Stranger:Objects can be finite without having a start or an end - they are called indefinite. The Earth, for example, is a sphere with upon which surface you can walk indefinitely. However, it is still a finite object.
That's true. But is time and space indefinite? In what way?
The value of the book is not in its material, the value is in the information. The author therefore has the right to decide how his work should be made accessible to others as well as the right to decide whether others may use that work. The author didn't write his book so that he could print a bunch of letters on his own personal and physical paper.
This isn't always the case. What about large table-top picture books? Value is subjective. You have the right to be free from physical interference with your property by others, but you do not have the right to the subjective value of your property. You have no more right to expect the value others will pay for your idea to remain at a certain level than you have a right to the value of your car not depreciating faster than you'd like.
liberty student:Anyone can use force. The use of force doesn't make something legal. You'll need to rework this.
State force.
Also, control is not equal to ownership. A thief can steal to get control, and then use force to maintain control. Surely you do not believe that theft is equal to property?
That control is not condoned by the state. Only state condoned control is property.
I'm not sure what you mean by peaceful property rights, is there such a thing as violent (?) property rights?
Slavery was a violent form of property right. All forms of collective state ownership is violent property rights.
Maybe this is a language thing, but its not banned from laissez-faire, it is contradictory to laissez-faire, and so is not a part of laissez-faire.
It is banned in the sense that you will go to jail.
What is "the mind stuff"?
The information content.
Also, if I share the information in that book, I have not pirated anything. The information is still in the book, and it is still in the author's head. I have simply made a copy of some or all of the information.
You could make exactly the same argument for industry espionage and peeping. If you somehow manage to get hold of an industry secret and then spread it on the internet you have not violated that business, because they still have the information. You have taken nothing from them, according to your argument.
The same goes with acquiring a DNA sample of your neighbor and then posting it on the internet. You have not violated your neighbor in any way by posting this sensitive data on the internet because he still has his genes and they still contain all the information they did before.
If I am contractually obligated at the time of sale, to handle the book and its contents a certain way, that is fine. But if you mean that if someone relays information to me from a book that I have received stolen property, then that is completely ridiculous.
By the same token, if you meet a person on the street and he has not *explicitly* told you that he does not want to be killed and you have not *explicitly* agreed not to kill him, then it is perfectly ok for you to do so. After all, there was no agreement, right?
There is a wealth of information on this site deconstructing the conventional notion of intellectual property and explaining how it is anathema to laissez-faire and individual liberty. If you would like resources, I would be happy to find some for you.
I'm well aware of them, thank you.
Mises Pieces:This isn't always the case. What about large table-top picture books? Value is subjective. You have the right to be free from physical interference with your property by others, but you do not have the right to the subjective value of your property. You have no more right to expect the value others will pay for your idea to remain at a certain level than you have a right to the value of your car not depreciating faster than you'd like.
You argue like a juvenile schoolboy.
If you don't want to restrict the use and distribution of your work, that's fair enough. However, that does not entitle you to deny other authors the right to restrict the use and distribution of their work.
I don't expect you to value my work, but I expect you to act in accordance with my restrictions if you value it. If you don't like like the price I put on my works, then simply don't buy it.
If you don't want to restrict the use of your book, that's fair enough. However, that does not entitle you to deny other authors the right to restrict the use and distribution of their books.
I disagree. It is only legitimate to use force if it is in defense or retaliation against someone else who has initiated the use of force. Since the person who made the copy of the book did not initiate the use of force, neither the author nor anyone else can legitimately use force against him, either.
You've really dug your own grave with this one. Is legal positivism really all you've got?
You could make exactly the same argument for industry espionage and peeping. If you somehow manage to get hold of an industry secret and then spread it on the internet you have not violated that business, because they still have the information. You have taken nothing from them, according to your argument. The same goes with acquiring a DNA sample of your neighbor and then posting it on the internet. You have not violated your neighbor in any way by posting this sensitive data on the internet because he still has his genes and they still contain all the information they did before.
An ancap society would have no legal problems with any of these things, so long as the information itself wasn't aquired in any way that violates property rights (like, for example, breaking into an office to steal documents).
Violation of copyrihgts is initiation of force. But since you're a materialist, you only recognize physical force.
Azure:An ancap society would have no legal problems with any of these things, so long as the information itself wasn't aquired in any way that violates property rights (like, for example, breaking into an office to steal documents).
An ancap society would collapse into fascism, like all anarchist societies have done.
I'm glad you edited your post to add an ad hominem.
I guess you read it again and decided that it might compensate for your empty, weak justification of why an author should "expect" the state to use force to grant him a monopoly.
Violation of copyrihgts is initiation of force.
You saying it is doesn't make it so. It doesn't change the physical integrity of anyone else's property, so it's not force.
No time to reply in detail, but this whole thing is confused and almost incoherent. Just a few comments:
Intellectual property rights are rights to ownership over products of the mind such as novels, music, articles, research data and software.
Note that he does not define IP. Just gives "such as" examples. IP advocates never know what system they really support. Does it cover fashion? perfume smells? math algorithms? should we have petty patents? design patents? plant patents? Boat hull designs? database rights? moral rights? Defamation? They don't know. IT's ad hoc.
Today this form of property right is under heavy attack especially from two groups, namely marxists and some libertarians. The strange thing is that these groups essentially have the same metaphysical reason against intellectual property rights, even if they in other contexts are enemies. Both launch a materialistic attack on intellectual property rights. Generally this amounts to denying the existence of information. Materially speaking information does not exist. Only matter exists, and therefore there can be no such thing as intellectual property, only material property rights.
We do not deny the existence of information, we just deny property rights in information. The reasons for this are that property rights are in scarce resources, things over which there can be conflict, things for which we need allocation rules to prevent conflict. The author seems to be completely unaware of this entire rationale.
One does not need to say that information "exists" and that it has to be owned, in order to have a "right to privacy"--the right to privacy in the state context is simply a limitation on state power; any limit on state power is good. There's no natural right to have a jury trial or to be free from double jeopardy, either, but these rules are limits on state power. in the private context there is no right to privacy; there are only property rights. Denying rights in information does not deny rights in property; to the contrary, they undercut property rights.
The other comments about contracts requiring information rights is likewise mistaken and confused; as Evers and Rothbard show, contract is simply a title-transfer--that is transfer of title to owned scarce resources. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the notion of information ownership. See my contract theory article at www.stephankinsella.com/publications.
Stephan Kinsella [email protected] www.StephanKinsella.com
I find it interesting that you expect me to justify the monopoly of my own life. Shouln't the burden of proof rather be on the evil materialists, who regard it a matter of course that they have the right to make use and distribute my work as they see fit?
No, of course property may be just or unjust. Example of unjust property: human beings have been property at some point in time (slavery) and what enabled that was state force. The difference between a thief controlling a stolen object and an owner controlling a stolen object is that the owner is condoned by the state, whereas the thief is violating the law. The thief has no guns to back up his control, and hence it is not property.
My point exactly. In my article I used this as an example of what lunacy positions follow from denying IP. I would also like to add that in an ancap anti-IP society it is perfectly ok to kill someone if you haven't explicitly entered into a mutual agreement that you should not kill each other.
"using your work" just means manipulating and using their own property as guided by information. Who says you own the information? Calling it "work" does not do anything but question beg.
Onar Am wrote:
In my article I used this as an example of what lunacy positions follow from denying IP. I would also like to add that in an ancap anti-IP society it is perfectly ok to kill someone if you haven't explicitly entered into a mutual agreement that you should not kill each other.
IP prima facie violates property rights. The burden is on you to carefuly define this right and then justify it. YOu can't do this by saying it should not be "denied." We don't even konw what "it" is. It is also ridiculous to say that it's okay to murder people if you have not agreed not to, in an IP free world. I have never heard such a ridiculous argument for IP. Without IP it's okay to murder people? Are you kidding?
Mises Pieces:It doesn't change the physical integrity of anyone else's property, so it's not force.
This is precisely the materialistic viewpoint Onar Åm smashes into pieces in his essay. Why don't you convert to communism? At least that would ensure the integrity of your evil.
Note that he does not define IP.
Weeell, I *did* state that "Intellectual property rights are rights to ownership over products of the mind."
That was the definition, then came the examples afterwords.
Does it cover fashion? perfume smells? math algorithms? should we have petty patents? design patents? plant patents? Boat hull designs? database rights? moral rights? Defamation?
The answer is that information rights cover all of the above.
They don't know. IT's ad hoc.
Oh, we know, alright. Information rights are rights that pertain to ANY information that is produced by the individual. That's the general definition of information rights. The *specific* rights and their mechanics is of course dependent on reality, and must be induced from the approproate context. To a rationalist who dwells in floating abstractions this may seem ad hoc, but to us who view principles as a tool for understanding and cataloging reality it is called reality orientation, or objectivity if you like.
Let me make this clear: it is perfectly possible to abstract the general principles of property and of information rights without knowing ALL possible applications of it in advance. This is known as induction, and it is used quite successfully every single day. Take the concept of "dove" for instance. It has been induced from reality and it covers ALL doves, including the ones you have not yet observed. So if you tomorrow see a completely new dove that you have never seen before (this happens all the time) you can still use your concept of dove legitimately to label it as a dove, without calling it ad hoc. In fact, if you see a whole new subspecies of pink spotted doves you will now create a whole new sub-category that didn't exist before. This is not ad hoc either. It is an application of reality oriented concepts.
The same goes with information rights. I can say with great certainty that sometime in the future there will be completely novel ways for humans to produce information that will require an entire new category of information rights and when that occurs we will simply darn well have to make one based on the principles of individual rights. This is not ad hoc. This is what scientifically oriented people do all the time.
We do not deny the existence of information, we just deny property rights in information. The reasons for this are that property rights are in scarce resources, things over which there can be conflict, things for which we need allocation rules to prevent conflict.
As mentioned earlier, by the same token then espionage and peeping is perfectly ok. All privacy laws must be abandoned, because they protect information. The original owner of a secret does not lose this information in any way if others get hold of it. All agreements must be rendered null and void because contract law protects the truth status of information.
Also as mentioned earlier, all existence is finite. Anything that is not a limited resource does not exist. Ergo information does not exist. In relation to IP you treat information as a non-existent, and hence no laws can apply. Notice that the marxists do exactly the same thing, although they are far more consistent than you, because they deny free will and hence ALL the products of free will (including private property).
One does not need to say that information "exists" and that it has to be owned, in order to have a "right to privacy"--the right to privacy in the state context is simply a limitation on state power; any limit on state power is good.
Ergo, information theft, espionage and peeping is perfectly ok.
The other comments about contracts requiring information rights is likewise mistaken and confused; as Evers and Rothbard show, contract is simply a title-transfer--that is transfer of title to owned scarce resources.
I have no way of understanding what this means without referring to information.
No... because you are the one wanting to enlist the state to prevent people from arranging their own property in a certain configuration, just because you don't WANT them to, not because they've deprived you of anything.
IP prima facie violates property rights.
Well, the emancipation of slaves was also a violation of property rights at the time. In the same way IP violates *materialistic* property rights. But if you want to go with a materialistic worldview, you should be consistent. I am only showing what the consequences of materialism is, and they are horrible and ridiculous.
YOu can't do this by saying it should not be "denied." We don't even konw what "it" is.
As mentioned earlier, intellectual property is the rightful ownership of mental products, encoded as information. That should be pretty straightforward for most people.
It is also ridiculous to say that it's okay to murder people if you have not agreed not to, in an IP free world. I have never heard such a ridiculous argument for IP. Without IP it's okay to murder people? Are you kidding?
I wholeheartedly agree that it is completely ridiculous to say that killing someone is ok unless you explicitly agree not to kill them. By the same token it is completely ridiculous to say that copying and distributing someone's intellectual product is ok unless you explicitly agree not to copy and distribute it.
Onar Am: "
The answer is that information rights cover all of the above."
Wow. So it even covers things the current IP law does not cover. You would extend IP rights to areas that currently escape unscathed, like math algorithms, laws of physics, fashion, smells, moral rights, database rights. You would impose laws even worse than the state does, in the name of liberty, and cast so many snares on action that human life would be snuffed out. This is absurd.
Whatever this is, it isn't libertarianism. This is nothing but a form of socialism. We libertarians live in a world with a large variety of socialists. Just another one to deal with.
Wow. So it even covers things the current IP law does not cover.
Careful when you read. I said that INFORMATION rights cover all these issues. IP is a special kind of information right, and it does not cover all the issues you mentioned.
You would extend IP rights to areas that currently escape unscathed, like math algorithms, laws of physics, fashion, smells
Yes, IP should apply to all these areas, but not necessarily in any form in use today. For instance, copyright and patents are not suitable for math algorithms and laws of physics. I am currently working on a book on academic property rights, that will differ from copyright and patents. In addition to apply to discoveries, algorithms, scientific data sets and papers on physical laws, they will also very often displace and replace patents and copyrights. They solve many of the problems that riddle patents and copyright today.
You would impose laws even worse than the state does, in the name of liberty, and cast so many snares on action that human life would be snuffed out. This is absurd.
On the contrary, I think you will see that these new property rights are quite liberating.
Whatever this is, it isn't libertarianism.
That's for sure!
This is nothing but a form of socialism.
Classical liberalism is the appropriate term for this, and how you get private property to be a form of socialism is beyond me.
If I can get an e-mail from Tim Berners-Lee asking you to stop using his WWW, would you do it?
Your saying yes would motivate me to try to get in contact with him.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Onar Am:Classical liberalism is the appropriate term for this, and how you get private property to be a form of socialism is beyond me.
Your not describing "private property". What we have here is a massive conflation in understanding of various terms, and key libertarian components. Like property.
Hi,
I'm not exactly a proliferate poster here, or an expert in either Austrian economics or libertarian theory, but I've had a crack at rebutting Onar's article at my personal blog, here. I tried posting it on the forum, but couldn't get it to work without messing up the HTML. If anyone knows the trick to doing so, and could help me out, I'd be thankful.
filc wrote the following post at Sun, Oct 17 2010 8:05 PM: If your statement were in any way true then we would not purchase books from bookstores, but rent instead. It amazes me that you don't follow your comments to their ends.
If your statement were in any way true then we would not purchase books from bookstores, but rent instead. It amazes me that you don't follow your comments to their ends.
I don't know where you are getting such an outlandish idea. Purchasing limited-rights media is much more convenient than renting.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
Jeffersonianatheart wrote the following post at Mon, Oct 18 2010 1:46 AM: I'm not exactly a proliferate poster here, or an expert in either Austrian economics or libertarian theory, but I've had a crack at rebutting Onar's article at my personal blog, here. I tried posting it on the forum, but couldn't get it to work without messing up the HTML. If anyone knows the trick to doing so, and could help me out, I'd be thankful.
I'm not exactly a proliferate poster here, or an expert in either Austrian economics or libertarian theory, but I've had a crack at rebutting Onar's article at my personal blog, here. I tried posting it on the forum, but couldn't get it to work without messing up the HTML. If anyone knows the trick to doing so, and could help me out, I'd be thankful.
Your post is a very long string of obscenities, that may be why the forum rejected it.
Yeah, the version I tried to post didn't have the four letter bits in. Still didn't work, sadly. You get the R rated version!
As mentioned earlier, by the same token then espionage and peeping is perfectly ok. All privacy laws must be abandoned, because they protect information. The original owner of a secret does not lose this information in any way if others get hold of it.
IP communism is even more radical an idea than this. According to IP communists, scarcity alone is not enough to produce ownership, rivalry must also be involved. This means that any kind of exclusivity is impossible. I cannot stop people from entering my house at any time, I can only get them to move out of the way when I need access to the kitchen or the bathroom. I cannot create a private club or society with closed membership. I cannot create any kind of good where exclusivity is the core value, most importantly paper money or credit. No modern system of contractual money (as you also noted) can exist in IP communism.
IP communists, having no economic foundation for their theories, are utterly unmoved by any of these problems. If you try to engage them into an economic argument, they will simply ignore it and make a claim to the purity of libertarianism and its sacrosanctity. It must be noted anyway for how dangerous a school of thought it could be if left to proliferate.
wow, you are hella confused about rivalrousness
Stranger:Evidently, you are not required to impose a lien on any of your books and screenplay. You can define yourself what the terms of use of your property are. This is why contracts like Creative Commons exist. What's immoral is denying others the right to restrict the use of their property because you personally don't want to restrict yours. That is just monopolism.
What's immoral is denying others the right to restrict the use of their property because you personally don't want to restrict yours. That is just monopolism.
As far as I can tell, no one who's anti-IP is proposing the above. This includes Mr. Kinsella himself (at least when he wrote Against Intellectual Property). We all recognize one's right to restrict others' use of the property that he creates and/or distributes. The only difference is that we see the existing legal framework for contractual arrangements as being sufficient here. So there's no need for additional legal restrictions (such as "intellectual property" laws).
Sorry for the drive-by posting. I plan next on reading and responding to Mr. Aam's blog post itself. Also, I for one am flattered that Mr. Aam has joined this forum so quickly to defend his positions, no matter how much I may disagree with them.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
IP communism is even more radical an idea than this. According to IP communists, scarcity alone is not enough to produce ownership, rivalry must also be involved. This means that any kind of exclusivity is impossible. I cannot stop people from entering my house at any time, I can only get them to move out of the way when I need access to the kitchen or the bathroom.
So you see no difference between copying and trespassing, even though the latter involves using someone else's physical property and the former doesn't?
Autolykos is right; it would be entirely legitimate for an author, or inventor, to restrict who owns "his" ideas by means of not making them public. Ben Tucker, no anarcho-capitalist by any stretch, argued as much when he said "You want your invention to yourself? Then keep it to yourself". Authors are not, should not, and under any libertarian framework would not, be obliged to give away his work for free.
The author or originator of the work maintains a lien on all physical property that holds his intellectual property, so obviously there is no difference between copying and trespassing. If you make a pirate copy of someone's work, you are invading the lien.
Agreed. And if an author/artist is able to cultivate sufficient demand for his work in general, he could likely contract to be paid in advance, e.g. on a commission basis.
The funniest part is the "you're a socialist!" "No you're a socialist" part of the debate.
It's like Salem circa 1692.
Either way, I still don't see any valid explanations for why copyrights are different than trade secrets.
I'm for recognition rights at least, I know that. But other than that, IP makes no difference to me which way it goes.
(I'll still be pirating it anyway )
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
kwalla: Mises Pieces:It doesn't change the physical integrity of anyone else's property, so it's not force. This is precisely the materialistic viewpoint Onar Åm smashes into pieces in his essay. Why don't you convert to communism? At least that would ensure the integrity of your evil.
We have a standard for posting here, these repeated ad hominems are not acceptable. If you wish to continue posting, please stop using these logical fallacies in argument.
Here's a question that just brought up for me LS. And I mean this honestly, it's not a trap, or an attack or anything.
This website is not physical property, how could one ban someone from it without appealing to some kind of right to informational/intellectual property?
Are there not terms and conditions that are to be accepted before one begins using the Mises Forums?
Funnily enough, even software pirates have a system of intellectual property amongst themselves. (They will want their 'rips' to be distributed with their own authorship files and denounce those who take their rips and claim it as their own.)
In that sense, pirates are less dangerous than IP communists - they actually recognize the necessity of intellectual property. Much like them the centuries old high seas pirates needed a code to determine the ownership of the loot they stole, and thus their piracy was not an act denying property rights but just simple banditry.
Here's a question that just brought up for me LS. And I mean this honestly, it's not a trap, or an attack or anything. This website is not physical property, how could one ban someone from it without appealing to some kind of right to informational/intellectual property?
Here's a question that just brought up for me LS. And I mean this honestly, it's not a trap, or an attack or anything.
Note also that the forums are not rival - unwanted posts being made in no way stops anyone from posting.
Good point Mr. Civil. I guess that about sums it up.
Now, what if I hacked LvMI with a team. And overnight we switched all the Mises articles with Marxist ones but left Mises's name on them, and encoded protections against them being put back to normal?
The webiste is not physical property, I have agreed upon no contract against hacking it. Have I aggressed upon the (members of) the institute?