If they made lots of money, good: they offered a service the public wanted. As far as that basic model goes they added value into the economy.
Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.
> That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization..
No, the article does not overgeneralise, your comment does.
The proposition is that a substantial proportion of particular quite well-defined 'innovation' was created through state systems as opposed to private commerce.
If, in order to argue against that, you have to generalise so much that one can almost no longer say anything causes anything, because everything causes everything, you end up saying nothing. You have not refuted something, you have just made up a more meaningless way of measuring anything.
Someone still needs to choose and arrange data-structures and algorithms to fit available resources. That is engineering. Just because the product is ill-defined and subjectively-judged does not lessen that.
You might want an architect to be sensitive to aesthetic/political/whatever concerns, but you pay the engineers to make sure the thing stays standing up. Does a building stand up because of story-arc and character development? No, it is because of understanding of physics and materials. The same holds essentially for getting computation done within time and space.
What precisely is wrong with people copying things for free? Since these are non-rival, non-finite goods -- that is, as many people can use or reproduce them as want to without obstructing anyone else -- there is no basic physical reason for restriction.
It is illegal, but that is not the same as immoral. For illegality to imply immorality the law would need to be shown to be itself moral. But unfortunately the law has (like the game concerned) been rigged by particular interests for their own purposes. No-one has so far produced good evidence to show the current laws are economically beneficial overall.
So the intellectually honest and moral position is to admit the law is unfounded, gradually abolish it, and try to figure out other better economic arrangements that allow people to do what is the obviously moral thing: freely use and copy non-rival, non-finite goods.
If you don't like the law try and overturn it. If you don't think the government is just try and overthrow it. That need not be violent, if you want to go the civil disobedience route, there's some rich history. But it isn't civil disobedience to secretly pirate a computer game (!) while doing everything possible to be avoid being caught and punished.
The law isn't a buffet for you to pick and choose from.
Why? If you want to measure energy, measure energy. The point of currency is something else.
Currency/money is a data-structure for a kind of cooperation algorithm. That is the way to understand it in an informational world. Note that money is not really about being a 'medium of exchange', a 'unit of account', 'store of value' -- those are tautological ways to look at it, they are its particular forms of activity, the real purpose is cooperation (more) generally.
The radical thought is that we do not really want currencies. We want something more information-rich -- something made for our current information tech, rather than originated from cowry shells or whatever. Hardly anyone is thinking in this way though, disappointingly. Yet it is myopia: if you look around non-currency systems are beginning to evolve. What is reputation, or 'karma', are they currency? Not really. What are things like Flattr and Kickstarter, are they markets? Not really.
What makes using an honesty-box moral? It is not that one side has dictated the terms.
Imagine finding an empty car-park, parking your car, approaching the honesty-box and finding a note declaring the owner does not expect money but instead expects to be paid in teeth: and would the car-park users please pull-out a tooth and deposit it. Would that be moral?
Yes, one could say it is moral to all follow a general rule of reciprocating, of giving something as well as receiving. But what and how much?
The morality of cooperative interaction is not about what one person wants, it is about how all are affected.
Saying what exact actions and amounts would be moral is in general an impossible calculation. But what would clearly not be moral is one party dictating to the other. Once you deliberately offer to engage in cooperative interaction you alone no longer set the rules.
> people have decided that they have an intrinsic right to content
They do -- people do indeed have pretty much exactly that: an intrinsic right -- to copy and share intellectual/informational goods.
Why? How? Because these are non-finite non-rival goods, hence are a commons by necessity. Since there is no scarcity in instances/copies, and one person's use does not interfere with anyone else's there is no reason for restriction. Instituting a restriction creates a conflict where there was none, it reduces an abundance that is simply there in physical fact.
> "the terms of the content producers"
What producers want is irrelevant. The validity of the law has nothing to with producers' wants. What is wrong with the actual law is exactly the consequence of that erroneous view: that the law is there to benefit and enrich content producers, and therefore should be expanded and enforced ever further and more strenuously.
The law restricts the intrinsic right to copy and use public intellectual/informational goods only for a collective pragmatic purpose. The intent is to serve the public overall by ensuring plenty of content is made.
Piracy seems most likely good. Every extra copy that is used adds value into the economy; the only possible downside is that production might be reduced below what is desired. But is that what we see? Music, books, TV, movies -- is there a terrible shortage of these? Nope: there seems to be not only plenty but even more produced now than ever before. Piracy is de facto acting to correct the dysfunctionality of the current law.
Your 'publication of ideas' argument applies only to things that can be hidden.
But the patent system applies to a super-set: things that are plain, too.
Therefore, by your own argument, the patent system is operating beyond its justification, and so could indeed be described as 'broken'.
In any case, the patent system is a trade-off -- of increasing production against restricting access (see: the standard economic model of it). If it is badly calibrated, the net effect is negative. And the current state of economic knowledge is that no-one knows whether it is set correctly (see: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.
The patent system doesn't apply to things that are "plain", though this word is a bit broad, so it isn't clear if you mean it the way I take you to mean it. Further, I didn't say that this was the justification for it, I said that this was one of the advantages of it, and thus, even if you disagree with the advantage, that doesn't ipso facto, make the system broken.
>When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.
Your argument also applies to government, in fact, from an economic perspective, government has a clear negative return (to the tune of $70 Trillion in the USA roughly).
Get rid of the patent system by getting rid of government, and you'll have my agreement.
If you think it is ok to have government but not a patent system, then there's contradiction in your positions.
The program get shorter because the author learned more and improved it each time, not mainly because of the languages.
Mainstream programming languages do not seem to vary much in lines of code of programs: the range is maybe about 2 or 3. Here is evidence: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison
This stands to reason. Look at everyday languages: they all have the same features -- they are perhaps surprisingly similar in basic structure. Control-flow, operations, data-primitives, data-compounds -- all are very similar. One of the more outlying is C: lacking common higher-level amenities like exceptions, nice data-structures, and particularly storage management, can expand code significantly.
These kinds of comparisons are worthless, because they are too short to show the advantages of large scale application of language specific idioms. LOC is not really a good measure of code size. The number of symbols is better. A single line of Java can be way more verbose than the same line in Python.
More than a decade ago I worked on a compiler written in C++ and did an exercise to see what the savings would be to implement it in Python. IIRC it was something like 80%. There were huge savings in the size of static data structures. A lot was due to the fact that Python lent itself to being an ad hoc DSL.
To be fair, the languages that I think lend themselves most to low LOC are haskell, common lisp, and clojure. None of these are covered in the minilight comparison.
Your list misses some pretty significant features that don't exist in Java, including lexical closures, list comprehensions, and macros.
Try spending some time on 4Clojure. For a while I was routinely solving problems in half a dozen lines or more, only to find that other people had done them in one line.
While that is certainly a nice and well regarded model, it does not say much about what actually happens. It really only amounts to a proposition, and cannot be read as indicating a necessity. As Landes and Posner themselves later say:
"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."
-- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003.
Conclusion, p422, s3.
That is, to spell it out, we do not know if intellectual monopoly law is doing any good at all. This is easy to see for oneself: there must be, and obviously are, costs -- legal, enforcement, search engine 'fixing' -- yet we have no idea how much the gain is. If there is a negative, but the positive is unknown, it is quite possible the sum is itself negative.
Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.