This whole movement was born out of the frustration that there was no democratic way to influence or change IP policy because the established party system effectively shielded it from public access. Elections were won with other topics like taxes, economy, etc, and IP policy was strictly kept quiet about, smuggled under the public radar, then finally arranged with the content industry behind closed doors (remember ACTA being declared a "threat level national security" issue to shield it from public scrutiny). Effectively, IP was handled as something "too important to let the public vote on it".
The problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers.
> not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.
And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet:
If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a compromise, a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer worse off due to the lack of these goods.
Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods:
Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory.
If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win.
At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome.
(Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
It is by no means well proven that having IP at all is overall beneficial. So rather than saying we definitely need it, it is quite possible we would be better off with none.
What do Landes and Posner say?
(in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003.
Conclusion, p422, s3.)
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
and:
"It is a reasonable surmise [as well] that some core patent and copyright protection is welfare-improving."
('surmise' meaning of course: 'a supposition that something is true without having evidence to confirm it')
One of the things I like about economics is 'revealed preferences' - how people act rather than what they say.
Via 'look inside this book' on Amazon, the book's copyright is Copyright 2003, "all rights reserved". Apparently they didn't feel strongly enough about laxer IP to fight their publisher for publishing it under different terms.
I don't think the current situation is ideal, but without IP, how would people be compensated for creating?
One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way. You couldn't create a lot of things that require a big payback without some form of IP. This is presumably why they "surmise" that we're better off with it than without it.
It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods", although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.
That it's difficult is without a doubt; in part because it becomes a question of what the ideal level of production of various "IP goods" is.
I would reaffirm my point that the simplistic answer of throwing the whole thing out, though, risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way.
We're already limited by IP. The proposition of IP is that the best way to encourage people to engage in creative works is to prohibit them from engaging in creative works that involve other people's creative works.
That seems ridiculous at face value to me. That's not to say I think it's universally false - reality is often annoyingly counter-intuitive that way - but it only makes sense when there's a dearth of people able and willing to engage in creative pursuits, or when disseminating ideas and works is prohibitively expensive. Both of those conditions may have been true a century or even arguably two decades ago - but not today.
It does bring babies and bathwater to mind, though. In the name of encouraging creativity, we prohibit particular forms of creativity.
It'd be one thing if we had good reason to think that it continues to have its intended effect - but we don't. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of unintended, negative effects that inevitably come with trying to impedance-match a reality full of cheap technology that can quickly spread information with a system that attempts to limit access "for your own good".
> It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods",
True. Strictly speaking, I don't think there would be any "IP goods" per se, just technological goods. But I think most businesses wouldn't be affected much at all - I could see, for example, a software vendor like Oracle continuing to do almost exactly what it does today, indefinitely, even in the absence of IP. Well, sans a bunch of lawsuits.
(Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing, or maybe some sort of DRM - but that's not the point. Ultimately, access to updates would be Oracle's "teeth" for discouraging that behavior among their customers. So they'd fire a good subset of the legal department, and instead hire more developers to write new features in order to retain customers. Sounds like more resources allocated to creative, productive work to me.)
> although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.
This is the biggie. IP has been around much longer than the transistor, and given the enormous potential upsides, it seems obvious to me that we should have gone on an IP 'sabbatical' maybe 10 years ago, just to see what happens. After all, it's entirely possible that the overall creative output of our society wouldn't be affected at all, leaving "just" the advantage of ridding ourselves of one more legal labyrinth.
But the best case is much more exciting - what if creative output rises dramatically? I certainly don't think we can rule it out without giving it a shot.
And sure, there's a worst-case too; maybe every job related to IP simply disappears and we end up with a generation of college grads with no jobs. Fine, it can be undone. I'm not morally opposed to IP - well, I guess I do find it distasteful - but I'm definitely morally opposed to wrecking the economy. No one's suggesting we just say "screw the baby" if it turns out IP is a good thing.
But right now, we just don't know, and we should find out. On balance, it's absolutely worth trying - so why haven't we done it already? Not that I'm actually asking, we all know that there's a long and dreary list of mundane political and human-nature reasons why it hasn't happened, and won't be happening anytime soon.
> (Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing,
That's very germane. It means that they would earn significantly less money. 10,000 times less, in that particular instance, which is a lot.
Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company. That's enough to pay a team of, say, 10 engineers and a few other people, which is, uh, significantly different than the number of people they have now.
So you'd have to fire massive numbers of people at companies like Oracle. But not just them - think of all the scientists at drug firms. Their income would be right out the window too. Many best selling authors would have to work some sort of day job to earn money to live on, and thus would be able to write less. Movies? Maybe independent artsy ones done on a shoestring would survive. Performed music might do ok, but recording would probably be an afterthought to market shows. And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing? Out with them too.
I don't think your numbers add up to 'more creative output', myself.
> Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company.
So if I'd said 100,000 servers, you'd argue that Oracle would be a $350,000 company, with maybe two employees? Heaven forbid they be 8-core servers (assuming per-core licensing) - I guess their workforce would be a leg.
It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow. In reality, their business would proceed almost exactly as it does today: they'd make a pitch, give a quote for however many servers the client needs, and many hours of consulting later, they'd bill the client. Their enforcement mechanism would be continued access to expertise and updates. Except when things get ugly and lawyers get called, this is what already happens.
I'm not familiar with Oracle's practices, but I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of software vendors already deal with non-payment by stopping services before they go the legal route - if they go that way at all, given how expensive it can be for the far more numerous non-Oracles.
> It means that they would earn significantly less money.
This is incorrect, for the same reason that millions of song downloads don't actually suggest untold billions would have gone to artists in the absence of the downloads. It's just not true. People or companies that need a software vendor's expertise will pay for it; that fact stays true whether IP is perpetual, eternal, and physically impossible to violate, or totally absent.
Naturally, we went straight to the OT part. Fun.
Pharma is the other big IP problem that always comes up. And, yeah, the current business model wouldn't work, and there are tough problems - drug development is expensive, clinical trials are expensive, basic research is expensive (although already largely publicly funded, yet the fruits somehow end up privately owned again, but that's further OT...), and no one is willing to take that kind of risk unless they can get millions of relatively well-off consumers (read: middle-class Americans) to get their insurance companies to pay large amounts for the finished product for maybe 15 years. So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months? What data do we have that patents are a good way of funding drug research, and that the current patent length is anywhere near optimal? Why should different drugs be restricted for roughly the same period of time? None of these questions can be answered today, because the fact that pharma is funded by IP is a historical accident, not some kind of finely-balanced common-good formula.
And let's take a different perspective: we have entities that 'everyone' - not really, but close enough for our purposes - pays into, who in turn pay pharma companies above-production-cost prices for high-initial-cost drugs.
It really resembles a privately-run taxation -> R&D system, except with highly perverse incentives like high marginal profits on each new prescription you can get signed up. It's no surprise, then, that so much of the funding (insurance premiums) goes to PR instead of R&D.
No one is suggesting that we do away with pharmaceutical research, or fire all the scientists. But I would like it if there was no longer an incentive to spend my premiums to convince other people that they should have their insurance companies fund another cycle of PR campaigns, with however much R&D can be squeezed in on the side. That's not going to change without fundamentally changing how pharma is funded, and if it's funded by high-price drugs that cover the expensive phases, no matter how you slice it, the perverse incentives remain.
It's a tough problem. And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.
> It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow.
Oracle's income is proportionate to the number of licenses people buy, with some revenue from services thrown in too. I don't know the percentages of each one in the total, but to state that drastically fewer licenses would not lead to much less revenue seems somewhat disconnected from reality.
> So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months?
Because, like I said, it's a compromise. We as a society pick a number that best balances the needs of IP producers and consumers. In theory. In practice, I don't think the numbers are ideal right now, and should be rebalanced. However, there's a big difference between some rejigging and throwing out the system in its entirety.
> And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.
Democracy is a messy, inefficient system too: it just happens to be better than the alternatives. If you don't have a superior system to propose, throwing out the existing one seems like a very ill-conceived experiment.
People really need to shake themselves out of the clutches of this IP myth -- for that is what it essentially is. It is not even well-founded for an old, material-oriented industry, let alone for informational.
And you cannot invent something like the internet and not expect the economics of information-goods production to be eventually utterly transformed. It changes not only the kind of info produced, but how it is, and the ways consumers and producers can interact. So why keep looking backwards? We should be prompting, encouraging, or forcing companies to develop new ways to do things now.
Are we doing things the same way as before the industrial revolution? Is anyone really going to propose that by ditching old practices and adapting to the full capabilities of the greatest info tech in history we will see a drop in production? Does that really not sound ridiculous?
Let's talk concretely rather than hand waving about 'inventing new ways of doing things' - the technology certainly has changed a lot of things, but how will people make money to pay rent, eat food, and things like that if the fruit of their labor is not remunerated? That seems like the sort of basic economics that doesn't change. Look at the 'public good' article: those are the known ways of funding goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
Distilled, it looks something like this: if what you produce is not scarce, it has no exchange value. In order to have something to exchange, you have to possess some scarce good. For instance, bands could potentially get by with concerts, which have a limited availability in terms of seating. What are authors supposed to do? Movie makers? Bands that really work best in the studio?
"Many saw the idea of blocking such sites as censorship of the internet"
Annoying inaccuracy! Of course pirates are not in favor of child pornography, nor of not blocking such sites. The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system that enables them to block any site, without even being required to give reasons and no possibility of appeal against it.
Naturally even now if illegal content is discovered on a German server, the government/police can make the hoster remove it. No magic switch needs to be given to the police.
> The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system
The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence.
This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying.
”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.
For an international audience who might not be that familiar with German party politics, "Christian-led" might be a bit misleading… Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit.
I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence on Von Der Leyen's side. But however it started, the fact that this "protection" can easily be extended certainly was a big reason for its support.
I remember that in the beginning it was all about "due to the rise of child pornography on the internet", but when an official inquiry was made (by the FDP, if I remember correctly), they had to admit that they had no such data.
> Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit.
There are not German and Swedish cases. The media industry efforts cross national borders. The quote being from a swedish MEP doesnt make IFPI's case somehow different.
> I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence
If she actually mentions "child pornography and copyright infringement" one by another in one and the same sentence on several occasions, then it crosses the border of obvious intent, at least IMHO.
The industry's efforts cross borders, but we're talking about different governments. I understood what you meant, but especially if you're not following the link some readers here might be misled a bit.
They have "Christian" in their name, although I suppose most of them are not as extreme as the bible belt Christians. I admit I tend to think of them just as "the conservative party" although to be honest I find it dreadful that they call themselves Christians.
The straight comparison to your average bible-thumping US ultra-conservative this might invoke is the reason I "complained" a bit. The argument back then was purely on a "Think of the children!" basis, it's really not usual for German politics that a "But Jesus..." cry comes up.
Also, the whole "Christian" component of the two parties (CDU/CSU) would be quite baffling and shocking to some bible belters, as we're talking about "Christian socialism" here, all based on a popular notion from the 19th century, backed by a Papal encyclical. Looking for a "third way" beyond conservatism or straight-forward socialism – which almost makes them by definition more "lefty" than e.g. the US Republicans… Think of it as "hyphen" ("christian-socialist") instead of comma ("christian, socialist"). Or as "neither" instead of "both" (I certainly wouldn't call Bavaria's CSU "socialist" – then again, as an American I might).
This historical perspective curbed my annoyance about those dreadful "C" letters a bit. Well, this and the fact that even compared to some Christian moderates in the US, the hard-core Catholic loons here come out rather saintly…
I am loving this wake-up call to the established parties of Germany, whose elected representatives are bailing out countries and banks left and right against the will of their electorate. The only parties which seem to represent the will of the voters (on the surface) in this regard are the left and the extreme right. But for historical reasons, many Germans will never vote for them. So the pirate party fills a real void (mainly for youths): as a protest party for disgruntled voters, and as a party which gets the internet and the importance of free/cheap access to knowledge and education.
I honestly don't know what to think about the PP. I want them to be more than a one-hit wonder but they seem to not have much of a political agenda other than "legalize warez" and "don't censor the net".
I hope their success stirs up the other parties a little.
I think PP shows how badly prepared are current democratic systems to handle a wider diversity of opinions. Politics got less ideological and more pragmatic, and that leads to a wider diversity of opinions, which the current systems aren't prepared to handle. The concept of all encompassing parties doesn't scale; we need a way for people to show their support for very targeted movements like PP without feeling they're wasting their vote away.
Very true indeed. Personally I could never join one of the many parties as they all have some opinions I just can't agree with. This really makes voting quite hard. In Switzerland we now have http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB were you fill out a questionnaire and then get some politicians matching your profile. While certainly not perfect, it is already a good start.
huh... doesn't it shows the opposite of that?
I mean, if the pirate party was able to achieve a remarkable success doesn't that mean that the political system works? At least in the german case.
Most of the characters involved in the politics game are not doing their job, I guess that's what you mean?
I think they achieved that result despite the problems with the political system. Remember this was just a local election; while getting a seat in Berlin is obviously important, it's not exactly the national parliament. My guess is that people felt this election was unimportant enough that they could 'waste' a vote making a point.
I never liked the choice of the word 'Pirate' for a political party even if I support some of their motives.
Though 'pirates' means freedom (doing whatever you want) it also means killing, robbing and taking hostages (Somalia, Indonesia).
Unfortunately the German "pirates" managed to kill the whole idea even before they were voted into parliament.
As far as I know, the original idea by the Pirate Parties was to have an opinion in the areas that unite their members (online privacy, copyright, etc.) and to leave the rest to the other parties.
Unfortunately the German Pirate Party now also tries to deal with all kinds of topics such as economics, education, gender politics, etc.
Maybe they've managed to get some additional voters that way, who don't care about the original topics that much. But at they same time they've made theirself unelectable for their original target group, as I guess that there are many people who don't agree with their opinions.
They are also about transparency of the whole political process and just being an alternative to the lobby-ridden decision making. Especially the German pirate party also has a strong position on privacy. I think they are still doing a good job on those things, especially when looking at the other parties.
32 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 87.0 ms ] threadThe problems arose when IP was started to be enforced against the public, to stop the free flow of information because few bits of this information have (undemocratically) been declared someones "property". Now the public was not only excluded from having a say in the prescious IP policy, they have become the primary _target_ of the IP policy, without any democratic way to do something about it. Millions of people have been threatened and sued, and to decide whom to sue, mass surveillance and data retention laws have been introduced. Even child pornography was misused as a vehicle to enable new intrusive surveillance laws with the intent to later apply them primarily to file sharers.
> not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.
And not only being against IP establishment, but literaly created from scratch to fight it. See Rick Falkvinges Google Tech Talk about the creation of the Piratpartiet:
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI
Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob...
Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.
If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win.
At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome.
(Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)
What do Landes and Posner say? (in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.)
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
and:
"It is a reasonable surmise [as well] that some core patent and copyright protection is welfare-improving."
('surmise' meaning of course: 'a supposition that something is true without having evidence to confirm it')
Via 'look inside this book' on Amazon, the book's copyright is Copyright 2003, "all rights reserved". Apparently they didn't feel strongly enough about laxer IP to fight their publisher for publishing it under different terms.
http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Structure-Intellectual-Proper...
I don't think the current situation is ideal, but without IP, how would people be compensated for creating?
One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way. You couldn't create a lot of things that require a big payback without some form of IP. This is presumably why they "surmise" that we're better off with it than without it.
It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods", although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.
That it's difficult is without a doubt; in part because it becomes a question of what the ideal level of production of various "IP goods" is.
I would reaffirm my point that the simplistic answer of throwing the whole thing out, though, risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We're already limited by IP. The proposition of IP is that the best way to encourage people to engage in creative works is to prohibit them from engaging in creative works that involve other people's creative works.
That seems ridiculous at face value to me. That's not to say I think it's universally false - reality is often annoyingly counter-intuitive that way - but it only makes sense when there's a dearth of people able and willing to engage in creative pursuits, or when disseminating ideas and works is prohibitively expensive. Both of those conditions may have been true a century or even arguably two decades ago - but not today.
It does bring babies and bathwater to mind, though. In the name of encouraging creativity, we prohibit particular forms of creativity.
It'd be one thing if we had good reason to think that it continues to have its intended effect - but we don't. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of unintended, negative effects that inevitably come with trying to impedance-match a reality full of cheap technology that can quickly spread information with a system that attempts to limit access "for your own good".
> It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods",
True. Strictly speaking, I don't think there would be any "IP goods" per se, just technological goods. But I think most businesses wouldn't be affected much at all - I could see, for example, a software vendor like Oracle continuing to do almost exactly what it does today, indefinitely, even in the absence of IP. Well, sans a bunch of lawsuits.
(Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing, or maybe some sort of DRM - but that's not the point. Ultimately, access to updates would be Oracle's "teeth" for discouraging that behavior among their customers. So they'd fire a good subset of the legal department, and instead hire more developers to write new features in order to retain customers. Sounds like more resources allocated to creative, productive work to me.)
> although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.
This is the biggie. IP has been around much longer than the transistor, and given the enormous potential upsides, it seems obvious to me that we should have gone on an IP 'sabbatical' maybe 10 years ago, just to see what happens. After all, it's entirely possible that the overall creative output of our society wouldn't be affected at all, leaving "just" the advantage of ridding ourselves of one more legal labyrinth.
But the best case is much more exciting - what if creative output rises dramatically? I certainly don't think we can rule it out without giving it a shot.
And sure, there's a worst-case too; maybe every job related to IP simply disappears and we end up with a generation of college grads with no jobs. Fine, it can be undone. I'm not morally opposed to IP - well, I guess I do find it distasteful - but I'm definitely morally opposed to wrecking the economy. No one's suggesting we just say "screw the baby" if it turns out IP is a good thing.
But right now, we just don't know, and we should find out. On balance, it's absolutely worth trying - so why haven't we done it already? Not that I'm actually asking, we all know that there's a long and dreary list of mundane political and human-nature reasons why it hasn't happened, and won't be happening anytime soon.
But so it goes.
That's very germane. It means that they would earn significantly less money. 10,000 times less, in that particular instance, which is a lot.
Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company. That's enough to pay a team of, say, 10 engineers and a few other people, which is, uh, significantly different than the number of people they have now.
So you'd have to fire massive numbers of people at companies like Oracle. But not just them - think of all the scientists at drug firms. Their income would be right out the window too. Many best selling authors would have to work some sort of day job to earn money to live on, and thus would be able to write less. Movies? Maybe independent artsy ones done on a shoestring would survive. Performed music might do ok, but recording would probably be an afterthought to market shows. And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing? Out with them too.
I don't think your numbers add up to 'more creative output', myself.
So if I'd said 100,000 servers, you'd argue that Oracle would be a $350,000 company, with maybe two employees? Heaven forbid they be 8-core servers (assuming per-core licensing) - I guess their workforce would be a leg.
It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow. In reality, their business would proceed almost exactly as it does today: they'd make a pitch, give a quote for however many servers the client needs, and many hours of consulting later, they'd bill the client. Their enforcement mechanism would be continued access to expertise and updates. Except when things get ugly and lawyers get called, this is what already happens.
I'm not familiar with Oracle's practices, but I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of software vendors already deal with non-payment by stopping services before they go the legal route - if they go that way at all, given how expensive it can be for the far more numerous non-Oracles.
> It means that they would earn significantly less money.
This is incorrect, for the same reason that millions of song downloads don't actually suggest untold billions would have gone to artists in the absence of the downloads. It's just not true. People or companies that need a software vendor's expertise will pay for it; that fact stays true whether IP is perpetual, eternal, and physically impossible to violate, or totally absent.
Naturally, we went straight to the OT part. Fun.
Pharma is the other big IP problem that always comes up. And, yeah, the current business model wouldn't work, and there are tough problems - drug development is expensive, clinical trials are expensive, basic research is expensive (although already largely publicly funded, yet the fruits somehow end up privately owned again, but that's further OT...), and no one is willing to take that kind of risk unless they can get millions of relatively well-off consumers (read: middle-class Americans) to get their insurance companies to pay large amounts for the finished product for maybe 15 years. So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months? What data do we have that patents are a good way of funding drug research, and that the current patent length is anywhere near optimal? Why should different drugs be restricted for roughly the same period of time? None of these questions can be answered today, because the fact that pharma is funded by IP is a historical accident, not some kind of finely-balanced common-good formula.
And let's take a different perspective: we have entities that 'everyone' - not really, but close enough for our purposes - pays into, who in turn pay pharma companies above-production-cost prices for high-initial-cost drugs.
It really resembles a privately-run taxation -> R&D system, except with highly perverse incentives like high marginal profits on each new prescription you can get signed up. It's no surprise, then, that so much of the funding (insurance premiums) goes to PR instead of R&D.
No one is suggesting that we do away with pharmaceutical research, or fire all the scientists. But I would like it if there was no longer an incentive to spend my premiums to convince other people that they should have their insurance companies fund another cycle of PR campaigns, with however much R&D can be squeezed in on the side. That's not going to change without fundamentally changing how pharma is funded, and if it's funded by high-price drugs that cover the expensive phases, no matter how you slice it, the perverse incentives remain.
It's a tough problem. And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.
> And people l...
Oracle's income is proportionate to the number of licenses people buy, with some revenue from services thrown in too. I don't know the percentages of each one in the total, but to state that drastically fewer licenses would not lead to much less revenue seems somewhat disconnected from reality.
> So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months?
Because, like I said, it's a compromise. We as a society pick a number that best balances the needs of IP producers and consumers. In theory. In practice, I don't think the numbers are ideal right now, and should be rebalanced. However, there's a big difference between some rejigging and throwing out the system in its entirety.
> And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.
Democracy is a messy, inefficient system too: it just happens to be better than the alternatives. If you don't have a superior system to propose, throwing out the existing one seems like a very ill-conceived experiment.
And you cannot invent something like the internet and not expect the economics of information-goods production to be eventually utterly transformed. It changes not only the kind of info produced, but how it is, and the ways consumers and producers can interact. So why keep looking backwards? We should be prompting, encouraging, or forcing companies to develop new ways to do things now.
Are we doing things the same way as before the industrial revolution? Is anyone really going to propose that by ditching old practices and adapting to the full capabilities of the greatest info tech in history we will see a drop in production? Does that really not sound ridiculous?
Distilled, it looks something like this: if what you produce is not scarce, it has no exchange value. In order to have something to exchange, you have to possess some scarce good. For instance, bands could potentially get by with concerts, which have a limited availability in terms of seating. What are authors supposed to do? Movie makers? Bands that really work best in the studio?
Annoying inaccuracy! Of course pirates are not in favor of child pornography, nor of not blocking such sites. The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system that enables them to block any site, without even being required to give reasons and no possibility of appeal against it.
Naturally even now if illegal content is discovered on a German server, the government/police can make the hoster remove it. No magic switch needs to be given to the police.
The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence.
This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying.
”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.
* http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-chil...
> No magic switch needs to be given to the police.
But it is absolutely necessary to be able to block "outsourced" overseas torrent sites.
I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence on Von Der Leyen's side. But however it started, the fact that this "protection" can easily be extended certainly was a big reason for its support.
I remember that in the beginning it was all about "due to the rise of child pornography on the internet", but when an official inquiry was made (by the FDP, if I remember correctly), they had to admit that they had no such data.
There are not German and Swedish cases. The media industry efforts cross national borders. The quote being from a swedish MEP doesnt make IFPI's case somehow different.
> I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence
If she actually mentions "child pornography and copyright infringement" one by another in one and the same sentence on several occasions, then it crosses the border of obvious intent, at least IMHO.
Also, the whole "Christian" component of the two parties (CDU/CSU) would be quite baffling and shocking to some bible belters, as we're talking about "Christian socialism" here, all based on a popular notion from the 19th century, backed by a Papal encyclical. Looking for a "third way" beyond conservatism or straight-forward socialism – which almost makes them by definition more "lefty" than e.g. the US Republicans… Think of it as "hyphen" ("christian-socialist") instead of comma ("christian, socialist"). Or as "neither" instead of "both" (I certainly wouldn't call Bavaria's CSU "socialist" – then again, as an American I might).
This historical perspective curbed my annoyance about those dreadful "C" letters a bit. Well, this and the fact that even compared to some Christian moderates in the US, the hard-core Catholic loons here come out rather saintly…
I hope their success stirs up the other parties a little.
A possible solution, to the problem you describe might be Liquid Democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
Most of the characters involved in the politics game are not doing their job, I guess that's what you mean?
As far as I know, the original idea by the Pirate Parties was to have an opinion in the areas that unite their members (online privacy, copyright, etc.) and to leave the rest to the other parties.
Unfortunately the German Pirate Party now also tries to deal with all kinds of topics such as economics, education, gender politics, etc.
Maybe they've managed to get some additional voters that way, who don't care about the original topics that much. But at they same time they've made theirself unelectable for their original target group, as I guess that there are many people who don't agree with their opinions.