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Burr · 06-04-2003, 01:40 PM

People don't earn cars in a vaccuum either. Nobody compensates society for their cars. We compensate only the people who previously claimed to own exclusive right to those cars. In any case, how would you go about compensating society for the money with which you are using to compensate society?

Moreover, assuming that everyone owns equal parts in society and that society owns equal parts in each piece of IP (due to the difficulty of predicting actual value added by society), then there is still the fact that the most obvious creator of the IP has more claim to that IP than anyone else in society, because they own their equal societal part plus however much value they added personally. As a communal norm, we do not recognize something as protectable IP until and unless, by communal norm, the creator is seen to have added a sufficient amount of value so as to overwhelm the value added by the rest of society. You would be pretty hard pressed to convince most people here that Tolkein didn't add overwhelmingly more value to his work than did the rest of society.

Unless you have evidence to the contrary, we can assume that society gave the copyright holder no more benefits than the copyright holder gave every other individual of society in return simply by being a part of that society. Thus, the benefits added by society seem to be irrelevant to the discussion.

The ease with which information may be duplicated is not the same as the ease with which information may be created. Sure, any fool can duplicate Tolkein's work. The ease with which something can be duplicated is merely the ease with which IP can be taken away. Surely the fact that something is easy to steal doesn't by itself make it okay to steal. By taking it away, you aren't necessarily taking the means of duplicating it, but you are taking away the benefits of having been the IP's creator, leaving the creator stuck with an unfair portion of the costs of the creation.

06-04-2003, 01:40 PM	#77
Burr Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 123	People don't earn cars in a vaccuum either. Nobody compensates society for their cars. We compensate only the people who previously claimed to own exclusive right to those cars. In any case, how would you go about compensating society for the money with which you are using to compensate society? Moreover, assuming that everyone owns equal parts in society and that society owns equal parts in each piece of IP (due to the difficulty of predicting actual value added by society), then there is still the fact that the most obvious creator of the IP has more claim to that IP than anyone else in society, because they own their equal societal part plus however much value they added personally. As a communal norm, we do not recognize something as protectable IP until and unless, by communal norm, the creator is seen to have added a sufficient amount of value so as to overwhelm the value added by the rest of society. You would be pretty hard pressed to convince most people here that Tolkein didn't add overwhelmingly more value to his work than did the rest of society. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, we can assume that society gave the copyright holder no more benefits than the copyright holder gave every other individual of society in return simply by being a part of that society. Thus, the benefits added by society seem to be irrelevant to the discussion. The ease with which information may be duplicated is not the same as the ease with which information may be created. Sure, any fool can duplicate Tolkein's work. The ease with which something can be duplicated is merely the ease with which IP can be taken away. Surely the fact that something is easy to steal doesn't by itself make it okay to steal. By taking it away, you aren't necessarily taking the means of duplicating it, but you are taking away the benefits of having been the IP's creator, leaving the creator stuck with an unfair portion of the costs of the creation.