More crap from the BBC

Roderick Stewart wrote:
On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:20:41 +0100, Bill Wright
wrote:

I wondered if I was alone in seeing a fundamental difference between
leaving something you've already earned during your life, and
continuing to earn money after you're dead. Naturally, anybody who
benefits from this weird arrangement won't want it to be changed, and
I don't suppose I'd argue for change if I or my children could benefit
from it, but still, I've always thought the concept of a dead body
earning earning money to be very strange.

Rod.
It's a fundamental principle that property that generates income can
continue to generate it even after the owner is dead. For instance, if a
man builds and owns a house and rents it out, the rent still has to be
paid to his estate after his death. How else could things possibly be?

Presumably he'll have written a will, so the house continues to belong
to somebody who's alive. Whether its new owner chooses to live in it,
sell it, or earn money from it, is up to them, because they're a
living breathing person in possession of a tangible object, just as
before. The situation is perfectly simple.

You could leave intellectual property rights in your will.



I don't have a problem with the rules of inheritance, just the concept
of inheriting somebody else's income by being allowed to sell the same
piece of work over and over again when the work was only done once,

It's irrelevant what the person had to do to originate the rights. He
did it whereas you and I didn't do it because we couldn't. It's the
inheritee's good fortune. You seem to have some sort of primary school
concept of fairness. This is the grown up world. It isn't fair. It never
was and it never will be.

There's no difference between me inheriting a fortune because my grandad
(who I never knew) bought a lot of land years before I was born and me
inheriting a fortune because the same old geezer wrote a series of best
selling novels.

Bill

brightside S9 wrote:

Intellectual property (see http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ ) is property, just
as a house is.


I think was bugging Mr Stewart is the fact that he regards property as
theft.

Bill

Bill Wright wrote:
brightside S9 wrote:

Intellectual property (see http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ ) is property, just
as a house is.


I think was bugging Mr Stewart is the fact that he regards property as
theft.

Bill

To enlarge on that thought, he regards inherited intellectual property
as theft but without the effort of breaking into a house then selling
the swag down the pub.

Bill

"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 17:12:01 +0100, brightside S9
wrote:

On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 16:48:01 +0100, "Geoff Pearson"
wrote:


"Richard Tobin" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Bill Wright wrote:

Start in Edinburgh?

Why not?

Oh no. We've had enough with the tram. No more big construction
projects please.

-- Richard

There will be the major capital project of conversion of the tram deport
to
a transport museum - full of pristine trams that no one used nor wanted.
It
will not need transport links because no one will want to see them. It
will
cost slightly more than the Scottish Parliament to build.

But only after all the customs posts and immigratioin control
premisess have been built on the border :-)

and Hadrian's Wall 2.

Not until all of the Jocks and Hens resident in England have been
repatriated to SamondLand.
--
JohnT

On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:18:50 +0100, Bill Wright
wrote:

Bill Wright wrote:
brightside S9 wrote:

Intellectual property (see http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ ) is property, just
as a house is.


I think was bugging Mr Stewart is the fact that he regards property as
theft.

Bill

To enlarge on that thought, he regards inherited intellectual property
as theft but without the effort of breaking into a house then selling
the swag down the pub.

I'm not disputing what the law says, or the fact that those who
benefit from it are not surprisingly quite vehement that the present
situation is part of the natural order of things and should never be
questioned. What's bugging me is that the concept of copyright creates
a few anomalies, and since it's several hundred years old it could
possibly do with a reappraisal.

There are effectively two classes of worker, some who receive an
income only while they are working, and some who continue to receive
an income from one piece of work for the rest of their lives, even
though they are no longer working for it. That's strange enough, but
it gets stranger-

Normally, when somebody dies, their heirs inherit their property and
any savings they've been prudent enough to make, but not their income,
because most people stop receiving an income if they stop working,
which is why people generally like to have jobs. Being dead would
render most people unfit for work, which you'd logically expect also
to render them unfit to receive an income for it.

I think the flawed notion that allows us to proceed to this reductio
ad absurdum is that of an idea being counted as property itself,
rather than something that can be exploited to earn money to buy some.
Of course a person who thinks of a marketable idea (practical or
fictional) should be protected against others taking unfair advantage
until they've had a reasonable chance to earn money from their idea
themselves, but how can anybody take advantage of the dead?

Rod.

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:20:41 +0100, Bill Wright
wrote:


I wondered if I was alone in seeing a fundamental difference between
leaving something you've already earned during your life, and
continuing to earn money after you're dead. Naturally, anybody who
benefits from this weird arrangement won't want it to be changed, and
I don't suppose I'd argue for change if I or my children could benefit
from it, but still, I've always thought the concept of a dead body
earning earning money to be very strange.

Rod.

It's a fundamental principle that property that generates income can
continue to generate it even after the owner is dead. For instance, if a
man builds and owns a house and rents it out, the rent still has to be
paid to his estate after his death. How else could things possibly be?

Presumably he'll have written a will, so the house continues to belong
to somebody who's alive. Whether its new owner chooses to live in it,
sell it, or earn money from it, is up to them, because they're a
living breathing person in possession of a tangible object, just as
before. The situation is perfectly simple.

The only alternative I can think of would be the communist one, in which
all the property and assets of the deceased become the property of the
state.

No, of course it's not the only alternative. We have rules about who
gets a dead persons' property. The instructions in the will are obeyed
first, if there is one, but if not there's an order of precedence, and
if the relevant individuals can't be found, only then does the
property go to the state.

I don't have a problem with the rules of inheritance, just the concept
of inheriting somebody else's income by being allowed to sell the same
piece of work over and over again when the work was only done once,
and wasn't even done by the person selling it because it was done by
somebody else who is dead. This has always appeared strange to me,
though I can understand how those who benefit from this system may
have slightly blurred vision.

I think the whole point of extending copyright after the creator's death - I
think it was something like 12 years from publication aroung 1900 - was to
support "widows and orphans".

So why can't writers &c. just pay into personal pensions or buy life
insurance like everyone else?

--
Max Demian

Max Demian wrote:

I think the whole point of extending copyright after the creator's
death - I think it was something like 12 years from publication
aroung 1900 - was to support "widows and orphans".

It was actually at least 50 years after the death of the author, as
established by the Berne Copyright Convention of 1886. The term was set
so as to benefit two succeeding generations of heirs.

So why can't writers &c. just pay into personal pensions or buy life
insurance like everyone else?

Why should they? They have set up a business on the basis of their own
creative efforts, and have passed it on just like any other business.
The business is their pension and life insurance.

You have to remember that copyright is not like an invention. It
doesn't have to pass into the public domain in order to allow the world
to progress. No-one ever needs to use someone else's creative artistic
work. If they want to, however, it seems perfectly reasonable to me
that they should pay to do so.

You could ask why copyright isn't therefore infinite, being the property
of the creator or his heirs in perpetuity. That would be a very good
question for philosophical debate. I suspect it doesn't rear its head
very often only because the term is so long at present that only few
creative works ever remain commercially viable for that long anyway.

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:52:38 +0100, Bill Wright
wrote:


There are effectively two classes of worker, some who receive an
income only while they are working, and some who continue to receive
an income from one piece of work for the rest of their lives, even
though they are no longer working for it.

There's nothing wrong with receiving an income from one piece of work.
If you've created something that continues to earn money you're entitled
to that money. That's called working clever as opposed to working hard.
It's a good thing, not a bad thing. What's confusing you is all the
propaganda from those who purport to represent the workers and shirkers
who aren't clever enough or industrious enough to pull this trick off.

Of course it's not a bad thing. If you've had a clever idea, you're
entitled to some reward for thinking of it first, and the way this
works with patents appears quite reasonable, in that others are
prevented from exploiting your idea for a time limit that is
sufficient to give you a chance of exploiting it first.

The thing that seems strange to me is that an idea can be protected
after the death of the person who thought it, when they are no longer
capable of exploiting it at all. They've had their chance, so to
speak. How can "ownership" of a piece of knowledge be transferred to
somebody else?

What about bank interest? Do you reckon that should stop when the
account holder dies?

Bank interest is not income in the sense of the accumulation of wealth
in return for work. It's a payment by a bank for the use of wealth
that has already been accumulated in return for work already done, and
which the earner has decided to save. If you don't work and save, it
doesn't happen, but if during your life you have worked and saved, it
will still exist in a more or less tangible form after you're dead.
It's the same as property; a house is still a house even after its
owner has died.

But an idea isn't property in the same sense as a house or a sum of
money, and calling it such doesn't make it so. What should be
protected is the right of a person to be the first to exploit their
own idea, but not the idea itself after the person who had the idea no
longer exists and no longer has any need to exploit it.

Rod.

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:20:54 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

Max Demian wrote:

I think the whole point of extending copyright after the creator's
death - I think it was something like 12 years from publication
aroung 1900 - was to support "widows and orphans".

It was actually at least 50 years after the death of the author, as
established by the Berne Copyright Convention of 1886. The term was set
so as to benefit two succeeding generations of heirs.

What happens when the copyright has been sold to a large corporation?

So why can't writers &c. just pay into personal pensions or buy life
insurance like everyone else?

Why should they? They have set up a business on the basis of their own
creative efforts, and have passed it on just like any other business.
The business is their pension and life insurance.

You have to remember that copyright is not like an invention. It
doesn't have to pass into the public domain in order to allow the world
to progress. No-one ever needs to use someone else's creative artistic
work. If they want to, however, it seems perfectly reasonable to me
that they should pay to do so.

You could ask why copyright isn't therefore infinite, being the property
of the creator or his heirs in perpetuity. That would be a very good
question for philosophical debate. I suspect it doesn't rear its head
very often only because the term is so long at present that only few
creative works ever remain commercially viable for that long anyway.

The curators of the Louvre might disagree with this.
--
(\__/) M.
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around
(")_(") is he still wrong?

In article , Bill Wright
wrote:


To enlarge on that thought, he regards inherited intellectual property
as theft but without the effort of breaking into a house then selling
the swag down the pub.

To some extent I think this is another example of where people can be
mislead by the language. Calling both 'intellectual' and 'physical' items
'property' allows people to assume they are to be treated in exactly the
same ways. Ditto for the term 'ownership'. Leads to confusions and
unsatisfactory results.

An author may sell *publication* 'rights'. That means the publisher may
'own' that right - albeit not always completely or exclusively. So their
'ownership' will itself have limits and conditions. Some of which aren't on
the face of the contract. What they can or can't do isn't exactly the same
as if you buy a new printer for your computer and now 'own' the printer.

And for the author-publisher case the key point is that the author is
agreeing someone else should be a *publisher*. Not someone who
fails/ceases/refuses to publish whilst becoming a block for others being
able to do so. The difficulty here is that at present it can be difficult
for an author to sort this out as it may involve a court ruling in a
situation where the (now current 'owner' of the 'rights') can't be located
and involved.

Personally, I've routinely arranged contracts that ensure publication
rights given and not 'exclusive', etc. But not all people think of making
such matters explicit. And not all publishers will agree.

e.g. With a certain irony. I wrote an article on Linux and Audio for a well
known UK Linux mag and submitted it. They liked it and wanted to publish. I
explained my usual terms. The magazine's (multinational) publisher refused.
So I published elsewhere.

The editor of the magazine was apologetic and embarassed. One of the key
promoted features of Linux is that it is 'open' and he felt they *should*
be able to agree to what I wanted. But the publishers refused.

Slainte,

Jim

--
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