Cluster bombing villages because someone has a knock-off handbag isn't really what anyone is talking about here, it's so much strawman and hyperbole that it's ridiculous.
In my mind, various forms of military intervention fall near the far end of the 'acceptable action' spectrum. I think there are going to be very few cases where military action would actually make sense - the harm is very rarely going to make that a rational response. Military action is expensive in direct and political costs, it's going to be particularly effective against most IP theft, the optics are probably going to be terrible, and there are other avenues that are simply...better.
But, military action is at the end of a spectrum that starts at 'politely worded letters' and ranges through a whole host of diplomatic and economic actions. I would think bombing a village that's sewing Armeni handbags to sell on the streets of NYC is absurd and counterproductive, but I can't say it's entirely outside the realm of possibility that a navy would interdict and seize a cargo ship full of counterfeit goods. That's still military action, and I could see an extreme situation where that would be justifiable. Or maybe a smart bomb (or satchel charge) hitting the North Korean facility that houses their $100 bill manufacturing program.
In general though, IP theft in the 3rd world is going to be so pointless to counter that it's effectively meaningless. The amount of profits being lost are negligible and in a lot of cases the IP holders choose to not even enter or compete in those markets. There are a variety of methods IP holders can use to 'protect' their brand from counterfeits shipped to the 1st world - branding, holograms, consumer information, legal action within the first world, etc.
It's a bit different with copyright, but for patented items / technologies, by electing to remain outside of these 3rd world markets, IP holders have effectively ceded the market. Basically, if they refuse to enter a given market under the laws that govern that market, they can't suffer harm when someone else does. Without harm / damages, there really isn't much of a claim.
I agree completely until the last two paragraphs. Waiting and timing your entry into a market is valid. Apple, Sony, etc all release products in different markets at different times. I don't see how that makes IP violation acceptable until the day their marketing plan calls for a local roll out.
What if the IP holder is participating, but the market has been inundated with knock offs for years and so even the discounted price is "too high" by local standards because they are used to bear free? Is that not a harm?
Now, I'll say again that I consider there to be a bit of difference between something with a copyright and something like a drug, gene sequence, or industrial process. The item with a copyright was something CREATED, while the drug, gene sequence, industrial process, recipe, etc was something DISCOVERED. I am...not in agreement with your opinion regarding copyright, but much closer to your opinion with something created vs. discovered.
Either way though, IP laws exist for the purpose of encouraging further discoveries or creations for the purpose of benefiting and enriching humanity. The fact that they protect profits is incidental to that purpose. Anytime profits / property rights are at odds with the purpose of benefiting / enriching humanity, the rights of the property holder should invariably be secondary. Granted that a lot of the benefit / enrich humanity is either intangible or needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
This is like the most wrong wrong can be. Their protecting of profits is the thing that allows them to fulfill their purpose.
The point I'm trying to make is that the purpose of patent, copyright, and other IP law is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The purpose is to promote progress, the method is securing exclusive rights to the creator / discoverers. This protects profits, because that's what the 'exclusive Rights' portion basically boils down to, but protecting profits is the means to an end, not the end in and of itself. If a law fails to serve it's purpose, it's inherently unjust.
Now, I acknowledged that the progress (in the sense of benefiting / enriching humanity) can be intangible in a lot of cases and often comes down to a case-by-case basis, but profits don't or shouldn't be the only consideration when it comes to IP law and enforcement. There is definite push and pull, and it's going to be very difficult to craft 'one size fits all' laws - the patents on an iPhone may stifle progress by HTC or Samsung, while a law that promotes progress in that market may put Pfizer right out of business.
There is also a lot of negotiation to be had over what 'limited Times' and 'exclusive Right' actually mean. Exclusive is not equal to absolute. Considering that pretty much all drugs and a lot of other technologies - at some point in the development or testing - use some form of Federal Grant money or subsidization, there is a good case to be made for some aspects to be 'public domain'.
It's funny how everyone loves to quote that bit of the US Constitution to prove that IP law exists only for society's purposes, but when I mentioned that IP protections are listed in the Declaration of Human Rights, I was called out on "appealing to authority".
The powerful not being able to control the weak isn't perverse, it's ironic. And possibly just. Unless one is embarrassingly ignorant of history enough to believe the strong became strong without ever hurting or stealing from the weak.
Yeah, history would have taken a great many unfavourable turns if the weak had no way to fight back agianst the strong.
Let's also not forget that some of the major offenders of IP violations are not poor. China is the second biggest boy on the block in economy and they will be the first soon enough. Are we going to invade China to protect the sanctity of Mickey Mouse?
China--a very distant second in the world by military spending--can't really hope to compare to the astronomic military might of the United States, a country with less than a fourth of the population but between 4 and 5 times the military spending. That being said, I'm actually looking more forward to whether or not we'll accept the fact that Chinese films are widely pirated and distributed, against domestic Chinese licenses, throughout the United States by movie viewers over the internet.
Whatever options we're apparently willing to level against the Chinese--sanctions, military intervention--so it's going to be okay when the Chinese resort to measures to stop every single pirated copy of Red Cliff or 1911, or at least try? We're hardly happy with Chinese civilian and military invasions into American networks as it is, can you imagine the sort of measures they're going to have to resort with to try and stop pirated films? After the very real likelihood that American authorities would give up, their arms already filled with dealing with Americans violating American IPs?
That's assuming that's more desirable than, say, the PLA Marine Corps (or someone else) running around the country in vans, busting down doors and seizing computers.
So the thing is, SKFM, I think the weakness of those international bodies is a result of the US very much wanting those bodies weak and benefiting from those bodies being weak.
The fact that a knock-on effect is a moderate level of IP infringement doesn't outweigh the desired ability for the US to flout international governance.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Even if I was an extremely pro copyright individual, SKFM's opinion that it's probably okay to blow up a school with a cruise missile in yemen if they refuse to stop using pirated copies of Windows 7 would change my opinion just because I don't want to be on the side associated with it
Even if I was an extremely pro copyright individual, SKFM's opinion that it's probably okay to blow up a school with a cruise missile in yemen if they refuse to stop using pirated copies of Windows 7 would change my opinion just because I don't want to be on the side associated with it
hey, now. He doesn't want to send in cruise missiles, he just wants militarily supported sanctions. He doesn't want to blow the kids up, he just wants them to slowly starve to death.
well if a cruise missile would do the trick he'd support it
basically the fact that there are privileged upper class people who consider IP to be more valuable than human life is kind of abhorrent to me
especially because outside of like, North Korea, most of the poorest nations on earth suck almost directly because of the history of western powers fucking their shit
override367 on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
. . . You're kidding. The defender of entrenched genetic nobility is defending the subversion of traditional power structures by the poor? Or does the claim of the IP holders not count because they had to actually work to create it, instead of receiving it as a bequest from a long dead relative?
Work to create it? There is no work to create it if all it involves is finding an Amazon tribe and taking their traditional medicine and then patenting it. IP law should not apply.
I defend their right to do it because I do not believe in any aspect of Capitalism but rather support any aspect of its destruction when it comes to exploiting the poor or the weak in the Global south. It does not infringe on the traditional power structures because that role is already taken by the forces of Capitalism.
Whether you think it is "real work" or not, it requires time, money and effort to develop these drugs.
I don't even know what bring anti-capitalism means in this context. It seems to me that you are opposed to the new world order based on meritocracy (to a greater or lesser extent) and would endorse anything which breaks this down, presumably in the hope that what emerges is feudalism? I don't really see how that is possible.
Let's also not forget that some of the major offenders of IP violations are not poor. China is the second biggest boy on the block in economy and they will be the first soon enough. Are we going to invade China to protect the sanctity of Mickey Mouse?
China--a very distant second in the world by military spending--can't really hope to compare to the astronomic military might of the United States, a country with less than a fourth of the population but between 4 and 5 times the military spending. That being said, I'm actually looking more forward to whether or not we'll accept the fact that Chinese films are widely pirated and distributed, against domestic Chinese licenses, throughout the United States by movie viewers over the internet.
Whatever options we're apparently willing to level against the Chinese--sanctions, military intervention--so it's going to be okay when the Chinese resort to measures to stop every single pirated copy of Red Cliff or 1911, or at least try? We're hardly happy with Chinese civilian and military invasions into American networks as it is, can you imagine the sort of measures they're going to have to resort with to try and stop pirated films? After the very real likelihood that American authorities would give up, their arms already filled with dealing with Americans violating American IPs?
That's assuming that's more desirable than, say, the PLA Marine Corps (or someone else) running around the country in vans, busting down doors and seizing computers.
I, uh, suppose I could try.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The powerful not being able to control the weak isn't perverse, it's ironic. And possibly just. Unless one is embarrassingly ignorant of history enough to believe the strong became strong without ever hurting or stealing from the weak.
I think perverse is exactly the right world, because it is a literal perversion of the natural order, where the strong prevail, without some stronger overarching body (like a government) monopolizing force.
So the thing is, SKFM, I think the weakness of those international bodies is a result of the US very much wanting those bodies weak and benefiting from those bodies being weak.
The fact that a knock-on effect is a moderate level of IP infringement doesn't outweigh the desired ability for the US to flout international governance.
I think that is the right answer. I also think that we ought to rejigger these institutions to better deal with these modern concerns.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
I agree with much if this, but the answer to your final question is what I see as most important. A nation is sovreign, but sovreigns dealing with each other without the benefit of an overarching world government that exerts a monopoly on force can only exert their laws to the extent of their strength (military, diplomatic, economic or otherwise). The weak country is free to act as it sees fit, of course, but only to the point where an angered neighbor does not stop them from doing so.
Even if I was an extremely pro copyright individual, SKFM's opinion that it's probably okay to blow up a school with a cruise missile in yemen if they refuse to stop using pirated copies of Windows 7 would change my opinion just because I don't want to be on the side associated with it
Have you read this thread? I thought I was pretty clear in saying that direct, unsanctioned force was a very unlikely outcome, and I'm not sure how I would feel about its use. I want to focus more on economic sanctions, which are more realistic.
The powerful not being able to control the weak isn't perverse, it's ironic. And possibly just. Unless one is embarrassingly ignorant of history enough to believe the strong became strong without ever hurting or stealing from the weak.
I think perverse is exactly the right world, because it is a literal perversion of the natural order, where the strong prevail, without some stronger overarching body (like a government) monopolizing force.
This is why gorillas are the dominant primate in the world today, because strength is all that matters.
I guess this means humans are perverse in that the weaker species works together to become dominant over the stronger.
. . . You're kidding. The defender of entrenched genetic nobility is defending the subversion of traditional power structures by the poor? Or does the claim of the IP holders not count because they had to actually work to create it, instead of receiving it as a bequest from a long dead relative?
Work to create it? There is no work to create it if all it involves is finding an Amazon tribe and taking their traditional medicine and then patenting it. IP law should not apply.
I defend their right to do it because I do not believe in any aspect of Capitalism but rather support any aspect of its destruction when it comes to exploiting the poor or the weak in the Global south. It does not infringe on the traditional power structures because that role is already taken by the forces of Capitalism.
Whether you think it is "real work" or not, it requires time, money and effort to develop these drugs.
I don't even know what bring anti-capitalism means in this context. It seems to me that you are opposed to the new world order based on meritocracy (to a greater or lesser extent) and would endorse anything which breaks this down, presumably in the hope that what emerges is feudalism? I don't really see how that is possible.
It also requires time, money and effort at tracking down old tribal remedies from the Amazon region and then claiming IP rights for something that has been in use for thousands of years and then requesting the WTO to force these tribal people from not using the medicine because, surprise, surprise, the American companies now claim IP over it.
You are not understanding the majority of the issue here. Answer me this: "Why should anyone respect IP rights when American companies, especially Pharmaceutical companies, when they go around claiming tribal remedies as their own or even the use of medicinal herbs and roots as their own?"
And you still haven't answered my other point. If an American Pharmaceutical company is charging people in Africa and India $200 for one pill why is that any fair to them to try to gain profit on people's death? Do you agree with this line of thinking or do you think that providing similar medicine that costs less is tantamount to a nuclear attack and killing all of the people just to get your illegal share of the profits?
You are going to need to provide some sources to back up your claims of wide spread repackaging of tribal remedies, as opposed to the synthesis of new drugs based in part on the active ingredients in plants.
As to why IP should be respected, I think that, like all property rights, exclusive use is the real value, and infringements effectively take that value from the right holders. This discourages people to create, causes creators to restrict access (I.e., drm), and contributes to a climate where ideas (one of the most important exports in the modern world) ceas to be of value. Why even try to develop the third world if you know they are just going to force you to compete against yourself? Sure, if they actually develop, maybe you find a market, but it is certainly at least a short term discouraging factor.
The nobility of someone's claim to your property does not entitle them to it. Does your family feel compelled to give their fine woven cloth and rugs to the beggar freezing to death on their door step?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The powerful not being able to control the weak isn't perverse, it's ironic. And possibly just. Unless one is embarrassingly ignorant of history enough to believe the strong became strong without ever hurting or stealing from the weak.
I think perverse is exactly the right world, because it is a literal perversion of the natural order, where the strong prevail, without some stronger overarching body (like a government) monopolizing force.
This is why gorillas are the dominant primate in the world today, because strength is all that matters.
I guess this means humans are perverse in that the weaker species works together to become dominant over the stronger.
There are obviously many forms of strength. I am not saying that third world countries shouldn't be able to steal US IP because Obama can beat their leaders in an arm wrestling competition. Is there any measure of strength that puts a poor third world nation ahead of the US though?
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
. . . You're kidding. The defender of entrenched genetic nobility is defending the subversion of traditional power structures by the poor? Or does the claim of the IP holders not count because they had to actually work to create it, instead of receiving it as a bequest from a long dead relative?
Work to create it? There is no work to create it if all it involves is finding an Amazon tribe and taking their traditional medicine and then patenting it. IP law should not apply.
I defend their right to do it because I do not believe in any aspect of Capitalism but rather support any aspect of its destruction when it comes to exploiting the poor or the weak in the Global south. It does not infringe on the traditional power structures because that role is already taken by the forces of Capitalism.
Whether you think it is "real work" or not, it requires time, money and effort to develop these drugs.
I don't even know what bring anti-capitalism means in this context. It seems to me that you are opposed to the new world order based on meritocracy (to a greater or lesser extent) and would endorse anything which breaks this down, presumably in the hope that what emerges is feudalism? I don't really see how that is possible.
It also requires time, money and effort at tracking down old tribal remedies from the Amazon region and then claiming IP rights for something that has been in use for thousands of years and then requesting the WTO to force these tribal people from not using the medicine because, surprise, surprise, the American companies now claim IP over it.
You are not understanding the majority of the issue here. Answer me this: "Why should anyone respect IP rights when American companies, especially Pharmaceutical companies, when they go around claiming tribal remedies as their own or even the use of medicinal herbs and roots as their own?"
And you still haven't answered my other point. If an American Pharmaceutical company is charging people in Africa and India $200 for one pill why is that any fair to them to try to gain profit on people's death? Do you agree with this line of thinking or do you think that providing similar medicine that costs less is tantamount to a nuclear attack and killing all of the people just to get your illegal share of the profits?
You are going to need to provide some sources to back up your claims of wide spread repackaging of tribal remedies, as opposed to the synthesis of new drugs based in part on the active ingredients in plants.
As to why IP should be respected, I think that, like all property rights, exclusive use is the real value, and infringements effectively take that value from the right holders. This discourages people to create, causes creators to restrict access (I.e., drm), and contributes to a climate where ideas (one of the most important exports in the modern world) ceas to be of value. Why even try to develop the third world if you know they are just going to force you to compete against yourself? Sure, if they actually develop, maybe you find a market, but it is certainly at least a short term discouraging factor.
The nobility of someone's claim to your property does not entitle them to it. Does your family feel compelled to give their fine woven cloth and rugs to the beggar freezing to death on their door step?
You can find more articles from google if you so wished.
If ideas are so important that they need to be IP protected I think you'd need to stop using numbers, which are a Indian product, the zero which is an Arabic system and other things which aren't American because frankly then it doesn't become yours to begin with. Is American paying for the usage of numbers?
If you have no sense of humanity that you'd ask that sort of question then you are nothing but ignorant. Humanity is what is the cornerstone to being at least elite and you sir have none of that.
That just gives an error message. I will be amazed if you can show that pharma just takes leaves off plants, crumbles them up and patents them. I don't even think that is possible. Aspirin is not just taking some willow bark and licking it. A ton of work went into creating what we use today.
We don't have indefinite patents or copyrights, so I don't know what you think this proves, but it does not.
So I take it your noble family is living very modestly because it has given all of its excess possessions to those in need, and you took no credit because they were entitled to those things by their need? I won't even say that's very charitable of you, because it isn't charitable to give someone something they have a right to.
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
From what I've gathered his philosophy is "might makes right." He only believe the laws should be followed when there's significant force to back it up. That's why he was fine with the US going after poor countries yet was hesitant to go after China or India.
The other option the US has to limit IP infringement is through non-agressive resolutions such as trade sanctions. However, I think it is clearly recognizable that the economic benefits of maintaing IP control would be severely outweighed by the loss of trade with a particular nation.
And if the cost-benifit analysis fails for trade sanctions, then it's certainly going to fail for military action.
I'm personally of the opinion that the US is engaged in quasi-military actions (drone strikes) in countries like Pakistan because they are reticent to provide access to resources such as oil. This is the kind of thing that can feasibly pass a cost-benifit analysis.
The other option the US has to limit IP infringement is through non-agressive resolutions such as trade sanctions. However, I think it is clearly recognizable that the economic benefits of maintaing IP control would be severely outweighed by the loss of trade with a particular nation.
And if the cost-benifit analysis fails for trade sanctions, then it's certainly going to fail for military action.
I'm personally of the opinion that the US is engaged in quasi-military actions (drone strikes) in countries like Pakistan because they are reticent to provide access to resources such as oil. This is the kind of thing that can feasibly pass a cost-benifit analysis.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
Have some sympathy for the citizens living in these countries. Why should their lives be made worse so some asshole big pharma company can pressure the US government into doing its dirty work and ultimately harm its profit margins? IMF shouldn't be a big stick against weaker countries.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
I agree with much if this, but the answer to your final question is what I see as most important. A nation is sovreign, but sovreigns dealing with each other without the benefit of an overarching world government that exerts a monopoly on force can only exert their laws to the extent of their strength (military, diplomatic, economic or otherwise). The weak country is free to act as it sees fit, of course, but only to the point where an angered neighbor does not stop them from doing so.
Okay, that's consistent. So then the question is: should a strong nation attempt to punish a weaker one for a slight as trivial as copyright violations? And, consequently, by what metrics should we judge inernational policies?
I feel like "makes money for select citizens and corporations" is pretty low on the priority list.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
The countries you most need to cooperate with sanctions, have most to lose from applying the sanctions.
This is exactly what you would expect from a system designed to force everyone to keep the system generating mutual gains from trade operational.
It's as if you had a police force where, every time a crime occurred, the sheriff had to go ask for posse of unpaid volunteers to risk their lives apprehending the criminal. You would have to have a rather flexible notion of 'crime' to make this sustainable.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
Fair enough. It's just not very satisfying.
Neither is dying of preventable disease because American companies don't want to play ball.
Guess which one people care more about?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The countries you most need to cooperate with sanctions, have most to lose from applying the sanctions.
This is exactly what you would expect from a system designed to force everyone to keep the system generating mutual gains from trade operational.
It's as if you had a police force where, every time a crime occurred, the sheriff had to go ask for posse of unpaid volunteers to risk their lives apprehending the criminal. You would have to have a rather flexible notion of 'crime' to make this sustainable.
I may well be wrong, but how valuable of a trade partner can one of these very poor African nations be? Especially in a world where the governments don't even really control their natural resources?
spacekungfuman on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
Fair enough. It's just not very satisfying.
Neither is dying of preventable disease because American companies don't want to play ball.
Guess which one people care more about?
Are you just trolling/being snarky or are you actually making an argument. As has been said several times, "playing ball" becomes impossible when pirates are undercutting your severely discounted prices by selling your own product for almost nothing.
The right that we care about when considering IP is the right to exclusive control over the idea's use. This is identical to the right to exclusive control over physical property. If I am at work and you come sit in my house but don't move or ruin anything, you have still wronged me even though I lost nothing physical, because you have taken my right to the exclusive control of my home.
Would you ever bother to sue anyone that actually did this, though? You'd be awarded nominal damages, and without a substantial punitive damage award (relatively unlikely) you'd probably take a net loss on legal fees and fail to seriously deter future trespasses. (In this analogy, these are unilateral economic sanctions.)
To effectively deter people from trespassing into your home you would rely on the state, i.e., call the cops, have the trespasser arrested, perhaps testify at hearings or a trial at the request of your local DA. (This would be the WTO in this analogy, imperfect as it is.) And if the trespasser is found innocent, or the DA decides the case isn't worth his office's time, or there's a plea deal and the trespasser only gets a few years of probation, you probably wouldn't be happy...but I'd doubt you'd become a vigilante and go after him yourself, either.
And when the state systematically fails to defend your claim? That is precisely when a state starts to lose its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, who do resort to self help. It doesn't happen after they fail once, but if the guy is in my house every day and the state won't stop him? I'm not going to tolerate that forever.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
Fair enough. It's just not very satisfying.
Neither is dying of preventable disease because American companies don't want to play ball.
Guess which one people care more about?
Are you just trolling/being snarky or are you actually making an argument. As has been said several times, "playing ball" becomes impossible when pirates are undercutting your severely discounted prices by selling your own product for almost nothing.
The reason why those pirates are successful in those countries is because their customers are poor people dying from preventable diseases.
The countries you most need to cooperate with sanctions, have most to lose from applying the sanctions.
This is exactly what you would expect from a system designed to force everyone to keep the system generating mutual gains from trade operational.
It's as if you had a police force where, every time a crime occurred, the sheriff had to go ask for posse of unpaid volunteers to risk their lives apprehending the criminal. You would have to have a rather flexible notion of 'crime' to make this sustainable.
I may well be wrong, but how valuable of a trade partner can one of these very poor African nations be? Especially in a world where the governments don't even really control their natural resources?
nations trade heavily with their neighbours. the neighbours of poor nations are often themselves poor. Chad's biggest trade partner is Cameroon.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
I agree with much if this, but the answer to your final question is what I see as most important. A nation is sovreign, but sovreigns dealing with each other without the benefit of an overarching world government that exerts a monopoly on force can only exert their laws to the extent of their strength (military, diplomatic, economic or otherwise). The weak country is free to act as it sees fit, of course, but only to the point where an angered neighbor does not stop them from doing so.
Okay, that's consistent. So then the question is: should a strong nation attempt to punish a weaker one for a slight as trivial as copyright violations? And, consequently, by what metrics should we judge inernational policies?
I feel like "makes money for select citizens and corporations" is pretty low on the priority list.
I don't see this as a "wealth to the few" scenario. IP creation is a major industry in the US, and IP is one of our main exports. We are a nation of idea men increasingly, and so IP rights are very important to our nation, in my view.
Uh. There is an international body that enforces copyright / IP laws (among other laws): Interpol
Maybe Interpol isn't 'strong' enough in your view, whatever that means, but it certainly does exist and certainly does arrest people (i believe it was Interpol that ultimately arrested the Pirate Bay guys).
It seems to me that we are essentially in a situation where we have placed the more powerful (as measured by military power, global influence and wealth) nations in a position where they are held at the mercy of the weaker nations who do not have as many IP creators, since they can violate IP laws and treaties with near impunity. The question that I want to discuss in this thread is what, if any, enforcement efforts or self help are justified on behalf of the stronger nations in this scenario when the international community process fails them. Should they be able to pursue economic sanctions? Press for trade embargoes? Engage in targetted military action? Full scale invasion?
To keep this discussion focused, I would like to limit discussion to IP violations where the violator simply copies someone else's creation (i.e., generic drugs, knock off hand bags, boot legged movies) and not IP violations where people use someone else's work to create something new.
...This is a really racist & jingoistic statement, eh? Claiming that the brown people over there don't make any new IP, and since they have no ideas themselves, well of course they just steal ours.
African nations like Mozambique make their own drugs after analyzing proprietary drugs sold by western profiteers because they feel that they they are being price gouged / held hostage, and that the medicine required to stop the HIV epidemic should not be a protected-for-profit enterprise - that it is not 'stealing' something to see what the ingredients are and then make a similar product. I have a feeling that if, say, 15% of Colorado was infected with an incurable disease, and the IP holders of the mitigation treatment were based in New Guinea, there would be no outcry over the abuse of IP laws when American labs simply duplicate the treatment rather than having a state enter into ridiculously unfair / unreasonable financial debt to a foreign body.
it's also ridiculous to claim that America is 'at the mercy' of places like Zambia or South Africa because they are making knock-off drugs and American pharmaceutical companies aren't making the absolute maximum amount of profit that they could be.
And they could easily make some money by simply licensing with companies in those areas instead who would be able to create and sell their product for similar prices as those gosh darn pirates with probably more success since they'd probably be better too.
I don't get you SKFM. You don't believe in natural rights, all rights must come through the law, and the law must be followed. Right? But there is no law higher than a nation's. By what right can any nation exert its laws on another? How can a citizen demand their rights be enforced in differnet nation?
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
I agree with much if this, but the answer to your final question is what I see as most important. A nation is sovreign, but sovreigns dealing with each other without the benefit of an overarching world government that exerts a monopoly on force can only exert their laws to the extent of their strength (military, diplomatic, economic or otherwise). The weak country is free to act as it sees fit, of course, but only to the point where an angered neighbor does not stop them from doing so.
Okay, that's consistent. So then the question is: should a strong nation attempt to punish a weaker one for a slight as trivial as copyright violations? And, consequently, by what metrics should we judge inernational policies?
I feel like "makes money for select citizens and corporations" is pretty low on the priority list.
I don't see this as a "wealth to the few" scenario. IP creation is a major industry in the US, and IP is one of our main exports. We are a nation of idea men increasingly, and so IP rights are very important to our nation, in my view.
Who do you think owns the most IP's in the country?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The countries you most need to cooperate with sanctions, have most to lose from applying the sanctions.
This is exactly what you would expect from a system designed to force everyone to keep the system generating mutual gains from trade operational.
It's as if you had a police force where, every time a crime occurred, the sheriff had to go ask for posse of unpaid volunteers to risk their lives apprehending the criminal. You would have to have a rather flexible notion of 'crime' to make this sustainable.
I may well be wrong, but how valuable of a trade partner can one of these very poor African nations be? Especially in a world where the governments don't even really control their natural resources?
nations trade heavily with their neighbours. the neighbours of poor nations are often themselves poor. Chad's biggest trade partner is Cameroon.
Lets be simplistic here for the sake if a thought experiment. Why not make demands of the whole bloc of poor countries in the region and embargo them all until the group complies? Unless the region is a relevant trade partner for the first works, this seems like a way to fix the incentives, no?
. . . You're kidding. The defender of entrenched genetic nobility is defending the subversion of traditional power structures by the poor? Or does the claim of the IP holders not count because they had to actually work to create it, instead of receiving it as a bequest from a long dead relative?
Work to create it? There is no work to create it if all it involves is finding an Amazon tribe and taking their traditional medicine and then patenting it. IP law should not apply.
I defend their right to do it because I do not believe in any aspect of Capitalism but rather support any aspect of its destruction when it comes to exploiting the poor or the weak in the Global south. It does not infringe on the traditional power structures because that role is already taken by the forces of Capitalism.
Whether you think it is "real work" or not, it requires time, money and effort to develop these drugs.
I don't even know what bring anti-capitalism means in this context. It seems to me that you are opposed to the new world order based on meritocracy (to a greater or lesser extent) and would endorse anything which breaks this down, presumably in the hope that what emerges is feudalism? I don't really see how that is possible.
It also requires time, money and effort at tracking down old tribal remedies from the Amazon region and then claiming IP rights for something that has been in use for thousands of years and then requesting the WTO to force these tribal people from not using the medicine because, surprise, surprise, the American companies now claim IP over it.
You are not understanding the majority of the issue here. Answer me this: "Why should anyone respect IP rights when American companies, especially Pharmaceutical companies, when they go around claiming tribal remedies as their own or even the use of medicinal herbs and roots as their own?"
And you still haven't answered my other point. If an American Pharmaceutical company is charging people in Africa and India $200 for one pill why is that any fair to them to try to gain profit on people's death? Do you agree with this line of thinking or do you think that providing similar medicine that costs less is tantamount to a nuclear attack and killing all of the people just to get your illegal share of the profits?
You are going to need to provide some sources to back up your claims of wide spread repackaging of tribal remedies, as opposed to the synthesis of new drugs based in part on the active ingredients in plants.
As to why IP should be respected, I think that, like all property rights, exclusive use is the real value, and infringements effectively take that value from the right holders. This discourages people to create, causes creators to restrict access (I.e., drm), and contributes to a climate where ideas (one of the most important exports in the modern world) ceas to be of value. Why even try to develop the third world if you know they are just going to force you to compete against yourself? Sure, if they actually develop, maybe you find a market, but it is certainly at least a short term discouraging factor.
The nobility of someone's claim to your property does not entitle them to it. Does your family feel compelled to give their fine woven cloth and rugs to the beggar freezing to death on their door step?
You can find more articles from google if you so wished.
If ideas are so important that they need to be IP protected I think you'd need to stop using numbers, which are a Indian product, the zero which is an Arabic system and other things which aren't American because frankly then it doesn't become yours to begin with. Is American paying for the usage of numbers?
If you have no sense of humanity that you'd ask that sort of question then you are nothing but ignorant. Humanity is what is the cornerstone to being at least elite and you sir have none of that.
That just gives an error message. I will be amazed if you can show that pharma just takes leaves off plants, crumbles them up and patents them. I don't even think that is possible. Aspirin is not just taking some willow bark and licking it. A ton of work went into creating what we use today.
We don't have indefinite patents or copyrights, so I don't know what you think this proves, but it does not.
So I take it your noble family is living very modestly because it has given all of its excess possessions to those in need, and you took no credit because they were entitled to those things by their need? I won't even say that's very charitable of you, because it isn't charitable to give someone something they have a right to.
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It's funny how everyone loves to quote that bit of the US Constitution to prove that IP law exists only for society's purposes, but when I mentioned that IP protections are listed in the Declaration of Human Rights, I was called out on "appealing to authority".
Yeah, history would have taken a great many unfavourable turns if the weak had no way to fight back agianst the strong.
China--a very distant second in the world by military spending--can't really hope to compare to the astronomic military might of the United States, a country with less than a fourth of the population but between 4 and 5 times the military spending. That being said, I'm actually looking more forward to whether or not we'll accept the fact that Chinese films are widely pirated and distributed, against domestic Chinese licenses, throughout the United States by movie viewers over the internet.
Whatever options we're apparently willing to level against the Chinese--sanctions, military intervention--so it's going to be okay when the Chinese resort to measures to stop every single pirated copy of Red Cliff or 1911, or at least try? We're hardly happy with Chinese civilian and military invasions into American networks as it is, can you imagine the sort of measures they're going to have to resort with to try and stop pirated films? After the very real likelihood that American authorities would give up, their arms already filled with dealing with Americans violating American IPs?
That's assuming that's more desirable than, say, the PLA Marine Corps (or someone else) running around the country in vans, busting down doors and seizing computers.
The fact that a knock-on effect is a moderate level of IP infringement doesn't outweigh the desired ability for the US to flout international governance.
and you, individually, are even more irrelevant to the strength of the bureaucracy you seek to divert to your interests than the weak state, so.
Can a nation declare itself (or some citizen therein) the sole holder of copyright for any work that passes through its borders? If not, why?
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
hey, now. He doesn't want to send in cruise missiles, he just wants militarily supported sanctions. He doesn't want to blow the kids up, he just wants them to slowly starve to death.
basically the fact that there are privileged upper class people who consider IP to be more valuable than human life is kind of abhorrent to me
especially because outside of like, North Korea, most of the poorest nations on earth suck almost directly because of the history of western powers fucking their shit
Whether you think it is "real work" or not, it requires time, money and effort to develop these drugs.
I don't even know what bring anti-capitalism means in this context. It seems to me that you are opposed to the new world order based on meritocracy (to a greater or lesser extent) and would endorse anything which breaks this down, presumably in the hope that what emerges is feudalism? I don't really see how that is possible.
I, uh, suppose I could try.
I think perverse is exactly the right world, because it is a literal perversion of the natural order, where the strong prevail, without some stronger overarching body (like a government) monopolizing force.
I think that is the right answer. I also think that we ought to rejigger these institutions to better deal with these modern concerns.
@ronya - could you elaborate? I don't follow this post.
I agree with much if this, but the answer to your final question is what I see as most important. A nation is sovreign, but sovreigns dealing with each other without the benefit of an overarching world government that exerts a monopoly on force can only exert their laws to the extent of their strength (military, diplomatic, economic or otherwise). The weak country is free to act as it sees fit, of course, but only to the point where an angered neighbor does not stop them from doing so.
Have you read this thread? I thought I was pretty clear in saying that direct, unsanctioned force was a very unlikely outcome, and I'm not sure how I would feel about its use. I want to focus more on economic sanctions, which are more realistic.
This is why gorillas are the dominant primate in the world today, because strength is all that matters.
I guess this means humans are perverse in that the weaker species works together to become dominant over the stronger.
You are going to need to provide some sources to back up your claims of wide spread repackaging of tribal remedies, as opposed to the synthesis of new drugs based in part on the active ingredients in plants.
As to why IP should be respected, I think that, like all property rights, exclusive use is the real value, and infringements effectively take that value from the right holders. This discourages people to create, causes creators to restrict access (I.e., drm), and contributes to a climate where ideas (one of the most important exports in the modern world) ceas to be of value. Why even try to develop the third world if you know they are just going to force you to compete against yourself? Sure, if they actually develop, maybe you find a market, but it is certainly at least a short term discouraging factor.
The nobility of someone's claim to your property does not entitle them to it. Does your family feel compelled to give their fine woven cloth and rugs to the beggar freezing to death on their door step?
There are obviously many forms of strength. I am not saying that third world countries shouldn't be able to steal US IP because Obama can beat their leaders in an arm wrestling competition. Is there any measure of strength that puts a poor third world nation ahead of the US though?
you are making a mistake that is common of hastily-proposed solutions to collective-action problems: to 'solve' the problem by invoking a group identity of people who you assume have, internally, no collective action problems. This is rather like solving the problem of flight by assuming away gravity.
you have three layers of CA problems here. The first one is the domestic problem: how do you propose to pay for all that military adventurism? You, yourself, are not enthusiastic to volunteer. This is the point that many other posters were driving at. You now invoke the domestic interest to justify the state acting on your behalf. But you are wrongly assuming that your interest is the domestic interest - the interest of many of your fellow citizens is to minimize the blood and treasure spent to defend wealth owned by a select few.
The second one is the national problem: you've drawn a circle around "strong nations" and assumed that just because they have a common interest now, under a carefully engineered international trade system where everything major is conducted through multilateral negotiation, that they will continue to have unambiguously common interests in a world where countries regularly conduct unilateral armed attacks on each other. Everything we know of the nation-state since Westphalia was a thing suggests that this is flatly wrong. Strong countries that see something to be gained from fighting with weak countries will find other strong countries contesting with them for the privilege. Strong countries that are on the edge of becoming weak countries will obviously fear being nudged over, and will act pre-emptively to prevent this. Weak countries will try to unify into strong countries. All of these things are fluid, and more problematically, the process of trying to hammer out the borders of nation-states is extremely bloody.
The third one is the international problem: you keep invoking a hypothetical global hegemon, that can act to enforce global rules. There is no such thing. The UN has no independent army. The ICJ needs countries to opt in. The WTO's sharpest tooth is a suspension of MFN privileges. The IMF can only stop lending to you. This isn't 1860 and you cannot have the Royal Navy park a battleship off a coast until they cough up, simply because there is no navy that has managed to escape the first two problems. What you have are weak treaties enforced largely by consensus - a Nash equilibrium where everyone agrees to penalize defectors at their own expense. If too many major players leave, then the agreement is pointless: see Nations, League Of. But this is sustainable only if the costs of punishing defectors is not very large, which correspondingly limits the applicability and extent of sanctions.
That just gives an error message. I will be amazed if you can show that pharma just takes leaves off plants, crumbles them up and patents them. I don't even think that is possible. Aspirin is not just taking some willow bark and licking it. A ton of work went into creating what we use today.
We don't have indefinite patents or copyrights, so I don't know what you think this proves, but it does not.
So I take it your noble family is living very modestly because it has given all of its excess possessions to those in need, and you took no credit because they were entitled to those things by their need? I won't even say that's very charitable of you, because it isn't charitable to give someone something they have a right to.
From what I've gathered his philosophy is "might makes right." He only believe the laws should be followed when there's significant force to back it up. That's why he was fine with the US going after poor countries yet was hesitant to go after China or India.
And if the cost-benifit analysis fails for trade sanctions, then it's certainly going to fail for military action.
I'm personally of the opinion that the US is engaged in quasi-military actions (drone strikes) in countries like Pakistan because they are reticent to provide access to resources such as oil. This is the kind of thing that can feasibly pass a cost-benifit analysis.
And if the cost-benifit analysis fails for trade sanctions, then it's certainly going to fail for military action.
I'm personally of the opinion that the US is engaged in quasi-military actions (drone strikes) in countries like Pakistan because they are reticent to provide access to resources such as oil. This is the kind of thing that can feasibly pass a cost-benifit analysis.
I think that I agree, although I remain convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have chosen to order the world re: enforcement of grievances against other nations including weaker nations. I do not see why, for example, we cannot effectively tell Chad that it will receive no foreign aid or access to the IMF unless it increases IP enforcement efforts or allows the WIPO to do so on its behalf within its borders.
This is a whole other issue from the line in the sand that we have driven re: nation building.
Have some sympathy for the citizens living in these countries. Why should their lives be made worse so some asshole big pharma company can pressure the US government into doing its dirty work and ultimately harm its profit margins? IMF shouldn't be a big stick against weaker countries.
Nation building? America's horrible at that.
you do. the IMF and World Bank famously condition a lot of aid on improved property rights enforcement. this is already the status quo. it is merely that the status quo is not as rigorous as you would like, but that is due to constraints I mentioned above: the enforcement has to be minimally costly to member states or the system collapses. And Chad's major export partners actually like having Chadian exports to buy.
Okay, that's consistent. So then the question is: should a strong nation attempt to punish a weaker one for a slight as trivial as copyright violations? And, consequently, by what metrics should we judge inernational policies?
I feel like "makes money for select citizens and corporations" is pretty low on the priority list.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Fair enough. It's just not very satisfying.
This is exactly what you would expect from a system designed to force everyone to keep the system generating mutual gains from trade operational.
It's as if you had a police force where, every time a crime occurred, the sheriff had to go ask for posse of unpaid volunteers to risk their lives apprehending the criminal. You would have to have a rather flexible notion of 'crime' to make this sustainable.
Neither is dying of preventable disease because American companies don't want to play ball.
Guess which one people care more about?
I may well be wrong, but how valuable of a trade partner can one of these very poor African nations be? Especially in a world where the governments don't even really control their natural resources?
Are you just trolling/being snarky or are you actually making an argument. As has been said several times, "playing ball" becomes impossible when pirates are undercutting your severely discounted prices by selling your own product for almost nothing.
The reason why those pirates are successful in those countries is because their customers are poor people dying from preventable diseases.
nations trade heavily with their neighbours. the neighbours of poor nations are often themselves poor. Chad's biggest trade partner is Cameroon.
I don't see this as a "wealth to the few" scenario. IP creation is a major industry in the US, and IP is one of our main exports. We are a nation of idea men increasingly, and so IP rights are very important to our nation, in my view.
Maybe Interpol isn't 'strong' enough in your view, whatever that means, but it certainly does exist and certainly does arrest people (i believe it was Interpol that ultimately arrested the Pirate Bay guys).
...This is a really racist & jingoistic statement, eh? Claiming that the brown people over there don't make any new IP, and since they have no ideas themselves, well of course they just steal ours.
African nations like Mozambique make their own drugs after analyzing proprietary drugs sold by western profiteers because they feel that they they are being price gouged / held hostage, and that the medicine required to stop the HIV epidemic should not be a protected-for-profit enterprise - that it is not 'stealing' something to see what the ingredients are and then make a similar product. I have a feeling that if, say, 15% of Colorado was infected with an incurable disease, and the IP holders of the mitigation treatment were based in New Guinea, there would be no outcry over the abuse of IP laws when American labs simply duplicate the treatment rather than having a state enter into ridiculously unfair / unreasonable financial debt to a foreign body.
it's also ridiculous to claim that America is 'at the mercy' of places like Zambia or South Africa because they are making knock-off drugs and American pharmaceutical companies aren't making the absolute maximum amount of profit that they could be.
But they don't.
Who do you think owns the most IP's in the country?
Lets be simplistic here for the sake if a thought experiment. Why not make demands of the whole bloc of poor countries in the region and embargo them all until the group complies? Unless the region is a relevant trade partner for the first works, this seems like a way to fix the incentives, no?
I think it would be fantastic if you could quote from that article the specific issues you are concerned about.