response 138 of 206:

Sep 21 23:14 UTC 2000

Let me rephrase my point from 129. I spoke incorrectly.

When you take something that you know does not belong to you, your reason for
taking it is moot to the debate as to whether or not you've committed a theft.
It will probably be relevant to the legal system's decision about how, and
how much, to punish you. Likewise, if you return the object after you're done
using it, that will probably also be taken into account.

That doesn't change the fact that taking a rowboat which does not belong to
you is theft, both legally and morally.

In the vernacular, "theft" is not defined in terms of the intent that the
individual had when taking or copying an item; theft is defined solely in
terms of perceived rights to ownership and use ("perceived" only to the extent
that if I have no reason to believe that the person who's offering something
for exchange, sale, or gift doesn't have the legal right to do so, I'm not
party to the crime involved). The primarylegal distinction between theft and
infringement is whether a tangible object is being illegally obtained (thus
depriving the rightful owner of use), which is "theft", or whether a copy of
something is being illegally produced and/or distributed (thus depriving the
owner of the right to copy as he/she sees fit -- hency "copyright"), which
is "infringement."

While there are many vagaries in intellectual property law when it concerns
portions of a copyrighted work, ideas inspired by a copyrighted work, and so
forth, there are no substantial vagaries when it comes to copying whole
copyrighted works. It should be noted that "copyrighted creatve works" is a
redundancy by American law -- all works of creative origin created in the past
75 years or so are legally protected by copyright law, and it is up to the
creator to decide to what extent the rights to copy shall be made available
to the general public, and for what compensation. Copyright holders are free
to sell those rights, to release works into the public domain, to give away
copies of their work but retain control over them, and so forth.

With regard to stolen goods and the purchase thereof, there are settings in
which one might suppose that the grand majority of items for sale or
distribution are illegally obtained, and settings in which one might suppose
that the grand majority of items for sale are legally optioned. For instance,
I would be less surprised to learn that the pawn shop on the corner is fencing
stolen goods than to learn that the Wards at the mall was, and even less
surprised to find out that the man in the trenchcoat on the corner offering
me brand new in the box Trinitrons for $100/pop was fencing.

The same goes for Napster. Yes, it would be cynical to assume that all MP3s
available via Napster were illegal. But, given that there are in fact websites
that do have legitimate contracts with artists and record companies to
distribute MP3s free of charge, there are more reliable ways to get copies
of less suspicious legality.

I don't think it would be economically feasible to fence CDs through used
record stores. I would assume that used CD stores of any reputation would be
suspicious if someone showed up with more than one, and certainly more than
three, copies of the same title, or with more than a dozen or so total CDs
less than a year old. It wouldn't be worth the risk.

Radio stations do sometimes dum their promotional copies into the used music
system, and that's technically illegal. I have quite a few "promotional
copies," and I'm prepared to hand them back if the record companies ever come
calling. Which they won't.

At any rate, though, it goes back to the issue of scale. There's no real
difference, legally speaking, between somebody making a Metallica MP3
available via Napster or somebody making a CD copy of a Metallica song for
all his friends. It's an issue of scale, though... it's much easier to make
many more illegal copies via Napster than via the Friends' Network or via
shoplifting/fencing.

response 140 of 206:

Sep 22 13:44 UTC 2000

Are you not depriving the owner of the boat of that boat for the time period
during which you are saving the drowning child? Is this deprivation not
non-consensual?

And, one more time, slowly for the reading impaired:

When you infringe upon a copyright, you are depriving the owner of that
copyrighted material of the right to decide how that material is to be
distributed.

The purpose of intellectual property law -- to provide a system for
stimulating original creative thought by rewarding that thought through social
recognition, fiscal compensation, and other means -- has not changed. Do you
suggest we abandon intellectual property law altogether?

There was a social experiment under which the concept of personal
accomplishment was abrogated in favor of making the "society" the owner of
creative works. The result? Creative production went down, and became
fossilized while the rest of the world moved forward. IT was one of many
components of the USSR's grand plans.

"Mandatory licensing" is one step towards that -- where it's the government,
not the creator, which dictates how a creative work is to be distributed. 

NOTHING prevents an artist from distributing an item for free. NOTHING. If
an artist signs their soul away to the RIAA, that's THEIR choice, not the
RIAA's. If an artist decides they never want to release another piece of music
to the public, and instead keep it in a vault private from everyone, that's
THEIR choice.

The choice MUST remain with the artist, or with the RIAA acting as an agent
of the artist. As non-sensical as those choices may seem to anyone else, we've
seen what happens when we go the other route. Y'all think "great music" is
being squealched by the RIAA? Let's go to socialized music (which is the
direction Russ is ultimately suggesting) and see what happens.

response 142 of 206:

Sep 22 15:43 UTC 2000

All healthy entities are self-serving.
It should be society's function to mitigate that innate egoism enough that
we build society without losing that egoism.

It is my opinion that the intent (if not the letter) of current intellectual
property law is to find such a balance between the good of the individual and
the good of the society.

It is my opinion that those who complain about the unfairness of the RIAA
would be best served finding something more constructive to do with their
time than bitch about not being able to get free music.

response 144 of 206:

Sep 22 18:59 UTC 2000

I would think not. It would go hard on you if you stole an ambulance 
even to help the victims of an accident. I think the issues would be
handled separately, in fact. You would have to answer to the theft.
Whatever you did as a "good Samaratin" would probably be considered
in the proceedings. It also depends on whether the owner of the property
you stole (boat, ambulance) wishes to prosecute. I don't think that
the law can punish someone for a theft unless the property owner
wishes to prosecute. 

response 146 of 206:

Sep 22 20:30 UTC 2000

I will suggest abandoning the current concept of "intellectual property". Not
because I don't think that creators of cool music or a Mr. Fusion home reactor
shouldn't be rewarded. But because enforcing it to any degree sufficient that
it not be a joke would require *huge* government - to which I am vehemently
opposed. Russ in #139, second paragraph made most of my thesis.

response 148 of 206:

Sep 22 21:40 UTC 2000

I had to sign one of those when I started working at the University.  Until I
quit, patent rights to any ideas I come up with belong to them.  It doesn't
matter whether I'm at work or on my own time when I come up with them.  I
understand this is pretty standard with a lot of companies, to the point
where you'd have a hard time getting employed if you didn't want to sign
away those rights.

response 150 of 206:

Sep 22 21:57 UTC 2000

        Yes.

response 152 of 206:

Sep 23 10:55 UTC 2000

Re 145.  Leaving aside everything else, I want to take issue with one
specific comment:

> The prisons are filled with people who think they were doing justified
> and even well-intentioned things that were nonetheless illegal.

I suppose this is metaphor, but it's not even vaguely, hand-wavingly close
to being true or valid in any sense of the word.  In fact, it is totally
ludicrous.

The prisons are full of armed robbers and drug users, murderers, rapists,
burglars, and other such conventional bad actors.

I don't know how many people are in prison for copyright infringement, but
I would guess it's fewer than 50 -- out of over a million in U.S. prisons
and jails.  Maybe it's in single digits.  But anyone who actually ends up
being imprisoned for infringement has done something egregious beyond
belief, and probably committed other crimes in the process.

Contrary to the impression given in the nearby zero-tolerance item, the
criminal justice system is capable of exercising a certain amount of
judgement.  The police have a certain amount of discretion to arrest or
not, the prosecutor has a certain amount of discretion whether to charge
or not (and with what), the judge and jury also play an important role.

Police and prosecutors and judges are very accustomed to seeing the same
kinds of predators and hard-luck cases day in and day out.  Armed robbers
and murderers and drug dealers and burglars and all the rest, people who
often seem to start behaving badly at a young age and escalate into repeat
criminal activity in their teens and 20s.  They never finished school, may
indeed be illiterate, are unable or unwilling to defer gratification,
place a shockingly low value on their own and others' lives, and don't
care about the impact of their actions on other people.

People who "do well-intentioned things which were nonetheless illegal" are
probably going to look very different from the typical offender.  As a
metter of practical reality, the system (already overburdened with plenty
of REALLY bad guys) is not going to be very interested in wasting its time
on them.

If someone took a rowboat in order to rescue a person from drowning, then
returned it, there are many reasons why he will not end up in prison:

     1.  The police are not going to arrest him.

     2.  The prosecutors are not going to charge him.

     3.  The judge is likely to throw out the charges.

     4.  The jury is likely to find him not guilty.

     5.  The judge is unlikely to sentence him to any jail time.

response 154 of 206:

Sep 23 11:12 UTC 2000

Not to be picky, but a huge % of those people in jail are indeed there
on drug related charges, & most of them probably probably would agree
that they were doing "justified and even well-intentioned things that
were nonetheless illegal".  I can imagine the drug users would say
things like "I just wanted to have a good time", and "I wasn't going to
hurt anybody".  Even the drug dealers may be able to say things like "I
couldn't find a job doing anything else" and "I needed the the money for
my sick aunt".  There's also an additional filtering process for people
who are educated, rich, or at least pretty -- they can often command
resources to get themselves out of bad situations that someone who is
stupid, poor, and ugly won't be able to escape.  So a disproportionate %
of the people in jail are poor, stupid, & ugly, which of course trains
everyone involved in the process to expect the worst of such people.
Nevertheless, you are still right that everyone involved in the process
is exercising lots of discretion - drugs are a "bad" thing, borrowing
rowboats to save drowning people is a good thing.

response 156 of 206:

Sep 24 04:25 UTC 2000

Re 154.  Of course, this goes back to the organized hysteria that I
pointed to in that other item.  No kidding that the "war on drugs"  has
distorted the picture.  But in any case, (1) it's hard to believe that
many users, buyers, sellers, etc., of illegal drugs in the U.S. are
unaware that they are breaking the law, and (2) it's a stretch to call
more than a handful of them "well-intentioned." 

Granted that people with more skills and resources have more options when
they get into trouble.  It is also a fact that, due to those same skills
and resources, they are much less likely to commit the kinds of stupid,
predatory, violent crimes that police see week in and week out. 

Middle-class and upper-middle-class types may get into drug problems, may
engage in embezzlement, insider trading, tax evasion, etc., but you don't
often see them robbing convenience stores.

And just due to the sheer numbers (aside from the War on Drugs, which I am
not here to defend), robberies of convenience stores the type of crimes
that the criminal justice system has to spend the bulk of its time and
resources dealing with.

response 158 of 206:

Sep 24 17:21 UTC 2000

Ed Meese is supposed to have said, "If they weren't guilty, they 
wouldn't have been arrested."  I smell a whiff of that attitude here.