Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 33. (Read 105893 times)

Laws do contradict one another.  Your right to privacy is contradicted by the right to make a search warrant.  Your right to own a dog is contradicted by animal cruelty laws that take the dog off you for cruelty.  A single seamless law without exceptions is impossible.

Yes, the definition of legal, property, and law are all ideological conceptual constructs. However, the basic idea behind any legal/law concept is that it should have no logical conflict with itself. Inconsistencies typically only benefit the more intelligent, powerful and manipulative at the expense of the ignorant and weak. Let's not make this a "might makes right" world, rather a world of equitable and logically consistent application of the rule of law.

The definition of intellectual property conflicts with the definition of physical property and implementation of laws related thereto.

I wish to solve that problem, not make 7+ million more problems of the same. Creating legal "land mines" aren't nice. They harm more than help.

What totalitarian hellhole do you live in where politics requires violence?  I'm a member of Amnesty International so I may have written to you Minister for "Justice."

I don't know. What happened when Frederick Seitz was hired by R. J. Reynolds?

"Luckily we live in a dictatorship so you are free to lobby to get the law changed"
or
"Luckily we live in a dictatorship so you are free to revolt to get the law changed"


You think politics is non-violent? You are hilarious!

Tell me, what happens when you win your vote and now some previously acceptable behavior of mine is made illegal?

Your property is a legal construct, just like any other property.  I have no interest at all in violating your property but you seem to have an unhealthy interest in violating mine.

And there you have it.  We don't agree.  Luckily we live in a democracy so you are free to lobby to get the law changed.  The whole concept is that people who have honest disagreements also have a non-violent way to resolve the disagreement.   

Cry me a river. Of course it will always be an easy decision by the oppressors. As long as they can oppress, they will, and the more power you give them, the more they will do it. There must always be a check in place, and that should be at the edge of my property. Poke holes in that boundary and property will eventually become meaningless and obfuscated.

Either I, or others I employ, can defend and maintain my property as mine, or it will eventually become somebody else's. As far as I can tell, the patent and trademark system, lovingly called IP, is nothing more than a mine field just waiting for somebody to step into and blow themselves to kingdom come.

IP law is nothing more than the ability (thru statutory assistance) to transfer physical property from one person to another due to the compositional characteristics the materials contain. So it's an easy decision. Stop it.

Thats the question we are discussing.  How do you balance the various wants and needs and what is the best option.  In the case of movies, taking them away would be a far great act of oppression than restricting your right to profit from copying movies.  So its an easy decision.

Sigh.

Really you need to think and then post.

The point is that the same silly argument can be made about every restriction on your freedom.  Its not limited to IP law. 

Got it now?

So how bad, how oppressive, how nasty, how unsustainable, and how ridiculous does it have to get, before we say enough is enough?

I'm just waiting for somebody to patent breathing air. Mark my words, something like it will happen.

"First they came for..." is not an argument.

"Cotton cannot be picked without slavery, regardless of the morality of slavery" is an argument for slavery. "Movies cannot be made without IP, regardless of the morality of IP" is the same argument.

Fred as I said earlier, I think you'll find that most everything can be made into an argument for slavery or compared to genocide.  For example, "First they came for the Jews...then they came for the owners of intellectual property...then they came for me..."

See how easy and how stupid that is?  The error is comparing a trivial inconvenience with slavery.  Compare like with like and a more intelligent dialogue is possible.

So true. Hawker doesn't realize that IP results in slavery, as does any other type of aggression initiated by the monopolist. All monopolies (backed by force) are a form of slavery. It can easily be proven. But, what Hawker wants us to concede on, is that just a little bit of slavery could benefit society. I tend to disagree with this theory because it is always a slippery slope in the wrong direction.

Monopolists love the taste of power, and they loath having to work any harder than they have to. Giving them special rules and regulations allows them to supress the masses just enough that they don't notice too much, and when they do, it's hard to point the finger at "who dunnit". Actually we have a list of 7+ million patent holders, and an untold number of copyrights, who we can point the finger at, but nobody realizes that apparently.

Then there are those that seek to fix the patent system, thinking it will improve the situation, when it just shifts the problem around to arrive at the same or similar position again. You can't fix slavery with different slavery. Consuming your own excrement with a pretty bow on top, doesn't make it any less "excrementty".

What's more interesting about it is the fact that, the system does work to an extent, just like cotton pickers in the antebellum south. There was a vibrant trade in cotton. There were many that made huge fortunes. Patents and copyrights achieve the same effect in a more insidious fashion, because the "slave" doesn't know he's a slave until he "infringes", then he finds out how precarious his person and property really are. Then there are the side trades (patent and copyright lawyers) that would take a hit. Heaven forbid should they lose their "jobs". That would just be an unspeakable tragedy.

It used to be the royals who we put up on a pedestal. It was them we could easily point a finger at and pursue. We could blame them for the unfair application of law and the inequity in trade and services and the manipulation of competition. There's a reason why we negotiate patents and copyrights with "royalties", as that's where the name came from. Instead of a few royal bloods out there suppressing the masses, now anybody with a few hundred dollars can ensnare anybody else.

Doing a cost/benefit analysis for IP is the same kind analysis as cotton pickers did in the south 200+ years ago. Of course it benefits the masters to the detriment of the slave. Can you make money and produce wealth with slaves, or manipulate trade with reduced competition? Of course. Can you pick cotton another way? Apparently so. Get rid of slavery (all forms of it), and I bet you'll see a lot of interesting results. Probably better than what we have now. No doubt some things will wither and go away. Maybe that's the way it should be. That's life.

Give freedom and liberty a chance. You might get a better world.

But with competing police forces, the most profitable way is the eliminate the competition.  That kind of war is like the warlordism you have in failed states.  Its very profitable.  So when there is a dispute, the economic incentive is to fight and the winning police force picks up the customers of the police force that was destroyed. 

You're missing something very big. Most disputes between governments are resolved without violence. That is how disputes between systems of polycentric law would be decided. However, governments can fall back to war because they collect tax revenue. War is expensive, bad for the bottom line, means you have to charge your customers more. If they have a choice, they will leave you for someone who doesn't go to ar, and thus doesn't charge more. The people in charge of these organizations will know this, and will opt to resolve disputes peacefully, and only resort to violence in self defense, unlike nation states.

We are talking about conflicts between police forces in a stateless society.  A sniper on either side won't help.

Off topic, but can I recommend you read "A Frozen Hell" by Trotter.  It will give you a better idea of how the Finns beat the Russians.  The key factor was logistics for the Finnish army.  Once the Russians fixed their logistics in WW2, the Finns lost all they had gained and more.

I'm open to being corrected but as far as I know, there hasn't been a war between Western forces in which infantry did even 50% of the killing in over a century.  I read that in WW1 it was about 10% infantry and the rest artillery.  So if there are 2 courts and one has a police force with trained soldiers with aircraft and tanks, and the other has civilians equipped with firearms, the civilians will lose the case.

What puzzles me is why you'd even think that is a good way to settle a dispute.

The reason the US is losing in Afghanistan is that it is focused on nation building.  If all it wanted was tax revenue, it could control a few bridges and and mountain passes and the Afghans would have to choose between starving and paying tax.

Much like the militias you'd have in a libertarian society in fact.  The Afghan model is not usually considered something to aspire to.

Tanks, artillery and aircraft are weapons of war that are effective against other weapons of war, such as other tanks, artillery and aircraft.  They are not particularly useful for subduing a rebellion.  Your statements make it obvious that you never served in the military.  The basic unit of a military is the single person with a rifle.  This hasn't changed despite hundreds of years of technical advancements in the field.  The most demoralizing and dangerous opponent to go up against is a talented sniper.  During WWII, the Soviets invaded Finland in what they called the "Winter War", and the Soviets would carpet bomb entire sections of the Finish countryside to kill one farmer turned sniper who had become known as the "White Ghost" and the "White Death" to the Soviet troops.  He was the most successful single sniper in recorded history, and very likely was a significant factor in the Finns successful defense of country.  The proliferation of the privately owned rifle was a major factor in the Soviets never actually invading the US.  After the Soviet Union broke apart, and we gained access to old Soviet military documents, there was a case study done on the feasibility of a military invasion of the US.  They focused upon Chicago, and despite the level of gun control in that city, the Soviet military planners estimated that it would take at least a full battalion to capture and occupy just this one city.

Unless your goal is the absolute destruction of a population, 300 tanks are of small value against 10,000 armed and upset adults, particularly if they are not organized into a collective unit.  4th Generation warfare, look it up.

Oh really? See: Iraq/Afghanistan. How is our modern military doing there?

Obviously we could just wipe them all out, but any invading government won't want to do that, they'll want to take control of the people, as a form of tax revenue. So yeah, an armed rabble is about all you need.

Governments have trained forces with tanks, artillery and aircraft.  Since guns are pretty well obsolete in modern warfare, armed citizens can't do much.

That's why democratic government is a good idea.