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Elhana is offline Elhana
2010-03-05 , 15:48
Posts: 97 | Thanked: 30 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Russia, Moscow
#301
I think bridge example is rather good, except that you should note that bridge itself is physical and technically everyone can build one, therefore if bridge owner wants too much money for going over it you can build your owns.

Bad things happen when building a "bridge" becomes really easy and cheap then he realizes that everyone can build their own bridge, so he gets a patent for "bridge", so no one can build one and he can keep his profit. There is cases where such bridge was in fact something really smart and worth to be protected, then such patent does in fact protects his time and effort he put into inventing it.
However imagine a case that nobody ever before saw a river and needed a bridge, he was the first to come to a river and crossed it buy just dropping a tree over it - then he comes home and gets a patent for a "bridge" = everything put over a river to cross it. Invention is trivial, every thinking man would come up with this, but sine he now owns a patent for it noone else besides him can now build bridges EVER without buying his rights for over 9000.

Same happens in software market and it does slow down or even make impossible many things that might have come to this world without all this patent crap.

IP laws should be changed, but the reality is noone knows how to do this in a fair way, therefore we are stuck with this crap. Logic tells you every man shall be rewarded proportionally to the efforts they've put into creation, but while it is relatively easy to do calculate values of physical goods it is close to impossible to achieve the same with intellectual property, even worse when they come combined in one physical product.
 
wmarone is offline wmarone
2010-03-05 , 15:55
Posts: 1,746 | Thanked: 2,100 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#302
Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
Granted, but you're still not embracing the problem, only escaping the heavy thinking by taking tangents away from the problem.
Hardly, I'm simply not stating "they'd all go out of business and need to be quickly granted the right to copyright their recipes and sue the living daylights out of anyone who reproduces them."

People will still be creative, and those at the top of their game will still receive recognition. Significantly fewer would do so, but it would still be done.

I have stated elsewhere that I'd rather have copyrights and a deluge of crap than no copyrights and a trickle of crap. At least with the deluge the raw number of -good- works is higher. But obscenely strong and virtually perpetual copyright is ridiculous.
Last edited by wmarone; 2010-03-05 at 15:58.
 
azorni is offline azorni
2010-03-05 , 16:19
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 1 time | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Paris, France
#303
Originally Posted by fatalsaint View Post
I'm a few pages late.. but azorni tried using street lamps as an example of something you don't pay for...

That's incorrect. That's what Taxes are for. (at least here in the US)

A very, very, very, limited number of things are maintained and ran "free" of charge. Homeless shelters and the "soup kitchens" etc are provided at no cost to the homeless people.. but they still take money (usually our money) to run.

Even "Non-profit" organizations actually make a profit most of the time. Money has to come from *somewhere*.

So yes.. you are paying for the street lamp... and the street.. and the sidewalk.. and you're also paying for the cop. Unless it's a private road... in which case it's usually got a Toll Booth on it...
God damned it I just can't help responding at least to this one. Note that the long answer from someone else previously was quite good too and would deserve some answer as well. But it was also quite emotional, probably since this person is involved in software industry. So I prefer wait a bit, let some water flow under the bridge, in order not to get him even more angry. And this long post deserves a long answer.

Anyway, the very fact that street lamps are financed by taxes, and not by private sector and market forces, does prove my point. There must be a reason for this, and this is precisely because very early, society understood the very particular aspect of this object. Individuals realized that it is very difficult to monopolize the use of such tools, or to charge for their use. Same for roads or bridges, as already discussed. Therefore people decided that these kind of stuffs should be public property, and that everyone should put some money to finance it, without any consideration about who does actually use it.

In case of street lamps, it is not a matter of marginal cost, but rather of question of factorization of service. Factorization is to services what marginal costs is to goods. There is some kind of duality between both concepts, and both have pretty much the same applications regarding determination of price.

This is quite interesting considerations, as far as theoretical economics is concerned. But I confess this is a bit far away from software industry.
Last edited by azorni; 2010-03-05 at 16:23.
 
mmurfin87 is offline mmurfin87
2010-03-05 , 16:23
Posts: 307 | Thanked: 157 times | Joined on Jul 2009 @ Illinois, USA
#304
Originally Posted by CrashandDie View Post
If you look at the exact value of a painting, its pure worth in terms of materials, sure, it's not much. But value is made of so much more than the basic building blocks -- this is the foundation of our whole world; I just can't fathom you don't realise this.
Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
So what gives this really long number value? Well, in certain contexts, the program it represents may offer some functionality that is desirable.
I'm already on the same page as you, Crash. The difference between your examples is, if say the "house" in question was a mobile home, and I took it, I've deprived the user of its use, and harm is done.

If I copy a program, and only do that. I just copy it. Is any harm done?

Let me rephrase that into a scenario.

Say I'm on an Apple computer and I download the latest Age of Empires video game (or any other windows-only program). Assume I'm running OSX, I don't have Boot Camp, so all I have is a useless copy of this program on my computer.

At this point though, what I've downloaded isn't really even a program. It doesn't run or do ANYTHING on my OSX computer. Its just a really long number. So have I done any harm or theft in this scenario? Ignore for the moment what my intent might be.

Now, say I was on a PC and I downloaded that program and then ran it and install it. All of you (and me included) would say you have committed piracy.

I'm just trying to separate the concept of copying a long number, and using functionality without paying.

In the case of a house, I cannot take the house from you without also depriving you of its functionality. In the case of code, I could "take" from you (copy) the program a billion times and not deprive you of your profits until the first time I ran your program and used it without paying.
 
mmurfin87 is offline mmurfin87
2010-03-05 , 16:26
Posts: 307 | Thanked: 157 times | Joined on Jul 2009 @ Illinois, USA
#305
Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
Hardly, I'm simply not stating "they'd all go out of business and need to be quickly granted the right to copyright their recipes and sue the living daylights out of anyone who reproduces them."

People will still be creative, and those at the top of their game will still receive recognition. Significantly fewer would do so, but it would still be done.

I have stated elsewhere that I'd rather have copyrights and a deluge of crap than no copyrights and a trickle of crap. At least with the deluge the raw number of -good- works is higher. But obscenely strong and virtually perpetual copyright is ridiculous.
What about Coca Cola and other soda companies? They're right out of business.
 
Bratag is offline Bratag
2010-03-05 , 16:34
Posts: 2,014 | Thanked: 1,581 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#306
Originally Posted by azorni View Post
God damned it I just can't help responding at least to this one. Note that the long answer from someone else previously was quite good too and would deserve some answer as well. But it was also quite emotional, probably since this person is involved in software industry. So I prefer wait a bit, let some water flow under the bridge, in order not to get him even more angry. And this long post deserves a long answer.

Anyway, the very fact that street lamps are financed by taxes, and not by private sector and market forces, does prove my point. There must be a reason for this, and this is precisely because very early, society understood the very particular aspect of this object. Individuals realized that it is very difficult to monopolize the use of such tools, or to charge for their use. Same for roads or bridges, as already discussed. Therefore people decided that these kind of stuffs should be public property, and that everyone should put some money to finance it, without any consideration about who does actually use it.

In case of street lamps, it is not a matter of marginal cost, but rather of question of factorization of service. Factorization is to services what marginal costs is to goods. There is some kind of duality between both concepts, and both have pretty much the same applications regarding determination of price.

This is quite interesting considerations, as far as theoretical economics is concerned. But I confess this is a bit far away from software industry.
You bought up the topic - you KEEP bringing up topics which are as unrelated to the issue at hand as a frog is to a bicycle, when one is refuted you simply move on to the next piece of unrelated gibberish.

Crapping on about things and using words you obviously do not understand the meaning of doesn't make you look eloquent, it makes you look like an idiot.

Keep that in mind when compiling the next "But lets take a tree - what if someone patented trees" or whatever other insane leap of logic argument you put forward next.

PS: By azorni's logic the design for the above mentioned house could be copied for any other building. Since once it is drawn it no longer has any intrinsic value apparently.
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cashclientel is offline cashclientel
2010-03-05 , 16:36
Posts: 663 | Thanked: 282 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ London, UK
#307
mmurfin87 - Interesting idea but this is not how the law works. The 'long number' is what's copyrighted, so just by copying it without permission you've offended. I do agree with what you're saying though.

And to think we've now got 31 pages of generally high quality discussion all from someone's flippant comment about warez-ing the angry birds level pack!
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fatalsaint is offline fatalsaint
2010-03-05 , 16:40
Posts: 3,428 | Thanked: 2,856 times | Joined on Jul 2008
#308
Originally Posted by azorni View Post
This is quite interesting considerations, as far as theoretical economics is concerned. But I confess this is a bit far away from software industry.
Precisely.. the logic here actually has nothing at all to do with the Software industry.. or at least: the vast majority of it.

For example: You *could* use this type of logic to say that Bill Gates should be federally funded and that the US taxes are increased to pay for Microsoft.. since nearly everyone uses Microsoft Windows - it's become a critical piece of most businesses, it is therefore just as much a "widely" used and therefore should be "public property" and funded via public funds, not individuals. In fact.. I'll bet more people in the US use Microsoft more than any given road in the US. Even landmarks or tourist attractions.

Then Microsoft Windows would be legitimately "free" to the public .

However.. this logic does *not* apply to about 99% of the rest of the software industry, where the software itself is actually used in very specific, and by significantly less people.. meaning that they could not say that they need public funding because most people have never even heard of them - so how would they get money and/or funding to continue creating their software if they were required to give it free?

By pirating it... giving it away for free without royalty to the owners.. takes away their only source of income and the software will cease to be maintained or updated because the programmers were fired since the company couldn't afford to keep them.

People can say and claim Programs are simply 1's and 0's all day long, and say that because it's all broken down into 1 long number anyway then it's value is useless... this is completely irrelevant. How many people can or could have built that same big long number? How many did? If the answer is many.. why are you pirating his software? Find a free one. If the answer is one - then big long number or not, what that programmer has is something akin to Brain Surgery. You wouldn't demand that the best specialist in Brain surgery be forced to work on you for free would you? Same for the programmer. They've built something that is obviously popular enough to be pirated, useful enough for you to want, and is the only person(/people) to have done it.

They should get compensation for that.

Now.. how they get compensation, and how they *should* release their software, and other ideals like that are for the other thread that doesn't exist that Fargus keeps trying to get people to start. But for this thread: Suffice to say, the programmer was the only that did it - and he chose to require you to pay for it to receive it, and to not do so is going against the wishes of the author.

Whether right, wrong, morale or not the only thing that *really* matters is, In the US (and I believe the UK?) - this is considered illegal. That's really the short and end of it. Philosophical discussions aside..

I personally believe Marijuana should be held to the same standard as alcohol as they are both pretty much equally harmful. So either ban both, or legalize both, but it makes no sense to split them. That doesn't mean I should go out smoking Pot or that I have a leg to stand on in court if I do.
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Last edited by fatalsaint; 2010-03-05 at 16:44.
 
azorni is offline azorni
2010-03-05 , 17:24
Posts: 16 | Thanked: 1 time | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Paris, France
#309
Originally Posted by CrashandDie View Post
The fundamental issue at hand here is that it may be your opinion that piracy isn't piracy, that commercial software and digital copies are inherently worthless, but it's nothing more than just that: your opinion. Having an opinion doesn't entitle you to anything.
I never said that piracy isn't piracy. I said, as others did, that piracy is not theft. I said for instance that according to me, piracy is illegal gift. I never said commercial software is inherently worthless. What I said is that its value is difficult to convert into price. Value and price are two very different things. Value is not necessary commercial value. I've given many examples.

The laws are there, and there's more than one reason to have them.
I am not convinced by those reasons, that's all. Now, law is law, so I will conform to it. But I have the right to say what I think about it, and to vote against it if I can.

Our current economical system is based on money. Sad, but true. People need money to survive. Worse yet, people need money to live. It's not a basic requirement, it's not a detail, it's the basis of western civilisation.
I very much doubt that if software industry was to vanish, all these people will suddenly become jobless and miserable. I believe in Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction, so I don't think it would be a problem for them.

A bridge is indeed a a construction which "provide a desirable function that reduces time or effort in crossing a natural obstacle", but it can also be seen as a work of art, some bridges are mind boggling, masterpieces. And guess what? You have to pay a toll for a lot of bridges in order to cross them; especially when the convenience factor (also called luxury) is its main advantage.
Well, in my all life, I've crossed many bridges, and I have never ever paid.

However, I feel we're drifting very far away from the initial subject (and on a sidenote, man, dude, you have waaaayyy too much time on your hands to be guarding a thread this much). I would have liked to see this thread move in a positive manner, but as usual it's the same story, one guy versus the rest of the world, recycling the same arguments over and over, and bringing really, nothing, utterly nothing new to the table.
This seems unfair. Many times I've given other examples, and developed different aspects of the pb. Copy vs counterfeiting, price vs value, intellectual ownership vs intellectual paternity, costs of production vs costs of diffusion, price elaboration mechanisms, and so on...

The point I wanted to bring across in my first few paragraphs was that people need money to live, but not everyone can be doing the same thing. Some people get next to nothing to be working in a factory day in, day out. Some people get paid massive amounts of money to wiggle their *** and pretend to be singing in front of a massive audience.

And guess what? The latter are there *because* of the former. Not thanks to, because of. This is something that is very, very important to grasp. Celebrities are celebrities because people pay attention to them. If they didn't, they'd just be another person on Earth. Whether you feel uncomfortable about that is not the issue, and you shouldn't deflect on piracy and copyright because you feel there is an issue with society (because that's what this is starting to sound like).
I don't get your point here.

I did quite like the turn when mmurfin87 started to think in terms of functional value rather than exact value. If you look at the exact value of a painting, its pure worth in terms of materials, sure, it's not much. But value is made of so much more than the basic building blocks -- this is the foundation of our whole world; I just can't fathom you don't realise this.
I did not say that the value of a product was the sum of the value of its component. I don't know where you've read that.

The building blocks that compose an application is code, or lines of code to be precise. A line of code, on its own, is usually quite useless, however if you have a few hundred thousands lines of code, and have a few architects that make it efficient, and designers who make it appealing to the eye, you suddenly obtain something which has a huge amount of value. How it is stored doesn't matter. How much the developers get paid doesn't really matter either. It's the whole package which holds the value, and it is only that package you pay for.
Again, you mix up value and price. A code may have a lot of value, and indeed much more than the sum of its lines. But just as poem is more valuable than its words or a theorem more valuable than the axioms. But when I use Pythagoras theorem, or when I think about "la cigale et la fourmi", I don't have to worry about whom I will have to pay license fees to.

I'd also like to point out that you are oversimplifying things, and not setting up a disclaimer for it. Some applications cost $1, others cost a few thousand. I am a consultant for an application for which the contracts rarely have less than a million written on them. Is each developer entitled to a straight cut of that? Of course not. Because developers are far from the only ones that help build an application.
And not a single person in all of those I have listed will ever touch a line of code; but they still need to be paid. For most companies, the Engineering team will represent tops 1/3 of the headcount.

[...]

Selling a product over and over keeps a company in business. The price point at which they sell the product is usually way below anything that it has actually cost to produce. A product like Photoshop or Lightroom requires investments in the order of millions. Yet you can buy it for a fraction of that. How come? Because they sell it multiple times.
Yeah indeed that's a lot of people. And all of them work in order to fit in the software retail industry paradigm. But once you question the very existence of this paradigm, everything change.

Well, obviously, at some point they make a profit, and in some cases they even make a massive profit, but so what? Where's the problem with that? What alternatives would we have?
I've already said that making profits is absolutely not the pb. I'm liberal and I have no objections about people making money, as long as they do that with market forces, and not thanks to the intervention of law.

Everyone paying a fair share of what the product actually cost to produce, plus a little rounding up so everyone feels ok? Yeah, why not. But the product would never sell.
Production costs are not everything. That's the all point of my intervention.

If you told people: "If everyone buys this product, right now, at this very instant, it will cost you $1. If you don't, this company and the 300 workers are without a job.".
Nobody would buy.

Being without a job doesn't have to be permanent. Those people won't lose their arms or their brain. They still are the same person and can find an other job. This is Schumpeter again.

I'll read these links, this seems interesting. Thanks.
 
Bratag is offline Bratag
2010-03-05 , 17:26
Posts: 2,014 | Thanked: 1,581 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#310
Being without a job doesn't have to be permanent. Those people won't lose their arms or their brain. They still are the same person and can find an other job
15 million Americans might disagree with that statement.
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