Item — HN Reader

>I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is naturally easy to copy.

Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free because of bandwidth costs, but they still make it really easy and cheap to copy data to a lot of computers.

Since games are software and software is data, it is rather easy to distribute them to an unbounded number of machines. Even if you come up with some complicated copy protection scheme, people only need to crack it once and produce a DRM-free version of the game that will work everywhere and won't do stupid things such as require an internet connection. Even cryptographically secure platforms such as the PS4 eventually got cracked and the first thing people did is enable the execution of unsigned software.

>insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models

That's exactly what copyright does.

2 comments

> Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems.

Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.

>Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.

Right. We not only write it with our hands, but with our brains too, as well as with the effort we put in over years to gain the skills needed to write the software in the first place. Otherwise any newbie programmer could write any of the software in the world, including complex ones.

This reminds me of that story of a senior retired engineer who was called in to diagnose a problem with some expensive, complex machine that he had worked with or operated a lot earlier (and/or maybe had invented). He walks into the room, bends down near the machine, taps it a bit, then makes an X mark with chalk near the bottom left corner. "There's your problem", he says. They open the machine, check that area, and sure enough, the fault is found and fixed. They ask him what his fee is. "$50,000", he replies. "What?", they ask. "$50,000 for making a chalk mark?". "No", he says. "$1 for making the mark. $49,999 for knowing where to make it."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

Exactly. You're providing a service. The digital goods, once produced, can be replicated infinitely at extremely low costs. Nobody can create copies of you or your expertise.

In order to pay for your software development services and turn a profit, the digital goods you produce are made artificially scarce so as to enable their sale. However, that does not change the nature of those goods. Copying them is still trivial.

> Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing.

That is not true. Running, maintaining, etc the IT infrastructure is costing money, electricity etc. It doesn't come for free.

Marginal and transaction costs are very low.

But you are right on the principle : storing, copying and transferring data always costs energy (in physics, temperature, energy and change of entropy are linked together)

OK, maybe you still have a point. What then, would be the threshold for saying: now, at this point, the costs of X are not marginal anymore but substantial enough to be taken into account?

According to Wikipedia, the best selling video game is Tetris: it has sold approximately 170 000 000¹ copies. If copying Tetris takes 1 second, the computer draws 400 W of power and electricity is rated at 30 cents/kWh, it would cost approximately $5667 to create 170 million copies of Tetris.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Depends on what you are thinking about ? Such cost always need to be taken into account, but IMHO in general we must always differentiate material things (that are formed from matter and its organization) and information (i.e. concept of entropy, ideas, thoughts, songs, language, jokes etc..) which have temporary physical supports but exists apart from them

Good distinction, I agree. This leads me to this: If, for example a song, is not written down anywhere, but some brains contain it, this means there some people who could reproduce this song by singing it, this song would still exist. Is a brain a temporal physical support unit in our sense?

Yes of course. As long as we have electricity in our brains we can store and process information. The very precise implementation of this would require to study biology (it's already interesting to see that we run on electricity like computers!).

Ok, cool, now, how is the number eight, for instance. Does it exist only because human brains have it in it? Or do numbers exist in the universe outside our brains? Can we answer this? This would be an important step in IP rights and all that…

“Marginal costs” are the additional cost for each additional unit delivered. They can be high or low, but with modern, non-custom software they tend to be extremely low.

Suppose that a copy takes 1 second to complete and the computer's power supply unit draws 400 W of power during that 1 second. How much does it cost to complete that copy? Hawaii has the most expensive electricity¹ in the United States, averaging at 29.23 cents / kW * h. Let's use 30 cents / kW * h.

If we have 400 W sustained for one second, that equals 0.000111111111 kW * h. (400 Watt * second) * (30 cents / kWh) = 3.33333333 × 10^-5 U.S. dollars. In Hawaii, that one copy would cost $0.0000333333. If one were to make 100 000 copies of that same data, it would cost $3.33333333.

¹ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

This is a very large strawman you've constructed.

Please explain what the problem with what I wrote is.