permaculture

[Leo Brodie <leobro@comcast.net>]

> ...if somebody comes and takes the farmer's harvest, the farmer no longer
has a harvest, if somebody copies the farmer's pdf files, the farmer
*still has* the pdf files. granted, if the farmer is making a living
through the sale of the work it gets more complicated, but it is still
a fundamentally different problem, because the very nature of
information is ephemeral.

Yes it *does* get more complicated, because even if the "farmer still has the 
pdf files," their *value* has been diminished by the theft. Taken to its 
logical extension, that rationale could produce a million free copies, and no 
money in the farmer's pocket to reward his efforts. 

I do agree with you that creative ways exist to offer content for free and 
still make money. I made one of my own books available under a Creative 
Commons license so that anyone download it for free, and I still make some 
money selling hard copies on Amazon.com. But as many people on this thread 
have said, that needs to be the author's choice, not the choice of a third 
party.

Good conversation,
Leo
>From jurgen@botz.org  Sat Nov 14 05:01:46 2009
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Information monopoly (was: Intellectual property)
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On 11/14/2009 03:23 AM, Leo Brodie wrote:
> Yes it *does* get more complicated, because even if the "farmer
> still has the pdf files," their *value* has been diminished by the
> theft.

How so?  I would argue the opposite, that in fact their value has been
INCREASED by the illegal copying.  This can be a valid argument,
because P (the "pirate") might never have bought the book, either
because he couldn't afford it or because the price was too high for
the value he thought it represented, so up to now there has been no
diminishment in value.  But now that P has the illegal copy he
recognizes it as having a higher value than he thought and a) perhaps
later buys a paper copy and b) publicizes the value to others who
might not otherwise have heard of it.  The end result is that A
(the author) never lost anything because P had never been a
potential customer (at least not without A first either lowering
the price or spending more on marketing), but after the act of
piracy A's pool of potential customers is increased without any
expense to him.

The whole problem with our civilization's approach to intellectual
property is that it simply assumes that your argument is correct while
the evidence is mounting that my argument is far more valid.
Practically everyone who has ever studied this question, either by
examining the empirical evidence from things like music piracy or by
using rigorous economic models, comes to that conclusion.

The bottom line is, information is DIFFERENT and trying to simply map
our concepts of property to it is bound to produce results that are
detrimental to our society and usually even to those trying to
generate income from it.  The very phrase "intellectual property" is
an oxymoron... information can never really be property.  A far more
correct term for the set of laws it refers to would be "information
monopoly".

:j