[H-GEN] Linux games are still proprietory

[Russell Stuart]

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On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 15:55, Trent WADDINGTON wrote:
> My argument was that one should not use the force of law to
> take money out of other people's pocket for their own benefit.  If you
> want a general argument then I can make one: people should use the force
> of law to benefit society, not just themselves.

When reasoning about copyright I have never found concepts like
"rights", "morals" or the law very helpful.  In general I have found
what people view their rights to be, or what they think of as moral,
tends to coincide with their own self interest.  Thus Bill Gates /
Microsoft probably thinks that selling software is a universal right,
and pirating software is morally wrong.  People working with open source
software often take the opposite view.  Most people tend, like Jon
Johansen, to view a copyrighted DVD they have bought as their property
which they can do with as they dammed well please.  The movie industry
disagrees and has managed to get a law passed which enforces their point
of view.  Many end users of music take the view that it is morally
acceptable to record a song off the radio, or download a copy off the
Internet - providing they don't deprive the artist of revenue by selling
it.  That also happens to be the view taken by Australian criminal law.

It all ends up being a argument about how you cut the pie.  Who gets the
biggest piece - the artists, the distributors or the end users?  Whose
rights are more important, and who gets to decide?

The one way I have found useful in reasoning about copyright is in your
last sentence: "to benefit society".  But you left it at that - vague
and undefined.  Here is a way to give it more meat.  One way we can
benefit society is to set rules that make as goods and services
available at the cheapest prices possible.  All right - it is a
statement of the obvious - simple economics.  The next obvious statement
is one of the best mechanisms we have found that does this is the
market.  It is because we protect and foster our markets that we in the
west have the best cars, the cheapest, fattest food, and the biggest,
meanest armies.

But markets don't always arise naturally.  If things are too scarce we
get a monopoly.  We "fix" that using anti-trust laws, the ACCC and the
like.  The reverse situation can be just as bad.  It is simply too easy
copy software, movies, music and whatnot - a market in them could not
exist without some sort of artificial law.  We fix that with copyright. 
And it works.  There would be no Lord of the Rings, no Brittney Spears
and no Microsoft Windows without copyright.

Now remember the reason we wanted to have the market in the first place
was, as you said, to benefit society as whole.  But now we can put that
in more concrete terms - we we wanted to make as many movies, as money
songs, and as many software titles available as possible at the cheapest
possible price.

So when it comes to making the law, we don't do it on the basis of
whether it is morally good of evil, we don't make arbitrary decisions
about a persons rights, we simply try maximise the amount of stuff
produced.  By that measure copyright is a partial success, and so is
open source.

Despite the successes copyright has had, you have to wonder whether
letting AOL/Time have copyright on "Happy Birthday to You" actually
promotes more and cheaper music.  It was, after all, written at around
1893 by someone who died in 1916.  The copyright is due to expire in
2030.  Considering most songs today make their money in the first 6-12
months this seems a tad long.  And I do have a lot of sympathy for the
movie companies.  It takes millions of dollars to make a movie and they
have a short life during which that money can be recouped - a few years
at most.  The DCMA does protect that market, and if something doesn't
the market will cease to exist.  its just that it does so at a huge
cost, allowing unrelated companies to establish mini monopolies in all
sorts of areas - printer cartridges and garage door openers will be the
least of it.  If that has to be the cost saving the movie industry then
I say let it die.

There is no doubt in my mind that copyright as it is exists in law today
is a bizarre and twisted animal, to the point that wondering if it is
actually a net benefit to society as it stand.  Gods knows how we got to
this point - I blame the Americans.  But that does not make the concept
bad, and nor does it make open source only the answer.  I think that in
copyright we have a hammer, and we have fallen into the trap treat
everything like a nail.  We need to more specialised tools, such as a
law that protects movies but not garage door openers.

Open source is one of those tools - it in an accidental side effect of
copyright.  I think that just like there should be a special law for the
movies there should also be a special law for open source, something
that puts in concrete as it were.

Open source works because software, unlike houses and nappies, does not
degrade.  So once someone puts in the effort we can all share in the
benefits ad infinitum.  And it does even seem to benefit the original
writer in indirectly because software seems to have this odd property
that the more you have, the more you need.  So if we make software
cheap, more people can afford it so there will be more of it, and the
more there is of it the more computer people you need.  Yeh!  Thus we
benefit both society and ourselves.  Yes, open software is good in all
senses of the word.

Which brings us to games.  I think that unlike other software, games do
degrade.  They don't wear out of course, but like movies, music and
fashion they loose value over time.  So you continually need more
games.  What is more, games are very expensive to make - most of the
work is in the art, not the programming.  Under those conditions open
source does not work so well.  If it did we would have open source
movies.  To put it another way, in order to maximise the number of games
available at the cheapest possible price, ie in order to benefit society
the most, we need apply copyright to games, just like we do to movies. 
Maybe not that insane bastard of a law we have now, but a form of
copyright nonetheless.

Sorry for taking so long to come to the point.

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