In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer
<usenet@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Tue, 06 May 2008 23:53:08 +0100
<m347f5-vjr.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
>> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Tue, 06
>> May 2008 21:30:18 +0100 <rnr6f5-5in.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>>> Use and distribution are not the same, and even with distribution
>>> there are first-sale rights. If Intellectual Property truly is
>>> property, then once purchased the buyer should be allowed to do
>>> whatever he wants with it. Period.
>>
>> But what is the buyer buying? Certainly not the work proper; it is
>> still owned by the owner (even the most diehard freeware/freemedia
>> advocates have to concede that point!). At best, we're buying a
>> license to play, with a convenient local duplicate of the finished
>> work.
>
> The Intellectual Monopolists argue that the buyer is paying for limited
> "rights", but I would argue that such "rights" have no meaning in terms
> of /knowledge/, which is after all what the written word; music and the
> film and television "content" is. That "content" is /not/ a product, it
> is a service, much like a live concert is a service. One /pays/ artists
> for what they /do/ (work), not for what they /know/.
I do not pay these artists directly. Were I to go to a
concert (a very rare occurrence, I should state), my ticket
purchase revenue would go through a number of hands -- and
I frankly don't know if I could identify the owners thereof
properly, especially if I were to use a ticket broker.
Were I to hire a band, I might pay the artists directly,
if the band writes and plays their own songs.
If I purchase music, video, or software, the issues are
similar to concert tickets; that money goes through a
lot of hands, from the store where I purchase the item
to (hopefully) the artist and/or production team and/or
programming team creating the product.
> Everything else is
> just a facsimile *copy* of that original /service/, and demanding money
> and exclusivity for (what amounts to) the /memory/ of that original act
> is pure extortion.
An interesting subpoint.
> That's not paying people for their work, it's paying
> them because they claim ownership of the *memory* of an original event.
> Facsimiles can not be property, in any sense other than material costs,
> and therefore those who distribute facsimiles should neither be able to
> claim exclusivity, nor charge more than material costs.
I'll have to think about it. In an ideal world the above
would indeed be true, except for one small caveat, which
is indeed small with digital media: duplication costs.
(Something has to power the DVD burner.)
In practice, I suspect that we pay the amount that we pay
because we think the facsimile is worth the amount we pay
for it, and *that* is because the moguls either have set
expectations, or have set up conditions where one has a
set of expectations -- $19.95 for a, say, Metallica album,
as opposed to the duplication+material cost of maybe
$0.10-$0.15.
How much of this is true market-driven and how much of it is
manipulation, I for one cannot say. Personally, I'm less
than thrilled with it.
Linux and distros such as Ubuntu are free in price, but
not free in cost; there's a small download charge because
that's the nature of one's ISP contract. (Most people
can ignore this cost.)
>
> We live in a society that supports the idea that knowledge can be owned
> and controlled,
To some extent, it can be -- does anyone really know
precisely how to assemble a "Fat Man"-type atom bomb,
for example? Of course, the details get interesting
fast, especially with Google/Youtube/FOSS being able to
much more rapidly disseminate digital information (which
can represent the printed word, a picture, an animation,
a film, a song, a song with lyrics, etc.) than heretofore,
and the legal system has yet to catch up.
(It may never catch up.)
> and there are even laws to enforce such twisted ideals,
They might have made sense in the days of print-on-paper.
> but that in no way makes it /right/.
Aye.
> One's private thoughts are another
> matter,
I could wax pedantic here and envision a heaume that sits
over the head, but that verges on science fiction. There
are experiments that can map out grosser surface activity,
though, using many tiny probes inserted into the scalp and
the wires connected to a computer. While mind-reading
beams and other such are probably far off (and likely
impossible), there's a fair number of issues next decade
that might ensue, should one ever sufficiently develop such
a heaume that would allow for detection of, say, fear,
once placed on a subject's head and the subject asked a
series of questions, somewhat a la polygraph tests today,
although far more sensitive (and, presumably, sinister).
We can already determine whether a person did something
or not, by using a new version of brainwave analysis.
I'll admit the implications wax worrisome for those opposed
to CIA/NSA spooks.
But I digress.
> but once knowledge becomes public it /should/ be treated as the
> property of public domain.
I'm inclined to agree, with a few caveats (how "public"
is public?). Of course, in an ideal world we'd respect
the original progenitor of the information -- though things
quickly get iffy if someone takes the information and chops
it up, incorporating the resulting pieces into some work
of his own. (Some rap artists got in trouble for this,
and there was a "rock" variant of part of Beethoven's 5th
Symphony running around. Of course the latter is quite
legit, as Beethoven's copyright expired back in 1917, if
not before -- 70 years after his death in 1827.)
> Attempting to enforce exclusivity on it is a
> gross perversion of creativity, mutating art into a /cattle market/; an
> artist into a sacrificial cow; and those who purportedly "help" artists
> into cynical harvesters of souls, who sit on their fat behinds, pushing
> a "copy" button that duplicates those souls for profit.
>
And milks the rest of us for suckers.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- allegedly said by Bill Gates, 1981, but somebody had to make this up!
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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