what I contend is the pervasive cognitive dissonance in the 'geek' community (of which, to be clear, I am part) that somehow they should have the right to download whatever they want because there is at the moment no effective way for creators to enforce their will on what happens to their creations.
For now, I hope we could reserve IP for Internet Protocol only.
I think the problem is that there are any rights involved at all. To be precise, I think nobody should have a right to download whatever they want but I also think that nobody should have a right to control copying either! They both seem ill-wrong, somehow.
I don't think we can possibly formulate our world based on rights. Going to the extreme, everyone has the theoretical right to not become killed and yet lots of people end up killed all the time by individuals, institutions and nations of much varying moral capacity and the world still goes around. So rights seem to be philosophical ideals: lots of should-nots and ought-not-to's but the actuality often doesn't reflect the rights at all. More so, often worst things happen when we try to be the judges of these rights ourselves.
I feel that there's no such thing as intellectual property. I don't know why exactly but I just know things are going terribly wrong with it. One indicator is the copying vs. stealing argument: we have lots of collective experience about the latter while the former has never been considered a major problem until the last few decades.
We have only recently built a commercial mechanism that allows certain individuals in a minority to make huge amounts of money by the music and movies they create, and keeps the rest a.k.a. the majority out of the picture, except for paying for that all. This is a new thing alltogether and concerns only a fraction of the whole population so it's funny to see the "problem" having grown out of proportions.
Imagine you've made up a song in the morning and you sing it aloud when you go outdoors gardening. Somebody walks by the street, hears the song, learns it and starts singing it along the street. All neighbours learn the song from him and soon the whole block is singing that song. Somebody will grab their guitar and go to the town marketplace to sing that song to everyone else, and he receives some money from it when people drop coins into his hat.
Is that a collateral wrongdoing going on there or just something that happens and nobody can't control? Major criminal activity or people having fun? Was the song writer deprived of lost sales or potential income by this ruthless copying? What if he never wanted any money? How could the other people know that? How could the song writer protect his intellectual property: by never singing his songs? What if he writes his songs out of love for music instead? Can we assume he did? What if he didn't care about it at first but becomes greedy and wants money from all his neighbours the next day, does he have a right to ask that money?
Who knows. Nobody knows.
The whole intellectual property thing is far from a clear-cut case and I consider it an open question at worst and a non-issue at best.
For now, I hope we could reserve IP for Internet Protocol only.
I think the problem is that there are any rights involved at all. To be precise, I think nobody should have a right to download whatever they want but I also think that nobody should have a right to control copying either! They both seem ill-wrong, somehow.
I don't think we can possibly formulate our world based on rights. Going to the extreme, everyone has the theoretical right to not become killed and yet lots of people end up killed all the time by individuals, institutions and nations of much varying moral capacity and the world still goes around. So rights seem to be philosophical ideals: lots of should-nots and ought-not-to's but the actuality often doesn't reflect the rights at all. More so, often worst things happen when we try to be the judges of these rights ourselves.
I feel that there's no such thing as intellectual property. I don't know why exactly but I just know things are going terribly wrong with it. One indicator is the copying vs. stealing argument: we have lots of collective experience about the latter while the former has never been considered a major problem until the last few decades.
We have only recently built a commercial mechanism that allows certain individuals in a minority to make huge amounts of money by the music and movies they create, and keeps the rest a.k.a. the majority out of the picture, except for paying for that all. This is a new thing alltogether and concerns only a fraction of the whole population so it's funny to see the "problem" having grown out of proportions.
Imagine you've made up a song in the morning and you sing it aloud when you go outdoors gardening. Somebody walks by the street, hears the song, learns it and starts singing it along the street. All neighbours learn the song from him and soon the whole block is singing that song. Somebody will grab their guitar and go to the town marketplace to sing that song to everyone else, and he receives some money from it when people drop coins into his hat.
Is that a collateral wrongdoing going on there or just something that happens and nobody can't control? Major criminal activity or people having fun? Was the song writer deprived of lost sales or potential income by this ruthless copying? What if he never wanted any money? How could the other people know that? How could the song writer protect his intellectual property: by never singing his songs? What if he writes his songs out of love for music instead? Can we assume he did? What if he didn't care about it at first but becomes greedy and wants money from all his neighbours the next day, does he have a right to ask that money?
Who knows. Nobody knows.
The whole intellectual property thing is far from a clear-cut case and I consider it an open question at worst and a non-issue at best.