Is Intellectual Property a legitimate concept?

[Cow Poke]

No, no, no, no, no and NO!!!!!!

A business can go out of business for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the copyright protection or the product. The copyright holder has every right to take his/her copyright elsewhere or (if owned by the business) to sell or even retain the rights pending reorganization.

Abandonment is hard as heck to show and isn't really much of an issue with copyright (trademark has more issues with this).

Well, it no longer seems that a company going out of business is an abandonment of the protection.

[Sparko]

This post is an original work and the Intellectual property of Sparko the Pirate. I hold all rights to this post. Including the right for you to store it in ANY medium other than on theologyweb. That includes your memory. So please, do NOT read this post and store it in your brain or I will be forced to sue you for everything you own. Thank you.

[Cerebrum123]

Here ya go, Cere:

http://www.copyright.gov/records/

I typed one game that I do own, and nothing came up. One that I don't, but want to, and nothing came up. All kinds of stuff showed up for games still being marketed, but really old. If nothing comes up, does that mean it's abandoned?

[robrecht]

This post is an original work and the Intellectual property of Sparko the Pirate. I hold all rights to this post. Including the right for you to store it in ANY medium other than on theologyweb. That includes your memory. So please, do NOT read this post and store it in your brain or I will be forced to sue you for everything you own. Thank you.

No worries!

[Outis]

Is Intellectual Property (IP) a legitimate concept? Why or why not?

It depends on what you mean by "legitimate."

IP is a concept that we, through our legislators, have defined and included in the law. It has no tangible facet ... but then, neither do "rights" have a tangible facet, and we have defined and included these into the law as well.

[robrecht]

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[Epoetker]

I have been a piratey guy in the past, then Steam came along and reduced my motivation and action on this part to near-zero. So the best thing, it seems, is that IP is owned by people interested in profiting from the IP but also recognizing of the relative money people will pay for it, and the relative ownership level expected after paying for it.

Nevertheless, this thread needs the wisdom of Erik Naggum:

A business can go out of business for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the copyright protection or the product.

Most of them of the "ulterior motive" variety:

companies that go bankrupt are a danger to healthy competition. They are able to make their creditors and shareholders pay for their losses and bad management and then to start anew with assets that they essentially got for free, quite unlike the competition that has not gone bankrupt, who have to pay full price for their assets, but quite similar to how their customers have wanted their products, for too little money.

A law making a bankrupt company's IPs and other assets immediate public property of the guvment auctioneer would heavily reduce, or at least mitigate, these shenanigans, and force intelligent business decisions, mergers, arbitration, organized closures, and acquisitions at earlier times.

As far as free software/abandonware/other stuff goes:

The whole idea that anything can be so “shared” as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea. Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be “nice” to some “community” which turns out not to be “nice” _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.

All of this “code sharing” is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need. As soon as the need arises, a lot of people discover that it has cost them real money to work for the community and they reap very little benefit from it, because they are sharing value-less services and getting value out of something that people take for granted is hard to impossible. This is unfortunately even more true when employees are considered “free” while consultants are not, so buying the supposed “services” from people who know the source code is not an _exercised_ option.

Just because it is nice to get things for free does not mean it is a good idea to organize anything based on removing the value of those things, but until people _need_ that value, getting stuff for free is _so_ nice that looking to the future is something most people simply will not do, and those who refuse think about will also refuse to listen to those who have. Thus they will continue to deplete the value of software to the point where nobody _wants_ to pay for any software, be it of a particular kind or in general. Software development tools are already considered to be give-aways by some people, threatening commercial vendors and those who would like to make money providing software tools to developers.

[Carrikature]

I have been particularly frustrated with software licensing.

At one point, many years ago, we actually bought WordPerfect instead of Word, because WordPerfect only allowed required us to have a copy for each work station, whereas Microsoft Word required us to have licenses for each work station AND a license for the server.

Borland (Quattro Pro, and many other fine products) pioneered the "like a book" license. You could have their software on as many computers as you used, as long as you used it "like a book".... if I have it on my home computer, my work computer, and my laptop - as long as I only use one at a time, it was allowable.

This sounds like an issue consumers need to address, similar to what Teal mentioned. I'd say the same thing for games. The issue is that you don't like how it's applied, but does that invalidate the concept behind it? Are there certain methods for application that should be valid while others aren't?

[Carrikature]

It depends on what you mean by "legitimate."

IP is a concept that we, through our legislators, have defined and included in the law. It has no tangible facet ... but then, neither do "rights" have a tangible facet, and we have defined and included these into the law as well.

That it's been legislated holds little merit for me. I think the concept of 'rights', while fundamentally useful, has burgeoned into a morass of nonsense. So, in answer to your question, I'm going to go with "conforming to recognized principles". My intent here is to establish those principles and use that as a baseline from which to extrapolate realistic applications.

[Outis]

That it's been legislated holds little merit for me. I think the concept of 'rights', while fundamentally useful, has burgeoned into a morass of nonsense. So, in answer to your question, I'm going to go with "conforming to recognized principles". My intent here is to establish those principles and use that as a baseline from which to extrapolate realistic applications.

My question would, then, be "recognized" by whom?

Are you looking for a justification that you personally can agree with? One that society as a whole (or, at least, the majority of society in our modern republics) can agree with? A legal basis? A philosophical basis?

I'm honestly not certain where you're headed, or what you're looking for.

[Carrikature]

My question would, then, be "recognized" by whom?

Any person making a claim would, I hope, be able to state the principles they are using for that claim. That's what I'm interested in discussing.

Are you looking for a justification that you personally can agree with? One that society as a whole (or, at least, the majority of society in our modern republics) can agree with? A legal basis? A philosophical basis?

I'm honestly not certain where you're headed, or what you're looking for.

I'm looking for a philosophical basis, hence the thread's location in this particular forum. What I (or anyone) can or can't agree with isn't terribly important.

[Cow Poke]

Copyright

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[Sparko]

I think the licensing contracts that you "automagically" agree to when you get software or movies or music is just ridiculous. When the RIAA and lawyers get involved they have to "earn" their keep so they make things so restrictive and convoluted they basically could probably arrest you for just buying the media.

I think if you buy software or a movie or music you should be able to use it in anyway you want for personal use. Rip a CD to MP3, copy your blueray to your harddrive, make backups, use software on all of your devices instead of having to buy something multiple times. After all, you paid for it. As long as you are not giving it to someone else, or selling it, what difference does it make how you store it or make backups of a disc?

[Outis]

I'm looking for a philosophical basis

To my mind, you're asking a second floor question, but doing so without building the first floor.

I would hazard that such a basis would depend on the foundations the argument started from. Such foundations would touch on existantial, epistemic, and metaphysical issues, and I would further hazard that until those primary issues are settled (at least, to the mind of the enquirer--in this case, you), you would not be able to establish an acceptable answer to this question.

[Carrikature]

To my mind, you're asking a second floor question, but doing so without building the first floor.

I would hazard that such a basis would depend on the foundations the argument started from. Such foundations would touch on existantial, epistemic, and metaphysical issues, and I would further hazard that until those primary issues are settled (at least, to the mind of the enquirer--in this case, you), you would not be able to establish an acceptable answer to this question.

I have no interest in the first floor for the purposes of this thread. Those foundations are more or less settled in my mind. I don't expect there to be any such thing as 'acceptable'. I'm just asking people to provide foundations and principles.