Wholesome Rage: Intellectual Property AS Property · 7:52am Feb 6th, 2019
I'll just quote the introduction.
In 2013, the Supreme Court came down with a decision on Bowman vs Monsanto. Bowman was convicted of growing what he thought was his own crops, using seeds from the soy he’d planted the previous year. Monsanto sued, claiming a violation of their intellectual property: He’d bought their Roundup Ready brand genetically modified seeds, and so the second crop was a violation of their copyright in the same way torrenting a game off of Pirate Bay is.
Also in 2013, activist Aaron Swartz – the man who shut down the internet for the SOPA protests – was facing charges by prosecutors of up to $1 million, and facing up to 35 cumulative years of prison, for the crime of illegally downloading academic journals from MIT servers. He committed suicide, and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame that same year.
In 2018 the John Deere corporation said that farmers didn’t really own their tractors: They owned an “implied license… to operate the vehicle”. This is currently being foughtby the Right to Repair movement, but if it goes the way of Bowman Vs Monsanto, it means that farmers will not legally have the right to repair their own tractors, because they don’t really own them.
To drop the solemn tone for a moment: What the hell is going on?
Capitalism.
Companies learned that the subscription model of “pay to use but don’t actually own” makes more money and allows them more control over their products, and by extension, their customers (which also makes them more money, albeit more indirectly). So they do that, at least as much as they can get away with it.
I do miss the days when you owned the things you paid for.
And technically Microsoft still maintains the legal fiction that the copy of Windows on your machine is not yours, but you are only given a license to use it, and at any time they want, 'Zip!' they can take it back with no recourse because you agreed to the license when you clicked that button. Kindle has much the same fun, where the book you 'bought' last year can vanish out of your library because the author and the publishing company are having a snit.
I posted a long, angry comment here about your negative attitudes toward dialogue, but then I found in my email that you had responded overnight to the critique I made of this post on your Patreon. I don't think it was a good response--you still avoided admitting that any of my points were good--but I'm going to tone down my response in light of the fact that you did, at least, reply to me.
In all the time I've been following you, in your political posts, you've never acknowledged it when anyone pointed out that you were factually wrong, or when someone made a good point against one of your arguments. In the many cases where I've showed that the "bad stuff" in America that you present as proof that capitalism is worse than... than what? you never say... is due to socialist policies, you've ignored my comments. You've still never named a single communist country that we can study to compare it to allegedly capitalist countries. To claim that Marxism is better than capitalism, you have to show that a problem is worse under capitalism than under Marxism. You've never done that.
When you posted this blog post on your Patreon, I told you that the Martin Shkreli case has nothing to do with IP, since the patent on the drug whose price he raised (Daraprim) expired almost 40 years ago. It isn't an IP problem; it's a problem with too much government regulation. Too few people need it to make enough money to pay for meeting regulatory requirements. It can be bought for pennies overseas, but the US government recently got all producer countries to stop direct consumer sales to the US, and Google censors website listings of overseas pharmacies that ignore that ban. Blame the FDA or blame Google, but don't blame IP.
I told you this; you read and responded to my comment; its truth is easily verifiable by checking the links I supplied to you. So why is this example, which you know is false, still in your post today?
You don't really dialogue. Sometimes you respond, but you never acknowledge any evidence against your narrative. And lately it's been getting worse. In your "Fimfiction's Fading Erotic Scene" blog post, you openly advocated suppression of dialogue:
I'm sorry to say this, because you're a smart guy, a talented writer, and a fun person, but after maybe a year of trying to dialogue with you, I'm about ready to give up.
5008959
I still think it's hilarious that one of the titles they did that with was 1984.
5008966 Regarding the John Deere case, when I objected that you seem to wish to forbid people from making contracts (which, indeed, Marxism must restrict), you replied:
The case you brought up was not about slavery, but about John Deere leasing tractors instead of selling them. You must either
Regarding the USPTO, patent trolling, and incentives, I used to be a patent examiner, and I explained that patent trolling is possible not because the IP legislation is bad, but because Congress insists the Patent Office must make a profit, and so the USPTO makes its examiners grant patents according to an algorithm that's very bad but very fast. I also wrote, "Capitalism does have an answer to rewarding the innovation, which is IP. It's Marxism that has no solution to rewarding innovation." You replied:
First, "being run for a profit motive" is not "capitalism". There's a big difference between a company trying to make a profit in the free market, and a government agency, funded with tax dollars and using the power of the state to force people to obey it, being run for profit. The latter is entirely against the spirit of capitalism, but compatible with Marxism. So once again, this is a case where the bad consequences result from the US not being capitalist.
Second, I've familiar with the US government "research" grants, which the DOE's is just one of--I've won and supervised 4 or 5 such grant projects--and they rely on intellectual property. The company receiving the grant keeps the IP resulting from the work (with an exemption granting the federal government a license to use the work for free, since they paid for it). They wouldn't touch the grant if that weren't the case.
The real problem with the grant system, BTW, is that the granting agencies aren't incentivized to care about most of the grants. They're required to pump a certain amount of money into these $60,000-$600,000 grants, but they're also supervising $30 million contracts, so they don't think the small grants are worth their time. Sometimes they don't even read the reports; they just hand out the money. So the results seldom get used by the agencies, and the company that did the work is left with something only partly relevant to their business interests. The people who get rich off these grants are the big companies and the famous academics who demand a big chunk of the money in order to put their names on the grant applications, then do very little to help. They can do this because the granting agency doesn't have a business interest in the grant, so they spend as little time as possible awarding them, so they generally give the grant to whomever has the most famous names on their application. Again, a failure because of a lack of free-market incentives.
5008978
Okay, so first:
1: Marx isn't a guideprint for what a successful communist state looks like. He goes to great lengths to not hypothesize that, though he does work on what revolution looks like. Marx exists largely to be a critic of capitalism: Those criticisms are still valid without a whole-cloth other system in place to compare it to. And I don't like getting bogged down in discussions of failed states, because I think that it's meaningless and exhausting.
2: While I enjoy Singer as an ethicist, and have a book of his open beside me, that's a summary of someone else's summary. And while I enjoy Slate Star Codex in general, I do note that he has a very conservative leaning fanbase, broadly, and seems to be a lot better at internalizing and debating fascist views than leftist ones. Compare that take to his Reactionary FAQ in length and comprehensiveness.
I thought you were arguing from a false premise, which is why I argued from the slavery context. It's beneficial to tractor manufacturers to offer this kind of license, because of the rights they have available. It's not beneficial to consumers, who may not have alternatives.
So, the issue becomes; Is it acceptable that this kind of contract exists or is normal, if its implications are broadly undesirable?
Right, but this is a counterpoint to "innovation could still happen outside of capitalism". Pointing out that while still under capitalism, they still use capitalistic motivators, isn't an argument.
Your next paragraph is that though! And I agree that it's a problem, but I don't think 'free-market incentives' would solve the problem you see, though - again, I pointed to the DoE grants to show that a lot of great research has been deemed non-viable or too risky for the free market to bear it, even though the results would be desirable.
Reducing it down to just free market incentives would remove the viability of all research which only produces positive externalities. Ecological research, for example.
5008966
If you’re curious why you’re getting downvoted, it’s because you’re making an aggressively toned public response to a private message and acting entitled about it.
5009069 I'll leave those comments there, but MrNumbers and I are communicating about this via PM now, in calmer tones. I think both of us will be better off doing that in private. He has since changed the thing I objected to most, the reference to the Shkreli case. He explained some other things as well, but I'm guessing that if he'd wanted to discuss them here, he would have posted them here, so I won't post them here.
I wasn't responded to any private message, but to many public and semi-public (Patreon) blog posts and comments. I'd been meaning to PM him, and maybe I should have--I have questionable social judgement.
I don't think you should use the word "entitled" with the object "objecting strenuously in a public form to what someone has done in that public forum". That sounds like a stepping-stone on the way to "arguing with my side is a privilege". I'm always suspicious of the word "entitled", because it's often used to silence people.
There's a good reason right there why I no longer buy books with DRM.
Also, see the link https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html.en
It's bad enough that people can own "ideas" that are part of something you now (should) own, but we're now getting an increasing reliance on cloud-dependent programs too. This causes issues, since even if the source for that is free software/open source, the version of it running on that server cannot be verified to be the same as the source code would produce. Aside from the fact that most cloud-based systems ARE proprietary, you also have to rely on that server/website being operational for anything you do requiring the service. And, of course, your data must be uploaded to the server for it to perform operations on it, so they might be storing it as well!
TL;DR: Anything cloud computing is even more temporary, and the upcoming idea of cloud-assisted graphics for gaming is even worse (since the games, client, and cloud software are proprietary, and aside from the extra DRM that can be easily added, you now rely on the server network even for games that are otherwise offline).
Other excellent resources:
https://locusmag.com/2016/11/cory-doctorow-sole-and-despotic-dominion/
I also remember an article (GNU again, but I can't find it) where it's pointed out that "theft" of so-called IP is absurd, since they are trying to claim that everyone who makes a copy would have bought it if they didn't make said copy. Aside from the important fact that property is a silly description of something that only gains in value as more people own it (and which is not lost or moved upon its taking, unlike physical objects), it ignores that most people cannot purchase the items which they "stole." Region-locking, DRM, overpricing, use restrictions... the list goes on.