Re:NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs
by JoshTriplett on Thursday June 21, 2012 @10:27PM
(#4145118)
You're fixating on the same point over and over again, probably because it is the same point that every "intellectual property" advocate ever fixates on when this discussion comes up: "the original author has an inherent right to demand payment for future copies, and copying deprives them of those payments".
I haven't attempted to argue whether the original author (note my not accepting the term "owner") will be worse off from the copying. I haven't fixated on that point at all; it never once entered into my reasoning. The original author is a third party to the transaction of copying; they have no standing to object. Party A has data; party A lets party B copy that data. Neither party is the original author, so the original author has no standing in the transaction.
Please do not assume that people who disagree with you must not have put enough thought into it. I have put a great deal of thought into my position on copyright, and I came to a different conclusion than you did. Your analogy provides no new information to lead to any different conclusion. I do not appreciate you dismissively lumping my arguments in with "every nerd ever" and assuming I have not put my own thought into the issue.
> By your own definition, the shopkeeper is "rent seeking" when he charges more than his cost basis for the M&Ms.
No, my own definition had absolutely nothing to do with the cost basis for M&Ms or any other physical product. Please don't attack a strawman. I defined rent-seeking the same way economists do, namely attempting to extract economic rent from a third-party transaction:
'Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.' -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
That seems to describe copyright quite accurately, doesn't it?
We both obviously agree on about property rights over physical property. Thus, we both obviously agree that the owner of a bag of M&Ms has the right to charge whatever price they see fit, and nobody has the right to take that bag of M&Ms on terms the owner does not approve of. You keep bringing up your analogy, bringing up the obvious absurdity it implies about property, and then trying to jump from there to a conclusion about copying. We fundamentally disagree over whether an author has the right to control the copying of data. To accept your analogy as having any meaning in the context of copying data, I would have to accept the concept of copyright as a property right the author has over the copying of their data. Circular reasoning at its finest, disguised by way of an appealing-sounding analogy.
> Why do you accept one and not the other?
Why do you assume one implies the other? I have no particular reason to think of data as property, so I don't. Why should I believe otherwise?
I haven't attempted to argue whether the original author (note my not accepting the term "owner") will be worse off from the copying. I haven't fixated on that point at all; it never once entered into my reasoning. The original author is a third party to the transaction of copying; they have no standing to object. Party A has data; party A lets party B copy that data. Neither party is the original author, so the original author has no standing in the transaction.
Please do not assume that people who disagree with you must not have put enough thought into it. I have put a great deal of thought into my position on copyright, and I came to a different conclusion than you did. Your analogy provides no new information to lead to any different conclusion. I do not appreciate you dismissively lumping my arguments in with "every nerd ever" and assuming I have not put my own thought into the issue.
> By your own definition, the shopkeeper is "rent seeking" when he charges more than his cost basis for the M&Ms.
No, my own definition had absolutely nothing to do with the cost basis for M&Ms or any other physical product. Please don't attack a strawman. I defined rent-seeking the same way economists do, namely attempting to extract economic rent from a third-party transaction:
'Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.' -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
That seems to describe copyright quite accurately, doesn't it?
We both obviously agree on about property rights over physical property. Thus, we both obviously agree that the owner of a bag of M&Ms has the right to charge whatever price they see fit, and nobody has the right to take that bag of M&Ms on terms the owner does not approve of. You keep bringing up your analogy, bringing up the obvious absurdity it implies about property, and then trying to jump from there to a conclusion about copying. We fundamentally disagree over whether an author has the right to control the copying of data. To accept your analogy as having any meaning in the context of copying data, I would have to accept the concept of copyright as a property right the author has over the copying of their data. Circular reasoning at its finest, disguised by way of an appealing-sounding analogy.
> Why do you accept one and not the other?
Why do you assume one implies the other? I have no particular reason to think of data as property, so I don't. Why should I believe otherwise?