[cc-community] Re: Stealing ideas?
Greg London
email at greglondon.com
Mon Nov 15 10:46:20 EST 2004
drew Roberts said:
> On Sunday 14 November 2004 11:37 am, Greg London wrote:
>> Branko Collin said:
>> > On 14 Nov 2004, at 13:22, Romain d'Alverny wrote:
>> >> Copyright protects works, not ideas.
>> >
>> > As a Project Gutenberg volunteer and webmaster of a site that deals
>> > with abandoned games, I must strongly object to this reading of
>> > copyright. Copyright does not protect works, it destroys them.
>> > Copyright protects the interests of authors (well, at least in
>> > theory). Works get the raw end of the deal with copyright.
>>
>> Don't be so naive as to believe every bit of anti-copyright propaganda
>> you've ever read. The idea of intellectual property has acquired some
>> severe flaws of late, but the basic concept is sound and can even be
>> fair.
>>
> Would you or others who promote the concept of "intellectual property" accept
> the governments right to levy an intellectual property tax on your property?
Holy cow, the logical fallacies are coming fast and furious.
Property tax on land and real estate works based on the fact
that land really is a zero-sum game. Government has an incentive
to keep the value of property up because it increases their
tax income. Property tax creates a feedback loop where the
government is rewarded with more tax money by keeping property
values up, and the property owners are rewarded by having their
property increase (or at least stay the same) in value over time.
And since government has such direct impact on property values
based on where the zone industrial, commercial, and residential
areas, I favor the idea of a system that rewards them for keeping
property values up.
If government starts screwing up and causing the value of properties
to go down, voters get ticked off and get kicked out of office.
A government tax on intellectual works creates no such feedback loop,
because the government has no direct impact on the value of works,
and so they are rewarded irregardless of their actions, which is
wasted money.
The closest thing there is to a feedback loop around intellectual
works is the millions of dollars of campaign donations made by
mega corporations which has resulted in the DMCA, CTEA, and other
draconian implementations of intellectual rights. The difference is
that IP isn't zero sum, and big companies can simply keep selling
more copies and therefore keep making more money to donate.
Any IP tax will simply squeeze the little guys even further
and will be irrelevant to the mega-corps who already spend tens of
millions of dollars on campaign donations.
So, not only is your argument a logical fallacy,
if actually implemented, it would only serve to
kill small authors, small companies, open source
projects, and any other competition against the
monopolies of the likes of Microsoft.
So, I'm against your IP tax idea, and it doesn't prove anything as to
whether IP law can be fair or not.
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