"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" [LWN.net]

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 21, 2006 15:39 UTC (Fri) by kmw (guest, #38039) [Link]

Your argument rests on the false assumption that intellectual property,
copyrights, trademarks, and patents are mere legal constructs.

They are not.

They are objective moral principles--rights inherent to all creations
which individuals are obligated to obey whether they are enshrined in law
or not. No entity should be required to waive certain of its rights in
order to prevent other rights from being trampled upon.

Furthermore, rights are not something that can be "granted" or "revoked",
as you seem to imply. When talking about rights, the proper question is
NEVER "Should X have right Y?" but rather "DOES X have right Y?". The
existence of rights is due not to government fiat, but rather to the mere
fact of the agent's existence.

Furthermore, your characterization of the supposedly inflated end-user
prices caused by Microsoft's OEM agreements as a "tax" is fallacious on
two levels. First, selling prices are metaphysically independent from
costs of production. Prices are determined by utility, supply, and
demand--period. If hardware with Microsoft products installed does indeed
tend to have a higher selling price than equivalent hardware without, that
is better explained by the increased utility and demand for the products
rather than the additional costs incurred by the OEM.

Second, your understanding of what a "tax" is is completely wrong. A tax
is collected at gunpoint, whether you wish to deal with the collecting
organization or not. If you refuse to deal with the government, it
threatens to take from you what you already have. If you refuse to deal
with Microsoft, all it can do is refuse to provide you with a benefit you
do not yet have.

Your assertion that Microsoft does not exist in a moral sphere is also
absurd. EVERY action has a moral component--and, as the eminent
20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, the honest and
noncoercive pursuit of private profit is one of, if not the, most virtuous
act one can engage in. Money is inherently a moral issue; read Francisco
d'Anconia's "Money Speech" in Atlas Shrugged for a better understanding.

Finally, obedience to the law is not a virtue in its own sake. There is
never any moral obligation to obey an illegitimate law--and one is morally
obligated to abide by the dictates of a legitimate law even if it is not
enshrined as such. The difference between the two is based solely on
substance, not on how they got on the books--just as the difference
between a legitimate and illegitimate government is based on what it does,
not how it got into power. An usurper who completely respects the
individual rights of everyone is infinitely more legitimate than a
tyrant--or even a Bush or Clinton--who received 99% of the vote in a free,
open election.

Certainly, the state may be able to get away with enforcing illegitimate
laws--but that does not make it right.

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 21, 2006 16:28 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Copyright and other intellectual property may be a moral right, in that we believe people have a right to profit from the work they do.

However, the precise amount of profit and the limits of control certainly are mere legal constructs. These are specifics that everyone disagrees with but can usually compromise on.

For example, an artist may have a moral right to profit from a song she has written. However, does she have that right for 25 years or life? What are the limits to what she can charge? Does she have any right to control the uses of her song once she sells a copy?

These specifics are not moral rights.

Copyrights, trademarks and patents have a basis in a moral right to benefit from our own work but the specifics are mere legal constructs. Therefore, xoddam makes no false assumptions.

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 21, 2006 21:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Copyright and other intellectual property may be a moral right, in that we believe people have a right to profit from the work they do.
However, the precise amount of profit and the limits of control certainly are mere legal constructs.

Furthermore, the moral aspect of copyrights and patents are almost never what we're talking about when we speak of copyrights and patents. We're nearly always talking about the laws. Those laws were written with no consideration of a person's moral right to his creations, but rather with a pragmatic social engineering goal. Copyright laws create legal rights out of thin air, with no pretense that they're founded on moral rights.

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 21, 2006 22:05 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

As a corporation lawyer, I have to take this opportunity to tighten up some of the terminology.

A company is a group of people working together. Often, what they're working on is a business, and they're employees of someone.

A corporation is a legal construct that helps us write and enforce laws that involve large groups of people. The kind of corporation most people think of when they hear the term is a business corporation, in which case the large group of people are investors in a business. (Other kinds of corporations include charities and governments).

In the case of a business such as Microsoft, "company" refers to the employees, not the investors.

A company is not a legal entity. You can't sue one or make a contract with one. It isn't property; you can't legally buy or sell a company. (When we loosely refer to buying a company, we either mean buying the assets of the company or buying the corporation that operates the company).

The way a corporation works is that the law treats it in many ways like a person, separate from the persons who are actually members of it. That way, millions of words of laws that have been developed to apply to a single businessman can be instantly adapted to apply to a group of a thousand investors as well.

This, I believe, leads non-lawyers to think of the corporation as an actual person separate from the investors -- one who has emotions and personality, conscience and survival instinct. That's a mistake. Fining the Microsoft corporation means fining Microsoft shareholders; that's all. Each shareholder becomes poorer, and it's to recoup riches that reached that shareholder illicitly and to punish him for hiring directors and giving them money with which to do evil.

Thanks

Posted Jul 24, 2006 2:24 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

This clarification is much appreciated. I was aware of non-corporate
uses of the term 'company', but not of its definition.

> (When we loosely refer to buying a company, we either mean buying the
> assets of the company or buying the corporation that operates the
> company)

If the company is simply the group of people who work together, wouldn't
it be clearer to say that we mean either to buy the assets the company
works with or to buy the corporation which *employs* the company? Or is
'operating' a group of people legitimate (and more general) legalese?

Thanks

Posted Jul 24, 2006 3:31 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I oversimplified the definition of company a little. It isn't exactly the collection of people -- it's the enterprise they're engaging in. The group of workers is the essence of it, but a (business) company is definitely said to have assets -- the things the employer owns that the workers use to do their thing.

But the important thing is that there is no crisp legal definition of company because it isn't a legal entity -- not like for example a partnership. That's why lawyers get so much money for closing deals to sell a company -- it takes a lot of work to figure out just what is getting sold.

And many are the small claims complaints I've seen get rejected because the defendant is named as "Joe's Garage." You can't sue somebody's garage. You have to sue Joe.

It seems to me that the word "business" is replacing "company" in legal discussions, and it may be because people are not as fundamental to a business as they once were.

I'll throw in one more tidbit: A company often has a name, one that is registered with the government, and that still doesn't make it a legal entity. Such a name is known in law as a "fictitious business name," and is nothing more than an alias for the person (or equivalent) who operates the company. On legal papers, it would say, "Acme Wastewater Treatment Inc. doing business as Woodland Spring Mineral Waters."

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 22, 2006 2:51 UTC (Sat) by irwinr (guest, #39286) [Link]

--snip---
"Your argument rests on the false assumption that intellectual property,
copyrights, trademarks, and patents are mere legal constructs.

They are not.

They are objective moral principles--rights inherent to all creations
which individuals are obligated to obey whether they are enshrined in law
or not."
--snip---

Oh yeah? Prove it. If the law didn't force people to obey a certain way, they would not. If there were no law, and someone was holding a gun at your head because you pissed them off, and you said "You are obligated to spare my life because it is my right to live..." They would laugh at you and say "Says who?"

Rights ARE granted, and they are granted because the majority believes they should be 'rights' and thus a government is established to protect those rights. A 'Right' is a human idea. What is, or is not a 'right' can not be proven by any kind of experiment. You only have the rights you have because society deems it so and elects government officials who agree.

--snip---
"Furthermore, your characterization of the supposedly inflated end-user
prices caused by Microsoft's OEM agreements as a "tax" is fallacious on
two levels. First, selling prices are metaphysically independent from
costs of production. Prices are determined by utility, supply, and
demand--period."
--snip---

Take an economics class. In a monopolistic environment, the rules for supply and demand are bent in such a way that demand is not as elastic, and therefore the monopolist can charge much more without greatly decreasing demand for it's products. Why? Because users have no choice, they buy from the monopolist or they do without significant and important technological innovations. (In this case, computers in general)

In this case, Microsoft was handed a monoply by IBM. Microsoft did not earn it's 90% market share by having the best product, it got there by being in the right place, at the right time. That, in and of itself, was not illegal. However, Microsoft abused their monopolistic position. They used illegal tactics to prevent competitors from being able to enter the market, and in economies that are based on a free market, such as in the US and the EU, this is ILLEGAL for good reasons.

The Microsoft "tax" was indeed a tax. Why? Because if you didn't pay it, not only did you not receive Windows, but you were denied the ability to use your computer at all. Alternative software for other operating systems didn't exist (And in some cases still doesn't) because Windows held a 95% market share. Microsoft adopted the practice of not only making it's products completely incompatible with anyone elses, they also hid the details of these incompatibilities, and forced you to agree not to try to reverse engineer them or face civil and/or criminal charges.

Essentially, this would be like a car manufacturer creating a new type of hitch, and telling people they can't look at how the hitch is made, and no-one is allowed to create a 'bridge' that allows other hitches to connect to it. This type of behavior would be considered absurd in any other industry, but Microsoft got away with it for years. It has severely hurt technological innovation in this area, as other operating systems with more and better features, are unable to get the neccessary user support and funding neccessary to continue innovating, because they can't run software or even open files that were created using Microsoft products. These activities in and of themselves are not that bad, because there's nothing wrong with Microsoft wanting to keep secret it's own technologies. However, taken in the big picture, it just adds to the big list of Microsoft bully tactics.

Microsoft used a catch-22 to hold it's monopolistic position:

Make sure no competing products can be compatible with Microsoft products.
This ensures that nearly all (Over 95%) of computer users were 'locked in' to a Microsoft product in way or another.

Make sure that no major OEM distributor can sell a competing product, or even bundle competing products along with Microsoft products.

It is literally impossible for any company to introduce a product to compete with this, because Microsofy even ensured that 3rd party programs that ran on Windows could ONLY run on Windows. So even if I invented a great new OS, it wouldn't run ANY of the existing software on the market. So why would anyone buy it? And because no-one will buy it and use it, none of the developers of those 3rd party programs will spend the massive amount of development it would take to essentially re-write their programs to run on this alternative OS.

Microsoft also forced OEM's to sell Windows on ALL their computers. It would not sell Windows to an OEM at all unless they agreed to this. And because there were few alternative products, none of which could run the software that users were demanding (Because Microsoft made sure that software could only run on Windows). OEM's were faced with a choice: Sell ONLY Windows, or go out of business.

Microsoft took many technologies that it did not own, (Java as an example), modified the format of the technology, rebranded it as it's own and bundled it with Windows in order to completely stomp out the company that created the technology. Lukcily, with Java, their contractual obligations with Sun explicitly prohibited this, and they got sued and were forced to stop. Do you feel Microsoft was wronged here too?

--snip---
"Your assertion that Microsoft does not exist in a moral sphere is also
absurd. EVERY action has a moral component--and, as the eminent
20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, the honest and
noncoercive pursuit of private profit is one of, if not the, most virtuous
act one can engage in. Money is inherently a moral issue; read Francisco
d'Anconia's "Money Speech" in Atlas Shrugged for a better understanding."
--snip---

First of all, just because someone wrote it in a book, does not mean it was 'proven'. Secondly, Microsoft's monopolistic practices put hundreds of businesses out of business. I guess according to your philosopher, those private profits were not as important as Microsoft's? What about the users who get the shaft when they're paying for a product that should be 1/3 the price they charge? What about society as a whole when technological innovation slows to a crawl because once you have a monopoly, and you literally control the market, you have no incentive to innovate. I guess everyone else is screwed because Microsoft should be allowed to own and control each and every one of us? What about everyone ELSE's rights here?

--snip---
"Finally, obedience to the law is not a virtue in its own sake. There is
never any moral obligation to obey an illegitimate law--and one is morally
obligated to abide by the dictates of a legitimate law even if it is not
enshrined as such."
--snip---

I don't think I have ever read anything so short sighted, or just plain dumb. Who determines if a law is illegitimate? Tell me? I'm listening... Everyone has different morals. If someone decides it's 'moral' to kill someone for no reason, does that make it alright? I'm sorry, but you can not just 'decide' a law is legitimate or not, and then decide to obey or not to obey it. No-one can say a law is legitimate or not, and it be fact. That statement will always be an opinion, regardless of who says it or why. You can not prove or disprove the legitimacy of a law without using other laws as a reference. Society decides whether laws are legitimate or not by who they elect to public office. And even then, it's not 'proven' or 'fact', it's a consensus by the people of that society that the law should be how it is.

There are people in other countries that will say that you should not have the right to free speech, or that you should not have the right to earn a private profit, or the right to choose ones own religion. What makes them wrong and you right? We only have those 'rights' because humans fought and died for them, and because humans established a government to protect them. People like you disgust me, because you think that you have your rights just because you exist, or because some philosopher says so. If you feel that way, move to North Korea, or Iran, and let me know what they think about your obligation to your rights.

In this case, Microsoft broke the laws defined by society, knowing full well it was doing so. It is now paying the price for those actions. If you think that's wrong, too bad. Get a new set of legislatures elected... Otherwise you and Microsoft can take yourselves and go somewhere where these laws don't apply to you.

-Jeremy

"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!"

Posted Jul 22, 2006 7:11 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

There's no point in trying to argue with someone who thinks ayn rand is a 'preemininent philosopher'. Author of mediocre novels, yes.