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[Don Andy]

(Following in response to mewse)

That's why said that this explanation only really works for me and that I didn't expect anybody else to understand it. It's just the way I grew up (even if that sounds like the easy way out).

And just to engage your example (DISCLAIMER: Nothing of the following actually happened):

In my case I would have indeed contacted the according company and tried to talk with them. However, in my case, that would've lead to nothing more than brushing me off in a manner of "If you don't like it, don't buy it, your own fault."

And that would've lead me again where I am now.

My point being, yes, what you said does sound entirely logical to you. But my explanation sounds just as logical to ME.
In the end we ARE two different persons.

Or, to put it in other words. I grew up not giving a damn about laws, you grew up valuing laws above everything else. (Warning: strongly simplified version, do not quote)

Also, please, people, stop trying to convince me that piracy is wrong. I know it is. I agree with you. But that still won't stop me from doing it until MY PERSONAL REASONS for doing are not fulfilled anymore.

(in response to rinkuhero)
That's why I asked, I really have no clue about stuff like that.

[charon]

Yo Mister Logics man!

Also, that the pro-piracy people declared that piracy is okay because CDs are made from petroleum products.

Since when can you logically prove that A is 'right' when B is 'wrong' and A and B are supposed to be 'alike'?

Also...

Having the right to own what you create and have full control of it...

There is no work of art (or entertainment) that is not derivative. It derives from the vast structure of cultural resources that our ancestors have started, and we are now continuing to build and preserve. For every original idea and hour of work you invest in your creation, there are millions of original ideas and millions of hours of work that have happened in our past, none of which belong to you and you only - they belongs to us all.

I never said piracy was right.

What I said is piracy was expected to happen as a reaction to cultural monopolies. It is a thing of nature... The more you squeeze them, the more of them trickle from your grasp or something like that?

Also, piracy is not personal. When a pirate copies something, he simply puts two cds into a device and the magic happens... When someone steals a car, they actually literally steal it from /someone/. I am not saying this is actuality, I am saying this is a mental representation... Nevermind. But it is important not to dismiss mental representation as any less valid perception of actuality as legal actuality or (is it?) objective actuality.

Yes, as an author, you definitelly have a right to control your creation, or own it. But unfortunatelly, you are not the only one. You are part of the culture, you feed upon it, and you repay your debt. Part of that payment is charity, if that is what you will. But don't think that only game creators, musicians and writers are hurt by current conditions of economy.

[Chris Whitman]

I meant it as "you don't get to play it, according to the law".

And to say that I am under any compulsion to accept the law as just or ethical is Hobbesian nonsense. To give you the short version: I don't believe our judicial system here is just because it derives its power from a state monopoly on violence and imprisonment which was itself established only by conquest and murder.

I consider personal ethical decisions to be infinitely more important than blind obedience. Part of having the ability to make personal ethical decisions is the ability to dissent from the majority opinion for rational reasons. What you're telling me is that I must obey simply because it's the law, as if I judge's decision carries any more weight for me than my own decision.

Are you saying that everyone should be allowed to do as they please with no regard for law and order? That people are free to murder, rob people etc just because they feel like it? That's just silly.

That is silly! Fortunately, I didn't say or even imply anything like that. The idea that I choose to disagree with the law on a single point does not imply that I disagree with the entirety of the law. Furthermore, the fact that I don't recognize any inherent legitimacy of the rule of law does not mean that I believe people's rights should not be defended.

If I create something, I gets to decide what is allowed to do with it. I gets to say how much money people must pay to use it. I gets to decide under what conditions people might use it. Turns out that when we're talking about my creations, I am the boss of you.

Because you said so? Because it's the law? I don't recognize any of these as valid lines of reasoning. I don't believe in imaginary property: I think that information is the property of everyone.

Property itself is a legal fiction, and if I don't believe in the validity of a privileged set of laws then I don't believe in the validity of a privileged definition of property. If we disagree on the definition, then we must adjudicate the matter ourselves as rational individuals and try to reach a common ground, rather than appealing to an authority. I do not believe in moral authority.

I believe that ideas cannot be property. Their origins are too nebulous. Have you ever developed IP based around robots in the future? Then why am I paying you instead of the estate of Karel Čapek? Except that Rossum's Universal Robots was based on the golem myth, so why am I not trying to track down the originator of a particular piece of Jewish mythology? Because ideas are derived from so many sources, I think they rightfully belong to everyone.

I also believe that information, including digital information, cannot be property, since it can be copied perfectly without loss. If I pirate music from you, you do not lose use of the music. You may lose a social or economic advantage you would have if I bought the music from you, but this represents a loss of sale, not of property. If I offer you a tomato for a million dollars and you refuse to buy it, I cannot turn around and sue you for the loss of a sale. The difference that is then often pointed out is that, in the case of music or software, I derive enjoyment without paying you, but as I have also pointed out we only apply this definition of value arbitrarily and to a select number of items. It is very difficult to justify in a broad sense.

If you do that anyway, because you can get away with it, it just makes you a selfish greedy bastard. Some people don't mind being selfish greedy bastards though, but don't come saying that you have the right, moral, legal or other, on your side.

It makes me selfish and greedy? I'm not the one stating that everything I create is under my absolute ownership and you have to give me money if you want to use it. I feel that can state that my position is moral because it is well thought-through and consistent with the rest of my ethics, based on what I consider to be important. It is not up to you to dictate my morality.

[Chris Whitman]

As an addendum, I think it is great to remunerate people for their efforts.

Money is stupid, but unfortunately we need it to live and buy beer, so I think it is admirable to give people money in exchange for the use of their hard work. The difference is that I feel that when it comes to software it is my decision to do so, not my compulsion to do so. Yes, this means I can just decide not to pay for anything, but in practice, as an ethical person, I do not do that. Typically I pay for the games I play and enjoy, especially if they are made by someone whom I feel is making a genuine contribution, as is the case with many independent games, as opposed to by a soulless conglomerate.

Since it is up to me, that means there is no one forcing me. It also means I can make bad decisions and no one will stop me. You have to start trusting me to make good decisions and, if you want me to stop, arguing with reasoning instead of threats. Welcome to life.

[Dacke]

What I Like Cake said.

[Bennett]

Yeah, well said.

Except mewse will now quote you as having said that "piracy is OK because all IP really belongs to Karel Čapek, who is dead and doesn't care anymore".

[Paul Eres]

I Like Cake, I agrued earlier that games are not information or ideas, do you have any specific objections to that line of argument? Although I know it's trouble to go digging through 21 pages to find it, so I'll understand if you don't want to.

[Paul Eres]

I believe that ideas cannot be property. Their origins are too nebulous. Have you ever developed IP based around robots in the future? Then why am I paying you instead of the estate of Karel Čapek? Except that Rossum's Universal Robots was based on the golem myth, so why am I not trying to track down the originator of a particular piece of Jewish mythology? Because ideas are derived from so many sources, I think they rightfully belong to everyone.

Also, somewhat relatedly, ILC, you're way smarter than this! You know that there's a difference beween an idea and an implementation of an idea. One is an abstraction which can have infinite implementations, the other is a specific implemenation.

By that argument, when you buy a car you should pay the person who invented it, not the person who built the car. Similarly, when you buy a game about robots, you don't pay the person who invented the idea of robots, you pay the person who built the game about robots. There's a difference between the work involved in coming up with ideas and the work involved in implementing an idea.

If you create a game you're not working in the realm of ideas, you're working on the concrete level, you're building something, the work is more akin to that of an engineer or an architect than that of a philosopher or theologist. A game isn't just information or ideas (as I argued earlier), it's a specific set of instructions which operates a machine. You're not paying for "information": you're not paying to know a rumor or to know who won last night's football game, you're paying for a precisely designed set of instructions which will make a machine operate in a unique way.

Just because something can be copied without loss doesn't make it information or just an idea. You can copy a lot of things without loss which aren't information. Many products are nearly identical to each other, they're copied over and over in very precise ways, such that the differences between two copies are almost negligable: a simple example is plastic spoons. Plastic spoons aren't information, even though they can be copied virtually losslessly.

[Dacke]

The problem with seeing a game as "information" is it isn't. A game isn't like information about who won which gold medals in 1964, a game isn't like information about what's the best way to install a power supply on a computer, a game isn't like the kind of stuff you learn about in Wikipedia, so to compare pirating a game with telling your friend a rumor that some girl in your class slept with the janitor, and grouping them both as "information", and saying that piracy restricts free speech because it restricts your ability to transmit information to others, is a mind-boggling fantasy. A game is no more information than a plum is information -- and sure, all matter is information in a sense, since it's just its specific location of atoms and such, but that isn't what we normally think about when we think of the term information, and giving a copy of a game to a friend has much more in common with giving him a copy of your plum than telling him a rumor.

Did you mean this argument?
To me it wasn't as much an argument as you stating that you don't agree with our use of the word. I think Wikipedia can shed some light on the matter, showing that our use isn't wrong but rather potentially sloppy.

Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation. [...] the word "information" is often used without careful consideration of the various meanings it has acquired.

[Chris Whitman]

I made a distinction between information and ideas specifically to make clear the difference between an idea of something (like a copyright) and the implementation of an idea in the form of digital 'property.'

Legally, both are considered purchasable items, although the purchase really grants you some usage rights, not a piece of physical property. I don't think I was arguing that information should be treated like ideas.

Technically, instructions for a computer program, digital media or anything of the sort is information -- I mean, by the technical, computer science meaning of the term 'information.' That's what I mean when I say information. I'm not talking about abstract ideas.

I'm not sure I understand your spoon idea. You cannot copy a physical spoon. It is a discrete object. You can produce new spoons from the same design, in which case you are really making use of the algorithm used to produce the original spoon. The spoon is something you can own, the algorithm is information and, in my opinion, should belong to everyone.

[Chris Whitman]

From a legal standpoint, intellectual property rights are basically a market 'hack.'

Extremely short and possibly biased introduction to intellectual property:

So we start off by having this industrial society that is based around the idea of the manufacture and sale of individual products.

You have your capitalists, who own wealth, so they hire workers to produce goods. The capitalists make money from the sale of physical goods, while the workers are rewarded by being remunerated for their time at a rate low enough to ensure that your capitalists make even more money than they started with.

It all works pretty well (for the rich people), and it's easy to regulate because the goods are naturally limited and you can physically prevent people from getting them by putting them in locked containers and beating people who try to take them from you without paying. It also has a built in stable solution due to supply and demand dynamics. Everyone is happy except that the majority of people work all the time and are still too poor to afford food (there's no helping some people, of course).

A lot of this makes sense because you take the idea of personal property, which is a very natural human idea which probably has some neurological basis, and extend it into private property, including the properties of a legally incorporated entity. This makes sense to people: it's easy to grasp and most people don't tend to have a huge problem with it. I have some minor problems with it, but that is another story.

But then your industrialized society yields the problem of cheap printing. You have books, and while books take time to write, they don't take much time to copy and sell. Because you have an industrial society based on the ownership and transfer of physical goods, all the money comes from selling physical copies, whereas all the costs are for the initial development, which is something you can't sell. This causes a problem for the capitalists, because this means books are something you can't invest in, and it causes problems for government, because most of them realize that literacy is relatively important and no one is going to take the time to write books if it means starvation.

So they do what anyone who controls the populace through a well-armed police force would do: they commodify the information of the book. They say: "Let's pretend that the information in the book is a physical property. That it can be owned and bought and sold like any other property. If you produce a new book using the information someone else owns, that is now theft, and theft makes our well-armed police force very cross."

The problem is, it isn't really property. If I have a thousand chairs to sell and someone steals them and sells them, I no longer have use of a thousand chairs. However, if someone steals the information that makes my book, I still have it and I can still use it. Intellectual property isn't property, it's just an analogy established to fulfill one purpose: to fix a broken market-based economic system -- to take something that has a value the system is not built to recognize and 'fake out' a commodity. It's nothing more than a utilitarian fiction brought about to make more money and, because the lords of nations were not necessarily scheming, cartoon villains, to make sure artists got a piece of the pie for their hard work.

Of course, in time intellectual property came to cover a whole bunch of new types of information and ideas, exceptions were made and intellectual property law grew into the beast it was today. In time, of course, people also mostly forgot about its origins and simply started accepting that "this stuff is property because... well, that's what we're told and you should do what you're told and don't rock the boat."

THE END

I don't have a problem with artists being remunerated for their work. I have a problem with the idea that I should be made to obey a decision made hundreds of years ago and half a world away by the leaders of industrial nations to fix a broken system that should have been scrapped already.

[Paul Eres]

I don't think it's just a terminology issue, because the claim here is, because games are information, they can't be owned in the same way that (supposedly) non-informational objects can be.

But if you use that definition of information, everything is information, plums and plastic spoons and all that, it's all just a specific organization of matter. Everything in this universe is a particular arrangement of very simple particles, and the reason plums look different from your hand is not what they are made of, but how the matter is arranged, the "information" part. Non-informational objects don't exist, everything has both a physical component and an informational component, nothing is totally just one or just the other.

That being the case, why is it that merely being able to copy something flawlessly makes it information? As I mentioned, there is a lot that you can copy virtually flawlessly besides media.

If you want to call games information, you can use that term (although it kind of makes the concept useless if it's broad enough to cover everything that isn't entirely plain matter), but in that case: I'm not saying information (in that sense) like games can be owned, rather I'm saying that if information can't be owned, nothing can be owned, because everything is information. Games are no more (and no less) informational entities than a cup of chicken soup is.

So: why isn't a game a descrete object? Simply because it can be copied isn't enough to call something information, because one could theoretically copy any object to any desired level of precision with technology advanced enough. And a game does have matter and form, it has to exist somewhere: if it doesn't exist at least on some hard disk or some CD somewhere in the universe you can't say that the game exists. And if something requires matter to exist, it's physical to some degree, it's not purely non-physical. Whereas the idea of a golem or a robot does not require matter to exist, there aren't even any real golems in real life, but the idea still exists.

[Paul Eres]

Also, your history of intellectual property could well be entirely accurate historically, but even if it is, that doesn't mean that objects which can be copied are any less property than objects which can't yet be copied. In other words, nothing in that history means that the rich and powerful weren't *right* to restrict unauthorized copying of objects.

[charon]

So: why isn't a game a descrete object? Simply because it can be copied isn't enough to call something information, because one could theoretically copy any object to any desired level of precision with technology advanced enough.

We are not having a theoretical debate, unless I can respond to this by 'one could theoretically copy money and then we'd all be filthy rich'?

And besides, even if this were a theoretical debate, you'd still be wrong. Unless I can respond with, 'with technology advanced enough, you could copy a game cd into our galaxy, simply extinguishing the stars that represent 0 bits and leaving 1-bit stars lit. And then aeons later someone could just take a photo of the night sky, toss it into a reader and play that game again' which proves that games, unlike plums, are information, because their form and function is preserved when transferred to another media... Which, alas, you cannot say about plum, when you take its photo that photo will forever remain inedible.

[Chris Whitman]

Hold on, this requires a glass of wine. You might want to get one yourself, reader, because I am about to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Fundamentally, what we are doing is discussing 'property,' but property itself is just an idea or, more specifically, a sociolinguistic construct. Since property in some sense is universal throughout humanity, I must believe there is some notion of property which is universal. However, since property definitions vary throughout societies, much of it must be socially informed. Furthermore, since our social beliefs can be altered through reason and consideration, it also needs to have a personal element.

What we have is, as with most ideas, a constant push and pull between biology, society and the individual which in the end produces a definition, in some sense concrete and in some sense nebulous, since it has no pre-linguistic meaning and can be defined only in terms of other words. When I state that I have a differing idea of property, my point is not that everyone must accept my definition. While it is reasoned rationally, and I would be delighted if you would tend to agree, I didn't, originally, bring it up to try to convince you of its correctness.

The reason isn't that I'm some flaky postmodern relativist (although you can accuse me of that if you'd like), but more that I have a definition of property that I must reason from where property is about personal enablement and betterment rather than exclusion or social standing. I feel that the purpose of property should be to provide me with things which enable me to lead a more pleasant and enjoyable life rather than to prevent you from having those things. Therefore, if it comes to an asset which can be copied without loss to myself, I do not feel that is property or that its copying presents an appropriation. This is in dissent to the prevailing opinion of property as monopoly, where I obtain value from my property specifically because I have it and you do not. This definition of property comes from my egalitarian and utilitarian beliefs.

So yes, by this definition the quantum information of the atoms of my possessions is not, in itself, a possession, and if you ever devise a matter-copying device, I would encourage you to come over to my house and copy anything you wanted, since your having it does not deprive me of the pleasure of having it. This is sort of a prescription, and I hope people will consider it and perhaps it will change a few minds out there. I think I am right and I think the monopolistic interpretation of property is harmful and unethical.

However, ethical systems can vary and here is where we return to that push and pull of factors. There is no objective 'right': there is only right or wrong by the consideration of an ethical system. There is also the absolute, existential freedom of any human being to dissent, which cannot be taken away. This is a little more complicated than 'everyone just gets to make up their own mind,' because reasoning is itself partly social and partly mathematical, and while reason can vary to some extent, an ethical system which is poorly reasoned by its own internal structure or depends upon fallacy can be distinguished as such.

My central point is that, while I feel of course that my definition of property is right, I acknowledge that there is no 'privileged' definition of property, by which I do not mean that all definitions are 'the same' but that there is no definition which simply possesses some innate quality of privilege which requires its acceptance. I can make up my own mind for myself. I can believe that I am right and you are wrong. I can also try to convince you of this, but I cannot simply make my definition of property an objective truth which exists independent of myself and the society I inhabit. I'm not saying its unethical to do so, it is in fact impossible. The argument I am responding to is not about egalitarianism or ownership but about the idea of an ethical system not privileged by its reason but by its quality of authority.

On an existential level, I can make my own decisions. The law does not and cannot compel me to believe certain things. In concrete terms, the people who made the decision that 'intellectual property' should exist may have made a good decision or a bad decision for any number of people or from any number of standpoints, and the most important thing is not that I feel it was a bad decision but that they cannot make that decision for me. Like everyone else they are answerable to reason and must face the possibility of dissent. Unlike everyone else, since they have a monopoly on violence they can fine or imprison me and if I resist they can restrain or kill me, but that does not give them the right to dictate reality in absolute terms.