Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me.

I agree the method of enforcement and level of influence the industry has on our legislative process is extremely problematic. I don't agree that how industry execs are compensated is relevant.

Intellectual property like the movie Avatar cost money to make and have real value. As consumers we are prepared to exchange money for that value, money which is worth less to us than the value we extract from the product. It's just that the laws of physics have changed and it's no longer possible to exchange one unit of Avatar for X dollars because once the first customer consumes it, it is free for everyone else, in a perfectly efficient piracy market.

I want to live in a world where people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making movies like Avatar. So rather than telling the industry to just "get with the program, your goods are free like smells now", I'd like to see our community come up with a solution to this very very hard problem. Any takers?

A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.

Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway.

It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.

For example, I'm producing a closed-source, proprietary piece of software to make a living. I will aggressively defend my copyright. Do I believe in copyright? No. But I'm operating in a bad system and I need to eat. In a better world, I'd be doing the same thing as work for hire for a group of actors within the industry who would collectively benefit from it, and customizing for any who had particularly unique use cases. I'd be working to reduce friction for the entire system and to make the tools that computers are generally more useful, rather than reenforcing the oligarchies of the market leaders who can pay my price (which is almost completely unrelated to my effort, but rather to the value of advantage over competitors in an underserved market.) My software being proprietary is just limiting general productivity gains and distorting the market (from whence comes it's value), and my enforcement is just limiting everyone's freedom to use their own machines.

another tl;dr, the GPL hack creates an island of freedom within a restrictive framework, and if the restrictive framework is gone there's no need to respect the GPL, a child of that framework.

We can't oppress the poor DRM artists:)

That seems ridiculously impossible and utopian right now, but I'll bet that won't always be so. How do we get there from here? I'd really like to short circuit the part where everyone that believes this is impossible or undesirable economically has to die off before this can happen.

If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression.

What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly.

Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.

If you cure cancer but you keep it in your basement should you be rewarded for that?

If you know the cure for cancer, but you didn't invent it yourself, should you be prevented from spreading it?

Your argument is that you never get the cure for cancer without incentivizing someone with the financial rewards to do it, which is a fair one logically, but in the case of the reality of the music industry it's quite simply not what's happened (the RIAA themselves have funded studies that actually showed piracy increasing profits). Instead the music market has been enlarged, and the RIAA is simply getting less of it. This is a Good Thing.

My argument is not inline with the entertainment industry because I am arguing that copyright infringement should no longer be a crime. People who provide the value of getting valued ideas to people should be paid for it, regardless of who created the idea. Publishers don't provide the value of creating or spreading ideas, they provide the value of selling a copy of an idea. We shouldn't give them licenses that says they do anything else because they don't.

s/google/some company that runs on AWS

Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...

Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.

So most web businesses are not providing value. Neither are any other software businesses. Neither are authors.

Except that loads of people want and need software and websites and books. Somehow it seems like this scarcity-based, property-based system of valuation doesn't work well.

Who wants to build the start-up that disrupts capitalism?

Who said that software is property? Not me.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-th...

Oh, wait...

Joking aside, I think that IP is and should remain a messy compromise. There are no easy answers. Were it to cease to exist completely, it would reduce the incentives for producers, and thus consumers would be worse off too because they would have less software, books, movies and music to enjoy. I don't have all the answers in terms of details, but copyright terms right now are too long. Patents should vary by sector, taking into account the real world. Biotech patents applied to medicines are useful because those medicines are easy to copy, more often than not, but take years of research to come up with. Software patents just seem like bunk to me. Other things are probably in the middle somewhere. And all of this should be reviewed every 10 years or so to see how the facts on the ground are changing.

As for enforcement... that's tricky. With no enforcement at all, it's sort of silly to even pretend that producers have any rights. Too draconian is obviously bad as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on the details, wherein lies the devil?

Also, speaking of smells and property, Googling for "perfume intellectual property" turns up some interesting stuff, like this:

http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2010/01/19/smelly-rig...

Sure, we can continue to limp forward with the mess we have now, paying the huge legal overhead, as well as the opportunity cost of the economic activity which is hindered by this environment (patent trolls, remix culture, etc).

But I don't think we should be content with that. I'd much rather we explore new incentive systems which are oriented specifically toward knowledge work. We already do this in the form of new business models: commoditizing your components, freemium, gift economies, etc. But there is still a lot of unexplored space in creating new ways to profit from the creation of data, either by creating new business models, or drafting new social conventions (government-backed or otherwise).

How do you propose we give someone the means to make a living writing books, for instance? Someone who is at the margin, not Stephen King ( http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin )?

* Commoditizing components doesn't work very well with books. This might work ok for saturday morning cartoons, where there are toys to be purchased, but it's a fairly limited model, especially for most authors, who don't have much else to sell.

* Freemium means that you still make people pay for the goods and they are not allowed to freely copy them.

* "Gift economies" is very hand wavy and, by and large, does not put food on the table as far as I can tell.

I suspect that there are new business models, but ultimately, it comes down to a question of scarcity. If information goods are, by law, not scarce, but the time needed to produce them is scarce, then they will be underprovisioned.

I think the case of podcasts is illustrative here. Despite a lack of DRM, a convention of free-as-in-beer, and a zero lawsuits (that I know of), the field has been thriving for 10 years using incentive structures which do not require IP:

- Pure Promotion, such as comedians who put out a free podcast to attract fans for live performances.

- Up-sells, whether for additional premium content, apps, t-shirts, etc.

- Donations, which at minimum can defray overhead costs. (It's worth noting that Kickstarter is fairly indistinguishable from a donation/gift economy, assuming the reward isn't a simple pre-order.)

- Advertising, while a dirty business model for producer and consumer alike, still can pay the bills, especially if ad content is tasteful and targeted.

Now, these methods are by no means the only ones possible, and that's my point. Rather than to try to create scarcity out of abundance, I think we're better off embracing it, and finding new, indirect ways to profit. To re-use PG's analogy, rather than suing the smell-stealer, the restauranteur could invite people to enjoy some free smells, knowing that some would be enticed to pay for a meal. Or he could buy the land next door and rent the space for gatherings, touting free smells. And on and on.

"Producers of information goods" is a far broader category, including authors, musicians, movie and software people; and one not superceded by something more practical, unless you consider twitter a good replacement for books.

And government protection to create a market is a fine idea - it's in the US constitution, for example. It just needs rebalancing.

I am also not arguing against all instances of government created markets, by the way. Just saying that failure to be able to make a living in a way that people used to does not by definition necessitate being saved by the government.

To me that is confusing, because in my mind distribution is a different act than creation of information goods.

Movie theaters, dvd's, netflix.... those are distribution, and I don't care too much if new ones arise and old ones go away. But I enjoy a movie once in a while, and would be sad to live in a world where it is no longer possible to do anything but the cheapest of indy efforts.

There may not be proof either way, but if people do not have to pay for information goods, it only stands to reason that there will be less of them produced. Certainly, they won't go away entirely, but why would anyone produce a movie like Avatar if there is no legal way they can get paid for it?

So, software as a service? It appears we've been heading that way for a while.

> Joking aside, I think that IP is and should remain a messy compromise. There are no easy answers. Were it to cease to exist completely, it would reduce the incentives for producers, and thus consumers would be worse off too because they would have less software, books, movies and music to enjoy.

I'm not sure we'd see less content, but less financially motivated content. Keep in mind, copyright is not the only way to subsidize content creation.

New music genres and artists are giving away their music online today -- and not just some of them. I'd say most new electronic music winds up on Soundcloud from the artists themselves. RIAA has a choke-hold on Pop music and that's it, but given the nature of Pop music, that's unsurprising.

It would be impractical to expect artists to give away their content with nothing in return... so create a business model that relies on payment before you produce the content rather than after you share it.

Copyright will die a slow and painful death, whether or not it is a compromise by today's standards. What are you going to do when I can put every HD movie ever created on my hard-disk? Enforcement isn't a gradient, it either largely works or largely doesn't.

'Financially motivated' means: it pays the bills, puts food on the table, and gives me a place to live. If someone can't do that as a producer of information goods, they'll have to do something else, and therefore produce less, leaving consumers worse off.

The argument isn't as much about what's morally right, but what's economically practical. It's really hard to control the flow of information, including music and software.

It would only be an hypocrisy if hackers were trying to push laws to protect software from being pirated. But you don't, quite the opposite actually, I'd guess most of us would rather see less IP enforcement, than otherwise. Personally, I'd invite you to share my creation as much as you can, please do so.

Look to large corporations: Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, &c using patents offensively and defensively, instead.

Labels which only offer their music (song catalogs) as a service, thus requiring a listener to subscribe to their service (and multiple services if one enjoyed music from artists belonging to different labels)?

Maybe someone could offer a platform for musicians to undercut (cut-out) the label middle-person. One would still likely see multiple direct to consumer music platforms --many requiring some kind of subscription service?

There could be a free service which would be subsidized or supported via advertising.

The solutions above could all be undermined by people recording the music and saving them locally.

One can't easily "save" Google services locally and get the same benefit out of them. I mean, one could make a good effort, but the result would require much effort that is beyond the tolerance of most people, I think.

Recordings have only existed for barely more than a century. Musical performers survived long before and will survive long after. Profiting from recordings is an aberration rather than the norm. The industry can reorient itself back to live performances.

Movies, as well, make substantial revenue via theaters. Home video is not required to sustain the industry, but they would have you believe the movie industry prior to the VCR could not exist again. (even though at the time they claimed the VCR itself would destroy the movie industry).

It used to be the case that the cost of listening to recorded music was a combination of creation and distribution. The cost of distributions is now effectively zero, and so therefore, society should now no longer listen to recorded music, because it's not possible to cover the cost of creation with the profits from distribution?

As the combined cost of creation and distribution is lowered, I'd want society to have more creation and distribution.

If the media industry needs laws and international accords to protect their distribution system at the expense of personal freedom and national sovereignty than I believe it is the musicians who should change and not society.

True. But that's saying the future is the past? That's not so much transformation, as devolution. I was trying to think how they would transform into the future, not "can they survive by looking back".

Live performances, I think, would create a strange situation where the listening was scheduled to the artist's performance, rather than being on my (on-demand) schedule. Even if I could schedule it to fit into my time, what about someone else in a different time zone. What woud I do about curating songs into a moody sequence?

My take on the musical profession, before the advent of recordings was that it was more a matter of survival, for most musicians --even good ones. That is to say, they barely survived on their musical income. That's not unlike lots of amateur musicians, but the difference is there was no "up" unless you were a virtuoso performing for a royal, or something similar. I would like for musicians to still be able to make a decent living from their art. Not necessarily millionaires (alto not against that).

Do you have a reason for not looking back? I don't find platitudes such as "devolution" to be in any way compelling to discount going to what worked.

>Live performances, I think, would create a strange situation where the listening was scheduled to the artist's performance, rather than being on my (on-demand) schedule. Even if I could schedule it to fit into my time, what about someone else in a different time zone. What woud I do about curating songs into a moody sequence?

I did not intend to say that music recordings would disappear. Only that the revenue stream would shift from selling recordings to live performances. A more easily enforcible way to make money without imposing draconian changes to law to force payments out of citizens.

>My take on the musical profession, before the advent of recordings was that it was more a matter of survival, for most musicians --even good ones. That is to say, they barely survived on their musical income.

This is actually how most of humanity currently exists. The artists who sell recordings are, again, an aberration. Think Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, or Jimi Hendrix still making money decades after any work stopped. I think it is reasonable to think performers move from a career of capital to one of labor. Actually the inverse. I find it unreasonable for laws to change to coddle the music industry by letting them create ethereal capital rather than work by actually performing music.

>That's not unlike lots of amateur musicians, but the difference is there was no "up" unless you were a virtuoso performing for a royal, or something similar. I would like for musicians to still be able to make a decent living from their art. Not necessarily millionaires (alto not against that).

I don't see why you think performing is a way in which musicians can't make a decent living.

Nothing concrete. But here are my thoughts. I don't think artists nor people who enjoy music would be easily convinced of having to enjoy music the way people used to over a century ago. No time shifting (for listening); Relatively low income (for the artists). In other words the solution to the problem imposes greater problems (in my view) than it solves.

>I don't see why you think performing is a way in which musicians can't make a decent living.

Beside superbands, how would unknown artists develop a following without the groundswell usually provided by broadcast media? I'm sure Byonce, U2, Madonna, Springsteen and Bieber would keep doing well in a concert only economy. how would unknown bands develop that following if there is no way to sample them before going to a concert? It's not as if music is the only entertainment in town (as may have been the case 100+ years ago).

Profiting from recording has become the norm. The industry is simply not going back to live performances as the primary means of enjoying music. People will not be dragged kicking and screaming from their iPods & iPhones.

Likewise, I suspect that attempting to make money solely from movie theaters would end up with a crippled industry. There's a reason that DVDs were the fastest growing recording media in history: when you can get all the benefits of a theater experience (many of us don't need a 100' screen to be happy) at home without any of the drawbacks, well, it's gonna be hard to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree.

Theaters in the US took in $10 billion[1] in 2011. Theaters are hardly on their last leg. If studios can't survive on 16 million in revenue (on average) we really shouldn't be modifying laws in the US and internationally at the cost of freedom to help those inefficient studios stay in business.

[1] http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2011

Concerts.

If creating the recording becomes cheap enough (and if you're skilled you can make an (almost) professional level recording these days with a few rental mic's and pre-amps and a laptop. Then perhaps we could reach a point where bands would be willing to give away the recordings if they make it back up on the road.

Hardest part here is that the labels also handle all the upfront costs of marketing a band and its music. This is the area where I'd try to innovate if I were a music startup.

For movies, I think that an ad supported channel could work, especially if it would use the same level of personalization as online advertising. Even cooler would be personalized product placement, but that's a 'tick' more involved.

Yes. Would we (everyone/most) be comfortable with that model being the predominant, perhaps only model? Perhaps. Not sure.

Now ask yourself why it is that engineers adjusted but media has not. What are their motivations?

Which I guess boils down to either the patronage system, where you can sponsors people to write (ex: epic poetry) or the organizational system where you can distribute free content and then give kickback to the most popular authors like many blogging systems do.

PS: Batoto.com is an odd mix as it returns money to people who translate works but not the original authors. Sort of like a pirates auction house. The advantage for users being a nice interface and rapid updates.

Of course engineers rely on intellectual property as much as anyone does.

Yeah, it's certainly working fine:

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7087027/Symantec_Norton_Anti...

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4149808/Windows_NT4_source_c...

https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3497574/Windows_2000_source_...

In terms of proof and evidence, no one can really "prove" anything without actually experiencing the counterfactual world. You can't prove that MacOS X code would not be everywhere, for instance, just as I can't prove that it would be.

The best we can do is look for evidence that suggests how things might go.

Treating source code as intellectual property is exactly what spawned GPL in the first place, as it is a "hack" that exploits the nature of software licensing.

Can you reiterate your point?

A correct statement would be that the BSD or MIT licence would be unnecessary (except for their clauses that you have to include the copyright notice with your modified program).

And for that matter, why should there be information security laws if there's no intellectual property?

Not if they're bound by contract OR if they conspired with someone who was. In other cases, yes. But what we think of whether it's "fine" or not is irrelevant: it'll happen anyway (try looking for Norton source code on TPB). What it matters is whether we want to fund laws to fight windmills.

And for that matter, why should there be information security laws if there's no intellectual property?

There are many laws under that "banner". What laws do you mean?

If you mean Data Protection, those are essentially mandatory contract terms. Regardless of whether they should exist or not, they're very different, because you're only bound by them if you enter in a contract (implied or not) with the person or company providing you with the data.

Whether that data is "property" or not is irrelevant.

They're exactly the same. There's a reason the industry is moving towards SaaS and building businesses atop FOSS, rather than trying to build a better dongle.

Similarly, games are pirated a lot; but is a world with lots of free-to-play games really worse than a world in which the games are (as now) largely too expensive (per hour) for the target audience?

There will always be money to be made in writing custom in-house software, but lots of software is becoming cheaper/free. This is mostly a good thing.

Microsoft sells it's compilers in the form of Visual Studio. Intel sells a variety of C++ and Fortran compilers. There's GCC, there's LLVM/Clang.

They all compete against each other in a variety of ways, thus there is a market, albeit one in which the currency is to extents eyeballs as opposed to money. (in the sense that if you're in an area where a for-money compiler is required, the cost of it is likely not an issue - so it comes down to which compiler do your devs want to be using)

In my opinion, a world with lots of free games is worse than a world with a few expensive games. I see at being almost analogous to mass-production vs artisan craftsmanship. I'd rather enjoy the fruit of a craftsman's labour than I would gorge myself on the cheap, cheerful and unpolished wares of the assembly line.

That's the wrong way 'round, from my perspective. The "few, expensive" games we have are bland blockbuster genre-stuffers created by committee. The "lots of free games" we're heading toward are tiny, polished artifacts of a single indie developer's labor, where the value in them comes from laser-focus on a single innovative gameplay mechanic, rather than a multi-million-dollar art pipeline. The latter sound much more like the "artisans" to me.

This probably is a good thing, it is possible to get started now with no expenditure beyond the hardware whereas when I started I was limited by what I could afford.

In a world where software and easy-to-copy "bits" can not be owned, would a viable business model be to hack into Facebook, steal the code and the user database then set up my own social networking site using their IP?

I mean, if they can't own bits then I haven't really stolen anything by hacking into their system. Maybe I'd need to pay them back for the cost of the download?

Just wondering.

He's saying the definition of that particular property is changing, but that doesn't mean it is non-existent.

With software, music, movies and books, what's changing is the notion that the copying of a piece of work is the creation of new property, hence deserving of the unit cost of all the work that went into the creation of the original material.

It's not that a new song belongs to everyone by default, it's that the math is skewed.

Software developers have figured this out already - which is why you can buy an app for $.99 instantly.

The producers of other material haven't adjusted. Although unlike pg I don't think it has anything to do with bonuses, and everything to do with the fact that the entire production-enabling industry has become obsolete; especially for music, but soon enough for movies as well and books as well.

The content producer doesn't need a gatekeeper to help create physical copies his book or song, then distribute these to selected merchants around the world.

He needs an editor and a marketing firm to get the word out, and that's it.

Of course they're analogous. I think pg is fine with disposing of the traditional model of "selling software." As he pointed out in his recent Pycon keynote, Amazon AWS is a spectacular example of profitable commercial software, but it doesn't follow that model of "selling software."

And just because it costs money to make certain properties, like the smells coming from a restaurant, should we make laws that twist common sense and decency to protect profits derived from these properties?

Copyright law should already protect "copies" of these things, and really has no regard to profit (how you profit from your copyright is up to you).

Sorry, but many people are. Personally, I'd like to at least try it too.

That's because I am intellectually consistent... which was the original point.

pg's intellectual inconsistency gives him power in the world of hucksters and thieves, but no one who takes these issues seriously simulataneously takes his self-serving screeds seriously.

If, hypothetically, all software is open source, but differs in its data input, then the data will be considered "property". It is already happening with social networking sites, wherein there is reluctance to share in an open way user data, comments, photos, "likes" etc.

That being said, I think content, being a product of human creativity and imagination, will always have some value in the "property" sense.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I'm working with a generic product which is freely available in mass, how do you charge for that? By making it more valuable to the user at the time of use is the best that I've come up with so far.

Can you own a single word, for example (like, say, sklartch)? Not as a trademark but actually owning the word, owning the right to let people use it, copy it, etc. Of course you can't, because copying a word is trivial. You cannot stop someone from memorizing and writing out a short series of letters, either with a keyboard or with a pen and paper. It is not within anyone's power to restrict or control the writing of the word "sklartch".

And, of course, we accept intuitively that you can't own a word, or a smell, because we have already internalized that it is impossible and thus ridiculous to do so.

We are in the midst of a technological revolution that is rapidly making it ridiculous to attempt to control the copying of digital goods. It is no more possible to control the copying of a movie, song, or book than it is to control the copying of the word sklartch. Does that mean that such things can no longer be property? Perhaps.

It can be disconcerting to traverse the boundary where something goes from being property to not, because of course we have come to believe that obtaining something that is defined as property without paying for it is stealing. But if you were to write the word sklartch on a piece of paper would you feel like a thief? Would you feel like a thief if you intentionally passed by a nearby restaurant because it smells good? Would you feel like a thief if you read a book in a library? Would you feel like a thief if you listened to a song on the radio and turned the radio off as a commercial came on?

Obviously there is additional complexity involved, but this is still a very important part of the discussion about the future of art and its relationship to law and technology.

Edit: how do you make money out of something that can't be property? Well, I put a lot of effort into inventing the word "sklartch" how do I make money off of that? To some degree, this changes what people do and what people make. You don't see people making careers out of inventing new words (except Dr. Seuss). But there are often other business models that still work. Radio/used book stores/libraries haven't destroyed art yet, perhaps file sharing won't either. One strong possibility, that is already a reality for some, is that makers acquire a reputation via their early works and then use a platform like kickstarter to earn money preemptively on their next work. In combination with "pay what you want" models, I think it might be workable.

Also, keep in mind that we are currently entirely blind to all of the activities that would benefit society greatly (including creation of art) but which are very uncommon because it's not possible to make a living from them.

If individuals are allowed special protection for that, why can't I be afforded protection on my computer program?

If there are still to be secrets where the access is legally controlled by an "owner" due to privacy or trade secrets, why should this ownership not extend to any sort of digital work?

If Rick Santorum has genital warts, as an example, then he doesn't own the phrase "Rick Santorum has genital warts" nor does it become property even though using that phrase could be a violation of his privacy and could even violate certain laws (such as HIPAA).