Dawn of thieves’

Sadly, this may be what will eventually happen. If we do not allow creators, in any world, to own the fruits of their labour, they will give up, one by one. As would you, if you were told constantly that your efforts were not your own, and that you did not deserve to benefit from them. Every person deserves to be paid for what they produce, no matter what discipline they work in, as every person incurs costs which must be paid for. There is nothing greedy about expecting to be paid for your labours when you have a sim to maintain or a rl phone bill to meet. RL utility companies do not give price rebates to visual artists, despite the common belief that artists somehow enjoy their work in ways that others don't and can magically work for less.

And, thievery is thievery, not flattery. The person stealing from Oriolus means him no well. The highest form of flattery to an artist is to instead become a good customer, and to enjoy living with their creations.

I will die after (ideally) a couple of years. Let's grab my inventory or just copybot my portfolio, as the heritage of every human being then. The only thing what I would like to ask: not before it. How hard is to accept this?

If we stick to the dictionary , it is not thievery, thievery involve depossessing you from something, wich it clearly doesn't.
Intangible products have this quite interesting property that after the initial costs are met, they are a potentially infinite source of income, the only thing that comes even close to this are illegal money printers.

So who is the biggest thief between someone making an unauthorized copy and someone being legally allowed to sell for more than his lifetime something that cost them nothing to manufacture.



Scientific breakthrough are only protected a couple of years, and any subsequent extension of this exclusivity cost a lot of money, is art more precious than scientific breakthroughs?

Seventeen years is more than "a couple".

Dispossessing a person from the ownership of their work, and the income from the sale of this work, while allowing another who has no legal or moral right to take it is thievery, and this is concrete, pure and simple. A dictionary is not neccessary.

it's not much compared to "a lifetime + 70 years"



You can't own an idea or a concept, there is nothing that can prevent it to be passed from person to person.

Sadly there are peoples in life that consider the only things worth doing are the ones that can bring a profit, mercantilism at it's best....

You can't own an idea or a concept, there is nothing that can prevent it to be passed from person to person.

Exaggeration, however, does little to convince people of the justice of your arguments.

All right, you don't have to wait more, the art is incomparably more cheap and valueless than the molecular biology. Let's start copybot my things right now.
And let me know please, what about my home and my family and with my own life (the last two were free to create so they probably worth nothing): may I keep them at least for a couple of years, or they are already the properties of the pool of the people's republic?

And i'm the one discrediting myself with gross exagerations?
(And i'm off to bed, enough fighting for today)

I just guess you can feel the irony in my words.

It was free to create (no material in it) = Valueless, part of the common pool ("something that cost them nothing to manufacture."
It is heavy and substantial = It has value, without question.



Are you sure about it? The world can't be that simple. This is the good, old collectivism and materialism.

Nice sentiment, but it's not how the modern world happens to work, concerning the employment of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. The employment of ideas is what we're talking about here.

I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, US Copyright law seems to be heading in the direction of denying this -- thus the Mickey Mouse comments. In the US, patents are limited to 20 years (used to be 17, but harmonizations with other countries caused it to change). Copyrights are limited to 70 years after the death of the author, but if the "author" happens to be a corporation ... well, I think this is currently a somewhat murky area that Disney lobbyists are working overtime to ensure that Mickey never becomes public domain, much to my chagrin.

Correct, however, you can own the *rights* to employment of the idea or concept.

In fact, one of the principles underlying the patent system is to encourage the dissemination of the ideas. Prior to patents, many inventors did their best to keep trade secrets. Patents allow inventors to publish the concepts while retaining the rights employ the concept. This spurs further invention, since others can learn from and make improvements on the original (and obtain patents on derivitive works).

~~~

There's a huge distinction between being influenced by prior art and copying it.

I was skeptical of Oriolus at first, having seen only one example of "copying", the lamp. Taken by itself, it's not at all a clear violation. But when you add up all the examples, it's obvious that copying is exactly what's going on -- not merely "influence".

Influence is good. A little copying is easily overlooked. But consistent and multifaceted copying is illegitimately taking advantage of the work of others for one's own benefit, in violation of copyright laws.

However, enforcement of non-criminal aspects of copyright law violation (such as hand recreation of items prim-by-prim), is left to the copyright holder.

So, what Oriolis has here is two kinds of problem. One is DMCA and ToS violations, which LL handled. The other is a civil matter, and he's within his rights to complain, and within his rights to file a lawsuit. There's not much else he can do. He can't call someone a criminal for this, because it's not a criminal violation.

If you think "thief" implies "criminal", then it doesn't quite apply. If you think it means "someone who takes that which does not belong to them, depriving the rightful owner of the benefit", then it does, to some extent. It's a semantic argument, and there are good points on both sides. Anyone who can't see both sides isn't seeing the issue very clearly.

Regardless, most people who've had their hard work copied wholesale feels a sense of violation that is very similar to the sense one has when one's house has been broken into.

But where does that leave Oriolus? If he hasn't the means or intent to file suit, there's little else he can do, other than to reconcile himself with the fact that "it is what it is", and get on with his life -- or else to keep stewing in the juices of his antipathy.

Well, there may be a third option; he could join Stoker's class action lawsuit against LL. In this case, I think he'd be attacking the wrong party, but that's his judgement to make, not mine.

Taking the words alone, they're a statement of simple fact. The only way to prevent the spread of ideas is to keep them secret.

But we're not just talking about ideas here; we're talking about the rights to use ideas in actual works. If we take Kyrah's words to mean that there should be no rights to exclusive use of ideas, then that's consistent with Communism. It's questionable whether it's consistent with Capitalism.

The temporary monopolies collectively referred to as "intellectual property rights" are orthogonal to capitalism. It is possible to develop a free market economic system with these rights included, and with these rights excluded. Some free market advocates have claimed that these "property rights" are government intrusion in the market. Others have claimed that they are a necessary fiction that allows the market to work in areas that it would otherwise be excluded from. Both views are consistent.

I personally think communism is a good analogy.

If what ever I do has to be communally shared by everyone who wants a bite of it... forget it, I'm not going to drag the weight of freetard culture forward, I'm going to simply give up and *be* a freetard instead. That goes for the internet, for real life, for whatever.

And it's not limited to monetary motivations. In fact I am more stung when someone takes something artistic of mine and ruins it.

* * * * *

These arguments apply to a lot more than copyright.

Hey, why not copy these little pieces of paper, the US government prints them and you can buy food, cars, entire buildings with enough of these little printed papers.

It's just paper! Sure it's a little hard to copy, but if you can make it, hey, who can take away your "human right" to make any design you want on earth? What's one more twenty dollar bill in the grand scheme of things?

Or what about medicine. Hey, that company spent five billion dollars showing that this chemical has the least side effects, is safe for humans and cures X, Y, and Z. But I can make that chemical by starting a small business, and make fifty million dollars selling pills for three cents each. Humanity wins! Today, at least, never mind that the big company just collapsed and will never make another lifesaving drug.


If we are to go with the whole heritage of mankind thing, then let's go all the way with it. The profits a thief makes should be returned to the 'heritage of mankind' too.

But what the thieves want is all the privileges of ownership, without the cost of earning it. If you want to look for people out for easy money, or ways around fair payment, start with the thieves not the victims.

* * * * *

There's an old native american view that basically goes: how can a person "own" the land? And its true.

Any claim anyone might have over this field or that mountain is purely an illusion. Settlers can come and swarm over the land like fleas, taking everything, you cannot stop them. So why 'own' land at all? And yet, we do.

Ownership of anything is purely a civil understanding completely unrecognised by physics or nature, generally backed by physical might by those with invested interests (or their representatives).

There are a lot of internet memes out there, such as "ownership of digital content is stupid" or "security through obscurity is no security at all"... but hey, if you have a bank balance, you are probably deeply invested in both those ideas, so much so that to overturn them would leave you penniless, broke, and without a way to convert your daily efforts into food and shelter.

The ideas you list here are pretty old

As we've seen elsewhere in this thread, opposing the concept of intellectual property is hardly unique to Communism; radical Libertarians make the same claim. What's interesting is the attempt to demarcate "tangible" and "intangible" property, and the curious need to distinguish one as being an artificial construction of the state.

One suspects that those drawn to that distinction have not owned much RL real estate, else they'd realize that *all* property is a construction of the state or, historically, private threat of deadly force. It's just easier to envision Pa Hatfield defending the perimeter with a shotgun than to imagine Uncle Walt sending out assassins against all those making faux Mickey Mouse ears.

I live near the original Disneyland. Perhaps this is why I can imagine it so much more easily...

I think you've put your finger on a real distinction even while you're making fun of it.

If you can't protect it with a big enough gun it's not property. That's the bottom line for the extreme free market folks. As a philosophy it's certainly got problems, but it's definitely self-consistent.

Like the survivalist who said, "If I have a gun and you have a bushel of wheat, pretty soon I'll have the gun AND the bushel of wheat."

You're right, there is no such thing as "ownership". It's a societal construct, starting from the strongest ape defending his right to the best tree and ending with laws, courts, deeds, and the whole mass of human institutions surrounding "property" and "ownership".

We need those constructs; they are essential to an orderly, stable society and civilization. If we did away with them, we are right back to being apes, "owning" only what we can personally control and defend.

So what can I do if I make a nice illustration for a book, and an untalented lazy parasite start selling it's scanned copy on the next day on his own name? Nothing, just because my work is already a part of the heritage of the humanity? I can't protect my work, I can't feel myself robbed out and humiliated - just because from that point I am only "one of it's drawers" (if any...)? If I try to defend it, I am only the "strongest ape", and the parasite is a warrior of freedom?

Excuse me, but this is insane.

Oh and once again:
- WHY copy anything, if the fantasy is free for everyone?
- WHY steal other's ideas/designs/works if the creativity is the TRUE heritage of the humanity?
- WHY create if you are too lazy or untalented for it? No one was forced to be a content creator.
- WHY don't just leave alone the content creators with their jobs and go back working, if you want the money so much?

It is very easy to be industrious, righteous or just fair.
- WHY don't try them instead speaking about your freedom and rights - for other's works/dreams/ideas?

Hey, Ori, I asked that and you said it's 'cos the guy was a lazy crook, basically.

If you know the answer, why ask the question?

True, but I would like to read the freedom fighter extremist teens(?) answers as well