Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 16. (Read 105875 times)

Even if I did read it, it wouldn't change my mind. I've read enough about the basic principles, concepts and purpose of law that any book written about it (if that's what your referring to), would change my mind. It's very logical if you start from the NAP. Any construction of law has to address that, otherwise it's just force legalized for any purpose. That always results in the have's and the have-not's. Viz., those who wield the law as a means to their ends, exercised upon those who are on the receiving end of it.

Your duty in the law-making process is to never write a law that directly or indirectly injures another. The law is to protect against physical injury and physical tresspass, not cause it. How hard could that be? Give people their freedom, and it's amazing what they can do with it (and no, not freedom to maim and injury, that's not freedom, or for that matter, justice).

2^43,486,543,900,000,000,000  +  1

My number is bigger.

And once you've solved that equation, you might want to consider this number as well: 2^43,486,543,900,000,000,000.

That's a really big number. And your arguments need to address the size of that number.

Well, that answered the question in the last sentence. What about the rest of my post? And one more thing: what is 2^24 * 5,000 * 3,000 * 24 * 60 * 120?

EDIT: changed the equation so that the large number is not a denominator.

Been vacationing. Politicking gets tiring after awhile.

Fred,

I take it you haven't read the short story "The Library of Babel"? Tell me now, did you see "Pride and Prejudice" starring Keira Knightley? What's significant about these two products, and why do they essentially make your points pointless? Furthermore, why haven't you addressed my latest posts in this thread?

Let the free market come up with a solution. You conflate offer with force. The second you use law, you imply consequences related to law. Laws use force. Careful.

We don't need laws that produce millions of monopolies to get things done. If you don't think your idea as applied to a product will produce a profit, don't do it. Monopolizing information/ideas/inventions isn't productive, it's counterproductive.

It was bad enough when just the "royals" did it. Now we have everybody acting like the royals do. It's a smogasbord of information "kingdoms" and "serfdoms" with hundres of thousands of lawyer swimming amongst us like sharks waiting to strike and extract their pound of flesh to return to the robber barons.

More money is wasted in suing, patenting, trademarking, copyrighting, lawyering, manipulation and threatening than actually doing stuff. GO AND DO! Stop whining about not "getting yours" from everybody else.

I think at this point the only question that matters is how can we keep a business going without having to rely on IP laws. Thanks to computers and internet, IP is pretty much dying or failing like the war against drugs. It being a law isn't stopping anyone from downloading, people are getting better TVs and sound systems, making going to the movies less necessary, and DRM in music has been practically abandoned. Young kids don't even see pirating music and movies as anything wrong. And if we ever switch to mesh networking, you can pretty much kiss the concept of IP good bye. About only thing left is patent protections for physical stuff sold, and that is apparently only protected by sue-happy mega corp (does make me worry about our patent). Once 3D printers are more prevalent, that'll start disappearing, too, with people downloading gadget schematics.

I admire your faith that there are some immutable rights out there which live forever but as a practical matter, rights are legal creations used to make society better.  IP rights were created to make society better and, to get rid of them, you have to offer something even better.

Nah, I'd have to say that people back then were pretty ignorant. We know a hell of a lot more now than we did back then, and not just about sciences. If you think that slavery was a perfectly fine and moral thing 1000 years ago, that's your prerogative. I'll keep believing that we simply didn't know any better.

As for IP, this is a discussion about rights. You can't have a discussion about intellectual property rights without establishing what is a right first.

You would have objected to your personal slavery but you would have not objected to the concept of slavery. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amistad_%28film%29

The guy the book film is based on returned to Africa and became a slave trader himself.

People are no smarter now than they were 1000 years ago.  And even though almost everything was barbaric 1000 years ago, I doubt people have evolved a moral region of the brain.  

Anyway, its nothing to do with intellectual property.  Its probably a co-incidence that the movement to abolish slavery and the concept of IP both emerged around the same time.

*sigh* Sorry, let me rephrase that:

Not if you were a slave or a close friend of one.

I think it happens because the person on the receiving end of that law eventually reasons that what is being done to them is not just, asserts their own rights, and uses logic and reason to convince others of his own rights. Using logic and reason in this way, we can figure out what rights people should have even if we are not on the receiving end of the law, and then change the law we realized was a mistake.

Ukraine was founded 1,400 years ago. I used Eastern European in the context of living in the eastern part of the European continent, like Asians or Africans.

Sorry wrong.  Africans were the last to give up slavery and its still practiced by the Tuareg and by the North Sudanese.  The Bible clearly says you have the right to own slaves, to sell them breaking up families and to torture them for misbehaviour.  The Eastern Europeans didn't exist 1000 years ago - there were people there but not with an Eastern European identity.

http://bible.cc/matthew/18-25.htm "Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt."

http://bible.cc/matthew/18-34.htm "In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed."

I don't know.

Serious answer.  How did we regard slavery as 100% fine for 60,000 years and suddenly come to regard it as an abomination?  For the same period we regarded abortion as evil and now most countries treat it as a human right.  How does that happen?  I don't know.  But the fact that it does happen.

Not if you wereblack/jewish/eastern european (or if you were friends with one). Those people sure as hell feel they didn't have a right to be owned. (See Bible, part 1)

I am a hard line anti religious atheist. I despise religion. I just try to be polite and not show it. In my explanation of where I believed rights came from, reason =/= faith.

The problem I have with your argument is that the logic doesn't follow. If slaves did not have rights because the law didn't give them rights, then why bother giving them rights? If blacks or gays did not have rights because the law didn't give them any rights, then why were they given rights? Surely if the majority opinion of society was that blacks and gays are inferior and don't deserve rights, then the idea of them having rights shouldn't have even been considered? Why was Martin Luther King proclaiming that blacks have rights, and demanding equal treatment for them, when the law said otherwise?

Basicall, your line of logic is: Law makes rights > A has no rights > Rights for A should not even be taken into consideration, since there is no law giving A rights > Since rights of A should not be considered, A should never have rights.
But eventually, and despite the beliefs of majority and despite the law, someone came by and declared that A does indeed have rights, and set upon trying to convince the rest of the world of that. If rights come from law, and thus A has no rights, where did that someone get the idea that A DOES have rights?

If we were both alive 1000 years ago, we would both have asserted the right to own slaves and that abortion was an evil.  Or do you believe everyone from prior to a certain date in human history was a moral pygmy unable to understand social interaction?

Yes, we disagree on what the concept of "rights" means. You say that our rights are whatever scraps our respective governments deem fitting to gift to us. I say that our rights are a universal statement about how humans should interact with each other, and they come from the nature of social interaction. Nobody ever had a right to own human slaves, they just could. Just as a murderer doesn't have a right to murder, he just can.