[PLUG-TALK] SOPA, PIPA, "Piracy", Incentives

[glen]

Keith Lofstrom wrote circa 12-01-19 09:03 AM:
> I will start things out by saying we need a better way to
> compensate producers of ideas that does not involve lawyers
> ( except, perhaps, for contract violations and physical
> theft and violence ).  
> 
> One of the /best/ ways to compensate producers is lowering
> the cost of production and the barriers to entry.  It is
> far easier to produce great ideas, new products, and new
> collaborations than it ever was.  I propose that much 
> better tools are possible, and we can cut the cost of 
> idea production and deployment by one or two more orders
> of magnitude.  That means more people can produce more
> good ideas more cheaply - they won't need very much 
> compensation per idea.  In a world awash in new ideas
> and invention, we can thrive with less compensation.

I can't help but think there are demons underlying your simple first
statement, here.  I think the problem lies in the concept of "producing
ideas".  Ideas are mental constructs that are useless unless they're
exported from one's head ... represented in an external form ... acted
upon with one's arms and legs ... communicated from mouth to ear ... etc.

So, you can't really be talking about producing ideas.  You must be
talking about transforming ideas into artifacts and making that
transformation less costly.

The trick with copyright and patent laws lies in the artifacts that are
produced from the ideas ... how one acts upon their ideas.  Those of us
who understand and want to avoid any type of thought police, tend to
resist the concept of protecting ideas and tend to focus on artifacts.
(That's especially true for engineers who appreciate how much effort it
actually takes to reify some thing that works ... less so for people who
mistakenly believe they traffic in pure ideas.)

To make matters worse, ideas, assuming away the mind-body problem, are a
part of our bodies, our selves.  And our selves are the history
dependent accumulation of all our experiences, most of which is stolen
from all those other bodies with which we've interacted.  So, tracing an
idea and giving credit where it's actually due is very difficult.  So
even biologically, it's largely delusional to speak of legally
protecting ideas in any sense.  But we _can_ trace and protect artifacts.

Protecting and giving proper credit for artifacts depends fundamentally
on the type of artifact and which history dependent organisms are
transforming the idea into artifact.  So, to be useful, this
conversation probably requires a taxonomy of people and a taxonomy of
artifacts.

-- 
glen