IP Laws

This recent slashdot thread has a significant number of insightful comments on it. The story is about a woman who is suing the RIAA under rackateering laws. People are mostly debating how downloading music is theft, or not, that it is copyright infringement and not theft at all. It was noted that a judge in the Grokster case told the lawyer for the plaintiff to stop using words like piracy and theft when he was framing the case, because in the legal sense, neither is true in relation to downloading music.

These sort of discussions get me thinking about intellectual property (which is actually a misnomer that I should stop using), since as an engineer my career is to provide others with intellectual products as a service. Unless I have a patent personally, my work usually automatically belongs to my employer. My work is a service, as is the work of the guys (and gals) who write big commercial software like Oracle. This owner of this output can sell as many copies as possible, which sort of breaks the service relation ship between the corporation and the consumer. Its sort of a guessing game; how much money can I pump into my developers (or musicians, in the case of the music industry) assuming that I think I can sell N copies at M bucks a pop? Anything above that is almost free money.

Software, music, whatever, isn't a physical product which can be stolen, in that it can't be taken such that the rightful owner is deprived. It is produced by someone doing a service, yet can persist after the service has been complete. Like a plumber that continues to unclog your drain after he has gone home. So how much is the right amount to pay for the presence of the ghost plumber?

Tricky business.