Chris said:
As to your ad hominem argument about well-off businessmen all watching
each others' backs, I showed that to the War Department, and she got a
good laugh out of that one. A slightly bitter laugh, but a good one.
I expect to be called "The Well-Off Businessman" or "Bourgeoise
Capitalist" or "Moneybags Industrialist" for at least several days.
But as a matter of fact, most of the manuals I've purchased over the
years have been for employers or customers. If you compare the cost of
a new lab instrument to a used/reconditioned one, $25 to $75 is small
change. They're still way ahead. As to my own few lab quality
instruments, if I can't afford the manual I need, I can't afford the
instrument.
It's not an issue of being an acolyte of the neo-liberal economic
church of Milton Friedman and his divine maxims. It's an issue of
fairness, which usually comes from the other side of the
political/economic aisle, as do I. And it's an issue of encouraging
creativity and rewarding the creators of intellectual property for
their work. Copyright is a very American idea. Before the formation
of the United States, the King of England had the right to award
monopolies on the publication of books. This monopoly was sometimes
used to reward cronies or punish the creators of the IP by burying the
book. Look at any American History survey course textbook, and Article
I, Section 8 of our constitution, as well as the original Copyright Act
of 1790.
It's kind of funny, really. Here's a newsgroup for electronics design.
Contributors include researchers, authors, teachers and professors,
chip designers, and many really good electronic engineers who make
original contributions to the field and write for everyone's benefit in
this newsgroup, trade journals and their websites. (I don't belong in
their league. For the most part, I just try to stay out of their way
and answer simple, obvious questions so they won't have to, along with
a suggestion to post to s.e.b. next time.) I'm just happy to read
their conversations and learn from them. But one thing they all have
in common is creating intellectual property for a living. One would
think they would be willing to go to the wall for IP rights in general.
Or possibly they're just being a little short-sighted.
These are not good times for U.S. engineers in general, particularly in
manufacturing. There seems to be a disconnect in our country between
the value of a thing which is made and the value of the intelligence
behind it. Managers of manufacturing companies feel they can do it
with fewer engineers, and then are surprised when their product line
gets stale, customers complain they can't get support with their
product and will buy something else next time, disastrous manufacturing
glitches happen on the floor -- things don't work right and nobody
knows why.
In my career, I've seen good engineers creating IP and increasing the
value of the companies they worked for, far in excess of whatever
they're paid (sometimes the equivalent of years salary on one project),
then being thrown away like used coffee grounds. The current crop of
tender, green MBAs could have a notion to shoot the company in the foot
by reducing "indirect labor and overhead costs". Management may decide
they can hire a fresh fish out of school or a foreign visa applicant
for a lot less money. They might even just let an engineer go if he
gets sick. In short, they really don't value IP because they don't
value the creators of IP.
TAANSTAAFL means There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (Robert A.
Heinlein, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", one of the icons of my
misspent youth). That's been used as a motto of the Scaife, Coors and
Murdoch neoliberals at the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise
Institute and Fox as they try to march the United States back to the
Gilded Age of the 1890s. I'm afraid Heinlein even used it himself that
way. But before the politics and the macroeconomics comes the basic
issue of paying for value received and doing what's fair. If you don't
pay an engineer for the value received from his IP he's trying to sell,
he'll stop making IP and do something profitable to support his family.
If you don't pay for the value of IP received from a coprporation, the
people whose job is making the IP will not be profitable to employ, and
will be let go. Fewer working engineers, less creativity and less IP
will mean a declining manufacturing economy. And as things go down the
drain and there are no more manufacturing jobs available, people will
just console themselves with anti-intellectual, anti-science beliefs,
following people like Ron Grossi and staring at Fox. They'll let other
countries take the lead, and they'll call it God's just punishment on a
sinful society.
So much for the big picture. I treat IP as always having value because
it does. I do it out of respect to the creators, and to maintain the
value of the IP. I also do it in order to keep from devaluing IP in
general.
Agilent isn't running around with platoons of armed library police, and
they definitely aren't buying up old manuals to keep 'em out of your
hands. I have never known of anybody who quietly copied a manual for
personal use who was busted by the legal department at HP or any
instrument manufacturer. I don't believe they really care about
manuals for orphaned instruments, except that there are several
long-term consequences to not making pro forma efforts to defend their
IP from obvious attempts to devalue it (like putting scans on the net).
Actually, I'm sure they look on this whole issue as a money and good
will loser and a general PITA. They see you acting like since it's
their fault they made these great, reliable instruments 25 years ago
that still work great today, they should be punished for it. I get the
feeling they already are, and I'm personally afraid they might be
thinking about learning from their "mistakes".
And as for me, I'll "pay for my pleasures", and have my employers and
customers pay for theirs, not so much because I can afford to light my
cigars with $100 bills as that's just the right way to do it. You
know, the right thing to do? Like, ethics and honesty and all that? I
know it seems obsolete in these times, but some of us (at least as many
Blue as Red) still feel that way.
Good luck
Chris
Copyright is fine. Patents are fine. But their continual extension, both
in time and ambit, at the behest of lobbyists for big corporations just
contributes to the increasing concentration of assets in fewer and fewer
hands.
It's amusing, as corporations grow ever larger, more powerful, and more
expansive in what they control, to hear folks defending free enterprise
and fairly-compensated innovation of hard-working engineers as if the
interests of such individual workers and creators were the same as those
of the wealthy stockholders who deploy immensely more power simply by
virtue of their wealth. Obviously those interests are not the same, as
the current endless tale of "layoffs for the workers equals more profits
for the stockholders" continually demonstrates.
Once the right-wing TV personality John Stossel did a show about a
little old lady in Atlantic City who refused to sell her house to a huge
neighboring casino that wanted to expand. How cruel was the pressure
they put on her! How noble was her fight! What sympathy she deserved for
being mistreated by that big, mean corporation.....etc., etc., etc.,
with lots and lots more sentimentality and tear jerking.
And finally (and this was the why Stossel did the story) there was the
true message hidden within all the schmaltz: See how important it is
that property rights are always defended to the max!!!!
Stossel couldn't have cared less about the woman's suffering, but I'm
sure he appreciated her story as a good way of confusing things nicely.
What he didn't want the viewers to notice, and I'm sure they mostly
didn't, is that it's not usually a sweet little property owner standing
up for property rights against larger forces. It's the reverse.
Something like 90 percent of all of the private assets of this country
are controlled by less than 10 percent of its people (and the latter is
a percentage that's continually decreasing these days!). That means
that, to the extent that property rights are made increasingly rigid and
sacred, our society becomes increasingly a place where more and more
power is concentrated in the same fewer and fewer hands.
This is what they've got in several Latin American countries, and the
result is constant unrest from the poor and repression, torturing, and
killing from the rich. In the US we've been slowly working our way in
that direction for the past 30 years.
Sorry, guy, what we're in in the US now is one very, very big case where
more "hair of the dog that bit you" (i.e., more, and safer, returns for
the stockholders) won't fix things. They've shown for a generation that
they only want their profits, period, and in the process of getting them
they will be happy to continue throwing away as many workers as they
possibly can without regret or compunction.
Cordially
Leonard (the other one)
