in practice, I think it would be impossible, so as another post says, in a non-IP world, you may have to reconsider your business model… :-/

but then again, I’m not the expert here!

1) nothing prevents you from setting a clause in your service contract that estipulates “the student shall not make or distribute copies of the material”. In this case,you will have to make all material uniquely identifiable, because you if you find copies of the material circulating in the market, you must be able to prove who bought the material from you and violated the contract.

2) You have not signed a contract with “the general public”, so you cannot sue anyone who you find in possession of the material, other than the person you originally sold it to, as long as the contract stipulated copies were not allowed.

3) You cannot sue the original client on the basis of “lost revenue”, because there is no way to prove that the people who got it for free or paid to the original client for a copy would have bought the material from you instead.

4) There is nothing preventing you from designing a business model that makes your services more difficult to be copies. For example, you could have your staff answering questions online, guiding the students, taking questions, etc.

To sum up: if one of your clients bought your study material with a clear understanding that he should not copy or distribute it, and does so nevertheless, he is not a thief, he has simply broken a contract with you. But it is up to you to prove that the person you are sueing is the person who copied and distributed the material.

A special pleader has repeatedly asked a question above:

“I wonder what would be the incentive….Is this not what the Dark Ages were all about?”

My answer, which I only bother with because of the touching pleading for it (I am sincerely sorry all you get is mine instead of that of the far more capable Mr. Kinsella, but do you really imagine he could ever find the time to intelligently answer every question he receives?), will be on a forum with a more general discussion of “IP”.

Here:

http://blog.mises.org/archives/010592.asp

Which part of, “this is for my own amusement here” did you not understand? I’m conflicted, I’m terribly conscious of cluttering up this entire site with these idiotic battles I get sucked into (because they start off close to the topic and I THINK I can add something. Not working out). I’m out of here after a word and a quote.

I have no political position, school, nor plans to defend, whatsoever. I have only one point and I’ve already made it: only criminals (as I’ve defined it) should have any contact whatsoever with the State. Non-criminals who do have contact against their will are the State’s victims, and those who request any thing of the State, at the very least, become a party to crime themselves. Maybe an intro to a talent far greater than mine could get my only damned point into your Randian head (is that better? I’m sorry, she just should not be ceded the word “objective”, I’m not ceding it, at any rate)

“…have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong, or as we say, despotic, when crime is great? Is there not more liberty, that is, less government, as crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function? Not only does magisterial power exist because of evil; but it exists by evil. Violence is employed to maintain it; and all violence involves criminality. Soldiers, policemen, and gaolers; swords, batons, and fetters, are instruments for inflicting pain; and all infliction of pain is in the abstract wrong. The state employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works. Morality cannot recognize it; for morality, being simply a statement of the perfect law can give no countenance to any thing growing out of, and living by, breaches of that law. Wherefore, legislative authority can never be ethical_must always be conventional merely.

Hence, there is a certain inconsistency in the attempt to determine the right position, structure, and conduct of a government by appeal to the first principles of rectitude. For, as just pointed out, the acts of an institution which is in both nature and origin imperfect, cannot be made to square with the perfect law. All that we can do is to ascertain, firstly, in what attitude a legislature must stand to the community to avoid being by its mere existence an embodied wrong; — secondly, in what manner it must be constituted so as to exhibit the least incongruity with the moral law; — and thirdly, to what sphere its actions must be limited to prevent it from multiplying those breaches of equity it is set up to prevent.

The first condition to be conformed to before a legislature can be established without violating the law of equal freedom, is the acknowledgment of the right now under discussion — the right to ignore the state.

- Herbert Spenser

For my own benefit, I always call on anyone who will listen to me to ignore the State. Once they agree, I like to play and talk music.

” Let’s talk about something that is DEFINITELY a workable business model under a democratic state (conspiracy theorist warning: sane people stop here): ………. And who just might get a few nice government contracts? ”

And what in the world, or rather in what I said gave you the idea that this is the model of Government that I am suggesting? This is the model you are railing against and are obsessed with. All I am saying is that no government is not necessarily the only alterative or even the best alternative to bad or oppressive government.

Please remember that in citing fact after fact of State-perpetrated or State-enabled atrocities, you are violating the most fundamental principle laid out by Hayek himself, which is that statistics does not and cannot lead to any conclusion (If I remember right, that figures in Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle). It requires a theory working on sound premises and irrefutable logic to explain anything at all. So please do try a theoretical explanation, not a fact-filled one. Please remember that neither an Objectivist Government nor a Libertarian Society have ever existed. Hence, any facts you cite are irrelevant to both.

” On another forum I had asked you some tough questions about the prospects of more than a relative handful of nerds ever adopting your obscure, muddled, eminently unattractive philosophy ”

Oh Please!!!! I really thought that was not germane to the discussion. Incidentally, that only a “handful of nerds would ever ….. unattractive philosophy” is only a claim of yours. I could say the same thing in return and that you belong to a lunatic fringe, but I shall not because I do not even think so.

” I don’t give a damn if it is ….. ”

This is really getting sad. I explain a problem and give “the dark ages” as the summary. You completely ignore the situation and go on and try to sling mud at the final statement and at me in turn???? This is not about ability (the way you claim to be an idiot) but about approach to a discussion.

What makes me even more sad is that SK, the author of the original blog and an avowed Libertarian and a Libertarian Scholar is somehow not addressing questions raised on this forum. I am therefore restating my question with the explicit request that SK answer it.

Here it is…..

****************************
I wonder what would be the incentive for anyone at all to come up with good ideas if almost anyone could use a commercially viable idea that they produced (please note that I do not say created). I am somehow worried about the situation where no one at all is interested in investing a lifetime (or any portion of it) developing ideas that will inevitably be hijacked by someone else. I therefore have the sneaky feeling that Libertarianism is a one-way street to the Dark Ages. In simpler terms, I am saying that if you create an environment in which ideas cannot be given the status of property rights, you will have a world in which no one will create ideas or if they do create, share them. Is this not what the Dark Aages were all about? Would you care to prove me wrong?
************************

I could say more, but I would rather leave that to a time when you bother to respond intelligently to the above question rather than calling me names.

Finally, when I said Liberty is not a good Axiom, please remember that I am not denouncing Liberty. All I am saying is that Liberty is a condition required for the maintenance Life. As such, it is subservient to Life itself. While Human Action (and hence Liberty) is a good axiom for a treatise on Economics (as Mises has written wonderfully and which I am yet to complete), I am not sure it is a good one for politics. As I understand it, all rights are political. Hence, the choice of Liberty as the Axiom for a political philosophy is fundamentally flawed.

An Axiom is a self-evident truth to even try to disprove which you need to refer to it. It can only be pointed at and identified. It is not to be derived from a more fundamental aspect of metaphysics. Liberty is not a self-evident truth. The Right to Liberty flows out of the more fundamental Right to Life. Liberty is an (only) essential condition for a rational animal (read man) to act as per the dictates of his rational mind in the sustenance of his own life. Hence, Liberty (and emancipation as you put it) is not a good axiom for a political philosophy. Care to respond to this?

Goodbye again, unless you make up more misleading things regarding me.

The alternative is no organized defense, which for this country, just might be viable because it is too large to conquor. The problem is, it also forfeits much.

How you cannot face it head on is beyond me.

Hearing what you want to hear,
Knowing only what you heard.

“Hey, take it easy, nobody’s insulting you, Utopian.” I’ve spent 25 years studying with the goal of perceiving reality as clearly as it is possible for a human given my particular talents and environs. I can’t think of a bigger insult. Back at ya: Statists are the Utopians, unless the world I see is what you actually wanted. That would of course make you supremely evil; no, you’re just a clueless Utopian. “Impracticably ideal schemes”, that’s Utopia. I have no schemes, no neat answers. You’re the one that craves that. You want an answer that is clean and simple. You’ll get one: clean, simple and wrong, one after the other, until enough of you grow up, forgo your grovelling before gangsters with idiotic promises and literally begin to mind your own productive business. A call for universal adulthood is not Utopia, Utopian.

It’s “blogging” for you but “hair trigger” hyperbole for me. Gotcha. I’m sure you know hyperbole.

“I wrote one post that poked fun at someone’s…”

That was not your first blog or your only insulting blog. I’m right now looking at your incredibly condescending epic opening post about what pigs we are. There is no other way to read it. When you backed down from the insults, I backed down from the insults. When you started back in, I tuned out, I did not read your plan, or question, or whatever the hell it was. Maybe someone else here doesn’t think you’re a waste of time, wait for their answer.

You ARE insulting, and worse, no longer interesting to me, and I must be crazy to be having an argument with you about whether you are or not.

Goodbye.

I didn’t accuse all Libertarians of anything. You are using hyperbole. Any criticism I leveled on anything came with a detailed explanation of how I derived my view. It’s called blogging.

I have received zero replies to the most basic question there is to any kind of anti-statist viewpoint. I ask the question not to antagonize, but to discover what the answer is.

It’s a very important question, it’s very specific, and it is primal. You came the closest to offering an answer by saying you are not strong in the theoretical side of the issues, but the question is not theoretical. Any axioms of an anti-statist belief must be considered invalid until the fundamental question is answered. It is this:

Who controls the defense?

If you can’t answer that, then there is a giant rift between all possible realities and your Utopia.

Hopefully the answer is clean and simple. Currently, it eludes me, but I am new to this.

I said I’m no expert in this field, and I said MAYBE unworkable. I knew I was being set up as a patsy for your coming anti-liberty spiel and I went ahead anyway. On another forum I had asked you some tough questions about the prospects of more than a relative handful of nerds ever adopting your obscure, muddled, eminently unattractive philosophy which you completely ignored, so it’s payback time I reckoned. But as I said, I’m an idiot.

“the workability of something depends on the prevailing legal environment which in turn depends”

You’ve demonstrated to me that you completely ignore what is inconvenient to your bias, so this is for my own amusement here:

Let’s talk about something that is DEFINITELY a workable business model under a democratic state (conspiracy theorist warning: sane people stop here): KBR, former subsidiary of Halliburton. Very rough business model: Completely infiltrate D.C. to the point that your C.E.O. becomes the Vice President under a functional moron. When a terrorist disaster occurs, as is guaranteed to occur when your “Homeland” is engaged in garrisoning half the world and supporting puppet governments all over it, perhaps your former C.E.O may throw your construction wing (among other things) a little love. Perhaps he could go on Tim Russert and lie through his teeth and have Russert eat it up, thereby selling the millions of drones who are so simple as to believe in them both. You know the story: now, just add tax dollar payed troops and bombs and a carefully cultivated boogie man with a country…and voilà! A country to rebuild! And who just might get a few nice government contracts?

So, there’s how your model, the State, works in practice. It is incontrovertible to anyone with eyes, curiosity and a functioning brain. You say:

“Libertarianism is a one-way street to the Dark Ages.”

I don’t give a damn if it is (which it’s not, this is your assertion based on your demonstrated ignorance. Check your premises, Randroid. I’m sorry, that’s not fair to the other Randroids.) because we are already in a Dark Age. At least in the Dark Age that you conjecture for libertarianism, we would all know that the corporations ruled us by brute force, we wouldn’t be absolutely surrounded by their pathetic dupes who carried us along in their moral decrepitude.

“flawed choice of Liberty as an axiom…Correct me if I am wrong…unswerving commitment to Liberty”

You got it, pal: You’re wrong. It “swerves” when someone takes the liberty to commit assault, theft of TANGIBLE property or fraud.

I don’t speak for others, but emancipation is axiomatic for me, and only me. I’m a panarchist and an adult. I ask for no master to take care of me or force through any lame business idea I may have (how would you respond if the teachers you hire turned out to be Marxoids [a stretch, I know], claimed you were exploiting them, and expropriated what they said was their due. Go run to your master, there’s more Marxoids than Randroids, it is the State that breeds them and already allows them to expropriate a large portion of our production. That’s the State, get it? I sure do) all I need in life is for no one to assault, physically rob or defraud me. What you do is none of my business, you may give yourself up to the care of any master. I exhort you to grow up and not do that, because when so many of you do this the State puts quite a crimp on my lifestyle. There is nothing else I can do about you poor lost children. Men aren’t “sold” on liberty, call it axiomatic if you like, doesn’t phase me. I like axioms; I’m not the smartest person in the world, I am not capable of formulating an elaborate system of first principles as you have. I and 99% of everyone else needs simple first principles. I only have a few others: “do unto others”, “those who don’t work, don’t eat”. These axioms work for me, I’m convinced they’d work for everyone else. It’s your choice.

From your first moment you came blazing with insults that libertarians are “hard right”: stupidlt selfish, heartless, irresponsible, unrealistic ideologues. I responded exactly in kind about your statist ideology, as is my wont. I probably shouldn’t do that, but unlike a lot of kind souls here, I have approximately zero hope that a statist over the age of 20 is ever going to wish to be emancipated. In any case, one that had it in him is not going to be dissuaded by any harsh thing I might say. I wouldn’t insult you by saying I was guiding you; there are other people here who sound like damned missionaries. To them I say: if you think it can be done at all, raising a libertarian can’t possibly be like raising an orchid.

I haven’t just countered your insults and given links, I’ve kindly answered your questions until now, and it took me no small effort (I am self-educated from the age of 13 and writing for me is a slow, painful process. The primary reason I’m here is to get better at it through the tests of fire against better writers). When you clearly suggested that our driving motivation is an IRRATIONAL hatred of the government, I determined I had been wasting my time (effort in, total incomprehension and insults out: I look for greener pastures). No removal of grace, I don’t have infinite time, I’m telling you the main reason I’ve responded to you in the first place is still open: you’re quite funny, usually.

I expect some bizarre reply now that will have almost no relation to the facts or the spirit of what I’ve said. Maybe I’m the world’s worst writer, but I just can’t be THIS bad, it’s got to be you. I want to find somebody where I can get SOME positive feedback.

All of this goes for Bala too: I put in a thoughtful reply in these little boxes trying to convey an intro to a massive subject that I’ve spent my life studying, the statist picks one thing he doesn’t like, ignores the rest and then starts off on his received, tirade against liberty. Irritating. I’ve got some more of my terrible harshness coming up for you, Bala. (Now you both may well say, as Acky basically did earlier: “Get over yourself, I can take whatever you dish out”. I know you can, that comment is directed at the third parties who may read this and disapprove of my rhetoric, perhaps justifiably.)

” Basically I think you’re asking the wrong questions and maybe you have an unworkable business model. ”

Unworkable…. Ahhhhh!!! A very interesting word indeed, especially given that the workability of something depends on the prevailing legal environment which in turn depends on the prevalent political philosophy which in turn depends on the prevalent framework of morality. I wonder what makes you think Libertarianism makes sense or is workable given its flawed choice of Liberty as an axiom (Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding says that an unswerving commitment to Liberty is the hallmark of Libertarianism. That, to me, sounds truly axiomatic.).

That apart, I wonder what would be the incentive for anyone at all to come up with good ideas if almost anyone could use a commercially viable idea that they produced (please note that I do not say created). I am somehow worried about the situation where no one at all is interested in investing a lifetime (or any portion of it) developing ideas that will inevitably be hijacked by someone else. I therefore have the sneaky feeling that Libertarianism is a one-way street to the Dark Ages. In simpler terms, I am saying that if you create an environment in which ideas cannot be given the status of property rights, you will have a world in which no one will create ideas or if they do create, share them. Is this not what the Dark Aages were all about? Would you care to prove me wrong?

Ohhh!!! Please don’t tell me I have to SELL it to you. That would be true if this were an Objectivist website where I am blogging and trying to sell Objectivism. Since this is a Libertarian blog, the onus is on you Libertarians, SK included, to SELL Libertarianism to people like me who think it is a dangerous notion masquerading as a legitimate political philosophy.

I appreciate the links you sent me, but if what you are saying is you will grace me with a reply if I amuse you, well… I’d just like you tell me what was wrong with my scenario. If not, I might just call you bad names.

@Russ, the subscription does include everything you mentioned except the DDK’s. Half of the stuff is extra language versions. Still, wading through it took time, endlessly chaining readme’s, and lots of disk swapping for prerequisites.

Without a doubt, Microsoft has the best all-around documentation, but it really is amazing how much stuff they force you to go through.

I wanted to open up something I wrote to scripting using the scripting engine. The problem was, everything I wanted to expose had to be an automation server. I wrote the automation server for a couple of classes to test the speed, and it was very disruptive to the source code, and the speed was pathetic. I ended up writing my own script language instead, and geared it toward being able to call into C++ classes that simply define a DoScriptable member function.

The scripting language has nearly all the functionality of Python plus extra operators, has the syntax of a streamlined C++ without of the linkage specifiers or type specifiers for builtins, and can make calls into C++ code at runtime, so it is much faster than VB or python. It can interpret strings as code, so you can pass entire blocks of code to functions to be executed locally. That’s how I tested the language. I had it dynamically generate permutations of expressions to execute.

I’m thinking of putting the source up on codeproject for anyone, but it could be a security nightmare. I wrote a command line shell for it, and I have a module that encapsulates about 500 Win32 system calls, so it is essentially interpretive windows. That could be a nightmare. I don’t know what the responsible thing to do is.

Microsoft yaa! Microsoft boo!

Still got more ideas, if you’re still around, I understand if you’re not. No biggie.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

sina,

Poetic justice, Freudian slip, fatal conceit? I don’t know; where I was saying your post was baffling, I inexplicably added to your confusion by saying I was a minarchist. I’m a panarchist. Brainf.. (does anyone have a better word for that? I hate that word)

I speak of the government every time the person I address speaks of the government AND every time they speak of corporatism and call it the free market.

You’ve again exhausted my store of good will for you.
I’ll wait until you say something that amuses me and then I’ll again be ready to play Charlie Brown to your Lucy.

“The last Developer Network Universal Subscription I purchased had hundreds of DVD’s, and took hours and hours to load up.”

Yeah, but doesn’t this include all the development tools, SDK’s, DDK’s, Office apps, BackOffice servers, etc.? And aren’t there options to only install the components you want to?

I understand, and agree with, your greater point of the downside of feature creep and bloatware, and I agree with it, but let’s be fair.

What Microsoft is not getting is technology. Not any more. Quantity does not replace quality. They used to sell a C++ compiler that came on 4 floppy disks and worked great. Then they came out with an integrated development environment, and it worked great. I think it was originally on 1 CD – a few hundred floppies.

The last Developer Network Universal Subscription I purchased had hundreds of DVD’s, and took hours and hours to load up. When I ran it, it was several times slower, and crashed far more often, but it included gobs of features I could care less about, and would never need.

At every turn, they seem to drive developers down a more difficult path to the goal. They had a beautiful 3D solution with OpenGL, and then chose DirectX to support and develop. DirectX has 11? versions. OpenGL 1 version and some extensions. OpenGL looks like software, DirectX looks and feels like a disjointed collection of bits and parts that requires writing twice as much to do the same thing.

I’m not sure ‘better’ means what they think it means.