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RE: Regarding Plagiarism and Intellectual Property
The concept of private property is not found in nature either. Why not go all the way? Theft does not exist.
The concept of private property is not found in nature either. Why not go all the way? Theft does not exist.
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference between claiming ownership of a physical material or other measurable asset and claiming ownership of a thought or action.
"You can't come into my house uninvited!" is quite different from "You can't sing that song!"
Ownership of thoughts and actions are measurable assets. If you do not believe that what on earth are you doing on Steemit?
All kinds of ownership is fundamentally the same. If you can not enforce it with violence you do not own anything. To you it would really not matter if I beat you up for singing my song, looking at my wife or nicking my silverware.
By what metric?
Exactly what you and I are doing at the moment: sharing our ideas and engaging each other in discussion about those ideas. That has far greater value to me than the monetization aspect of the platform.
You are arguing against a point that I never made. I can and will defend my physical property with violence when pressed to do so. The ability to employ violence as a tool does not necessarily justify doing so, however.
You are attempting on my behalf, and you have entirely misinterpreted my thinking in the process. This statement commits several logical fallacies: false equivalency, reductio ad absurdum, and you could apply several others.
Also, a red flag in any discussion is when the speaker begins arguing with an increasingly emotional tone, at which point they usually begin firing off unfounded and poorly defined assertions. There is nothing wrong with experiencing some level of cognitive dissonance when presented with a viewpoint which conflicts with your own worldview. This uncomfortable sensation can continue until you are able to reconcile the opposing assertions to a single conclusion. Of course, if you instead reflexively lash out in anger, you stop thinking altogether. The one trait which sets human beings apart from all other species on earth is the ability to suppress animistic instinct and act instead from logical reasoning. Of course, that's an entire discussion in itself.
It's easy to verbally attack others over the internet with the layer of anonymity and insulation that it offers. That's no excuse for savagery, however. Don't be an animal.
I can wallow in the rhetorical mud with you if I choose. Trolling and provoking strangers to anger is actually a favorite pastime of mine. Having such control over another person's emotional state is essentially to have command of their consciousness, and gives a sense of superiority over intellectually weaker individuals. I find it even more exhilarating than physically overpowering someone. I feel, however, that Steem is not an appropriate forum for such behavior. There are plenty of low-brow social media sites and discussion forums where you can engage in such activities.
Sorry, I did not mean to provoke you. You are the emotional one here :) I did not write to hear your analysis of how to discuss, most of what you write does not address the intersting question -the thing you just left as a question... by what metric. My answer is that there already exist human laws that do measure this I would say you could examine those.
What I opposed originally was you arguing from nature. That is a fallacy, and a big one, and it belongs in religious thinking not in rational thinking. Either nature is everything except human society - in which case I would say you would have a hard time finding anything akin to ownership, or nature is everything (which would be the way I prefer) including the ways of human society - and here you would find the idea of intellectual ownership nicely alongside the idea of other kinds of ownership like material property, slaves, trade-rights etc..
The law can be, and often is as I see it, wrong.
I did indeed choose my words poorly in that case.
As far as the ownership of ideas, I think we are going to continue to be at odds with one another. I have not seen reason yet to abandon my assertion that once you put an idea out there, you cannot expect to control what others do with it. IP law as it exists seems to me to be an impediment to innovation and the free exchange of ideas, something which I value more highly than
onone individual's pride over the assumption that they were the first to present an idea to the world.One of my favorite things about the internet is how much it has done to destroy the concept of intellectual property.
(I'll answer here because the comments can not be more than 6 post deep)
Laws can indeed be wrong and annoying, but I think the ethical discussion is a bit of track from the ontological discussion. I'll let that rest. The empirical discussion of the state of IP is maybe more interesting. :)
I have been an artist for many years so of course I will not challenge you about our lack of ability to control thoughts, or the value of stealing/lending ideas. But I think that you only scrape the surface when you assume that the internet is destroying the concept of IP. The contrary is actually happening. Everybody can steal an art-work. Artist have been fucked over since the Sumerians. When we defend our small businesses it is often understood that the real issue with IP is the artists and his individual pride. But we are only jesters - decapitated on a whim. What IP really means for the internet can not be underestimated, because every line of code depends on IP. An example is open-source software. GPL and BSD both depends on copyright, because you can not give away what is not yours. Another example: I post a lot of artworks as CC-by but you have to mention me when using my art even though I do not care to be named, because there would not be a license if there was no creator claiming it and without the license you would infringe on my copyright. It's a catch-22.
The internet has given so much extra value to Intellectual Property that the corporate lobbyists are pressuring the politicians to tighten the IP-laws and enforce them harder than ever. These laws do not apply to me or other small business-holders, but to corporate semi-states that doesn't give a shit about innovation or free exchange of ideas. That's just an illusion they like to uphold with artist as the show-case.
That's one of the reasons I am here, because this technology just might give a little back to innovators, artists and scientists. But we can't do that without the copyright.
For the little guy, eh? Or we could take the scorched earth approach toward leveling the playing field. I've actually seen a lot of sentiment expressed from pockets of the open source community regarding how ridiculously complicated IP law and licensing has made the open source development landscape. Some would prefer to do away with it altogether.