RE: [projectvrm] MaidSafe claims to deliver world's first 'safe' network

["Crosbie Fitch" < >]

> From: Phil Windley
> This is only half of the story.  People and companies earn 
> money for either labor or rents. Rents happen because someone 
> has exclusive control over capital or rights of some kind 
> (i.e. the right to publish a particular work, manufacturer a 
> specific product, drive a car for hire in a specific city, 
> run a hotel, etc.)

Most of the 'rents' you indicate have only become possible with the power of
the state, via privileges such as copyright and patent, and other
licensing/zoning laws (permitting otherwise proscribed acts).

On The Internet some of these privileges are rather ineffective, e.g.
copyright.


> To ignore the role capital and exclusive rights have played 
> through time is to significantly slant the story.  

It is also important to understand the difference between natural rights and
state granted 'rights' (a natural right annulled in the majority, to be
left, by exclusion, in the hands of a few), e.g. the difference between
being naturally able to exclude others from the manuscript in your desk
drawer, and being unnaturally able to exclude others from the manuscripts in
their desk drawers.

If you know what power people really have (vs that which they imagine they
have), then you can engineer systems that really work (vs those that don't,
except in our imagination).


> You may not like that this model exists and has existed, but 
> cannot simply wish it away by ignoring it. 

Indeed.

Similarly, you cannot wish that which is ineffective into effectiveness,
however effective you believe it once was, or should be.

Either publishers of eBooks have the power to prevent people copying them,
or they don't.

 
> Readers of a book aren't really paying an author for her 
> work, even if they pay her directly. That is, unless they are 
> paying her for her labor directly and then gaining ownership 
> of end product it is not labor.

They may not be today, but payment contingent upon labour is the fundamental
exchange they must revert to when a state granted privilege is ineffective
in extracting 'rents'.


> If we attempt to define things like "publishing" as "bad" and 
> not part of VRM, we'll end up as Occupy.

Publishing, delivering art, science, and news to the public, is good.


> I fear that VRM can't be seen as anti-corporate or else 
> it will fail to be adopted in any degree.

I don't see why VRM should be anti-corporate.

There are fundamental problems with corporations, and those developing VRM
facilities should be aware of them, but this doesn't preclude VRM facilities
helping people deal with corporations.


> I similarly fear attempts to cast VRM as "about privacy" or
> "taking back control" since they have similar messages. 

I don't think VRM is about privacy (though some do), or even about
discretion (that some mistake for privacy).

What control have people lost that they can take back?

People may well lack facilities, and there may be an effective imbalance in
terms of bargaining ability, and VRM should greatly help rectify that
imbalance.