Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
You haven't really addressed the realities of the process of drug creation here.
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
You haven't really addressed the realities of the process of drug creation here.
While you raised some really good points about drug R&D, I do believe that without the requirements of the patent process, they would keep drugs as trade secrets forever. At least as it stands now, they only have twenty years from the date of discovery.
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
if history is any judge, obscurity does not produce good security.
Tell that to Coca Cola.
You make a good point, but there is trade secret protection for a reason as well.
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
You haven't really addressed the realities of the process of drug creation here.
While you raised some really good points about drug R&D, I do believe that without the requirements of the patent process, they would keep drugs as trade secrets forever. At least as it stands now, they only have twenty years from the date of discovery.
Excellent point. Trade secrets go back longer than any of the rest of the IP laws, back to the guild times of medieval Europe.
Interestingly, you lose the protections of a Trade Secret only if you don't actively keep it a secret (AFAIK).
Not really much justification for it though, except "hahahaha ... greed".
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
if history is any judge, obscurity does not produce good security.
Tell that to Coca Cola.
You make a good point, but there is trade secret protection for a reason as well.
This recipe is attributed to a diary owned by Coca-Cola inventor, John S. Pemberton, just before his death in 1888. (U.S. measures).[13]
Ingredients:
1 oz (28 g) caffeine citrate
3 oz (85 g) citric acid
1 US fl oz (30 ml) vanilla extract
1 US qt (946 ml; 33 imp fl oz) lime juice
2.5 oz (71 g) "flavoring," i.e., "Merchandise 7X"
30 lb (14 kg) sugar
4 US fl oz (118.3 ml) powder extract of cocaine (decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf).
2.5 US gal (9.5 l; 2.1 imp gal) water
caramel sufficient
"Mix caffeine acid and lime juice in 1 quart boiling water add vanilla and flavoring when cool."
Flavoring (Merchandise 7X):
80 oil orange
40 oil cinnamon
120 oil lemon
20 oil coriander
40 oil nutmeg
40 oil neroli
"Let stand 24 hours."
Even if that's not the recipe they use anymore, there's plenty of drinks that taste virtually identical to coca-cola. Imagine if coke could sue Pepsi for copying their taste!
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
if history is any judge, obscurity does not produce good security.
Tell that to Coca Cola.
You make a good point, but there is trade secret protection for a reason as well.
This recipe is attributed to a diary owned by Coca-Cola inventor, John S. Pemberton, just before his death in 1888. (U.S. measures).[13]
Ingredients:
1 oz (28 g) caffeine citrate
3 oz (85 g) citric acid
1 US fl oz (30 ml) vanilla extract
1 US qt (946 ml; 33 imp fl oz) lime juice
2.5 oz (71 g) "flavoring," i.e., "Merchandise 7X"
30 lb (14 kg) sugar
4 US fl oz (118.3 ml) powder extract of cocaine (decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf).
2.5 US gal (9.5 l; 2.1 imp gal) water
caramel sufficient
"Mix caffeine acid and lime juice in 1 quart boiling water add vanilla and flavoring when cool."
Flavoring (Merchandise 7X):
80 oil orange
40 oil cinnamon
120 oil lemon
20 oil coriander
40 oil nutmeg
40 oil neroli
"Let stand 24 hours."
Even if that's not the recipe they use anymore, there's plenty of drinks that taste virtually identical to coca-cola. Imagine if coke could sue Pepsi for copying their taste!
They wouldn't be suing under a violation of trade secret though and as far as copyright, only the newer formulas would not be in the public domain, given when the cpoyright terms were extended.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
But without the creation of scarcity, which allows you to sell information, why be an information creator at all? Why not horde your information and try as hard as possible to put any information involved in the production of your widgets in a black box? It seems to me that allowing a market to exist is a pretty compelling reason to regulate IP in some way.
Well I already answered this question.
Information, once you have it, has no scarcity, but information you don't have is scarce. So you have sort of a funny situation where something is valuable to you until you have it and then it's not valuable anymore (you are better off, you just don't lose anything by giving it away).
But the point was this: you should pay the person to produce the information, not pay the person to give you the information, which is a subtle but crucially important difference. Giving someone information is an act with no cost. Producing information is an act with a cost.
Which again, gets back to what I was saying in the first place: information production should be a service, information should not be a product.
My apologies if I missed something, but what is the solution to the free rider problem under this pay to produce model? I know positive externalities are good, but this seems like a problem that can literally kill the market, since I as a company will never commision a new technology while I can make a profit without doing so. I'll just wait for someone else in the industry to pay first (unless I can keep anyone else from getting the knowledge long enough for me to profit from it), and the result is increased productivity or profits left on the table.
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Exactly. This is the whole reason companies avoid the "black box" approach I was just describing. Without IP, I don't think it's that hard to imagine drug companies only making medications available as injections administered in proprietary offices, to keep their drugs from being reverse engineered.
You haven't really addressed the realities of the process of drug creation here.
While you raised some really good points about drug R&D, I do believe that without the requirements of the patent process, they would keep drugs as trade secrets forever. At least as it stands now, they only have twenty years from the date of discovery.
My issue is that I don't seriously believe that drug company R&D matters all that much to the process - even if it did, the drugs are so expensive that it straight up doesn't matter if they're trade secrets or not - the WTO treaties ensure they might as well be, for all the good it does people. There's also significant moral hazard to it anyway - disproptionate focus on drugs which solve problems for rich people, which don't necessarily address actual existential issues for civilizations as a whole (like malaria, flu etc.)
It's telling that in light of SARS and swineflu, governments foot the bill for stockpiling the needed drugs.
The important aspect of drug company contributions is large scale manufacturing - and that's an area much better served by having many manufacturers producing the same product in order to get production costs down (which is an important issue with more complex drugs - vancomycin has a pretty long synthesis).
But without the creation of scarcity, which allows you to sell information, why be an information creator at all? Why not horde your information and try as hard as possible to put any information involved in the production of your widgets in a black box? It seems to me that allowing a market to exist is a pretty compelling reason to regulate IP in some way.
Well I already answered this question.
Information, once you have it, has no scarcity, but information you don't have is scarce. So you have sort of a funny situation where something is valuable to you until you have it and then it's not valuable anymore (you are better off, you just don't lose anything by giving it away).
But the point was this: you should pay the person to produce the information, not pay the person to give you the information, which is a subtle but crucially important difference. Giving someone information is an act with no cost. Producing information is an act with a cost.
Which again, gets back to what I was saying in the first place: information production should be a service, information should not be a product.
My apologies if I missed something, but what is the solution to the free rider problem under this pay to produce model? I know positive externalities are good, but this seems like a problem that can literally kill the market, since I as a company will never commision a new technology while I can make a profit without doing so. I'll just wait for someone else in the industry to pay first (unless I can keep anyone else from getting the knowledge long enough for me to profit from it), and the result is increased productivity or profits left on the table.
For corporations, you could make joint pacts to go in on software that would be mutually beneficial.
My apologies if I missed something, but what is the solution to the free rider problem under this pay to produce model? I know positive externalities are good, but this seems like a problem that can literally kill the market, since I as a company will never commision a new technology while I can make a profit without doing so. I'll just wait for someone else in the industry to pay first (unless I can keep anyone else from getting the knowledge long enough for me to profit from it), and the result is increased productivity or profits left on the table.
The problem is there is no real way to solve the free-rider situation. If you try to restrict the flow of information you're just going to get more problems long term because it is a "commodity" that defies scarcity. It is just not possible to control even in the best cases for very long unless you want to go start executing people who know your secrets. So either you subsidize it and ensure everyone chips in via government, or you could consider a model like fee-for-service where the people who need/want a tech invest in it's production and then it becomes free later.
There's still room for the possibility of IP in some reduced capacity but really we need to figure a way to get away from the buying and selling of information. If anything we should seek to make the rest of the market somehow more free from costs to reflect information's abundance then we should try to make information scarce like physical goods.
We'll never make goods truly infinite, or information truly finite, but pursuing the goal of providing material abundance to all will generate a lot more social good then the goal of enforcing information scarcity for the sake of business profits.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
This isn't an all or nothing game. It is obvious that our IP laws aren't working as intended, but that doesn't mean we burn the whole system down and say problem solved.
I can't speak to the technology or engineering worlds, but, in regards to the arts, music in particular, the problem is rooted in the business model. The record industry is operating on a business model that was developed in the 1920s and it only really became profitable in the 1960s. If the four major record labels collapsed tomorrow, most musicians would actually find themselves making more money than they had prior (see: any).
This is a problem. For all the horseshit jammed in our ears about supporting artists, 95% never see a dime. That's not an exaggeration. The four big companies make all of their profit from 5% of their artists (think people like Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc). If you talk to most people making music below that level, most don't give a shit if you steal it as long as you show up to a concert or buy a t-shirt, which is how the majority of musicians have made their money.
I don't see the problem with your last paragraph. Those 5% making the money are supporting the existence of the other 95%.
If all art had to be profitable on an individual level, we'd see alot less art and alot less interesting art.
I didn't explain why it's bad, but it is. If you sign a contract with one of the big four, they own the rights to your music. If your stuff doesn't sell, they can release you from your contract, but still retain the rights to the music you recorded. If this happens, you owe the record company whatever your touring and recording did not recoup against your advance (the average advance at this level is $125,000), and you're not allowed to play your own songs.
When I talk about 95% of artists not making money, this is the situation they're in. It's not 5% supporting everyone else; it's 5% covering the loss the record company suffered from those artists not selling enough records. How many is enough to break even? About 250,000 records. That's right, an artist can sell 200,000 copies of their album and still end up owing money.
That's just an issue with the recording industry having really really shitty contracts then.
Cause 5% paying for 95% is the standard in most industries.
The U.S. music industry is widely know for having incredibly exploitative contracts and there are many songs and movies about this factual reality.
Besides that, typically while ownership is in the hands of the 5% in most industries, 0% of them could make money without the 95% doing approximately 100% of the work.
I'm not sure you are understanding what was being referred to.
5% of artists make 95% of the money. That money is then reinvested in other artists, essentially trolling for the next big thing or what have you. As a consequence, a bunch of other artists who would not normally be super profitable are supported as well.
Interestingly enough, the patent system is designed to encourage the public disclosure of information, yet still allowing for the creator to enjoy a temporary monopoly on its use.
Indeed. And their purpose was to replace Trade Secrets as well since Trade Secrets were mostly responsible for the loss of ENORMOUS amounts of information when somebody died unexpectedly or the like.
Even if someone else copies you, having your product in the market first is a huge competitive advantage.
You have an even better competitive advantage if you hold a temporary monopoly on the product.
Well, yes, but that's not necessarily what's best for society. The point is they'd still have a financial incentive to innovate new products.
No, you'd have a financial incentive to let someone else do all the R&D money and then just steal the design, thereby reducing your costs by a huge amount.
The idea of giving up on Intellectual Property law is pretty outrageous from the position of the average forum-user. IP law is the new colonialism, its beneficiary primarily being `the West' (for now), and its deployment is essentially a way of extracting taxes from the colonies.
"For the privilege of selling electronic tablets, you will tithe us $X so that they may be labelled iPads". And because even with this the dollars work out, and because Apple are happy to provide the capital, lo, it is done.
As for pharmaceuticals, wouldn't it be useful to have a regulatory body that is responsible for enforcing minimum standards of product (not just tut-tutting)? It'd need to be international though, so we know thats not getting off the ground. However, right now, the patent holder is that regulatory body; they are the party responsible if the drugs that they have produced have unexpected side effects, or if the studies are wrong.
Lets say Company X comes up with a new product, begins trials, and hey presto. But at the same time as they have a commercial release, Company Y grabs the formula and starts putting out an equal amount of product, with the same name...but maybe Company Y doesn't have the same production standards, and some product is faulty. Maybe Company Y is actually a series of smaller companies based around the world, flooding product anywhere they can see a buck.
Awesome, we have sufficient supply of product, but virtually no quality control - without IP, there's no brand identifier that can be relied upon as conforming to certain standards, because the competitors can copy its packaging, name and so on.
There's a reason why brand works, and has real value to consumers. A well-managed brand asserts minimum standards in quality that you don't get with a no-name. Giving the original creator/tester a good run before generic release is just a smart idea; it lets them establish themselves as a quality supplier, and that forces competitors to compete on that ground, not just on price/distribution. I kind of thing that there are some areas where IP is pretty useful.
Even if someone else copies you, having your product in the market first is a huge competitive advantage.
This is true only if you manage to deploy to the market in a way that is visible, in relation to the ease of copying, and to the size of your competitors. If you're first to market with something easy to copy, you don't have a lot of money to start with, and Wal-mart decides to copy you, then this advantage is non-existent. You might be first to your local market, but to the rest of the world, Wal-mart is first.
Having this as your competitive advantage basically means that bigger companies have an inherent advantage.
Kickstarter is a good model of this idea. The developer advertises the project that they want to make and the amount of money they want in order to make it, then individuals can find which project they want to exist and pledge money towards it. The pledge money only goes through if the project generates enough money in total, and some projects are tiered (so, say, if they reach $5,000 they'll make the product, but if they reach $10,000 they'll make the product with such and such extra features).
...Have you had any experience using Kickstarter?
I completely disagree that this sort of crowd-funding represents the future for artists, authors, game designers, etc. I applied for & got approval to put my own project up on Kickstarter, and then began working on making my advertising video. A week later, I was still building the Goddamn video, and work had stalled on the actual project itself.
Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding websites, require the artist to divert a substantial amount of tie & energy into marketing that is quite likely not going to see any returns (the vast majority of Kickstarter projects either fail, or require the creator be bailed-out by a friend or relative).
This is not a good model.
With Love and Courage
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Trade secret rules and NDAs work well for protecting you against current or former employees, but on their own, they can't protect you from the outright theft of your idea once the product is in the market, and your competitors see how it works. I really think that, while our IP scheme has many problems, it is very important to protect a creator's right to profit off their idea, at least for a while. Being first to market is all well and good, but even under our current scheme, the world is full of inventors who were first to market and did not see much return before the market giant came in and started selling a similiar product.
Coming from the perspective of someone who had a startup and then exited the market because MS started pursuing a similiar product, I just think that first to market as a know name is not enough to protect content creators. The real problem in my mind is that a company like MS has so many extremely vague patents that leveraging the protections of IP law against them as a small player is so impractical that it doesn't even justify the time or cost of trying.
So what would people think of a world where there was perfect drm for all things? You could keep people from copying your cd, taking a picture of your painting, or reverse engineering your drugs or electronics. In this world, we don't need ip protections, because there is literally no way to copy anything. Personally, I think it sounds like a wonderland, but I suspect at least some people here will disagree.
I think that this is an interesting idea to consider. What if we take the pirate off the table. Let's assume everyone follows the law.
The first problem is there are multiple laws. I've already mentioned how EULAs are inconsistently enforced. Likewise the anti-circumvention section of DMCA are a legal gray area. Those are just in the US, things can get worse internationally.
From a consumer point of view, were left far less rights to what we buy. A friend comes over and wants to listen to a CD you bought: no go. Want to describe the recent playoff game you saw to your friend: no go.
Datamining is kind of a weird issue here. If you had absolute control over your personal data, your looking at wiping out companies like Google's AdWords.
This still doesn't solve the patent troll issue or bio-patents.
Well, wouldn't a lot of these problems disappear because they are designed to prevent copying? Put the metaphysics of how copying is outlawed aside. I think the question is do we have a problem with people exerting absolute control over their ideas for all time? Put another way, do the "information should be free" people think that information should inherently be free, or is this freedom just in response to problems with our current ability to control information?
I want to be clear, it's not an issue of "should", it's an issue of "is". Information has no inherent scarcity, it is unlimited and can be copied infinitely without any resource cost aside from that of the medium used to carry it, which can be anything. The cost to you of delivering already possessed information to someone else is nil while the value to them can be extraordinarily high. These are fundamental properties of information, distinct from material objects. If I give you an apple, I lose an apple. If I tell you a story, I still have the story.
It's also sort of inherently ridiculous to ask if I think something should have scarcity. Of course not! I wish nothing was scarce, and we lived in a post-scarcity society. I wish all food was free and cars were free and all computer software was free. This doesn't happen to be the case.
yeah, this. Basically all the arguments for information scarcity boil down to the fact that, since other resources are scarce, we need to make information artificially scarce so that people who create information can exchange it for other scarce resources. And even aside from the logistical difficulties of that, I think there are better alternatives.
Well, not to mention the fact that material scarcity is often solved for by an efficient (which in terms of information transmission means free) flow of information.
This is kind of a weird quote tree here. First, several of the things mentioned, like playing a cd for a friend, or describing a game, are not really illegal under current copyright law. There are provisions for fair use, which would usually include these kinds of things.
Secondly, yes, IP law is creating scarcity in information in order to reward creators, this is true. This is part of the purpose of IP law, as well as giving an incentive to share information with the public. But if you're going to replace IP law, then you need to do something that also achieves this. Right now most of the suggestions have not detailed exactly how they reward creators.
Thirdly, you can't 'solve' material scarcity. Scarcity is just the concept of there not being an infinite amount of things. You can't make infinite cars with good planning, even if it's really good. If there were no material scarcity, then there would be no money, because all items would be equally worthless, because nothing would be worth more than anything else.
The other apparent problem is that there would be a sort of bystander effect that would prevent products from ever getting made: people would say to themselves "sure, I want it, but if other people are going to pay for it so I can get it for free, why don't I just not contribute any money?" If enough people adopted this attitude then no projects would ever go through, or if they did they would get considerably less funding and end up of much lower quality. This is a serious threat, but at the same time I'm willing to discount it.
So you think current IP laws are useless and broken due to the large number of free-riders but you think having a large number of free-riders isn't a problem for your system?
I'm not sure you are understanding what was being referred to.
5% of artists make 95% of the money. That money is then reinvested in other artists, essentially trolling for the next big thing or what have you. As a consequence, a bunch of other artists who would not normally be super profitable are supported as well.
You don't understand how this works. Those 95% of people who "don't make it" are operating at a loss. The other 5% make 100% of the money. That money is not shared with all those other failures; it covers the costs of that one artist, and, if there's still money left over after that, the artist will earn royalties on album sales while the bulk of cash still goes to the record company.
Want to know what Eminem made per album at the height of his contract? Fifteen cents. How much did we pay per CD again? $18 fucking dollars.
Piracy literally has no bearing on this situation. This situation was already in place prior to Napster. This is because the record industry has an insane business model that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be successful. Those 95% of artists don't get to keep struggling; they get booted from their contract, handed a bill for what their sales didn't cover, and the record company has the rights to the name you perform under and the music you made. If you re-record the songs, they will sue you. If you perform under the name you signed the contract under, they will sue you. And they will win.
Piracy literally has no bearing on this situation. This situation was already in place prior to Napster. This is because the record industry has an insane business model that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be successful. Those 95% of artists don't get to keep struggling; they get booted from their contract, handed a bill for what their sales didn't cover, and the record company has the rights to the name you perform under and the music you made. If you re-record the songs, they will sue you. If you perform under the name you signed the contract under, they will sue you. And they will win.
Steve Albini wrote the classic description of the business model:
Record wholesale price: $6.50 x 250,000 = $1,625,000 gross income
Artist Royalties: $ 351,000
Deficit from royalties: $ 14,000
Manufacturing, packaging and distribution: @ $2.20 per record: $ 550,000
Gross profit: $ 710,000
The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
Record company: $ 710,000
Producer: $ 90,000
Manager: $ 51,000
Studio: $ 52,500
Previous label: $ 50,000
Agent: $ 7,500
Lawyer: $ 12,000
Band member net income each: $ 4,031.25
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
The other apparent problem is that there would be a sort of bystander effect that would prevent products from ever getting made: people would say to themselves "sure, I want it, but if other people are going to pay for it so I can get it for free, why don't I just not contribute any money?" If enough people adopted this attitude then no projects would ever go through, or if they did they would get considerably less funding and end up of much lower quality. This is a serious threat, but at the same time I'm willing to discount it.
So you think current IP laws are useless and broken due to the large number of free-riders but you think having a large number of free-riders isn't a problem for your system?
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
Kickstarter is a good model of this idea. The developer advertises the project that they want to make and the amount of money they want in order to make it, then individuals can find which project they want to exist and pledge money towards it. The pledge money only goes through if the project generates enough money in total, and some projects are tiered (so, say, if they reach $5,000 they'll make the product, but if they reach $10,000 they'll make the product with such and such extra features).
...Have you had any experience using Kickstarter?
I completely disagree that this sort of crowd-funding represents the future for artists, authors, game designers, etc. I applied for & got approval to put my own project up on Kickstarter, and then began working on making my advertising video. A week later, I was still building the Goddamn video, and work had stalled on the actual project itself.
Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding websites, require the artist to divert a substantial amount of tie & energy into marketing that is quite likely not going to see any returns (the vast majority of Kickstarter projects either fail, or require the creator be bailed-out by a friend or relative).
This is not a good model.
You practically mentioned the solution yourself. You go in with someone else. Have a friend or someone do all the marketing legwork and you produce the content, then split the proceeds.
Trade secret rules and NDAs work well for protecting you against current or former employees, but on their own, they can't protect you from the outright theft of your idea once the product is in the market, and your competitors see how it works. I really think that, while our IP scheme has many problems, it is very important to protect a creator's right to profit off their idea, at least for a while...
In principle I agree with you sentiment that I highlighted.
However, I think you are overlooking the fact that this typically is not guaranteed by our current IP laws. In most cases involving commercial art such as music, illustrations and TV/movies, the corporation profiting from IP had nothing to do with creating the content other than a very small salary in some exceptional cases (like a studio artist). Plus, the fights being had in the political arena to allow them to charge us even more for work they had nothing to do with, are driven entirely by those same interests.
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
I'm going with the idea that IP laws are pretty much neutral. They cover for some good effects and bad effects, and they will always be applicable to business entities. It's for consumers that they are breaking down.
There's no moral component to this. Trying to move the argument to whether it's wrong or right misses the point. Technology is increasingly making exchange of large-batches of data to be effectively free among individuals. Most consumer-aimed IP exists in files between a few dozen megabytes for music to a few gigs for video. Content distribution is already on the honor system.
Even if you drive it underground a bit, there will still be mass sharing of music, movies and books via Dropbox, email and flash drives. It's a losing battle and probably not one worth fighting, since the best you can hope for is a data version of the drug war with endless expenses for enforcement and regulations that creep into overbroad powers of surveillance and seizure.
IP in terms of business to business production is an entirely different issue. Since any intellectual property taken by a business will show up in that business's product, enforcement will be a lot simpler and will not require the expansion of laws and police powers. There is absolutely no reason that a consumer-level collapse of the IP framework will automatically mean anything when it comes to drug production, engineering schematics and other B2B transfers. It's apples and oranges in terms of impact and enforceability.
This is also where the model can be used to benefit individual creators, since the big money today is not in sales to end-consumers but in business licensing for advertising and use as a part of a larger production - novels into scripts, songs into soundtracks, drawings into production art, etc. There will always be a need for content to be created for larger productions, and the larger producers have venues they control outside of the sale of individual creative works - concerts, movie theaters and galleries.
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
I'm going with the idea that IP laws are pretty much neutral. They cover for some good effects and bad effects, and they will always be applicable to business entities. It's for consumers that they are breaking down.
There's no moral component to this. Trying to move the argument to whether it's wrong or right misses the point. Technology is increasingly making exchange of large-batches of data to be effectively free among individuals. Most consumer-aimed IP exists in files between a few dozen megabytes for music to a few gigs for video.
Even if you drive it underground a bit, there will still be mass sharing of music, movies and books via Dropbox, email and flash drives. It's a losing battle and probably not one worth fighting, since the best you can hope for is a data version of the drug war with endless expenses for enforcement and regulations that creep into overbroad powers of surveillance and seizure.
IP in terms of business to business production is an entirely different issue. Since any intellectual property taken by a business will show up in that business's product, enforcement will be a lot simpler and will not require the expansion of laws and police powers. There is absolutely no reason that a consumer-level collapse of the IP framework will automatically mean anything when it comes to drug production, engineering schematics and other B2B transfers. It's apples and oranges in terms of impact and enforceability.
This is also where the model can be used to benefit individual creators, since the big money today is not in sales to end-consumers but in business licensing for advertising and use as a part of a larger production - novels into scripts, songs into soundtracks, drawings into production art, etc. There will always be a need for content to be created for larger productions, and the larger producers have venues they control outside of the sale of individual creative works - concerts, movie theaters and galleries.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
The other apparent problem is that there would be a sort of bystander effect that would prevent products from ever getting made: people would say to themselves "sure, I want it, but if other people are going to pay for it so I can get it for free, why don't I just not contribute any money?" If enough people adopted this attitude then no projects would ever go through, or if they did they would get considerably less funding and end up of much lower quality. This is a serious threat, but at the same time I'm willing to discount it.
So you think current IP laws are useless and broken due to the large number of free-riders but you think having a large number of free-riders isn't a problem for your system?
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
The patronage model of IP creation is just another way of creating artificial scarcity.
Except here that scarcity is in actual number of original works rather than in the volume of copies
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
... Even if you drive it underground a bit, there will still be mass sharing of music, movies and books via Dropbox, email and flash drives. It's a losing battle and probably not one worth fighting, since the best you can hope for is a data version of the drug war with endless expenses for enforcement and regulations that creep into overbroad powers of surveillance and seizure ...
The fact is that as long as consumers could copy music or movies, they have.
I remember the 80's and everyone was trading tapes all the time, and illegally recording TV shows and movies, then as DVDs and CDs could be copied, mixed CDs and movie trading began in that format.
Naturally when these forms of piracy were truly prevalent in the U. S. bandwidth was still too limited for practical online pirating.
I mean that shit was far more prevalent than online piracy is right now because it was infinitely harder to detect and stop, so I really hate it when the recording and movie industries act like anything has changed other than their products have become increasingly poor and they want increasing amounts of compensation. I mean how many times can you recycle the same crappy idea, and why should I pay you for ruining the earlier versions again? The online part has simply made the existing very high levels of piracy extremely obvious and easily traceable to the offenders.
Personally, I think that boycotting iTunes (like me) in favor of better priced online distributors could force the recording industry to recognize that their prices are over-inflated which might get them to shift to a price that almost no one would bother to pirate. Of course, I also believe that artists should never sign with a major label so that their death is hastened.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral.
There is a very good argument for moral neutrality of current IP by some philosophy Ph D, that a lot of people accept. I can't remember the name but probably someone else can help me.
Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Not necessarily. Look at the Patriot Act, or the Alien and Sedition Act. We can say the laws should be moral, but no one can claim that they necessarily encapsulate all moral behavior.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
Kickstarter is a good model of this idea. The developer advertises the project that they want to make and the amount of money they want in order to make it, then individuals can find which project they want to exist and pledge money towards it. The pledge money only goes through if the project generates enough money in total, and some projects are tiered (so, say, if they reach $5,000 they'll make the product, but if they reach $10,000 they'll make the product with such and such extra features).
...Have you had any experience using Kickstarter?
I completely disagree that this sort of crowd-funding represents the future for artists, authors, game designers, etc. I applied for & got approval to put my own project up on Kickstarter, and then began working on making my advertising video. A week later, I was still building the Goddamn video, and work had stalled on the actual project itself.
Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding websites, require the artist to divert a substantial amount of tie & energy into marketing that is quite likely not going to see any returns (the vast majority of Kickstarter projects either fail, or require the creator be bailed-out by a friend or relative).
This is not a good model.
Who is going to hand fistfuls of cash to someone without some sort of presentation?
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Not really.
Law is a public enforcement of morality.
That's fundamentally its entire intent.
It's just that things can be immoral but not fall under the purview of law.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Choosing a side of the street to drive on is absolutely necessary, but has no moral component. IP laws are similarly designed, at least in part, to solve coordination problems.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
It's just that things can be immoral but not fall under the purview of law.
Law is also zoning codes, tax rates and standardization of weights and measurements. There are moral components to some laws - and arguably moral components to every law in the "who benefits" sense - but much of law operates outside of moral dimensions. This is why the man who steals medicine to give to his dying child in the U.S. will still go to prison. The law is set up to protect property first, reduce violence second and regulate moral behavior third.
Here's a good summary from a random Law and Ethics professor:
Let's summarize the relationship between morality and law.
(1) The existence of unjust laws (such as those enforcing slavery) proves that morality and law are not identical and do not coincide.
(2) The existence of laws that serve to defend basic values--such as laws against murder, rape, malicious defamation of character, fraud, bribery, etc. --prove that the two can work together.
(3) Laws can state what overt offenses count as wrong and therefore punishable. Although law courts do not always ignore a person's intention or state of mind, the law cannot normally govern, at least not in a direct way, what is in your heart (your desires). Because often morality passes judgment on a person's intentions and character, it has a different scope than the law.
(4) Laws govern conduct at least partly through fear of punishment. Morality, when it is internalized, when it has become habit-like or second nature, governs conduct without compulsion. The virtuous person does the appropriate thing because it is the fine or noble thing to do.
(5) Morality can influence the law in the sense that it can provide the reason for making whole groups of immoral actions illegal.
(6) Law can be a public expression of morality which codifies in a public way the basic principles of conduct which a society accepts. In that way it can guide the educators of the next generation by giving them a clear outline of the values society wants taught to its children.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Not really.
Law is a public enforcement of morality.
That's fundamentally its entire intent.
It's just that things can be immoral but not fall under the purview of law.
Don;t forget that laws aren't necessarily, or even often, moral.
In fact, most laws' moral component really only comes for the fact that the Rule Of Law contributes to a better overall state of being in all those inhabitants of realms controlled by the Rule Of Law, that is the Rule Of Law supposedly contributes to the greater good.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Choosing a side of the street to drive on is absolutely necessary, but has no moral component. IP laws are similarly designed, at least in part, to solve coordination problems.
But couldn't you make a utilitarian argument that it would be immoral to not coordinate a side to choose. The side itself might be arbitrary but the act of coordinating the side is moral.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral.
There is a very good argument for moral neutrality of current IP by some philosophy Ph D, that a lot of people accept. I can't remember the name but probably someone else can help me.
Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Not necessarily. Look at the Patriot Act, or the Alien and Sedition Act. We can say the laws should be moral, but no one can claim that they necessarily encapsulate all moral behavior.
I didn't say that law is always about what is right and wrong, I said that is what it is supposed to be about, what it should be about.
I would love to read that paper, it sounds interesting.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
But shouldn't laws be moral? We don't want a bunch of immoral laws do we?
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Not really.
Law is a public enforcement of morality.
That's fundamentally its entire intent.
It's just that things can be immoral but not fall under the purview of law.
Don;t forget that laws aren't necessarily, or even often, moral.
In fact, most laws' moral component really only comes for the fact that the Rule Of Law contributes to a better overall state of being in all those inhabitants of realms controlled by the Rule Of Law, that is the Rule Of Law supposedly contributes to the greater good.
Contributing to the greater good IS moral from a utilitarian view of morality.
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You haven't really addressed the realities of the process of drug creation here.
While you raised some really good points about drug R&D, I do believe that without the requirements of the patent process, they would keep drugs as trade secrets forever. At least as it stands now, they only have twenty years from the date of discovery.
Excellent point. Trade secrets go back longer than any of the rest of the IP laws, back to the guild times of medieval Europe.
Interestingly, you lose the protections of a Trade Secret only if you don't actively keep it a secret (AFAIK).
Not really much justification for it though, except "hahahaha ... greed".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula#Pemberton_recipe
This recipe is attributed to a diary owned by Coca-Cola inventor, John S. Pemberton, just before his death in 1888. (U.S. measures).[13]
Ingredients:
1 oz (28 g) caffeine citrate
3 oz (85 g) citric acid
1 US fl oz (30 ml) vanilla extract
1 US qt (946 ml; 33 imp fl oz) lime juice
2.5 oz (71 g) "flavoring," i.e., "Merchandise 7X"
30 lb (14 kg) sugar
4 US fl oz (118.3 ml) powder extract of cocaine (decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf).
2.5 US gal (9.5 l; 2.1 imp gal) water
caramel sufficient
"Mix caffeine acid and lime juice in 1 quart boiling water add vanilla and flavoring when cool."
Flavoring (Merchandise 7X):
80 oil orange
40 oil cinnamon
120 oil lemon
20 oil coriander
40 oil nutmeg
40 oil neroli
"Let stand 24 hours."
Even if that's not the recipe they use anymore, there's plenty of drinks that taste virtually identical to coca-cola. Imagine if coke could sue Pepsi for copying their taste!
They wouldn't be suing under a violation of trade secret though and as far as copyright, only the newer formulas would not be in the public domain, given when the cpoyright terms were extended.
My apologies if I missed something, but what is the solution to the free rider problem under this pay to produce model? I know positive externalities are good, but this seems like a problem that can literally kill the market, since I as a company will never commision a new technology while I can make a profit without doing so. I'll just wait for someone else in the industry to pay first (unless I can keep anyone else from getting the knowledge long enough for me to profit from it), and the result is increased productivity or profits left on the table.
My issue is that I don't seriously believe that drug company R&D matters all that much to the process - even if it did, the drugs are so expensive that it straight up doesn't matter if they're trade secrets or not - the WTO treaties ensure they might as well be, for all the good it does people. There's also significant moral hazard to it anyway - disproptionate focus on drugs which solve problems for rich people, which don't necessarily address actual existential issues for civilizations as a whole (like malaria, flu etc.)
It's telling that in light of SARS and swineflu, governments foot the bill for stockpiling the needed drugs.
The important aspect of drug company contributions is large scale manufacturing - and that's an area much better served by having many manufacturers producing the same product in order to get production costs down (which is an important issue with more complex drugs - vancomycin has a pretty long synthesis).
For corporations, you could make joint pacts to go in on software that would be mutually beneficial.
You have an even better competitive advantage if you hold a temporary monopoly on the product.
The problem is there is no real way to solve the free-rider situation. If you try to restrict the flow of information you're just going to get more problems long term because it is a "commodity" that defies scarcity. It is just not possible to control even in the best cases for very long unless you want to go start executing people who know your secrets. So either you subsidize it and ensure everyone chips in via government, or you could consider a model like fee-for-service where the people who need/want a tech invest in it's production and then it becomes free later.
There's still room for the possibility of IP in some reduced capacity but really we need to figure a way to get away from the buying and selling of information. If anything we should seek to make the rest of the market somehow more free from costs to reflect information's abundance then we should try to make information scarce like physical goods.
We'll never make goods truly infinite, or information truly finite, but pursuing the goal of providing material abundance to all will generate a lot more social good then the goal of enforcing information scarcity for the sake of business profits.
I'm not sure you are understanding what was being referred to.
5% of artists make 95% of the money. That money is then reinvested in other artists, essentially trolling for the next big thing or what have you. As a consequence, a bunch of other artists who would not normally be super profitable are supported as well.
Indeed. And their purpose was to replace Trade Secrets as well since Trade Secrets were mostly responsible for the loss of ENORMOUS amounts of information when somebody died unexpectedly or the like.
No, you'd have a financial incentive to let someone else do all the R&D money and then just steal the design, thereby reducing your costs by a huge amount.
"For the privilege of selling electronic tablets, you will tithe us $X so that they may be labelled iPads". And because even with this the dollars work out, and because Apple are happy to provide the capital, lo, it is done.
As for pharmaceuticals, wouldn't it be useful to have a regulatory body that is responsible for enforcing minimum standards of product (not just tut-tutting)? It'd need to be international though, so we know thats not getting off the ground. However, right now, the patent holder is that regulatory body; they are the party responsible if the drugs that they have produced have unexpected side effects, or if the studies are wrong.
Lets say Company X comes up with a new product, begins trials, and hey presto. But at the same time as they have a commercial release, Company Y grabs the formula and starts putting out an equal amount of product, with the same name...but maybe Company Y doesn't have the same production standards, and some product is faulty. Maybe Company Y is actually a series of smaller companies based around the world, flooding product anywhere they can see a buck.
Awesome, we have sufficient supply of product, but virtually no quality control - without IP, there's no brand identifier that can be relied upon as conforming to certain standards, because the competitors can copy its packaging, name and so on.
There's a reason why brand works, and has real value to consumers. A well-managed brand asserts minimum standards in quality that you don't get with a no-name. Giving the original creator/tester a good run before generic release is just a smart idea; it lets them establish themselves as a quality supplier, and that forces competitors to compete on that ground, not just on price/distribution. I kind of thing that there are some areas where IP is pretty useful.
This is true only if you manage to deploy to the market in a way that is visible, in relation to the ease of copying, and to the size of your competitors. If you're first to market with something easy to copy, you don't have a lot of money to start with, and Wal-mart decides to copy you, then this advantage is non-existent. You might be first to your local market, but to the rest of the world, Wal-mart is first.
Having this as your competitive advantage basically means that bigger companies have an inherent advantage.
...Have you had any experience using Kickstarter?
I completely disagree that this sort of crowd-funding represents the future for artists, authors, game designers, etc. I applied for & got approval to put my own project up on Kickstarter, and then began working on making my advertising video. A week later, I was still building the Goddamn video, and work had stalled on the actual project itself.
Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding websites, require the artist to divert a substantial amount of tie & energy into marketing that is quite likely not going to see any returns (the vast majority of Kickstarter projects either fail, or require the creator be bailed-out by a friend or relative).
This is not a good model.
Coming from the perspective of someone who had a startup and then exited the market because MS started pursuing a similiar product, I just think that first to market as a know name is not enough to protect content creators. The real problem in my mind is that a company like MS has so many extremely vague patents that leveraging the protections of IP law against them as a small player is so impractical that it doesn't even justify the time or cost of trying.
This is kind of a weird quote tree here. First, several of the things mentioned, like playing a cd for a friend, or describing a game, are not really illegal under current copyright law. There are provisions for fair use, which would usually include these kinds of things.
Secondly, yes, IP law is creating scarcity in information in order to reward creators, this is true. This is part of the purpose of IP law, as well as giving an incentive to share information with the public. But if you're going to replace IP law, then you need to do something that also achieves this. Right now most of the suggestions have not detailed exactly how they reward creators.
Thirdly, you can't 'solve' material scarcity. Scarcity is just the concept of there not being an infinite amount of things. You can't make infinite cars with good planning, even if it's really good. If there were no material scarcity, then there would be no money, because all items would be equally worthless, because nothing would be worth more than anything else.
So you think current IP laws are useless and broken due to the large number of free-riders but you think having a large number of free-riders isn't a problem for your system?
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
You don't understand how this works. Those 95% of people who "don't make it" are operating at a loss. The other 5% make 100% of the money. That money is not shared with all those other failures; it covers the costs of that one artist, and, if there's still money left over after that, the artist will earn royalties on album sales while the bulk of cash still goes to the record company.
Want to know what Eminem made per album at the height of his contract? Fifteen cents. How much did we pay per CD again? $18 fucking dollars.
Piracy literally has no bearing on this situation. This situation was already in place prior to Napster. This is because the record industry has an insane business model that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be successful. Those 95% of artists don't get to keep struggling; they get booted from their contract, handed a bill for what their sales didn't cover, and the record company has the rights to the name you perform under and the music you made. If you re-record the songs, they will sue you. If you perform under the name you signed the contract under, they will sue you. And they will win.
But I guess that's just normal support, right?
Steve Albini wrote the classic description of the business model:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
I don't think Winky is saying current IP laws are bad because of free-riders. I think he is saying they are bad because they enforce artificial scarcity.
You practically mentioned the solution yourself. You go in with someone else. Have a friend or someone do all the marketing legwork and you produce the content, then split the proceeds.
In principle I agree with you sentiment that I highlighted.
However, I think you are overlooking the fact that this typically is not guaranteed by our current IP laws. In most cases involving commercial art such as music, illustrations and TV/movies, the corporation profiting from IP had nothing to do with creating the content other than a very small salary in some exceptional cases (like a studio artist). Plus, the fights being had in the political arena to allow them to charge us even more for work they had nothing to do with, are driven entirely by those same interests.
I'm going with the idea that IP laws are pretty much neutral. They cover for some good effects and bad effects, and they will always be applicable to business entities. It's for consumers that they are breaking down.
There's no moral component to this. Trying to move the argument to whether it's wrong or right misses the point. Technology is increasingly making exchange of large-batches of data to be effectively free among individuals. Most consumer-aimed IP exists in files between a few dozen megabytes for music to a few gigs for video. Content distribution is already on the honor system.
Even if you drive it underground a bit, there will still be mass sharing of music, movies and books via Dropbox, email and flash drives. It's a losing battle and probably not one worth fighting, since the best you can hope for is a data version of the drug war with endless expenses for enforcement and regulations that creep into overbroad powers of surveillance and seizure.
IP in terms of business to business production is an entirely different issue. Since any intellectual property taken by a business will show up in that business's product, enforcement will be a lot simpler and will not require the expansion of laws and police powers. There is absolutely no reason that a consumer-level collapse of the IP framework will automatically mean anything when it comes to drug production, engineering schematics and other B2B transfers. It's apples and oranges in terms of impact and enforceability.
This is also where the model can be used to benefit individual creators, since the big money today is not in sales to end-consumers but in business licensing for advertising and use as a part of a larger production - novels into scripts, songs into soundtracks, drawings into production art, etc. There will always be a need for content to be created for larger productions, and the larger producers have venues they control outside of the sale of individual creative works - concerts, movie theaters and galleries.
I can't say that I have ever heard someone say they think of IP law as morally neutral. Isn't law supposed to be about what is right and wrong?
The patronage model of IP creation is just another way of creating artificial scarcity.
Except here that scarcity is in actual number of original works rather than in the volume of copies
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I remember the 80's and everyone was trading tapes all the time, and illegally recording TV shows and movies, then as DVDs and CDs could be copied, mixed CDs and movie trading began in that format.
Naturally when these forms of piracy were truly prevalent in the U. S. bandwidth was still too limited for practical online pirating.
I mean that shit was far more prevalent than online piracy is right now because it was infinitely harder to detect and stop, so I really hate it when the recording and movie industries act like anything has changed other than their products have become increasingly poor and they want increasing amounts of compensation. I mean how many times can you recycle the same crappy idea, and why should I pay you for ruining the earlier versions again? The online part has simply made the existing very high levels of piracy extremely obvious and easily traceable to the offenders.
Personally, I think that boycotting iTunes (like me) in favor of better priced online distributors could force the recording industry to recognize that their prices are over-inflated which might get them to shift to a price that almost no one would bother to pirate. Of course, I also believe that artists should never sign with a major label so that their death is hastened.
Who is going to hand fistfuls of cash to someone without some sort of presentation?
Law and morality are too very different things. They can intersect - morality and the law agree that murder is bad - but otherwise they are separate realms.
Not really.
Law is a public enforcement of morality.
That's fundamentally its entire intent.
It's just that things can be immoral but not fall under the purview of law.
Choosing a side of the street to drive on is absolutely necessary, but has no moral component. IP laws are similarly designed, at least in part, to solve coordination problems.
Where on Earth did you get this idea?
Law is also zoning codes, tax rates and standardization of weights and measurements. There are moral components to some laws - and arguably moral components to every law in the "who benefits" sense - but much of law operates outside of moral dimensions. This is why the man who steals medicine to give to his dying child in the U.S. will still go to prison. The law is set up to protect property first, reduce violence second and regulate moral behavior third.
Here's a good summary from a random Law and Ethics professor:
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/320/320lawmo.htm
In fact, most laws' moral component really only comes for the fact that the Rule Of Law contributes to a better overall state of being in all those inhabitants of realms controlled by the Rule Of Law, that is the Rule Of Law supposedly contributes to the greater good.
But couldn't you make a utilitarian argument that it would be immoral to not coordinate a side to choose. The side itself might be arbitrary but the act of coordinating the side is moral.
I didn't say that law is always about what is right and wrong, I said that is what it is supposed to be about, what it should be about.
I would love to read that paper, it sounds interesting.
But shouldn't laws be moral? We don't want a bunch of immoral laws do we?
Contributing to the greater good IS moral from a utilitarian view of morality.