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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

See the major difference there is that engineers have recognized this and built a moat around their inventions. You don't just provide some bytes that run on someone's computer, you provide a service that can't be duplicated.

Now ask yourself why it is that engineers adjusted but media has not. What are their motivations?

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Maybe because only engineers have the luxury of providing a service that can't be duplicated? I have trouble imagining viable SaaS equivalents for media. What would a, say, Books-as-a-Service look like?

You can get 1 free Kindle download a month with Amazon prime. However, I think Porn is leading the way on that one. There are plenty of sites that give you access to a growing collection of stories for a monthly price, and one that allows free access to it's collection but charges for a better search and bookmarking system.

Which I guess boils down to either the patronage system, where you can sponsors people to write (ex: epic poetry) or the organizational system where you can distribute free content and then give kickback to the most popular authors like many blogging systems do.

PS: Batoto.com is an odd mix as it returns money to people who translate works but not the original authors. Sort of like a pirates auction house. The advantage for users being a nice interface and rapid updates.

Except now the patronage system can be easily distributed instead of relying on rich people. I doubt it'll ever fund an "Avatar", but 2.9 million dollars is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adv...

I'm being very radical here, but the thought of the only books being published being by people who actually want to be read rather than waant to be rich is not a problem for me. For craftsmen whose primary goal isn't to communicate or entertain, I'd suggest patrons. I'd certainly sponsor about 1/50 of a writer spread across a curated pool. I'd probably sponsor about 1/200 of a curator. They wouldn't have to even send me the books, I'd just buy them from the printer with the best quality to cost ratio.

Music-as-a-Service has been around as long as music.

I look forward to all the source code and databases of the world to be made freely available to everyone.

Of course engineers rely on intellectual property as much as anyone does.

IP here means "IP laws". Access to the source is a completely different issue. You don't need IP laws to protect your source: just don't distribute it.

So it is OK for your employees (that you share your code and data with) to distribute it among third parties as they please?

Employees are bound by contract. You don't need IP laws to prohibit them from sharing the code.

What if your code gets "snuck out", and you don't know who did it. Should it still be free to copy and distribute at that point?

Yes. The question is: if the code gets snuck out, do you really think IP laws will actually prevent people from distributing it?

Yeah, it's certainly working fine:

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7087027/Symantec_Norton_Anti...

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4149808/Windows_NT4_source_c...

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3497574/Windows_2000_source_...

"That which is not seen" is a great deal of other software that otherwise might be out there were there not laws against that sort of thing.

I'd like to see some evidence of that, please.

Well, the links you pointed to are for fairly old versions of Windows, and they are on a pirate site, rather than any old site that chooses to host them in the US. Is Mac OS there in its entirety? How about Oracle? DB2 from IBM?

So the fact that the source isn't there is proof that copyright prevented it? I may have a tiger repellent rock to sell you.

You need to provide evidence that the source of the Mac OS, Oracle or DB2 would be there if copyright didn't exist.

Look at the availability of Linux source code compared to Mac OS X. It's everywhere.

In terms of proof and evidence, no one can really "prove" anything without actually experiencing the counterfactual world. You can't prove that MacOS X code would not be everywhere, for instance, just as I can't prove that it would be.

The best we can do is look for evidence that suggests how things might go.

So if someone did get access to your source and data, by whatever means, it'd be fine to spread it at will?

And for that matter, why should there be information security laws if there's no intellectual property?

So if someone did get access to your source and data, by whatever means, it'd be fine to spread it at will?

Not if they're bound by contract OR if they conspired with someone who was. In other cases, yes. But what we think of whether it's "fine" or not is irrelevant: it'll happen anyway (try looking for Norton source code on TPB). What it matters is whether we want to fund laws to fight windmills.

And for that matter, why should there be information security laws if there's no intellectual property?

There are many laws under that "banner". What laws do you mean?

If you mean Data Protection, those are essentially mandatory contract terms. Regardless of whether they should exist or not, they're very different, because you're only bound by them if you enter in a contract (implied or not) with the person or company providing you with the data.

Whether that data is "property" or not is irrelevant.

What about violating software licenses? I guess the restrictions of the GPL are moot then. I can just do whatever I want as I'm really not depriving anyone of anything they didn't already have.

Yes, the restrictions of the GPL would be moot if there were no copyright.

Treating source code as intellectual property is exactly what spawned GPL in the first place, as it is a "hack" that exploits the nature of software licensing.

Can you reiterate your point?

That's not true. The GPL wouldn't be unnecessary, it would cease to work. The GPL relies just as much on copyright laws to work as does proprietary software. Something that is disallowed with the GPL is taking the source code, making a modification, compiling it, and then only distributing the binary. There is nothing that prevents this but copyright law.

A correct statement would be that the BSD or MIT licence would be unnecessary (except for their clauses that you have to include the copyright notice with your modified program).

It was a bit of a rambling point, but relates to the double-standard I see often applied. Terms like "piracy" and "stealing" aren't applicable because there's no physical good (although there's hardly any ambiguity over what's being discussed) and no one is being deprived of anything. But, hey, we need the GPL to ensure everyone shares everything and we need to go after those that violate the GPL. Although, quite arguably, the same logic could be applied: it's not stealing, I'm not taking anything you don't already have, and I don't need to share because I wasn't going to anyway, but maybe my friend will hear about it and contribute a patch to make your project better! [Please forgive the liberal use of pronouns.]

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