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Re: "My dad is a pirate."
From: |
Tim Smith |
Subject: |
Re: "My dad is a pirate." |
Date: |
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:30:41 -0800 |
User-agent: |
MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b2 (Intel Mac OS X) |
In article <slrnfr9ftc.ei3.jedi@nomad.mishnet>,
JEDIDIAH <jedi@nomad.mishnet> wrote:
> >
> > Are you playing word games because you don't have a real point to make?
> >
>
> No, he is making a genuine legal and economic distinction.
Sounds like he's nit picking language to me, for two or three reasons.
First, in ordinary English usage, people commonly use terms like theft,
stealing, etc., to apply to situations beyond just taking of real
property. E.g., person X casually mentions an idea to coworker Y. Y
presents the idea to their boss, omitting to give X credit. X is likely
to say that Y "stole" his idea. And how many times have Linux advocates
said that Microsoft stole this or that from some free software project,
or that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox?
If you are writing a brief, then yeah, you need to say "violated the
exclusive right of distribution given to the copyright owner in 17 USC
106". But we aren't writing briefs here.
Second, copyright, and some other areas of Intellectual Property law
*purposefully* give intangible property some aspects of real property.
(That's why it is called intellectual *property* law, I suspect). The
economic justification for IP law is that intangible goods do not have
the necessary properties to allow a free market to determine optimal
production and consumption of them. This is called a market failure.
Since production and consumption of IP is considered to be a good thing,
we want to fix this market failure.
There are basically two ways to do that. One is to say "to hell with
the market", and have someone decide what should be produced and how it
should be made available for consumption. This system has been used in
the past and worked well in some cases. E.g., in the Renaissance, you'd
have the local lords or princes or whatever who would become patrons of
artists and musicians. Things have changed a bit since then, and that
doesn't seem really practical now. Not many people want the government
deciding what musicians get funded!
The other way to fix the market failure is to artificially (e.g., by
law) give art and music the same attributes that real property has, so
that the free market can better handle it.
If you do that, the free market can then decide which musicians get
funded. There is a downside, however. The price of music is higher
under this system than it *should* be from an economics point of view.
Economically, the cost is supposed to be close to the marginal cost of
production, which is almost zero. So, you get underconsumption.
(A hybrid approach has also been suggested. The government maintains a
fund for musicians, and people are allowed to freely copy music. The
government keeps track of what music people are consuming, and uses that
to pay musicians out of the fund. Consumers then get their music at the
economically correct price (free), but musicians get paid according to
what the public wants, so it is the market, not the government, that
determines what gets made. The big problem with this approach is
deciding where that fund comes from. The most common suggestion is a
tax on something that correlates reasonably with music consumption, like
blank media, or MP3 players, or speakers. The hybrid approach is, I
think, all things considered, the most sensible approach for music).
Anyway, since copyright law is *designed* to make copies of music act
somewhat like real property, I don't see anything wrong in casual
conversation with using terms related to real property when discussing
artificially real property like copies of music.
--
--Tim Smith
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", (continued)
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", address@hidden, 2008/02/14
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", Johnny Rocket, 2008/02/14
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", cc, 2008/02/14
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", cc, 2008/02/14
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", cc, 2008/02/14
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.",
Tim Smith <=
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", Beth Kevles, 2008/02/16
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", address@hidden, 2008/02/16
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", mark . kent . is . owned, 2008/02/16
- Re: "My dad is a pirate.", Rex Ballard, 2008/02/21