Why intellectual property is such a confusing concept

[Louigi Verona]

Maybe you should just consider one time that not every game studio has a contract with nvidia or amd or some other company.

No offense meant, Jojo, but maybe you should take it easier. In this discussion you always seem to try to push my words to the extreme.

I did not say that all game companies have contracts with hardware vendors - of course not. I said it is one of th cross-company agreement schemes that exists. No more, no less. No need to try to shift my words to a different meaning.

[PPH]

I cannot agree with what you say here.

In general, yes, people are forced or even tricked a lot of times. Hype makes people buy games which otherwise they wouldn't have bought, etc. In fact, a lot of businesses are doing this - creating hype around products which you do not really need - by that I don't mean it's crap, but that they are unnecessary, you can live without them quite efficiently.

Vista was a failure, but many people use it because millions of laptops were preloaded with it and not a lot of people would care to switch, even if they were not satisfied and rather stayed with XP. Microsoft made it difficult to switch back, by using hardware that is not supported in XP or that was not initially supported in XP.

Your general argument is that people are not tricked into buying or using things and that everyone is outright smart and always chooses the best deal. I cannot agree with that.

Creating hype is not forcing. It's convincing. Ultimately, people bought the thing voluntarily. You think they are wrong, because you think the product wasn't worth buying. By what standard do you say this? By yours. It is not worth for you. But it is for others.

Tricking is another matter. Tricking is when someone says a given product has certain features, and it actually doesn't. For example, a charlatan may sell a beverage by saying it cures diseases, but the beveage actually does nothing. This kind of thing is a crime, and has nothing to do with creating hype.

I don't say everyone is smart and chooses the best deal. People make mistakes. So what? If someone buys something and then realizes he shouldn't have, this is not the seller's fault, unless he lied about the features of the thing. Also, before the person bought it, she wanted it. Making mistakes is a natural thing. Do you have the recipe for avoiding such mistakes? Do you think if someone else, say, the Emperor, chose what to produce instead of people, no mistakes would be made? How? He wouldn't even know what people want, so he would never get it right.

So, demand does reflect what people want, and as production reflects demand, it reflects what people want, which, for me is what is important for society (which is what this discussion was about). If you don't believe in this last part, they you believe someone, a dictator, king or whatever, should decide, instead of people, what they should want. I don't think this will make people happy, and it also makes it impossible to coordinate production in a rational way.

[Louigi Verona]

Creating hype is not forcing. It's convincing. Ultimately, people bought the thing voluntarily. You think they are wrong, because you think the product wasn't worth buying. By what standard do you say this? By yours. It is not worth for you. But it is for others.

It is difficult not to agree with you what you say here. Basically, taken out of context, I agree.

However, let me point out several delicate things here.

1. You cannot always draw a line between convincing and forcing. If you have friends who work in advertising companies, talk to them. They will tell you a lot of interesting things. There are many psychological techniques which basically force people to want something, seemingly giving them a choice. Subliminal stimuli - heard of that? There are other, more effective techniques.

2. When we are speaking about standards by which we judge other people or the society in general, while there are certainly personal opinions through which we look at society, we should not undermine the objective part of such an observation. By creating a mythical "it's just you personal opinion" we undermine any observation at all.
But when in this discussion I am speaking about a certain lack of progress, I do not base that simply on my "personal opinion", I base it on observations and on certain facts.

I am not sure if I made it clear, I have to find a better phrasing for this.
But in the context of our discussion, I do not simply say those products are not worth for me, I observe that those products do not mean a lot to society - that they are unnecessary and would not massively sell if no special conditions were set up by the manufacturers. This is not just personal opinion, it is a conclusion based on observation of the methods used by manufacturers. If the products would be so necessary that people would buy them anyway and advertising would only be used as means of informing people, then certain very expensive things companies do to market their products become a meaningless waste of rather large sums of money.

Also, in general I do not think there is something as a solely personal opinion, which is locked onto itself and has no connection to the real world, when we are discussing society.

I can say - I don't care about playing Doom 3 - and that would be my personal opinion. And based on that personal opinion I can say that Doom 3 is unnecessary and it would be indeed only my personal opinion, because playing the game or not concerns only me.

But in case of opinions about things which are not just some individual past time, but part of a larger process, like the development of culture, it is more difficult to have a locked personal opinion. You make conclusions based on observation of the life of society, not on your personal experiences, which are limited to your individual existence anyway and cannot be used as a basis for any meaningful conclusions.
Do you understand what I mean?

Let's summ it up.

I believe that demand nowadays is created artificially. Not in all fields and not in all cases, of course, but in many cases, especially in the world of technology. It is created by marketing techniques and by playing on the general philosophy of the modern culture which assumes that if something is new, it must be good.
As far as I understand your view, you do not think there is any forcing going on and that people get what they want.

If this is so, we at least understand the point of our disagreement.

But I further argue that the progress itself is artificial, as it is a progress in quantity, but not in quality. Because companies have profit as a goal, rather than actual technological research, a lot of what is done is done not very well and only so that it well sell quickly. A lot of products are short-term, so that people would have reason to upgrade.
As far as I understand, that view is challenged by Jojo, although I do not understand his reasoning.

[g]

About demand; I think you refer to what people "need" and those of us disagreeing with you refer to what people "want".

[psishock]

I believe that demand nowadays is created artificially.

we don't really "need" much stuff in our life, water, food, some daily resting and a place that can protect us from rain/cold/wind/etc.

Anything else is a matter of choice, depends if people want them or not. It's the persons job to decide if the product is useful to him or not. I can imagine some high class business meeting, the people there could look down on you and may avoid to take you seriously if you not have 1000$ shoes, 5000$ clothes and a 20000$ car, but some cheap chinese ones, a t-shirt and a bike.

There are stuff that are expected from you in some level of lifestyle and stuffs that you chose to have, because you can afford or simply want it. Even i have spent sometimes double amount of money on less than 100% more effective upgrade because i've decided, that it will be well worth for me to do so. There is no such think like an ultimate bad deal (based on any personal experience or observations), because if the deal sounds good for both of the clients, it IS a good deal for both of the clients.

[PPH]

1. You cannot always draw a line between convincing and forcing. If you have friends who work in advertising companies, talk to them. They will tell you a lot of interesting things. There are many psychological techniques which basically force people to want something, seemingly giving them a choice. Subliminal stimuli - heard of that? There are other, more effective techniques.

I draw the line in the existence or absence of aggression (violence or threats). I know of subliminal stimuli, but they can't make me buy something useless for me. For example, I have no use for a lipstick. An ad won't possibly cause me to buy a lipstick for myself. It might make me buy product of company A instead of product of company B, as long as I don't see much difference between the two. If one is way more useful than the other, I don't see how an ad can make me change my mind. And if it does, I'll realize, after I bought the product, that I made a mistake.

So, in the long run, such tactics can't enable companies to completely control demand. If these techniques were so powerful, all companies would use them, and people would stop buying things at some point, because they would think buying things doesn't work.  The economy would collapse. Like I said before, we would observe a world in which houses would be full of useless things. Production would be random and the standard of living would never improve. It would be chaos. This is not happening, so I guess these techniques are not that powerful.

After all, one of the main principles of marketing is that before making ads you must have a good product; something people can use.

2. When we are speaking about standards by which we judge other people or the society in general, while there are certainly personal opinions through which we look at society, we should not undermine the objective part of such an observation. By creating a mythical "it's just you personal opinion" we undermine any observation at all.
But when in this discussion I am speaking about a certain lack of progress, I do not base that simply on my "personal opinion", I base it on observations and on certain facts.

I am not sure if I made it clear, I have to find a better phrasing for this.
But in the context of our discussion, I do not simply say those products are not worth for me, I observe that those products do not mean a lot to society - that they are unnecessary and would not massively sell if no special conditions were set up by the manufacturers. This is not just personal opinion, it is a conclusion based on observation of the methods used by manufacturers. If the products would be so necessary that people would buy them anyway and advertising would only be used as means of informing people, then certain very expensive things companies do to market their products become a meaningless waste of rather large sums of money.

Reality is objective. That's for sure. But "progress" means to go from a worse state to a better state. There is no objective way of evaluating that. Different people want different things. Society is made of people, individuals. Society doesn't have an existence independent from the individuals that compose it. What's good for society is what's good for people. People make choices according to what want they most urgently want to satisfy. The sum of those choices that relate to exchangeable goods (ie things that can be bought and sold) determines general demand and supply. So, demand reflects what "society" wants in terms of exchangeable goods (not in terms of things such as "friendship", "goodness", etc).

Also, in general I do not think there is something as a solely personal opinion, which is locked onto itself and has no connection to the real world, when we are discussing society.

I can say - I don't care about playing Doom 3 - and that would be my personal opinion. And based on that personal opinion I can say that Doom 3 is unnecessary and it would be indeed only my personal opinion, because playing the game or not concerns only me.

But in case of opinions about things which are not just some individual past time, but part of a larger process, like the development of culture, it is more difficult to have a locked personal opinion. You make conclusions based on observation of the life of society, not on your personal experiences, which are limited to your individual existence anyway and cannot be used as a basis for any meaningful conclusions.
Do you understand what I mean?

I'm not sure I understand. But I think what I said above pretty much applies to this.

Because companies have profit as a goal, rather than actual technological research, a lot of what is done is done not very well and only so that it well sell quickly. A lot of products are short-term, so that people would have reason to upgrade.
As far as I understand, that view is challenged by Jojo, although I do not understand his reasoning.

Again, you're using your own value judgements to assess the decisions of other people. A company makes profits if it satisfies the wants of the consumers (in a free market, at least; and to a degree, in a mixed economy, which is what we have everywhere to varying degrees). So, companies aim at profits, because that's the way most people get what they want. You say this way they don't seek technological research: they do. They seek that technological research which will make them more profits, ie will satisfy more people in the market. Products are short term? Maybe that's what people want.

[Louigi Verona]

I agree on a lot of what you say.

But I do think that it is possible to more or less form public opinion and public demand. At least to a certain extent. Of course you cannot market an absolutely useless product, a product can indeed be attractive and desirable at the moment, but useless in the long run.

You can say that if a person decides to buy a socially cool product, then he is getting what he wants, but in my opinion this is superficial argument.

Let me explain what I mean.

If a person is taking drugs, it is obvious he has problems, but you can basically say - well, he is getting what he wants. And he does, doesn't he? But we know that if a drug addict is getting what he wants, eventually he might simply die.

A person who is trying to sell drugs will try to create a demand. And of course not everybody would give in, right? A person who has a tendency to give in, would. You might say that if he gave in, he had a need, albeit a hidden one. And a superficial argument can be - well cool. Everyone gets what they want.
But this is not how a person who lives in a society should look at things. Because we live amongst each other, we have responsibility for one another. This is not just an opinion, it is an objective means of survival for a society. If people would not share responsibility for each other, society would not survive.

And with a drug addict situation, it is clear if a person has psychological problems that create a tendency to go for drugs, the inertia of society surrounding him might help him either to recover and solve his problems or become an addict.

I am trying to say the same thing about economy. You might be giving people what they want at the moment. You are giving them a choice, but you are creating an atmosphere with ads which will create a thought model. Yes, eventually each person makes his choices, but weaker people might give in even to something you would consider cheap advertisement.

I hope I made my opinion more clear. If you do not agree, it is ok, I just thought that you might have misunderstood what I meant.

[Louigi Verona]

ps: and as for short-term products which dominate today's market, I think it is even more superficial to say that people are making their own choices and that this is just my opinion and my own values, superimposed on other people.

I once again want to stress that this is not just my subjective personal liking. If you are building a house and you build it in a way that it is estimated to serve 50 years and another person is building a house that is estimated to stay around for 500 years, the greater value of the second house is not a matter of personal opinion.

When I am saying that long-term products are more beneficial to society, those are not just my subjective likings and values, it is reasoning, based on reality.

A company that is focused on short-term profit, and most companies are working for short-term profit, since long term profit is too uncertain to be estimated and thus too large a risk, will inevitably tend to create short-term products. By these I mean, say, making laptops that are guaranteed to break in 2-3 years. Creating a program and then releasing a new version with no backwards compatibility, etc.

This short-term philosophy greatly influences decisions made during research. Technologies which would make things more reliable and long-term are usually dismissed in favor of research that would make things cheap to produce - and notice the difference between these two paradigms.

As for what people want, it is also important to note that if you have limited choices, you of course will want something among those limited choices. But it does not mean that people do not want something else, something that they have no means to produce. And because the industry values profit above all, usually people do not get what they would really want. They get what they get and they accept it because they do not have much choices.

It is like with TV:
- Why do you show so many soap operas?
-Well, people like them! Look, they are all watching them.

But are people actually given a choice of what to watch on TV? Of course, not. They watch it just because it is there. And although people might choose not to watch, for many various reasons people would tend to watch what's there rather than not watch anything.

=)

[PabloLuna]

Microsoft admits code theft for Chinese blog Juku
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8415597.stm

Piracy?

[Louigi Verona]

Strictly speaking, reusing code is as natural as anything. But considering Microsoft is a company that "respects intellectual property", the attack on them makes sense.

[PabloLuna]

No decrease in illegal downloading, says BPI
The number of people downloading music illegally is not decreasing, despite the availability of new legal services, according to a music industry research.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8420484.stm

It looks like the business model will need to change.
Economy is about human behavior, not about laws.
Not even Gandhi could change the behavior of his followers, I doubt a government or a law can do it.

[Saga Musix]

You guys could surely open a up a blog with this stuff.

[kit beats]

Read up how well Quake 3 runs on ATI and how much worse it runs on NVidia.

Like this?

do you play quake3 online G? im @ retro-CTF  :lol:

[g]

Read up how well Quake 3 runs on ATI and how much worse it runs on NVidia.

Like this?

do you play quake3 online G? im @ retro-CTF  :lol:

Sorry, I'm a UT-person Or was.

[PPH]

I agree on a lot of what you say.
But I do think that it is possible to more or less form public opinion and public demand. At least to a certain extent. Of course you cannot market an absolutely useless product, a product can indeed be attractive and desirable at the moment, but useless in the long run.

You can say that if a person decides to buy a socially cool product, then he is getting what he wants, but in my opinion this is superficial argument.

If the person buys the product, it's because she values the fact of using a socially cool product. Someone would have a hard time proving that providing products that are considered cool by society is not good for society.

Let me explain what I mean.

If a person is taking drugs, it is obvious he has problems, but you can basically say - well, he is getting what he wants. And he does, doesn't he? But we know that if a drug addict is getting what he wants, eventually he might simply die.

A person who is trying to sell drugs will try to create a demand. And of course not everybody would give in, right? A person who has a tendency to give in, would. You might say that if he gave in, he had a need, albeit a hidden one. And a superficial argument can be - well cool. Everyone gets what they want.

But this is not how a person who lives in a society should look at things. Because we live amongst each other, we have responsibility for one another. This is not just an opinion, it is an objective means of survival for a society. If people would not share responsibility for each other, society would not survive.


And with a drug addict situation, it is clear if a person has psychological problems that create a tendency to go for drugs, the inertia of society surrounding him might help him either to recover and solve his problems or become an addict.

I am trying to say the same thing about economy. You might be giving people what they want at the moment. You are giving them a choice, but you are creating an atmosphere with ads which will create a thought model. Yes, eventually each person makes his choices, but weaker people might give in even to something you would consider cheap advertisement.

I hope I made my opinion more clear. If you do not agree, it is ok, I just thought that you might have misunderstood what I meant.

I understand what you say, but let's recall what is under discussion here. Pablo said that software companies produced according to demand, and not according to what is good for society. That is what I contend is wrong.

Now, what does "good for society" mean? As society is made of individuals, it must mean "good for each individual in society". Now, all individuals are different. Very few things are good for everyone. And even those are "good in different degrees. Everything has a cost, and therefore, there are always tradeoffs.

You can't say, for example, "health is good, so let's forbid smoking". Yeah, everyone cares about health, but most are willing to run certain risks. Most people value life. But if they valued life in an absolute way, nobody would drive cars for the risks involved. These choices and tradeoffs manifest themselves in the demand in the market. And there is no other way of doing it, except having one person decide for everyone else.

There is no answer to the question "what is good for society?" that will satisfy a great majority, let alone everyone.

Now, people might be manipulated to a degree, but, if this is so, only to a small degree. If it weren't so, society would have broken down, for reasons I already explained.

The case of drugs is touchy, and a special case. You can say: if demand for drugs exist, then not always what demand indicates is what is good for society. You might have a point, although a case can be made that there is no objective way to assess that. I won't, though. But it is a very special case in which the very choices people made are influenced by the product they are consuming. This only happens with drugs. Hell, that's almost the definition of drugs and addiction, right?

Besides, another issue enters the scene: in these cases, you don't have infinite alternatives: either you let producers produce according to demand, or you have someone forcing decisions on people. So, it's not like demand not always reflects what's good for society and there is an alternative that ensures that only what is good for society is produces. That alternative doesn't exist. There is no perfect option.

Then, charging producers with producing according to demand instead of producing what is "good for society" doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially because there is no rational way of producing what is good for society. How does a producer determine that? Suppose it can determine that: then, either it is the same as what demand indicates (in which case the problem doesn't exist), or it is different, in which case the producer goes out of business. Ultimately, if all producers behaved like that, massive discoordination would ensue, because they wouldn't be producing what people want, so people wouldn't buy these things. The economy would collapse. So, paradoxically, by producing what's good for society instead of what society wants, producers would cause society to break down.