I need to revise that. It is an idea (don't know why I said it wasn't; that's not what I meant to say at all). But it is, nevertheless, a hypothetical possibility.
Pro Christo et Libertate integre!
MacFall: I need to revise that. It is an idea (don't know why I said it wasn't; that's not what I meant to say at all). But it is, nevertheless, a hypothetical possibility.
yes, and I agree with that. That's why I quoted your brilliant post, partly because I lack skills at expressing my own thoughts.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Autolykos wrote the following post at Tue, Oct 19 2010 3:12 AM:
Hi Onar, I was wondering if you happened to see my critique of your blog post that I posted in your thread. I'm very interested to see a response to it from you. Thanks!
Hi Onar,
I was wondering if you happened to see my critique of your blog post that I posted in your thread. I'm very interested to see a response to it from you. Thanks!
I saw your critique and I chose to ignore it. You either brought up points that others have brought up and I have answered previously in the thread, or your comments weren't really very relevant, such as the nitpicking about liens.
1. The law states that your idea is your property and should be protected 2. I can't use my piece of paper to write down the idea (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my piece of paper
1. The law states that I can't rob you at gun point 2. I can't use my gun to rob you (or hold it in this direction, at this place, at this time) (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my gun
Why isn't the second example valid? Because you would violate a person's rights when using your gun like that? Well, that happens in the first example as well (by definition; see 1) and 1))
Therefore, I would say that these arguments aren't relevant. After all, we're discussing 1)
Wow this is a hot topic. Excuse me for coming in late. I commend Onar Åm for joining this forum to promote his position. This is interesting as a newcomer to libertarian thought as I have been trying to sort out the question of IP rights in my mind. I have years of indoctrination to overcome, so it takes some time. I am the holder of many US Patents, have published many scholarly articles in scientific journals and have had many of my photographs published in books and magazines. So you might say I have some predisposed bias toward IP rights. As I have read through Rothbard, Kinsella, Block and others on this topic I have tried to imagine the impact on my own "products of my mind".
As I have read through this long forum thread I have not been able to find a solid defense of a state-granted monopoly over these products of my mind. (Oh there are plenty claims and name-calling, but very little reason or logic.) On the other hand there are very many sound logical arguments against the concept of these IP-rights.
If there were no such state-granted monopoly over my work, what might change?
In all, I don't see any direct impact on my work or my motivations to continue to produce "products of my mind" should the entire system of Intellectual Property Law be dismantled overnight. Thanks to those who have helped me sort this out. Stephen Kinsella your book on this topic is a great work, thanks for making the PDF version and the audoibook version available for FREE here on Mises.org!
dnixx: 1. The law states that your idea is your property and should be protected 2. I can't use my piece of paper to write down the idea (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my piece of paper 1. The law states that I can't rob you at gun point 2. I can't use my gun to rob you (or hold it in this direction, at this place, at this time) (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my gun Why isn't the second example valid? Because you would violate a person's rights when using your gun like that? Well, that happens in the first example as well (by definition; see 1) and 1)) Therefore, I would say that these arguments aren't relevant. After all, we're discussing 1)
the law states that you can't initiate force against me. You can use your gun wherever you want :)
"What harm is there to the author of a book if you copy the book (and there was no contract signed stating you would not copy it)? " None. The only thing that he is being deprived of is potential, future profit. But one cannot own potential, future profit as it does not exist. It is a hypothetical possibility, but one cannot own it until and unless it becomes present and real.
None. The only thing that he is being deprived of is potential, future profit. But one cannot own potential, future profit as it does not exist. It is a hypothetical possibility, but one cannot own it until and unless it becomes present and real.
After having been ridiculed on this forum for stating that anti-IP libertarians are materialists who deny the existence of information in relation to the individual, someone comes along with a perfect example. Thanks. I was sort of waiting for this.
Now, let me rephrase the exact same argument, but only substituting the information violation with physical violations.
"What harm is there to someone who wants to go to see a movie and someone waves a gun at them and tells them that they can't see that movie?"
None. The only that he is deprived of is a potential, future movie experience. But one cannot own potential, future movie experiences as it does not exist. It is a hypothetical possibility, but one cannot own it until and unless it becomes present and real.
In this case every materialist libertarian will recognize that this is a violation because a *physical* violation was involved. Someone waving a gun at you is a threat of physical violence and hence coercion. Then it is completely irrelevant that the future movie experience is only potential. Someone actually made an action which prevented you from going to the movies, and THAT's the violation.
But a materialist will not be able to see or understand that copying and distributing information is a violation of the mind, because it only involves an unlimited and therefore non-existent resource, namely information. The materialist denies that there exists anything to be violated.
I see that all the IP communists decided to ignore the problem of exclusivity in real property. There's no problem at all, move along folks, nothing to see, continue to embrace communism so that you can pirate movies with a clear conscience.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
1. The law states that your idea is your property and should be protected 2. I can't use my piece of paper to write down the idea (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my piece of paper 1. The law states that I can't rob you at gun point 2. I can't use my gun to rob you (or hold it in this direction, at this place, at this time) (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my gun Why isn't the second example valid? Because you would violate a person's rights when using your gun like that? Well, that happens in the first example as well (by definition; see 1) and 1)) Therefore, I would say that these arguments aren't relevant. After all, we're discussing 1) the law states that you can't initiate force against me. You can use your gun wherever you want :)
1. The law states that your idea is your property and should be protected 2. I can't use my piece of paper to write down the idea (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my piece of paper 1. The law states that I can't rob you at gun point 2. I can't use my gun to rob you (or hold it in this direction, at this place, at this time) (but I can use it for "any" other purpose) 3. You implicitly claim ownership over my gun Why isn't the second example valid? Because you would violate a person's rights when using your gun like that? Well, that happens in the first example as well (by definition; see 1) and 1)) Therefore, I would say that these arguments aren't relevant. After all, we're discussing 1)
Ok, scratch that and add "throw the gun in your face" instead :) The law against force (against copying) would give me some restrictions on the usage of my gun (my piece of paper), right?
David: I would still photograph, as my work distinguishes my skill and expertise in the craft, which remains in demand because of scarcity.
I would argue that this is true for any creative work. By creating excellence you create a brand name. People seek such brand names for guarantee of enjoyment.
IP laws today are largely unenforceable. We live in IP anarchy as far as we are not corporations (IP is enforced there). You can download anything over internet for free today. Why there are people that pay when they can get things for free? Why records of income from movie sales are still moving even higher today? Because of unenforceable IP laws? :)
Piracy is strictly limited in scale by IP laws. For the same reasons, high seas piracy happens but it does not stop international shipping. If piracy were to become legal, all shipping would stop immediately.
I'd like to throw in some (meta?)physics here and say that everything in our relevant sphere of reality is materialistic. Ideas are also just spasms in the brain. Information are physical patterns be it in energy or matter - both physical.
The difference is that you want to own spasms and patterns that otherwise are, in lockean theory, created by others. That is the theoretical conflict, and you're not going to resolve it by simply stepping on it, or calling us "materialists". You're a materialist too, kind sir. Please develop a full theory of "spasm and pattern ownership" before ditching conventional property theories, ty.
Onar Åm: But a materialist will not be able to see or understand that copying and distributing information is a violation of the mind, because it only involves an unlimited and therefore non-existent resource, namely information. The materialist denies that there exists anything to be violated.
I don't understand how you came up with "unlimited therefore non-existent". Is it because in reality there are no unlimited things therefore anything I call unlimited is automatically synonymous with non-existent?
"What harm is there to the author of a book if you copy the book (and there was no contract signed stating you would not copy it)? "
None (forget about the potential, future profit).
"What harm is there to the supplier of apples if I saturate the market with apples?"
It would be OK for the owner to do this if you tried to break in. On a serious note, when you substitute copying with physical force, we all agree that it's wrong. But this is only because we move from physical property to ideas. After all, we're discussing whether ideas are property, so the result of this example shouldn't surprise you. Ref. "Precisely! So it's not an argument to say that IP is a violation of property right, because we are discussing what those property rights ARE."
Explain fashion business. IP piracy is legal there.
If piracy were to become legal, all shipping would stop immediately.
Regardless of terminology, please substantiate these claims.
There is simply no way that shipping would stop. A new market would spring up for PDA's, but somehow I think the state would want to 'offer' its protection services for a fee.
And by offer I mean that 'you're going to have our services whether you want them or not'.
David:Wow this is a hot topic. Excuse me for coming in late. I commend Onar Åm for joining this forum to promote his position. This is interesting as a newcomer to libertarian thought as I have been trying to sort out the question of IP rights in my mind. I have years of indoctrination to overcome, so it takes some time. I am the holder of many US Patents, have published many scholarly articles in scientific journals and have had many of my photographs published in books and magazines. So you might say I have some predisposed bias toward IP rights. As I have read through Rothbard, Kinsella, Block and others on this topic I have tried to imagine the impact on my own "products of my mind". As I have read through this long forum thread I have not been able to find a solid defense of a state-granted monopoly over these products of my mind. (Oh there are plenty claims and name-calling, but very little reason or logic.) On the other hand there are very many sound logical arguments against the concept of these IP-rights.
Fantastic post David. Welcome.
Stranger:Piracy is strictly limited in scale by IP laws. For the same reasons, high seas piracy happens but it does not stop international shipping. If piracy were to become legal, all shipping would stop immediately.
I don't think you know very much about what goes on with the internet if you really believe this.
Thanks to tor and freenet (completely anonymous p2p networks) you can get everything for free without any consequence from a state. If people really only wanted free stuff then there is nothing stopping them now. Yet they still pay! Why is that?
The implication of the legalization of piracy, which is what the IP communists advocate, is that pirates will be protected in their acts of piracy by such very institutions.
This means that piracy that was once confined to minor clandestine outfits will now be possible at enormous scale under corporate operations, and there will be no protection available against any of it.
Piracy is still a highly marginal activity restricted to low availability, lower quality goods than what can be obtained from the white market. If piracy were to be legalized, there would be no stopping capitalist business from offering pirate goods at the same availability and quality, and thus all producers would cease their activities.
If you take the crops a farmer planted, no harm is done to the farmer, since he still has his body. For some, a miracle of productivity will have happened since crops will be enjoyed free of charge. This illusion will only last until the next planting season when the farmer has left the land and no one remains to plant again.
Property exists because the future exists. Extremely high-time-preference youths who enjoy software piracy do not care for the future. They just want to steal right now.
Equating piracy with IP piracy is unfair. Pirates rape, murder and steal. IP pirates copy. I can't see how you can say this is the same. Sure you can try to make ethical arguments how wrong it is to copy but to equal it to murdering for the loot is not going to convince me to your case.
Explain this (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings):
In the early 1960s Donald A. Wollheim, science fiction editor of the paperback publisher Ace Books, claimed that The Lord of the Rings was not protected in the United States under American copyright lawbecause the U.S. hardcover edition had been bound from pages printed in the United Kingdom, with the original intention being for them to be published in Britain.[citation needed] Ace Books then proceeded to publish an edition, unauthorized by Tolkien and without paying royalties to him. Tolkien took issue with this and quickly notified his fans of this objection.[25] Grass-roots pressure from these fans became so great that Ace Books withdrew their edition and made a nominal payment to Tolkien, well below what he would have been due.[citation needed] However, this poor beginning was overshadowed when authorized editions followed from Ballantine Books and Houghton Mifflin to tremendous commercial success. By the mid-1960s the novel had become a cultural phenomenon. Tolkien undertook various textual revisions to produce a version of the book that would be published with his consent and establish an unquestioned US copyright. This text became the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1966.[citation needed] Houghton Mifflin editions after 1994 consolidate variant revisions by Tolkien, and corrections supervised by Christopher Tolkien, which resulted, after some initial glitches, in a computer-based unified text.[26]
The modern breed of pirates is content merely with ransoming to make their living. I do not see them as particularly more evil than software pirates.
"This illusion will only last until the next planting season when the farmer has left the land and no one remains to plant again."
Yet you can't steal an idea from someone by copying - he still has this idea. If I would copy crops from a farmer (lets assume this is possible) then he would still have his crops, ceteris paribus only thing that he would lose is some fraction of market value of his crops.
You can't steal land from a farmer by taking his crops - he still has the land. It's the output you are stealing, and why is this output his? In fact it comes from many things, his investment, of course, but also the sun and the wind, which he does not own. Why should he own the crop?
The burden of proof is on the IP communist to explain why the farmer's crops are his property, while one's intellectual product cannot be. So far, IP communism is just a long series of rejections of authority with no fundamental basis for any kind of property ownership.
I have never seen an IP pirate demanding, under threats of violence, payment from authors for downloading stuff from internet. I think you got that backwards.
boniek:Equating piracy with IP piracy is unfair. Pirates rape, murder and steal. IP pirates copy.
Indeed, as Kinsella recently addressed at the Supporters Summit, the first pirates were the recepients of patents. Because patent, has always been a state granted monopoly, not a natural right. So the very people who violated property rights, did so under the legal justification of patent.
But that aside, real pirates are violent. IP pirates do not cause any harm.
Indeed, and the 'harm' they might cause would be to destroy some of the 'hypothetical' future income.
If we are to accept that, then we also must accept corporations petitioning the government to prevent competitors from stealing their future income by providing better and cheaper products.
IDk, the "IP causes no harm" seems to me the same as saying a petty thief is somehow different than a mugger. If it's thievery it's thievery, whether violent or not.
I would just not touch any issue that automatically assumes IP to be thievery (were I in either camp here. Im just a pirate, care not what laws are made for this issue yarrrrr)
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
I think that there is resentment from a fact that you can copy a work for free without any hardship, work that potentially could require a lot of investment of various resources. So there is emotional harm too caused by failed expectations from business model that rejects or ignores needs of consumers. That is my current understanding of part of this issue.
Do you see a difference between stealing and copying?
Yes, partially. You materialists are essentially negating the mind (which is a limited resource). While it is true that information is an unlimited resource, the mind isn't. It took time and mental effort for an author to write his book, and this is totally ignored and all the focus is placed on the unlimited nature of information. I like the analogy presented by a one of the contributors here with growing grop. In growing a crop a farmer is using three resources that are renewable and virtually unlimited: water( rain), light (sun) and CO2 (air). Why shouldn't people be allowed to freely take the crop from the farmer? The sun, rain and air are all still there. The soil is still there. And the profit for selling the crop is non-existent. It is only a hypothetical potential that could exist in the future.
All materialist libertarians immediately understand the fallacy of this reasoning because they are accustomed to thinking in materialistic concepts, but the exact same scenario with respect to the mind is the fertile ground for information to be produced simply does not compute. The mind? What the hell are you talking about? He still has the same information! It's an unlimited resource! Nothing has been taken from him! Profits are only a potential!
I've highlighted the word "nothing" here to emphasize that we non-materialists say that "something" has been taken. The materialists however denies the existence of this thing. It's nothing.
Why shouldn't people be allowed to freely take the crop from the farmer? The sun, rain and air are all still there. The soil is still there.
The crop isn't there anymore, is it?
Hmm, so you noticed that, did you? Even though I said all the nice things about the rain and the sun and the air? And about the non-existence of potential future profits from the crops? Let's now see if you can just replace "crop" with "intellectual work" and see if you are still able to notice it, despite all the nice things said about information and the non-existence of potential future profits.
Well, they are different, but they do have something in common, just like murder and rape have something in common. They are violations of the individual. I would actually compare pirating more to rape than to stealing. In a rape it is perfectly possible for the girl to come out without physically having lost anything or been harmed in any way. The rapist may have threatened her with violence, but as long as she obeyed she was not actually harmed. He may even have been very hygienic and used a condom to protect her from diseases. Physically she will be able to walk away from the incident without having endured any physical loss. Or put in the words of the anti-IP people her: nothing has been taken away from her. That of course doesn't alter the fact that she's been raped and that this is a gross violation of her MIND more than anything in this case. So I would definitely say that piracy most resembles rape.
I did, but I still can't see that the intellectual work has been taken from him, or is gone, like the crop. My point is that these analogies won't work for someone who believes that property rights should only apply to scarce resources and that ideas and information are not scarce - even if he accepts that they derive from a scarce resource (the mind). Therefore I think it is these concepts that need discussion, and that this thread is going off track at times.
Edit: I think that the discussion really starts somewhere here:
Well, I agree that the non-aggression principle is arbitrary and that is not what i base my argument on. I start with egoism, i.e. the principle of self-interest. This is not arbitrary. Life is the ultimate value and all values presume life. This combined with the fact that we humans are 1) rational and 2) social beings results in the non-aggression principle as the most important DERIVATIVE principle that follows from egoism. However, since egoism is primary there ARE cases where aggression is moral, and that is the case of emergencies. If you are out on a cold mountain and you are surprised by a horrible storm it is moral for you to break into a cabin to save your life, even though that is an act of aggression. This will not be a crime, so long as you make up for your damages after you have recovered from the emergency.
Stranger:Yet you can't steal an idea from someone by copying - he still has this idea. [...] You can't steal land from a farmer by taking his crops - he still has the land.
Yet you can't steal an idea from someone by copying - he still has this idea. [...]
You can't steal land from a farmer by taking his crops - he still has the land.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."