>Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding.
Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency.
>You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.
>Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.
The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
I'd also add that if anything copyright has left us poorer because it promotes software and other content that doesn't permit free-riding. GNU/Linux and BSD probably would have occurred much sooner and become the dominant platform in the world if copyright had not afforded Microsoft the money to spend on every which way to compete besides simply building a better product.
> Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation?
Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives. There are lots of different incentives and lots of different ways to increase or reduce incentives, but free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.
> I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.
That's not really the full extent of the question. It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?
BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project. That's a viable and popular model, but do we want to rely on the Department of Defense for an even larger fraction of our technology? I used to work for a DARPA contractor. They're not the world's most efficient way to develop technology. We use DARPA for blue-sky things the market doesn't invest in naturally, not because it's a great way to develop new technology.
Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches. Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did? An incentive scheme that relies on government funding or personal hobbies results in very different software than one where a customer can pay a vendor for a piece of software. And I think there is much to be said about how the latter incentive model incentivizes the creation of software that the public wants rather than say what is most useful to the military.
It's interesting to see how recent developments built on Linux have been monetized. Nobody can make money selling Linux directly to cell phone vendors, like Microsoft did selling Windows to PC vendors, so what you have instead is a platform, Android, based entirely on the perpetuation of Google's search/advertising empire. Instead of paying cash for an OS, people pay in the form of their privacy, because that's something that can be monetized in a world where software cannot be monetized. Is that better?
- It's not technically true that you can't make money selling Linux, but even if it wasn't, it's a red herring; Google could certainly sell Android. The reason they don't has to do with their business model, nothing else.
- It's not true that you can't make money selling it to cell phone developers. What you do is not charge for current software, but for future development. As an employee of a company which sells GPL licensed software, I can tell you it's a very viable business model.
- Google could also charge for access to their services, including App Store.
Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre interests and even Location? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash and their privacy.
> What you do is not charge for current software, but for future development. As an employee of a company which sells GPL licensed software, I can tell you it's a very viable business model.
It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software.
> Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre interests and even Location? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash and their privacy.
The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models. A lot of those monetization models involve privacy-invasion through advertising, etc. Paying for software doesn't eliminate that obviously, but rather when software can't be sold as a product the equilibrium moves to a very different place.
> It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software.
That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case.
> The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models.
It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models.
> Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives.
AnthonyMouse didn't say otherwise. This is a non-sequitur.
> free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.
In this case, yes, that's the theory. The problem is that there is no meaningful evidence to support the notion that incentives are affected in this way by the effective elimination of copyright or patent monopolies. Consider, for instance, the fashion industry -- specifically a no-fly-zone for patents and copyrights, but highly active and very lucrative for successful firms. More interestingly, it pays the designers, the actually "artists" of the industry, far more consistently than some copyright industries (e.g. record industry) and far with far more significant high-end payouts for top performers than other copyright industries (e.g. software development).
As statistics in Falkvinge's article show, however, the consistency across the field has been increasing in the record industry since the advent of Napster, thanks to such effects as increased directness of the business relationship between the artist and the consumer (bypassing the copyright dependent record industry infrastructure). Meanwhile, the watermark for top performer income in software development is also rising thanks to the rise of business models independent of copyright protections, such as served by facilitators like Kickstarter and Humble Bundle and the growth of foundations supported by voluntary donations that fund open source projects.
> It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?
Yes, absolutely. There. Asked and answered.
> BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project.
This is no more accurate than your statement that Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of copyright and patent law. UNIX was originally created by software developers within AT&T Bell Labs, in part to scratch an organizational internal itch, and made available for free to universities; BSD Unix was originally created as what amounted to a patchset by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley to serve his own desire to work on the project.
It wasn't until after the third major version of BSD Unix (3BSD) was created that DARPA funding related to the project appeared at all. This funding guided the direction of BSD Unix development for the 4BSD release, of course, but given the history of the previous three versions it seems ludicrous to suggest that without DARPA interest the BSD Unix project would have suddenly evaporated and we would never have a publicly accessible BSD Unix. You are, for some reason, seeing the existence of DARPA funding at a late stage of UC Berkeley involvement in Unix development as some kind of evidence that DARPA funding was a necessary precondition for the existence and continued development of BSD Unix, which is a wholly unwarranted conclusion.
Subsequent to meeting the DARPA-directed goals of 4BSD, development went back to what it had been before: largely Bill Joy scratching an itch. 4.1BSD was essentially the result of him tinkering with kernel performance. While DARPA still kept its hand in things, it basically served as bureaucratic overhead, which the developers accepted because their parent organizations received what amounted to bribes. To suggest that somehow BSD Unix would not have existed without DARPA funding is just laughably without supporting evidence. It's like saying that without Avatar there never would have been 3D movies. S Cameron's movie represented a huge influx of capital into the 3D movie industry, and it suddenly looked like 3D movies were the future, but after the hype waned the result is that a lot of people realize that 3D is not magic fairy dust that automatically makes movies Better. They further realized that 3D movie technologies and techniques were actually progressing for a long time leading up to that moment when conditions were right for someone to take advantage of a confluence of factors to create a big-budget, very popular 3D movie. James Cameron, it could be argued, was just in the right place at the right time, and as a result he got credit in the history of 3D movies far out of proportion to his actual contribution -- just like DARPA in the development of BSD Unix according to your version of history.
> Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches.
It's funny how you take a strong argument against the necessity of copyright, turn it around, and present it as though it's some kind of argument for copyright. No, it doesn't work like that; the Linux kernel and the huge communities that have arisen around it all add up to a gigantic counterargument for the notion that we wouldn't have useful operating systems without copyright.
> Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did?
With greater interest, in the absence of a market-dominating monopolist, I'm sure it would have served the home computer user market far better than MS Windows did in the real world. After all, MS Windows is the result of push-marketing, where a huge corporation decides what it will sell based on its judgments of the most "efficient" production methods for its purposes, then spends ungodly amounts of money on marketing to convince people that's what they want to acquire. By contrast, open source OS projects serve the actual interests -- the economic demand -- of actual users. The fact that Microsoft has effectively muscled the lion's share of competition out of the market through means largely unrelated to directly competitive provision of quality limits the actual sources of market inputs to the development plans of other OS developers so that they tend to focus on narrower target audiences; the narrower target audience influence on their development is thus in part a result of the existence of MS Windows, and not a natural state of affairs that ensures BSD Unix projects could never serve the same user demographics as MS Windows.
You're not talking about what would realistically happen in the absence of copyright, in other words. You're just talking about what happens if you remove a copyright-dependent organization and assume nothing else would change, which is quite unrealistic.
As for your assertions about smartphone support, icebraining responded to thats, I'll stop producing Wall Of Text.
Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency.
>You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.
>Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.
The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.