

Why Oracle’s Copyright Victory Over Google Is Bad News for Everyone - coffeecodecouch
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oracle-copyright/?mbid=social_twitter

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duncan_bayne
I'm sure that many pundits will come out brandishing their own proposals to
'fix Copyright'. Here's an alternative idea: kill off the idea of intellectual
property altoegether.

[http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm](http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm)

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself;
but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every
one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every
other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
darkening me."

\- Jefferson

~~~
chc
This is about as meaningful a suggestion as "I think everyone should just get
along and then we'd have world peace." It's not wrong, but it's so
inapplicable to the world we live in that it might as well be wrong.

Copyright does not exist because it is thought to be natural — quite the
opposite. Copyright exists because there is no natural property right to those
things, but it is widely believed that granting authors some degree of
ownership of their work serves the common good.

It is certainly true that it appears to be hard to get compensated for work
that is not protected by copyright. Some might say that's all right, and
people should just create things for the good of everyone else and they can
_mumblemumble_ to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads while
they're creating — but that kind of "let them eat cake" attitude is unlikely
to gain currency as long as people actually believe authors bring value into
the world.

Incidentally, if we're actually talking about everything that's called
"intellectual property" rather than just copyrights, your plan also means
there will be nothing preventing me from, say, opening up a faux Apple store
and selling knockoff Macs and iPhones that just run Gentoo with a crappy
theme.

~~~
duncan_bayne
There's a significant difference between Copyrights (and Patents ... same
argument, really) and trademarks. Passing off your knockoff Mac as an Apple
product is actually a class of fraud, and should be treated as such. Selling
something that just happens to look exactly like an Apple, but you clearly
explain to the customer that it isn't? Go right ahead.

Re. mechanisms for paying authors and musicians (and other creatives) without
Copyright or Patent law, take a look at that Molinari site. History is replete
with examples.

Furthermore, even _if_ your argument were correct, it _still_ wouldn't justify
the initiation of force inherent in Copyright and Patent law. That is, the
desire of authors to earn a living from writing ought not to be sufficient
cause for the State to coerce people into paying them for their writing.

~~~
chc
The distinction between copyright and trademarks was my point. When you say
"intellectual property," you're lumping together a bunch of things that aren't
alike. (Also, if we do abolish all intellectual property, my crappy Gentoo
computer with the aluminum case not only _looks_ like an Apple iMac, it _is_
an Apple iMac — just not the Apple iMac you're thinking of! Trademarks exist
to prevent namespace collisions like this.)

As for the Molinari site, I looked at it, but it was very hard to find
anything noteworthy in the wall of links with anchor text like "Copyright is
murder," "The War on Copyright Nazism" and "On the Subject of Genocidal Rage."
If you have a good piece in mind that argues against the historical utility of
copyright, I would be interested to read it, because I've never seen such a
thing.

~~~
duncan_bayne
And yeah, I think that there is a case for trademarks as distinct from other
forms of IP. I think I'm on shaky ground here according to other market
anarchists, but I think that trademarks serve a purpose of communication.

That is, that there _is_ in reality a distinction between my 'iMac' and an
iMac made by Apple, that trademarks exist to facilitate the communication of
that distinction to customers, and that it's reasonable to deal with trademark
infringement with force.

Of course, _that_ opens an entirely new can of worms: what constitutes a
trademark? The Apple logo? The shape of an iMac? The colour? Etc. etc.

No-one said this was easy :)

------
hajile
If this continues, I will certainly be making it my policy to NEVER use any
API unless it is permissively licensed under a widely-used license
(specifically, 2-3 clause BSD, OSI MIT, GPL variants, or Apache 2).

If they want to play copyright games, then we as developers can force them to
play the game by our rules (else we don't use their APIs).

