Copyright is not justified by it being a way to maximise producers' revenue. Such principle would set no limit to laws that restrict people in general to make money for some few. That should immediately seem awry.
Informational goods are nonrival. The right and wrong of their use is fundamentally different from that of rival goods. One does not 'take' informational goods, one copies them. Normal property is, as a first simplification/approximation, justified by the loss of taking. And that because moral rules in general are, roughly speaking, justified by how they affect other people. Since copying lacks that effect of loss it obviously cannot reasonably be treated in the same way.
If you are only skimming a few comments, you are not reading most. But if the comments are not being read, how can they be scored properly? The extent to which points allow reduced/selective reading is the extent to which the accuracy of that selection is itself reduced.
The basic problem is a power imbalance, and its result is that they tell you how they pay. So any proposed solution built on the idea of you telling them how to pay seems very much in danger of failing for exactly the same reason that there is a problem in the first place.
(Perhaps the main avenue to a solution is in freelancers acting collectively somehow -- thereby becoming more powerful. If clients risk being unable to find service-providers because those clients have been blacklisted, they would more strongly feel the value in paying-up.)
The whole of the author's argument, and its weakness, in four words:
> It’s fine. It’s business.
Why is this inadequate? Because whether something is 'business' is not the beginning and the end of whether it is a good thing to do. It is merely one aspect.
The market is not a perfectly accurate and complete representation for all of human wishes and behaviour. So we cannot delegate to it as the final arbiter on questions of what should or should not be done.
No, the whole issue is really the other way around. What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want. What people want is grounds for examining how the market and business are failing to work well -- and then pondering how that could be improved. That seems the more reasonable, just, and interesting avenue to pursue.
The "It's business" attitude has been popping up a lot. Nobody seems to be making the distinction between good business and bad business. Everything I've seen around the Sparrow sale has been bad business. The told users they were working on push notifications and an iPad app. They had a half price sale last weekend! And even though they were charging a premium price and clearly had a sustainable business (they were one of the top grossing apps and were highly rated and publisised) they still screwed their customers.
There was a good way to do this. Finish push notification and iPad support before discontinuing development (i.e. keep your promises). Don't have a half price sale days before you are acquired without informing the users the product will be discontinued.
This whole episode has further reinforced my complete lack of faith in humanity. How people can get so upset at so little and be so entitled when they are owed nothing just disgusts me.
It's a premium when you look at the average price of software on the Mac and iOS App Stores. It's also premium considering my computer comes with a free email client and Google provides a free webmail app.
When I look at the top paid apps in the App store, I see at least as many >$10 apps as I see under $10.
If I look at my own App store purchases, $10 is easily on the cheap side.
It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes (one if you're talking about the mobile version), especially when the Sparrow guys said they'll be providing bug fix releases as required.
> It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes
The value of productivity software that is integrated to your workflow cannot be determined by its cost of purchase. Try taking Microsoft Word off an author's set of tools, and telling them that they only lost $120 and shouldn't be complaining.
Moral of the story: don't bet your digital life on cheap, cool, transient, proprietary, made-for-App-Store software built by enthusiastic young startup founders or "indie" developers.
It's disturbing that someone's faith in humanity is so fickle that it is perturbed by something like this. Human behaviour isn't exactly something new.
Fickle? Where did you get that idea? My lack of faith in humanity is as constant as the terribleness of humanity on which it is based. I merely said that these things reinforce it, not that it changed my mind.
As someone who bought Sparrow during their sale last week, I feel ripped off. I don't think they owe me free updates forever, but I would have liked to have known that it was a fire sale.
I paid full price for Sparrow and used it for two months. I didn't like it and switched back to Mail.app. But I don't feel ripped off because I got my money's worth from using it.
The app works, so I don't know why you would feel ripped off, fire sale or not. It's an overglorified EMAIL client for heaven's sake. How much more can you expect from an app that does e-mail?
It continues to function as-is (albeit with no updates) regardless of whatever happens to the company, right? And if it really is as useful as people are saying, on email, which most people spend hours of their day on, then I'd definitely still have bought it.
How much do you value your time? For most software professionals, $10 is not even rounding error.
This doesn't address the OP's post but here's a quote from Iain M. Banks along your line of thinking:
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
So are you suggesting there should be some arbiter other than the market of what a business can or cannot do with regards to product decisions, or acquisition opportunities? Who might do that?
Would you even consider developing a product if your hands were then somehow tied to supporting it and even improving it forever? Would your company be attractive to potential buyers if they were obligated to support your product line indefinitely after an acquisition?
On top of all that I mean we're talking about TEN DOLLARS. I often spend more than that on lunch. If you bought a $10 hair dryer on Amazon and later discovered that the manufacturer had been acquired and was no longer producing hair dryers would you feel ripped off? Betrayed? Offended?
They're not suggesting anything as far as I can tell. But I think a suggestion they would agree with would be for conscientious business owners to consider not only what's good business, but what is good for the consumers, even if it means not getting quite as much profit. It's about personal ethics. Of course, ethics, also demand you feed your family, so it's hard.
As for the hair dryer example, see the top-level comment by makecheck.
"What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want"
I've not ever heard anyone say that. OP included.
There are no "rules of the business game", other than an obligation to make money. And other than abiding by the law, there are no rules on how that money should be made.
Whether you consider the process moral or not makes no difference. The metric is $.
Requiring originality is far too restrictive. For example: would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion, and absolutely no-one else? No, that hardly sounds like freedom.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, makes no mention of originality:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Intellectual monopoly seems inevitably basically in conflict with that. It is only possibly justifiable as a pragmatic exception.
> would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion
If you want to recreate his entire speech (or mostly his speech), you would indeed need to get his permission. Or that of his estate.
If King wished to give his speech away, it was entirely his right and prerogative to do so. For the instances that I am aware of, he did not. In fact, King published and sold many of his speeches via vinyl record.
You are allowed to have your own opinions and talk about them. Pretending that seeding The Avengers is you expressing your opinion doesn't really fool anyone.
I'm a little young to remember, but wouldn't most of the civil rights rallies been "open to the public"? Even if King gave away his opinions as a sermon to his church, I'd bet that attendance was open to anyone who cared to go.
Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?
Shouldn't the question be reversed: if King wanted to sell his opinions, shouldn't he have avoided public oratory in which he gave away those opinions without getting an NDA or some other kind of license agreement with the attendees?
> Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?
Are Paul Simon's songs in the public domain because he did a concert in Central Park? (No.)
"I Have a Dream" is definitely owned by King's estate. King actively registered the copyright on it. This wasn't an accident. There is no doubt he wanted to keep on owning it.
Non-transferable/alienable rights is a valid possible adjustment. But it is or would be so solely on the basis of its actual economic effect. This simple clear economic approach -- Posner's broadly -- is the only sensible way to understand actual law and activity here.
All that stuff about 'personhood' and 'intellectual domination' and 'possession' is otiose. Any attempt to make an a priori case for intellectual monopoly seems certainly doomed to failure -- for a very simple reason: they do not fit the basic physical facts.
Informational goods are nonrival: they are copyable and usable with no loss to the original. The relation between copies of information is abstract. A copy adds its value, and subtracts nothing.
Two notable ethical points follow from that. Copying is consistent with the principle of universalisation: a general rule that all should copy is not self-contradictory -- the opposite: if we all do it, we all gain. Second, restriction of copying fails a basic rights-justification or liberty principle: we are restricted only so far as we would harm someone else, yet for the notion of unauthorised copying any claim of loss has no grounds in any physical fact.
Ultimately, we want to be governed by the basic physical facts and how their constraints and ramifications allow us best advantage. 'Personhood' justifications for intellectual monopoly seem about as reasonable a basis for regulating behaviour as believing that taking a photo takes someone's soul.
> Informational goods are nonrival: they are copyable and usable with no loss to the original. The relation between copies of information is abstract. A copy adds its value, and subtracts nothing.
That is where I disagree. There's an important distinction between the inventive step leading to a discovery and subsequent copies thereof. A subsequent copy of an idea does not possess the same characteristics as the ``flash of genius'' in the mind of the person responsible for producing that idea. From this distinction, it follows that an idea, alone, has no intrinsic value--intrinsic value arises out of attachment to society.
Your argument is that an idea gains value as it spreads, but I don't think that's correct. Rather, societal advancement occurs when members of a society generate and produce novel ideas. There are two competing forces: (1) the spread of new ideas is akin to a positive feedback loop, since new ideas are based on old ones (there's evidence of this: technological advancement grows exponentially with respect to time); and (2) as an idea spreads, its connection to its creator fades, eventually causing misappropriation of that 'inventive step' and disincentivizing the creator's continued creation of new ideas. The belief that losing control over the spread of an idea on the basis that no harm to the information occurs from copies thereof is flawed: it focuses on the information, rather than the person who created it.
Permitting patent rights to vest only in the inventor transforms his talent into a commodity, rather than the fruits of that talent. It rewards the individual rather than those acting on the information for no purpose other than economic gain.
We now have the technology to completely remake the financial system -- not just make 'banking' or whatever easier online, but a thorough and innovative re-imagining of what the whole thing should even be about.
Information structure is the essence of all cooperative systems, and that means the economics of tomorrow is absolutely about software -- its architecture, its engineering.
The practicalities mean this cannot be tackled directly, but someone needs to think big and work on it (in various ways).
You're missing that all of these things have valid uses. Take CDS for example. They're a very efficient way for organizations to mutually insure each other's risks, cutting out the middleman. The trick is to cross them with two uncorrelated things (pork bellies and frozen OJ, for example) rather than using defaulted mortgages to insure umm defaulted mortgages. Or CDOs, done right they're how a bank protects itself against a run and is still able to do maturity transformations (e.g. turning monthly salaries into 25-year mortgages).
How can CDOs be both limited in abuse as well as a meaningful
The problem is that in any realm, commotidization acts as a one-way function, with enough complexity it becomes difficult or impossible to track, thus allowing effective money laundering (or outright theft).
The real problem is lack of oversight, or traceability inherent in these devices. This draws in shady money and, essentially, evil.
This is a wonderful piece of waffle, but I'm trying very hard to find any abstract or even remotely concrete idea that it would describe that doesn't in some way model our existing markets, which already exist in almost every conceivable formulation, with and without regulation, with and without every kind of fee/commission/rebate/order structure imaginable.
You get back to some very deep concepts in economics and finance.
Value is defined based on trust and faith. I accept dollars for goods I produce because I believe that I can then turn around and give the dollars to get other goods. It's a trust issue throughout the economy.
Many of the problems associated with the economy hinge on the very usage of the dollar or renminbi or whatever currency you use. You need to replace that currency. As we saw with BTC, it's not a simple task to replace a currency and maintain a trust structure throughout critical infrastructure. We are willing to lend trust to the sovereign but your task would be to establish faith in this other entity.
Unfortunately, you will need to establish a new currency to accomplish your goals. This is far beyond the scale of a YC startup.
Do note that given the depth, breadth and complexiy of wall street, this is like asking someone to come up with ways to kill the tech industry. And I suspect that the financial sector is the more complex of the two.
Not saying that it shouldn't be attempted - but that instead of targeting wall street, target a specific function they provide and disrupting that.
This seems broadly to pass the Kant test on morality, so it could be said to be well-grounded.
Something is immoral if it is contradictory when generalised -- that was the gist of Kant's view. And real manipulation and persuasion seem to fail: if everyone is allowed to manipulate everyone else, everyone loses their own control of themselves -- in which case, how can they manipulate someone else? There is a contradiction.
The two basic checks the article proposes -- "Will I use the product myself?" and, "Will the product help users materially improve their lives?" -- are sort-of rough ways of testing for such Kantian contradction.
> And real manipulation and persuasion seem to fail: if everyone is allowed to manipulate everyone else, everyone loses their own control of themselves -- in which case, how can they manipulate someone else? There is a contradiction.
Consider the case of two people A and B in a zero-sum game, who are trying to manipulate one another. Both parties know the score---that each is attempting to control the others actions.
When A or B acts, either one party has succeeded at manipulating the other or both parties have failed.
There can be no situation where A manipulates B (thus A wins), and B manipulates A (thus B wins simultaneously).
If something asks you about update/downloading/etc., reject it. You decide what to do and when, and you type the URL into the browser, or go to the normal menu/dialog/tool for updating.
(This is partly why Chrome browser is right and the normal approach is wrong: if/when it needs update, it just does it.)
I think you're really on to something here. A root problem of this is that a lot of legitimate software communicate via random popups out of the blue - training users to just "do what the computer says".
People are used to the computer being in charge and commanding them. This is bad from a UX point of view, but now I see it also affects security.
Yet another reason popups of all kinds should be forbidden.
When all application-initiated communication come from the OS notification area, this kind of dialog will make people wary. Which is a win.
Informational goods are nonrival. The right and wrong of their use is fundamentally different from that of rival goods. One does not 'take' informational goods, one copies them. Normal property is, as a first simplification/approximation, justified by the loss of taking. And that because moral rules in general are, roughly speaking, justified by how they affect other people. Since copying lacks that effect of loss it obviously cannot reasonably be treated in the same way.