Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 04:41:23 PM
My "IDEA" is also a limited resource, since two people writing on the same genre will not come with the exact same ideas almost never.

I'm confused by your use of "ideas" and "writing", because the Trove piracy is about authors' copyrights being violated.
In the US, Patents protect novel ideas.  And copyrights protect expression.  Is this different in Mexico?

Quote from: estar on October 12, 2021, 06:12:11 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 04:41:23 PM
Because somehow me profiting from my work is a privilege if said work is creative.

Except you can by printing the pulp game and selling it. Oh wait somebody else can print it and sell it as well right? Fine that is an issue. But it still doesn't stop you from printing and selling your pub game. Doesn't stop you from being first in the market. Nor does it you from be recognized as the creator of your particular take.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 04:41:23 PM
Because socialists think my ideas belong to "society" "for the greater good".

Because your ideas as a whole are not unique, they rest on the knowledge of others. The concept of tabletop roleplaying, the consider of packaging a game in a box. The use of dice as game mechanics. A thousand ideas from other folks are embedded in your pulp game some of them quite recent on the human scale of time. Are you going to pay them? Cut them in on a slice of your pulp game. What about all the authors who pioneered the genre decades ago or their heir. What about Speilberg, Lucas who refreshed the genre for a new generation? You want to take credit for the whole muffin when the only original bits are a few scattered raisins.

You feel to plunder to the work of others but god forbid that you allow other to benefit from your work. All because you can't see the muffin only the raisins you created yourself.

Except you can't point to a plce in my game where I wholesale copied anything, as for the mechanics, it has been ruled you can't patent those, plus if I use the mechanics in the SRD? In the OGL? Are you now to denounce an open licence?

Yep, YOU want the "right" to profit from my work or else I'm "INFRINGING" on your "rights".

And you keep making false equivalences, it's not the same to take the idea of magic (that has millenia so old you can't trace it to one individual and that apeared on all cultures) and do something with it than to take what I DID WITH IT and then profit from MY WORK.

But I'm the one for theft and slavery and the socialist and you lot are the ones for freedom and free markets...

In your minds only.

Quote from: DocJones on October 12, 2021, 06:22:38 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 04:41:23 PM
My "IDEA" is also a limited resource, since two people writing on the same genre will not come with the exact same ideas almost never.

I'm confused by your use of "ideas" and "writing", because the Trove piracy is about authors' copyrights being violated.
In the US, Patents protect novel ideas.  And copyrights protect expression.  Is this different in Mexico?

So you haven't read all the argument?

Fine, I'll sumarize for you:

I don't really care about someone pirating my game, can't be helped and the pirate will go without it if he can't pirate it.

The discusion switched to "fixing" copyright law.

Some think they have the right to profit from my ideas (expression) without my consent and without giving me money, and since I don't agree I'm (in their minds) pro theft and slavery and I'm somehow infringing on their "rights".

To these guys my game is "just an idea man!", and as such I have no claim to it and by saying I do I'm a socialist, a thief and pro slavery.

But don't believe me go back and read the argument.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 06:15:17 PM

Quote from: estar on October 12, 2021, 06:12:11 PMExcept you can by printing the pulp game and selling it.

Question, if part of my permission for you viewing my work is a contract not to reproduce it, are you still ethical if you break said contract.

If a person signed a contract to not share your work (like an NDA), then they would be violating the contract if they shared it. This contractual obligation wouldn't be passed on to the person they shared the work with, though.

There's a good discussion of "IP as Contract" on page 45 (PDF page 46) of this book (you only have to read p45-47 to get the gist; it's very short):

https://cdn.mises.org/Against%20Intellectual%20Property_2.pdf

EDIT: Rothbard was a proponent of this "contract-based copyright" view, but I couldn't remember what part of what book he talked about it in, and couldn't find it immediately. I think it was "The Ethics of Liberty" or "For a New Liberty", but I knew it'd be discussed in Kinsella's book linked above (there are plenty of citations if you're curious).

Quote from: Oddend on October 12, 2021, 06:31:52 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 06:15:17 PM

Quote from: estar on October 12, 2021, 06:12:11 PMExcept you can by printing the pulp game and selling it.

Question, if part of my permission for you viewing my work is a contract not to reproduce it, are you still ethical if you break said contract.

If a person signed a contract to not share your work (like an NDA), then they would be violating the contract if they shared it. This contractual obligation wouldn't be passed on to the person they shared the work with, though.

There's a good discussion of "IP as Contract" on page 45 (PDF page 46) of this book (you only have to read p45-47 to get the gist; it's very short):

https://cdn.mises.org/Against%20Intellectual%20Property_2.pdf

"Here, read a book by the holy profet of my utopian ideology, this might convince you!"

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 06:15:17 PM

Quote from: estar on October 12, 2021, 06:12:11 PMExcept you can by printing the pulp game and selling it.

Question, if part of my permission for you viewing my work is a contract not to reproduce it, are you still ethical if you break said contract.

It is not ethical to break a legitimate contract. But that particular contract clause is unenforceable in the United States due to the First Sale Doctrine.

It gets way more vague with digital goods like software because their use almost always involves making exact copies all the time. For example you can copy it from a CD to a hard disk when you install it. The software is copied from the hard drive to memory and so on. So that why you get a license with the product when you buy software.

In contrast software that on a fixed physical media like game cartridges is subject to first sale doctrine. Licenses were tried but ultimately defeated resulting in a used game market. Which was in turn was upended when High Speed Internet became more available allowing you to buy and download games into your console. At some point during the sign up process there was a license that spelled out what you were not allowed to do with your purchase as far as copying goes.

There are hundreds of nauces to this but that the basic gist.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 06:34:51 PM

Quote from: Oddend on October 12, 2021, 06:31:52 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 06:15:17 PM

Quote from: estar on October 12, 2021, 06:12:11 PMExcept you can by printing the pulp game and selling it.

Question, if part of my permission for you viewing my work is a contract not to reproduce it, are you still ethical if you break said contract.

If a person signed a contract to not share your work (like an NDA), then they would be violating the contract if they shared it. This contractual obligation wouldn't be passed on to the person they shared the work with, though.

There's a good discussion of "IP as Contract" on page 45 (PDF page 46) of this book (you only have to read p45-47 to get the gist; it's very short):

https://cdn.mises.org/Against%20Intellectual%20Property_2.pdf

"Here, read a book by the holy profet of my utopian ideology, this might convince you!"

Yeah, personally typing out my own book for you to call me a communist is a much better use of my time!

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 06:23:52 PM
Except you can't point to a plce in my game where I wholesale copied anything, as for the mechanics, it has been ruled you can't patent those, plus if I use the mechanics in the SRD? In the OGL? Are you now to denounce an open licence?

Actually patent is the only way to protect game mechanics (see Magic the Gathering or Monopoly) 
Gygax/Arneson/TSR could have patented D&D game mechanics, but they did not.
It's only the fact that that prior art (D&D) exists,  that noone can patent their game mechanics that are based on it.
There are a whole host of US patents on various role-playing game mechanics. 
I'm not sure that any of them affect most of the games we play here.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 06:28:45 PM
Some think they have the right to profit from my ideas (expression) without my consent and without giving me money, and since I don't agree I'm (in their minds) pro theft and slavery and I'm somehow infringing on their "rights".

Yes, someone can take your ideas and profit from them.
And no, someone cannot take your expression and profit from it.
As long as those arguing keep conflating ideas and expression, it ain't addressing reality.

No contract is 100% enforceable and arguing that it must before it is viable is a request for tyranny.

In addition I do not believe that anybody here believes that willingly benefiting from unethical behavior is ethical.

Quote from: DocJones on October 12, 2021, 06:44:59 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 12, 2021, 06:28:45 PM
Some think they have the right to profit from my ideas (expression) without my consent and without giving me money, and since I don't agree I'm (in their minds) pro theft and slavery and I'm somehow infringing on their "rights".

Yes, someone can take your ideas and profit from them.
And no, someone cannot take your expression and profit from it.
As long as those arguing keep conflating ideas and expression, it ain't addressing reality.

Okay, say I develop a pulp TTRPG is it "and idea man!" or an expression of an idea?

To me you're free to develop your own pulp game, but not to print and sell mine.

But the "free market advocates" disagree, they claim my finished game "IS JUST AN IDEA MAN!".

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 06:47:55 PM
No contract is 100% enforceable and arguing that it must before it is viable is a request for tyranny.

In addition I do not believe that anybody here believes that willingly benefiting from unethical behavior is ethical.

But some here DO believe that clearly unethical behaviour IS ethical and should also be legal.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 04:41:36 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 12, 2021, 04:30:21 PMI've gotten the impression that the reaction against what I've said isn't based on logic, but on gut feelings. A sense of moral outage.

My argument is that all things have some level of 'gut' instinct because reality isn't rational, and neither is our relation too it. I feel just as frustrated with you at times as you with me. And I do not believe that you personally argue in bad faith like I find oddend doing.

I appreciate the extension of good faith.

And I agree. Our fundamental motives aren't rational. But we're still rational beings, and we can make rational decisions.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 05:02:06 PM

Quote from: Pat on October 12, 2021, 04:30:21 PMI think the key is property rights, or the concepts of rights themselves, or the use of the term privilege. We seem to be using them in very different ways.

Alright Il make a comprehensive list:
I know what a positive right vs a negative right is. One demands compulsion and one theoreticlaly doesn't. Free speech vs healthcare.

But free speech, without an assumed level of protection and a demand of compulsion is largely worthless. Or moreso then compulsion, an agreement of ethics about it.
Human beings are not rational, and at a level in society we don't build around rationality. Because life isn't rational. We build around 'holy' elements functionally. Things that are important by themselves regardless of context.

If you are not obligated by society a level of protection for your speech, then the right itself is worthless. This is how free speech is ultimatly compulsive. It demands a certain behaviour in others (legally or culturally) or else its just words in somebodies mind.

So far am I making sense?

I'm not sure free speech really applies to the conversation, other than it's true that rights need to be defended. But that doesn't make them inherently compulsive in any but the most technical sense.

But regarding the irrational or the holy, that's what I tried to address in my big post when I talked about translating morality to new situations. The morality we've developed occurs at a level below that of rationality. For instance, the sense of disgust where we have a visceral reaction to something like cannibalism or bugs. But while the reaction is irrational, the reasons we develop those reactions are logical. A lot of our ancestors probably died from that brain disease caused by eating other humans, or from poison insects or arachnids. It's a learned trait. Sometimes, it goes awry and we learn the wrong lesson, but collectively the bad ones tend to be weeded out and we're left with a functional moral infrastructure.

And when it comes to the modern world and all the new situations we're exposed to, we have the opportunity to shape our instinctive reactions. To rationally think about how to apply the morality from an earlier era. That's more or less the field of ethics, working out specific applications of our subconscious moral underpinnings. That's why I think the spread of the moral belief that ideas are property is so dangerous, because it removes a maladapted morality from the reach of reason.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 12, 2021, 05:40:05 PM
To refine the idea further: I think discussions should be about how we want to exist as a species moreso that about purely survival.

I think my earlier post addressed this:

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2021, 01:04:54 PM
Characters like Odysseus, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman are part of the cultural consciousness. By using and reusing them, we add to and participate in common culture. These characters grow and become more interesting by being re-interpreted and re-imagined, and the stories are richer because of it. That's the nature of myth.

To bring this back to gaming -- I'm going to suggest that the OSR has been good for gaming. Let's suppose that the OGL had never been created and WotC had behaved like others and kept all of their content proprietary. I think that gaming would be worse for it. On the one hand, people have always been able to make D&D look-alikes like The Arcanum and so forth. But without being able to pull from D&D, I don't think there would be an OGL at all, and to the extent that there was - it would be more like the various D&D-look-alike games of the 1990s.

I'll suggest that games today would be better if game designers could pull from any of the games of the 1980s. Being able to build on top of this past content would let designers focus more on what makes their new game design unique and interesting.

As I see it, we should still give credit and recognition to these 1980s games, but they should be in the public domain so that other designers can legally build off of them.

For me, one of the most powerful illustrations I learned about copyright was from the 2014 film Selma. The film had to fake the words that Martin Luther King Jr used in his recorded speeches, because those were still under copyright and the film rights to them had been sold to Steven Spielberg. I think that is horrific. Dr. King's speeches are part of the public consciousness, and should most certainly be in the public domain by now. Keeping them as property to be bought and sold is a moral wrong.

Morally and ethically, I think people should profit from the fruits of their labors - whether intellectual or physical. They should get credit and recognition for their work. However, I don't think that current copyright and patent law helps this overall. It primarily the big corporations like Disney and record labels -- while independent artists are the ones most likely to forego copyright and give their creations away for free to get distribution and interest.

Quote from: Pat on October 12, 2021, 07:09:52 PMBut we're still rational beings, and we can make rational decisions.

I will 100% disagree on that. We can make judgement decisions but we are not ultimately rational beings.

Pretty sure 99% of economics is a study of that.

Quote from: Pat on October 12, 2021, 04:30:21 PM
I'm not sure free speech really applies to the conversation, other than it's true that rights need to be defended. But that doesn't make them inherently compulsive in any but the most technical sense.

If something need and requires something from other people, then its compulsive and its not technical.

QuoteThe morality we've developed occurs at a level below that of rationality.

Apologies but....No it isn't. Even basic sociological (and at this point increasing amount of biological data) study says we act off gut and then make up rationals for it second. Our rationals are channeled versions of instincts we justify to ourselves.
Our rationality is ultimatly subjective and irrational.
The belief that people are largescale rational actors is one of the many catastrophic, CATASTROPHIC flaws of communists and enlightment revolutionaries. The thought that led to largescale purges and eugenics is the belief that people COULD be.

Using 'rationality' to develop ethics, is like using a sand castle to prop up sand. Its still ultimatly just sand.
Edit: And its also performing brain surgery on yourself without a doctors degree.