Well, if software is duplicated prior to use, a book that is read by a
  human reader is duplicated in that the light reflected from the book is
  a fresh copy, a movie is "performed" by duplication, a TV program or a
  piece of recorded music likewise.

| Bits can have many representations and is easily and automatically
| converted among them.  An ordinary object is usually created by a single
| process, and thereafter keeps its representation.

  Non sequitur.  In between each bit's representation it also keeps its
  representation, exactly the same way everything else does.  Given enough
  time, everything has been and can be everything else.  Being confused by
  the short timespan is as silly as being confused by the low cost.

| Duplication of bits can be done today with very little cost using
| consumer-grade equipment.

  The cost is completely irrelevant to the process.  In fact, it is that it
  is almost cost-less that has led people to confuse cost with process, but
  the fact that people drag in the cost highlights the _existence_ of a
  process by which it is copied, almost for free, so the key must be the
  process, not the cost.

| That kind of duplication of ordinary objects is the subject of Star Trek.

  Only because you think in too short a timeframe.  Think about it.

| If you know of a matter replicator, I'd love to hear about it.

  Quit the stupid game you play.

| Mass production of objects is not duplication; it's an optimized,
| specialized process for making specific kinds of new instances of things
| out of raw materials.

  Non sequitur.

| A given process can't be trivially readjusted to make a completely
| different thing.  But a bit replicator will copy any bit sequence.

  Irrelevant.

| Lastly, when an ordinary object is traded, the value is usually assigned
| to the *instance*.

  Sufficiently many objects are traded based on the same valuation as
  software, yet still exist, that this is completely irrelevant.

| When bits are traded, it's not the concrete representation, or instance
| that is being traded, but rather the *class*: the abstract program which
| all representations are instances of.

  Non sequitur.  The same goes for movies, books, recorded music, etc.

| It's no use denying differences that are real, just because they don't
| agree with your political view.

  Oh, christ, if you have nothing better to dredge up when you have no
  argument to offer, at least admit that you have none.

| Reality must be the starting point of all rational thought.

  Quit the stupid game you play.  Just because you see things in a bogus,
  mythological way, does not mean that have any right to assume that
  reality _is_ only what you want it to be.  Pretending to have a monopoly
  on the proper interpretation of reality is the hallmark of the believers
  in mythology who cannot defend their faith.  Quit the stupid game and get
  back to the rational thought.

marc

In any case, I don't see how "they can force [you] to give away stuff that
is not related" because if it's not related then, as you say, the licence
does not apply.  Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "not
related."

My time is not made of matter, but that does not imply that there is
any material difference beteeen it and any other object I own that I
would wish to trade.

-dan

--

Clearly, literature and software share a property with each other that
they do not share with loaves of bread: the ability to be reproduced
(or transferred to a new owner) at little or no cost, without
depriving the original owner of the possession of the object.  (Think
memorizing poems in an oral tradition, for example.)

Indeed, the assignment of monetary value to something _so_ intangible
is one of the turning points of modern economies, IMO.

I do not understand the physical nature of software (nor of literature).
Could you elaborate/clarify?

--
Janis Dzerins

I find it useful to think of the world as being composed of two inherently
different essences: matter/energy and information.  As energy and refined
matter still are scarce resources, I think it's only reasonable that objects
carrying much matter/energy can be owned and traded.  Informational objects
OTOH, such as software, literature and music, have become so easy to copy
that IMO it does not make much sense to treat such objects the same way as
material objects.  This is not a moral statement (there are no such things
as "natural rights"), I merely believe that an economy based on
proprietorship of informational objects is bound to either fail or to
protect it's information using ever more totalitarian methods.  (I don't
like the saying, but information really wants to be free. :-)

Until the emergence of super-intelligent machines, however, _knowledge_ will
have nonzero market value, even without totalitarian regimes to protect it.

Apparently designing an all-new automobile costs on the order of a
billion dollars.

In both cases, making successive copies is rather a lot less
expensive.  For software, there's the difference that the result, a
form of "digital knowledge," can _trivially_ be copied, generally at
minscule cost, whereas for automobiles, there is the requirement of
having a factory, and bringing in parts and such.  Software
distribution can involve no transfer of physical material, only the
transfer of the resonance of moving electrons/photons.

The crucial difference seems to be that making extra copies of
software doesn't have to cause any noticeable disturbance, whilst for
cars, toasters, or digital watches, there is a difference of
materiels.  Whether that represents a material difference may be in
the eye of the beholder...

  This begs the question of why a computer is so special.  What, exactly,
  makes electricity non-real?  What kind of magic wand does a computer
  possess that makes that which is stored within it _materially_ different
  from any other reality?  The fact that we can no longer _see_ it is no
  different from a lot of other very real things that we cannot see.

  And who _values_ things?  How come a particular aspect of a book is
  designated an "essential value" just because a computer can retain it?

  If I model a car down to its smallest details in some form that is not
  usable as a car, but from which a working car may again be built, it is
  completely irrelevant to the owners of the car design that I had a
  non-usable intermediate model.  The same goes for books, actually, and
  whether the intermediate, non-book model can be _read_ through _yet_
  another duplication process is also irrelevant.

  We can already give industrial robots computerized drawings of a lot of
  things and they will happily reproduce them faithfully.  The _amount_ of
  work that goes into the duplication process is completely immaterial.
  The fact that _some_ work is required is the essential issue.

  This is because _somebody_ is willing to supply the electricity and the
  hardware that does the copying.  Suppose I supplied all the ingredients
  of a loaf of bread and the energy and hardware required to mix them and
  bake the result, then it would essentially be free to copy a loaf of
  bread, right?  Suppose we had lots of people who had vast stores of
  ingredients and an enormous surplus of energy and unlimited access to
  hardware, what would materially differ between a loaf of bread and a
  piece of software as we see it today?  Hinging the issue on _cost_ is no
  more than a means of relating it to the surplus of the ingredients in the
  economy.  Then again, an incredibly large fraction of science fiction can
  be summarized in the very simple idea "what if energy were free?".

| Indeed, the assignment of monetary value to something _so_ intangible is
| one of the turning points of modern economies, IMO.

  It is no less intangible than anything else we assign monetary values to.
  It is just that we have decided at some particular time, not to think
  about certain real, physical things as "tangible", even though they are.

| I do not understand the physical nature of software (nor of literature).
| Could you elaborate/clarify?

  Perhaps we should dispell with the equivocation first.  There exists a
  notion of "meaning" that is that which is obtained when a human being is
  exposed to something and experiences something, and this "meaning" is
  often considered to be the _real_ purpose of something, the medium
  somehow being discounted as being irrelevant.  This is just like the idea
  that in computer programming languages, syntax is irrelevant, because
  some make the confusion between "no _particular_ syntax is reqeuired",
  and "_no_ syntax is required", because, clearly, _some_ syntax _is_
  required.  The same is true of software and literature -- without medium,
  it ceases to exist.  Also, clearly, the medium is not the software or the
  literature, but this is the same argument as software for a different
  machine or literature in a different language or script.  If it has no
  meaning, what _is_ it, when only its meaning is valuable?  When the last
  person to read a language dies, does all the literature of that language
  become non-existent?

  Simply put, an interaction between two physical things is also physical,
  even though it ceases to exist if you remove some of the physical things,
  so you cannot take something apart to "find" it.  Gravitation is real.
  Magnetism is real.  Software is real.  It took physicists several hundred
  years from discovery of the consequences of the interaction to figure out
  how these interactions had a nature of their own.  Culturally, we are
  still looking at software like the kind of "magic" that people who do not
  understand the nature of magnetism and gravitation would think they are.

  For what purposes is it useful?

So by making a copy of a CD (for example) I deprive no-one of anything
that they were not compensated fairly for (at market price) yet I get at
small total cost, an identical copy of the information stored on that CD,
as well as a physical approximate copy of the artifact, for a net marginal
cost of about 1 dollar US.

I think the whole thing comes down to people saying that the political
notion of creating a government guaranteed monopoly on information is not
beneficial economically, contrary to free-market economics, and the wrong
way for producers of these goods to be compensated, in large part because
of the jack booted enforcement required to make it effective  in an age
when the actual market cost of copies is a few pennies.

One obvious alternative is to create a financial futures market in
informational goods, and to sell forward contracts on the delivery of such
goods to the people who want the goods. This requires no jack booted
thugs, and no restrictions on the use or redistribution of the goods after
delivery. And no artificial market destruction by government protection...
It also provides a way to enforce delivery or compensation for
non-delivery through well understood contract and tort laws.

In my view the GPL is a license that tries to establish a reasonable
notion of "community property"; it is specifically meant to prevent
entities from redistributing "community" code in a derivative work
from which the "community" derives no benefit.  For the linux kernel,
that means things like kernel modules, patches and add-ons must be
shared (as per GPL) with the kernel developers (if they are provided
to anyone else).  It also protects people that contribute to the linux
kernel, since the copyright holders (i.e. Linus) could not use those
contributions to produce a non-GPL'd version of the kernel without
permission.  

AFAIK, no other license offers such egalitarian protections- many other
free-ish licenses (like apache's) require contributors to forfeit their
copyrights if they'd like to contribute anything.  By way of comparison,
book publishers and record distributors typically seek forfeiture of
copyright from their authors, whereas newspapers and magazines do not.  
Sadly transfer of copyright is required by most academic journals
as well; and IMO it prevents a lot of publicly funded, published research
from ever hitting the worldwide web.

Put another way (this point has been made before by another poster, but it
bears repeating) there is a fundamental distinction between energy and
information.  Energy (or mass) is the stuff that things are made of.
Information is the configuration or the state of the stuff.  The value of
some things, like raw materials, lies mostly in their energy content, not
their information content.  It's the *stuff*, not the arrangement of the
stuff that matters.  The value of other things, like cars, lies in a
combination of their energy and information content.  The fact that there
is steel and plastic there matters, but the particular arrangement of the
steel and plastic matters too.

I'll answer what makes computers special below.

  It seems that some people consider property as "that which you can
  deprive other people of".  This is commensurate with the "all property is
  theft" line of reasoning, but it is fundamentally silly and offers no way
  to reason about property.

| The market value of the medium can't be what you're getting at though.

  No, you are quite right, it is not.

| It's a complete false start.

  Then it is a really good idea not to think people begin with completely
  false starts.  It make a conversion _so_ much more intelligent if people
  would not assume that the other party is an utter moron and believes
  easily refutable positions.  It is fantastically annoying when people do
  believe in the easily refuable and do not stop doing so even after it has
  been refuted, repeatedly.

| I think the whole thing comes down [economics].

  The value system of any economy is founded on the ontology of the objects
  valued and people's willingness to prioritize their acquistion.  Starting
  with economics is like studying language by watching how people react
  emotionally to each word or phrase.  It may give you some information,
  but what you learn form it is not _meaning_.

  It is _not_ the economy.

  What is a bit?  Can you explain what it is?

| They do not have mass.

  Well, is a thought real?  Or is it mystical?  Is it ideal?  Is my idea
  that bits are real real?  Is the expression of that idea real?  Which of
  these have mass?

| Put another way (this point has been made before by another poster, but
| it bears repeating) there is a fundamental distinction between energy and
| information.

  Nonsense.  I politely asked the poster if he could explain the purposes
  for which this distinction is useful, but you go ahead and say there is a
  fundamental distinction, and that is simply _wrong_, unphilosophical, and
  begs the question, which I think you do not realize, but would if you
  thought about this instead of defending an unsupportable notion.

| Energy (or mass) is the stuff that things are made of.  Information is
| the configuration or the state of the stuff.

  Does magnetism have mass?  Is it "energy"?  How about gravitation?  Does
  _distances_ exist?  Do distancaes have mass?

| People value things.  And while I don't have any hard data, I'll wager
| long odds that most people assign most of the value of most books to
| their information content and not to their physical embodiments.

  Philosophy meets democracy.  What a wonderful way to think!

| If you had a choice between having all your books changed to a different
| physical format, or retaining the same physical format but translated
| into some language you didn't understand, which would you choose?

  If you had a cube and you could choose between retaining all the edges or
  all the sides, which would you choose?

| What makes computers special is precisely the amount of work (energy)
| required to add information content.  That amount is vastly less -- many,
| many orders of magnitude less -- than for non-computer artifacts, even if
| they are fabricated by robots.

  So again, we have an economy-based ontological ordering.  I am amused,
  frankly.  It is so ridiculously obvious that this must be wrong, simply
  by looking at where _values_ are in the order of things.  How can you at
  all _believe_ in economy as an ontological primary?  Even rabid marxists
  do not actually believe in that, if _they_ still exist.

    Joe> No- gmp is LGPL'ed;  which use to be the "recommended" license for code
    Joe> libraries that have existing non-GPL counterparts.  The difference is

My fuzzy memory of this issue is in line with Fred.  There was a
fairly big discussion about this in gnu.misc.discuss (I think) a long
time ago.  FSF demanded that the other code be "released" as well
because it was specifically written to use gmp and no other library
would work.  It was some kind of crypto code like RSA or some such.

Eventually the code was changed to support some other bignum
implementation, perhaps, as Fred says, written for the sole purpose of
replacing gmp.  I think the FSF finally said it was ok by either
saying it was ok or by changing the license to LGPL.  Don't remember
the exact reason.

Might be available on usenet archive near you?

  http://groups.google.com/groups?q=gmp+gpl&hl=en

Thanks for the correction: I haven't been using gmp long enough to
notice the change in licensing.

I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying. The fact of the matter
is that none of the ingredients of a COPY of a piece of software are
"free" they are just cheap because of our current market conditions.

Now the original creation is still limited by time and effort on the part
of the designers, programmers, and soforth.

On the other hand I haven't heard anyone argue that in the conditions
described (a large free source of ingredients) the making and eating of
copies of some loaf of bread should be punishable by several hundred
thousand dollars in fines and various jail sentences. That is what we are
talking about when we consider copyright enforcement.

The common notion of property torts under the law is that when one person
is deprived of their property, then there is a legally enforceable
recourse under law. That is where the notion of deprivation comes in.
Without deprivation there is no tort.

So what is it that you believe should be considered a
tort/deprivation/damage?

Yes, I am basing my distinctions at least to some extent on economic
concepts.  (It's not just economic -- there are physical (in the sense of
Physics) distinctions too.)  I don't know how you can coherently deal with
the world without referring to economic concepts.  The very notion of a
*useful* distinction is inherently economic.  A thing is useful if it has
utility.  Utility is an economic concept.  Sorry, but that's how I think.
I don't believe I'm alone in this.

Tell me: do you believe that there is a useful distinction to be made
between a steam engine and a tea kettle?  If so, how do you make this
distiction without an ontology based at least to some extent on economy?

I think software differs from debt, futures, and insurance risk, which
are traded, and those differ from oil, gold, sexual organs, and water.
They are tied together by exchange value, but exchange value doesn't
erase all of their difference, wether they be qualitative or
quantitative.