple from you would be stealing because it would deprive you of the apple. But someone copying the information contained in a book you wrote does not deprive you of the book.

This is an important distinction, and it is tremendously important to the economics of the issue, but I have some free complications for you.

The article is interesting, but it goes wrong in its focus on rivalry. This is trying to decide whether or not IP is legitimate from a utilitarian perspective (though it fails to address the issue even in that regard), rather than focusing on the all-important question of whether or not it is a natural property right. It is true that in order to do this, you must first answer the question, "What is Property?". For a more exhaustive explanation than I could possibly give here, I refer you to Kinsella. I will attempt to summarize here.

Scarcity occurs when not everyone can have access to a particular resource. Therefore, it must be determined who has the strongest claim. This is the individual who first homesteaded (occupied and/or improved the resource) or purchased it. Therefore, the right is assigned to them. Any attempt to take it away from them is an unjustified use of force. But with information, there is no scarcity; it can be copied infinitely without depriving the discoverer or creator of it. Any law that changes this situation uses the threat of violence to create a false scarcity, which infringes on the physical property rights of everyone except the creator, and harms the economy as a whole.

Consider this analogy: Your neighbor has just invented the rocking chair, and you observe it on his front porch. You want one, so you wait until he's not looking and then you take it for yourself. Obviously you are the aggressor here, you have committed theft. But suppose instead you decide that you will make one just like it, and you go and cut down a tree on your property, and fashion the wood with your own tools, and make your own chair. Your neighbor is enraged and goes to the government, demanding that your chair either be destroyed, or that you pay him a hefty fee, because it is his "intellectual property". Clearly, it is the neighbor, and the government by accessory, rather than you who is the aggressor in this case.

Javaness2 wrote:Nagano, I think you should give this some more thought. The skill to write a novel can easily be claimed to be as scarce as an apple. Also, your approach to the argument is rather immediate in nature.

Scarcity in the economic sense only refers to the availability or reproduciblity of a good. I therefore must conclude that you are arguing from a utilitarian position, implying that authors deserve government protection because their work has value, and assuming that they would not be properly compensated without IP. There are two flawed assumptions here:

1) That content creators are entitled to compensation. In the free market, no one is entitled to anything. All economic activity rests on the hope that others will find the product useful or enjoyable, and therefore be willing to adequately compensate the creator for it. If this is not the case, their economic model is flawed or they are producing a good which people do not want, and they should alter their strategies and production rather than clamor for government protection.

2) That content creators will not be able to make money. This is patently false. For example, a popular author could write a book, but refuse to release it until fans had donated a certain amount of money. Musicians already make most of their money on live events, while the recording companies take most of the profits from album sales. There are many, many more examples that could be given. A good book that touches on these issues with regards to software (and some other areas), though the author does not advocate total abolition of IP, is After the Software Wars.

nagano wrote:

hyperpape wrote:

nagano wrote:]

Consider this analogy: Your neighbor has just invented the rocking chair, and you observe it on his front porch. You want one, so you wait until he's not looking and then you take it for yourself. Obviously you are the aggressor here, you have committed theft. But suppose instead you decide that you will make one just like it, and you go and cut down a tree on your property, and fashion the wood with your own tools, and make your own chair. Your neighbor is enraged and goes to the government, demanding that your chair either be destroyed, or that you pay him a hefty fee, because it is his "intellectual property". Clearly, it is the neighbor, and the government by accessory, rather than you who is the aggressor in this case.

Ok, lets place this analogy in the context of go databases.

Say I live next door to T Mark Rockingchair, and I see him toiling away, entering games and building a database. He shows it to me while I am trimming the hedges, and I decide I would like one just like it. So I go and find a go record tree on my property, and I enter the data, one by one, with my own tools, and I make my own database, just as he did - years later. T Mark Rockingchair sees what I did and says, "Nice job, you know you could have saved yourself years, I would have sold you a copy cheap" He might have enjoyed the idea of being a good neighbor, and having the choice of letting me have one for free. I do not think he gets outraged.

People do not get outraged when you cut down trees, work hard with tools, and fashion your own versions of things, for your own private use.

People get upset when you simply press copy and get all the benifits of their work for free. People get outraged when you press copy and then sell it yourself.

I have officially considered your analogy. It is not analogous.

nagano wrote:The article is interesting, but it goes wrong in its focus on rivalry. This is trying to decide whether or not IP is legitimate from a utilitarian perspective (though it fails to address the issue even in that regard), rather than focusing on the all-important question of whether or not it is a natural property right.

You're the one who brought up rivalrousness in the first place ("scarcity" in your terms). The article was a focused rebuttal of the claim that scarcity is the essential feature of property, which is your claim. As far as I can see, utilitarianism doesn't enter into the issue at all.

Edit: Nagano, you should note my earlier post that points out that most of the requires of current IP law could be created via private contracts, and of course publishers are currently able to opt out of copyright law via the GPL or public domain. So I think a "high church" libertarian can't really object.

P.P.S. Am I right in thinking that I'm being directed to a for sale version of the argument against intellectual property? I hope there's a freely available copy out there somewhere...

Javaness2 wrote:I don't know if you're joking in what you write here, or not. If I write a book, and somebody comes along, and takes the same book and sells it as there own, they can do this as it is now their intellectual property. If I buy an apple, and a man comes by, takes it, and sells it to another man passing, he can do this as it was his physical property. You are saying that intellectual labour is different to physical labour. Frankly that sounds like a kind of derivative, ridiculous bar room philosophy.

I am not joking, and you need to be careful with your terminology usage. Books are only a subset of intellectual property. Physical labor is treated completely differently than intellectual property. If you've never had to deal with the distinction in your professional job, I have to envy you somewhat.

In your hypothetical, if you have not published the book yet, and someone takes it and publishes it, you have to take them to court. You will need to prove beyond a resonable doubt that it was sitting in your possesion first. This is an extremely painful process and it is not guaranteed you will win. When this comes up between two corporations, it is often settled out of court. I know it SOUNDS like a joke, but this is why people often get angry about the current IP law in the US.

(Sorry for the double post, but the forums software doesn't work well with my tablet)

I have a special book at work for writing things that could become IP in. It has a tamper proof binding and each page is signed by a witness on the same date I write into it. Each page the date is stamped. When I start to file the IP I reference these pages. The filiing request is signed by two witnesses. Then I finally start to talk to the lawyers. They rewrite everything completely. It has to be filed with the gov't before I talk to anyone else about it, even if we have confidentiallity agreements in place already. If you don't have this, it is a tough time in court. We've ended up with cross licensing deals before instead of damages because of breaches in the process when the IP is infringed.

badukJr wrote:In your hypothetical, if you have not published the book yet, and someone takes it and publishes it, you have to take them to court. You will need to prove beyond a resonable doubt that it was sitting in your possesion first.

While I agree proving a claim can be difficult, I'm quite sure the burden is "preponderance of the evidence" (similar to "more likely than not") and not "beyond a reasonable doubt," which applies in criminal prosecutions.

HKA wrote:...

Ok, lets place this analogy in the context of go databases.

Say I live next door to T Mark Rockingchair, and I see him toiling away, entering games and building a database. He shows it to me while I am trimming the hedges, and I decide I would like one just like it. So I go and find a go record tree on my property, and I enter the data, one by one, with my own tools, and I make my own database, just as he did - years later. T Mark Rockingchair sees what I did and says, "Nice job, you know you could have saved yourself years, I would have sold you a copy cheap" He might have enjoyed the idea of being a good neighbor, and having the choice of letting me have one for free. I do not think he gets outraged.

People do not get outraged when you cut down trees, work hard with tools, and fashion your own versions of things, for your own private use.

People get upset when you simply press copy and get all the benifits of their work for free. People get outraged when you press copy and then sell it yourself.

I have officially considered your analogy. It is not analogous.

I think HKA's analogy is closer to reality, but it seems debatable to me if the database should even be sold.

It seems to me that Mr. Rockingchair & Co. primarily profit from the go records themselves, which came from pros. It's true that it may take time to compile the data into a computer format, but the real value in what is being sold is not an original work by the sellers. The real "authors" of the database are the pros. The people that put together their games are, in some ways, simply publishers of the original work.

So to me, I do not think people should steal the work of others. I don't think people should steal the GoGod software, for example, and they particularly shouldn't take advantage of it for profit.

But I think it's debatable if it's "moral" for the game records that pros created to be sold like this in the first place. At the very least, they should ask permission from the pros that are still alive.

This is similar to an issue that arose between Lee Sedol and the Hankuk Kiwon. The Hankuk Kiwon wanted copyright of the games that he created, whereas Lee Sedol (in my opinion, appropriately) assumed that the ownership of the game records should belong to those that created them.

Of course in this case, there is no question as to whether the database compilers own copyright to the games in the database. Yet, they still profit off of it.