Villa: Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture

Is it now?

Ownership of a good consists of the right to consume it, to use it up. As such, ownership only comes into play when someone else consumes your property. The exclusivity of this right is merely a side-effect of scarcity: two people cannot both consume the same scarce good. Intangibles are not scarce and cannot be consumed, ergo ownership does not apply.

The rights to restitution and retribution which permit the enforcement of natural property rights are justified only on the basis that they are a response in kind to damage caused to your own property. This is why property is called a natural right: one cannot usurp anothers' property rights without providing the justification for a response in kind. There is no justification for seeking restitution or retribution simply because someone /benefited/ from your work while causing no harm to you.

Yes. This is correct.

This is based on physical reality. You have to be in control of a item in order to use a item. You can't get away of this. You can claim that something is 'publicly owned' or that it's communal property or something like that, but in the end somebody has to be in control of it at some point to use it. If you don't believe me try having two people simultaneously use a single spoon to eat food.

Property rights is the term that is given to describe how we delegate control (aka 'ownership') in order to avoid and resolve conflicts.

> Copyright is a legal concept that grants exclusive rights to the creator of intangible entities such as software.

No it's not. Copyright does not grant _any_ rights. You would still have the same rights to use your creation with or without copyrights.

To understand what is going on:

'Copyright' stems from government censorship. When the printing press came out it threatened the stability and security of government by making it dramatically cheaper to distribute ideas and knowledge. Control of the spread of ideas is a important thing to have when you are a ruler of a population. So they made it illegal for people to own and operate a printing press unless they had a special license that came with a number of restrictions (such as having all published works inspected by a government censor). This license was called 'Copyright'. A author had to sell their works to a licensed publisher to legally get their writings duplicated and disseminated.

The publishing houses that became very wealthy and powerful under this regime used their wealth and power to influence the governments of the day to re-establish and maintain copyright rules in order to limit copying in order for them to limit competition from smaller publishers.

This system has evolved into the modern copyright system of today.

The modern copyright system cannot grant 'rights' over intangible property. It simply does not have the power or authority to do that. To do this would require changing the basic functionality of the universe to control the flow of information.

Instead Copyright functions by violating the property rights of entire populations. It controls, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and other forms of violence, the ability for individuals to use their own physical property to record and disseminate information. Ostensibly this is done to create economic incentive for people to write and publish various things, but it increasingly going back to it's old roll of censorship... using copyright to control the flow of information for political reasons.

> . So copyright is a reasonable extension of the Natural Right of ownership of property.

No. In fact it's a gross violation of natural right of ownership of property.

To quote another commenter: does it now? This statement needs significant supporting argument.

Gerv

We pay the editors because they are willing to write and operate this wonderful site in exchange for the money -- completely unrelated to the legality of redistributing their work.

I'm sorry - are you arguing for a free market, or are you arguing for massive government intervention to prohibit some forms of activity in favour of creating an entirely artificial scarcity as state support for other kinds of activity?

You are assuming that copyright does significantly increase the number of new works created, and that the labor employed to create these extra works would not be more valuably spent on other pursuits--a common problem with subsidies. You are also ignoring the cost of copyright to society, including the cost of enforcement, the undermining of respect for the law, the impact to the government's claims of legitimacy, the loss of potential derivative works, and the loss of works whose copyright holders wish to suppress or simply fail to consider valuable enough to preserve. The cost in liberty alone is enough to render the whole enterprise a net loss.

Hardly. But since this would shut down an industry that has specialized on acting on behalf of the creators, ultimately the creators would spend more time, work, and worries on securing a living.

In the history of culture, copyright is a rather recent idea. It involves a transfer of rights and responsibilities, with results that are far from beneficial: hundreds of millions don't make a single popular artist more prolific or able to eat better. But they could benefit thousands of other artists. And a diverse and rich artistic background is necessary for actually growing inventive new material and expanding and developing culture.

Those are actually two separate questions.

0) How do you ensure the original creators get paid?
1) How do you ensure that the original creators keep creating?

Arguably, question 1) is much more important than 0), as 0) is intended as an inducement toward goal 1). It's also intended as an inducement toward a goal you've not stated, which is

2) How do we ensure more people become creators?

and the ultimate question, which is the complete thrust of everything which is

A) How do we promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts?

i.e. how do we encourage people to make new, easily copied works of art and discoveries, and particularly how do we encourage people to reveal the magic sauce to continue scientific and technological advancement?

Everything we've discussed is for A), which has perhaps familiar phrasing.

You can demand payment upfront before you publish, or gain a patron, or request donations, or do something else and create in your spare time, or even something else.

Take large accounting software as an example. There have been many one-off solutions made for the big companies that could afford them. However, nowadays many solutions are customizations of a common platform. The cost of implementation is lowered because the platform maker can spread the cost of common features and updates across multiple customers, and the customers are happy because the quality and flexibility is better. The common platform can gain large features anticipating future needs, even if no one company would be willing to pay for it.

The economies of scale for software (and games, and books, and...) can only work if creators can sell their product more than once, and copyright is the best tool we have for this.

Now, if copyright terms were reduced somewhat, it could still be possible to get your initial investment recouped before it was a free-for-all, but changing the law would need to be done carefully.

Just because the recompense is intangible, that doesn't mean it isn't there. With the GPL, I am getting the satisfaction of contributing to a common pool, and thanking the original author for distributing under a free license. The copyleft provisions prevent unequal contributions--Red Hat releases the changes they make to the GPL software they use.

BSD is a tougher argument, and I contribute to fewer BSD projects as a result.

I support the right for people to *volunteer* to contribute to free software; I do not support not having the right to decide.

> I would _not_, however, release the source code except to close, trustworthy friends. If others were to want to find out the secret sauce, they'd have to reverse-engineer it, like they do now.

If someone broke into your server, anyone could use the source code without penalty, and you'd be up shit creek. You'll have no rights to the source code, and while the first person could get in trouble for hacking, everyone else who got your code could do as they wished with it.

Finally, you are ignoring other fields such as literature or music where there is no secret sauce to keep hidden. As an avid reader, I realize that today authors don't make that much money, and publishing is not a particularly high profit-margin business. Take away the ability for an author to sell to multiple people and far fewer authors will make enough to live on.