Klarinet Archive - Posting 000063.txt from 2010/07

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Sheet music copyright
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:38:16 -0400

At 02:32 AM 7/6/2010, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

>As for "you cannot sell what people can get for free", perhaps you would
>like to take this up with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a copy of which I
>can get for free, perfectly legally, rebranded under the name "CentOS",
>but which nevertheless manages to sell copious numbers of licences in
>its original form. :-)

I'll wager it is NOT "perfectly legal." If it is, anyone who pays
for it is a fool, and Red Hat Enterprise would be wise to get out of
the losing business.

> > Even tangible objects can derive the majority of their value from
> intangible
> > property. Take medicine, for example. The marginal cost to produce most
> > drugs is close to zero - does this mean that all pills should be free? Who
> > would pay for their development?
>
>Perhaps you should take this up with the World Health Organization, who
>not so long ago concluded that the existing patent systems for drugs
>were failing to serve their intended purpose of encouraging innovation
>and availability of drugs to those who need them:
>http://www.msf.org/msfinternational/invoke.cfm?objectid=DA40FEBF-0FFE-7C62-A0B20D2B8DF1AF82&component=toolkit.pressrelease&method=full_html

The main problem with drug patents is that the FDA approval process
takes so long, the patents are nearly expired by the time the drugs
gets to market, reducing the opportunity to recoup development
costs. The "public good" is only served by encouraging the
development, and reducing the profit opportunity DECREASES the incentive.

>The clear need for incentives and financial sustainability for
>innovation is too often conflated with the _particular incentives_ that
>are employed at present...
>
> > There are other slices of intellectual property that fall into the same
> > boat. A set of architectural plans for a house costs several thousand
> > dollars. You can now download them over the internet in .pdf form. Does
> > the fact that they can be transported by electrons make it OK to freely
> > copy, just because I don't sell them?
>
>The "just because I don't sell them" line is interesting, since I recall
>that up until 1997 (when the No Electronic Theft Act was passed) there
>were no grounds for criminal prosecution of copyright infringement
>unless it was carried out for "commercial advantage or private financial
>gain".
>
>Whether it's "OK to freely copy" (from a moral and practical, rather
>than legal point of view; the legal position is fairly clear) will
>depend a lot on your assumptions about the situation. If you start from
>the assumption that an architectural plan (that is, the information
>contained within the plan) is property, then naturally you will arrive
>at a conclusion that says that to copy them without paying is wrong.
>However, if you examine copying from the point of view of whether
>permitting it increases net public welfare, it's not so clear.

"Net public welfare" is irrelevant. A person trying to reconcile
copying with a "moral" point of view really MUST consider the fact
that it against the law as something of a deal-breaker, whether or
not they happen to AGREE with the law.

Bill Hausmann

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

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