- The Netherlands didn't have patent laws in the decades that Edison was introducing his lamps
- Philips bought up the machines of competitors that Edison drove out of business through his patent monopoly and started producing lamps en masse in the Netherlands
- more than a few researches of said former competitors joined Philips' R&D crew, presumably partially out of spite, partially because it was the only place where they could continue their research
- this combination of experts and not giving a damn about patents resulted in really quick innovation at Philips' factories, meaning their light bulbs soon were both better and cheaper than anyone else's (of course, this only lasted until the light bulb manufacturers formed a cartel to introduce manufactured obsolescence).
- eventually the Netherlands caved in to international pressure to introduce patent laws. By then Philips was so huge that they started abusing it for patent trolling of their own.
There is a difference between a conspiracy theory and a well-documented conspiracy. The things the Phoebus Cartel did falls squarely into the latter, including the planned obsolescence.
> Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt.
What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.
But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits.
The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members.
Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market.
If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition.
It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.
> The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
The simple fact that they explicitly set a lower operational life target rather than setting a minimum target tells me everything I need to know about what they were trying to do. The additional fact that they fined manufacturers who exceeded the target doesn't leave much room for speculation.
If they had any interest whatsoever in efficiency as the driver, the targets would have been based on an efficiency target like lumens per watt rather than life expectancy.
Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature.
Then why did they need a secret agreement and fines to enforce it?
There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.
Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product.
It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be.
I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.
Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.
In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1]
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-...
Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though.
Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong)
https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why...
> There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products.
> I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.
A lot of my winter and nighttime electricity comes from natural gas.
50-60% of the heat energy in natural gas can get turned into electricity and make it to my house.
Then, it can be used to heat my ceiling a light bulb, where almost half of the heat immediately escapes my home. This is not a very good way to heat my house, versus my high-efficiency natural gas central air system that is more than 95% efficient in using the energy in natural gas to heat my home: it's about 3x worse.
Of course, even more efficient would be to use the natural gas to make electric power that runs a heat pump. That could be 200% efficient end-to-end.
Or, as the gas is already being pumped to your home, use the natural gas directly to power the expansion engine of the heat pump. Noisy, though.
Or use the gas for cooling in the same manner that a propane-powered refrigerator does. Although I have no idea how efficient that would be.
Resistive heat has efficiency ~1. That is better that almost any other heating source with exception of heat pumps and cogeneration. If we consider visible light as a separate gain, then light bulb has efficiency ~1.02
> Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection. So it heats whole room and occupants, but not air.
... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it. High efficiency natural gas heating systems are 98% efficient; compare to natural gas combined cycle plants that are ~60% efficient, plus a few percent more lost to transmission and distribution.
> with exception of heat pumps
Sure, that's the actually-efficient source of heat from electricity.
> For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection.
For incandescent bulbs, this is unrealistic. The bulb is quite hot and heats the air around it and the fixture.
Moreover, of the IR, a whole lot also strikes the fixture and is conducted into the ceiling.
Well yes. Statement 'efficiency of X' generally means 'useful work of X / relevant energy input into X on X boundary', not including efficiency of whole supply chain from primary energy source.
It does if you only consider the efficiency of the electricity -> heat conversion, but electricity generation itself is often not that efficient. It can be a lot more efficient to go fuel -> heat than fuel -> electricity -> heat.
In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze.
So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted.
The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.
I keep wondering when ASIC+5G "electric heaters" will be nearly given away to people.
You should be really cautious when using the phrase “conspiracy theory” especially when talking about a cartel for which we have plenty of historical evidences.
Of course the Phoebus cartel isn't responsible for all problems with light bulbs, and it didn't even worked as well as it was supposed to and not for as long as it was supposed to, but it is still a real thing.
Gravity is also theory - but there is so much evidence that a layman would call both a fact.
"To quote Wikipedia, for a given light bulb, "A 5% reduction in voltage will double the life of the bulb, but reduce its light output by about 16%"."
The intention is irrelevant - the point is that they conspired to manipulate the market, which is illegal.
If it's okay because someome deems the decision right, then robbing banks to feed poor people is okay too.
But there is a tipping point when international enforcement of copyright and patents starts to work in your favour.
Your suggestion that the west should be required to trade with countries which don't respect western IP policies is actually an imposition insofar as it imposes on western nations' freedoms of association, but allowing countries to determine their own trade provisions isn't an imposition.
I'll hazard an analogy: if I refuse to debate certain people on the Internet who don't adhere to my rhetorical standards, am I "imposing my regime on everyone else" (and thus I should be required to debate everyone who wants to debate me)?
EDIT: significantly revised to (hopefully) improve clarity.
Coercion requires a threat to an actor's rights. In the case of nations, these rights can probably be summarized as territorial integrity and political independence. While there are powerful incentives to cooperate, these incentives aren't coercive as they don't intrude upon territory or political independence (including the ability to decide with whom and under which terms one trades).
I think it's a fine thing to criticize the western legal framework of IP and you can argue that the west shouldn't export this legal framework; however, I don't think there's any philosophically consistent way to argue that the export mechanism (mutually beneficial agreements, basically) is "coercive" except perhaps to indict any kind of mutually beneficial agreement.
IP agreements are far more complex and are usually negotiated on top/after the initial agreement.
You think modern trade agreements can't be coercive?
Yes, you’re forcing them to abide by your “rhetorical standards”. The point of debate to help someone see your point of view. Nowhere does it require abiding by a certain process. If so, one could make the argument that only those that have not taken logic and learned the proper way to debate can engage in such things. So yes, you’re forcing people to play by your rules, or you refuse to play. It’s actually quite a bit childish.
Thats a terrible analogie.
To argue that being cut off from the global economy is 'freedom of association' is like arguing that selling cocaine to children is 'just free market' and "honest business"
Countries are not people - if the rest of the world stops trading with UK, 60 milliom people starve. In some countries, people will freese to death without fuel. West imposed moderate sanctions on Russia, and economy is already collapsing.
Ideally Russians would understand that sanctions are a consequence of their government's murderous invasion and that they represent a mild inconvenience compared to the plight of Ukrainians--if a given Russian can't muster the courage to protest (yes, I understand protests are illegal, which makes those who do protest all the more commendable) then I hope he can muster the courage not to complain about sanctions (similarly I hope westerners can muster the courage not to complain about high gas prices and so on).
The threat of cutting off trade is an attempt to 'twist the arm' of a country. In this case its justified, cool. (Although some of them like banning Russian cat breeds, seem questionable)
But then why are posters above pretending that many countries, which signed up this IP regime under threat fo being cutoff from trade, didn't do that under duress?
Because most people reserve "duress" for a threat to one's rights. In the case of nations, these rights are generally territorial integrity (basically, the right not to be invaded or attacked) and political independence (the right to self-govern, including to choose with whom and under which terms a nation engages in trade or other treaties and alliances). While there are certainly powerful incentives for cooperation, it's incoherent to argue that exercising one's right to self-govern is coercive and thus out-of-bounds.
That's because books were hand-made items, the industrial revolution hadn't begun, and there was no concept of IP.
>If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits
Well, yes. Ease of copying is a non-issue, because the real cost is in creation.
Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
And I make that point as someone who has seen multiple developers quit one particular space (music software) because piracy made it impossible for them to earn a living.
Pretending this is about what you want is simply narcissistic selfishness. There are two parties in these transactions, sometimes they're small independent developers and not giant corporates, and piracy has very real effects on their livelihood.
One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on.
No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft.
Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse.
It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either.
As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.
This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.
Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.
Err, nope. If I steal a bicycle from the shop around the corner there is one less bicycle the owner can sell.
If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.
This condition is simply not true in the majority of cases of piracy of digital items.
I worked in third world countries, I have a friend who is a single mother on a low wage job.
These are just /some/ examples where a sale of many digital items, software, media, etc. would provably not happen. There is no 'theft' because there was no income withheld from the creator. [1]
Proof: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/09/21/eu-buried-own-400000-stu...
[1] Whether they should be allowed to do that is a different matter – one detached from theft/economy. It's a philosophical/ethical issue and I agree with parent that the view we hold on these things is recent and shaped by conditions that frequently no longer apply (physical item vs digital one resp. cost of making a copy).
This argument never held up. By taking it, you admit it has value to you. Whether or not you agree with the asking price is incidental: you have to acknowledge you are taking something with some value and not paying for it.
I've pirated my fair share of software and media, and had my own software pirated. I'm not judging anybody for pirating software, but I am calling out specious self-justifications about doing so. You pirate it because it's cheaper and easier than paying for it.
It's not a matter of convenience, and it's not just because it's cheaper either -- piracy is the only way to actually get access to it for some people. Otherwise, it's just prohibitively expensive for them.
Sure, you could argue that that still falls under "because it's cheaper", but there's a difference between someone pirating because they just want to save money and someone pirating because they literally can't afford to get it legally no matter what.
And this doesn't cover stuff like software just being plain unavailable in some regions; I literally cannot get some software I use in university legally.
I hate it when people say that to dismiss things. Semantics is all about meaning. Without it we can't have a discussion. It's what's important about the words we say.
> You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for.
Right, which means it had enough value for you to copy it, but says nothing about whether or not it was valuable enough to pay money for it. And if it wasn't valuable enough to pay money for it, the author loses nothing in that particular instance of piracy.
Of course, that doesn't mean all piracy falls under this case, but it does seem important to distinguish between these things.
I always avoid ever saying anything like "that's [just] semantics", and I try to discourage others to, too, but in many of the situations where it shows up (including this one), there's nothing wrong with the complaint itself. When you hear someone swipe, "I'm not going to argue semantics with you", it generally carries an implicit accusation of an attempted change in subject. Consider:
Sara: "Nathan ate the clementines I bought from Oliver this morning!"
Oliver, Nate's friend: "I didn't sell her any clementines. The only fruit I've even touched today are these. They're not clementines. They're small mandarin oranges."
Does it matter that Sara can't distinguish clementines from ordinary mandarins? If there's a law that punishes you differently depending on whether you stole true clementines or not, then sure, what they actually are is materially relevant. Absent that, though, does Sara care what the definition is right now? No, and neither should anyone else. To even bring it up just distracts from Sara's actual complaint.
That is to say: if the argument starts as a semantic one, then semantic quibbles are relevant. ("The law says this about subcategory Y. Does what's at issue satisfy the definition of Y, or is it merely Z?") If it's not, though, then it's appropriate to call someone out on DOSing the conversation with a semantic rabbit hole (instead of being able to concede, "You say 'photocopier', while I say 'Xerox'", and then moving the fuck on).
Of course it's semantics - we're discussing the meaning of the word "theft", and deciding whether it applies to this situation! By denying the relevance of semantics you beg the question, assuming that the words must mean to everyone precisely what they mean to you.
"Owner", for example: your statement presumes the idea of software copyright, that someone who is neither party to the copying scenario can "own" the pattern of bits being copied, and have a right to demand payment for it. Well, that is the question, and the Russians clearly have a different point of view than yours.
Of course I share their skepticism: the idea of intellectual property seems to have brought about rather more harm than benefit, and I generally follow Proudhon's view on the subject of property.
It's similar to arguing ice cream is not fresh because it is made of frozen milk. You're trying to form a bad association that is completely illogical.
If Joe is selling cherries he grew on his cherry tree, and I start selling some cherries from my cherry tree for cheaper (or just giving away cherries), this does deprive Joe from some of the profit he would get from selling his cherries, because some people who would have bought some cherries from Joe instead of from me, but I am by no means stealing profits from Joe. I'm not taking his cherries. He still has his cherries. That's not to say that he isn't worse off. He is, of course, worse off. But (except if some other conditions hold) I haven't wronged him, and I certainly haven't stolen from him.
(Ftr, I don't actually have a cherry tree, and do not grow any food.)
Now, if Joe is selling copies of a file, and I am giving away copies of the same file, well, it seems like a similar situation. One difference is that in the case of the cherry tree, both Joe and I are putting in the work to create the product, namely, by raising and maintaining our respective cherry trees, and harvesting the cherries,
while in the case of the computer file, it may be that Joe put in a lot of work into creating that file in the first place, and I did not, and so if I were to sell copies of the file, that would seem quite questionable.
Now, if I were to distribute the file Joe made and is selling, the reason this would be bad is probably a combination of "This makes Joe worse off, and he should be rewarded for the benefit he provided others, and also society decided on that basis that I shouldn't do that, and unless there is an overriding moral obligation to do otherwise, I morally ought to follow the ethical rules that society has established."
This is, I'll admit, somewhat similar to at least some of the reason it would be bad for me to steal some of Joe's cherries and give them away (though with less of the reason being "because of the ethics society decided" part than in the case with distributing the file.)
Though, one difference in this case is, Joe could do other things with the cherries other than sell them, and by stealing them, I am depriving him also of that option. This doesn't happen in the case of distributing the file. Nor would it happen if I had a magical duplication beam which I used to make duplicates of his cherries.
I think this difference is an important part of the concept of theft.
The concept of theft, I expect, arose substantially before money, and I imagine also before significant trade.
The concept of "Hey, that's mine! I need that!" is fairly basic, and is based on "If another person takes it from you, you don't have it anymore." .
Now, of course, socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should. I think it is best to use different words for them, because I think it makes sense to keep the concepts separate (though related).
Do you personally feel that wage theft isn't theft?
Same hypothetical, except the cherries Joe picks aren't actually Joe's—they're Jill's. Jill owns some farmland where cherries grow, and she lets people pick them. They do so on the premise that cherry pickers get paid by Jill on Tuesdays. Joe moves to town and picks cherries there all week and then hands them over. Jill says "thanks" and then slams the door in Joe's face. Does this fail to meet the threshold for the appropriate use of the word "theft"? Joe has not had anything taken from him[1]—certainly not any physical property[2] he could do anything else with or ever plausibly argue "That's mine" to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear—because the cherries were never his.[3]
1. 30e7f23b81e476dd7afc8f4e23401aed004567526f8dc58ca97fc3339fe5d2bf
2. d38b2ef315ebb47a44a28abf7884c7fecf05b11f0d34a875fffc89ce4f955e81
3. 188e9eee6f835b8a6bd2f927de75006cd87215d10dee9a0225e320f3ee6d4b65
P.S.: What's with the hashes?
¹. It seems to also be used in Spanish, but mostly in an American context as a calque from English.
Property being about land and geographical boundaries is one of the most common misconceptions that gets shattered in the first few weeks of a first-year course on the subject in law school.
> Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.
Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity so that people can produce things that are valuable but not physically scarce so that they can buy those things that actually are scarce.
(Emphasis mine.) Who said that? Certainly not me.
Acts of charity happen all the time, and we are doubtless better off for them. But those are a choice. It doesn't mean it should be the only choice.
> Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity
You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.
Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise? A realistic example I've lived, is that purchasing the software/movie or whatever copyrighted material is impossible due to its unavailability in the local market, the absence of payment methods to purchase it online and/or the heavy cost compared to the cost of living in most parts of the world.
Frankly it doesn't matter whether the person would have purchased the item or not if they couldn't make their own copy. Going down that path would outlaw all competition, or even just choosing to abstain from purchasing anything. There is nothing inherently wrong with making choices or taking actions which result in other people receiving less income than they might have in some other hypothetical scenario. What matters is that they still have all of their own property whether the copy is made or not—they are not made any worse off than they were before.
I don't think this analogy works very well here. What if the alternative is that the potential buyer would just never have purchased the product in the first place? Then there is simply no exchange that would have occurred, and the seller's "money in their pocket" was never going to be any different in this case.
To think about this analogy some more...Is it theft if one walks into a store, sees something interesting that they remember for their own benefit later, but they choose not to make any purchases? Does that deprive the shopowner of income in some way that the potential buyer should be made responsible for?
This isn't to argue that copying software (or music, or movies, and so on) is universally good or bad here, just that the theft analogy really has some serious problems with it.
I pirated Ableton Live until v5. I've paid for the full suite every release after that. If I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't be paying for it now. This is pretty much ubiquitous in Ableton users, and I'm pretty sure that it applies to many other high end software packages. Photoshop would probably be the best example, but Office, Autocad and many others would have a similar customer base.
If I pirate something, how do I _very literally_ take money out of the pocket of the creator?
My act of piracy does not "very literally" cause any amount of money to be removed from the IP owner. And if the poster meant to invoke the more colloquial form of literally, they damn well shouldn't have qualified it with "very."
As far as "theft" is concerned: software, including recorded music and films, has zero marginal cost of production. The software industries therefore have the potential to generate extreme profits, unrelated to the risks and costs of development. Intellectual Property laws are needed to protect these extreme profits.
Incidentally, I'm not aware that the term "Intellectual Property" was in use before about 1985. Copyright infringement, in particular, wasn't a crime before about that date; enforcement was by civil suit, and if you didn't make any money from infringement, then the court's award couldn't be greater than zero.
Copyright infringement was most definitely a thing before then and damages could be awarded even if you had no income from it. See statutory damages. Really the only thing that changed with computers was the ability to make perfect copies, thanks to the data being digital. Prior to that, the problem was somewhat mitigated by the analog nature of it and that by the time you got to the 3rd or 4th generation copy the quality had significantly degraded.
It's not. The problem lies with the way the respondent rephrased the original. The original, as written ("very literally ends up with less money"—not to "very literally take money out", as the respondent chose try to use in a bizarre and underhanded setup), is in perfectly reasonable accord with the correct use of the word "literally"...
Patenting a "ground flower X and leaves of plant Y in alcohol with sugar added" was not a thing back then.
Recipe as secret is not compatible with modern standards like peer-review / FDA approval, etc ...
I personally don’t know a single software pirate who would have actually bought the things they’ve pirated. Mostly they just would have gone without the software, probably using some free alternative instead. There’s no value lost by piracy here, because there was no potential to capture value from these users in the first place.
Pirates are often teenagers without a single dollar to their name to spend on software, but all the time in the world to explore shady websites for warez. Later, once they have money, they buy software!
Thats a very slippery slope
Freeing slaves was theft
When Ghandy led subjects of India of the British Empire to the sea to mine salt, that was theft - mining salt was illegal for them
Using electromagnetic spectrum without a lisence is theft
Are you using the oxygen molecule I produced without paying? Is your house casting a shadow on my land, blocking sunlight i am entitled to?
What about ownership of airspace, 'ownership' of international waters and economic exclusive zones, ownership of orbits in space, ownership of the atmosphere and 'ownership' of pollution?
All ownership is a social construct - piracy is a symptom of the overall system being crap
I have less money than if you sent me some right now. You not sending me money is clearly not theft.
Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.
Remember, before the 15th century less than 5 people could do long division in Europe. Try solving middle/high school math equations without the number 0 and using only roman numerals, you will understand the problem very quickly. For this and many other reasons, most of the intellectual heavy lifting was done outside of Europe. It took 400 years or so to collect information and catch up to the rest of the world.
Patents last 20 years. So no.
>Patents last 20 years. So no.
That's a domestic choice that most countries had no say in, there is no global consensus on how long patents should last.
In the US, congress has the right to grant and extend patents for however long it wishes (and has done so many times in the past).
So yes, to my original point.
Yes there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
Also, you're confusing patents and copyrights. Patents have not been extended for very long lengths.
If it's not voluntary, I don't consider it global consensus.
Joseph Stiglitz makes a similar point...
"TRIPs imposed on the entire world the dominant intellectual property regime in the United States and Europe, as it is today. I believe that the way that intellectual property regime has evolved is not good for the United States and the EU; but even more, I believe it is not in the interest of the developing countries."
But is this incentive adequate in modern society? I would argue it is worth revisiting. A lot of the science that is done around the world is already funded by governments with no guarantees of patent success, so it is clearly possible. Open source software also shines a light on the willingness of people to create amazing things for everyone...
The printing press was over 200 years old in 1700, like 99% of the nearly a billion books in Western Europe were printed.
When I repair an iPhone instead of buying a new one, Apple ends up with less money in their pocket. Repairing an iPhone clearly isn't theft, so this argument is clearly fallacious.
When a country signs a treaty, it is agreeing to something, presumably because it sees some benefit in it. It is entering into a kind of contract, from which there are presumably multiple benefits to all participants. Nothing is being imposed on anyone. It is being freely chosen by the governments that participate.
If a Nigerian politician signs a treaty while receiving bribes or election support from a Western or Chinese oil company, that doesn't mean "a country" sees a benefit.
If a country signs a treaty at a risk of being ostracized by the world, it's taking the lesser of two evils.
And if you take a child bride from a war zone, it's a free exchange, with both sides seeing benefit. However, that doesn't mean it's fair or non-coercive. Power imbalances can allow for pretty nasty, unfair deals.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread with examples, both modern and going back 200 years.
Not the case at all. Treaties are sometimes compromises and in sometimes coercion under the diplomatic guise of choice.
Otherwise there would be no need for a treaty and nations could choose to enforce others' values of their own free will.
Exceptions don't refute the general case.
> Otherwise there would be no need for a treaty and nations could choose to enforce others' values of their own free will.
The point of a trade treaty is for each party to formally affirm that they will abide by the other's conditions. This is necessary irrespective of coercion.
Are you asked if you are Swiss citizen when you open a bank account in America?
Per FATCA treaty you should be but that isn't happening because the mighty power the US holds over anyone dealing with USD. If a US bank doesn't share its Swiss tax cheats nothing happens. If a Swiss bank hides them they get taken to the cleaners and can loose to do business with USD which is a death blow for any bank.
Did you sign a contract to be aligned with whatever the individuals running your country decide that you should do?
"""
In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the
importation of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another
nation's market with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the
drug was sold in India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This
is called "parallel importation," and it is generally permitted under
international trade law and is specifically permitted within the European
Union.
However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than
opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association
characterized it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to
permit compulsory licensing or parallel imports." 3 Through the Office of
the United States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa
to change the law — and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the
USTR listed South Africa for possible trade sanctions.
That same year, more than forty pharmaceutical companies began proceedings
in the South African courts to challenge the government's actions. The
United States was then joined by other governments from the EU. Their
claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical companies, was that South Africa
was violating its obligations under international law by discriminating
against a particular kind of patent — pharmaceutical patents. The demand
of these governments, with the United States in the lead, was that South
Africa respect these patents as it respects any other patent, regardless of
any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South Africa.
We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt
patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access
to drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care
infrastructure matter more. But whether patents are the most important
reason or not, the price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and
patents affect price. And so, whether massive or mar- ginal, there was an
effect from our government's intervention to stop the flow of medications
into Africa.
By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States
government was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not
like wheat (if they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United
States intervened to stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information
about how to take chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those
chemicals into drugs that would save 15 to 30 million lives.
"""
Don't use the products whose creators' values you don't agree with.
It's even easier in software with its widespread and thriving open source ecosystem.
Yet you don't seem to promote that. Instead, you seem to promote the idea that people who want stuff should be able to impose THEIR values on the creators of that stuff.
If you make a coffee table out of wood from a sustainable forest, does it belong to you? What causes it to become personal property?
If you make a coffee table out of code from a second life engine, does it belong to you? What causes it to not be personal property?
What if the coffee table you make in VR is made from "wood" tokenized on a blockchain that cost money to generate the electrons for?
Your examination concludes that things made from your invention and/or labor rendered in atoms are property, but from your invention and/or labor rendered in electrons are not? Or one form of labor has a right to earn a living, the other does not?
Until we achieve a post-scarcity world -- where life-time is included in scarcity -- that thinking seems both wishful and facile.
A coffee table made of code can be used by an infinite number of people in an infinite number of virtual living rooms. Everyone who wants to use it is able to, and everyone can have one in their living room without conflict. Since there is no conflict, there is no need for anyone to decide its resolution.
> What causes it to not be personal property?
My baseline is that things are not property, so justifying the absence of property is a foreign concept to me. I'm curious why people would tend toward assuming property and then rationalizing away property in certain contexts. The assumption of property has consequences so enormous that I cannot authentically assume it as my default. Again, really interested to hear what made people chose that as their default.
You could say that about a lot of things. It's pretty irrelevant to the question of if something should be thing or not.
But that fact should serve as a caution to people wanting radically change it (e.g. abolishment): most of us only have direct experience with the problems created by the solution, but not the problems the solution solved.
> I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way.
But likewise, we shouldn't compromise our values either. I'm not denying that "corporate lobbyists" have a had a pernicious effect on IP law, but my understanding is that most of this "imposition" has been in the context of the quid-pro-quo of trade deals. It's totally legitimate for a country with a Western-style IP system to decide it doesn't want to give some trading partner favorable trade terms if that partner refuses to recognize IP.
The US copyrights regime was mostly imposed on my country in 1994. What do you mean we have no experience with the problems it solves?
(Any honest discussion at that time would at a minimum bring shorter terms.)
Some people want to just abolish IP (e.g. patents and copyright) because they've read some articles about abuse by patent trolls or copyright terms that are too long. They're not thinking about (say) the author who spent a large amount of effort writing a successful book, just to have to continue working a regular job, while all the profits go into the pocket of some corporation(s) that are under no obligation to pay the author because copyright doesn't exist so they have no special rights. Or the books that never exist because the author never writes a second book, because it's too difficult and stressful to juggle writing with a job, and they can't live off the proceeds of their previous work.
Legal rights give power to the little guys. Take away those rights, and it'll mainly be the big guys who benefit.
When thinking beyond the means (economical based incentive) and skipping straight to the end (advancement of human technology and culture) - One particularly huge country (China) has already been doing an accidental experiment for a long time: taking western IP and patents with a pinch of salt, and just using them pretty freely (as far as I understand it), at least at a national level.
I find the existence of that duality in the world really interesting, and it's not exactly one sided because the west has been exploiting China and Asia in general in their own way. On one side you have economically based idea and technology creation incentives with ever increasing restrictions; on the other you have all the benefits unleashed without restriction, yet without significantly affecting the incentive for the source (I'm sure some "not rich enough" people will complain it does but frankly the economical mechanism have already been pushed too far).
They are going to come after you if you try to sell them to MAKE money or tell others how to make it.
Maybe you should be.
Personally I am of the stance that IP rights are inherently unenforceable once a work is released to the public, especially in the digital realm where information copies itself freely. Knowledge and art should be freely given and received and IP laws are directly opposed to this. There are other ways to monetize almost all forms of IP if that is the desired outcome.
I know, that's happened a lot in the past, but aren't we moving towards recognising that was wrong and figuring out more respectful forms of cultural and commercial interchange?
The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?)
The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation.
Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least.
A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.
This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
Culture isn't proprietary to a group, and these groups aren't objectively demarcated in any way. To even say "Risotto belongs to the Italians!" is to make statements on who Italians are, and pretend that this is some immutable, objective group, and that for some reason, there is this magical doorstep that if you carry Risotto over it turns it bad. It's when the corporation pretends to "take" this cultural heritage as a marketing facade that they're appropriation something nobody owns, to then turn a profit from it.
SO, I apologize for my mangled point. Culture isn't proprietary. Languages and food and customs and songs and stories travel. This is what makes human dynamism. Cultural appropriation is the act of trying to take possession of it. The very act of copyrighting something communal is the problem.
I love that line and it makes perfect sense.
What does it mean to own stuff? Clearly more entity classes than individuals can own stuff—much IP is owned by companies, a legal fiction of an individual owned by people in the class of shareholder with generous but limited dispositional power held by people classed as company officers.
Some cultures have established foundations and such to own things, like the Free Software Foundation or the Scientologists. Some fishing rights are granted to certain cultures which pre-existed contemporary government.
Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces.
And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza.
However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.
No.
By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair".
It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination".
Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does.
Linguistics(?) is hard...
Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists.
To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.
First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.
Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it.
Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms.
Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach.
Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here.
I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.
It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.
Well, that is the question, isn't it? You consider mimicry to be a form of theft; others disagree.
Why don't we all just keep our technology to ourselves. Or does that not suit russia because russia can only steal everyone else's technology?
When participating in a global economy, other participants expect fair dealing. What do you think will happen now with Russia? We'll assume they are going to try to steal our tech. Instead of trading with them, we won't do business with them at all whenever possible. We learned this the hard way with China. And their internal incentives to create IP also disappear - who would want to spend time building an app in Russia when the guy next door is now allowed to steal it and sell it as its own? Nobody.
You're going to see much more draconian DRM. User experience will suffer. Less tech will be created. People will avoid doing business with Russia (and we already see that happening, and it was already true to an extent before they started murdering Ukrainians). And Russia's economy will continue to fail.
We'll outsource all our manufacturing to them, and freely participate in technology transfer along the way, because we want access to the market? /s
Whereas if they pirate Russian software or software they can buy, there is an impact to the bottom line.
As a result it can be seen as a logically consistent position.
So if you take goods from a store that doesn't exist is it stealing?
A lot has happened in the past 300 years…
Okay, so what is your suggestion here? Make it legal to make the copies? You know that that will only make more companies implement more aggressive DRM, right? Because, if you can't legally stop people from copying your software, you have to stop those who copy it from being able to run it.
This is also why cloud applications with web interfaces are on the rise. They don't have to worry about piracy because it's literally impossible unless people break into their servers, which I'm sure no one is going to argue isn't a crime.
Without legal teeth, they can’t do that with offline consumables. They haven’t been able to even with their current draconian laws.
The client needs to consume the information, and so is in an inherently advantageous position to copy.
> cloud applications
Exactly. And these are popular even with their legal shenanigans. These laws have never helped the consumers at all.
The fact that we sat on our hands while China stole our IP for two decades is a contributing factor to why Russia felt emboldened to attack the Ukraine.
I've recently dropped the "the", because I understand some people object to it. Is this because "The Ukraine" referred to a geographical region, while "Ukraine" is the name of a country?
The point is many entered treaties to respect and recognize foreign IP.
And you know why? Because they eventually become technologically sophisticated enough that they want their IP recognized and respected.
You act like this was imposed by the West when it entered into voluntarily.
Where it gets worse is when it gets enforced by some giant behemoth as just another tool to maintain dominance and essentially forbid competition. It's just extracting money for the sake of having more money.
For example, Lay's (owned by PepsiCo) forbidding farmers in India from growing the same potatoes that Lay's uses for chips because PepsiCo owns a patent on the seeds. There's basically no other rationale behind doing stuff like this besides "but my money!". Like, the rest of the world should just cave to a $227B US conglomerate on everything they want?
At that point, IP isn't even about up keeping freedom or justice or whatever, it's just another way to enforce a colonialism-esque class hierarchy via capitalism.
It's like having the KKK join your cause.
It's about not doing what they agreed for when they signed these contracts which are now terminated.
This "X is a social construct" meme has degenerated from meaning "it could have been designed/evolved differently" to "it doesn't matter, because it is relative so it might as well not be" - it's a terrible meme. There is a very big difference between claiming something is very wrong AND it follows an arbitrary decree or custom that was unjust, and claiming that whatever is socially constructed is also wrong. Pretty much every aspect of social life is a social construct. Justice is a social construct. Not killing each other over the slightest disagreement is a social construct. Pretty much every boundary, every aspect and definition that gives people meaning is a social construct.
The case for somehow breaking up IP laws regionally, I don't think it's a very good one because it would effectively cut out entire regions from many developments. But "it's just a social construct" - that just doesn't make any case either way.
BTW having separate, insular knowledge is what the current situation evolved from. Mutual certification and validation - say Rospatent being integrated into the Madrid System ( https://rospatent.gov.ru/en/activities/international_coopera... ) - is just a way to remove insularity and reduce costs for smaller IP owners without big pockets behind. What Russia is doing here is basically reneging accords, not some valiant pro-IP-freedom effort. This is a bit like US prints pirating the hell out of every British (+Empire) author after US independence. Just getting away with it, not some Libertarian movement.
Great argument, Putin.
It’s easy to look beyond the months of negotiations that precede trade agreements when not involved. Or buy into certain narratives crafted to pressure US negotiators, that the US is “forcing itself” on nations. But elected officials from other nations signed on the dotted line after, ostensibly, long debate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22999487 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472906 (July 2019)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Isn't everything a human construct? What does that even mean?
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0...
You're whole statement hasn't suggested any better approach and is flawed in it's core.
That aside, this article isn't about IP either...
What matters is whether then you want to trade with the countries who's IP you are using. At that point it becomes extremely unfair to the country that developed the IP.
If China steals industry secrets that took billions to develop, and then sells those same products for cheaper (because they get the IP for free) in the west, is that fair?
I don't like your rhetoric of the west using force. There is no force or legal requirement if you don't engage with the west. But of course everyone wants to engage with the west, but at that point you have to come to a mutually agreed trade and legal pact. This is normal. This is also voluntary on the part of both countries.
The tools have gotten more nuanced, but they're still at play. There are quite a few books on the ways the West subverts democratic structures in Africa in order to be able to extract natural resources. China is now getting in on this game too.
We still use militaries to protect Western trade interests, especially around key shipping lanes like the Panama and Suez canals.
But if you want to speak about it in a historical context, I would ask you explain what you mean by the "west" and the west forcing their values.
And I would note you are speaking to someone who's country's been invaded by mongols, ottomans, and russians within the last 1000 years. They all seemed to want to "force" their values on the people living here.
Is this a western thing?
In the previous commenter's context the West forcing its ideals informs his/her comments. In your context the mongols, ottomans, and russians forcing their ideals informs your comments.
You're both probably right.
At the same time, it's ludicrous to tell a, say, Zambian, that no one forced anything on them in the "modern context". When we know we forced everything from their laws, right down to their very borders onto every nation in sub-saharan africa. We even forced them to sign the very treaties we're saying were not forced on them. The leaders who didn't sign, we killed, and put a new leader in place who signed.
Hungary and Poland can test whether they can get outside of the EU's legal jurisdictions and whether they can lead decent lives doing that.
Just to reitirate, ultimately these things are actually voluntary. But they come with consequences. And it's not like these western values of trade, and individual rights are really western any more, when Japan and Korea has had success with them, arguably China was well (before Xi).
But there are consequences if you want to go it alone, and it's questionable whether other economic systems actually work as well.
I think as the West attempts to keep some of these nations in Western orbit, we need to more openly acknowledge some of the issues our system has caused them in the past. Then we should lay out for them a credible reset that compares favorably to their Chinese opportunity. Absent that, the Chinese will continue to gain outsized influence across Africa because Africans will continue to make decisions that really are just common sense in the current context.
Larger point being that we can't simply claim we have not forced anything on people and these places are acting irrationally. From the perspective of a lot of places outside of the West, things have been forced on them, and they are beginning to take what are, from their perspective, perfectly rational actions to rectify these issues.
- Mongols did not force ideals or cultures on the people they conquered. If you surrendered and paid tribute, you were free to do as you pleased.
- The Ottomans were mixed; you were pressured but not forced. Non-Muslims, for example, paid higher taxes.
Most long-lived empires let people do their thing. The Romans lasted for a millennium, and finally collapsed when (and in part because) they tried to impose Roman values on everyone, and that turned out to be more expensive than the empire could sustain.
These also aren't historic; I posted examples from the 1800s, but also recent ones.
The comment about Korea and individualism is just crazy too; Korea is probably the most deeply Confucian culture left.
Pointing out all of the historic and cultural errors would be an essay longer than the comments.
And what you say about ottomans is also wrong. You should speak to historians in the affected countries.
Mongols - perhaps you are right, if you were left alive, which was mostly women and children. So I guess for them they got to live free in the mongol empire...?
The level of ignorance here is staggering. The Mongols were pretty straightforward. For the most part, they would politely ask you to surrender. If you did, you were left alone to live as you saw fit, as part of a trade network, Mongol-friendly governance, and paying tribute. No one got killed. If you fought and lost, there was wholesale slaughter. Everyone got killed. There were a few in-betweens. There was no scenario like the one you're describing. The in-betweens might, for example, have skilled workers and artisans carted off.
I won't get into a back-and-forth about the Ottomans. You have no idea my background, and you presume too much. You have no idea who I am, or whom I've spoken to.
But Russia is specifically saying you can pirate software from countries supporting sanctions i.e. Western software made under Western ideas of IP and an expectation of profit for their work. If Russia wants to allow pirating Russian software, then I don’t see the issue. But to buck another country’s legal framework is a step over the line. If Russia wants to use Western software (Photoshop, Microsoft Word, cloud providers), they need to respect the Western terms of use.
Take the .cat domain for Catalan. It is Catalonia’s right to make the terms of use of that domain such that the user must support Catalan translations. If you don’t want to agree by these terms, it is not your right then, to say “well that’s a Western idea of cultural integrity and I don’t agree with that and I’m gonna use the domain anyways.” It’s their domain, their software, not yours.
Other countries should be free to figure out other ways of doing this.
Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).
I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way. There are fundamentals and externalities -- the war on Ukraine is wrong, and we should intervene. However, on something like having IP law, let alone breaking it up into copyrights/patents/trademarks, let alone stating durations and contexts of all of those, this just seems like overreach.
I feel like this is one of those places where corporate lobbyists managed to change people's values in a way which is quite unfortunate. People learn about IP theft in elementary school, it gets integrated into UN human rights documents, and something which is really culturally-dependent is viewed as universal. It wasn't viewed this way when I was a child.
Even little things make a big difference. We've gone from "copyright infringement" to words like stealing and theft. They're fundamentally different concepts which were intentionally mixed up. If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).
I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws. I'm just arguing we shouldn't force our IP regime on everyone else.