> Who is arguing that one should pay for every previous idea that a new idea is derived from?
IP limits production to create artificial scarcity. No matter how you look at it, after you copyright or patent something. You are limiting what can be created in the world.
> As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation
No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy. [1] Together with the monopoly selling rice, and other commodities, were the monopoly of printing books. At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate. That excuse was only invented after the "monopoly privilege" over copying books were renamed to "copy rights". At the same time that other monarchy monopolies were destroyed.
Society never discovered that it's worth in the aggregate. You cannot prove it's worth in the aggregate. Any attempt so far to measure the aggregate has been absurd. [2]
> You are limiting what can be created in the world.
Not really true. You could say that IP limits some forms of use that could produce new creations. But that would ignore the fact that often IP is licensed, thus not preventing the creation of some content.
Further, providing a reward for the creation of new IP dramatically increases the overall creation rate of what society considers to be "useful" IP.
> No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy
That's just an ad hominem.
> At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate.
See, this is just factually incorrect. All you need to do is to look at US history and the motivations for creating copyright and patent law as part of the new nation to see that you're wrong.
The saddest thing is that I actually think that our system of IP is in serious need of a rewrite. The way that big media companies abuse our legal system and the power of our government should be criminalized. At very least, we should be using statistical models and the Scientific method to determine the ideal values for copyright and patent lengths rather than basing new IP laws upon the lobbying efforts of Disney.
That said, as an advocate for changing the situation, you're not being effective. You make totally unfounded arguments and in at least one other place in this same thread I saw where you were using cheap online debating tricks to try to get your point across.
When I read the original article this thread is based on, I felt some legitimate annoyance at the professor since what he's doing is unethical. But then I read a couple of your posts and felt I needed to respond to arguments that were remarkably uninformed and disingenuously constructed.
Actually, it isn't. Ad hominem is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.
In this case, he is referring to a third party (the monarchy) who actually did use it as a monopoly priviledge for the monarchy. Saying that it is frabricated does not make it so. In fact, if you look at all that was said, it was "Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy."
> Actually, it isn't. Ad hominem is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.
Which is what the poster did in bringing up the motivations of a monarchy that used some form of IP regulation that we weren't even discussing. Discrediting monarchies' motivations for wanting IP has nothing to do with the situation we have today. It's an ad hominem.
None of that has anything to do with the utility of reward-based IP laws in promoting the creation of useful IP to society. So you could also consider some argument about how monarchies used IP in medieval times to be a red herring. Regardless of the label, the argument is equally invalid.
IP limits production to create artificial scarcity. No matter how you look at it, after you copyright or patent something. You are limiting what can be created in the world.
> As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation
No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy. [1] Together with the monopoly selling rice, and other commodities, were the monopoly of printing books. At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate. That excuse was only invented after the "monopoly privilege" over copying books were renamed to "copy rights". At the same time that other monarchy monopolies were destroyed.
Society never discovered that it's worth in the aggregate. You cannot prove it's worth in the aggregate. Any attempt so far to measure the aggregate has been absurd. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html