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[Chris Whitman]

Sorry to go all po-mo on the forums, but I think it's an important distinction that needs to be made to respond to the original argument made against me, which is that I should agree because it is the law, and your interpretation that the arbitrariness of the legal decision as I stated it meant that it was wrong, when I was not in fact discussing right or wrong but rather their ability to make the decision in the first place.

In a roundabout way, I also think my egalitarian and utilitarian definition of property responded to your point about the generality of information and whether I felt it was unethical to copy my things.

[Paul Eres]

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.

Why are we not having a theoretical debate? I'm surprised by how often people want to limit the conversations of others. "You can't talk about that, it's theoretical!" or "you can't talk about that, it's politics!" and the like.

As for copying money, it's been done and it's called inflation. If we went mad copying and had thousands of times the money we do now it won't make anyone rich, it'll just make money worth less.

Could you rephrase your second paragraph, though? I don't really understand what it means, it's a bit confusing. Tentatively my response to it is that you are positing technologies which could not, metaphysically, exist -- i.e. supernatural technologies, whereas I was only positing natural technologies. I know that quote about advanced technology seeming indistinguishable from magic and all that, but what you describe there seems more like "magic" than technology.

[Paul Eres]

re I Like Cake:

I understand what you mean, but when I said right I was referring to your own moral system. I.e. even if it were true that there's no such thing as objectively right or wrong acts, you still probably have your own beliefs about it, it would still be true that nothing in your history of IP explained why you believe it to be a wrong act, historically, to enforce copyright. Unless you believe that anything done by force is wrong or something like that.

As for being able to go to your house and copy anything I wanted to, that's easy to say when you didn't create most of the stuff in your house. For it to be a comparative offer to piracy, you'd have to have built your house yourself, written all of the books in it, built your own furniture, etc. -- copying something that someone bought from someone else doesn't hurt the person who bought it, it only hurts the people who sells it.

And (I know this is getting too hypothetical, but it's an interesting hypothetical) if this ability to copy any physical object existed, copyright would be needed more than it is now, because now only a small section of the economy depends on it, and a section mainly focused around entertainment. If you could copy anything, and there were no laws against doing so, the economy would consist entirely of services, and there would be less incentive (not none, but significantly less) to have a career in anything besides the services, which would reduce the flexibility and innovation of the species as a whole except in that area. There'd be less incentive to make new kinds of cars or new kinds of television or new kinds of cell phones or pretty much any good.

So to be consistent, one either has to be okay with that (I'm not, since I don't want to see the species end up like that), or one has to accept some social restrictions of copying -- which doesn't even have to be by force, it could be done through, like, extremely advanced DRM which links your genetic code to the game you buy or the car you buy or something, so that only you and your idential twin can play a game or drive a car registered to you (or probably some superior system). You don't necessarily have to use a monopoly on force to have copyright, an anarchist society could still have copyright of that type.

[muku]

Thanks I Like Cake, those two long posts (the first one in particular) were some of the more interesting reads containing big words I've encountered recently.

That's all.

[Chris Whitman]

As for being able to go to your house and copy anything I wanted to, that's easy to say when you didn't create most of the stuff in your house. For it to be a comparative offer to piracy, you'd have to have built your house yourself, written all of the books in it, built your own furniture, etc. -- copying something that someone bought from someone else doesn't hurt the person who bought it, it only hurts the people who sells it.

QUESTION ALTRUISM.

Seriously, though, I wouldn't have a problem with you copying stuff that I wrote or a house that I built were that possible. I think if our society had a more sharing attitude, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have ended up with.

On a more fundamental level, though, we're talking about the difference between you remunerating me for a lost item, in terms of a sale, versus you remunerating me for time I chose to spend on creating something. I chose to spend time making something, and now I want to see a gain from that, but I've already made the thing that I set out to make. Whose responsibility is it then to give me additional benefits for that? We make it the purchaser's responsibility, in our society, but I find that a hard position to justify when it comes to something which I can't consider property. It seems to me like I'm putting restrictions on someone else's behavior until I get something that I feel I deserve.

[charon]

Why are we not having a theoretical debate? I'm surprised by how often people want to limit the conversations of others. "You can't talk about that, it's theoretical!" or "you can't talk about that, it's politics!" and the like.

To be honest, I used the wrong word. I should've said 'fictional'. What I mean is that this discussion (as I see it) is about real life and its real problems, and bringing in 'fictional' structures is useless... Almost like if you told me your head hurts and I told you 'sure but if we had already invented this universal pill that heals everything I could've just used it on you now and it'd stop hurting'. Or something like that. I'm pretty sure the analogy doesn't work but it's heading in the right direction...

As for copying money, it's been done and it's called inflation. If we went mad copying and had thousands of times the money we do now it won't make anyone rich, it'll just make money worth less.

You're right, money cannot be copied.

Neither can plums.

Could you rephrase your second paragraph, though? I don't really understand what it means, it's a bit confusing. Tentatively my response to it is that you are positing technologies which could not, metaphysically, exist -- i.e. supernatural technologies, whereas I was only positing natural technologies. I know that quote about advanced technology seeming indistinguishable from magic and all that, but what you describe there seems more like "magic" than technology.

I don't think the ability to copy matter is any more or less metaphysical than lighting up or extinguishing stars - if anything the latter should be easier, in both cases what you need is extreme quantities of energy.

What I am saying is that: as long as you are incapable of copying matter, anything that you can copy will be regarded and defined as information. That is what the word information means. Only when you will have invented that machine will plums and other material objects become actual information. The meaning of words is not what things are, it is what they represent to us withing a certain cultural framework.

However what I also wanted to underline is that information survives transfer to other media. You can deliver exactly the same game on a cd, a dvd, a tape or even printed as bar-code then later scanned into your computer and convert it back to bits and bytes. This is also part of the definition of information - the text stays the same no matter what shape of letters or ink color you use to print it.

A plum, so far, is not information also because it cannot be comprehended by any known entity that is capable of comprehension - the database is simply too large. Or do you actually believe that the entire molecular structure of a plum can be comprehended by a person in the same way a source code of a program can be comprehended?

[mewse]

Hm.. Staying completely in character, I'm going to summarize that extremely long post as:

"Piracy is okay because I believe that anything which can be copied cannot be considered to be "property", and so morally shouldn't be protected.  Also, you shouldn't need my money to support your creation of this non-property anyway because we should be a more sharing community where you can get food and housing for free.  So I don't feel bad about not repaying you for the enjoyment I've taken from your work, because it's not like you're going to starve or anything.  Because food and housing should be free, remember?  I just finished saying that.  And now I'm going back into my happy place.  Aah, free pie.  Yum!"


 

[undertech]

In that case, patents and copyrights are also irrelevant! Let's imagine a society in which both are absent!

[charon]

 

[Chris Whitman]

In that case, patents and copyrights are also irrelevant! Let's imagine a society in which both are absent!

Hey... hey. Argument from consequence is not an ethical position.

[increpare]

Argument from consequence is not an ethical position.

That's what he said, before I showed him the diagram, we tried it out, and totally had an ace time with it.

[Paul Eres]

You're right, money cannot be copied.

Neither can plums.

But I wasn't saying money can't be copied. I said it can be copied, and that it's regularly copied, and that it creates inflation when it's copied. Both money and plums can be copied, it's just that we don't yet have the technology to copy plums except through their own self-copying technology.

I don't think the ability to copy matter is any more or less metaphysical than lighting up or extinguishing stars - if anything the latter should be easier, in both cases what you need is extreme quantities of energy.

When our technology exceeds the technology of biology we'll be able to copy plums just as easily as we copy games today. And it's a whole lot closer than being able to alter stars, I'd give it 50 years at most, there are people today working on the technology that would allow the molecular copying of every object, we know how to do it, it's theoretically possible, but igniting a dead star breaks the second law of thermodynamics. You don't need to break any laws of physics to copy a physical object molecule for molecule, but you do to bring to life dead stars. Maybe you just aren't that familiar with the state of developing technology, but building stuff on the atomic scale is one of the fastest growing areas of technology right now.

What I am saying is that: as long as you are incapable of copying matter, anything that you can copy will be regarded and defined as information. That is what the word information means.

What? Why is that what the word information means? I've never heard information used to mean anything that can be copied exactly until this thread.

Only when you will have invented that machine will plums and other material objects become actual information. The meaning of words is not what things are, it is what they represent to us withing a certain cultural framework.

That sounds a bit crazy to me. How can something not be information now and become information later, merely because of the development of some ability? So plums are information to civlizations more advanced than ours, and games are not information to civilizations not yet advanced enough to copy computer data?

A plum, so far, is not information also because it cannot be comprehended by any known entity that is capable of comprehension - the database is simply too large. Or do you actually believe that the entire molecular structure of a plum can be comprehended by a person in the same way a source code of a program can be comprehended?

You don't need to comprehend something for it to be information. Many games are so complex that no one person can comprehend them. No one can keep all of a game's source code, resources, etc., in his mind, at least for games with rule sets more complex than a board game. If we could, we wouldn't need computers to run them, we could just play them in our heads.

QUESTION ALTRUISM.

Seriously, though, I wouldn't have a problem with you copying stuff that I wrote or a house that I built were that possible. I think if our society had a more sharing attitude, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have ended up with.

On a more fundamental level, though, we're talking about the difference between you remunerating me for a lost item, in terms of a sale, versus you remunerating me for time I chose to spend on creating something. I chose to spend time making something, and now I want to see a gain from that, but I've already made the thing that I set out to make. Whose responsibility is it then to give me additional benefits for that? We make it the purchaser's responsibility, in our society, but I find that a hard position to justify when it comes to something which I can't consider property. It seems to me like I'm putting restrictions on someone else's behavior until I get something that I feel I deserve.

Haha, don't worry, I've read the complete works of Max Stirner, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand, so questioning altruism isn't a big deal to me.

I think a sharing attitude only comes when you have something to share, and piracy isn't about sharing your own stuff, it's about sharing someone else's stuff. I'm not saying it's not a good idea to let people copy things, just that it's a good idea to ask permission first, rather than saying anyone should be allowed to copy anything without permission. Sharing by force (and if you believe in IP, which as you mentioned earlier doesn't necessarily exist but doesn't exist any less than other social structures of property, piracy is a use of force) isn't sharing in the classical sense.

[Zaphos]

sharing in the classical sense.

And modern sharing is so much more confusing than classical sharing!  Relative sharing is so hard to relate to, and quantum sharing just makes my head hurt

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

If Naked Ninjas beat you up every time you pirated a game, Indies would be a richer place.
There was a novel series I read (shhhit I can't remember. It's got an orange cover and I think a suit of armor on it :S). Anyways, it's set in the future, there's this fringe planet, lots of corporations and crafty deal making. This one guild/group/corp, I think they're called Lucifer Bargaining or something, they specialize in killing people who break deals and contracts. Companies pay them 10k or sth to approve of a deal being made, and if anyone (not just the company parties, even a third party) proves to Lucifer that the deal has been broken, they kill whoever broke it. There's a really awesome scene where a hologram is talking to a guy explaining that he's going to kill him and the guy says "You're not real, and I'm inside a dozen layers of security". A few lines later it reads something like "The top 3 stories of the Meritime Apartment complex burst into flame.".

Well, murder is a pretty damn dirty and, not very cool (I'm not condoning it!) solution to piracy or the like. Getting beaten up by people who like beating people up though? It might be more of a deterrent then being fined -_-.

Or maybe you have to play some ridiculously stupid game while pop-ups lecture you: "If you keep stealing, this is what games will be like!"

Practical solution? Human honesty > DRM. For a legal solution, I think a team of people who beat you up would be damn effective.

[Paul Eres]

Eh, I don't think crime can end crime, just as war can't end war. A better way to fight piracy is non-violent resistance. Just refuse to pirate and hope people will follow your example. "Be the change you seek in the world" and all that.