[LINK] In other news....

[Stilgherrian]

On 26/6/07 8:48 AM, "Brendan Scott" <brendansweb at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> Stilgherrian wrote:
>> On 25/6/07 1:32 PM, "Rick Welykochy" <rick at praxis.com.au> wrote:
>> If you make a copy of someone's copyrighted material without paying, you're
>> depriving them of whatever profit they would have made had you acquired that
>> copy according to the license they want you to follow.
> 
> The difficulty with this argument is that it is not applied generally.  When
> you use a house some builder built years ago, no one expects you to pay a
> licence fee to the builder for that use.   The reason is property.  It would
> be possible in theory to create a system where builders never actually sell
> anything, just licence it, but this would undermine lots of things that make
> our economy work (imagine if everything which you currently "buy" was actually
> licensed, and every time you used it you needed to work out if your use was
> complying).   There are now job categories which fall under the heading of
> licensing compliance.  Some people claim to specialise in understanding
> Microsoft licensing.  What do these jobs contribute to the economy?
> 
> The legislature has chosen to create a category of rights which apply post
> sale of a thing.  In doing so they are undermining the concept of property.

The core of the problem is that the law was designed when "information" or
"intellectual property" or "content" or whatever you want to call it had to
be instantiated as a physical object before it could be distributed, and so
this content became confused with the container.

Jimmy and his band record a song with four people, but it takes an army of
executives, distributors, retailers and promoters to get that music into the
ears of listeners around the globe. Along the way, the $19 for the "music"
is actually $1 for the music and $18 for the physical container and the
minions.

Now that the content can be poured from one container to another and piped
around the world at (almost) zero cost, the people in between the producer
and consumer, who made all the money, and fighting tooth and nail to hold
onto that revenue stream.

(Of cou7rse, way over-simplified there. There *are* still minions in the
middle, they're called telcos and computer manufacturers.)

Stil


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