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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5563 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 9 of 52 03 January 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't quite get the distinction between personal property and private property in this context (I know that some Marxists make a distinction, but that doesn't apply )
What is property? Aside from Proudhon's glib answer of 'theft', property is the right, backed by law, to the exclusive possession and use of the thing in which the property right(s) resides. This means the right to exclude another from using the thing or to allow another to use it subject to the owner's licence. Traditionally, personal property is contrasted with 'real' or immoveable property - i.e. a car versus a house and private property with things in common - a farmer's field v. a communal playground, not with private property being as a subclass of personal or the other way round . Intellectual property is about the protection of the commercial value in tangible and intangible labour - the work and effort that a person puts into writing a language course for example. That person can alienate that property to a publishing house just as I can sell my car - but the law protects that right so that I or those I sell my labour to can make money out of it. I see nothing immoral about that in a capitalist economy. I would agree that what finds its way into the realm of the immoral is that I or my assignee can hold onto the copyright for my life +70 years (or whatever), even if nothing is being done with my efforts. The moral debate is in the length of time a person or company can keep hold of something or whether an item of intellectual property that has not been used for say, 30 years (like French without Toil) should still be protected by law. Edited by Elexi on 03 January 2012 at 7:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5781 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 10 of 52 03 January 2012 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, perhaps I have misunderstood, but I have always understood personal property to
be the things we actually use for our own needs and/or pleasure; private property being anything we are held to own in law (etymologically that property of whose use we have the [legal] right to deprive other people). Thus if you own your own house it is your personal property, if you're a landlord renting it out at a profit then it's not, although it's still your private property. This is not the Marxist definition (though since we're talking about a moral distinction rather than a legal one I fail to see why the Marxist definition should be any less relevant than any other). Perhaps I am wrong about this, but even if I'm wrong about the name it's a distinction that should be made. Just to be clear, I'm talking about a moral distinction here, not a legal one. When it comes to IP I think the law's part of the problem rather than the solution Speaking of the Marxist definition of private property, I believe that Proudhorn's definition b.t.w. was referring to property used as capital- he was surely not calling you a thief because you own your own house or a car or whatever. Whether you agree with him or not, he wasn't saying something as stupid as that. Edited by Random review on 03 January 2012 at 9:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 52 03 January 2012 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
But information is valuable, and creating information is a very specialist task. Anyone can learn to build a wall, but only very specific people can create valuable new thoughts, ideas etc. By reducing the value of information to the value of its dissemination, you devalue the act of creating that information, and where's the information to come from if there's no reward for creating it? I agree that life+70 is a long time for copyright to subsist, and it maybe should be a bit shorter, but cutting things off at 30 years from publication would have dire consequences. Have you noticed how the last few years have seen a flood of badly-OCRed language materials appear on Amazon? The signal-to-noise ratio is getting dangerously low. If you could sell 30-year-old materials, everyone would be doing it. A bunch of uncreative people would get a lot of money for no effort and the people actively working in the field would get squeezed out. It would reduce the amount of work going into producing new materials. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5781 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 12 of 52 03 January 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh dear, Cainntear. I don't think I've ever disagreed with you so fundamentally. I believe that anyone can be creative and that most of us feel a deep longing to do so, that's exactly what this is all about. Edited by Random review on 03 January 2012 at 10:57pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5863 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 13 of 52 03 January 2012 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cainntear, i think that is just speculation (and the same can be said about what i'm about to say). With information more widely available you also increase the amount of people who are able and willing to produce new material (or even update old materials). Perhaps instead of selling cheap ripoffs of old out-dated courses (or selling Assimil's Russian Without Toil for over $100) that you could get for free online or hundreds of commercial books teaching you the same two or three tenses and 200 words, we would see courses less interested in earning a few quick bucks and more interested in actually teaching/sharing information. As naïve as it may be, i believe that sharing information helps to create new information. Edited by Crush on 03 January 2012 at 11:40pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| NickJS Senior Member United Kingdom flickr.com/photos/sg Joined 4957 days ago 264 posts - 334 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 14 of 52 04 January 2012 at 1:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I personally do not have a problem with people distributing the older resources that are
not copyrighted any more or are just simply outdated due to newer versions being out - as people who do like the older versions of the books can always buy the physical versions second hand, as some people just prefer to have the physical version anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5563 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 15 of 52 04 January 2012 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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'Thus if you own your own house it is your personal property, if you're a landlord renting it out at a profit then it's not, although it's still your private property. This is not the Marxist definition...'
I think this is the Marxist definition It is the distinction between that which has solely personal use value and that which is capital producing - I grant it is a valid distinction, but to my mind it is not one from which to draw moral arguments relating to IP. Let's postulate a sole trader bookseller with a poor credit rating who can't buy goods to sell on credit. S/he has to buy the books s/he sells at a trade discount before they are sold to customers at market price. She is selling at a profit, so on the personal/private distinction the books are not her personal property but they are her private property - but the books are her personal property, if they are unsaleable or if you steal them she loses. OK let's say that some of her first editions become rare over time and are sought after and she holds them back from sale as the prices sky rocket. She has used her labour and taken the risk to buy the books in the first place and they have come up trumps - that is how buying and selling works. I don't judge such activity to be immoral - perhaps inconvenient to me, but not immoral. I have written numerous articles and am completing a book (none of them are worth anything and I have to publish as a condition of my job). I have often worked (after a full working day) to two in the morning on my book and then have got up four hours later to get more words on the page. Creating something like this takes a lot of labour and I (save that it is an academic work with a very limited market) expect to have the property in my labour for a good time to come - i.e. someone has to buy my book so that I can get a royalty payment rather than downloading it for free on the internet. Now for me money is not the primary goal, but I consider it more immoral to download during my copyright period than for me to obtain the 5p per copy royalty that I am going to get from my labour. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yaboycon Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4733 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 16 of 52 04 January 2012 at 11:39am | IP Logged | ||
I way prefer to have the physical version of the books, I don't like reading off a computer. However finding a "without toil" book from assimil is difficult. I see very few on amazon or ebay (UK). Also sometimes on Amazon I see they have one used version but that person has made the price hundreds of pounds just for the book. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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