But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society.
> Julian Sanchez, who has been doing excellent work on copyright issues of late, has a nice post about how such arguments are totally irrelevant to copyright policy. He notes that it’s no surprise that artistic and creative people want greater copyright privileges, and fewer exceptions such as fair use, but that’s meaningless:
> > These will often be wonderful, likeable, creative people, and the correct policy response to these objections as such is: Cry me a fucking river; now piss off.
> And the reasoning why is that copyright policy is not about what someone deserves or about rewarding people based on some moral grounding. Its purpose is and has always been clear: to provide incentive to promote progress.
It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing the value of people’s production. Training AI on other people’s labor without paying them for it and then extracting value from it is rent-seeking.
Consider what happens to AI companies’ value if they had to enter into mutual agreements with their data sources. AI company value will be almost solely determined by the AI company’s own value contribution, which is close to zero, while the data sources’ value would be unaffected or go up.
If your business model relies on you leveraging the work of others without mutually agreeable remuneration, chances are good you’re the rent-seeker.
A more apt comparison would be that a cracked version of your software is being used by OpenAI for profit without paying you for a license at all. Would you not object to that?
If Entity A has copyright on a application nothing is stopping Entity B from writing a competing application, they just have to invest their time and effort into the application like Entity A did. If Entity B thinks they can eat Entities A lunch with a different pricing model / cheaper price they are free to do so.
If Entity A has patent protection on a application then no one else can make the "same application"* (without licensing the patent) and Entity A has a monopoly on that market for the life of the patent (upto 20 years iirc).
* This would all be down to how the patent is written, and personally I am against software patents, but patents can often be bypassed even if that means that the bypassed version could be incompatible with the patented version. I also think that the length of copyright protection is too long, but I don't think it should be abolished either.
Pay the musician $400-$500 for each song and then you don't need to pay a recurring fee for it in perpetuity.
Also I'm pretty sure if your carpenter has been studing to produce the works they produce and each work takes several months to a yeah then my estimated price above is off be at least 1 but probably more factors or 10
If it wasn't expensive time wise a musician can happily give you a no-redistribution license verbally, you may want it in writing to prove they gave it to you but that is about how loose these things are.
If you ask me "hey can I use this in my video for free" and you respond "yeah sure no problem" that's all it takes, if its in a text even better.
Granted most musicians don't currently have redistribution rights to their own music but that is between them and their lack of hiring a good contract lawyer, and this would fall under contract law not copyright.
Understand you are paying a lawyer to make intent clear in the first place since how do you define "use", we I might define it differently and the court may as well unless it is made explicit what "use" means.
There is a reason that even the licensing agreement you didn't read for most software is so verbose and licensing for any creative work is about as obtuse.
Intent is important though, if I intendef for you to use it to listen to at home but you instead played it tp a crowd of 20000 people and earned a fat paycheck there is a big difference there morally and under current law legally.
Most musicians want their music listened to, they just want a little money back for that... Same with other art forms.
In my mind, subscriptions imply support and/or updates, and I don't want to work on my software forever. But I don't necessarily want to give it out for free either. one lump sum sounds fine for me.
Well maybe calling it funny is not the right take.
Your response isn't addressing what my response was addressing.
> In general, copyrights and patents generate royalty income reported on Schedule E, Supplemental Income and Loss, unless it is characterized as business income reported on Schedule C, Profit or Loss From Business (Sole Proprietorship). However, who owns the intellectual property, i.e., the creator or the party who requested its development, also determines the type of income reported. The proper classification of royalties also affects the recipient’s tax liability in other ways, including self-employment tax, investment interest deduction limitations, and the new 3.8% net investment income tax on unearned income.
Seems like that is already the case.
This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, especially given the economic realities of the world we find ourselves in, but it does seem more than a bit rent-y.
Meanwhile, if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it. But selling a book to person B in 20 years doesn't sound like "rent", despite the fact that I have heard that "media older than 10 years is fair game to pirate". 10 years in industry can be a step for an artist, not a career's worth of time like the original copyright law time period.
You appear to be arguing against buying a house/book when I wrote about building/writing?
As in, if I write a book, and then thanks to copyright law own the right to make copies (hence the name) I and my estate get to make money from every new[0] copy sold for 70 years after death. That's what I'm saying smells like rent.
[0] But not re-sold copies because first-sale doctrine, and I hope equivalents but that's a US law and I don't know what if anything is the equivalent in my jurisdiction, but I hope there is.
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
This logic always comes to conclusion with things like disposing of disabled and elderly.
In other words, not a great argument.
> A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse.
> https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitf...
If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss.
I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals for all to use.
So let's re-imagine a system where copyrights and patents are abolished. As Samuelson argues, as this is non-excludable and has zero marginal costs, it is a perfect fit for the government to take charge. Given that the current system produces dead-weight loss bringing down the production of the entire country, if we remove this dead-weight loss than the country will have much higher productivity. That higher productivity will drive higher taxes, and those higher taxes will allow the government to expand tenure track positions in public universities. Those tenure track positions can then go on and create new works and patents. The demand that those works create will then bring students to study and allow the works to proliferate.
Would you prefer a system where copyrights and patents were abolished but there were 100x more tenure track positions? Where 10% of the population held such a role?
If you want to make your software pay-to-use on a monthly basis, that is your perogative. But your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users.
No one would buy tables from those carpenters...
Perhaps you should understand basic market before making asinine statements such as, "But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society."
If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work, without compensating you.. Then that is in fact morally wrong. It really isn't harder than that.
An interesting way to start a comment.
> No one would buy tables from those carpenters...
There are companies owning large portions of markets where they can do exactly what you describe. Through market manipulation, political manipulation and probably other tactics I don`t know. This is a moral issue.
> If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work..
While I agree with that statement, this is not the moral issue we are discussing. We are discussing the morals of rent seeking behavior, which you shrug of as "your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users" as if that will always be the case.
Regarding monetization:
- either you developed said software as an employee, than you were properly paid for it and it is not content
- your user bought liscenses from you for whatever conditions you agreed upon
- you sell it as a SaaS, and you get monthly subscription fees
- you give it away for free
Obviously, all those payments end when the conrtact with your customers end. If your next of kin runs the software 90 years from now, and customers still use it, of course cuatomers will pay, or not, as laid out above.