You clearly lack perspective: try to reverse the point of view and apply the same logic.
An employer wants others to live for his sake, does that make him a parasite? No. (The analogy fails to go any further, but your point is nonetheless invalid.)
Plus, if you had some intuition, you'd realized that 1) we too, have worked really hard on movies.io (and still are), and 2) we would love to work towards a legal solution. Discussing with people right now, will press release if/when that happens. But our requirements are pretty steep, cf. http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/
An employer provides compensation for the work of the employee. If he didn't, and the employee wasn't working willingly, that would be slavery, which would definitely make the "employer" a parasite.
As far as http://www.dontmakemesteal.com, what gives you the right to blackmail a business into doing things? If you don't like their prices, don't watch the movie right now. Wait and watch when it's on TV. If you don't like the DRM, don't buy it. Market forces are strong when the market puts their money behind their intent.
I don't like the bullshit restrictions some companies put on their content, such as HBO but they have a right to whatever the F they want with their hard earned content. They put up the financing/energy/creativity/etc to produce the content. It's not my right to put them to an ultimatum: do things my way or I'm going to steal from you.
I mentally struggled while making the choice to use that phrase.
I don't think any of the individuals want to be a parasite. I think they want to be valuable and rewarded for the value they add.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to live a normal modest life with a normal paycheck that lets you raise a family, buy a house, etc. I think that's all most people want.
The only way that is possible, though, is if one adds value to the company or organization one works for. If you actively harm the company or organization, your value is negative, and you are actively killing the organization that is distributing paychecks.
I blame the union for short-sighted thinking, not the individual workers for wanting job security.
Maybe that's a bad biological analogy... can you think of a better one? It seems like if an individual or group of individuals in an organization are not useful, but want to keep receiving benefits... well, the closest analogy I could find is maybe a leech or tapeworm or something like that. Maybe an appendix or a whithered arm?
Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but that won't change the reality of what happens when the business is outcompeted and everyone is out of a job. The union cannot create a company - only provide some protections against certain classes of management decisions.
Once there is no management because there's no company, the union will die. :-/
you don't get the point. every individual is weak in the face of a large corporation seeking to exploit them. that's why we have laws to protect employees.
People have agency and can decide for themselves if a job offer is worth it
if they desperately need a job then they don't.
the pandemic actually demonstrated that. many more people than before are refusing to work when a job forces them to be in an office. that means previously they accepted that work even though they would have preferred not to. but they didn't have the agency to voice that preference. only the demonstrated evidence that work from home is possible and the collective awareness of that gave them that agency.
likewise, most people are uninformed as to the consequences for signing away the right of a digital version of themselves. at a minimum they are not aware of its value.
that is a power imbalance the film industry seeks to exploit, and that power imbalance must be corrected by giving individuals more protection.
it is similar to copyright. i know the US doesn't recognize this but at least in europe copyright includes the inalienable right for a creator to be associated with their work even if they sold away the right to profit from it financially.
Do the people who pose for stock photos have special laws?
yes, they have the right to control how their image is used.
in a similar manner, at a minimum it must be recognized that an individual should always have the right to use their own digital version as they wish and to control how their digital version is used by others and that selling the rights to someone else must not prevent them from doing so.
where there large likelihood of individuals being exploited, the law must step in to reduce the risk for that exploitation.
that's why we have minimum wage laws. that's why in europe health insurance is mandatory for any job and even available if you don't have one. that's why in many countries you can't dismiss an employee without proper justification, or you can't evict tenants unless they egregiously violate their tenant agreement (and failing to pay rent on time is not such a violation).
there are plenty of examples of how the law protects individuals from being exploited. to suggest that such laws are unnecessary is completely missing the power imbalance that exists here, or worse willfully ignoring it.
All you're doing here is re-stating your original argument, seemingly without actually understanding my criticism of it. I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish by that, but it strikes me as very strange.
Look, let's say we observe an employee and employer undertaking a discussion that goes something like this.
"Take this medicine"
"No I don't want to"
"Take it or else you're fired"
"I'm not going to take it, fire me if you have to."
"OK, you're fired"
"That's going to turn out poorly for the people who must now suffer the consequences of not having people available to do my job"
I don't understand how you jump to the conclusion that the reason the employee refuses to take the medicine is so they can have that last line of dialogue, rather than that they don't want to take the medicine.
No, the problem is that sometimes, people are not able to refuse a work agreement. There are plenty of cases where a potential employee essentially has a choice between signing and starving. If the employer knows this, that is no longer an agreement between consenting adults.
If I put a gun to your head, and you then 'consent' to an agreement where you give me money, and I don't shoot you, is that a hallmark of free society?
So, you're in favor of employers being able to threaten their employees' survival in order to get what they want? Because that's de facto what happens. Sure, it's not the anarcho-capitalist definition of "coercion," but that's a ridiculous concept, anyway.
You think it's possible to have a fair deal where the literal life of one party (the worker) depends on the outcome, but not the other party (the employer)? Because that seems to be what you are saying here.
agree with this, after introduction the role becomes parasitical, unless that agent has an agreement with you directly to constantly find other / better opportunities on your behalf. Given what I know about employment law, they should not be able to do this if they also represent the end employer.
another way to look at it is to review your ideas on rent seeking as being 'always bad'. I think in most cases it is, but perhaps we can also understand rent seeking as a pen test of a system, forcing it to improve. Parasites exist in biology - the trick maybe to try find a way to make them symbiotic rather than just parasitical
An employer that allows some employees to endanger others is negligent, most importantly in terms of ethics, but also in terms of productivity.
Your right to swing your fist ends at my face. If you want to work with people, you have to take reasonable measures not to harm them.
An employer that is willing to tell me to come in to work with people who refuse to get vaccinated is one that doesn't care about my well-being, and one I don't want to work for.
The key idea here is that managers of a company have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the company, and not to work on their own side projects. He certainly could make employee do what he wants, but it's not legal and is why people are unhappy.
There's a lot wrong with that when society--us--have the duty and obligation, which we do, to help when that Deliveroo driver gets doored and can't pay a medical bill because the job is comedically penurious.
Employers have a duty to their employees and to the society and community that grants them the right to the fiction of their existence, and that is being shirked.
> Even if they were, what do you want them to do? Refuse to work?
Yes, if an employer asks an employee to help violate any law, the employee has the legal right to refuse to do so. (I'm sure there'll be some country where that's not true, but generally...)
The responsible thing to do there would be to work with the employer to come up with a different design that does not have the same issues. If the employer explicitly insists on an illegal design, be sure to save proof that you informed the employer that it's illegal. Beyond that, it's tough and not everyone will be up for continuing the fight, and I don't blame the employees if they don't. A decent employer, however, of which there are many, will be okay with a legal alternative.
there should be no "WHY" someone had to sacrifice their career/life to expose systemic industry wide treatment of people that is unjust. There is only that this treatment exists and that the industry is not going to progress without everybody's collective effort to change it
Yes, my example is different. I'm using that difference to demonstrate that your argument fails.
You acknowledge that Joe doesn't owe you his touch on the basis that he isn't required to put out any effort to save you.
My point is that you're distinguishing between effort at different times. You think that should be able to benefit from work that he does before you have a need but not from work that he does after you find yourself in need. That's absurd.
Yes, I know that the mechanism by which Joe withholds his labor is different in the two cases. So what?
The whole "there's no marginal cost" argument is silly. We pay programmers more than ditch diggers even though it's clear that the latter work much harder than the former.
As to the "prudent" argument, pharma companies don't control IP law. The actual argument boils down to "they should have tried to molify righteous thugs". (Yup, I think that taking someone's labor is thuggery.)
This is a fair argument, but the solution isn't to just strip the employees right to own their own thoughts.
The specific problem seems to be about patents and trade secrets. If a contract covered those two things well, would an employer have legitimate cause to push further than that?
Im not sure it is contractual when death is the alternative. It isn't like they can just walk to an empty piece of land and build a cabin and farm on it to live. Or wander the wilds foraging and hunting. Work, or the capital to purchase other people's work, is a requirement to live here. That is why I support stronger minimum wages and eliminating work 'benefits' in favor of paying that money directly to employees. If they want to buy into a company insurance plan, so be it, but it should be entirely optional and payed into out of their bank account, not drawn out before the employee even knows what it is worth. Companies are using benefits to hide employee's actual wages from them so it is harder to even value your own income and compare it to others or other companies.
An employer wants others to live for his sake, does that make him a parasite? No. (The analogy fails to go any further, but your point is nonetheless invalid.)
Plus, if you had some intuition, you'd realized that 1) we too, have worked really hard on movies.io (and still are), and 2) we would love to work towards a legal solution. Discussing with people right now, will press release if/when that happens. But our requirements are pretty steep, cf. http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/
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