Intellectual Property Laws bad for business 293
mshiltonj writes "The NYTimes has a story called "Report Raises Questions About Fighting Online Piracy" that talks about how the stringent enforcement of current Intellectual Property laws (see: RIAA) may acutally be bad for business. It's the not EFF or FSF saying this, it's professors at Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace." and "Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.""
wired article (Score:5, Interesting)
It is pretty clear that an idea is not something that someone can "own", because it doesn't exist in space and time. Property laws were developed because there is only a limited amount of material objects in the universe, but everyone can "own" ideas without "taking" anything from anybody else. In fact, it is better to spread good ideas around, for the same reason that it is better to live in a good neighborhood than a bad one.
The term IP itself is misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just hard to apply the term "property" to something that is so easily duplicated and propagates so easily.
Fear for the future (Score:5, Interesting)
IPR isnt a problem in itself... (Score:5, Interesting)
A startup requires some kind of protection from companies that are bigger and more established from taking their idea and using their extra resources to get the product to market first. The IPR laws were orginally designed to protect the small guy and give him a fighting chance... in this case they add competition to the market.
The problem is that they are being used as bargining chips by huge global-hyper-mega corps as the corperate equivilant of a nuclear deterant (You sue me for this and i'll sue you for that!). This is absolutely NOT what they are designed for.
It would be great to come up with some hard and fast rule that prevents this abuse, but I cant think of one. Perhaps some kind of patent lifespan restriction based on company net worth (to prevent a company with ample resources to develop a patented technology from just sitting on the idea).
Any other suggestions?
Re:too complex (Score:2, Interesting)
C|Net News.Com.com Mirror (Score:2, Interesting)
Correct term is Intellectual Monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
Adam Smith and *Intellectual monopoly* (Score:5, Interesting)
by NZheretic (23872) on Fri 18 Oct 12:11AM (#4467943 [slashdot.org])
Everyone realises and acknowledges that Microsoft is a business, there to make a profit to share with it's marjor stakeholders, from it's shareholders to it's employees. However ...
If there were no copyright ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The primary motivation for copyright is to stimulate more output by giving creators limited-time protection of their work. But do we really need stimulation for more musical output if you can a million songs with you at anytime? If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether. The benefits is that everybody can, for little costs, enjoy about the complete published musical output of the past with them. Is this a good tradeoff?
So you want MORE coercion through force... (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright makes sense in some ways, but if you look at copyright historically, much of the greatest art and music was produced with no protection for the author. Great literary works and poetry also had no protection under copyright until recently.
In the past 300 years, we decided in order to protect the "rights" of a creator, we need government to step in and threaten anyone who wanted to steal such creations and use them without compensating the artist. Fine.
Our Constitution gave very limited protection (7 years, extendable for another 7 years maximum). To many free thinkers, copyright was a great concern, as it now gave government a new power it didn't have before. As many of the free marketeers here know, every new government power is a slippery slope towards ultimate government power.
Copyright has been made into a monopolizing power for corporations, and now capitalism and the free market is blamed! Capitalism would never allow copyright -- if you create something, don't release it until you have the best way to market or distribute it. Should I have a better tactic, I should be able to move it too. Creating a product or art is only part of the profitability -- marketing, distribution, and other parts of selling the item are just as important.
Copyleft is no better. In the end, you still need some entity to enforce it. If its a free market entity, people will have no reason to support your copyleft as they aren't forced to. If you allow government the ability to enforce it, they will only use coecion through force to protect it, and that again creates a monopoly.
When it boils down to software, there might not be any reason to copyright or copyleft or protect the software through the monopoly of force. There are free market protections in place already!
If you were the author of Windows, and someone wanted to promote the product without your consent, you could submit to the buying public that they should buy your product as they'd get your support. They'd get your updates (as you have the source code) quicker than through your competitor. They'd get the support of knowing they can submit new ideas to you that might get into the code (your competitor wouldn't have that ability, no source code). Your customers would also have the knowledge that they'd be supporting you to continue to make better products.
Where does copyright fit into this? Is copyright preventing rampant piracy? Not a chance. If you want to protect your software from getting copied, force your software to register itself online at every use. Fixed. No pirating.
If you want to protect your software from getting copied, how about hardware locks like in the past? Sure, some have been worked around, but in the end, the pirates would have to work extra hard to do so. If you price it properly, business would have no incentive to pirate.
Copyright and copyleft are both automations created that can only work through force. Only government has the legal mandate to initiate force. And once we allow that power, we have no power to restrain it should it get out of hand.
Science Friday (Score:5, Interesting)
So I'd definitely agree that this travesty of laws that have sprung up at the behest of media companies is indeed harming the economy.
Re:radical rethinking of IP? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:radical rethinking of IP? (Score:5, Interesting)
While these acedemics may be doing the hero's task of rethinking IP, I'm also concerned about this comment by a copyright professor who read the report:
Sloppy scholarship helps no one. Given how much bad research, lack of fact-checking, and fabricated hearsay (Jane Fonda and John Kerry photos anyone?) floats around on the net, the moment I encounter anything that I know is untrue or wrong in any piece, I stop reading and file the whole thing in the Intellectually Suspect folder.
The Committee for Economic Development has a spotty track record. Marshall Plan: Good. World Bank and IMF: iffy. Setting standards for public schools through testing: bad (and, yes, I am a parent).
Monopoly on commercial distribution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If there were no copyright ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If there were no copyright ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Assuming 3 min per track, if you have 500.000 songs, you can listen for 8 hours per day for more than eight years without ever repeating a song.
And yet Stallman is the *WORST* person to talk (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yes, stringent enforcement is bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Great! Friends, I need to "borrow" $20.
Unfortunately, this time you'll have to share your own money, not an evil record company's money, and I don't actually plan to give it back to you.
I mean, as long as you can re-define "friends" to mean "people I've never met who share my musical tastes and my ethical blind spots", can't I be as intellectually (dis)honest and re-define "borrow" too?
(I am reminded of the Cowbirds in Walt Kelly's Pogo, socialist agitators whose motto was "To share! To share what others' have!")
Re: the "worth" of bits. (Score:4, Interesting)
Currently when assessing the "damage" when a copyright violation has taken place, the retail cost of the item is used. However, this doesn't make sense - when a 14 year old kid pirates a movie industry standard $40,000 dollar 3D rendering package - is the damage really $40,000? Of course not, it is really $0. (I'm not saying the kid should go unpunished - that's a different argument).
Re:No kidding? People prefer free? (Score:3, Interesting)
and that right should end when you perform that work in public.
that system worked very well for thousands of years, and would still work today if we totally abandoned copyright law. all but a handful of musicians already make all of their profits from live performances. patronage (government or private) can support artists who require more financing (opera and architecture come to mind) than they can get based on expectations of future performance revenues.
i do think there is a role for protecting artists from having their work plagiarized or bastardized (some european countries have laws like these). but copyright as it stands now hurts consumers, and doesn't help artists.
-esme
Cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
1 - Sell each song on the internet for $1,
they will probably get more money than
trying to sell CDs with 12 songs for $15.
If for no other resason than because you
don't have to leave your house.
iTunes proves that a lot of people prefer
this to just swapping files.
2 - The same goes for movies -- if you could
"order" a high quality copy for $5,
you wouldn't have to go out to the
movie theater, but you will watch at least
4 times the number of movies.
When the networks get faster, to download a
high quality 4GB mpeg for $5 beats
downloading a crappy version for 0
CEOs and children under five... (Score:3, Interesting)
IP is property and downloading is theft. (Score:2, Interesting)
How about these.
You bring your car to the garage. It gets fixed and the bill comes to some amount of money. You are expected to pay the mechanic this amount. Lets say it was all labor as well and no parts were replaced. You use your extra key and get your car back some night without paying the mechanic for the work he did. Did you just steal from him or did you just violate his right to collect the money you owe him. What is he no longer in possession of in this example? The car was always yours, you just took it back without paying the bill. If the answer is nothing then you did not steal from him although I think a court would disagree.
The following argument is a bit absurd but the point is made. Don't think about the details, think about the concept. Ignore that the charge uses $20 worth of electricity or the outlet is on the street.
Since many people claim that theft can only occur when a physical object is taken then how about electricity. Assume a city produces their own electricity via a solar grid. Say you are walking down the street. You see an outlet. You decide that you need to give your cell phone a quick charge and plug it in. You leave your cell phone there (because this is a perfect world and it won't get stolen) and it charges. When you get back there is a city employee there holding your cell phone (He unplugged it to plug his whatever in) telling you that you owe the City $20 for the electricity you used (your cell phone takes a lot of juice to charge). Did you just steal from the city or not? You didn't take anything "physical" from them.
SlipHead.com Idea Exchange (Score:2, Interesting)
We have all had our own version of the Jump to Conclusions [eccentrix.com] mat which never saw the light of day due to our own time and resource commitments. What if implementing that idea were as easy as contributing to an open source project. Ok, what if it were almost that easy?
My reasoning is this: I have noticed a recent rise in "open idea" sites such as Half Bakery [halfbakery.com], SlipHead [sliphead.com], and Should Exist [shouldexist.org]. These sites all have one common theme: put your idea out in a public discussion forum for others to enjoy, contemplate, and critique. My thoughts are that this methodology, coupled with the growing ease of desktop manufacturing [zcorp.com], has a potential to revolutionize the way new concepts are created and developed. It also has potentially profound effects on procuring patents, business practices, and intellectual property in general. The question then is: How can these open ideologies and development processes excel within a predominately capitalistic society?
What are your thoughts?
Actually they don't (Score:3, Interesting)
The question is how much personal freedom we want to give up to serve the later very small group, and whether we maybe can find a more efficient and less problematic way than the current content distribution monopoly to serve them.
PS: The "surprise finding" is that more and more lawyers and economist supports amore liberal copyright regime. Among ordinary people, the idea of copyleft is not even known.
Compare with 19th C England (Score:5, Interesting)
The main result was the decline of new invention and improvement originating out of England and a surge of advancement of invention in the US.
(England continued to 'coast' as a world power by expending its capitol (i.e.: the empire) for another 50 - 100 years before precipitous decline was obviously evident.)
Re:bad for economy too (Score:3, Interesting)
All the major corporations are moving their operations to overseas . . .
Corporations are not moving their operations overseas because of IP issues. They still have to sell their wares in the US, which would still hold them liable for IP compliance. So I can't see how parent is so insightful.
Corporations move overseas to avoid paying higher taxes and higher wages. Since higher wages are an issue, perhaps over-unionization and price floors on wages are more to blame?
Re:But... (Score:4, Interesting)
Three words: Economies of scale
I think there's an interesting change happening around us, where folks are starting to rediscover that ideas aren't the be-all, end-all of a successful business. The key in business has always been in the execution. If you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc. you win. You don't get a guaranteed billion just for coming up with an idea and ambushing somebody with your patent 10 years after they make the business model work.
I'm drawing a bit from my artistic background here, and looking at it from a slightly different perspective. As an artist (dancer), I don't get paid if I don't work. That work can be teaching, it can be choreography, it can be performing. The simple fact is, however, that if I'm not constantly working, I don't get paid. I don't tell my students that they can't use the knowledge I've passed on to them. They can use it however they please.
The key works out to this: If you don't work, you don't eat. You can have all the inspiration you want, but if you can't translate that into something someone else wants, and do it consistently, you're going to be hurting. I'm not sure yet whether I like that idea or not, but it certainly seems fair enough.
Then again, I may just be hallucinating....
Dan
Insightful? Please... (Score:4, Interesting)
what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
That's not insightful, it's just manipulation of words to thinly veil a support of wholesale piracy. In no meaningful way is a person whom you have never met--and with whom your only interaction ever is the trading of a song file--your "friend". Saying "I'm a friend to the world" doesn't change the fact that wholesale piracy is fundamentally different than sharing music with a close circle of actual friends.
It's pathetic when people try to make this defense of massive online filesharing (as opposed to, say, sharing within an actual, meaningful, community of people, be it online or in the real world). If you are for piracy, say so. Don't try to defend your position using meaningless redefinition of terms. There are grey areas in file swapping--calling everyone your friend is not one of them, and weakens much more legitimate arguments (such as calling a smallish online music discussion group a group of friends with whom sharing should be permissible).
Any crime can be "defended" by relabeling:
but the relabeling itself doesn't make the defense valid.
"mickey mouse"-right (Score:3, Interesting)
Freedom from the RIAA (Score:4, Interesting)
For over a year I've been suggesting that artists stick a PayPal button on their sites and offer amnesty for downloaders. Paying the artists 2 or 3 times what they actually profit for these crappy CD deals that the RIAA companies force artists to sign, is peanuts compared to CD prices.
Amnesty is the answer!
Re:Not bad for business... (Score:5, Interesting)
But everyone else gets screwed. That's fine as long as it encourages people to come up with new stuff, but it's bad in the long term; which is exactly why patents and copyrights should be for a limited time only. Your comment is like saying that inflation is good, because some people benefit from inflation (e.g. borrowers with a fixed interest rate, etc.) at the same rate that other people suffer. But in the long run, you don't want runaway inflation or runaway intellectual monopolies; because it destabalizes the economy, and breaks the fundamental quid-pro-quo of copyright/patent/trademark law.
Just to give an example; if you want to make an album full of samples (like the Beasty Boys' second album) these days.. well.. you can't! Because it would be too expensive to license all those 1 second samples, even though they have questionable artistic merit per se, and combining them into a new work is an artistic endeavor which results in a holistic new work. And that holds true even for those with pretty sweet record deals; record companies won't even crosslicense between their own artists. This is an enormous barrier-to-entry for sampling artists, which the established rightsholders don't care about because it's not their model of either business or art. And you can count on none of those copyrights expiring any time soon, because they're retroactively being renewed by paid-for laws.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
The fees themselves, and the costs of contesting bad patents, and their running time, are as much of a problem as the USPTO's whoring for dimes.
If applying for patents was really cheap, the FSF would hold hundreds of them; if contesting them was cheap and easy (just mail the USPTO some prior art or explain why it's trivial), most of the patents that come up on
None of this is true though; applying for a patent is costly, contesting one (either through the USPTO or the courts) is fiendishly complicated and costly, and patents run for years and years. The rubberstamping is little more than aiding and abetting.
Re:bad for economy too (Score:5, Interesting)
Trying to own and sell automation using barcodes (the concept, not the product) is viewed by most as open seas type piracy. One of the major bar code manufactures was sued for patent infringement for providing factory automation solutions which used barcodes with a workflow database. Somehow someone thought the concept of tracking with a database and barcodes instead of hand entry was a violation of IP. It got thrown out (thank goodness). Unfortunately more and more stuff is being tyed up in a concept as IP rights, not product rights. This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
Imagine if the concept were copied to the building industry. Someone makes nails. Someone else makes screws. Someone else makes glue. Someone makes 2X4's. They all patent the idea. Do you know the problems this would create for the building industry. Screws and screwdrivers only from International Fastener, Nails only from National Wire, 2X4's only from Georga Pacific.. etc. Some in the fastener industry have already done some of this. Posi-drive screws, Torx tm., etc.
Building materials are much cheaper if there is not a single vendor choice. Market forces set prices.
I see Open Source, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and the internet as a great equalizer. We just have to wean ourselves off the **AA licensed stuff. Tonight I was downloading free Public Domain radio programs. Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee, and Jack Benny are great alternitves to much of the high priced stuff. Don't pirate. Shop for the deals. They are out there.
There are lots of sites dedicated to collecting the material, selling or trading for very reasonable prices. Why can't BMI, Capitol, etc. sell MP3 CD's full of over 20 year old stuff for $5 each? You just can't tell me it's the cost of production and distribution. They would rather sell a couple of copies of $100 CD collections of old stuff than sell thousands at $5. They are also unwilling to use MP3's. Funny but the competion is using MP3's. All the radio programms I downloaded tonight are unencumbered MP3's. They will work in my MP3 CD player unlike what they are selling.
Do a search of Old Time Radio MP3's. You can literaly get days worth of material on MP3 CD's for under $10. Hey RIAA, are you listening? Want to sell from your old catalog? Naw, they would rather sit on their archive while I shop the competion. Their artificaly scarce material is being diluted by the competion. Piracy isn't their only competion. Games, movies, Public domain, Creative Commons, and freebies are their competion. Killing piracy won't make it go away.
The major problem is (Score:5, Interesting)
The person who created the work should retain all rights to the work. Not some global megacorp that can monopolize on the giant mass of copyrights they have bought or taken from employees.
If you can only monopolize what you have actually created then the power and wealth would be spread much more evenly. An individual is normally much more likely to license or sell a product at a reasonable price.
The idea that a corporation has the rights of a person but no way to be held accountable for its actions was not taken into account when these laws were passed or when the US Constitution was originally written to grant copyright.
IMHO, returning a corporation to its original status of a group of accountabe individuals with individual rights and copyrights, rather than the current status of an untouchable person, would correct many of our current problems.
Re:wired article (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, I can learn an idea from you, but I am not "taking" anything from you the same way as I would with real property. You still retain the original idea.
Copyrights and patents are restraints on society's advancement, not aids.
A solution to the "IP question" (Score:1, Interesting)
The root of out difficulties with IP is that ideas don't have natural scarcity in the economic sense; that is, any number of people can consume them without diminishing others' aiblity to do so. This means that the "invisible hand" of supply and demand will not work on ideas, unless we artificially induce scarcity -- exactly what IP laws are designed to do.
The problem with this is that it doesn't work. In practice, IP laws are failing miserably (in my opinion doing more harm than good at this point -- see the DMCA, for example); but even in theory, I believe IP laws are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
What can we do about it? Scrap all of our current IP laws and start over.
And then what? Some would argue that we don't need IP laws or their equivalent at all -- for example, Slashdot featured an essay by an economist arguing exactly that not too long ago -- but I am not entirely convinced of that yet, and in any case that would certainly bring about a vastly different order of things, which is certain to induce very large amounts of resistance from those with vested interests in the current IP system.
My proposed solution, then: subsidize the production of ideas. The basic idea is to subsidize the creator of a given idea proportionally to society's use of that idea. This will not necessarily result in overconsumption (as is the case with most subsidies), since the subsidy would exist not on top of but instead of the market.
Of course, there are rather large practical hurdles to overcome in implementing such a system, but I don't believe any of them is intractable, certainly not more so than some of the problems we already face with our current IP system.
What I seek, then, is some feedback for this idea -- point out anything that seems like an intrinsic flaw in the idea, or a practical problem that you believe to be truly unsolvable; or perhaps suggest some ways this plan could be implemented. (I have some ideas on that front, of course, but they are too large to fit in the margin of ths post!)
Mike
IP policing == offshoring has precedents (Score:5, Interesting)
Eventually people got sick of it and moved to the other side of the country & got on with it unmolested.
Current US IP laws are a significant incentive to move any business involved in the creation of IP offshore.
I suspect in a hundred yeasr noone other thana few historians will know why it is that the biotech or IT industry is centered on, say, Australia or India or Marituis and that it once was centered in the US.
Re:wired article (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no fallacy here. The value of property is derived from its scarcity. Thus, it is necessary to impose scarcity on things that do not naturally have it, otherwise they would have no economic value. Intellectual property laws serve this function. Without them, everything could be copied freely and would have no value, which would mean to incentive to product it, which ultimately is bad for society.
Re:But... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes the monopoly actually helps the little guy, by preventing abuse by larger entities. As an advanced photography student, who has not only spoken to, but assisted pros, copyright is needed by anyone working freelance.
Anyone wanting to work in either the advertising or fashion fields sends out portfolios, to as many art directors as possible. Without a contract (which no one would give to ALL of the portfolios received), what, if not copyright, stands in the way of $COMPANY from taking an artist's work, and using it in an ad campaign, with no compensation for $ARTIST? In this case, copyright law protects the "little guy," and their ability to work as a creative professional.
Furthermore, if I say, decided to expand my artistic horizons, and write a novel, and made it availible online, gratis, what, besides IP laws, would prevent a publisher from printing and selling this work? Yes, I could pay a lawyer to write an air-tight terms of use for my site, but, would have to fight any battles on the basis of contract law, and would be much more likely drawn into a lawsuit which I would lose due to lack of funds, than would occur under copyright laws
Current copyright law allows the copyright holder to allow certain types of distrobution beyond fair-use, as evidenced by the GPL, through liscensing. Thus, one can release their works under rules of their choosing, to better benefit society. Copyrights protect GPL code from the abuse of entities such as Micro$oft, who could easily steal such code without restriction, were it not for copyright.
What I'm trying to say, is that the temporary monopoly given by copyright allows creative professionals, whether artists, or programmers, to avoid becoming prey to "bigger fish." The lack of creative monopoly only serves to hurt those who make creative works, at the benefit of big(ger) business.
However, I do not believe that this monopoly should be anything but very temporary. If any potential heirs of mine want to strike it rich, they had better create something themselves, rather than ride daddy's success. I'd be happy with a 15 year copyright... period., which will allow me to profit off of my work, but prevent most of the abuse of others doing the same. But to eliminate IP laws altogether, would allow megacorps to abuse artists, and likely, programmers.
Re:incentive (Score:3, Interesting)
The other side comes from the phrase, "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Patents and Copyrights are SUPPOSED to release that stuff into the Public Domain, so others can use it as a basis for further works.
Absolutely right. Now think about how this applies to software. Under current copyright law, it is possible to obtain legal protection for code that will *never* enter the public domain in a form that allows it to be used as a basis for further work. Why? Because the software is only published in binary form while the source -- the form that is useful for advancing the art and science of software -- will never, ever see the light of day.
This is completely different from any other form of copyrighted material. Can you publish a book while keeping the text secret, or obscured to the point of being practically secret?
Copyright is supposed to be a trade; society gives creators a temporary monopoly and in return all of the created material flows into the public domain for future generations to build from. Copyright as presently applied to closed-source software is more of a gift than a trade.
IMO, the law should not grant protection to unpublished source code. If you want society to give you a legal monopoly, you should have to tell us what it is you have a monopoly on.
Re:bad for economy too (Score:3, Interesting)
You cannot own an idea. One major difference between 'intellectual property' and physical property is that ideas have unlimited use; Everyone in the world can think about something all they want without preventing others from doing the same, causing wear, etc. If physical goods had these characteristics, we would have no justification for property either. The reason for property rights is that multiple people cannot use it at once, and thus using someone else's property without permission reduces their rights to it. Physical objects cannot benefit everyone, so they must be owned to provide any benefit other than squabbles as to who's turn it is to use it.
If you don't like the terms, do something else.
Why? Ideas often are developed independently. For example, Newton developed calculus, but didnt publish it. A few years later Liebniz developed it and published it. If I come up with an idea, just because you thought of it first should not give you a right to force my to accept your conditions to use my own thoughts.
These things are subject to the same market forces as anything else- if its owner wants to make money, he will balance market demand with the price he charges.
They are subject to the same market forces as monopolies, not competitive goods. DeBeers for instance must balance market demand with the price it charges. If it decided to charge 1 billion dollars for a small diamond, no one would buy it, because they have the choice to do without. However they can sell a diamond that in a competitive market would be worth well under a dollar for a thousand dollars. Just because they are subject to some market forces does not mean they do not have a monopoly. Intellectual property is a monopoly on an idea, which is, unlike physical property, a true monopoly in the sense that their are no competitors. A physical object is for all practical purposes the same as another object of the same design, except that they are different objects, and thus most of the time different people's property. Intellectual property laws on the other hand prevent copying, meaning in the analogy between physical and intellectual property, that another object of the same design cannot be made without the owners permission.
If you don't want to pay simply because you can copy it, you are engaging in theft- it's no different than any other good in the marketplace.
It is different; you cannot take that particular copy, but there is no law preventing you from making copies of physical objects, and if it were as easy as it is with ideas, we would all be living like kings, and anyone who suggested it was morally wrong would be laughed at or even thrown in an asylum.
Re:wired article (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, I'd agree with that. But stopping people from sharing ideas is not the same as stopping them from copying movies, albums, etc. Just because you should be able to freely discuss and share the ideas contained in a film or book doesn't mean you need to be able to freely copy the specific expression of those ideas that is the book or film itself. Ideally, intellectual property would protect books, movies, software, etc., but not "ideas". No one should be able to own an idea (in my opinion) or stop others from discussing it.