. . . 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.
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.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
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.
Citation needed.
Unless you have information i don't, 'discounts' are never offered by drug manufacturers, even when selling to developing nations. Gilead Science (manufacturer of Atripla), for example, reviews what the 'market' will bear in a target country (what they could reasonably hope to squeeze out of the local government, because they couldn't hope to sell the drugs in a traditional off-the-shelf fashion) and then goes to the American government and haggles for subsidy to cover the standard cost for the drug (they sell it for about $24,000.00 per yearly dose on the American market), pocket the subsidy and then go to arrange some sort of credit agreement with either a state actor or an NGO.
I mean, if you want to talk about how it's unfair for a entertainer to have their content stolen, depriving them of a living, or even how it's unfair to have luxury designer goods stolen, that's one thing. Nobody is going to die if they don't get to watch a bootlegged copy of Battleship or a knock-off Gucci watch. But a lot of people will most certainly die if they don't receive a daily tablet that does the same thing Atripla does, and those people have no money to pay you with.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
skfm: Since you've brought up your house analogy, If you were poor and dying and could survive by breaking in to some rich guy's house (I guess it's really cold out) and staying for a few hours in the porch, would you?
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
I don't know how to tell you this, but 'international law' is almost never respected in any arena, especially by America. Brazil breaks patents law, America violates foreign sovereignty & the Geneva convention. Two way street (with America getting the more favorable side of that street).
And of course that 'ideal' police force is not something that will ever happen, because the whole idea of a police force is that it's a third party with overwhelming force at it's disposal and (ideally) no interests outside of enforcing the law. You'd need to do something like hand over America's military command & assets to a multinational body and say, "Police the world. And that includes us,"
Moreover, why fix what isn't even broken? The trade agreement mechanism we have are working as intended, and companies are making money hand over fist - especially American companies - despite however lax you think IP enforcement is. What if you went to 'fix' the non-problem and caused more harm than good? What's the supposed benefit to your 'ideal system'?
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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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
skfm: Since you've brought up your house analogy, If you were poor and dying and could survive by breaking in to some rich guy's house (I guess it's really cold out) and staying for a few hours in the porch, would you?
Sure, I would. That doesn't mean the police would be wrong to arrest me.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
I don't know how to tell you this, but 'international law' is almost never respected in any arena, especially by America. Brazil breaks patents law, America violates foreign sovereignty & the Geneva convention. Two way street (with America getting the more favorable side of that street).
And of course that 'ideal' police force is not something that will ever happen, because the whole idea of a police force is that it's a third party with overwhelming force at it's disposal and (ideally) no interests outside of enforcing the law. You'd need to do something like hand over America's military command & assets to a multinational body and say, "Police the world. And that includes us,"
Moreover, why fix what isn't even broken? The trade agreement mechanism we have are working as intended, and companies are making money hand over fist - especially American companies - despite however lax you think IP enforcement is. What if you went to 'fix' the non-problem and caused more harm than good? What's the supposed benefit to your 'ideal system'?
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
If it is impossible for a company to establish a "virgin" marketplace, change the strategy. Adapt.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
There's a certain amount of stupidity inherent in affluence.
A person who has lived life close to the bone for a while will laugh at a $200 handbag. After all, their cousin down the street is the one who stitches them up and the raw materials aren't worth spit. Certainly, one of the fringe benefits of the Great Depression was a quality consciousness in the American buying public that has since dissipated. Rather than worrying about how to get the third world "affluence stupid" we could train ourselves to be more conscious of quality rather than branding.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
You never want to see any police force turn violent, but even domestic police have to do so with alarming regularity. There have been sitting mayors in the US who were arrested while in office, I don't see why your hypothetical mayor may not be treated the same way. To be honest, if we had this sort of multinational agency and everyone is signed onto it, I don't really see where you would need to draw the line. Anyone who doesn't want to be arrested just needs to not pirate. Anyone who doesn't want to be subject to force just needs to cooperate when arrested.
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.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world
In my ideal world dogs shit ice cream. Not going to happen anytime soon.
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.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world
In my ideal world dogs shit ice cream. Not going to happen anytime soon.
I still don't know if I'd want to eat that...
But a world where governments say "Yes, we will strictly enforce the international treaties to which we agreed" is a lot more doable than Dairy Queen Poodles.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
I'm sure their giant piles of money will help them... oh wait, they don't have feelings because they're not actual people. And the executives don't care because they're making money hand over fist, and the shareholders would lose far more because of the exorbitant cost of enforcement
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
I'm sure their giant piles of money will help them... oh wait, they don't have feelings because they're not actual people. And the executives don't care because they're making money hand over fist, and the shareholders would lose far more because of the exorbitant cost of enforcement
Why does everything need to be about class warfare? I don't think there is a class undertone here at all. IP infringement hurts the first world IP creation industries which are key components of all of their economies and employ many many employees.
Well, when your rallying cry is "make the poors pay their share" it kinda already is
No, I am saying that being poor doesn't exempt you from the law. That is quite different, I think. Need does not create entitlement, no matter how sympathetic.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
I'm sure their giant piles of money will help them... oh wait, they don't have feelings because they're not actual people. And the executives don't care because they're making money hand over fist, and the shareholders would lose far more because of the exorbitant cost of enforcement
Why does everything need to be about class warfare? I don't think there is a class undertone here at all. IP infringement hurts the first world IP creation industries which are key components of all of their economies and employ many many employees.
Class warfare is intertwined into human society and big business. You can't avoid it. IP's are a field that is deeply entrenched into subject on a worldwide scale.
Well they wouldn't be policing America obviously. Its those thieving African nations that are the problem!
Well, that solves the problem. Until the mayor of Cairo politely informs Interpol, acting on behalf of MGM, politely tells them to eat a dick when they try and arrest some pirate graduate student in an Egyptian university.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
You never want to see any police force turn violent, but even domestic police have to do so with alarming regularity. There have been sitting mayors in the US who were arrested while in office, I don't see why your hypothetical mayor may not be treated the same way. To be honest, if we had this sort of multinational agency and everyone is signed onto it, I don't really see where you would need to draw the line. Anyone who doesn't want to be arrested just needs to not pirate. Anyone who doesn't want to be subject to force just needs to cooperate when arrested.
That doesn't seem like an actual answer, even for this fictional, already unfeasible scenario: Those mayors--and government officials--were arrested on orders of an American government, federal or otherwise. Because if they weren't--and they were arrest for a crime comparable to foreign IP violation--please tell me. Countries arrest their own nationals. This is not new. They have since the rise of the nation-state. Have any of those sitting American mayors been arrested at the behest of entities, public or private, of another nation for any reason? And painlessly handed over? Because that example seems to offer a big reason why my hypothetical mayor, in your hypothetical world, wouldn't be treated that way. Or for that matter, why plenty of domestic violators of foreign IP laws would be ignored by domestic law agencies whose responsibility is to their own countrymen, not to some foreign corporation that may or may not be covered an economic treaty.
Sometimes criminals are extradited. And sometimes they're not. We have a great many cases where multiple governments have plainly refused to release their nationals--or for that matter, foreign nationals--to a foreign government. In the face of much stronger arguments--national security, crimes against humanity and treason--than "violation of IP law." I can write a giant check to New Tang Dynasty Television, a real life propaganda arm/TV channel of the Falun Gong, against the wishes of the sovereign government of 1.3 billion people, and show it to American government officials, and they won't give a shit. Who in their right mind would care about some other country's IP laws? Is such a hypothetical world entirely dependent on a coexisting hypothetical world where Interpol is full of supermen, or domestic police don't act like any counterparts in reality?
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SmasherStarting to get dizzyRegistered Userregular
One of the results of the laws of physics in our universe is that, generally and simplistically speaking, two people can't make full use of one physical object. Two people can't eat the same apple unless they split it in half (in which case neither of them eats as much as if they'd had the whole apple), two people can't use the same car at the same time to go different places, and in general a transfer of an item from one person to another results in the first person losing the use of that item.
To prevent people from stealing from each other all the time we've come up with the concept of property, where any given object has an owner who has full legal control over that object granted to them by the government. When combined with capitalism (which allows for the transfer of an item's control for money) and government enforcement of property rights this system works reasonably well (though certainly not perfectly) for providing a fair distribution of items.
Content however is not subject to the same physical limitations that material objects are. If I communicate content to someone else I don't lose the knowledge of that content or have a reduced ability to use it. Thus the rationale for the notion of property rights, which works for material objects, doesn't apply to content. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's no reasoning allowing the restriction of the distribution of content, and indeed there is, but it's not property rights.
Creating good content (whether inventions, books, songs, movies, etc.) is generally beneficial to society for obvious reasons and thus is an activity that should be encouraged. However, it takes time and effort to create these things, which is time and effort that's not spent doing other things to support the creator.
If there were no protection for content those creators wouldn't be able to make money off it, as the content could be distributed for free and most people would opt not to pay the creator (or not even know who they were). To allow people to make content professionally society gives them the exclusive right to distribute that content for some period of time. This allows people with the talent to come up with that content to do so full-time, thus being able to come up with more of it than they could if they could only focus on it part-time, which in turn benefits society more.
The common term for that is "Intellectual Property", but I think that's a highly misleading term and doesn't reflect the true reasoning behind the concept. In my opinion a better term would be "Exclusive Distribution Rights" (EDR).
So how does all that apply to the main line of argument in this thread?
Common sense dictates that even though nations have no jurisdiction over each other a natural extension of property rights applies to them as well, with each nation owning everything that lies within its borders. If one nation tries to take material objects from another nation without permission the first nation has a range of options extending from doing nothing to declaring war.
However, if we stop using the loaded phrase IP and instead use EDR it becomes clear that the first nation has no rights to control distribution of content in other nations to begin with. The first nation isn't losing content when it moves to the second nation, so property rights don't apply, and EDR is not a natural right but instead a created one adopted or not by each nation at its own discretion. A content creator can seek EDR in other countries individually, or two countries can recognize each other's EDR by treaty, but a nation has no obligation to establish its own EDR or recognize the EDR granted by other nations without such a treaty.
e: Fixed terminology (Idea->Content)
I disagree with this post in the strongest terms possible. I do not agree that there is such a thing as a "natural right" (what possible meaning is there to a right which is "natural" but not recognized by your government?).
If there were a global apocalypse and only two people were left there would no longer be any government. Let's assume they're both the same sex so there's no possibility of repopulating humanity. Do you think it would be OK for one of them to kill the other for no particular reason? If not, why not if there aren't any natural rights?
More importantly, I disagree with your physical/concept distinction based on the ability to consume the good. 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. Using my IP without my permission is similarly a violation of my exclusive right of control. I have rights in my home because I built or purchased it. You do not because you did neither. I have exclusive rights over my IP because I created or purchased it. You do not because you did neither.
Your consumption approach is also wrong because, unlike a single apple where the value is in that limited matter making up the apple, if I can produce an indefinite amount of physical goods based on my IP, then you have taken the value of my IP from me when you decrease my potential market by making one of the IP based goods that I sell just as completely as you would take value from my apple by taking a bite.
The state grants the exclusive control of private property for a combination of reasons such as privacy, prevention of accumulated wear and tear from a bunch of people walking through your house, and easier enforcement of laws such as those against property damage and theft. The exclusive control is a mechanism, a means to an end rather than an end to itself. If a bunch of invisible ghosts flew around your house but couldn't see you or any private information would you really have been wronged?
Privacy doesn't apply to content because you're intending to distribute it anyway, content (as opposed to the medium it's stored on) doesn't suffer wear and tear or damage, and as I mentioned earlier duplicating content doesn't deprive you of your use of it.
There's no natural right to control a given market; if you have an apple farm and then I start up another one I'm decreasing your potential market in just the same way as if I started making and selling copies of a book you'd written, yet the former is clearly legal and ethical. The reason the latter is illegal is to reward and incentivize creation of content, and is a matter to be enforced internally or not as each government decides.
The best long-term solution to unlicensed foreign content is simply reducing global inequality. As poorer nations (hopefully) become wealthier their citizens will gain the ability to afford and produce content on their own, at which point they'll develop copyright laws of their own. They'll want other countries to respect their copyright, so they'll make treaties like the wealthier countries have done and the "problem" you seem to care so much about will fade away.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
well, humanity is condemned to suffer. Here's your share.
I think spacekungfuman is more about principles than benefit in this case. That something is impractical and costly doesn't change that the IPs must be protected. They have a higher priority than profit. Right?
Of course, it would be even better to guard the sanctity of IP and make a profit at the same time.
I think spacekungfuman is more about principles than benefit in this case.
It's what he's always about when it wouldn't negatively affect him.
America is killing thousands/millions for the benefit of rich Americans? Hey the American government is obliged to kill anyone it takes if it results in even the slightest improvement for America.
A third world country manufactures drugs to treat AIDS because their people are dying from it in droves and drug companies refuse to sell at a price they can afford? Send in the drones.
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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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
If it is impossible for a company to establish a "virgin" marketplace, change the strategy. Adapt.
If you have to make serious changes to account for rampant illegal activity, then the regulatory authorities have failed. Full stop. The whole point of having them is supposed to be to create a baseline assumption of lawful activity.
You said that need creates entitlement to the property of others. I want to know how far you will go with that.
Your egotisical views about my family and the entitlements that we have gotten are nothing less that downright disgusting. You are not interested in debating but rather in taking pot shots at something which your mind cannot grasp. That is no fault of my own and your condition is not my concern.
However, I will entertain your egotistical fantasy on "need creates entitlement".
It certain does when American companies, such as the Pharmaceutical companies, go into the third world, corrupt the systems in place, and then claim that their products are being infringed upon and huff and puff about it.
Frankly if this isn't Neo-Colonialism then I do not know what is.
When it comes to stealing to intellectual, medical, or any other such knowledge which is clearly stolen from natives by American or even "Western" companies then there is a need to steal or infringe on the IP of companies to take back what was theirs regardless of whether or not they put, time, money, or effort into it.
For your analogy if I have a car and you come and steal it, take it to your country, rebrand and register it for your IP and create improvements or whatever on it I still own the car regardless of whatever you've done to it. If I decide that your country doesn't support the Global south from succeeding on their own terms then I have full rights to remake that car and sell it as my own cheaper alternative.
You have a problem with that? Then make your Pharmaceutical companies stick to their own borders and don't try to colonize the world once again. As a citizen of a nation which came under Western colonization once, any actions taken to stick these colonizers get my support, regardless of what it is be it movies, medicinal drugs or handbags.
I am not sure that I follow what you are saying here. If I grow corn, then you see my corn, think its a good idea and start growing it, there is no problem, because you don't own the rights to all corn. Now, if I go home and put the work into learning to make a medicine by isolating a special property of corn, synthesizing that molecule, running tests on it, etc., I own the work I did and the process, even though I don't own corn. If I go and start selli gbthe drug to you, how have you been stolen from? You still have your corn. You can still eat it. If you had a folk remedy based on the corn, you are still free to use that. But if you want my synthetic corn wonder drug, you need to pay me. What is the problem here?
Also, I still don't understand what any of this has to do with need creating entitlement.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Well they wouldn't be policing America obviously. Its those thieving African nations that are the problem!
Well, that solves the problem. Until the mayor of Cairo politely informs Interpol, acting on behalf of MGM, politely tells them to eat a dick when they try and arrest some pirate graduate student in an Egyptian university.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
You never want to see any police force turn violent, but even domestic police have to do so with alarming regularity. There have been sitting mayors in the US who were arrested while in office, I don't see why your hypothetical mayor may not be treated the same way. To be honest, if we had this sort of multinational agency and everyone is signed onto it, I don't really see where you would need to draw the line. Anyone who doesn't want to be arrested just needs to not pirate. Anyone who doesn't want to be subject to force just needs to cooperate when arrested.
That doesn't seem like an actual answer, even for this fictional, already unfeasible scenario: Those mayors--and government officials--were arrested on orders of an American government, federal or otherwise. Because if they weren't--and they were arrest for a crime comparable to foreign IP violation--please tell me. Countries arrest their own nationals. This is not new. They have since the rise of the nation-state. Have any of those sitting American mayors been arrested at the behest of entities, public or private, of another nation for any reason? And painlessly handed over? Because that example seems to offer a big reason why my hypothetical mayor, in your hypothetical world, wouldn't be treated that way. Or for that matter, why plenty of domestic violators of foreign IP laws would be ignored by domestic law agencies whose responsibility is to their own countrymen, not to some foreign corporation that may or may not be covered an economic treaty.
Sometimes criminals are extradited. And sometimes they're not. We have a great many cases where multiple governments have plainly refused to release their nationals--or for that matter, foreign nationals--to a foreign government. In the face of much stronger arguments--national security, crimes against humanity and treason--than "violation of IP law." I can write a giant check to New Tang Dynasty Television, a real life propaganda arm/TV channel of the Falun Gong, against the wishes of the sovereign government of 1.3 billion people, and show it to American government officials, and they won't give a shit. Who in their right mind would care about some other country's IP laws? Is such a hypothetical world entirely dependent on a coexisting hypothetical world where Interpol is full of supermen, or domestic police don't act like any counterparts in reality?
I don't understand why you are positing a hypothetical multinational police force, which every country signs into, and then assuming that these countries will reject its legitimacy. The whole point of the hypothetical is that everyone has agreed to it.
One of the results of the laws of physics in our universe is that, generally and simplistically speaking, two people can't make full use of one physical object. Two people can't eat the same apple unless they split it in half (in which case neither of them eats as much as if they'd had the whole apple), two people can't use the same car at the same time to go different places, and in general a transfer of an item from one person to another results in the first person losing the use of that item.
To prevent people from stealing from each other all the time we've come up with the concept of property, where any given object has an owner who has full legal control over that object granted to them by the government. When combined with capitalism (which allows for the transfer of an item's control for money) and government enforcement of property rights this system works reasonably well (though certainly not perfectly) for providing a fair distribution of items.
Content however is not subject to the same physical limitations that material objects are. If I communicate content to someone else I don't lose the knowledge of that content or have a reduced ability to use it. Thus the rationale for the notion of property rights, which works for material objects, doesn't apply to content. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's no reasoning allowing the restriction of the distribution of content, and indeed there is, but it's not property rights.
Creating good content (whether inventions, books, songs, movies, etc.) is generally beneficial to society for obvious reasons and thus is an activity that should be encouraged. However, it takes time and effort to create these things, which is time and effort that's not spent doing other things to support the creator.
If there were no protection for content those creators wouldn't be able to make money off it, as the content could be distributed for free and most people would opt not to pay the creator (or not even know who they were). To allow people to make content professionally society gives them the exclusive right to distribute that content for some period of time. This allows people with the talent to come up with that content to do so full-time, thus being able to come up with more of it than they could if they could only focus on it part-time, which in turn benefits society more.
The common term for that is "Intellectual Property", but I think that's a highly misleading term and doesn't reflect the true reasoning behind the concept. In my opinion a better term would be "Exclusive Distribution Rights" (EDR).
So how does all that apply to the main line of argument in this thread?
Common sense dictates that even though nations have no jurisdiction over each other a natural extension of property rights applies to them as well, with each nation owning everything that lies within its borders. If one nation tries to take material objects from another nation without permission the first nation has a range of options extending from doing nothing to declaring war.
However, if we stop using the loaded phrase IP and instead use EDR it becomes clear that the first nation has no rights to control distribution of content in other nations to begin with. The first nation isn't losing content when it moves to the second nation, so property rights don't apply, and EDR is not a natural right but instead a created one adopted or not by each nation at its own discretion. A content creator can seek EDR in other countries individually, or two countries can recognize each other's EDR by treaty, but a nation has no obligation to establish its own EDR or recognize the EDR granted by other nations without such a treaty.
e: Fixed terminology (Idea->Content)
I disagree with this post in the strongest terms possible. I do not agree that there is such a thing as a "natural right" (what possible meaning is there to a right which is "natural" but not recognized by your government?).
If there were a global apocalypse and only two people were left there would no longer be any government. Let's assume they're both the same sex so there's no possibility of repopulating humanity. Do you think it would be OK for one of them to kill the other for no particular reason? If not, why not if there aren't any natural rights?
More importantly, I disagree with your physical/concept distinction based on the ability to consume the good. 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. Using my IP without my permission is similarly a violation of my exclusive right of control. I have rights in my home because I built or purchased it. You do not because you did neither. I have exclusive rights over my IP because I created or purchased it. You do not because you did neither.
Your consumption approach is also wrong because, unlike a single apple where the value is in that limited matter making up the apple, if I can produce an indefinite amount of physical goods based on my IP, then you have taken the value of my IP from me when you decrease my potential market by making one of the IP based goods that I sell just as completely as you would take value from my apple by taking a bite.
The state grants the exclusive control of private property for a combination of reasons such as privacy, prevention of accumulated wear and tear from a bunch of people walking through your house, and easier enforcement of laws such as those against property damage and theft. The exclusive control is a mechanism, a means to an end rather than an end to itself. If a bunch of invisible ghosts flew around your house but couldn't see you or any private information would you really have been wronged?
Privacy doesn't apply to content because you're intending to distribute it anyway, content (as opposed to the medium it's stored on) doesn't suffer wear and tear or damage, and as I mentioned earlier duplicating content doesn't deprive you of your use of it.
There's no natural right to control a given market; if you have an apple farm and then I start up another one I'm decreasing your potential market in just the same way as if I started making and selling copies of a book you'd written, yet the former is clearly legal and ethical. The reason the latter is illegal is to reward and incentivize creation of content, and is a matter to be enforced internally or not as each government decides.
The best long-term solution to unlicensed foreign content is simply reducing global inequality. As poorer nations (hopefully) become wealthier their citizens will gain the ability to afford and produce content on their own, at which point they'll develop copyright laws of their own. They'll want other countries to respect their copyright, so they'll make treaties like the wealthier countries have done and the "problem" you seem to care so much about will fade away.
There would be no obligation not to kill the other man. What would that even mean? The whole reason prohibitions on killing are so universal is that we don't want to spend our whole lives watching our backs. Doesn't apply here, because once you kill the other man, there is no one left to follow the precedent.
I would object equally to the ghosts trespassing as I would people.
I disagree that property rights are just about privacy. I think they are about making sure that the work you do is not taken from you, since choosing work instead of leisure is a net negative in most cases. If I put the work into building a house and you take its use from me, then you have stolen the time I put into building it. Without robust property rights, I am stuck in a self help situation, sitting in my booby trapped house with a shotgun to keep would be interlopers from taking what is mine, which is terribly inefficient.
I think IP is identical. You are free to compete with me based on your own labor, and that is fine, but you can't just take my labor and compete against me. It wrongs me in that you take my time/invalidate my choice of how to use my time/take my freedom to choose work or play (I.e., enslave me). It's the difference between growing your own apes to sell vs sneaking onto my orchard, stealing some apples that I was not going to sell for whatever reason, and then selling them for less than I do, because you have no costs to account for.
The fixation of your peculiar, foreign country with taking a medicine (which is a processed product, not unlike steel which AFAIK does not have IP protection) and stamping a label that says "only I can create this even if you know how to do it" is both confusing and meaningless to a guy in Africa. What you are asking to do is to be able to enforce American law wherever you like, which in a world of supposedly sovereign nations is impossible.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I think spacekungfuman is more about principles than benefit in this case.
It's what he's always about when it wouldn't negatively affect him.
America is killing thousands/millions for the benefit of rich Americans? Hey the American government is obliged to kill anyone it takes if it results in even the slightest improvement for America.
A third world country manufactures drugs to treat AIDS because their people are dying from it in droves and drug companies refuse to sell at a price they can afford? Send in the drones.
I can only take your refusal to time down the hyperbole as a refusal to engage in good faith, but I will still respond.
I believe every nation is obliged to advance the interests of its citizens and its citizens alone. For a powerful nation, that may well mean imposing sanctions and requirements on other, weaker nations. For a weaker nation, it may well mean getting away with what they can, but once their stronger neighbor takes notice? They can only push to the extent they have the power to do so. I don't think any government has any obligation to (or even the right to) put other nations' citizens ahead of its own, but that doesn't mean that a weaker nation has a right to force those interests on a stronger country. Sovreign rights end at the point where a stronger sovereign's exist.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
That's a risk that a company accepts when they choose that particular strategy. There are benefits and costs to both methods of introduction.
I already pointed out that - in many cases - drug companies wait to enter particular markets (US, Japan, EU are the big ones) until after the product is established in one market. Translating from T4 to Population is an expensive, lengthy, and difficult step, and while some of the steps overlap between the FDA, EMEA, and Japanese Ministry of Health, you basically need to do the same thing three times over if you are introducing a new drug.
If your drug is already established in one population though, it becomes MUCH easier to pass the EMEA, Japanese MoH, or any of a hundred other countries versions of the FDA's approval process. And yes, even India and China have regulatory processes that need to be passed.
When a company chooses to save money by delaying entry into one market, they are making an informed choice to do so. The amount of money it would cost them to enter that market at each point, vs. projected profits, vs. potential losses due to timing, are all something their business should (and generally do) consider. Potential losses due to IP theft are one line on a balance sheet - somewhere around 'transportation damages', 'manufacturing QA' and 'shrinkage'.
Companies are always happy to privatize profits but socialize risks. They never, ever, want to accept the consequences of their actions, even when those consequences are known ahead of time. This is no different - if a company makes a choice to act in a way that knowingly encourages / promotes IP theft, I'm not going to cry about the profits they supposedly lose.
If their projections are wrong? Well, that's on them. Price of doing business. Explain it to your board and shareholders.
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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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
That's a risk that a company accepts when they choose that particular strategy. There are benefits and costs to both methods of introduction.
I already pointed out that - in many cases - drug companies wait to enter particular markets (US, Japan, EU are the big ones) until after the product is established in one market. Translating from T4 to Population is an expensive, lengthy, and difficult step, and while some of the steps overlap between the FDA, EMEA, and Japanese Ministry of Health, you basically need to do the same thing three times over if you are introducing a new drug.
If your drug is already established in one population though, it becomes MUCH easier to pass the EMEA, Japanese MoH, or any of a hundred other countries versions of the FDA's approval process. And yes, even India and China have regulatory processes that need to be passed.
When a company chooses to save money by delaying entry into one market, they are making an informed choice to do so. The amount of money it would cost them to enter that market at each point, vs. projected profits, vs. potential losses due to timing, are all something their business should (and generally do) consider. Potential losses due to IP theft are one line on a balance sheet - somewhere around 'transportation damages', 'manufacturing QA' and 'shrinkage'.
Companies are always happy to privatize profits but socialize risks. They never, ever, want to accept the consequences of their actions, even when those consequences are known ahead of time. This is no different - if a company makes a choice to act in a way that knowingly encourages / promotes IP theft, I'm not going to cry about the profits they supposedly lose.
If their projections are wrong? Well, that's on them. Price of doing business. Explain it to your board and shareholders.
I agree on the economics of the choice, but isn't it a serious regulatory failure that we should even need to account for illegal activity like this in our calculus?
No, it is not a serious regulatory failure that we need to account for this sort of illegal activity.
It is a choice that has been made because it is one of the best options. You can't have your cake and eat it too. America cannot demand 100% effective international enforcement and also not be beholden to any enforcement.
So, we deal with some amount of piracy.
The only reason you see it as a serious failure is this odd insistence that America needing to choose between two options is anathema.
If the government has to protect the interests of its citizens then I'd rather it spends money on universal healthcare and other important social services instead of policing bootleg handbags.
If the government does not have to protect the interest of its citizens, then that is the corporation's problems. If asking for universal healthcare is communism, entitlement and God knows what else then using public funds and organisms to serve corporations (up to military intervention!) should be much worse.
I mean, if we talk military intervention, how is it right for a government to risk its citizen's lifes in order to allow other citizens to make some more profit?
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
That's a risk that a company accepts when they choose that particular strategy. There are benefits and costs to both methods of introduction.
I already pointed out that - in many cases - drug companies wait to enter particular markets (US, Japan, EU are the big ones) until after the product is established in one market. Translating from T4 to Population is an expensive, lengthy, and difficult step, and while some of the steps overlap between the FDA, EMEA, and Japanese Ministry of Health, you basically need to do the same thing three times over if you are introducing a new drug.
If your drug is already established in one population though, it becomes MUCH easier to pass the EMEA, Japanese MoH, or any of a hundred other countries versions of the FDA's approval process. And yes, even India and China have regulatory processes that need to be passed.
When a company chooses to save money by delaying entry into one market, they are making an informed choice to do so. The amount of money it would cost them to enter that market at each point, vs. projected profits, vs. potential losses due to timing, are all something their business should (and generally do) consider. Potential losses due to IP theft are one line on a balance sheet - somewhere around 'transportation damages', 'manufacturing QA' and 'shrinkage'.
Companies are always happy to privatize profits but socialize risks. They never, ever, want to accept the consequences of their actions, even when those consequences are known ahead of time. This is no different - if a company makes a choice to act in a way that knowingly encourages / promotes IP theft, I'm not going to cry about the profits they supposedly lose.
If their projections are wrong? Well, that's on them. Price of doing business. Explain it to your board and shareholders.
I agree on the economics of the choice, but isn't it a serious regulatory failure that we should even need to account for illegal activity like this in our calculus?
No.
It's another consideration businesses need to make, that's all. Every single business has to consider for activity like this in one way or another.
Retail stores need to consider into their bottom line a given amount of shrinkage in their inventory. That loss ranges from damaged goods to inventory mistakes to (usually primarily) shoplifting / theft.
Farmers usually have to pay for frost / hail insurance, or risk losing an entire crop if bad weather strikes.
Manufacturing has to account for a given number of defects in the manufacturing process. It also needs to consider in it's bottom line a given amount of settlement / legal fees / damages for injuries / deaths that result from those defects.
Hell, every business needs to consider a given amount of their employee's time will be wasted on activity that doesn't benefit the business.
This is literally the price of doing business. We don't live in a perfect world, and not every consideration can or should be regulated and fully preventable. Normally, the economics of preventing unwanted activity results in a certain amount of mitigation, and some acceptance.
In your proposal, instead of taking actions to mitigate unacceptable losses due to IP and accepting a given amount of IP theft is inevitable, businesses should socialize the costs of preventing IP theft - through government regulation, diplomatic pressures, and military action. Instead of privatizing the costs (instituting DRM, adding value to their 'legitimate' products, selling at a price point that allows them to utilize economies of scale to make IP theft uneconomical) they want someone else to deal with it for them.
I'll agree that a certain amount of IP theft should be mitigated socially as there are definitely societal benefits to having some IP rights that are enforced through law / regulation. Even some corporate profits are beneficial to society - but that doesn't extend to infinity. At the point, the returns on those costs are negligible to society as a whole or even become detrimental / negative. At that point, the onus should be on business to either assume those costs themselves or find a way to cope / mitigate them. Corporate profits are only - to a certain point - beneficial to society. If that means not entering certain markets, so be it.
Well they wouldn't be policing America obviously. Its those thieving African nations that are the problem!
Well, that solves the problem. Until the mayor of Cairo politely informs Interpol, acting on behalf of MGM, politely tells them to eat a dick when they try and arrest some pirate graduate student in an Egyptian university.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
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?
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
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.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
You never want to see any police force turn violent, but even domestic police have to do so with alarming regularity. There have been sitting mayors in the US who were arrested while in office, I don't see why your hypothetical mayor may not be treated the same way. To be honest, if we had this sort of multinational agency and everyone is signed onto it, I don't really see where you would need to draw the line. Anyone who doesn't want to be arrested just needs to not pirate. Anyone who doesn't want to be subject to force just needs to cooperate when arrested.
That doesn't seem like an actual answer, even for this fictional, already unfeasible scenario: Those mayors--and government officials--were arrested on orders of an American government, federal or otherwise. Because if they weren't--and they were arrest for a crime comparable to foreign IP violation--please tell me. Countries arrest their own nationals. This is not new. They have since the rise of the nation-state. Have any of those sitting American mayors been arrested at the behest of entities, public or private, of another nation for any reason? And painlessly handed over? Because that example seems to offer a big reason why my hypothetical mayor, in your hypothetical world, wouldn't be treated that way. Or for that matter, why plenty of domestic violators of foreign IP laws would be ignored by domestic law agencies whose responsibility is to their own countrymen, not to some foreign corporation that may or may not be covered an economic treaty.
Sometimes criminals are extradited. And sometimes they're not. We have a great many cases where multiple governments have plainly refused to release their nationals--or for that matter, foreign nationals--to a foreign government. In the face of much stronger arguments--national security, crimes against humanity and treason--than "violation of IP law." I can write a giant check to New Tang Dynasty Television, a real life propaganda arm/TV channel of the Falun Gong, against the wishes of the sovereign government of 1.3 billion people, and show it to American government officials, and they won't give a shit. Who in their right mind would care about some other country's IP laws? Is such a hypothetical world entirely dependent on a coexisting hypothetical world where Interpol is full of supermen, or domestic police don't act like any counterparts in reality?
I don't understand why you are positing a hypothetical multinational police force, which every country signs into, and then assuming that these countries will reject its legitimacy. The whole point of the hypothetical is that everyone has agreed to it.
So--and I'm not trying to put to put words in your mouth--but the only way this would be remotely feasible is:
1) All countries agreed that foreign IP law would be worth protecting, when they can't agree on things like nuclear nonproliferation or climate change or the safety of the human species.
2) All countries start respecting the laws of other, distant countries--for that matter, occasional vague, frequently changing laws--when they actually prefer to flagrant violate other country's laws for social and political reasons, as well as those of convenience, and will sometimes actually go out of their way to do so.
Neither of which seems even remotely possible. The ideal world isn't dependent on just one "miracle", it's dependent on two (or more) unrelated miracles.
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You said that need creates entitlement to the property of others. I want to know how far you will go with that.
I'm pretty sure its a violation of international law, to the extent it exists in this area, to recede engineer drugs, and if these countries want to permit such actions, I see no reason that we should enable this. In my ideal world, we would have a very strong multinational IP enforcement organization that would have the power to unilaterally root out these abuses, but that is obviously not going to happen.
If Chinese audiences sort around a digital copy of Nixon so they don't need to order or rent a DVD to watch it, it's a travesty and Oliver Stone is at their mercy. But if American audiences sort around copies of Red Cliff so they don't need to buy them, it's just...fine, and nothing bad is happening to John Woo?
Okay, it's probably a case of neglect and disinterest so much as outright racism. "That's China's problem," etc.
At the risk of mimicry--how far would you go with that? In your ideal word, I mean, in the face of refusal to comply from a populous country with some or more economic clout?
Loss of favorable nation status? Economic sanctions? A naval blockade? Invasion and occupation?
Citation needed.
Unless you have information i don't, 'discounts' are never offered by drug manufacturers, even when selling to developing nations. Gilead Science (manufacturer of Atripla), for example, reviews what the 'market' will bear in a target country (what they could reasonably hope to squeeze out of the local government, because they couldn't hope to sell the drugs in a traditional off-the-shelf fashion) and then goes to the American government and haggles for subsidy to cover the standard cost for the drug (they sell it for about $24,000.00 per yearly dose on the American market), pocket the subsidy and then go to arrange some sort of credit agreement with either a state actor or an NGO.
I mean, if you want to talk about how it's unfair for a entertainer to have their content stolen, depriving them of a living, or even how it's unfair to have luxury designer goods stolen, that's one thing. Nobody is going to die if they don't get to watch a bootlegged copy of Battleship or a knock-off Gucci watch. But a lot of people will most certainly die if they don't receive a daily tablet that does the same thing Atripla does, and those people have no money to pay you with.
then the gains from compliance are also small, since (as you have defined) the area is a small trade partner for the first world anyway
so if the costs are still non-negligible, then the temptation to ignore the embargo is very large.
I don't know how to tell you this, but 'international law' is almost never respected in any arena, especially by America. Brazil breaks patents law, America violates foreign sovereignty & the Geneva convention. Two way street (with America getting the more favorable side of that street).
And of course that 'ideal' police force is not something that will ever happen, because the whole idea of a police force is that it's a third party with overwhelming force at it's disposal and (ideally) no interests outside of enforcing the law. You'd need to do something like hand over America's military command & assets to a multinational body and say, "Police the world. And that includes us,"
Moreover, why fix what isn't even broken? The trade agreement mechanism we have are working as intended, and companies are making money hand over fist - especially American companies - despite however lax you think IP enforcement is. What if you went to 'fix' the non-problem and caused more harm than good? What's the supposed benefit to your 'ideal system'?
What if you want to maintain a virgin marketplace for your product in the future, when it has developed? Even if I can't make money selling Gucci handbags in Chad now, it doesn't mean that I want my logo so diluted that when they do become affluent, they aren't willing to pay my prices because they are used to buying knock offs for $10. Maybe hand bags aren't the best example, but what about drugs or DVDs?
I'm honestly not sure. If there was an international IP police force, I suppose arrests would be appropriate. Never invasion and occupation though.
Sure, I would. That doesn't mean the police would be wrong to arrest me.
The benefit of my ideal would be wider markets (both in the future and now) for legitimate products. Even if 1/10th of all spending on pirated goods was exchanged for legitimate goods, that would be a huge boon to IP creators. It would also incentivize the creation of products for regions like China and India, which are often ignored now despite their size because of piracy.
If it is impossible for a company to establish a "virgin" marketplace, change the strategy. Adapt.
So we're clear on the language: the benefit would be that companies already making a lot of money would be able to make even more money. That's what you mean by 'wider market', correct?
And I'm not sure what you mean by, "creation of products for regions like China and India," ? Again, do you not understand how ridiculously racist you sound when you say things like that?
affluency entails a domestic interest in intellectual property, no?
A person who has lived life close to the bone for a while will laugh at a $200 handbag. After all, their cousin down the street is the one who stitches them up and the raw materials aren't worth spit. Certainly, one of the fringe benefits of the Great Depression was a quality consciousness in the American buying public that has since dissipated. Rather than worrying about how to get the third world "affluence stupid" we could train ourselves to be more conscious of quality rather than branding.
I would really like to pursue this line of thought. I already mentioned Interpol (and Lupin III) at the beginning of this thread--what happens when a local government flat-out informs Interpol that they are not going to leave with a reasonable, clean-cut, telegenic young person who they've arrested for hosting a website that distributes foreign movies to his or her countrymen (well, let's be real--him, they'd probably think more than twice before arresting a woman in a foreign country for reasons to follow).
What happens if its Johnny from down the street, who graduated from MIT on a scholarship, promotes open-source, Linux, and other non-negative nerdy crap, who takes care of his single mother. What happens when Interpol agents arrest him at the behest of the Beijing Film Group for helping to distribute a Chinese blockbuster to, say, three million viewers who didn't pay for it. And what happens when the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, very plainly informs the 3 or 5 or 10 Interpol agents, in the middle of an election season, that Johnny doesn't owe the Chinese shit, and certainly isn't going to jail for doing something on a computer to a movie the honorable mayor never heard of--and uses physical means to plainly stop those Interpol operatives from going anywhere with Johnny--not legal, obviously, easily within the powers of a high city official.
How does that end? Is there any answer besides, "With the Interpol agents watching 100 local police form a human barrier around Johnny, and his computer, until they give up."? If there is, I absolutely would like to hear it.
"That won't always happen," isn't an answer. I expect it'll only take one time, that doesn't even end in violence, to make a complete mockery out of the enforcement capabilities of the police organization in question.
And continue to hire IP creators and people in marketing and distribution, etc. IP creation is so critical to the US that I think it is totally reasonable to take efforts to protect the field.
Right now, major markets like China are often ignored by major companies (or don't get products released until years after their introduction in other countries) because you can't sell in those markets with pirates as competition. Enhance IP enforcement, and you turn those into viable markets.
Small comfort to the multinationals whose brands have been devalued by piracy in the markets.
You never want to see any police force turn violent, but even domestic police have to do so with alarming regularity. There have been sitting mayors in the US who were arrested while in office, I don't see why your hypothetical mayor may not be treated the same way. To be honest, if we had this sort of multinational agency and everyone is signed onto it, I don't really see where you would need to draw the line. Anyone who doesn't want to be arrested just needs to not pirate. Anyone who doesn't want to be subject to force just needs to cooperate when arrested.
In my ideal world dogs shit ice cream. Not going to happen anytime soon.
I still don't know if I'd want to eat that...
But a world where governments say "Yes, we will strictly enforce the international treaties to which we agreed" is a lot more doable than Dairy Queen Poodles.
I'm sure their giant piles of money will help them... oh wait, they don't have feelings because they're not actual people. And the executives don't care because they're making money hand over fist, and the shareholders would lose far more because of the exorbitant cost of enforcement
Why does everything need to be about class warfare? I don't think there is a class undertone here at all. IP infringement hurts the first world IP creation industries which are key components of all of their economies and employ many many employees.
No, I am saying that being poor doesn't exempt you from the law. That is quite different, I think. Need does not create entitlement, no matter how sympathetic.
Class warfare is intertwined into human society and big business. You can't avoid it. IP's are a field that is deeply entrenched into subject on a worldwide scale.
Well, that solves the problem. Until the mayor of Cairo politely informs Interpol, acting on behalf of MGM, politely tells them to eat a dick when they try and arrest some pirate graduate student in an Egyptian university.
That doesn't seem like an actual answer, even for this fictional, already unfeasible scenario: Those mayors--and government officials--were arrested on orders of an American government, federal or otherwise. Because if they weren't--and they were arrest for a crime comparable to foreign IP violation--please tell me. Countries arrest their own nationals. This is not new. They have since the rise of the nation-state. Have any of those sitting American mayors been arrested at the behest of entities, public or private, of another nation for any reason? And painlessly handed over? Because that example seems to offer a big reason why my hypothetical mayor, in your hypothetical world, wouldn't be treated that way. Or for that matter, why plenty of domestic violators of foreign IP laws would be ignored by domestic law agencies whose responsibility is to their own countrymen, not to some foreign corporation that may or may not be covered an economic treaty.
Sometimes criminals are extradited. And sometimes they're not. We have a great many cases where multiple governments have plainly refused to release their nationals--or for that matter, foreign nationals--to a foreign government. In the face of much stronger arguments--national security, crimes against humanity and treason--than "violation of IP law." I can write a giant check to New Tang Dynasty Television, a real life propaganda arm/TV channel of the Falun Gong, against the wishes of the sovereign government of 1.3 billion people, and show it to American government officials, and they won't give a shit. Who in their right mind would care about some other country's IP laws? Is such a hypothetical world entirely dependent on a coexisting hypothetical world where Interpol is full of supermen, or domestic police don't act like any counterparts in reality?
The state grants the exclusive control of private property for a combination of reasons such as privacy, prevention of accumulated wear and tear from a bunch of people walking through your house, and easier enforcement of laws such as those against property damage and theft. The exclusive control is a mechanism, a means to an end rather than an end to itself. If a bunch of invisible ghosts flew around your house but couldn't see you or any private information would you really have been wronged?
Privacy doesn't apply to content because you're intending to distribute it anyway, content (as opposed to the medium it's stored on) doesn't suffer wear and tear or damage, and as I mentioned earlier duplicating content doesn't deprive you of your use of it.
There's no natural right to control a given market; if you have an apple farm and then I start up another one I'm decreasing your potential market in just the same way as if I started making and selling copies of a book you'd written, yet the former is clearly legal and ethical. The reason the latter is illegal is to reward and incentivize creation of content, and is a matter to be enforced internally or not as each government decides.
The best long-term solution to unlicensed foreign content is simply reducing global inequality. As poorer nations (hopefully) become wealthier their citizens will gain the ability to afford and produce content on their own, at which point they'll develop copyright laws of their own. They'll want other countries to respect their copyright, so they'll make treaties like the wealthier countries have done and the "problem" you seem to care so much about will fade away.
well, humanity is condemned to suffer. Here's your share.
Of course, it would be even better to guard the sanctity of IP and make a profit at the same time.
It's what he's always about when it wouldn't negatively affect him.
America is killing thousands/millions for the benefit of rich Americans? Hey the American government is obliged to kill anyone it takes if it results in even the slightest improvement for America.
A third world country manufactures drugs to treat AIDS because their people are dying from it in droves and drug companies refuse to sell at a price they can afford? Send in the drones.
If you have to make serious changes to account for rampant illegal activity, then the regulatory authorities have failed. Full stop. The whole point of having them is supposed to be to create a baseline assumption of lawful activity.
I am not sure that I follow what you are saying here. If I grow corn, then you see my corn, think its a good idea and start growing it, there is no problem, because you don't own the rights to all corn. Now, if I go home and put the work into learning to make a medicine by isolating a special property of corn, synthesizing that molecule, running tests on it, etc., I own the work I did and the process, even though I don't own corn. If I go and start selli gbthe drug to you, how have you been stolen from? You still have your corn. You can still eat it. If you had a folk remedy based on the corn, you are still free to use that. But if you want my synthetic corn wonder drug, you need to pay me. What is the problem here?
Also, I still don't understand what any of this has to do with need creating entitlement.
I don't understand why you are positing a hypothetical multinational police force, which every country signs into, and then assuming that these countries will reject its legitimacy. The whole point of the hypothetical is that everyone has agreed to it.
There would be no obligation not to kill the other man. What would that even mean? The whole reason prohibitions on killing are so universal is that we don't want to spend our whole lives watching our backs. Doesn't apply here, because once you kill the other man, there is no one left to follow the precedent.
I would object equally to the ghosts trespassing as I would people.
I disagree that property rights are just about privacy. I think they are about making sure that the work you do is not taken from you, since choosing work instead of leisure is a net negative in most cases. If I put the work into building a house and you take its use from me, then you have stolen the time I put into building it. Without robust property rights, I am stuck in a self help situation, sitting in my booby trapped house with a shotgun to keep would be interlopers from taking what is mine, which is terribly inefficient.
I think IP is identical. You are free to compete with me based on your own labor, and that is fine, but you can't just take my labor and compete against me. It wrongs me in that you take my time/invalidate my choice of how to use my time/take my freedom to choose work or play (I.e., enslave me). It's the difference between growing your own apes to sell vs sneaking onto my orchard, stealing some apples that I was not going to sell for whatever reason, and then selling them for less than I do, because you have no costs to account for.
I can only take your refusal to time down the hyperbole as a refusal to engage in good faith, but I will still respond.
I believe every nation is obliged to advance the interests of its citizens and its citizens alone. For a powerful nation, that may well mean imposing sanctions and requirements on other, weaker nations. For a weaker nation, it may well mean getting away with what they can, but once their stronger neighbor takes notice? They can only push to the extent they have the power to do so. I don't think any government has any obligation to (or even the right to) put other nations' citizens ahead of its own, but that doesn't mean that a weaker nation has a right to force those interests on a stronger country. Sovreign rights end at the point where a stronger sovereign's exist.
That's a risk that a company accepts when they choose that particular strategy. There are benefits and costs to both methods of introduction.
I already pointed out that - in many cases - drug companies wait to enter particular markets (US, Japan, EU are the big ones) until after the product is established in one market. Translating from T4 to Population is an expensive, lengthy, and difficult step, and while some of the steps overlap between the FDA, EMEA, and Japanese Ministry of Health, you basically need to do the same thing three times over if you are introducing a new drug.
If your drug is already established in one population though, it becomes MUCH easier to pass the EMEA, Japanese MoH, or any of a hundred other countries versions of the FDA's approval process. And yes, even India and China have regulatory processes that need to be passed.
When a company chooses to save money by delaying entry into one market, they are making an informed choice to do so. The amount of money it would cost them to enter that market at each point, vs. projected profits, vs. potential losses due to timing, are all something their business should (and generally do) consider. Potential losses due to IP theft are one line on a balance sheet - somewhere around 'transportation damages', 'manufacturing QA' and 'shrinkage'.
Companies are always happy to privatize profits but socialize risks. They never, ever, want to accept the consequences of their actions, even when those consequences are known ahead of time. This is no different - if a company makes a choice to act in a way that knowingly encourages / promotes IP theft, I'm not going to cry about the profits they supposedly lose.
If their projections are wrong? Well, that's on them. Price of doing business. Explain it to your board and shareholders.
I agree on the economics of the choice, but isn't it a serious regulatory failure that we should even need to account for illegal activity like this in our calculus?
It is a choice that has been made because it is one of the best options. You can't have your cake and eat it too. America cannot demand 100% effective international enforcement and also not be beholden to any enforcement.
So, we deal with some amount of piracy.
The only reason you see it as a serious failure is this odd insistence that America needing to choose between two options is anathema.
If the government does not have to protect the interest of its citizens, then that is the corporation's problems. If asking for universal healthcare is communism, entitlement and God knows what else then using public funds and organisms to serve corporations (up to military intervention!) should be much worse.
I mean, if we talk military intervention, how is it right for a government to risk its citizen's lifes in order to allow other citizens to make some more profit?
No.
It's another consideration businesses need to make, that's all. Every single business has to consider for activity like this in one way or another.
Retail stores need to consider into their bottom line a given amount of shrinkage in their inventory. That loss ranges from damaged goods to inventory mistakes to (usually primarily) shoplifting / theft.
Farmers usually have to pay for frost / hail insurance, or risk losing an entire crop if bad weather strikes.
Manufacturing has to account for a given number of defects in the manufacturing process. It also needs to consider in it's bottom line a given amount of settlement / legal fees / damages for injuries / deaths that result from those defects.
Hell, every business needs to consider a given amount of their employee's time will be wasted on activity that doesn't benefit the business.
This is literally the price of doing business. We don't live in a perfect world, and not every consideration can or should be regulated and fully preventable. Normally, the economics of preventing unwanted activity results in a certain amount of mitigation, and some acceptance.
In your proposal, instead of taking actions to mitigate unacceptable losses due to IP and accepting a given amount of IP theft is inevitable, businesses should socialize the costs of preventing IP theft - through government regulation, diplomatic pressures, and military action. Instead of privatizing the costs (instituting DRM, adding value to their 'legitimate' products, selling at a price point that allows them to utilize economies of scale to make IP theft uneconomical) they want someone else to deal with it for them.
I'll agree that a certain amount of IP theft should be mitigated socially as there are definitely societal benefits to having some IP rights that are enforced through law / regulation. Even some corporate profits are beneficial to society - but that doesn't extend to infinity. At the point, the returns on those costs are negligible to society as a whole or even become detrimental / negative. At that point, the onus should be on business to either assume those costs themselves or find a way to cope / mitigate them. Corporate profits are only - to a certain point - beneficial to society. If that means not entering certain markets, so be it.
So--and I'm not trying to put to put words in your mouth--but the only way this would be remotely feasible is:
1) All countries agreed that foreign IP law would be worth protecting, when they can't agree on things like nuclear nonproliferation or climate change or the safety of the human species.
2) All countries start respecting the laws of other, distant countries--for that matter, occasional vague, frequently changing laws--when they actually prefer to flagrant violate other country's laws for social and political reasons, as well as those of convenience, and will sometimes actually go out of their way to do so.
Neither of which seems even remotely possible. The ideal world isn't dependent on just one "miracle", it's dependent on two (or more) unrelated miracles.