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

[bwv812]

@anon50609448

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.

That’s simply false. There are professional inventors who license all of their patents, and there are creators who cash out before their IP can be put to productive use. When Google or Apple buys an unprofitable startup for billions, are the startups trollies for have unproductive, unprofitable “businesses” whose IP sells for billions? These are people who are doing nothing other than sitting on IP that they don’t know how to make money with, and holding it ransom from other companies that could actually use the IP profitably. But they’re not trollies, they’re worthy of celebration.

And that’s even assuming we adopt this [Lockean, labour-based view of property][1], whereby the source of proper property rights comes from the ability to put the property to productive use. But it’s clear that this isn’t the only source of property rights in modern cultures, as landlords and other rent seekers have property that they make no productive use from but charge others for using productively. Yet landlords are seldom described as trollies, even though they do nothing to make their property productive.

@bwv812

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).[/quote]
Sorry, what I said is wrong as written. I meant to say that the video rights to covers are nor subject to mechanical licenses and must be negotiated. Audio-only rights are subject to mechanical licenses.

@anon50609448

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.

Perhaps, but there are various ways legal property rights can be lost, such as through abandonment, failing to claim lost property, squatter’s rights, etc. And there are enough gaps and loopholes in these definitions and treatments to make distinctions relatively meaningless, so the question remains why trade secrets and organs cannot be thought of as property (do you have the right to use, dispose of, and prevent others from using your organs? at least with your own trade secrets you could actually sell them, which you can’t do with your own organs in most jurisdictions).

I’m pretty sure theft charges for illegal harvesting of your organs would not stick, as your own organs are not property and cannot be bought or sold.

@anon50609448

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.

Yes, but people had personal possessions and even real estate possessions before they had a legal concept of property. Does that mean that before the legal concept of property nobody actually owned anything and no one stole anything?

@anon50609448

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.

I would be interested in knowing how it is transparently, factually wrong.

Certainly there are different property models in different cultures, ranging from communal property to purely private property, but all of these property regimes do enforce the right to exclude some people. In communal property regimes it may only be people from outside the community, but the right to exclude still exists and is enforced. I don’t think the concept of exclusive possessions is even exclusive to humans, nor would one really expect it to be from an evolutionary perspective: if property helps you pass your genes down, then all species should protect their property.

[1]: Labor theory of property - Wikipedia[quote=“anon50609448, post:144, topic:31696”]
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).

The threat of violent revolution is a great solution. If this becomes a real threat, it’s a great signal that the system is broken and something needs to be done. Violence and other extra-legal responses strongly signal how disempowered, disenfranchised, and dissatisfied those engaging in it are, and is one of the reasons why growing inequality should be a greater concern.