hxa7241

Non-transferable/alienable rights is a valid possible adjustment. But it is or would be so solely on the basis of its actual economic effect. This simple clear economic approach -- Posner's broadly -- is the only sensible way to understand actual law and activity here.

All that stuff about 'personhood' and 'intellectual domination' and 'possession' is otiose. Any attempt to make an a priori case for intellectual monopoly seems certainly doomed to failure -- for a very simple reason: they do not fit the basic physical facts.

Informational goods are nonrival: they are copyable and usable with no loss to the original. The relation between copies of information is abstract. A copy adds its value, and subtracts nothing.

Two notable ethical points follow from that. Copying is consistent with the principle of universalisation: a general rule that all should copy is not self-contradictory -- the opposite: if we all do it, we all gain. Second, restriction of copying fails a basic rights-justification or liberty principle: we are restricted only so far as we would harm someone else, yet for the notion of unauthorised copying any claim of loss has no grounds in any physical fact.

Ultimately, we want to be governed by the basic physical facts and how their constraints and ramifications allow us best advantage. 'Personhood' justifications for intellectual monopoly seem about as reasonable a basis for regulating behaviour as believing that taking a photo takes someone's soul.

There should be another entry in the YC RFS http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html :

10. Kill Wall Street (etc.)

We now have the technology to completely remake the financial system -- not just make 'banking' or whatever easier online, but a thorough and innovative re-imagining of what the whole thing should even be about.

Information structure is the essence of all cooperative systems, and that means the economics of tomorrow is absolutely about software -- its architecture, its engineering.

The practicalities mean this cannot be tackled directly, but someone needs to think big and work on it (in various ways).

This seems broadly to pass the Kant test on morality, so it could be said to be well-grounded.

Something is immoral if it is contradictory when generalised -- that was the gist of Kant's view. And real manipulation and persuasion seem to fail: if everyone is allowed to manipulate everyone else, everyone loses their own control of themselves -- in which case, how can they manipulate someone else? There is a contradiction.

The two basic checks the article proposes -- "Will I use the product myself?" and, "Will the product help users materially improve their lives?" -- are sort-of rough ways of testing for such Kantian contradction.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat

Never respond. Always take the initiative.

If something asks you about update/downloading/etc., reject it. You decide what to do and when, and you type the URL into the browser, or go to the normal menu/dialog/tool for updating.

(This is partly why Chrome browser is right and the normal approach is wrong: if/when it needs update, it just does it.)

Ideally, for informational-goods, we first find out (somewhat) what people want, take payment, make the product, then release it for free use and copying.

The economic problem here is fundamentally one of information and cooperation. As far as we know what we want we should share the cost of producing it (i.e. production should be of what is known to be wanted, and cooperation should be on shared goals). And where we do not know (e.g. the future) we should not prevent unpredicted gains from what has been produced (i.e. by charging for copies).

The practical problem is how to get information and how to promote cooperation -- this is where possible arrangements can vary. But the core theoretical structure is that our production should follow from information, and our consumption should not be hostage to lack of information -- this is what all arrangements should try to achieve.

Everyone should read the second paragraph of that article, so here is a link: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html -- it is one of the baselines for intelligent consideration of the subject, pro or anti.

(relevant jargon ref: "public good" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good)

That's "Savile Row" -- one 'l' !

See Grayling: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/10197-graylingsqu...

"'ethics' is either the organised philosophical study of the concepts and principles involved in systems of morality [i.e. a 2nd-order enquiry of morality], or it is the set of principles, attitudes, aims and standards adopted by individuals or organisations by which they live and act [i.e. a superset of morality]".

Informational goods covered by copyright are ones already made public.

These are nonrival goods -- as many people can use and enjoy them as want to with no hindrance or loss to any. When there is plenty for everyone, why should any have a right to impose restrictions on others? The only plausible reason is a collective one: that we can in practice (by stimulating production) get a better functioning economy.

Living for others' sake is what being human is largely about, it is what cooperative systems like economies are about -- which are critical for us to live well. By maximising our costless use of nonrival goods we all gain.

People really ought to stop and examine this idea that copying information is somehow underneath unethical -- and that the special word 'unethical' can be uttered and that will tell people to behave.

Information is a nonrival good: it is an abundance with respect to access -- how on earth, in any rational conception of morality, can free access to an abundant good be construed as intrinsically immoral?

It is unethical only pragmatically: only in that (it is proposed) the economy will function better with some restrictions on copying -- which is the main purpose of the law. That is: it is unethical no further than it is illegal.

It is not necessarily parasitical (and not at all dishonourable), because the only justification for imposing restrictions on people's freedom to share informational goods is the standard economic rationale, and we cannot a priori specify the correct extent of that. If copyright is actually too long (broad, etc.) a de facto reduction of it by illicit copying would be economically beneficial (and that seems most likely the case).

So the best way to encourage innovation is give companies big fat monopolies like infinitely expandable copyright?

It is of course the exact opposite: it is very difficult to innovate when you have guaranteed monopolies, because they are effectively money for nothing, and the easiest way to keep the business going is to focus on manipulating the law and enforcement in your favour instead of working on innovation -- which is indeed exactly what the MPAA/etc. lot have been doing.

What are you going to do? Work hard to create new ways to improve the service, or call a lawyer and have the government shut down your competitor overnight? It is an all too easy choice, and it is one the media industry has been taking year after year.

At least have an honest comparison:

   function render() {
      $return = null;
      if($condition1 && $condition2) $return = 2;
      elseif($condition1) $return = 1;
      elseif($condition3) $return = 3;
      else $return = 4;
      return $return
   }

The broad suggestion that indentation is somehow wrong is ill-advised.

Sure, various of the refactorings given are sensible. But the basic problem is not indentation. If something can be simplified, simplify it. If something is too long, break it into pieces. But if something is tree-structured, that is what it is, and it probably ought not be bent out of shape.

(Note: Fowler's refactoring 'Replace Nested Conditional with Guard Clauses' is very specific -- it does not declare that all nesting is bad.)

A tree-like-indentation structure is a perfectly good element of programming -- why try/want to change it into something else?

In fact, a good case could be made that software in its most fundamental essential conception is tree-structured -- even that engineering generally is tree-structured.

'Fair'? That seems an invalid concept here. What is 'fairness', assuming a strict copyright system? -- it is a race with the qualifying runner, but where no others are allowed to run! That is a strange notion of fairness.

But 'fairness' is just a diversion: these copyright trade monopolies are supposed to prevent competition (of distribution), that is their point. That is how they increase one kind of revenue and so supposedly increase production.

When non rights-holders are copying/distributing it is competition de facto -- according only to the basic rules of physics. And it can therefore be an important signal: because what is basically physically possible is what the economy should really be aiming for. If people can distribute informational goods themselves better than the authorised channels, those channels are clearly underachieving according to the real baseline measure.

Value and price are different things.

Abstract objects -- i.e. informational goods -- certainly have value, it is just that they have practically zero price now.

Price, and paying for things, is a way to regulate how limited resources are shared out. But abundant things do not need a price -- there is plenty for everyone.

The idea that creative work be paid for through copies of it is only an artificial convention. It was just a pragmatic economic arrangement to make it possible to pay for one thing by paying for another.

In the end, we need to pay for scarcity -- creative effort and resources -- but should allow abundance -- copies of informational-goods -- to be free. That recognises the value of abstract/informational-goods by maximising the value that everyone can get from them.

Thinking of piracy as a tax is not really a very good way to understand things.

Business is only able to sell copies at monopoly prices because the government gives them that ability through copyright law -- copyright is effectively a negative tax, a subsidy: the government gives businesses money the free market would not otherwise provide.

Since current copyright terms are almost certainly, in general, too large, piracy is working as a corrective: it brings actual copyright 'protection' back towards economically defensible and efficient levels.

One might feel there is still wrongness in piracy: that it is unfair, that some pay and others get things for free. But there is a very substantial amount of free-choice here: people are not at all strictly forced to pay and strictly prevented from free access. People can make a choice.

This seems like it might be, or at least suggest, a rather more functional kind of market than the standard conception. Instead of access being set bluntly and by guesswork by governmental law, it is decided by each individual according to their particular circumstances.

This is ultimately more by luck than judgement. Because the main legal perspective is utterly, fundamentally flawed. The notion that there is a principled difference between idea and expression simply does not work with software. In software everything is an abstraction, which means everything has some generality. There is no dividing line anymore.

The idea/expression rule of thumb only made sense because it was a simple proxy for actual market effect. And there is the nub of the matter: no-one really wants to measure what the real market effects are for any of these rules. The law is unhinged from reality. It is just stupid.

For copyright to make sense, we should get rid of all the lawyers and remove it from the legal domain. Copyright is really a matter of data measurement and analysis. If the negative effects of restricting and paying for movement of information are outweighed by the positive effects of creating information, let us measure that . . .

We built the internet, but then we want to rule it as if it were a small stack of manuscripts. It is ridiculous.

This is bizarre. Not for wrongness -- but because it is baffling that what is right about it should not be obvious and taken for granted.

Business is always, and has always been, about avoiding competition. One can start by recalling Adam Smith's comment on any gathering of industrialists inevitably leading to conspiracy against the public. Then simply look at what any business does or tries to do, legal or otherwise -- what is a patent, for example?

Competition between business is supposed to be good for the public, not the competitors themselves -- hence business always wanting to avoid it. Competition is, broadly, destructive. It is only worth it because of other effects (spurring effort, creativity), and when it is limited and substantially supported by other cooperative systems.

> The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question.

But is that not the more important question? -- how much effort it takes to design software (which surely is the gist of Brooks' observation).

If the final code is much smaller, yet it took as long to design/write, what has been gained? Something, certainly (easier to manipulate, reuse), and furthermore there must be a fairly good relation between size and effort, yet it is the effort to create that is the key matter here.

Well, it should really say something more like 'essential complexity in software development'. The size of the software does not simply, directly represent the effort -- making compacter code might take more effort, and it is only because of the extra work of design iteration that improvements were possible.

But there are various things involved so I am certainly not sure.

Kay's assertion seems incredible -- he really has to prove it.

It does not square with at least some research and what Brooks most perspicaciously noted in 'No Silver Bullet' -- that there is essential complexity in software, and it is the dominant factor. That really seems very opposed to anything anywhere near 100-fold general improvements.

Looking at the VPRI Steps report of 2011-04, prima facie, overall, they seem to be producing a 'second-draft' of current practice, not a revolutionary general technique.

People regularly say they translated their system from language A to language B and got 10-100 times code-size reductions. This seems essentially what STEPS is doing: when you look at something again, you can see how to improve it and do a much better job. But the improvement comes not from the general aspect -- the language B -- but from understanding better the particular project because you already had a first-draft.

This can still be valuable work though, since it is about general things we all use. Second-drafts are valuable, and ones of important things even more so.

But we should probably not infer that they are coming up with a revolutionary general way to write new software.

Substantially because large scale software cannot be designed: it must be evolved. We only know what to focus a second-draft around because we muddled together the first draft and it evolved and survived. You cannot write a second-draft first.

Having said that, if they find particular new abstractions, they could be very valuable. If, for example, VPRI came up with a neat way to express implicit concurrency, maybe, that might possibly be comparable to inventing/developing gargage-collection in common programming languages -- certainly useful and valuable.

Fine, yes, functionally -- and that is probably the most important thing -- but not really so interesting for speculative discussion.

It works, but seems to subtract more than it adds. It looks a little less like itself, and a little more like every other site.

> 3

The main text is too light and low-contrast: it looks like it is frightened of being there and trying to run away and hide! (and so the most big and powerful thing on the page is the footer, which does not seem the right priority...)

Put the color back (top bar and background) -- that is pretty much the entire graphical identity of the site (i.e. a distinctive, recognisable visual character).

> More money has got to change hands.

No, quite the opposite. If you really want to be bold about inventing the future, money is one of the things that needs to be replaced.

The internet is, in a general sense, a technology for cooperation -- for organising collective activities through shared information. Money is really just an information channel for doing that too, but it is now comparatively obsolete.

Because whether various people think they are being paid as much as they should, and how much is actually being produced, are different things.

If you are asking for special provisions from the public, prove the public gets a good deal. How much should the public give? Simply as much as you say? No, that does not work. The public cares about the end result: how much is produced (and available). That is the point.

There has been significant -- or to some, rampant -- 'piracy', and huge 'losses', for a decade: that is what we have been told. But where is the devestation to the amount of production? Where is the terrible shortage of new music being made? That does not seem to be happening.

> everyone will soon be, in general, short of music

So, you admit it has not happened, and is not currently happening.

You will forgive people for being cautious about claims from the general direction of the music industry, and instead expecting good evidence. Everyone likes music, but we should not be giving away money simply because someone else says they should get it.

> How can we stand for this?

Because, in a single concept, these are nonrival goods. We would want there to be excess value created over what they cost to produce.

All we need to do is cover the costs of sufficient production. But then we should use the produce freely as much as we want. Because that way we all gain.

If musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone is, in general, short of music, then we need to address the matter somehow. But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.

The backbone of this seems to be complaining about musicians having things difficult and not making as much money as they should. And accompanied by lots of numbers and information. The problem is, it is in itself irrelevant.

Why should anyone else care? Maybe professional gardners are having a hard time nowadays and not making much money. Do you care about that? Perhaps they are going to lobby for a law that will increase their income -- i.e. take money from you, and otherwise inconvenience you -- how does that sound?

The point is this: we do not care about musician's, or anyone else's, self-interest; we, in general, care about how much we get from them. That is ultimately the only basis of justification for any law here. The public, though laws, grants 'creators' special provisions, in order that the public as a whole benefits.

If you want to argue for such special provisions, you must show the benefits that the public generally will get. If you say creators are not making enough money, show that there is, from the public's view, too little stuff being produced.

So is there too little music (etc.) being produced? The article did not seem to answer that question -- yet that is the only thing that counts. And from a casual view, as anyone can see just looking around them, there seems to be a heck of a lot of music out there at the moment.

Show that insufficient stuff is being produced, and show that any proposed corrective laws or provisions are overall to the public's gain. Otherwise you have failed to make a case for laws that the public must bear the costs of.

If the gist is that some big companies are making lots of money using your goods therefore you should get a larger share of it, that fails too. If some industry is making too much, the answer is not to divide it up differently, it is to stop them, somehow, making so much in the first place.