December 18, 2007 at 11:50 am
In the case of the chair used as a flowerholder, or a "sitting fee", you can return the chair and the chair-maker then has control over it. You no longer have use of the chair.
In the case of a plan for a chair, if you "buy" a plan, make a copy (mimeograph, offset press, Xerox, photograph, cave painting, memorization, whatever), and then you return the original, you still have use of it and the chair-planner doesn't have control over it.
The problem is, does the chair planner still have any incentive at all to plan better chairs.
In the case of music, if one performance, or one copy of the sheet music, is all it takes for the musician to no longer have control over the music, and no ability to deny use, you effectively have infinite supply, which in limited economics (supply vs demand), you thus have zero value. The argument can thus be made that no musician has any monetary incentive to produce music, and since our modern society can't value something which can't be monetized, we thus have a choice of no music, starving musicians, hobbiest musicians (no money, just having fun), or the artificial amplification of the fear and/or admiration factors.
Personally, moving out of the realm of theory into the realm of opinion, I think the music and movie industries are both ephemeral and obsolete. There used to be highly paid (by the standards of their time) scribes, whose job it was to hand-copy books word by word. The printing press eliminated that profession centuries ago. It used to take specialized machinery and technicians to copy recorded audio and video, but no longer. They'll end up in the scrap-heap of history, along with copyist scribes, buggy whip makers, and vacuum tube manufacturers. But, since we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry, they'll hang on as long as they possibly can, as long as they can turn a profit.
Companies think they are entitled to a profit because they made a profit last year, same as people think they are entitled to a job because they have skills that were in demand last year.
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December 18, 2007 at 11:56 am
In the case of patents, we're getting back into the chair-design realm, instead of the physical chair.
If you like the chair so much that you copy it, you have put effort into it, and thus deserve use/remuneration for it. If that denies me income based on my chair manufacturing, that's just a competitive economy. If it denies me income based on my chair designing, we're right back at intellectual products vs real products, and the analogy doesn't break in that case.
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December 18, 2007 at 12:20 pm
In which country does an artist have the legally enforceable "right" to go into another person's home against that person's will and deface that person's property?
December 18, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I find the painting thing hard to believe, but it probably depends where it was tried. San Francisco might allow that 😉
Let me reframe this slightly, since I probably didn't so a great job the first time around.
Ignore current law. There are problems with the current law and it was never really devised to handle digital goods, or those goods where the effort or cost to copy is essentially nil.
If you design a chair and then build it and I buy one, here's what I think:
- I own the chair, therefore you have relinquished all rights to this particular manifestation of your design. I can destroy it, paint it, cut the arms off, etc.
- I can resell the chair.
- I can copy the chair, meaning physically build my own copy for my own use, or non-commercial use. I must let people know that I built a copy of your chair if I give it away or display it, meaning I don't represent that I designed it.
- I cannot sell copies of the chair without a license from you, meaning the design is still yours and you control the rights associated with that.
- You can sell the rights to others to build chairs, build more chairs, etc., unless we have agreed on a work for hire contract.
- Even with a work for hire contract, meaning you cannot resell the idea to others, I must not pass off the design as my own.
If we move to a digital world, I'd like to think there are similar rules. I'm just not sure how to deal with copies of music or software if there is no commercial aspect. The ability to "share" can be good or bad, depending on how it works. If I share your product widely enough, I can seriously impact your ability to sell other copies, which can result in your lack of profit and perhaps lack of future production. I think there should be a limited time in which you can profit from exclusive control and prevent copies from being sold, even at $0.
However if you have complete control, then I cannot build on your work either and that's a problem. I think that non-commercial, or non-profit derivatives should be allowed.
My head hurts now and I can't really develop this further, but I am interested in what others think.
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December 18, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Another hypothetical thought.
I'm in my yard listening to my neighbor's music. I like what I here so I get out my recorder and turn it on. For sake of argument, I can record a perfect copy without birds chirping or the kids hollering in it. It sounds great when I play it back.
Then I play the music in my car while driving off my property and into town.
Did I illegally gain that music?
I did not ask for it to come on to my property in the form of sound waves. But once it did, did it become my property?
I have not won this conversation with the moose that walk up to the windows by the way. They just ignore humans and move on eating my trees and plants and leaving their calling cards behind.
December 19, 2007 at 8:17 am
Bob Hoffman (12/18/2007)
... I did not ask for it to come on to my property in the form of sound waves. But once it did, did it become my property? ...
A similar argument is made regarding "illegal" access to unsecured WiFi. You cannot block the signals coming into or going out from your residence, short of installing the expensive wireless-blocking window covering and painting your house with the expensive wireless-blocking paint, so is it theft?
Some courts have ruled that it is, it falls in the category of theft of services. One person is paying for that internet connection and wireless router, another person is using it without compensation to the one paying. But at the same time you're getting into reselling of services, and a lot of ISP contracts don't let you resell your service, they want the other party to buy their own connection so that the ISP makes more $$$.
Digital theft is a similarly tricky concept. If you copy my data, you are not depriving me of the use of my data, unless you trash my system afterwards, and that's a whole different kettle o' fish. Theft of a material object deprives the owner of its use, such as me stealing your car. Data is a different matter.
Unauthorized digital penetration is likewise a tricky concept. If I break into your system and poke around, but don't break anything or copy any of your data, where is the crime? I didn't deprive you of anything on your system, I walked in through a door that you hadn't locked.
I own what I create (loosely-speaking). If I provide a service and bill people for it, that billing information is my property. I can keep those records. I'm a fool if I keep credit card information, but that's a PCI compliance issue. I can mine that data and use it for marketing if I want. Possibly I can sell that refined data: after all, I refined it into a new data set. If I offer you the opportunity to decline to have your information sold to third parties, then I am honor-bound to respect that, but I don't know if I am legally-bound to respect it. I'd probably include a fine print that says "terms subject to change without notice" and then write an internal memo before selling the data saying that I've changed my terms.
I don't create my medical records with my doctor, those are notes, observations, thoughts, test results, etc. that he records based on examining me. I have a right to a copy of those results, and he has to provide some of that data to my insurance company, but he is adding value to his encounter with me through his diagnostic/medical skills, and that is data that he owns.
But I'm rambling. :hehe: It's too early for abstract discussion for me.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
December 19, 2007 at 10:41 am
Wayne West
Unauthorized digital penetration is likewise a tricky concept. If I break into your system and poke around, but don't break anything or copy any of your data, where is the crime? I didn't deprive you of anything on your system, I walked in through a door that you hadn't locked.
I consider that to be trespassing on private property and we do have laws for that. Along the same lines, let say I see you on my system and send you an electronic bullet that wipes out your network connection. Am I justified in protecting my self? The cable companies do this to rid their system of unauthorized cable boxes.
I work near the largest cargo airport in the country. On certain days, the heavily laden 747's fly right over my roof drowning out phone conversations. I get no revenue from their business but their activities interfere with mine. Again, its unwanted sound waves entering my property.
I know that's a extreme example and I don't have the answer. Locally, the airport spent a large amount of money retrofitting the windows for sound control on whole lot of homes near the airport when they increased the amount of traffic from a nearby runway.
I do think that I should be able to record what I hear for personal use. Using some ones wi-fi is theft of service but then so that signal coming into my house as it is trespassing.
This will be in the courts for years.
December 19, 2007 at 2:34 pm
You get signals up in Alaska?
Surprisingly, no neighbor is within 1000 ft of my house, yet for some reason I see 2 other Routers appearing in my wireless network.
Maybe we shouldn't allow routers to be sold without security? That way the signal might enter your space, but you'd actively have to break in to get at it.
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December 19, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (12/19/2007)
Maybe we shouldn't allow routers to be sold without security? That way the signal might enter your space, but you'd actively have to break in to get at it.
That would certainly be the ideal. It would be easy enough to create a startup disk for the router that would require certain parameters to be configured, but then the buyer would have to manually configure security on all wireless devices that access it, and we all know where that would lead.
And obviously you can't turn it on by default, because then you'd be supplying default passwords, and effectively you'd have no security as they'd be posted online in a week (or less).
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
December 19, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Steve Jones: You get signals up in Alaska?
Sure we do.
They reflect off the bottom of the UFO's.
It's mostly in Russian however... :hehe:
And moose racks make great antenna's!
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