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[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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.