I contend that art (in terms of IP) should have the shortest protection possible (the lifetime of the artist), Midwesterner disagrees.
Here is my reasoning:
For the purposes of brevity art is defined as the following: music, video (including film), literature, fine art (painting, sculpture etc.). And is considered to be independent of the medium of transmission, you could be reading this on a peice of paper and it would be the same as reading it on a screen.

1. Art is the product of a person’s mind, and hence is their property. This is a given. However it is different from other forms of IP for the reasons stated below.
2. Art’s value is completely subjective (I can’t see whats so special about the Mona Lisa for instance, and yes I have seen the real thing. I certainly wouldn’t pay to have it hanging on my wall.)
3. Art is ultimately useless and impractical and hence it is objectively valueless
4. Art is rarely created for profit (you can usually tell if it is because its generally inferior. Hence the Spice Girls.) Artists never become artists to get rich. (You just have to look at my poetry, I didn’t write it to make money, I wrote it because it needed to be written.)
5. Art would generally be created whether there was an incentive to do it or not.
6. Since the means of production/distribution is now extremely cheap and accessible to (nearly) everyone, and will only become more so. The artist no longer needs to employ the services of a third party (studio, publisher, record company) in order to profit from their art should they wish to do so. They may no longer be coerced into giving up the rights to their property in order to get it distributed (which is how it has been done in the past). Prints and castings of fine art may even be sold over the internet
7. In the case of other forms of property, and other forms of IP, I can see the point in passing the rights to profit from it along to your descendants. The point may be moot anyway as any IP which is not art is generally not owned by individuals but by corporate entities (gone are the days of the gentleman inventor) and individuals do not often have the resources to exploit their IP effectively and so trade it to an entity which can. I can also see the merit in passing the physical part of fine art on as it is usually unique and is well known for holding its value (if it was deemed to have any in the first place). However giving someone the rights to profit without having worked for it (ie producing their own art) doesn’t sit right with me somehow, I may be flexible when it comes to family but letting a faceless corporation profit from an individual’s art long after they are no more is something I don’t think I can budge on.

I think that about covers it. I’ve said most of it before but its nice to have it all in one place. Do your worst

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I cut and pasted this out of the SD thread. why don’t we drop it on the ice and chase it around a bit.

If we concede that as an individual, I have a right to have a secret, and
if we concede that as an individual, I have a right to enter into contracts with other individuals, and
I require a contract from another individual in exchange for telling my secret to him, and
that contract places restrictions on if and how he may relay that secret to others, and
someone finds that secret ‘with the doors unlocked’, then
they can no more claim entitlement to it than if they find my house or car unlocked.
They say that because stealing my car denies me the use of it, it is theft. No. It is theft because it is my car.
Furthermore, stealing my intellectual advantage (IP) does deny me the use of it. Whether you are a moralist or a pragmatist, it’s still wrong.
IP is intrinsic to individualism. Denying IP is pure intellectual collectivism.

So, starting from the top down, let’s find the first statement that is not stone cold obvious, and debate it. By working one at a time from the top down, we can reduce confusion. I’m on way too many threads right now.

If we establish IP as a general concept, then we can go onto to details. But they will be easier if we can keep track of how we got to where.

I can’t find anything in that to disagree with, if the secret bestows upon the originator and any contracted keepers some kind of advantage, ie it has a practical application or is useful in some other way. A treasure map for instance or some kind of industrial secret. The words “intellectual advantage” must have triggered something in my brain and I realised where I’d been misunderstanding and misunderstood.

Through entirely my own fault I was looking at the issue from the perspective of the secret being a work of art (music, writing, film, painting etc.) which has no practical applictaion. Its what immediately came to mind when copyright was mentioned. There is no intellectual advantage to be gained from keeping art a secret, it is meant to be shared/distributed as widely as possible otherwise it loses any meaning. A book is meant to be read, a painting to be seen, music to be heard and a film to be watched. The only advantage gained by anyone with regards to art is by those with the means to distribute it as widely as possible.

Until these digitised times a book had to be printed, music pressed onto discs, films transferred onto film and these physical things had to be transported around the globe by a variety of slow and expensive means. Various industries grew up around the need to distribute art, and they made an awful lot of money at it. That all changed with the dawn of the internet. I can access a symphony recorded in Tokyo and have a copy stored on my computer in a matter of seconds. I can read a book as it is being written half a world away (Its a very good book aswell I can reccommend it.) And though I don’t think anyone’s done it yet I could feasibly watch a movie as it is filmed, live, right on my desk.

The old distribution systems are no longer necessary and so neither are the giant companies which grew up around them and made so much money from them. The distribution network is much cheaper and as such is available to every Tom, Dick and Harry who feels the urge to put finger to keyboard, digicam to eye, mouth to microphone, or stylus to graphics tablet. I’m doing it myself, no-one in their right mind would publish what I write in a traditional medium, it just wouldn’t be cost effective (and most of it isn’t really good enough anyway). Instead of the distributors getting rich of the backs of the artists, if they want to the artists can get rich themselves or give their art away for nothing. The whole brouhaha about copyright (of art) is to do with the passing of the old order and the various distributors resisting the change. They’ll give in eventually and find other revenue streams or they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs they are.

As to their ownership of the art they distribute, they never had that, they were only contracted to distibute it (The film industry is a special case where the distributor is more often than not the creator aswell, see Disney). Its a pity that the musicians and writers of the past whose works are still under copyright can’t reclaim the distribution rights.

Having read that back to myself I realise that its a bit of a ramble and probably slightly off topic. As I said the idea of IP is a valid one, as it is explained above, and I have no objection to it when applied to practical, profitable and useful ideas. If you can convince me that keeping art to yourself bestows an advantage, in and of itself, which would be lost if it was freely distributed, then as I said before go right ahead.

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Midwesterner:
First thing: I don’t want this to degenerate into a slagging match and as stated above if I can learn something from this discussion all the better. I don’t take issue with the friggin’ part of “What a friggin’ communist.” Anyone who denies that is lying or dead from the waist down. However, I am far from a communist. I will concede that some of my attitudes and opinions will be collectivist in nature, I blame that on my cultural and socio-political conditioning and beg your indulgence. I’m slowly getting it out of my system through argument, education, and some directed reading (suggestions welcome). Saying I’m a communist implies that the majority of my opinions about such things are communist in nature, which I’m sure they aren’t. If you feel you can convince me otherwise then please do so. Otherwise I’d still like a retraction

On to more important things…

“Why should anyone who had nothing to do with the writing of the book make money out of my hard work?”

This is not a statement about the legitimacy of IP. It is a flat out statement denying the legitiamacy of unearned property.

True. I don’t see your point though.

“(publishers/record companies/film studios) . . . These parasites make a living out of the work of others”

I’ll let other readers decide whether this is a statement on the legitimacy of IP or a more general anti-bourgeoisie sentiment.

Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class which obtains income from ownership or trade in capital assets, or from commercial activities such as the buying and selling of commodities, wares and services. Though why you let Marxism define anything I don’t know. I’m not anti-bourgeoisie, that would make me a communist. The service that the aforementioned parasites provide is no longer necessary though they would like you to believe that it is. The only thing that concerns the parasites is keeping the monopoly on distribution that they have. Not very free market is it? This is beginning to change Spiralfrog.com is an indication of how things are developing. Once active Universal Music will be making their entire catalogue available for download free of charge all they ask is that you watch some ads while you download. It could so easily be the artists themselves making that money instead of Universal.

“This is coporate property (a form of collectivism btw)”

I don’t think you understand the difference between voluntary co-operation and collectivism. Those silly East Germans should have just sold their stock in that particular collective enterprise.

To be honest I don’t see the difference between voluntary co-operation and collectivism, here’s your opportunity to educate me. You seem to be implying that collectivism requires coercion, hence the East German reference. I don’t think that it does. Collectivism may be voluntary, based upon an agreement between individuals.
If a corporation isn’t communal property what is? A corporation is considered to be a single entity but it is made up of individuals whose work has gone into providing the corporation with its property, the only thing that stops these individuals claiming a chunk of the corporation’s profits is the fact that they have agreed not to. How have the shareholders ‘earned’ their claim on the corporation? Bought maybe but not earned.

“If you so desired you could do it all on your own. You only have to look at the internet to see it beginning to happen, YouTube, IUMA, and blogging are all evidence of it.”

Golly. You’ve got a lot of confidance in my capabilities. If I were to try that, I would still be hung up at the burying cable stage.

What do you need to bury cable for? You’re already paying for that if you have an internet connection. How YouTube, IUMA et al make thier money is by selling advertising space on their websites. You are already paying for the infrastructure in a million little ways. All you need is A DV Camera for film, A microphone for music and a keyboard for an Ebook and of course the requisite talent and determination and you’re laughing.

“No-one owns my thoughts but me. I may wish to sell a physical manifestaion of those thoughts (CD, Ebook, Dead Tree Edition, DVD) but the thoughts are still mine all the buyer can claim ownership of is the medium of transmission, not the thought itself.”

How can you claim they are your’s and yet also say they are not transferable or bequeathable?

how can you claim your life? It is after all equally non-transferrable and unbequeathable and yet it forms the basis for all concepts of property. A thought cannot be unthought, I cannot give you a thought of mine and then not have the thought. You’re applying concepts of physical property to something intangible which simply doesn’t work.

“PS If I were a communist I’d be saying that no-one should own anything, which I’m patently not. I’d like a retraction please.”

Well, I certainly will retract “friggin”. It is irelevant and unproven. As for “communist”, it is relevant, and there certainly appears to be features of your concept of property that would be more at home in some for of communual property system. The contradiction that I can’t work out is how you can “own” it in your mind, but not transfer ownership of it on your own terms. That is the essence of IP. To provide a framework so you can share your thoughts without losing title to them.

I don’t see the contradiciton. I am transferring ownership on my own terms. Upon my death any idea of mine which I have transmitted in any medium (Book, CD, DVD, Flashdrive, or whatever) enters the public domain and no individual or corporate/government body may restrict or otherwise impede the reproduction of said idea for their own profit or advantage. If someone wants to keep printing my book and selling copies all power to them but they will not have the sole right to do so.

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