Political Theory

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:57:02 GMT

AJ:

z1235:

a. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME physical property MUST be separated in TIME. (classical rivalry)

b. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME information property MUST be separated in SPACE.

I'm not sure I see your analogy. Two people may want to use a piece of physical property or IP - a can opener, an apple, or a piece of music - at the same time. Two people generally don't want to use a can opener, an apple, or a piece of music in the same physical* space (if that were even possible).

*I assume you don't mean "information space" when you write "SPACE" above, because below that you refer to "our 4 dimensional universe (3 physical + 1 temporal)".

Sorry for the delayed response. Been busy off-line these days.

You assumed correctly.

Agent A and agent B CAN NOT use the same piece of land (same physical SPACE) at the same TIME. A and B CAN use the same piece of land (SPACE) at different times (when A sells the land to B).

In our 4-dimensional (3 spatial + 1 temporal dimensions) physical universe, acts of property usage (utilization/enjoyment/consumption) occur at different 4-dimensional coordinates, both for physical AND information property. Classical rivalry (physical property rules, rights, laws) merely addresses the distribution of these acts along the time dimension. General (information AND physical) property rules address their distribution along all 4 dimensions.

A and B can watch copies of the same movie Avatar at the same TIME but at different physical SPACES (locations). Admittedly, this makes the movie Avatar not rival in classical sense, but the question remains why (and how) must classical rivalry be a necessary ingredient in the definition of property.

It seems that classical rivalry is merely the MEANS to the desired END of a non-conflicting, one-to-one mapping between all pieces of physical property and their rightful owners at a certain point in time. The non-conflicting mappping is the desired feature of property. Such mapping clearly exists between a piece of information property (in the information universe) and its rightful owner (i.e. creator).

I'm happy to wind down this thread at this point, as I also anticipate less time available for online forums in my near future. I thank all contributors for shaking the concept up from different angles. At least for me, dialogue (debate) is the most efficient way of building an idea, concept. Hopefully, I'll find the time in the future to beef it up some more.

Re: Information as Property

Jackson LaRose — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:04:21 GMT

E. R. Olovetto:
What does this even mean, "justly excludable"?

"In economics, a good or service is said to be excludable when it is possible to prevent people who have not paid for it from having access to it, and non-excludable when it is not possible to do so." - Wikipedia.

The "justly" had to do suggesting he come up with a proof to satisfy all the ethics dweebs.

E. R. Olovetto:
I don't see how it in any way supports the existence of "information space"

That's good, because I suggested it as an alternative. Hence:

E. R. Olovetto:
Instead of using the somewhat clumsy analogy of "information space" to justify information as property

Re: Information as Property

E. R. Olovetto — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:02:00 GMT

Jackson LaRose:

Just a quick suggestion:

Instead of using the somewhat clumsy analogy of "information space" to justify information as property, could you just consider information as justly excludable, and base your argument from there?

What does this even mean, "justly excludable"? If it means what I take that to mean, I don't see how it in any way supports the existence of "information space", in any sense relevant to physical things. It looks like begging the question to me.

Re: Information as Property

Jackson LaRose — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:31:29 GMT

Just a quick suggestion:

Instead of using the somewhat clumsy analogy of "information space" to justify information as property, could you just consider information as justly excludable, and base your argument from there?

Re: Information as Property

AJ — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:41:01 GMT

z1235:

a. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME physical property MUST be separated in TIME. (classical rivalry)

b. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME information property MUST be separated in SPACE.

I'm not sure I see your analogy. Two people may want to use a piece of physical property or IP - a can opener, an apple, or a piece of music - at the same time. Two people generally don't want to use a can opener, an apple, or a piece of music in the same physical* space (if that were even possible).

*I assume you don't mean "information space" when you write "SPACE" above, because below that you refer to "our 4 dimensional universe (3 physical + 1 temporal)".

Re: Information as Property

Clayton — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:09:30 GMT

z1235:

ClaytonB:
Basically, I think you and I do not understand property in the same way.

ClaytonB:
My argument, in a nutshell: Since information cannot be secured, and the ability to secure something is a necessary condition to its being property, information cannot be property.

I understand, but I disagree.

ClaytonB:
The point is that it's impossible to prove that these transformations of Avatar are equivalent to the original. This means it's impossible, even with courts that believe in IP, to really secure IP since it can always be transformed in such a way that it is impossible to prove its equivalence to the original bits that were under IP protection.

I already responded to your encryption argument before. You are welcome to secretly encrypt, encode, transform the original sequence all you want at the privacy of your home. If you want to profit from it by selling it to the public, you would have to provide both the encrypted sequence and the decoding mechanism so the public could see the content. Then your scheme stops being secret any more and I can show the courts what you have done exactly.

I'm not familiar with a theorem claiming what you say above, so I can't respond with authority, but my intuition is that you may have misunderstood it. Even assuming its correctness, I think it is only relevant to proponents of a property concept as you describe above. In your world, the strength of a property claim is proportional to the difficulty of perpetrating and covering-up a crime (aggression, trespass) against it. In mine, it isn't. We can agree to disagree.

Z.

I don't know why there is basically no discussion on the net of the equivalence problem - I have class handout that I grabbed off the web a long time ago (which is no longer available on the net), by a "Maggie Johnson", here's a quote:

"Another famous undecidable problem is the equivalence problem. Imagine that you had a number of programs which had run successfully for several years. You want to replace these programs with new programs that are supposed to run faster, but you want to make sure they work. Is it possible to write an algorithm that will determine if two programs are equivalent (they always produce the same output for the same input)? Unfortunately, it can be shown that a solution to the equivalence problem would imply a solution to the halting problem, so the equivalence problem must also undecidable."

Clayton -

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:02:04 GMT

nirgrahamUK:

ok, lets make it more of a game.

1) can you give an example to explain/illustrate why a hat is rival?

2) can you give an example to explain/illustrate why (not the media) but the information of how to perform a musical piece is rival? (information of what the notes, melody, rhythm are etc.)

1) We can't both be owners of a hat at the same TIME. If I'm wearing it, you aren't.

2) We can't both be owners of the same musical composition (movie, book, software). If I created it, you didn't, and in information space, the creator/producer is the original owner of the information.

a. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME physical property MUST be separated in TIME. (classical rivalry)

b. Two separate instances of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of SAME information property MUST be separated in SPACE.

I concede that classical rivalry's definition is associated with (a). But going beyond that, why would (a) present a stronger case for property than (b)? If property is ultimately about control over the distribution of utilization/enjoyment/consumption of assets (both physical and information) in our 4 dimensional universe (3 physical + 1 temporal), why should exclusivity along the temporal dimension (rivalry in classical sense) have precedence over exclusivity along the spatial dimensions? In other words, why MUST classical rivalry be a necessary ingredient of property?

Re: Information as Property

nirgrahamUK — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:58:05 GMT

ok, lets make it more of a game.

1) can you give an example to explain/illustrate why a hat is rival?

2) can you give an example to explain/illustrate why (not the media) but the information of how to perform a musical piece is rival? (information of what the notes, melody, rhythm are etc.)

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:53:37 GMT

nirgrahamUK:
given the real physical rival nature of such a good

Nir, we're going in circles. I understand your refusal to accept a non-physical information space, much less any property residing in it.

Re: Information as Property

nirgrahamUK — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:06:01 GMT

if a piece of gold could be non-rival. then you could be melting it, whilst i could be using it to squash bugs. there is obviously a conflict in the thing-in-itself given the real physical rival nature of such a good.

now information, is actually non-rival. you can know where a goldmine is and i can know where a gold mine is. if we perform actions that conflict. they will conflict in rivalrous physical objects. for example the mine (which is rival). they will not conflict in the non-rival 'thing' in the 'information' of the 'information'.

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:05:48 GMT

nirgrahamUK:

its not a strawman, its a perfect analogy for the fallacy you tried. i don't believe you understand rivalry. your 'market value' story is a complete non-sequitor

Looks like an impasse. Ok thx for your replies.

Re: Information as Property

nirgrahamUK — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:00:55 GMT

its not a strawman, its a perfect analogy for the fallacy you tried. i don't believe you understand rivalry. your 'market value' story is a complete non-sequitor

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:57:58 GMT

nirgrahamUK:

thats like saying a chair is not rival because you can break off one leg and use it to fuel a fire and i can break off another leg and whittle the end into a spear to hunt animals with. i.e. you haven't discovered that physical objects are non-rival you have adroitly illustrated your incomprehension regarding the concept of rivalry.

Strawman. Cameron owns a valuable property in information space, for which the public is willing to pay to "visit". The gold prospector owns valuable property on Mars, contents of which the public is willing to buy. Cameron could sell 1billion "visits" @ $10 each before the global market gets satiated. The gold prospector could extract and sell 1million oz of gold @ $1,000 each before there's nothing left in the mine. You, by stealing Avatar's master and releasing the DVD at the same time with Cameron, will take approximately 50% of the market for it, i.e. actually steal $5billion from Cameron. A company aggressing and trespassing on gold prospector's property on Mars and digging alongside him from the same mine would steal 50% of the deposits from the owner, i.e. steal $500million from him.

Semantics is not knowledge, and a different understanding of a concept is not ignorance. Whatever your comprehension is of rivalry, please explain how it differs in the above two scenarios.

Re: Information as Property

z1235 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:31:42 GMT

ClaytonB:
Basically, I think you and I do not understand property in the same way.

ClaytonB:
My argument, in a nutshell: Since information cannot be secured, and the ability to secure something is a necessary condition to its being property, information cannot be property.

I understand, but I disagree.

ClaytonB:
The point is that it's impossible to prove that these transformations of Avatar are equivalent to the original. This means it's impossible, even with courts that believe in IP, to really secure IP since it can always be transformed in such a way that it is impossible to prove its equivalence to the original bits that were under IP protection.

I already responded to your encryption argument before. You are welcome to secretly encrypt, encode, transform the original sequence all you want at the privacy of your home. If you want to profit from it by selling it to the public, you would have to provide both the encrypted sequence and the decoding mechanism so the public could see the content. Then your scheme stops being secret any more and I can show the courts what you have done exactly.

I'm not familiar with a theorem claiming what you say above, so I can't respond with authority, but my intuition is that you may have misunderstood it. Even assuming its correctness, I think it is only relevant to proponents of a property concept as you describe above. In your world, the strength of a property claim is proportional to the difficulty of perpetrating and covering-up a crime (aggression, trespass) against it. In mine, it isn't. We can agree to disagree.

Re: Information as Property

Clayton — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:19:17 GMT

z1235:

ClaytonB:
Also, I just realized that there is a serious theoretical problem with z1235/Stranger's positions - it is a problem in computability theory called the language equivalence problem. Is it possible, in general, to decide if two languages* are equivalent? If the domain of languages is any language which can be defined on a universal Turing machine (general purpose computer, such as you are using right now), the answer is no - it is an uncomputable (basically, unsolvable) problem. To translate this to ordinary English, this means that it is impossible to decide if two computers produce the same output simply by inspecting them. So, it is always possible to make copies such that it is impossible to decide, by inspection, whether they are equivalent or not, that is, whether they both output the movie Avatar, for example. This is worse than the "just because you can't defend it doesn't mean it's not yours" situation, it means that information is inherently indefensible. If the physical universe were like the information universe, in this regard, there would be no fences or security because such measures simply could not exist.

I would love to understand your argument but I don't. Do you mind elaborating? Are you saying that one could encode/encrypt an Avatar 10GB binary sequence to the point at which it becomes unrecognizable as Avatar any more? If so, I thought I already responded to that (in one of the two posts here awaiting your reply). If not, I'd love to learn more about this.

I just thought about another answer to your defensibility attack from before. A prospector discovering and homesteading a gold mine on Mars could simply keep it a secret (hide the map in his safe) or publish the discovery and the instructions on how to get there on the cover page of the New York Times. Would the latter weaken in any way his claim to ownership of the mine? I would say, no. I could be wrong, but a claim to property is NOT weakened/strenghtened by the owner's ability to defend it. If it was, wouldn't that be tantamount to "might makes right"?

As I've repeated a few times before on this fora, I am not married to ANY idea, concept, and paradigm. I love building/discovering/collecting them for their own sake and I welcome bricks being thrown at them. If I can defend the structure by catching the incoming bricks, then I can use them to make the structure stronger. If I'm unable to defend it then the structure just wasn't meant to be and it's better torn down sooner than later. As free market proponents we all agree on the optimality of creative destruction and inefficiency of subsidies (of the mental sort, in this case). Nothing should be left standing longer than the market would allow it. The market of ideas, in this case.

Z.

Basically, I think you and I do not understand property in the same way. There's the old phrase "possession is 9/10ths of the law" and I think it may be an understatement... it's probably closer to 9.99999/10ths of the law. Publishing the location of a gold mine you just discovered would be exceedingly unwise - you would almost certainly be strong-armed off the property for just enough time for someone to pick up the nuggets and mine the surface deposits and then leave. Good luck prosecuting your valid claim when you can't even find who took your minerals, much less prove how much was taken. In other words, securing your property is an integral part of owning it. To push your analogy further, let's say you withdraw all your retirement accounts and stack them in cash in the middle of Times Square with appropriate fanfare, taking photos, and publishing an article. You later go home (leaving your money there in the square), knowing full well that since it's your money, no one can (will) take it without facing prosecution - after all, there's lots of cameras in Times Square! When you return the next morning, your money will be gone. No one will feel sorry for you and the police will not exert much, if any, effort in solving your case. Why? Because you have a responsibility, like everyone else, to take reasonable measures to secure your own property. So the ability to secure a physical object (fend off aggressors) is an integral component of property.

My argument, in a nutshell: Since information cannot be secured, and the ability to secure something is a necessary condition to its being property, information cannot be property.

The language equivalence problem has to do with any transformation to the original that, when run on a computer, will output the original. This could be compression or encryption or whatever. The point is that it's impossible to prove that these transformations of Avatar are equivalent to the original. This means it's impossible, even with courts that believe in IP, to really secure IP since it can always be transformed in such a way that it is impossible to prove its equivalence to the original bits that were under IP protection.

Clayton -