Bowie's takedown of Hadfield's ISS "Space Oddity" highlights copyright's absurdity

boing
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You mean like you telling me that I mean modern trade secret law when I’m talking about 400-year-old trade secrets? Or your repeated insistence on bringing whether or not individual creators profit when I’ve never based my argument on that? Or spurious comparisons to the benefit of one person as weighed against 7.5 billion people (as if they all benefit)? Or changing the meaning of words like “worthless” to suit your purposes. Why isn’t it straw manning for you to change the context from financial to creative, and to change the benefit analysis from creators to consumers?

If the US is the odd man out, then there isn’t any shortage of socialized medical systems. Given that this is the case, why haven’t we seen this sort of socialized pharmaceutical development yet? Has the current IP regime done anything to prevent socialized pharma?

Ad is there something special about IP protection in the US that makes their health care more expensive? Are you seriously suggesting that Canadian health care is cheaper because of Canadian IP law?

Or you could just provide examples and support your arguments instead of saying very vague things about history. How can you have a sane rational discussion with someone who makes vague statements that give no basis for challenge? Is simply saying “history proves this” the basis for a conversation?

You’ve explained it on the basis of “ownership,” and said that because you can lose it it’s not property… even though all sorts of property can be lost in the same way.

No. I obviously don’t think there was more innovation in the middle ages than in Ancient Greece. Innovation may build on innovation, but this doesn’t mean that you become more innovative just because you have more things to build on. There are obviously key technologies that foster innovation (writing, printing presses, radio-based communication, the internet, etc.), but I don’t agree with your base position at all, especially to the extent that I don’t think there’s any determinable growth curve based upon accumulated innovation.

But this is an argument entirely unsupported by even a shred of evidence, at least when it comes to IP. There’s the big problem that the golden ages you’re looking at likely have a fairly long time span, which makes it easy to over-estimate the pace of innovation. Then there’s the impossible problem of figuring out how their innovation would have proceeded if there were IP systems in place, with the duration of IP protection being another factor. I have my doubts that having IP protections in place would even affect many of the innovations that actually occurred. I mean, it took 25 years after Gutenberg for the printing press to reach England, for example, and Gutenberg itself was some 70 years after moveable type debuted in Asia (if Asian presses had to release technical details of their presses in order to patent them, then even those unwilling to license the technology would have been able to release their own after the 20-year patents expired). And there’s a reason why the majority of pre-IP authors tended to come from the upper class: they certainly couldn’t hope to support themselves on the basis of their creative output.

But it’s an impossible question, as you yourself essentially acknowledged when you said that no rational point can be made by talking about things that didn’t exist in a non-IP regime: by the same token no rational point can be made by comparing how things were before (non trade secret) IP existed. Yet you talk about what history has taught us as though there were a reasonable basis of comparison, when there isn’t. But I suppose it’s so much easier to simply make assertions about what history has taught us than to try and back it up.

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NO those were my points not yours. I never claimed you were arguing my points, nor did I argue against my OWN points, that is the HUGE difference! You really truly don’t get this distinction do you?

doing even a small amount of cursory searching shows that this does indeed happen. Surprise, other countries develop medicine also, socialist countries, even communist ones… gasp

edit: i went on to comment that none of the other things you are saying I think are what i think, but deleted this portion because obviously pointing that out is pointless.

The short is that I honestly I don’t think that greed and money are the only motivators in the world or even the best ones for all areas. I don’t deny them, I just don’t discount the other human motivators. Profit motivation certainly doesn’t lead to the best art, music, science, or medicine. I understand we fundamentally disagree on this.

I get that we have VASTLY different world views, polar opposite in fact. Lets both agree to move along and to not comment on each others posts now or in the future, as any exchange we have is a vast waste of both of our time. Our previous exchange was equally fruitless, and noting is gained by clogging the comment threads with our disagreements. i think we can both agree on this out of respect to each other and our fellow boing boingers who don’t want to have to deal with such comment clutter.

can we respectfully agree to ignore each others posts and refrain from commenting on them? for our sake and the sake of other in these forums? thanks.

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Then why did you continuously raise the 1-against-7.5-billion argument as a response my arguments that IP laws help incentivize creators and make things worthwhile? I mean, that’s surely not some sort of irrelevant straw man, is it? Why talk about whether it is creators or corporations that profit, as though this is a response to public goods being a market failure? This isn’t changing the goal posts? But my pointing out the hollowness of a history-based argument is? Does it make it better if I say that my responses (to your vague and unarticulated arguments) were my own points, and not yours?

You could take it as an opportunity to articulate what you actually think (as you finally did in your last post). Instead you just make some drive-by comments about the high price of medical care in the US and the effect of monopolies, but get angry when I connect the dots in a way you disagree with.

I don’t disagree with this. I do place more importance on the ability to make a profit from creative exertion, though. Profit may not be the primary motivation, but in the absence of—at the bare minimum—the ability to make a living through one’s creative endeavors, innovation will be discouraged. I don’t care if it’s lab techs working for pharmaceuticals, rock stars making millions, or authors living off advances, I do think IP laws help create a viable market in which more creators can earn a livelihood.

I get that you don’t like me putting words in your mouth. I hope you get that if you articulate your positions more fully this can be avoided. And instead of complaining about me putting words in your mouth or making assumptions about your position (which is pretty unavoidable in online discourse), simply clarifying what your position is would be a more constructive use of space and time.

I still have no idea how you can logically support your views about what history has taught us when it comes to IP protections, for example, and I doubt I ever will.since you don’t seem very interested in defending this position.

I’m sure I could ignore your comments, but haven’t remembered who you are, and I’m sure I won’t in the future, either. Copyright threads on BB endlessly rehash the same points of view over and over again, anyways, though I’ll admit our exchange has no doubt been especially tedious for others.

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Thank you.

I remember almost all my exchanges I’ve had here and i’ve been following boing boing a long time, if you forget I’ll kindly remind you.

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If you feel like you and redesigned have been talking past one another, you have, but the source of this is that you want to frame everything in terms of whether it is a market failure or a market success. No one can argue that public goods aren’t a “market failure” but the entire concept of a market is set up to prevent public goods from existing and make everything owned by someone. When he said that greed is not the only or the best motivator of action he was really arguing against the idea of markets which are premised on the idea that greed is the best (or only) motivator of human action.

You asked for examples of things that were developed before IP, and redesigned rightly pointed out that absolutely everything developed before the last couple hundred (or four hundred if you’d prefer, the precise date hardly matters to the argument) year was developed without IP. In fact, IP was developed in absence of IP, to think otherwise is nonsense. Humans spent tens of thousands of years living in traditional societies, then about 7000 years ago written language was invented. That’s tens of thousands of years hunting and gathering, and once we have writing 7000 years pass before we can go to the moon. Who profited off of writing?

And further - who profited off of irrigation? The scientific method? The wheel? Bricks? Glass? Iron?

The answer is obvious - everyone did. And we didn’t have to ensure that we paid some kind of rent to the “creator” of these concepts to make sure that everyone did. I don’t think we can realistically argue that markets have made us successful at all - how can we disentangle the idea of markets from the idea of scientific progress? Why does progress seem to be continuing as we allow markets to collapse completely into crony capitalism and oligarchy?

The entire foundation for IP is that creators have a right to profit from their creations, but the way to guarantee that is not to write it in a law that creators end up being responsible for enforcing themselves through a court system they can’t afford against oligarchs who the law protects. I think property is a complete mess, but if you sensibly prefer incremental change to revolution, I still don’t see how you can protect the IP system that stifles the thing it is supposed to promote.

Yes, and it is still the case today that all but a tiny few artists have second jobs, and it will always be that way. Those who make money make it almost entirely based on performances that others can’t easily replicate - musicians get paid for playing music not for selling records. The exceptions are a handful of very wealthy people. A system that leaves the vast majority in the same state but elevates a few to obscene riches is the best system because…?

Also, this has been bugging me:

Because of this.

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The term [Market Failure][1] has a specific economic meaning, and its antonym is not “market success”. Public goods are a specific type of market failure. Examples of public goods include not only intellectual property but things like the clean air and the environment which people pollute at no cost to themselves.

[1]: Market failure - Wikipedia[quote=“anon50609448, post:129, topic:31696”]
No one can argue that public goods aren’t a “market failure” but the entire concept of a market is set up to prevent public goods from existing and make everything owned by someone.
[/quote]
Not really. Remedying the market failure is an attempt to encourage the efficient or optimal amount of the public good. In the absence of the remedy, there will be underproduction of the public good, since people will be discouraged from producing things that others can take for free. In the environmental context, failing to fix the market failure means over-pollution and under-investment in ecologically friendly technologies.

Trade secrets have existed for much more than 400 years.

And it’s probably no accident that the earliest records of writing (cuneiform) are essentially store-keeping records, created and maintained by trained scribes for the benefit of merchants. The development of writing was very much motivated by profit. Let’s suppose that they had patented writing. Patents are generally licensable and (currently) last for 20 years. Other merchants would likely license this new technology in the first 20 years, and it’s not like literature was being created within 20 years of the creation of writing even in this pre-patent regime, anyway. As it is, if there was a competitive advantage to being able to write when others could not, writing was probably kept secret for as long as possible. But it’s also possible that it was economically beneficial to have as many people be able to read, write and understand the records as possible, in which case widespread dissemination would be preferred (just like open formats like pdf or html are used even in our IP regime). I suppose the third possibility is that the inventors of writing wanted to keep it secret in order to retain their advantage but the state recognized the social benefit of writing and forced them to divulge their system (note that state-mandated disclosure would show that old-school trade secrets really are a form of property, to the extent you cannot be forced to divulge them in normal circumstances). It’s honestly difficult to see how much modern IP would have delayed the development, adoption, or ascendance of writing. In the very worst circumstance there would be a 20-year lag before completely opened to the public for free, which would be somewhat counterbalanced by completed disclosure of the writing system as required by patent law.

Well, at least in the US the Constitution is very clear that the purpose of IP is to encourage the creative arts: it’s not about the right of creators to profit. As for your concerns about the difficulty of enforcing copyrights, the market solution to this would presumably be to sell your IP rights to parties that can effectively enforce them (be they record labels or copyright trollies).

I have my doubts about this. I think there are a lot of professional authors, and the vast majority of them are not independently wealthy members of the leisure class. This is very different than it has been historically.And even if you’re right, and the outcomes are largely the same as they have been throughout history, why isn’t a system that offers the chance to become rich preferable to a system that offers no such chance? Why won’t people be motivated by the prospect of striking it rich and seeing their smiling face on the cover of the Rolling Stone?

As for your remaining concern, I think it remains true that when you talk about encouraging innovation, it’s the incentives/benefits to the creators you have to worry about, not how much the consumers benefit (and this is the entire public good problem: it’s possible for huge numbers of people to benefit without incurring any costs or compensating the creator of the public good). What does a creator care if people really benefit from his work if he personally receives no benefit? If I give away all my money, there’s no doubt that the recipients benefit, but what is my personal incentive to do so? Why should creators be expected to give away all their creative output for free? How does telling me the consumers benefit from free stuff address the argument that IP laws incentivize creators?

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I was using “market success” as an antonym of market failure. It’s not strange that people who talk about market failures don’t ever think about what an antonym would be - there is an assumption that if it weren’t for market failures, everything the market would do would be a success. In fact, I tend to find that the idea of a market is considered equivalent to the idea of success, and “market failure” is a term used to dismiss the actual flaws of the market system as aberrations.

But if the optimal or efficient way to produce something was to not use the market at all then that would never be considered.

First of all, you are talking like a modern state existed when people invented writing. That is crazy. Tribal cultures that lived as extended families shared discoveries in the community.

Second, you are awfully wrong about he worst case scenario. The worst case scenario for IP applied to things like the wheel would be that the success of the invention would greatly enrich a small number of people and their heirs and that those people would then use that influence to convince the government to alter laws to extend their patent protection or would hire private armies and rule as despots for hundreds or thousands of years. The majority of human history has been about despots commanding other people, and concentrating the power of such powerful inventions in a few hands for a long period of time would be very bad. Of course this sort of thing happened with inventions anyway and IP wasn’t necessary to do so.

The point is, though, that IP was not necessary to get people to invent any of these things either. The majority of human history an innovation happened with IP, and there were always musicians, poets and storytellers, as well as inventors.

This kind of thinking is a distortion of actual human psychology and motivations. As I just said, there have always been artists and poets and storytellers. In contemporary society, lots of people write and draw and sing and never have a chance of getting paid. Why? It is because people are driven to do these things. The vast majority of people who have ever done these things did so because they wanted to do the things themselves.

People are motivated by that, and we don’t want to encourage those people. Markets are a system that encourages machiavellianism and then we lament that all of the people with the power are machiavellian. People who think only of how what they are doing will enrich themselves need to be stopped before they screw things up for the rest of us, not rewarded for finding the holes in the system that allow them to take over. Of course this isn’t a big deal for would be musicians, but it would be nice if we didn’t give so much power to psychopaths in charge of banks.

Exactly, the solution inside the market is to sell your rights to copyright trollies. Basically, if you can say that is a solution and not the problem then we are arguing from such radically different axioms that I don’t think much more can be said.

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That’s a pretty big if, and there’s abundant evidence from things like pharmaceuticals that efficient production in the absence of IP protection does not happen.

Mesopotamian cities where writing was developed were not tribal, and the bookkeeping the first scribes engaged in would likely be of little interest those in their family/community. I wouldn’t be surprised if their community was limited to those who shared the same employer, either.

Enrichment as a result of developing advancements is pretty inevitable, IP protection or not, and as you acknowledge concentrations of power happened in the absence of IP so this is hardly an outcome that can be ascribed to IP—IP would only possibly decide who the despot was, not whether one existed.[quote=“anon50609448, post:131, topic:31696”]
As I just said, there have always been artists and poets and storytellers. In contemporary society, lots of people write and draw and sing and never have a chance of getting paid. Why?
[/quote]
How does IP harm these people? How does it discourage these people? On the other hand, IP allows for professional creators and provides additional incentive to at least some. Also, I’m not sure how the existence of some creatives in the absence of IP protection is an argument against IP protection (if the goal is the optimal level of innovation).

And the alternative (according to you) is to have illusory rights that you can’t enforce, which is no different than having no rights at all (which is what you apparently support). I’m not sure why your solution is to remove rights and any possibility of enforcing them.

So we don’t want to encourage drug companies, or companies like Apple, or Alexander Graham Bell or Edison or anyone like that who is concerned with something as dirty as money?

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You do realize we are talking in a thread about how a person is no longer allowed to freely share music they recorded, right?

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Somebody with 22 million views of their youtube video hardly fits the profile you gave—and to which I was explicitly responding—of people “write and draw and sing and never have a chance of getting paid” but nevertheless do them because they are driven to do so. If Chris Hadfield is really driven to do those things he can do them and is very unlikely to be bothered for doing so.

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that’s a lot of words.
for your enjoyment and imagination:

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Chris Hadfield is a guy with a guitar who really likes David Bowie. Because he is an astronaut and has NASA behind him he was able to get a one year agreement to post the song. All the other guys with guitars who really like David Bowie are just as subject to takedown notices and don’t have any clout to get a reprieve.

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Look. there are plenty of cover videos on youtube that never get attract notice or get taken down, especially since really unique covers are unlikely to be detected by automated tools. (Since the “look at all the communist governments developing their own medicines” seems to have been an acceptable rebuttal to my point about the primacy of commercial pharma development, I assume this will pass muster, too.) Small scale creative efforts are not hugely affected, and virtually none of the historical varieties of creativity that people have been doing forever are affected: I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of a subway busker being subject to shakedowns, though I suppose it’s possible.

Random guys with guitars will probably get in trouble if their just-for-the-fun-of-it videos attract 22 million views, though. That might be sad for those 22 million people who enjoyed the video (or the 7.5 billion figure that others like to use), but if each of those 22 million people cared even one cent’s worth that would be $220 000 (or $75 000 000 for the other example): if you really are enriching that many people, is it outrageous to ask them to pay anything at all?

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This is your idea of how IP doesn’t harm anyone: “Don’t worry, even though someone is going to be stopped from doing what you are doing and that person could legally be sued by entities that have sued over copyright in the past, that person probably won’t be you.”

Retroactively when that wasn’t part of the deal when they clicked the link? Yes?

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Maybe you forgot about DMCA takedown notices, which prevent the ability to sue unless the material isn’t taken down: that person (Hadfield, say) cannot legally be sued unless he makes the choice to fight the takedown notice despite knowing he might be sued. So yeah, running the risk of being told to take something down isn’t a huge risk in my book, especially when you can (re-)upload it on multiple forums and/or put it back up with an alternate account. Nevermind that artists in the historical eras you lament never had these venues of expression in the first place, and that if our modern-era Joe the strummer wants to become a wandering minstrel he is free to do so big media getting in his way.

[quote=“anon50609448, post:138, topic:31696”]
Retroactively when that wasn’t part of the deal when they clicked the link? Yes?
[/quote]Who says it has to be retroactive and unforeseen? If you can bundle copyright fees into the price of blank media (like some jurisdictions do), you can bundle it into just about anything. But the real question is whether you disagree with the principle of 7.5 billion people paying a fraction of a penny for this content they’re supposedly enriched by or whether you just disagree with the mechanism by which that fraction of a penny is collected.

Could our IP systems be improved? Absolutely… but this doesn’t mean that an IP-free regime is some sort of magic bullet.

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Look, I know that I’m insane to suggest that the concept of property is stupid and harmful because even if that were plainly true we wouldn’t actually be able to abandon it or even set a course to abandon it. But that’s a very different tone to than the argument has taken to this point. So far I have presented problems with the IP system and denied that it accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish and you have argued that the problems aren’t real problems and that it is accomplishing what it should.

Like I said, the part where you presented patent trollies as a good solution to the problem of the small guy not getting paid I felt that we were pretty much from different worlds. Implying that an entire generation of children not having access to a technology as important as reading and writing isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things was also pretty over-the-top (in case you’re counting, 20 years is actually a long time).

So what compromises could be made, what could be improved? I think that 20 years is a very, very long time in the world of electronics and patents could be just as effective at letting holders profit with a much shorter period. I think that since patents are meant to encourage rather than stifle innovation they should revert to the public domain automatically if their holders are not using them to produce things for people - you want to invent something and make it or use it, fine. You want to invent something and sit on the invention in the hopes that someone else invents it as well so you can sue them? Not so much.

As for copyright, the duration of copyright is currently unfathomable. Death of author + 70 years for written works? I don’t think the right of your grandchildren to sue people after you are dead is a factor in encouraging creativity. I also think that copyright should work very differently for performance art than for other art. The reason this whole thing with Hadfield seems so silly is that the performance is by Chris Hadfield. This is not at all the same as photocopying or typing out my own Harry Potter since the text of my Harry Potter would be actually identical to the text of the original. With music that is performed by a different performer, it is a very different thing. That’s not to say that people who write songs mean nothing, but that our current system confounds the writing with the performance in a way that doesn’t recognize the reality of the medium. If I record a pop song and I have to be paying royalties to someone I should be paying them to the writer, not to the other guy who recorded it, since I’m not actually copying anything they did (in the case of Space Oddity Bowie actually wrote it, but that doesn’t excuse a legal system that can’t tell the difference).

Which brings me to another thing, Just like patents, I don’t think people should be able to assign or sell their rights. If you want to encourage creation and not the mere accumulation of wealth, then the power should be in the hands of the creator. That doesn’t mean they can’t agree to, say, an exclusive contract with a record label to distribute what they produce, but if anyone is going to lay claim to the work, it should be a person who actually created it.

That, of course, is actually doing away with the idea of Intellectual Property since it wouldn’t really be property (you can sell property to other people). Instead, it would rights given to the creator of a work of art. This is just one idea, but it points to the fact that just like “no IP” is not a magic bullet, “IP” is not the only possible legal framework that can fill the role that IP currently fills.

This goes back to Trade Secrets which you have nonsensically argued have always been intellectual property. I don’t know enough about the law to know what date they started to become intellectual property, but at some point people had trade secrets that were just secrets. When trade secrets were actually just secrets, no one had that right - if someone else found out what your secret was (maybe they planted a spy in your company) then they could use that secret all they wanted. Law grew around the fact that such a practice felt unfair to people, but a secret is not a possession. If I am keeping my affair a secret then I can’t accuse my spouse of theft when they use their knowledge of my affair to initiate divorce proceedings.

If you think that current IP could be improved, what do you think are its faults? What changes do you think would make things better?

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Like it or not, patent and copyright trollies are an answer to a problem (though when they work properly as an answer, they aren’t characterized as trollies), just like venture capital, ground-floor investment, and IPOs are an answer.

And again, I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken on how quickly writing spread from being a specialized bookkeeping tool used by a small cadre or workers to being a widespread technology used by children around the world to communicate everyday thoughts. Widespread literacy is a new phenomenon, and to suggest that within 20 year of cuneiform being invented kids were keeping diaries or something is ludicrous.

On the other side of the “history teaches us” argument, imagine that Marco Polo was able to walk into a Chinese patent office and examine the published details of all Chinese patents, including those long expired. I have to imagine that he would be able to learn a thing or two and spurn substantial progress in the West upon his return.[quote=“anon50609448, post:140, topic:31696”]
I think that since patents are meant to encourage rather than stifle innovation they should revert to the public domain automatically if their holders are not using them to produce things for people - you want to invent something and make it or use it, fine. You want to invent something and sit on the invention in the hopes that someone else invents it as well so you can sue them?
[/quote]
Its not like these are the only two possibilities. More sensible would be a system of mandatory licensing, with easier nullification of spuriously-granted patents. A scheme of different monopoly durations for different industries/sectors might also make sense.[quote=“anon50609448, post:140, topic:31696”]
If I record a pop song and I have to be paying royalties to someone I should be paying them to the writer, not to the other guy who recorded it, since I’m not actually copying anything they did (in the case of Space Oddity Bowie actually wrote it, but that doesn’t excuse a legal system that can’t tell the difference).
[/quote]
Actually, [the copyright system works as you would like it to][1]. Record a cover and you only need the rights from the writer (the rights are not subject to mechanical licenses, however, and must be actually negotiated). Its only when you want to use someone else’s actual recording of that music that you have to negotiate with them.

[1]: Synchronization rights - Wikipedia[quote=“anon50609448, post:140, topic:31696”]
This goes back to Trade Secrets which you have nonsensically argued have always been intellectual property. I don’t know enough about the law to know what date they started to become intellectual property, but at some point people had trade secrets that were just secrets. When trade secrets were actually just secrets, no one had that right - if someone else found out what your secret was (maybe they planted a spy in your company) then they could use that secret all they wanted. Law grew around the fact that such a practice felt unfair to people, but a secret is not a possession. If I am keeping my affair a secret then I can’t accuse my spouse of theft when they use their knowledge of my affair to initiate divorce proceedings.
[/quote]
This is like saying you don’t possess your own thoughts or even your own organs (the forced taking of either is not theft).

While it may be true that (trade) secrets are a form of property that it is very easy to lose, they do essentially function as property and are treated by their holders as such. But if its true that these things have only become property with the advent of our IP regime, then I kind of wonder why most commercial software manufacturers keep their source code secret instead of openly publishing it. I mean, its also copyright, so why don’t they simply rely on that protection? (Answer: they’re protecting the software from being rewritten in a way that would defeat copyright, since the algorithmic recipes themselves cannot be copyrighted to the extent they are manifestations of ideas and not expressions of creativity) What is it about the secrecy that is important, and why do we consider them keeping it secret to be part of them protecting their IP? Is it only because we have decided to call it copyright that that these unprotected elements also become IP? The reality is that source-code secrecy also protects these elements otherwise unprotected by the IP regime, and yet we still consider closed-source policies as being protective of intellectual property despite the IP regime not granting legal property rights to what they’re actually protecting.

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I paid for Bowie’s song a long time ago. But I don’t want to listen to Bowie.

I want to listen to Hatfield, and copyright law makes his creation inaccessible, because having already paid to listen to Bowie sing his song apparently isn’t enough for some people.

Copyright makes it legally impossible for me to pay for things created by artists who’s work I appreciate and greatly enjoy, because someone else who once managed to buy out a different artist I don’t particularly care for who stole most of his ideas from someone else anyway says I can’t.

And you think this is a good thing.

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If you just want to listen, you don’t need video. Hadfield can release an audio-only version whether Bowie likes it or not, subject to a mandatory mechanical license. The only problem is video requires a negotiated synchronization license.

Sorry, you wanted to pay for Hadfield’s work? If people wanted to pay then he could probably pay Bowie’s licensing fee. And whats all this about stealing ideas? Kdeas can’t be copyright, and (according to other posters here you almost certainly agree with) are not property at all. Hadfield or whoever can steal any ideas they want from Bowie.

Yes, I think its preferable to an IP-free regime where creators have no right to be paid for their creations.

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Violent revolution is a solution to a problem too, but if we have a system that includes that solution we might want to rethink it (well, we likely won’t have to). Patent trollies are entities that exist to profit off stifling the innovation of others - if they are the solution we need to change the problem. You are right though that when businesses protect intellectual property they are using we don’t call them trollies, that’s because they aren’t trollies.

This is a sensible suggestion. With mandatory licensing the inventor can profit but everyone else can go ahead and use the thing even if the inventor doesn’t have the interest or means to produce it. If someone else immediately makes a much better version it isn’t kept off the market, but we still honor the notion that society must drastically enrich the first guy who got to the patent office because great individuals and not broad cultural advancement that is expressed through individuals chosen at random are responsible for getting us where we are.

Elsewhere you say that Hadfield could release a recording of the song subject to automatic licensing (or did someone else say that, maybe I’m confused). But if this is the case then he can’t.

You are conflating different meanings of the word “own.” Of course I own my organs in a sense that almost anyone would agree with, and of course they are my property colloquially. Property is colloquially anything that we thing of as ours, and legally a think that we have an absolute right to use, dispose of, and prevent others from using.

Legally whether or not the your body or your thoughts are your property probably varies from place to place, but either they are or they aren’t. If they aren’t then they aren’t. If they are then forced taking of your organs is absolutely theft, even if the police and prosecutors don’t charge as such. If someone takes your kidney, ask the police to lay theft charges along with the assault and whatever other charges happen. I think the US these charges would stick (if I recall, the body is property of the individual in the US).

Either way it doesn’t matter what the legal definition is. If I say someone stole my idea, I say so knowing that they haven’t taken my property in a legal sense. I may be doing anything from employing a metaphor, to using a phrase, to exaggerating to express how I feel about the situation. I honestly don’t know if my thoughts are my property in any legal sense or not, but I know that people had thoughts before anyone had a concept of property that we would recognize. And I know that people had secrets, even secrets they used to make or build things, before there was anything like a legal idea of property.

Unless you think the platonic ideal of property existed before people stumbled across it and modeled their thinking after it. I don’t think you think this, because it is transparently, factually wrong.

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