I’d say first of all that I didn’t read JQ as addressing Victor Hugo, but rather actual commenters here, some of whom do appear to have a reflexive defensive reaction to any suggested change in the status quo.

But I also second Salient: I don’t find it all all ‘rich’ to consider the possibility that the 19th century policy makers responsible for the Berne Convention might have been operating in something of an elite echo chamber. In particular, I think it’s easy to see how the idea of a strong “creator’s rights” movement has a rather powerful sort of truthiness to it that would be rather difficult to counter without a fairly well-developed appreciation for the role of the public domain.

I dunno. A lot of people sure seemed to support invading Iraq. I think they were unreasonable, etc.

C’mon, though, can I persuade you to address #97? I’m more interested in exploring your perspective than I am with arguing with you, and you said some things about an artist’s right to hide/destroy their own work that were interesting. Example: what you said in #78 earlier upthread implied, to me, that you might support (for example) a definition of “sell” that allows an artist to later demand the artwork back so it can be destroyed. In this case “sell” = “right to view/read/listen to for an indeterminate period of time” (or maybe the artist would be required to refund money if s/he wanted the artwork back to destroy it). That’s interesting and I want to know if I’m understanding correctly.
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I don’t understand IP very well from a theoretical perspective. Open question, who is currently doing analytical work & writing on ethics re: intellectual property? Is anyone empirically researching what IP policies result in the maximum level of innovation, however that gets measured?

I think IP seems roughly equivalent to “laws that prohibit others from profiting off the new stuff you’ve created unless they have your permission.” I thought the main point of such law was to prevent, for example, Person Y from selling copies of Person X’s book for half the price Person X was charging. That’s very naive. Perhaps IP = “laws that help make sure you can make money off the new stuff you come up with, if you want to try.”

So it’s not protecting “property” in the way I normally think of protecting property (right to prohibit use); it’s protecting “right to control distribution” (I guess there really is strong parallel with owning a business; other people can’t open new locations and claim to be part of your chain w/o permission).

Unsurprisingly I find this statement to be unfounded and unreasonable: almost all the countries in the world subscribe to what you are calling the “strong IP position”, i.e. the Berne Convention and its successors. And in case you want to argue that all this is the work of some policy elite solely interested in furthering corporate power, I have already mentioned that the roots of this position are to be found in the French ALAI founded by Victor Hugo and other writers. Claiming that all these people are simply unreasonable is a bit rich.

Some light (if slightly distastful) relief – don’t know if they have the same kind of ads in the US, but: The IT Crowd clip

I don’t think my argument was a caricature or a straw man. I was trying to briefly articulate a point of view that I think is taken for granted among some people who are interested in IP arguments. If I’d had more space and more time, I might have tried to make an argument for this point of view’s actually existing. I’m sorry if my point didn’t come across.

I certainly did not intend to sarcastically imply that academics are rarely “morally sound[ and] peace-loving.” (I see it could be read that way.) Rather, I am calling into question the idea that morality and pacifism are correctly considered the most important qualifications a scientist can have. Something like what I described is in fact commonly assumed in a fair amount of scholarly literature in related fields, as well as in the media (say, the New York Times). Taken individually, I think most if not all of the phrases in my comment represent the current “common sense” view. If it’s a caricature to combine them all, I don’t know what ordinary people are supposed to think at times when they find it necessary to take an opinion on a topic they only know about from the newspaper and from discussions in the corporate cafeteria.

I don’t consider myself to be taking the “strong IP” position in this particular argument, nor (as you probably know) are the people who seem to share the point of view I pointed out—a point of view that I think is logically compatible with a great deal of what had already been said in the comments to this post. People who might easily think what you are discussing is the argument most of interest to them.

If John Q. is correct—that scientific progress and cool technological innovations, historically speaking, have always come from morally sound, peace-loving academics

The extent to which this comment, and quite a few others on the strong-IP side of this discussion, relies on a caricature of the opposing position is pretty good evidence of the extent to which the strong IP position relies on reflex reactions and not on reason.

The problem with this kind of thing is that, as the post shows, these reflex reactions aren’t widely shared, so relying on them is a path to political defeat, now that the issue can no longer be confined to the policy elite.

Right. As somebody said way back at comment 18…

Right. As somebody said way back at comment 18…

Dunno. Maybe the royalties thing just shifts the bad incentives from consumers to creators. We don’t want you splitting your piece into 40 segments, and we don’t want the Minutemen tacking an hour of silence onto the end of each of theirs. Or maybe there is a workable solution. Like the royalties aren’t based on downloads, but on what fraction of people in a representative sample are listening to your music at a given moment. Since we actually do pay for broadcast TV through a system like that, it can’t be totally impractical, right?

I’m not wedded to any particular alternative, just to the idea that there are alternatives.