This points to the problem at the root of any "intellectual property" law - it's not a tangible object. Historically, the notion of object itself derives from the notion of tangible, personal property, not the other way around. Originally property was divided into personal property and real property, the 'real' in the latter survives in the term 'real estate', and referred generally to land and structures on that land that could be rented out. However renting out 'intellectual property' as paywalled sites do, which is neither personal property (in the sense of a tangible object) or real property (in the sense of real estate) is a conflation of two inadequate analogies. Price is based on scarcity. Anything that can be infinitely reproduced for little to no cost will never qualify as scarce enough to command a reasonable price. As a result we need something completely different than copyright in order to compensate creators of ideas for their work.
This raises an interesting issue. My library card gives me access to various paywalled services. If I copy something off a paywalled service, what is the difference between that and copying a page from a physical book in the physical library? In both cases I "obtained access" via the library and copied a copyrighted page.
Never mind Mao, or Truman for that matter. Mao alone was responsible for a larger genocide than all religious conflicts in history combined. And he justified it specifically in the name of atheism. g
Given that you are entirely correct that hate crime laws do apply to majority groups, one has to ask why people like E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins etc. are not charged with hate crime? Of course the answer is that, like the police, they are on the side of the privileged, the wealthy and the powerful.
In the event you live in the U.S., do you realize there are still "sundown towns" in states like the Carolinas, where if you happen to be black you'd better get out of town by dark or face physical violence? Should people be allowed to promote or defend that? The problem in this situation is not hate laws as such but their application to protect people least in need of such protection, the people who are themselves the #1 perpetrators of hate crime and the #1 protectors of other perpetrators, i.e. the police.
Hate crime laws are meant to protect those still on the wrong side of violent systemic discrimination. For that purpose they are valid. Police officers are not on the wrong side of violent systemic discrimination, in fact they are one of the main perpetrators of it. Applying a law in a situation where it's radically inapplicable is a massive misuse of that law, but doesn't invalidate the law when used as intended.
"That's a different thing. Just because a murderer is capable of taking responsibility does not mean that being incarcerated is taking responsibility."
Yes, I agree with you. Holding someone responsible and taking responsibility are not necessarily the same thing.
"in what sense to hate laws not restrict free speech? Restricting the ability for people to say anything they like is the entire purpose of the laws. Note that I'm not arguing whether or not such restrictions are acceptable, just that they are undeniably restrictions."
The assumption in the way this is being approached is that free speech is an actual thing that can post facto be restricted. In the sense that is implicit, no such right to free speech exists, so there is no restriction placed on it by hate laws, or by privacy or defamation laws for that matter. Where free speech is a valid right it has generally trumped the others, where it isn't a valid right there's no restriction involved since there's nothing to restrict.
I was referring to the more meaningful argument that hate laws intrinsically restrict 'free speech' not the inane argument here.
Arguing that it is merely punishment is entirely equivalent to saying that since many murderers don't experience being responsible for their actions that the laws prohibiting it aren't based on society holding them responsible. Since capacity for responsibility has to be demonstrated in a criminal case, it is relevant from society's perspective. Switching to the criminals' perspective is just that, not an argument in any meaningful sense
Your argument hinges on the notion that the laws protecting free speech, in any of the countries involved in the various incidents, have ever been interpreted as protecting any kind of speech, and then had certain restrictions amended. This is simply not the case.
In the U.S. and Canada, as well as England and those European countries that in fact do have laws protecting speech acts, only certain types of speech acts have ever been covered. In the U.S. for instance only speech "contributing to public debate" is protected under the First Amendment.
“On the whole does [speech] enrich public debate? Speech is protected when (and only when) it does, and precisely because it does.” - U.S. Supreme Court
The type of absolutist 'free speech' being posited here is no more than a myth. It hasn't existed in any actual society in history.
Free speech doesn't imply freedom from responsibility for what is said, as all hate speech law recognizes. You have the right to say what you want, and you have to take responsibility for what you say. The two are not contradictory.
Intellectual property is not 'infinite', it is interminably reproducible at a marginal cost.
The problem is not infinite vs finite property, nor is it limited to IP in the first place. The problem, which is showing most clearly in IP at the moment, is in the notion of property itself. The following quote is full of the inanity of the common notions of property:
"Property that is infinitely reproducible is just like money. However, money is borrowed into existence and interest is paid on that process. Since more government resources are required to protect IP, therefore IP income ought to be taxed at a either a greater marginal rate or add new margins over the current margin of USD250,000."
First, money is not property, it is a measure of exchange. The substantialization of money as 'capital' is the biggest myth of our society. Most of the 'capital' or monetary accumulation cannot be realized in terms of either real estate, goods or services, and as such is for the most part fiction.
Second, anything whose value is dependent on something outside itself, i.e. a social or technological network of relations, can never be simple property. My iPhone is a perfect example, without continued support from the cellular networks and software developers it becomes almost instantly worthless. Thus anything other than a 'mere' thing can never be fully owned. The "internet of things" will create an analogous problem in physical products as we see currently in IP, except the problem is not interminable reproducibility, but the more fundamental loss of the commonly assumed meaning of ownership itself.
The above is not limited to IP or technology. The same is true even for real estate - without demand to utilize it, it isn't worth anything. Or to put it in more realistic terms, the less the median person can afford, the lower the value of the rentier property of the wealthy must eventually drop to, since at any higher price demand will disappear.
The resources necessary to protect property are as interminably reproducible as the 'property' itself. When property is nearly non-reproducible, the resources needed to protect it are extremely limited, as examples like Fort Knox or the Mona Lisa demonstrate. This limitation disappears further the more reproducible anything is.
The fundamental cost associated with non-intellectual goods is energy, if the ability to maintain a fictionally high cost of energy is lost, then non-intellectual goods may become as reproducible as intellectual goods.
Even without the latter, though, the notion we have of ownership is outdated. How many people are quite sure what they in fact own when it comes to an iPhone or a Kindle? The licensing on software at least is very clear: you don't own anything.
"People are only experts in one or at most two areas for the most part, leading to idiocy when they speak on other topiccs. Solution there, it seems to me, is to only trust polymaths."
"Technology isn't focused on the real problems in the world. Solution there, it seems to me, is to innovate more usefully."
Thing is, you're both wrong. Innovation in technology doesn't arise from need per se and in general. That fallacy comes from not looking at innovation as it is, in the particular and actual manner that it occurs.
Innovation is based on the manner in which technology itself appears. Technological things have an ontological oddity in that they can "stand-in" for technology itself. Other things cannot. The result is that any given technology produces the potential that innovation innovates to replace it with. What produces the features in the next iPhone, or produced the iPhone, iPad and various other things from the Apple Newton? That they dfemonstrate their own inadequacy in an immediate and tangible way and thus in a sense create the need to innovate.
Need in general has never been the prod to innovation, specific needs that first become thinkable only on the basis of an inadequacy of any given technology in realizing the essence of technology are always the prod of actual, particular innovations.
An interesting tangent to this discussion resides in something peculiar to things that are predominantly technological. The more technological a given thing, i.e. the more defined it is by the technology used versus use-value or branding etc., the more it acts as the outline or prefiguration of what will replace it by acting as a stand-in for an idealized device that will encapsulate technology itself. As a result innovation is the biggest spur to both innovation and the demand for that innovation in these products. The larger the subset of all-technology a device encapsulates, though, the less successfully any it can perform that subset, given an approximate equivalence of capability between vendors that choose to support more functions and those that support less.
To give an example, the Newton prefigured the Kindle, the iPad and the iPhone, but wasn't as successful at the specific functions of each, and as such implied its own replacements, leading to the innovations that created those. Neither the Kindle nor the iPhone nor the iPad successfully stand-in for all technology to the degree that the Newton did, but like the Newton, they point to it by encapsulating much of the underlying meaning of technology in a specific device. In this case, the splintering of platforms spurred innovation the most because the need for a more complete platform is felt more strongly while simultaneously the usefulness of each, their success at implementing the smaller subset, is enhanced. Because it's an interplay, however, every evolution of the splintered platform brings each fork closer to the other by incorporating more of the others' functionality.
Thus the main spur to both innovation and the demand for it is innovation itself. That spur is accelerated by an interplay in the market between generalizing and specializing. Since the adaptation of platforms tends to move towards completeness, eventually it opens a space for disruption, where a new specialization acts as an ex-aptation and re-splinters the framework.
You recognize that technological 'things' like e-books are not 'real things' in the old sense. Nor are the devices on which they are read.
Nor, in fact, were things ever property. That was the basic error of metaphysics. The attempt to continue it is doomed to failure.
It would be more useful to determine what, in fact, a thing properly is today, rather than pretending it's something it's not just to feel more comfortable.
The small town I was born in is rather famous for riots, in fact the original 'reading of the riot act' was performed there in 1853. As recently as 2001 during a riot over unemployment 21 people were injured, of whom 15 were police in riot gear (that's right, only 6 were unarmed civilians with no riot gear).
The problem is not a technology gap here any more than there (where the technology of riot gear is only on the losing side). It's a misunderstanding of reality itself, without which one would be unlikely to become a cop in the first place.
"Police" started as thugs paid by the wealthy to enforce the privileges of the wealthy. They haven't changed in this, nor will they. They are there to serve and protect the privilege of the privileged. The rest is pretense, dissimulation and outright lies.
For over two millennia the idea of 'real' has intrinsically meant 'property'. To be 'real' something had to have spatial extension, durability, etc. This no longer works, not just for so-called 'intellectual property' but for the technological itself.
The problem is that we have different determinations of what is being sold. For flickr et al, they are selling a print and a frame, what it happens to be a print of is irrelevant, since it makes no difference to them what they put on the print. To the originator of the image, they're selling a copy of the image. To the buyer, it's a mixture of both.
As paper with a picture on it and a frame it fits into the old idea of real, something that can be owned. As an interminably reproducible image it doesn't. You could look at an e-book in a similar way - I don't buy an e-book, I purchase a right to have it available on whatever device I want to read it on. The device is, like the printed image, a mixture of property in the old sense and not, since although it's tangible property, a simple software change in the distribution system can render it worthless.
Technological things, whether digital images, e-books or iPhones are not 'real' property in the old sense. Laws and licenses based on an outdated notion of what a 'thing' is only lead to more confusion. Trying to stuff it into the old category by calling it 'intellectual property' (or 'virtual' for that matter) also adds to the confusion.
The problem is that what 'matters', to both producer and consumer, is precisely what is non-material in the sense of a physical, locatable object. Materiality itself in quantum mechanics doesn't mean 'physical', it means mattering-to in the sense of relevant, important, or in the way we use material in the legal sense, as what is material to a case versus what is not relevant.
When we value something, we put a price on it, 'value added' in business calculates how much of what matters, is valuable, in a given product was contributed at various stages - conception, production, distribution etc. Until we learn to define a thing by what in it matters, what is of value, we can't properly assess where the value in a thing was added, thus we can neither price it properly nor distribute the proceeds fairly.
In this situation the distributor is claiming 100% of the value of the thing. From their perspective that makes sense, but people purchasing prints don't want 'any' print, they want a specific image. Thus the image 'matters' and is a significant part of the value of the thing. No, it doesn't cost the originator anything that more copies are made, nor does it 'cost' film companies if their films are interminably duplicated and distributed digitally at a cost of at most pennies per film. However if they are not compensated films won't get made.
The creative commons license, rather than having the two, should have only the non-commercial license - if nobody is making money off something, there's no question marks. The commercialization of technological 'things' needs to be rethought, since none of the modes in which we've tried to account for technology has worked, and it hasn't worked because we haven't bothered to properly think about what a technological thing IS in the first place, and how it can have value, and thus be valued and priced.
If something is indistinguishable, then by definition it is the identical thing. (this was proven by Leibniz, and is as true of electrons as it is of ideas - since electrons are identical, there can only be one electron that is actual in any quanta of time).
As a result your argument falls apart. The problem is that your underlying definition of 'idea' itself means 'exchangeable property'. We mistake things if we see 'property' as something added to a thing. Since the time of Plato property as something exchangeable has been the true meaning of both 'real' and 'thing'. The term 'real estate' brings out that meaning clearly.
Re: Re:
Re: Re: Paywalls and libraries
Re:
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Re: There's already laws to protect cops more then ordinary citizens
Re: Re: Re:
Hate Crime Laws
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Responsibility
Yes, I agree with you. Holding someone responsible and taking responsibility are not necessarily the same thing.
"in what sense to hate laws not restrict free speech? Restricting the ability for people to say anything they like is the entire purpose of the laws. Note that I'm not arguing whether or not such restrictions are acceptable, just that they are undeniably restrictions."
The assumption in the way this is being approached is that free speech is an actual thing that can post facto be restricted. In the sense that is implicit, no such right to free speech exists, so there is no restriction placed on it by hate laws, or by privacy or defamation laws for that matter. Where free speech is a valid right it has generally trumped the others, where it isn't a valid right there's no restriction involved since there's nothing to restrict.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Responsibility
Arguing that it is merely punishment is entirely equivalent to saying that since many murderers don't experience being responsible for their actions that the laws prohibiting it aren't based on society holding them responsible. Since capacity for responsibility has to be demonstrated in a criminal case, it is relevant from society's perspective. Switching to the criminals' perspective is just that, not an argument in any meaningful sense
Re: Re: Responsibility
In the U.S. and Canada, as well as England and those European countries that in fact do have laws protecting speech acts, only certain types of speech acts have ever been covered. In the U.S. for instance only speech "contributing to public debate" is protected under the First Amendment.
“On the whole does [speech] enrich public debate? Speech is protected when (and only when) it does, and precisely because it does.” - U.S. Supreme Court
The type of absolutist 'free speech' being posited here is no more than a myth. It hasn't existed in any actual society in history.
Responsibility
Infinite vs interminable
The problem is not infinite vs finite property, nor is it limited to IP in the first place. The problem, which is showing most clearly in IP at the moment, is in the notion of property itself. The following quote is full of the inanity of the common notions of property:
"Property that is infinitely reproducible is just like money. However, money is borrowed into existence and interest is paid on that process. Since more government resources are required to protect IP, therefore IP income ought to be taxed at a either a greater marginal rate or add new margins over the current margin of USD250,000."
First, money is not property, it is a measure of exchange. The substantialization of money as 'capital' is the biggest myth of our society. Most of the 'capital' or monetary accumulation cannot be realized in terms of either real estate, goods or services, and as such is for the most part fiction.
Second, anything whose value is dependent on something outside itself, i.e. a social or technological network of relations, can never be simple property. My iPhone is a perfect example, without continued support from the cellular networks and software developers it becomes almost instantly worthless. Thus anything other than a 'mere' thing can never be fully owned. The "internet of things" will create an analogous problem in physical products as we see currently in IP, except the problem is not interminable reproducibility, but the more fundamental loss of the commonly assumed meaning of ownership itself.
The above is not limited to IP or technology. The same is true even for real estate - without demand to utilize it, it isn't worth anything. Or to put it in more realistic terms, the less the median person can afford, the lower the value of the rentier property of the wealthy must eventually drop to, since at any higher price demand will disappear.
The resources necessary to protect property are as interminably reproducible as the 'property' itself. When property is nearly non-reproducible, the resources needed to protect it are extremely limited, as examples like Fort Knox or the Mona Lisa demonstrate. This limitation disappears further the more reproducible anything is.
The fundamental cost associated with non-intellectual goods is energy, if the ability to maintain a fictionally high cost of energy is lost, then non-intellectual goods may become as reproducible as intellectual goods.
Even without the latter, though, the notion we have of ownership is outdated. How many people are quite sure what they in fact own when it comes to an iPhone or a Kindle? The licensing on software at least is very clear: you don't own anything.
People are too single focused.`
Re: promoting the fallacy
Thing is, you're both wrong. Innovation in technology doesn't arise from need per se and in general. That fallacy comes from not looking at innovation as it is, in the particular and actual manner that it occurs.
Innovation is based on the manner in which technology itself appears. Technological things have an ontological oddity in that they can "stand-in" for technology itself. Other things cannot. The result is that any given technology produces the potential that innovation innovates to replace it with. What produces the features in the next iPhone, or produced the iPhone, iPad and various other things from the Apple Newton? That they dfemonstrate their own inadequacy in an immediate and tangible way and thus in a sense create the need to innovate.
Need in general has never been the prod to innovation, specific needs that first become thinkable only on the basis of an inadequacy of any given technology in realizing the essence of technology are always the prod of actual, particular innovations.
Technological Innovation
To give an example, the Newton prefigured the Kindle, the iPad and the iPhone, but wasn't as successful at the specific functions of each, and as such implied its own replacements, leading to the innovations that created those. Neither the Kindle nor the iPhone nor the iPad successfully stand-in for all technology to the degree that the Newton did, but like the Newton, they point to it by encapsulating much of the underlying meaning of technology in a specific device. In this case, the splintering of platforms spurred innovation the most because the need for a more complete platform is felt more strongly while simultaneously the usefulness of each, their success at implementing the smaller subset, is enhanced. Because it's an interplay, however, every evolution of the splintered platform brings each fork closer to the other by incorporating more of the others' functionality.
Thus the main spur to both innovation and the demand for it is innovation itself. That spur is accelerated by an interplay in the market between generalizing and specializing. Since the adaptation of platforms tends to move towards completeness, eventually it opens a space for disruption, where a new specialization acts as an ex-aptation and re-splinters the framework.
Technological 'things' are not property, not real in the metaphysical sense.
Nor, in fact, were things ever property. That was the basic error of metaphysics. The attempt to continue it is doomed to failure.
It would be more useful to determine what, in fact, a thing properly is today, rather than pretending it's something it's not just to feel more comfortable.
Riot Gear
The problem is not a technology gap here any more than there (where the technology of riot gear is only on the losing side). It's a misunderstanding of reality itself, without which one would be unlikely to become a cop in the first place.
"Police" started as thugs paid by the wealthy to enforce the privileges of the wealthy. They haven't changed in this, nor will they. They are there to serve and protect the privilege of the privileged. The rest is pretense, dissimulation and outright lies.
Idea of Property
The problem is that we have different determinations of what is being sold. For flickr et al, they are selling a print and a frame, what it happens to be a print of is irrelevant, since it makes no difference to them what they put on the print. To the originator of the image, they're selling a copy of the image. To the buyer, it's a mixture of both.
As paper with a picture on it and a frame it fits into the old idea of real, something that can be owned. As an interminably reproducible image it doesn't. You could look at an e-book in a similar way - I don't buy an e-book, I purchase a right to have it available on whatever device I want to read it on. The device is, like the printed image, a mixture of property in the old sense and not, since although it's tangible property, a simple software change in the distribution system can render it worthless.
Technological things, whether digital images, e-books or iPhones are not 'real' property in the old sense. Laws and licenses based on an outdated notion of what a 'thing' is only lead to more confusion. Trying to stuff it into the old category by calling it 'intellectual property' (or 'virtual' for that matter) also adds to the confusion.
The problem is that what 'matters', to both producer and consumer, is precisely what is non-material in the sense of a physical, locatable object. Materiality itself in quantum mechanics doesn't mean 'physical', it means mattering-to in the sense of relevant, important, or in the way we use material in the legal sense, as what is material to a case versus what is not relevant.
When we value something, we put a price on it, 'value added' in business calculates how much of what matters, is valuable, in a given product was contributed at various stages - conception, production, distribution etc. Until we learn to define a thing by what in it matters, what is of value, we can't properly assess where the value in a thing was added, thus we can neither price it properly nor distribute the proceeds fairly.
In this situation the distributor is claiming 100% of the value of the thing. From their perspective that makes sense, but people purchasing prints don't want 'any' print, they want a specific image. Thus the image 'matters' and is a significant part of the value of the thing. No, it doesn't cost the originator anything that more copies are made, nor does it 'cost' film companies if their films are interminably duplicated and distributed digitally at a cost of at most pennies per film. However if they are not compensated films won't get made.
The creative commons license, rather than having the two, should have only the non-commercial license - if nobody is making money off something, there's no question marks. The commercialization of technological 'things' needs to be rethought, since none of the modes in which we've tried to account for technology has worked, and it hasn't worked because we haven't bothered to properly think about what a technological thing IS in the first place, and how it can have value, and thus be valued and priced.
Re: Re: Re: Benefacio
As a result your argument falls apart. The problem is that your underlying definition of 'idea' itself means 'exchangeable property'. We mistake things if we see 'property' as something added to a thing. Since the time of Plato property as something exchangeable has been the true meaning of both 'real' and 'thing'. The term 'real estate' brings out that meaning clearly.
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