From: tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au (Tonio Loewald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Why the Piracy? Here's why...
Date: 26 Jan 93 11:37:07 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12

eric.larson@f620.n2605.z1.ieee.org (eric larson) writes:


> # Microsoft -- IMHO -- has never innovated, only copied, ripped off,
> # and so on. Our IP laws are paying people for doing bad things.

>The problem is that you can't buy a C compiler for the Mac or MS-DOS from
>AT&T. Whose mistake is that? Certainly not Microsoft's. Should we punish
>Microsoft for filling a real need?

Microsoft never released a C compiler for the Mac either, for that
matter. (Phew!)

> # I wouldn't be surprised if this causes as much harm, in the long
> # term, as laws which benefit companies who move factories out of
> # the country and engage in leveraged takeovers and rationalizations,
> # all of which are slowly grinding the US economy into the dust.

>One of the real problems the US has is that companies are inefficient in
>bringing 'breakthrough' technologies to the marketplace. You DO NOT improve
>this by making IP law protection for commercial technologies weaker, and

I agree. Good point. Absolutely true. But you might consider the possibility
of making IP laws _different_.

I have no perfect solution in mind, but I doubt that you'd find many 
microeconomists with genuine affection for things as they stand. (Who
knows, since research grants seem to buy pretty strange "honest"
opinions, you might...)

>strengthen IP protection for basic R&D - this LESSENS the incentive to
>commercialize a technology. The real benefit to an economy is from the
>commercial enterprise - that is the manufacturing effort. The royalties on an

That remains to be seen, as the cat said who voided into the sugarbowl.
Software, effectively, isn't manufactured, and that's the problem. If
software were manufactured, our IP laws, which are designed to protect
the inventors of automatic apple-peelers, would largely work. No-one
much cared if someone saw a patented apple-peeler selling at the general
store but made one for him or her self, They only worried if he made
them for his or her friends, and to sell. If he or she did this, she or
he would have to pay a royalty. The problem is that anyone can make
a software package for him/her-self, precisely because it isn't
manufactured. Horse and buggy laws...

>idea amount to a small percentage of the actual economic activity of the
>manufacturing process.

Unfortunately, _ideas_ are the one thing for which no protection seems
to exist. You can benefit from an idea if you keep it secret and implement
it (or evangelise it successfully to venture capitalists) but the people
with the _ideas_ seldom make the money. The people who put lots of money
into good ideas do make lots of money. Some people generate good ideas on
a salary -- then it's open season as to who makes money off the ideas.

If you implement an idea, you can patent your implementation -- maybe.
If you sing your idea or write it down, you can copyright it. Obviously,
there are practical problems involved in registering ideas.

One of the reasons that the IP laws aren't failing quite as miserably
w.r.t. software 
as the music and book and video laws (which we all probably break from
time to time -- anyone care to disavow photocopying?) is the continuing
progress of computer hardware and so on. If this stuff ever plateaus,
or if writers ever decide that word-processing doesn't _need_ to get
any better, we could be in for some interesting market behaviour.

This has already happened to a very limited extent, in the form of
ultra cheap software. Only the lack of standards, lack of user
education, and so forth, prevent the effects from being broader. If
I buy CheapWrite (tm) I can't open Word files. Thus, it seems I
_need_ Word. That's what the nice salesman says... Assuming someone
so much as _told_ me that CheapWrite (tm) exists.

There are so many cases of intellectual property laws producing silly
effects that _any_ person should be able to reflect upon dozens of
them. From the selling of the rights to "the inside stories" by the
wives of serial killers to people being able to sell photographs they
take of crimes or celebrities, with the people whose images are
being bought and sold having no say in the matter. In software we have
the slowly growing patented algorithm fiasco. We have look and feel
lawsuits. We have _incredible_ licence agreements that would seem to
be outright illegal but which some courts seem willing to enforce.
We have legal fictions -- can you or can't you "own" a piece of
software? What exactly is a "licence" issued by a company and can
it be leased? Is it subject to sales tax or import duties? If so,
what type?

And if you think that all this is part of some Utopian "free market"
where the righteous and clever are rewarded with just the correct
incentives, you probably believe in trickle-down economics.


Tonio

PS. What really gets up my nose is all this moralising by people
who (a) probably pirate music and photocopy books all the time
and (b) probably _would_ pirate software if they weren't overpaid
computer programmers who hope one day to benefit from inefficient
laws that are small inconvenience to them.
-- 
Tonio Loewald | tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au

"Yes!! For the hundred and fiftieth time!
 We're burning in hell!!!" (John Callahan)