permaculture

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

Juergen,
 
I have the impression that you don’t understand the function of the 
Intellectual Property system.  The system is subject to change according to 
changes occurring in customs and society and there are some differences 
between different countries.  But basically its function is to propagate 
information and not to monopolize it.  Put simply, it is a contract between 
the inventor (or author) and society that obliges the inventor to publish her 
invention.  In exchange, society guarantees that others will not use the 
invention for their own personal gain.  Nevertheless, others may use the 
invention to improve on it.  Without that contract, the inventor would have 
to hide her invention for as long as possible because everyone would be able 
to steal it and use it for their own personal gain. Thus, nobody would be 
able to improve on it, which would slow technological progress.  Today, no 
industrial country can survive without an Intellectual Property
 system.
 
Dieter


--- On Sat, 11/14/09, Juergen Botz <jurgen@botz.org> wrote:


From: Juergen Botz <jurgen@botz.org>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Information monopoly (was: Intellectual property)
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 10:01 AM


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

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>From toobeeorknottoobee@gmail.com  Sat Nov 14 13:08:40 2009
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Intellectual property
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I generally agree with your positions, and I think your site and your
abilities will have a great impact. People are tricky though and
meaningful change is very hard. I have been trying to think outside of
the box and implement changes for some time now and yet much remains the
same in my own life. There is a lot of momentum  when you have kids and
a fair many years on you and vary limited capital. I am beginning to
believe that it is better to raise a parallel solution to the problem
rather then toppling an existing paradigm. For instance I have wondered
if rather then trying to change a highly broken health care system, if
small groups of people could make incremental changes such as making a
health care cooperative that would buy a doctor. The doctor would be an
employee of the owners of the co-op. The doctor is charged with the
health of the members not with making money, his/her income is
guaranteed. Malpractice may also somewhat be eliminated in an employee
relationship.

On the intellectual property front there is a lot of momentum. You are
going up against an explosive giant. I would truly love to see an open
source designers manual and it may serve your abilities and energy to
help bring this about. There has to be a way to use technology to build
the book without any one person being beat down by the overwhelmingness
of it, i.e. small groups being assigned to chapter content, a governing
body to oversee basic book layout and timeline decsions, a group for
editorial change suggestions, translators would be needed later and this
could be handled similarly. Small groups could print the translated book
on local printers and send them overseas to needy areas for binding.
Perhaps a one person one vote approach and a temporary withdrawal of the
individual ego for the greater good. A gift to humanity. There is the
perhaps way too idyllic vision of what we might be able to accomplish.
And yet wouldn't it be worth it? -Jeff



Evan Schoepke wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> Don't mean to flog a dead horse here but I just thought I would give this
> one more go...
> For a innovative system that talks up abundance this, and abundance that, it
> seams as though we're looking at this from the classical scarcity/capitalist
> viewpoint.  What if someone takes that farmers pdf spreads it around and
> then everyone starts doing organic polyculture farming and no one has to go
> hungry ever again? What if the indigenous knowledge of polycultures and
> plant guilds had been copyrighted by Monsanto (which they would love to do)?
>
> I often use the metaphor of a flower shop to explain the scarcity/abundance
> conundrum.  Classic capitalist logic (which some people seem to think is
> synonomis with moral logic) says that you can't give out flowers for free or
> as flower shop or you'll lose lots of money.  Everyday all over the country
> thousands of perfectly good flowers get dumped in the trash.  Some of these
> flowers may have been harvested in another country and then flown to shop at
> a great expense of money and resources, and yet still perfectly good flowers
> end up in the trash.  Imagine instead if the flower shop stapled their
> business card to each of those flowers and couple of days a week handed out
> all those flowers for free in different parts of the city.  Now which flower
> shop would you want doing the flowers for your wedding, the one that throws
> the flowers away in the trash, or the one that gives them away for free.
>  Whenever I tell people I dumpster perfectly good cases of beer they
> curiously ask me,"why would anybody throw away good beer"?  To which I
> always reply "because they're capitalist of course, being wasteful is what
> they're good at". Being wasteful is what the ideology of
> capitalism compels them to do....
>
>   If anything by my actions *I have only increased the appeal* and market
> share of permaculture material.  Remember when google came out with free
> email they seemed to have done okay with that, and in fact next week they're
> coming out with an entire free operating system that will compete with
> windows from Microsoft (aka:the ultimate digital proprietary monster).
>
> I am happy that folks have been talking about various open source
> permaculture sites and projects and so I wanted to offer
>
>    -   appropedia.org
>    - open source
> ecology<http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Ecology>
>    - blooming in space <http://bloominginspace.wordpress.com/2008/12/>
>
>
> If the principals of permaculture can not evolve to accomadate the needs of
> people *willing to learn* from various backgrounds and income levels in a
> very substantial way then permaculture *will not* avert a vast ecological
> and social collapse.  To be clear I have *never* stolen anything from Bill
> Mollison and have in fact have given as much time and *money* and I can to
> the permie cause. I didn't even scan the Permaculture Designers Manual
> myself but merely promoted a link I found to a free copy.  The reason I did
> this is because I do know that there are people from all over the world with
> less resources who would put it to good use (*see christophe's comment*).  I
> expect to get support and criticism but most importantly I expect that
> permaculturalist of all people will at the very least *begin to
> question*the "business as usual" logic that is destroying our planet.
> Is capitalism
> as we know it now an "appropriate technology"?
>
> take care and fair share,
> ~evan
>
> P.S. I invite anyone on this list serve (even folks who wish someone sued my
> pants off) to write and contribute to www.punkrockpermaculture.com.  Thank
> you, and keep up the great work.
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