First of all what you are doing is not completely thankless. Thank you. What you are doing is really appreciated.
Anger is the expected reaction from people trying to cheat and thinking that they had and then getting caught. You do a great job of just letting it slide off your back and then keep moving. I appreciate content ownership and have been defending it my entire life so I am with you.
Stay strong and keep knocking the cheaters on their asses my friend.
Wow. I am sure that the long comments I write get reused. Never actually thought about it before. I guess because I would never do that.
you are right
@baah I appreciate your passion, but I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree. As someone who has for decades advocated for creative people to own their creativity, I can tell you with 100% certainty that them owning it has nothing to do with slowing down creativity or impeding industrial progress or anyone else from doing anything, it only has to do with positioning creative people to be both recognized and compensated for their work.
If you drive a taxi or build a house you are paid for your work. It should be the same if you write a book or a song or a piece of software. You are confusing the business around creativity which I agree is terrible and a business that has been mismanaged, with necessary intellectual rights. Without these rights creativity would dry up completely.
Look at places like China where there have been no rights. Name one artistic achievement out of that country in the last 50 years. Name one technology advancement. It is because they do not protect and encourage those who create these things.
Creative people do not usually make good business people, history has shown. They need protecting, history has shown. They have been exploited for the benefit of others. The current social networks continue to do this. Every social network including this one runs on their creativity. Without it, no one including you or me would be here and it would devolve into nothing.
Yes right now Steemit can offer people a financial incentive to come but that is just a carrot. They will have to keep people here with good content and to get good content, they will need to protect the rights of those who create it. There is simply no other way.
As always I am open to hear a competing view but please give me some examples of where protecting someone's invention has impeded progress. Before you do however let me give you one and provide insight around it.
Let's say that someone created a cure for cancer and they patented it which means two things: 1. It is exclusively theirs and 2. everyone can see exactly what it is. So for the life of the patent no one could use it. Or could they?
What would you do? I would use the information contained in the patent, make the thing and distribute it widely. They would scream blood murder, but would show I never make any money off my use of their patent so they could not stop me. This is a real occurrence and happens every day in places like where I live in Thailand. They take patented drugs for HIV and sell them or give them away for next to nothing to poor people. Some of these pills are $15 each in the US. Here they are less than 10 cents. What I am saying is that if someone wants to use a patent to make money from it and can't then yes it is a hindrance, but if they simply want to move things forward, nothing holds them back. Yes Thailand is on some IP watch list, but the bottom line is people have access to the drug. In other words, you take out the business part and there is no issue when the subject is real need and IP.
Finally and to be clear I am not saying I like the current system only that creative people should own what they create. Thanks and sorry for the long post. By the way I was a songwriter and composer in Hollywood and represented about 200 writers at one point so this subject is near and dear to me. Thanks.
Hello, Baah. You're having trouble to distinguish absolute ownership and subjective ownership.
Absolute ownership is a theoretical impossibility by which an individual can "own" something through divine rights or universal truths. It is impossible unless you believe that a god exists who gives such ownership of something to someone.
Relative ownership is the opinion of individuals of the belonging of a certain object. If I think that a certain piece of paper that fell to the floor is mine and I pick it up, but you pick it up first because you think you own it, there is no "real ownership" but the one that will result from the discussion of our opinions. I will say "Hey, I saw that falling out of my pocket, it's mine" and you'll say something similar to fight for your right to keep the piece of paper.
If I grab your comment and I say "I wrote this" and I repost it everywhere and everyone credits me, @cryptosharon, for your comment and I get a lot of money for it, you'd feel bad because it was actually you who wrote it but I'm getting the credit. It is not because you hold absolute rights for it, but relative rights for it (coming from your opinion and the opinion held by the members of the surrounding social context).
There is a lot to debate about copyright, ownership, licenses, terms of usage, et. al., but saying "ownership doesn't exist" is just not the way to do it. Claiming and enforcing ownership of certain things might be bad for productivity, technololgical advancement or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that ownership is subjective and exists as long as someone thinks it exists.
Ownership is an opinion, but it has real consequences depending on the regulations that are present in each context. In the Steem blockchain, there is an absolute freedom. This means that anyone can say anything they want. But there are subjective regulations (as regulations are always subjective). These regulations are not called laws by any means, but they are imposed by users.
@grumpycat sets his own rules, for example, and enforces them. There is no absolute rule that says that having a bid bot that accepts more than 3.5 days is bad, but Grumpy Cat thinks that it is so and, JUST BY THE FACT that he THINKS that this should be so and acts upon it, we can say that there is a regulation.
Ownership is the same. I own my writings because I think I own them and the society that surrounds me thinks that I own them. But if nobody thought that, I would not own it.
With all due respect, you're still misunderstanding the different kinds of ownership.
There is an "ownership as an opinion" and an "ownership as a right". One is a thought, the other is a social convention.
You did say that. Ideas are the abstract, content is the concrete. So basically you said that nothing can be owned. I can own anything I want. I can own your head if my distorted mind thinks I somehow own it. That will be my opinion. You will disagree, of course, and society will disagree, and, legally, I will not own it, but I will in my mind.
Someone makes a sculpture, someone steals the IDEA of the sculpture. The sculpture is concrete, yet it has abstract values such as its shape and what it represents. Someone makes another sculpture with the same shape and, by extension, same representation.
The first sculptor owns his sculpture because he thinks he does and society around him accepts the fact as such. The second sculptor owns his sculpture because it is his opinion, and society agrees that he owns his sculpture but society disagrees that he owns AUTHORSHIP of the sculpture.
There is no "actual ownership". There is absolute and relative ownership, and under relative ownership there is ownership as an opinion (effective only in the thinker's mind) and ownership as a right (effective in a community such as human society).