932 karma · joined November 25, 2008
We can safely assume a big fat newspaper wants there to be copyright laws. In which case they should obey those laws.
The universal application of a rule -- i.e. fairness -- is probably the single most important principle of morality. One would think most normative theories of ethics, across history and culture, are centered on some form of it.
Well, . . . The purpose of patents is to get things invented that would not otherwise be invented -- if something costs significant time/effort/etc. to invent and those costs would be difficult to recover by selling copies of implementations, patents increase the profit margin of sales and hence help cover costs. (That is the theoretical proposition anyway: it is not really proven by evidence.)
So would this particular invention have been made without patent support? (assuming the standard theoretical model) That is the question.
If they are indeed 'goods', more copies/variations/etc. makes them more available. Why stop that?
One might say that the creator loses exclusivity and so can charge less. That would be a reason for the creator -- it would be good for them. But the restriction would be bad for everyone else (and creators themselves are 'everyone else' to other creators). Only being good for one set of people does not make it a good rule in general.
The only plausible reason seems to be that the work would not otherwise be done without such exclusive control -- and so we would all lose it. Is that the case here? It seems not: the first sentence of the original blog-post describes that the work had already been done from another impetus.
And if one seeks appreciation, surely any restrictions of exclusivity will do the exact opposite. The more copies the better: more credit, more links, more recognition.
(As a fundamental baseline: if we all share what informational-goods we have produced, and all grant everyone freedom of use of them, we all gain -- we all gain more freedom and we all gain more good stuff.)
It seems, for want of a pleasanter term, a bit weasel-worded. It is trying to say 'you should not do that' but while pretending not to be so strong.
If it has any real meaning -- any moral force -- it is saying 'you should not'. But demanding someone behave in a certain way, and so lose their own freedom of choice in the matter, really requires some justification.
So what could be the justification? Merely that one person might feel a little dislike seems insufficient. The thing in (putative) 'contention' is information, but that is nonrival: one person's use does not limit another's. That really seems to reduce the grounds for restricting someone else's freedom here -- 'my freedom ends where your freedom begins', so if there are no substantial limits on the material of our actions, why should it be any business of either to tell the other what to do ? . . .
The new project credits (and links) the previous, and builds on it. That is pretty much everything we should want -- that is the core basics of information culture. (The problem is, our half-conscious social conventions still have not yet grasped the proper ethics of information.)
That is inane and witless. It throws away any kind of intelligent informed view and reduces it all to a cheap emotive sloganeering.
Rightsholders are not entitled to control what people do with information -- they are granted special commercial rights, and not for their own benefit but because such an arrangement is intented to encourage production for people to use/enjoy overall. The purpose is not to deny people or restrict people -- exactly the opposite. The aim is to have no more restriction than needed.
This is just the standard rational understanding. It is not difficult to find.
And it follows that if people do feel inordinately restricted or inconvenienced, the system is not functioning well and needs adjustment or fixing.
https://plus.google.com/102359018718464872517/posts/LKJA5Uua...
One can only expect to command a copyright-level price for a copy if other people obey a copyright-like law to not make other copies.
But that is just going in circles. One cannot justify something based on itself.
The substantial question here is more basic: are plenty of things being produced, and do we have easy access to them?
We want to pay people to do work (to some significant extent). Copyright is a troublesome and inefficient way to do that now. So we should start doing it in other ways -- see what the market produces, adapt some already existing, invent some new ones.
If people are paid sufficiently to produce, or just if plenty of stuff is produced by whatever ways, what (else) is/isn't/needs to be 'protected'? (We can perhaps have laws for proper attribution, but that is not really a matter of copyright.) Do we want to 'protect' information from being copied? No, of course not: on the contrary, we want it to be spread and used and adapted.
This idea of 'protecting effort' is gone along with copyright. It only means something if we believe in copyright -- if we do not, it disappears.
Such a structure consumes a scarce resource -- creative effort -- wastefully, and restricts an abundant resource -- communicability of information -- unnecessarily. That seems very much the opposite of economically efficient.
Information goods should be more like better kinds of software production. But the current copyright-based system makes it all more like a 'waterfall economy'
That is not really quite true. Look at human anatomy: it is structured into various discrete organs. That is separation of concerns.
Evolution indeed appears to create, adjust, and maintain systems of abstraction, somehow . . . and when you think about it, it seems central to what evolution is doing.
You can start with the thought that there must be some coherent, discrete, mapping from genome to body -- otherwise evolution, by selection, could not work. It is not simple or clear, but there must be significant logical structure.
Chaitin postulates hierarchy as a basic form (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/jack.html): it is a way to restrict the effects of mutation, and is indeed evident in the body. Chaitin also explains the genome/body separation (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/ev.html): it is a way of amplifying mutation -- small changes in the genome make large effects in the body (otherwise, large changes in the body would require comensurately large mutation) -- thereby making evolution more powerful.
It seems there must be some significant relationship to software yet to be unravelled.
Whilst that might be accurate in the detail of the law, it appears to contain something basically malfunctional.
It seems to render the law effectively meaningless. If you are actually prevented from doing something, what has happened to your right to be allowed to? If there were public rights-of-way across someone's farmland, but they built walls around it, there would seem to be some kind of problem. (Or maybe a better example would be a visibility-cloaking device that made it look like there was a wall -- is that prevention, or just making things less easy? Does that make it OK?)
If the letter of the law supports the frustration of the intent of the law, something is wrong, surely.
It seems a bit large though -- roughly 600 lines of code, average. So that suggests a project of about 200 lines would probably be nearer optimal for learning.
It is about the right use of both design and evolution.
You can only design with/for information you have in front of you (that is what design means really). So you should put effort into design only for things you clearly know are wanted.
But on the other hand, distribution of designed software is practically free. That should obviously be done freely (ideally) because then the value of the software can be most fully realised. But there is something beside that. It also allows the unpredictable value of the software -- in reuse, adaptation, rewriting, etc. -- to be fully realised too. What design is unable to cover, evolution is given free range to take on.
( http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20111218T1151Z.html )
Well, this is the thing, it is pretty much a physical law. Information is nonrival: it is infinitely copyable and anyone can use it without reducing access to anyone else. The effort and work to produce information is a scarcity, but once the information is expressed and public it is an abundance.
The whole of the ethics and economics hinges upon this basic physical/logical structure. This is the fundamental fact of the matter, and if it is followed through rationally, all of the normally assumed ethics of copyright unravels.
Paying people for work done to create makes sense. It makes an 'economic' structure that mirrors the basic physical constraints. And it is justified according to its 'economic' effects. You give something up, you get something in return. The individual transaction is fair and square, and the global outcome is a gain from being able to 'move' things around.
None of that much holds for paying for copies. The transaction is not fair and square, it is an unwarranted and unjust restriction of personal freedom of those using the information. And as for the global gain, it seems rather lacking grounds of actual evidence.
> The same holds true for everything, even for murder.
No, there is something of a difference. Murder is outlawed not arbitrarily, but because it is something we do not, in a very basic way, want. It has a grounding in the physical facts of what the act does, and in the physical facts of our reaction to it (as a victim). That physicality gives it an unparalleled strength as something we all agree on.
Copyright has no such physical grounding. Would murder be just as wrong if it could be done without actually killing anyone? You do the same things, but the actual effect is not there? -- perhaps imagine it as a video-game. It is a very different thing. And this is like copying: on the fundamental level it is 'stealing' without the stealing (i.e. not really stealing at all) -- because the basic relation involved is abstract.
Etc.
Copyright is a law we have made, and those who reject it see it as bad and unjustified. From a principled position it is basically immoral, and from a pragmatic position it is unproven by evidence.
From the anti position, all the notions of 'stealing', 'losses', 'will of the creator' no longer exist -- they are entirely dependent on accepting the copyright concept. If there is no copyright, there is no stealing, losses, or primacy of creator's will.
If a law is not justified and well-founded we really ought not to have it. Is that not important?
The judgement goes on and on about originality and similarity and labour and skill. Certainly, that demanded a careful and fine examination. But really, this is all nigh on irrelevant. The only thing that really counts is the commercial impact. This is because the sole substantive purpose of copyright is to create market conditions to support production. Yet the commercial question seems, on a quick reading, entirely absent.
Of course, the lawyers can only work with the law as it is; the problem is deeper. The law seems like it is trying to do the wrong thing. Restricting copying when it has no effect on original production is utterly counterproductive. If someone copies, in a case like this, we can presume it was because the material copied was good. And if they use it to sell a product, we can presume -- since they are actually making sales -- they are providing some useful service. Again, that is good. And if the copying has no detrimental effect on the original's commercial use, then we cannot have even a contrived sense of harm being done. So then one ought to ask: what on earth is the law doing preventing good and stopping no harm?
One year they lobby government to strengthen enforcement. They say: piracy means they are not getting what the law says is their due. (it sounds almost reasonable!)
The next year they lobby government to expand copyright. That is: they are deciding for themselves what is their due.
Far from the general public interest, and, indeed, plainly very far from the free market.
Now we can see that the common statements about the 'problem' of piracy are misconceived (often deliberately of course). The only proper problem that could exist here is if the public are being poorly served: by insufficient content or expensive/difficult access.
Industry bodies complain that their companies are 'losing' money. That is a nonsensical use of the word 'losing'. What they mean is they are not making as much as they think they should. But the purpose of copyright does not care about what they like to imagine, it cares about the two question above. If enough content is being produced, then by definition the companies producing it are being paid enough.
(And piracy is actually a direct positive for the economy, since it helps with the second question: it gives the public better, cheaper access to content -- indeed, just what industry bodies have been obstructing by buying legislation.)
So is there a decline of production? Well, those claiming, or rather implying, there is cannot provide any evidence, so why listen to them? And we can at least simply look around to get a rough idea. Do you feel there are less movies/music/books now, compared with say 10 years ago? That certainly does not seem very sensible.
And another notable point is this: these industries say they have been suffering a terrible onslaught of piracy for about 10 years now, yet there appears to be no decline of production. Now there are two possible deductions from that: either they are talking nonsense, and/or the current level of copyright has been strongly proved to be unnecessary. If production has stayed sufficient, yet copyright has de facto been reduced, we obviously do not need that level of copyright.
Yes, we could say that work justifies payment (very simply and roughly). But that is not in dispute. It is that it does not justify payment by a particular means -- one that restricts the freedom (to copy etc.) of others. And -- you will forgive me if I am mistaken -- I am afraid inclusion of the word 'fucking' does not quite cover that.
Does payment depend, necessarily, on restriction of copying? No, it does not. It is possible to be paid in other ways -- that do not impose on other freedoms. Then in the most general sense, that sounds like what we ought to be doing (i.e. that is moral).
Again, in so far as it turns out most practical to pay by copyright, that is how far it is justified. Not in some other ethical way.
Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?
> In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process.
This is a common approach, but it completely fails as a moral argument. You are saying it is right because it is good for creators. That is an argument of self-interest, and problem is it immediately justifies its opposite. A non-owner can simply say: disobeying the law serves my self-interest, therefore that is right for me.
But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too. One might well be the greatest writer of books, for example, and so benefit from increased copyright/IP rights. But one will probably not also be the greatest music composer, and the greatest film-maker, and software developer, and so on. We are net consumers, in a sense. To give producers more is to take more from ourselves.
Ultimately, we grant IP rights not because they are for producers, but because they are pragmatically supposed to be useful overall -- that is the only justification. There is no other, no sensible rational purely moral argument, for copyright/IP. That ought always to be remembered.
If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.
You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.
It might seem very intuitive to say such things, but it is not truth. The truth is that the economic evidence is just not there. What do Landes & Posner say?
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare." -- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.
That means we do not know whether it does good overall. Hard to quite believe? Well there it is.
There is some question of privacy: it might be objectionable there. But that does not really bear upon the core of copyright, which is about items that have been made public.
One could pose a similar question: what if someone else decides to dress exactly like you, and go about like that? What grounds are there for your objection to that? (There do not seem to be any . . .) If they went so far as to impersonate you in the sense of identity fraud, there is a problem. But that is really about lying rather than copying per se, like counterfeiting.
Most importantly, it comes from thinking about why the current laws and conventions are justified. They are not simply there in reality. Why do we have them?
It is not about justifying piracy, it is saying we should not even have the laws in the first place that lead to the possibility of piracy.
You might reply that this is ridiculous: simply changing the name of an act does not remove the harm it does. But this is the core of the matter: with copying, that reply is basically false! (Piracy is in legal terms a malum prohibitum not a malum in se.)
Look at the underlying phenomena, prior to any legal construction. Copying is an abstract relation: there is no physical connection between an original and a copy. It no more harms someone to be copied than it harms the number 4 when you write it down. Since copying renders no harm, and in fact the opposite, it is very beneficial, and furthermore it is an abundance, why should we restrict it? (No moral argument for copyright/IP/etc. seems ever to have answered that.)
In practice it may possibly be that selling creative effort is difficult to do optimally without some structure like copyright etc. That is the contention of the standard economic view. But that gives only a very particular and limited justification. Such restrictions on copying are justified only insofar as they actually turn out to help us overall.
Which returns us the gist of the article: if those restrictions do not help much, or rather have comparable alternatives, the justification for their existence is gone.
It all comes down to the basic physical limitations. Copying may be illegal, but there is no physical loss -- in fact the opposite, it is beneficial. We ideally want the economic system to evolve toward fully realising the resources available. That means copying is free, and everyone should benefit from it as much as they like. And production is scarce and has costs, hence commands a price in a market (and in a better form of market would then be used according to need).
Of course, we may or may not, in various ways, be able to reach that ideal. But a law -- like copyright -- that restricts us from using resources that are otherwise free is not justified in a fundamental way. It is there only pragmatically, to get the best out of practical limitations. It must not obstruct us from finding other ways.
People expect to be able to get stuff because they know it is available.
If each piece of TV/music/whatever had to be dug out of the ground, or hand-made, at great expense, they would not be available easily. People would want them, but hardly anyone would be providing them.
But that is just not the case here. These things are trivially available. It is that they are being witheld by certain providers -- because the whole market rests on a made-up artificial scarcity. That is the basic underlying physical fact, and people feel it.
If people expect to be able to easily get stuff that is actually easily available, they are absolutely right!
With structured code, if you put a statement after a block it will be executed (notwithstanding exceptions, but that is a slightly different matter...), no matter what is changed. But if you have returns, breaks, etc. that structural condition is lost.
If you have a function with a statement, or block, at the very end, to clear something up or something, but then someone puts an early return in, the clear-up will be missed. There is a certain error-proneness there.
The best use of the early-return pattern ('replace nested conditional with guard clauses' in the Refactoring book) is where that is the only thing going on in the function. So you are effectively reading/understanding the whole thing as an 'early-return function'.
(And software is very different from natural languages. When you look at software what you see is not language, but a machine. And it has a particular hierarchical structure.)