Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery
Slashdot, the technical news site, has a mixed reputation. Mostly, it's known as the abode of armies of Microsoft-bashing trolls with too much time on their hands, a domain of vitriolic, fact-free arguments and tired "In Soviet Russia..." jokes. But every so often, it throws up something really insightful, like this comment. It's a great,
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I wasn't arguing against all IP law (at least, not here) - I was pointing out the damage that overly-strong IP law can cause. Speaking as an academic, copyright law is simply a pain in the arse. Speaking as a programmer, software patents are a huge, lurking minefield, that's messing up the industry (though I'm prepared to accept that patents may be appropriate in, say, manufacturing industry). Development is much easier when everything's open-source - and yet this is a deliberate subversion of copyright law. If copyright law were weaker, it wouldn't be needed. Does it make sense for genes to be patentable? That's not the same question as "does it make sense for anything to be patentable?".
And yes, I'm aware of the difficulties bringing drugs to market. But the pharmaceutical industry has done, and continues to do, some pretty shady things - badscience is good on this stuff. And you're aware that as an industry, Big Pharma spends twice as much on advertising than on R&D, right? When I said "hard to think anyone would shed a tear for some of the richest entities in the world", I was really trying to say that the industry is quite big enough to look out for itself, without needing to co-opt the US Government to interfere in some other country's laws to protect their business model - this isn't how either government or business is supposed to work!
This all ties into my general thoughts on piracy - there's not much point in criticising the current system unless you can come up with a workable replacement, and the most important question is "who pays for it?"
I'm sorry, I don't agree at all. In the software world, do we require every bug report to come with a fix attached? No, of course not - we recognise that identifying problems is a valuable service in and of itself. If the problems are identified and the news spread about enough, someone else can work out a way of fixing it.
And I'm really not worried about the long-term prospects of making money out of curing sick people. The precise business model can and will vary, but as long as people want to stay alive, there'll be demand, and as long as there's demand, there'll be a way of making it pay. The same goes for music and movies, btw - people have been wanting to watch entertainments since at least the ancient Greeks, and making and listening to music since the first proto-human hit two bones together and noticed that they made a nice noise. The business model has changed any number of times, but the industry's survived.
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This is my instinctive reaction too. It occurs to me though, that there's an implicit assumption that we're talking about a system, which may have been designed (or may have grown from hacks and patches over the years), which may have bugs, and which can be patched or replaced.
I've had arguments with economists in the past, when I've come very much from that standpoint, and we've hit a brick wall in the conversation pretty soon - because they've not agreed with that assumption, and neither of us had really identified that we were making assumptions in the first place. On those occasions when I've come close to noticing my assumption, I've continued to believe in it and thought the other party was just failing to notice that what they thought were laws of nature were in fact alterable laws of man.
Now I'm starting to wonder though...
I don't know how fundamental a lot of this stuff is... It's like: are these laws (copyright, patents, etc) more like a transformer - a giant constructed robot, which can be changed, redesigned, scrapped, replaced, etc -- or are they more like an Eva - a giant robot suit/armour/restraint-system designed to control the giant angry monster imprisoned within it?
If the latter, then there could conceivably be a fundamental copyright monster which we have to deal with - because that's the way the world works. We dress that monster up in robot-suit-laws which follow it's shape, and make it a bit easier to live with, but the monster is still there underneath, even though you only see the suit. So the consequence of dismantling the existing suit, and perhaps building a replacement somewhere else, is that the fundamental monster gets free, the replacement is obsolete at best, and we all have to deal with the raw monster again.
Like I say - I don't know how fundamental the laws and rules of economics and business are, so I don't want to assume that any bugs are fixable. I don't want to assume that they're not fixable either though - so for the moment I agree that they're worth identifying and talking about - with or without potential fixes. I don't yet think it's as pointless as discussing the morality of gravity. I do want to keep an eye out for evidence of more fundamental laws though.
Here's a question before I go:
Every so often, people talk about extending the tube to Croydon. It never happens. Even when people are talking about it, they talk about reusing an overland line, and tying it up to a tube line at the northern end. No-one ever even thinks about digging a new tunnel - that would be just too hard.
It wasn't too hard for the Victorians. They riddled the city with tunnels - for sewage, trains and all-sorts. Technology has gotten better since then - so why is digging tunnels harder now?
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It's also not at all clear to me that we actually know what the correct versions of the laws of economics are. I'm 95% sure that most "laws" of economics quoted on the Web are rubbish, or at least oversimplified to the extent that they resemble Aristotle's physics more than Newton's.
The "system" model does seem to apply pretty straightforwardly to our body of legislation, though, because it has evolved by a series of patches (it also suffers from a bad case of grognard capture, which doesn't help). Like any large, crufty system, it has bugs: places where the code does things that aren't in the spec, or fails to do things that are. This would also suggest that many bugs are fixable (unfortunately, the current managers seem to believe that spamming the codebase with new, potentially buggy, code is better than taking a few steps back and refactoring). But we can still have spec errors: we may be asking our system to do things that fundamentally aren't possible (like setting π equal to 3, for an uncontroversial example, or stopping people from using drugs, for a more controversial one). This comes back to the first paragraph - is "human nature" an invariant? Are the "laws" of economics (whatever they are) really laws, or can they be worked around?
So, that's three more degrees I need, then - one in economics, one in law, and a third in anthropology...
In this specific case, I don't think there's anything very fundamental about copyright. It's basically an artifact of the printing press - copyright laws weren't needed before, and I think they're rapidly becoming obsolete now. Unfortunately, a lot of very powerful and rich people are heavily invested into the old system. Can we stop them from taking our freedoms away in a doomed quest to save their business models? Can we buy them off?
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I wonder how much of this we really need to understand in order to say useful things about systems of humans? We could, for example, ignore the nature/nurture question, and restrict ourselves to systems which will work when comprised of individuals who exhibit the behaviours we observe in those around us - regardless of the cause of those behaviours.
I think I tend to assume that people are basically rational, with imperfect knowledge/belief and often with obscure utility functions. That's an assumption about fundamental human nature isn't it? There's a chance it may not be the sort of assumption you were thinking of though - it's not so deep. Perhaps that depth is hidden in the utility functions I glossed over ;)
I certainly don't think I know what the correct laws of economics are - I don't know if anyone else does. It sounds to me like a hard thing to really understand.
The system:
Certainly there is a system - the body of legislation we're talking about. That body of legislation has evolved through patches, I agree with this. What I'm not 100% sure about any more is whether all the things that I previously thought were bugs in that system are indeed bugs in the system - or whether they're the inconvenient shape of an underlying fundamental structure, which isn't man made. Possibly that shape could be better glossed over, but possibly not... I don't know.
Of course, one man's bug is another man's feature - especially in an evolved spec-free system like this. Who gets to decide what we want in the first place?
Degrees:
I think they're supposed to get easier after the first one ;) You might also like to consider english lit, if you're interested in fundamental human nature - the human condition.
This specific case:
I'm inclined to agree with you, but in the interests of playing devil's advocate, I'll try to argue the case that copyright, or something like it is fundamental. (in another comment, since I seem to have hit the limit)
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So let's consider what might happen if we had no copyright law - stuff that's been communicated is free to reproduce and evolve as RMS would like. The GPL is meaningless, because the copyright law it sits on doesn't exist any more - so there's nothing to stop me from downloading firefox, changing a couple of fonts (or not?) and passing it off as my own work to anyone gullible enough to believe me. We hope that ubiquity of communication will make this kind of scam much harder to pull off than I've implied - folk will realise that it's not totherfox, it's firefox in a different box.
Of course, proprietary software will go the way it's going anyway - since there's no copyright to prevent software copying, they stop selling software and start selling software-based-services. You can copy MS Office all you like, but you'll still only have one windows live account, one username/password, one place to store all your work - all your confidential letters, etc. Same goes for games, which are all at least partly online now anyway, and operating systems, which need online support for security patches, etc.
Now, entertainment. Musicians can make money from doing live performances, of course - as can actors. So maybe we get some of the theatre and gig revival that a lot of anti-copyright people want. I guess the equivalent of the theatre for animators and filmmakers is probably cinema - which is currently used as a massive promo for dvd sales. If we assume for a moment that dvd sales aren't going to work any more, then perhaps those guys start relying on cinema - which means hightened security in the cinamas themselves. You sign an agreement on the way in that you won't record the performance, and they enforce that agreement themselves. I guess if you're doing that then there's less motivation for interoperability - the studios might end up running their own movie houses with security they trust, and with their own weird film formats, refresh rates, etc. And maybe not - perhaps someone like odeon would convince enough people that their security was up to scratch.
I wonder if you could do something similar for home viewing - buy a movie on its own custom hardware - maybe a pair of glasses, or something else that's difficult to record from. Maybe the glasses could have integrated eye trackers too - you could do some cool directorial things with those, and they'd also serve to shut the thing down if it sees a camera instead of eyes. Maybe you don't need all this technology - maybe just an NDA every time you buy a movie, and a private NDA enforcement force would do the trick.
Of course, the security and the technology aren't free, so prices go up, and wages go down across the board - except for the security specialists filling the market gap that was left by the retreating legislation. Where wages go down, I guess they go down fastest and furthest in the most vulnerable places. The masses of people doing menial jobs below the poverty line are easier to replace if they complain about going slightly further below it than the execs making the decisions...
How's that?
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How does this sound: US and WIPO are pushing for laws to make Indian patent law? US and WIPO have no "jurisdiction" in India so I really don't see how they'll be able to succeed in this demarche.
blairrewards.com
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