[pvn]

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You are mistaking scarcity for ease of duplication IMO.

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Actually, you're falsely differentitating between the two. If something is easily duplicatable it cannot be scarce.

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It is easier to go over to your neighbors house and burn a copy of a CD or scan a photo than it is to duplicate his car or the computer you use to do the duplication.

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That's because bits on a CD are not scarce. Interestingly, the blank CD itself IS scarce.

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Simply because you can upropriate something with relative ease doesn't mean that you aren't stealing or that the original owners aren't harmed. You are basically arguing for imminent domain over items that can be stolen by the general public.

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Iminent domain? Are you serious? I'm not giving the duplicator exclusive rights to the duplicated information. You are begging the question; you assume that information can be owned instead of showing *why* this is the case.

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Lets use the music idea to try and keep this relatively on topic. Say that I am a hiphop producer my job is to wright beats and tunes and then shop them around to artists who will then buy the usage of those songs from me and put their lyrics on them. I shop the songs around to allot of groups and eventually Ludacris likes the tune and wants to record with it. We wright up a contract for usage of my idea together with his idea agree on a price and a use and hes off to the studio. Now the song is about to be released on national radio when along comes a tune from Lil John using my exact tune copied from the demo tape. Now Luda can't release the tune because it sounds like a rip off when in fact he was ripped off. And I'm screwed because my deal was to make money off the album sales.

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Bummer. Let's say I have this idea to take thin pieces of bread, roll them up, and stick ice cream in one end of them. I call it an "ice cream cone". I start collecting some money and materials to build my ice cream cone stand, and right across the street someone else opens a "Ice Cream Conicals." Now I can't open my store because it looks like a rip off. And I'm screwed because my deal was to make money off of the ice cream cone sales.

Boo hoo.

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Regardless of whether or not ideas can be considered scarce. This is still simple contract law. In any market system you would like to operate in other than pure chaos contracts should and will exist. Your not advocating a world without contracts are you?

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What gave you that idea?

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And when you purchase music or art you are entering a defacto contract. I provide you with my IP (music) for a price. As the seller I define the limits of that contract and you can either accept or refuse it.

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Sounds perfectly good to me.

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If I want to sell a record for $500 or throw them from the back of speeding truck in bundles of 1000 that's my business. If you copy and distribute that music then you are violating our contract and harming me.

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I have no objection to this. So why didn't you use that contract in your demo tape example?