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Yui Unifex · 06-04-2003, 12:52 PM

But why is using someone's IP without permission wrong?

Any bonehead can come up with a reason why taking someone's car is wrong: It deprives them of their car, which the "rightful" owner (presumably) wholly compensated society for. Stealing the car deprives without compensation, therefore it is wrong.

IP is, as I'm sure you know, orders of magnitude more complex than that. It is nearly impossible to measure the value to society with a piece of IP. You might say, "That's not important, it's only the the value to the individual creator that's important," but that's simply not true: The creator was not educated in a vacuum, and we all know that Tolkien blatantly used many things from various societal myths. Furthermore, due to the ease with which information can be duplicated, the only thing that a copyright holder has to sell, really, is exclusivity by restricting what society at large may do. Those are two very important benefits that society has given to the copyright holder, and society is thus owed benefits in return. The extent and form of those benefits is the great grey area of IP ethics.

So I'm looking for some concrete wrong here, and I'm just not seeing it with your emphatic statements of wrong without explanation. Given that these ethics are a great big grey area, you'd think that we deserve some explanation before someone starts making these sorts of claims.

06-04-2003, 12:52 PM	#71
Yui Unifex Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 323	But why is using someone's IP without permission wrong? Any bonehead can come up with a reason why taking someone's car is wrong: It deprives them of their car, which the "rightful" owner (presumably) wholly compensated society for. Stealing the car deprives without compensation, therefore it is wrong. IP is, as I'm sure you know, orders of magnitude more complex than that. It is nearly impossible to measure the value to society with a piece of IP. You might say, "That's not important, it's only the the value to the individual creator that's important," but that's simply not true: The creator was not educated in a vacuum, and we all know that Tolkien blatantly used many things from various societal myths. Furthermore, due to the ease with which information can be duplicated, the only thing that a copyright holder has to sell, really, is exclusivity by restricting what society at large may do. Those are two very important benefits that society has given to the copyright holder, and society is thus owed benefits in return. The extent and form of those benefits is the great grey area of IP ethics. So I'm looking for some concrete wrong here, and I'm just not seeing it with your emphatic statements of wrong without explanation. Given that these ethics are a great big grey area, you'd think that we deserve some explanation before someone starts making these sorts of claims.