The Political Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

Taking property is a different thing. Property is a scarce resource, ideas are infinitely replicable.

Anarchism isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't agree with all of it, but statism is much worse. I'd rather rely on my own judgement, and the judgement of the individuals I deal with, rather than being forced to submit to the judgement of a Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Bending to people like that simply because they won a popularity contest is dumber than a whole warehouse full of bags of hammers.

[The Legendary Shark]

Thanks for the Dan Dare correction, Frank.

It doesn't change my argument but it's good to get the facts right.

[Funt Solo]

Taking property is a different thing. Property is a scarce resource, ideas are infinitely replicable.

I wouldn't have to call "bollocks" so often if you didn't present absolutes with such frequency. Look at the work of Escher, of Giger, of Einstein. The intellectual property they created should belong to them in the same way that a talented wood-worker should earn a crust from their finished product.

At what point do you take the end product and decide that it's so much something that is just borne of an "infinitely replicable" source of ideas that actually it just belongs to everyone? Happy days for the plagiarists in your world.  "Yeah, I didn't actually come up with any of the ideas or anything, but I could if I wanted, so really it's mine, ain't it?" It's a playground argument. "I know the secret of how to transmute lead into gold." Prove it. I could if I wanted but I'm not going to...

[The Legendary Shark]

If an artist creates a work, then it is theirs to sell, absolutely. But what if the buyer then sells that artwork to a third party? Should the artist get that money as well? If I sell a Dredd GN I bought, should I pass on the money I get for it to Rebellion?

If I pay a master woodworker to make me a bespoke table, to whom does that table belong?

People should be able to profit from their work, you'll get no argument from me on that score. However, expecting an income in perpetuity for something you've already been paid for is, to me, unreasonable. Would you pay a plumber to install a toilet and then continue to pay them 10p per flush for as long as you use that toilet? If not, why not? How about paying the manufacturer 10p per flush after you've bought it?

I mentioned Einstein to highlight the differences in attitude to what is essentially the same thing. If one wants to exploit his work to invent a gps system then that seems to be okay but if one wants to exploit something of far less importance, like a fictional character, then that's seen as wrong and punishable.

[Tjm86]

Would you pay a plumber to install a toilet and then continue to pay them 10p per flush for as long as you use that toilet? If not, why not? How about paying the manufacturer 10p per flush after you've bought it?

Kicking into total pedant mode, you do pay for each flush.  That's the sewerage part of your water bill ....

[ducks quickly]

[Funt Solo]

If I sell a Dredd GN I bought, should I pass on the money I get for it to Rebellion?

No, but you also shouldn't mass produce copies of it and sell those. Your original argument was against copyright, not against selling on a single product you bought. You're changing the position of the goal posts mid-way through the argument. Ref calls foul!

[The Legendary Shark]

Nope, same thing. See my op.

The creators have been paid once by the original publishers, the secondary publishers might reprint it without permission but, basically, so what? It's entirely analogous to buying the original publication second-hand. One might believe that the second publisher is acting immorally but that's a judgement call on the part of the secondary publisher and their customers. As I said, so long as the original creators are credited then I can't see a problem.

If I were to re-publish 'Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos, by John Wagner,' and put enough money into the project to produce a really nice (or really cheap) version, then there should be no problem, especially if I throw a few sheckels at Mr Wagner and company. The purchaser must decide whether to buy it or not. If, on the other hand, I were to re-publish 'Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos, by The Legendary Shark,' two things would happen. First, I'd be rightly laughed out of town and probably not sell a single copy and, second, I'd open myself up to charges of fraud and be punished accordingly.

[Funt Solo]

Honestly, you make no sense. On the one hand you reference fraud laws, on the other you say copyright is nonsense. It's scattershot logic, or you're trolling me and I'm an idiot for responding. Sadly, I think it's the second.

[The Legendary Shark]

You seem to be under the impression that anarchy is the same as lawlessness. Anarchy depends on law and can't work without it. Statism, on the other hand, can't work without the ability to ignore, pervert and simulate law.

IP laws (legislations), as I said originally, were invented to grant monopolies to favoured royal supporters and have no foundation in reality. Fraud laws, on the other hand, arise from tradition and actual case laws. Fraud is a form of theft, which is an ancient and widely accepted crime.

And I'm not trolling you, I simply have a different view, which I have tried to explain - though I don't seem to have done a very good job of it, for which I apologise. If you wish to continue, then I'm happy to try and make my arguments clearer - if not, then that's fine too.

[Tiplodocus]

I see where you are coming from.

But there's a fuck ton of other people who have invested time and effort (and money) to make Day Of Chaos a viable product. 

If you spent time planting an orchard, feeding and nurturing, looking after the trees for years until they bore fruit, you'd be pretty hacked off if people came along and took your fruit.

It wouldn't matter if they brought their own ladders and baskets, they'd still be taking, literally, the fruits of your labour. Fruit that they had nothing to do with getting ready to harvest.

[Hawkmumbler]

The creator of PePe the Frog basically had his character hijacked by neo-nazis who proceeded to produce counterfeit merchandise and profit off of his IP.

Thats why we have content protection laws.

[Funt Solo]

In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one year's patent "to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury".

The grey area is all important: there are cases where IP constricts creative solutions (such as medical development being horded for profit) but also cases where it seems fair that the artist should be the main beneficiary of their hard labors, or decide who to sell stuff to (rather than just any lazy chump who happens to wander along afterwards and claim that it's easy to think of such things).

"The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave." - Ayn Rand

[IndigoPrime]

I remember in a recent GE (2015, I think, but it might have been 2017), the Greens wanted to overhaul copyright rules. That they couldn't easily do so unilaterally seemed to have escaped their thinking, but I did notice the number of people I know in the creative industries who were considering voting Green (quite a few) dropped almost to zero on hearing this news. They were, to put it lightly, massively insulted and absolutely furious by the Greens' stance.

A lot of it came down to "you shouldn't have the right to profit from the thing you've made for long, and you can just make up other ideas anyway". That hand-waving thing that creativity is just something on tap. But also, there was the wonderful follow-up of the market naturally deciding to 'reward' the rightful owners/creators, if a dodgy rip of their stuff were to occur. So author X writes an amazing novel. After the laughably small rights window that was being proposed, OF COURSE everyone would continue to buy from author X and not undercut company Y. And when movies come out, OF COURSE everyone would flock to the one that's paying the original creator, because that's how things work!

Except it isn't. This kind of system would make things far worse for creators, because all of the power (rather than, as now, 'merely' a whole lot of it) would sit with those who have the deepest pockets.

I'm all for better creator rights. I agree that copyright shouldn't be forever. But I'm also not for removing what little rights people currently enjoy under the law, for whatever work they've made.

[The Legendary Shark]

Tips, an orchard is a physical thing, a scarce resource. Stealing apples isn't the same thing as copying a book. The author of a book always owns the content of their book, the abstract form, the arrangement of words and/or illustrations. When that abstract form is made physical, as in the printed book, the purchaser of the book owns that physical thing, just like the purchaser of the apple owns that apple. Once the apple or book has been purchased, it's up to the owner what they do with it. The purchaser of the apple does not own the orchard just as the purchaser of the book does not own the story. Theft of an apple is the same as the theft of an original manuscript. Once the apple or the original manuscript has been sold, the ownership of the physical object passes from the farmer/author to the new owner. The new owner of the physical object can do with it as he or she sees fit - just as they can with any other physical property they lawfully own. The owner of the apple has every right to plant the apple seeds found inside and grow a tree just as the owner of the book has the right to copy it or reinterpret or expand upon it - but neither has the right to claim the orchard or the story as their own.

Hawkie, I think that's a different argument. Would you be as upset if it was, say, Amnesty International who used PePe to raise funds instead of neo-nazis?

FS, your post highlights one of the fundamental problems with IP (etc) legislation, namely its arbitrary nature. Where did the Greeks come up with the one year term of monopoly? Why not six months or eternity? We've already seen how the arbitrary nature of these legislations reward the Dan Dare Corporation and offer the discoverer of E=mc² absolutely nothing. I don't think any of us are comfortable with arbitrary laws, I'm certainly not.

The pharmaceutical industry is a big advocate of IP, and one can understand their reasoning. If a company invests large amounts of money into developing a product, why should they not be given a patent or monopoly on their developed products? Humanitarian reasons aside, this is a good question. However, I have no problem with trade secrets. A company can keep developments, formulae, etc. to itself and guard its secrets closely. However, this does not protect them from parallel developments or reverse engineering. Existing laws offer some protection from industrial espionage but parallel developments are a risk every developer faces. If two companies invest heavily in developing the same or similar products, why should the first to finish glean all the rewards and the runner-up be forced to write off their investment? That doesn't seem fair and is the antithesis of the free market. In the case of reverse engineering, again this is an aspect of the free market which itself requires time and funding. The original developer will still have a head start in which to try and recoup its investment which it may or may not do. On the plus side, the company would not have to pay for legal fees and IP lawyers and would still have the option of entering into contracts with other companies to manufacture their development. It's not perfect but, then again, neither is the current system.

Sorry, this is a long post already and there's still a lot to say. Should I continue or have we had enough?

[Funt Solo]

Should I continue or have we had enough?

That made me laugh. There is a sense that you're beating me into submission with word volume. I still think you're just arguing that it's okay to steal other people's work: you're just dressing it up in lots of blah.