Regarding Plagiarism and Intellectual Property
It's a good thing nobody has noticed me yet, or the following might draw some ire from many Steemians out there. Who am I kidding? I love rattling cages. It's too bad nobody ever sees my posts. At any rate, let's get right down to the crux of the issue:
Ideas are ephemeral and vaporous, given substance only when they are shared. While nobody may claim ownership of the intangible thoughts in your head, you likewise cannot claim ownership over the thoughts of others. Once you pass an idea into the collective consciousness, it is no longer yours to claim. It is communal. You may have been the first to breathe life into it, but once it is out there it can be assimilated by other minds, and within those minds it may even evolve beyond anything that you had ever conceived.
This is not to say that others ought not to show gratitude for your contribution. Many will do so, should they find value from it. That is for them to judge. It is not your place to demand tribute for the value that you place on your idea.
If you do not want your idea to be shared, then do not share it. Lock it up. Keep it secret. Ideas are viral. You cannot possible presume to control how they spread. This is the natural state of things. In ancient times, stories were passed along from one mind to the next, evolving as they did so. The original teller of the story could not possibly demand payment from all those who shared his story. It would be unthinkable to attempt to censor the telling of his story by others.
The concept of intellectual property is unnatural. To patent a design is to declare that no other individual may ever assemble a specified assortment of materials into a given or similar configuration; even though the materials they hold are owned by that individual and not yourself. The same goes for a story, a song, or any other idea. Ideas are meant to be shared.
Ideas are meant to be shared. How you use that idea is your property, not the idea itself. Therefore intellectually property is absolutely natural.
That passes the logic test in my mind, but it's entirely pointless. Here's why: you cannot sell that which you do not first own, but to sell it is also to exchange ownership of it. If I buy from you a painting which you created, it is now my painting. I may do with it as I please, to include producing copies of it. I may even sell those copies which I have created. You are still the creator of the original work. You no longer own the original work, but you do own your identity. So there is one thing which I morally cannot do: I cannot pass myself of as the original creator of the work, because in so doing I will have stolen your identity which you did not sell to me. Identities can certainly have monetary value, or athletes' faces would not appear on product packaging. So, having purchased your painting, I now own it, and may do with it as I please. I may sell it. I may create reproductions of it an sell those. I may even do these things without crediting you, the original creator. I may not, however, seek to gain, financially or by admiration, from assuming the identity of you, the original creator. There is a tangible distinction between these things.
There is also an exception to all this, which would be if, at time of purchase, you and I entered into a contractual agreement of some sort. Copyright declarations and simple statements of "by using this product you agree to..." are vapid prose and cannot be considered truly binding contacts. They are not unlike if I were to write "1 million monies" on a piece of paper and submit it to you for payment. You would not accept it because it is not serious and no one else has or ever would recognize it's value. This is the reason why all serious contacts are witnessed and signed by a neutral third party.
purchasing the painting doesn't provide you with the rights to the created product. it provides you with the right to own the art. If you want the rights, you have to purchase them separately. If you create copies of the art you have purchased, then you have violated my rights and you will get sued. Unless you can prove that you purchased the rights, they are mine under the law of most countries.
Intellectual property belongs to the creator unless you specifically purchase those rights or the creator is willing to assign them to you.
That is an intangible derivative of
the physical worldreality. If I purchased the artwork, it is now my property. What you are describing would be more akin to 'renting' the artwork. I am well aware that copyright law contradicts what I am saying. My point is that copyright law falls apart under logical examination. There is no such thing as 'intellectual property'. This is why intellectual property is so difficult to define and IP law has become so convoluted as a result. It requires one to engage in logical acrobatics.Actually, it requires an acceptance of the rights of others. At this point I'm going to leave you to live in your contrived reality and return to actual reality.
Well if you're going to resort to making insulting insinuations:
But, if you ever decide to poke your head out from your intellectual blanket fort again, you ought to explore the concept of negative vs. positive rights. There are some great essays on the subject.
I agree, but I'd like to add that if someone dislikes plagiarism, they could use nonviolent methods to discourage its spread.
Is a 'nonviolent' attempt to restrict someone else's right to do something any less oppressive?
Yes. It's less oppressive that the violent attempt. Example: If I run a website where users can add content, but I told them that I'll delete any plagiarized posts, I'm not oppressive when I actually do it. But if I'm forcing you to delete content from your website, I'm oppressive.
You don't have a right to post just anything on my website - I set the rules there. But I don't have a right to force you to change the content of your website. Deleting something from my website is a nonviolent action, forcing you to delete something from yours is violent.
Agreed. You may dictate what material will or will not be published on your own publishing medium. This does not interfere with any other individual's right to share or exchange with others by their own means.
This is great! This type of engaging discussion is how Steem should be used. I love this! I want to wholeheartedly thank everyone who has engaged with my post so far.
The concept of private property is not found in nature either. Why not go all the way? Theft does not exist.
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference between claiming ownership of a physical material or other measurable asset and claiming ownership of a thought or action.
"You can't come into my house uninvited!" is quite different from "You can't sing that song!"
Ownership of thoughts and actions are measurable assets. If you do not believe that what on earth are you doing on Steemit?
All kinds of ownership is fundamentally the same. If you can not enforce it with violence you do not own anything. To you it would really not matter if I beat you up for singing my song, looking at my wife or nicking my silverware.
By what metric?
Exactly what you and I are doing at the moment: sharing our ideas and engaging each other in discussion about those ideas. That has far greater value to me than the monetization aspect of the platform.
You are arguing against a point that I never made. I can and will defend my physical property with violence when pressed to do so. The ability to employ violence as a tool does not necessarily justify doing so, however.
You are attempting on my behalf, and you have entirely misinterpreted my thinking in the process. This statement commits several logical fallacies: false equivalency, reductio ad absurdum, and you could apply several others.
Also, a red flag in any discussion is when the speaker begins arguing with an increasingly emotional tone, at which point they usually begin firing off unfounded and poorly defined assertions. There is nothing wrong with experiencing some level of cognitive dissonance when presented with a viewpoint which conflicts with your own worldview. This uncomfortable sensation can continue until you are able to reconcile the opposing assertions to a single conclusion. Of course, if you instead reflexively lash out in anger, you stop thinking altogether. The one trait which sets human beings apart from all other species on earth is the ability to suppress animistic instinct and act instead from logical reasoning. Of course, that's an entire discussion in itself.
It's easy to verbally attack others over the internet with the layer of anonymity and insulation that it offers. That's no excuse for savagery, however. Don't be an animal.
I can wallow in the rhetorical mud with you if I choose. Trolling and provoking strangers to anger is actually a favorite pastime of mine. Having such control over another person's emotional state is essentially to have command of their consciousness, and gives a sense of superiority over intellectually weaker individuals. I find it even more exhilarating than physically overpowering someone. I feel, however, that Steem is not an appropriate forum for such behavior. There are plenty of low-brow social media sites and discussion forums where you can engage in such activities.
Sorry, I did not mean to provoke you. You are the emotional one here :) I did not write to hear your analysis of how to discuss, most of what you write does not address the intersting question -the thing you just left as a question... by what metric. My answer is that there already exist human laws that do measure this I would say you could examine those.
What I opposed originally was you arguing from nature. That is a fallacy, and a big one, and it belongs in religious thinking not in rational thinking. Either nature is everything except human society - in which case I would say you would have a hard time finding anything akin to ownership, or nature is everything (which would be the way I prefer) including the ways of human society - and here you would find the idea of intellectual ownership nicely alongside the idea of other kinds of ownership like material property, slaves, trade-rights etc..
The law can be, and often is as I see it, wrong.
I did indeed choose my words poorly in that case.
As far as the ownership of ideas, I think we are going to continue to be at odds with one another. I have not seen reason yet to abandon my assertion that once you put an idea out there, you cannot expect to control what others do with it. IP law as it exists seems to me to be an impediment to innovation and the free exchange of ideas, something which I value more highly than
onone individual's pride over the assumption that they were the first to present an idea to the world.One of my favorite things about the internet is how much it has done to destroy the concept of intellectual property.
(I'll answer here because the comments can not be more than 6 post deep)
Laws can indeed be wrong and annoying, but I think the ethical discussion is a bit of track from the ontological discussion. I'll let that rest. The empirical discussion of the state of IP is maybe more interesting. :)
I have been an artist for many years so of course I will not challenge you about our lack of ability to control thoughts, or the value of stealing/lending ideas. But I think that you only scrape the surface when you assume that the internet is destroying the concept of IP. The contrary is actually happening. Everybody can steal an art-work. Artist have been fucked over since the Sumerians. When we defend our small businesses it is often understood that the real issue with IP is the artists and his individual pride. But we are only jesters - decapitated on a whim. What IP really means for the internet can not be underestimated, because every line of code depends on IP. An example is open-source software. GPL and BSD both depends on copyright, because you can not give away what is not yours. Another example: I post a lot of artworks as CC-by but you have to mention me when using my art even though I do not care to be named, because there would not be a license if there was no creator claiming it and without the license you would infringe on my copyright. It's a catch-22.
The internet has given so much extra value to Intellectual Property that the corporate lobbyists are pressuring the politicians to tighten the IP-laws and enforce them harder than ever. These laws do not apply to me or other small business-holders, but to corporate semi-states that doesn't give a shit about innovation or free exchange of ideas. That's just an illusion they like to uphold with artist as the show-case.
That's one of the reasons I am here, because this technology just might give a little back to innovators, artists and scientists. But we can't do that without the copyright.
For the little guy, eh? Or we could take the scorched earth approach toward leveling the playing field. I've actually seen a lot of sentiment expressed from pockets of the open source community regarding how ridiculously complicated IP law and licensing has made the open source development landscape. Some would prefer to do away with it altogether.
(only six deep... I continue here)
Like I said - to the vikings or the mongols ownership of property meant only little, at least outside their own communities, but they had what you and I don't - violent force. Jacob Appelbaum from the TOR-project had a secret government swat-team waking him up one night. Now he lives in Berlin. Philosophy is arguing about what is real and what is not. Politics is about realism.
Politics is about influence. It's a different kind of domination. Pillage 2.0
Some very smart thugs figured out that you don't have to expend so much physical energy conquering your neighbors and taking their stuff if you can conquer them intellectually instead.
Edit: That went of topic so let me bring it back around. Saying that I own that idea even though I sold it to you is sort of like how the government can say that they own my land even though I bought it. They even charge me rent for it. They call it taxes.
Sorry, I think we will have to end here, you suddenly lost height, and I am a bit to busy. But pleasant exchanging thoughts with you.
Just so long as I get the last word.