John Deere just told the copyright office that only corporations can own property, humans can only license it

boing
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I think this is a case where you need to clarify what your point was. You never said why ownership was a contrived concept, making it fairly easy for someone without telepathic powers to miss that point. It’s also not clear how this is gamifying the notion of ownership, which biases it perpetuates, or why.

You say here that it’s a self serving bias, but it’s not clear what “it” is. Is “it” the thing that is hypothetically owned, or the concept of ownership itself? Ownership could lead to self-serving bias, certainly. I might think my car is the best car, because it’s mine (I don’t. My car is actually pretty shitty, because I can’t afford to get it fixed properly). However, L_Mariachi’s point still works. I own money. It’d be silly to think that my money spends better than anyone else’s money, but it’s important to understand that it’s my money. Otherwise, someone else could use my money in exchange for goods and services. This would be non-optimal, because I contribute to society in exchange for that money, so I can get the goods and services. Should someone else use my money, and should I be able to use someone else’s money, because there is no ownership, I have little reason to contribute to society. More directly, I could take goods, if not services and bypass the money part altogether. With the concept of ownership being meaningless, I have little incentives to offer in exchange for the services of others. Hypothetically I could offer to trade my services in exchange for theirs. This isn’t workable though, because while I believe the services I am able to provide are important, they are only important to a select few people, and those people are not the same people as those I would need services from.

So, if I understand you correctly, we could do away with the concept of ownership and reduce our biases, but we would also have to start growing our own food and making our own clothes. This may seem extreme, but when it comes down to it, ownership and currency are contrived social constructs. This does not mean they weren’t contrived for a reason, however, in much the same way as traffic lights are a contrived construct, but still far better than the simpler alternative of road anarchy.

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So, looking downstream in this thread, it seems I’m not the only one searching for clarity here. And going back 130 years for clarity (in this case) seems like a bad idea.

“Means of production” isn’t as distinct a category as the Marxists try to make it sound. For instance, comparing the means of production at Boeing with the means of production at Microsoft, and it’s a very unequal set of tools. The stuff at Boeing is heavy duty specializes gear that can’t be used to make furniture or boats or cars, not very well anyway. The brain trust is important, there’s a lot of knowledge embedded in people’s heads, but nothing like Microsoft, where if you take away the people, all the means of production mostly boils down to general purpose office equipment. For that company, far more value is represented by what’s in people’s heads, and the noncompete contracts they make these workers sign on employment. So, it’s not the sort of thing a strictly Marxist approach is well suited for.

Another problem. I have with “Means of production” as a scorekeeping aid- it totally ignores the value of the life support that Earth Day is supposed to acknowledge. Huge swaths of value are being erased by pollution,erosion,deregulation… because market capitalism doesn’t know how to value something until it’s scarce. And by the time this kind of life support becomes scarce enough to value, it’s far too late to bring it back within any sort of human lifetime.

So as far as properly valuing factory labor, I think Marxism has a lot to teach us. A post-industrial, software driven world? I think there’s more conceptual work to be done before we see knowledge workers making the same kind of changes factory workers clamored for back in the late 1800’s.

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Also, since you’re f-ing with farmers, how about we de-license all John Deere execs from their food/consumables. They’re more than willing to buy it, but actually eating/modifying it chemically is now a violation of the TOS.

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And who thought that John Deere of all companies would be leading the USA in it’s Socialist revolution?

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That’s a good point. One of the key tenets of capitalism is to induce artificial scarcity in order to make things profitable. It will be a major roadblock to getting to a post-scarcity society even in a time of abundance.

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so if some company happens to accidentally use some open source code in one of these situations - who owns the license?

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Isn’t that great ? After years fighting human rights, corporation now want to apply them (on themselves).

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I think we’re going round in circles here, because of my poor explanations.

I don’t have time to explain properly, but John Deere is being anti-socialist in it’s actions by protecting private property for a minority while depriving access to the masses, unless they agree to John Deere’s rules when they effectively rent John Deere equipment.

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Rank hypocrites.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a29293/vehicle-emissions-testing-scandal-cheating/

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You bring up some good points, I just wish I had enough time to answer them before the topic closes.

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Start a new thread on these issues?

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Next generation small-scale farm business models, $10k tractors and polyculture practices for the win.

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What’s going to happen is farmers and auto customers are going to rip that trash out, the whole wiring harness, and install new ones once people figure out how to bypass it and put the new code in a rebuilt harness. It not breaking the law if it is a replacement part.

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Actually, it’s not silly at all. It’s known as Velocity of Money, and evaluates the economic benefit of a dollar based on who is spending it.

That is exactly what banks do. When you break fractional reserve banking down to its base components, your money is being used explicitly to create more money which of course is then used in exchange for goods and services.

I think this is a non-sequitur,. because money isn’t a necessary medium of exchange in a socialist society where the MoP are collectively controlled, and there’s a broad range of opinion in left econ as to how it might work. Parecon is an example of the top of my head.

Further, near or fully automated production systems in theory will drive costs towards zero plus the price of resources, so likewise basic goods and necessities would essentially be free. As long as distribution is equitable, the social distinctions of private property would no longer carry weight.

IMO that’s what Roddenberry was truly getting at with the Replicator, more than the idea of actually being able to produce real objects out of thin air.

Why is this true, asides from a little ditty about a butcher? To believe this would be to believe that humans are normally idle, and only engage in activity that is not directly pleasurable when they absolutely must. How could this be possible, however? Honestly if that was the case, I think we’d be extinct. Of course, these theories were initially proposed by rich white men who viewed the lower classes a small step above rats, so its a pretty biased concept from the start.

[quote=“Mankoi, post:41, topic:99614”]
we would also have to start growing our own food and making our own clothes. [/quote]
What makes this true? We are certainly capable of making collective decisions concerning production and distribution without the need to become overly self-reliant. Why would people who want to farm stop farming? Why would people who want to make clothes stop making clothes? We can certainly organize the people who want to farm and the people who want to make clothes into production units which maximize their efforts, and we absolutely can structure distribution so that these goods are accessible to those that need them. The parecon link above is just one example of that might work.

Ownership wasn’t contrived for a reason, however, it arose organically. It was born when warriors started taking women from vanquished foes as sex slaves, producing a material distinction between them and the non-warriors of their tribe.
Modern definitions are certainly more nuanced than those for Grok and Bonk but the social products are still the same- class distinction, pecuniary emulation, and political protection for those with more over those with less.

Street lights provide the same order for everybody using them. The order produced by enforcement of private property doesn’t remotely approach the equality distributed by street lights.

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Yep

(additional characters)

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The corporation is a means of production; every worker ought to be stakeholder.

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That’s a different concept than what I was relating to. No one thinks that their money is worth more inherently because it’s theirs, as your comments on self serving bias would indicate. They might think that if their money actually does spend better, but no one says “Because this dollar is mine, and for that reason alone, it’s worth more than someone else’s dollar.”

Which is money I agreed to give them for this purpose. If it’s a good purpose, how much choice I really had in giving this money to a bank, and so forth are valid discussions for another day. But they didn’t barge into my house and take the money from under my mattress to spend it for themselves. I gave them my money for safekeeping, and in exchange for holding my money, they get to use some of it to make profit. Better regulations needed, etc, etc, but it doesn’t work well as an argument against private property.

That covers some resources, but not all of them. I’m not that concerned about if my food isn’t considered private property. I’m much more concerned about my bed being private property, or my toothbrush being private property. If my cat is considered property would be debatable, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world where someone could come in and take him either. My grandfather’s pocket watch, I would also like to consider to be mine now, because it has value outside of its (non-existent) monetary value. Or, say the fans I have to keep my house cool in summer. Even in a world where I could pick new ones up for free, I’d still say I own those fans, because it would be, and should be socially unacceptable for someone for someone to just take something I was using.

No, to believe that doesn’t imply the latter. People like to work, but there are types of work no one wants to do. Nobody wants to be a janitor or a security guard. Some people like to make clothes, but the people who like making clothes obviously like making good, high quality clothes. That means it takes them more time to produce fewer articles of clothing, meaning there’d be more demand for clothing than clothing available. And if someone was lucky enough to have good clothes, they wouldn’t actually OWN those clothes, so there’s nothing to stop someone literally taking the shirt off their back. Or take myself. If I didn’t need money, I’d write novels. Actually, I do that anyway. Writing novels does contribute to society, and I’m glad people can make a living off it. The reason I don’t make a living writing novels is because my novels aren’t very good. While they contribute to society in the hypothetical, they don’t actually in real life. The sad truth is, if everyone did the job they wanted, we’d have way more people doing some jobs than needed, and not enough in others.

Enforcement is the key word here, isn’t it? It’s not the idea of property that’s a problem, it’s how it’s enforced. Under a better system, I could still say “I own this house” or “I own this toothbrush” or “I own this bed” and it would be understood that other people couldn’t make use of my house, bed, or toothbrush without my consent. The way we enforce laws and social norms makes problems. The concept of ownership does not. We could easily say that traffic lights don’t apply to some people, but do to others, and make a terrible, unequal system. Under that system, the traffic lights still aren’t the problem.

Socialism and the concept of property aren’t at odds. You mentioned Star Trek before. In TNG, there’s no money, and no need for it, because it’s a post scarcity society. Everyone is equal. No one is hungry. No one is needy. There’s still private property though. Picard owns a flute, for example, and, because of the immense personal value of that flute, I think we can all agree that the flute should be his, that no one should be allowed to come and take it away because they want too. Data owns a hologram of Tasha Yar. Riker owns a trombone. Sure he could pop down to the replicator and get another one, but maybe he wants the trombone he played for Troi on their first date, or whatever. Is that wrong of him?

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That’s been true ever since Orange County vs Union Pacific railroad, back in the 1800s. Misuse of the 14th amendment is a crucial part of this story.

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So if a piece of John Deere-owned farm equipment accidentally throws a piece of Monsanto-owned seed into the field of a farmer who didn’t buy (or license) the seed and who’s not the owner of the farm equipment, how screwed will that farmer be when both Monsanto and Deere sue them for unauthorized use of their property? Or can the farmer move (in court) that Monsanto and Deere need to slug it out before (or instead of) taking on the farmer?

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Thanks, but I’d rather get a regular paycheque that I can bank rather than lose all my assets if the company loses money.

I’m willing to work very hard to for my employers. But all I want at risk with my employer is my job. I think Enron taught us the hazard of being stakeholders. If choose to take on risk with a company, I want it to be because I have chosen to risk my assets, not as a prerequisite for accepting employment.