Copying Is Not Theft — remixed (song and video) archived comments below. (Hat tip Jules Jeffrey)
January 18, 2010 at 5:19 pm
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austronaut wrote:
“if my house purchase was a contract (signed, witnessed) and noone else signed the purchase contract it would be against convention to see my locked front door as just an inconvienient barrier to entry?”
I don’t believe so, no. The convention here is called “property rights”, which I believe in. A contract is not necessary to protect one’s normal property rights.
“if a sticker on a software box says “EULA!! property of stinkysoft: by exchanging money for this information-laden disk you are given limited usage (meaning you cant use the disk in a way that would facillitate copying) but….but since there was no contract (signed and/or witnessed) it is just an improper convention on the part of stinkysoft…..”
That is my belief, yes. Others here disagree, of course. It all depends on which “conventions” (normal property rights, contractual rights, copyright, patent rights, IP rights) you consider proper rights.
January 18, 2010 at 5:34 pm
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“I gave an explanation, several times, why causality is not a sufficient condition to claim ownership.”
I must have missed it. Nothing by itself is sufficient to claim ownership of something, so I don’t see your point.
My claim is based on a prior established ownership, and a causal connection of using my owned resource as a factor of production in another.
I own A and raw materials B. If I use A on B to produce C, then obviously I own C. The question arises, what if some other party uses my property A to produce E, with his own raw materials D. Now we have an issue of joint ownership that needs to be settled.
Obviously we both causally contributed to the creation of E. Also it is obvious that ownership in E isn’t going to always be judged to be 50/50. Sometimes one factor of production is responsible for far more of the value of an object. Thus ownership of the object should be heavily weighted to one owner or the other.
There will also be issues of whether the other actor commingled our resources accidentally, intentionally, or maliciously. I will skip such issues.
In such a dispute the judge (or the process of common law) will have to decide the best way to settle the dispute.
If someones child accidentally took someone elses diamonds to decorate their play dough sculpture it is obvious that the owner of the diamonds is going to have the majority ownership stake in the art work. The question then is how to recompense the parties. Most likely the diamonds will be picked out of the play dough and given back to the owner, and the play dough returned to the child owner.
Perhaps the child is the scion of Bill Gates and he loves it so much he is willing to pay ten times the going rate for the diamonds for the, in his eyes, masterpiece. In that case maybe the artwork isn’t destroyed, 9/10ths of the value attributed to the child and a cash settlement is made in recompense for the diamonds, the owner willing.
Normally would not be just to judge the child 50% ownership because frankly no play dough sculpture is likely to be worth as much as a pile of diamonds. In fact it would be judged next to worthless. If there is one dollars worth of play dough in with $10,000 you can see my point, the child’s labor being worth next to nothing.
That was an example of production where the goods are consumed in the process (and also it turns out are easily separable).
There are other means of production where one of the goods (or several) are more durable and act as a template while the other raw material(s) are consumed. I’m assuming the labor (another factor of production) is owned by the person who combines them.
Now even for the durable goods there is consumption going on. Molds do wear out, as do CDs and DVDs.
The value of the produced good is usually of greater value of the factors of production. Sometimes much greater.
As I pointed out in prior comments a DVD or CD is a very cheap factor of production with little value, as is the labor, and computer wear needed to churn out a copy of a piece of software. What contributes most to the value of the copy by far is the template used to create it. In the case of software the original.
So if I own a piece of software A, and you own a blank CD, D, then unauthorized use my A and your D, to produce a copy E, then we have a joint ownership in E. An ownership in this case where the vast majority of the value is causally due to my property. If my software is worth $99.90 a copy and blank CDs go for ten cents a pop. Then I own 99.9% of the copy.
So causality can be used here to determine ownership rights given prior ownership rights.
Furthermore, if the copying was done maliciously, that is, you intended to steal my 99.9% ownership by doing the copy in secret then absconding with it, then there is a question as to whether you should have any title at all in the CD. My costs in discovering and prosecuting this will surely exceed ten cents. So when brought before a judge he is very likely to entirely discount the software pirates production costs entirely.
Now things are even more clear than that. The judge in the case of the diamond/playdough sculpture would never treat it as a amorphous mass of which the diamond owner was 99.99% owner. I wouldn’t ask that it be placed in some machine to scrape just, .01 percent of it’s surface to hand back to the child (potentially damaging imbedded diamonds). He wouldn’t hand the kid some playdough and diamond dust.
No, he would understand and disambiguate the component contributions, and try to separate them to the best of his ability.
In the case of the software copy the value that is contributed by the original is in the pattern of ones and zeros imbedded in it’s surface. Whereas the value of the blank CD is just that, some plastic in the shape of a CD.
If the copying was accidentally done by me then what a Judge would do to make both parties whole would be to hand the copy over to me, and require me to buy you a new blank CD. If however the copying was due to your negligence, I would get the copy of the software, and you would get nothing.
It’s really the pattern aspect of the CD of which I am 100% owner because I am the 100% causal factor in. The process would not have generated that pattern without my CD.
Suppose that before I discover you that you’ve made the unauthorized copy, you make a copy of the copy, and repeat. Does that mean that by the zillionth copy your proportion of ownership should go up? Well no, the value of the copies is due to the pattern portion, which is all due to my property, all along the chain of copies.
Notice that there I have not discussed any agreements, copyright hasn’t even been invented.
So causality combined with ownership is important to establishing ownership in unauthorized copies. In causality I include factors of production, who acts, and their intentions.
Causality sure may not be sufficient but it is necessary to establishing ownership in the copy.
Ownership over one factor of production is insufficient to establish ownership in the produced good. Owning a blank CD, as a factor of production, is insufficient to establish full ownership over the produced good, the software copy.
Nor does the fact that I have a CD with some unique piece of software in any way restrict you from doing what you want with your blank CD, other than not using my property without my permission.
Suppose I wrote, Mackersoft Word. I make a single copy on a CD and never sell it. That in no way hinders your use of any blank CD you ever buy.
It’s only if you somehow misappropriate Mackersoft Word, that there would ever be a problem with one of your blank CDs being converted into a copy.
So now the only remaining question is, how does copyright work. Simple. I sell copies of the CD but retain my ownership rights in the physical pattern on the CD. The buyers who get the copies are not sole owners. They are only joint owners.
The joint ownership is not homogeneous. The buyer, for instance, has the normal property right of control over destruction. He can destroy the physical copy at any time, which also happens to destroy my interest at the same time. The buyer also has ownership over any use, other than as a factor of production in copying.
If an unauthorized copy is made of the copyrighted co-owned disk then, again the vast majority of the value of the copy is due to the value inherent in the ability to copy, which is wholly owned by the copyright owner by contract.
Thus the total value in any pirated copies due to causal factors will adhere to the copyright owner. The pirate, by using the unauthorized copy, or selling it will be stealing property that is not wholly his, and which is ownership claim is minuscule if not totally erased by his malfeasance.
The copyright owner owns all the calves generated form the cow (of which he is co-owner).
Now the question is, what if the cow is a bull, and the bull escapes an impregnates a cow across the street on some other farm. That is the case of the Russ’s freely visible wheel, and as you can see the bull owner does not have a as strong an ownership claim over the calf that is produced. The bull is analogous to the patent and patents don’t work so well.
Worse for patents. It’s pretty damn clear that the unique pattern of bits inherent to Microsoft Word can be used as proof in court of origination.
Patents, on the other hand, are an attempt to control patterns that are likely to be discovered independently. Mere existence of something that looks like a copy is not clear proof that a copy was made from an item covered by the patent.
Patents attempt to own a platonic idea. Like the idea of using a fishing net. One doesn’t have to use a prior fishing net as a factor of production in a new one. Nor is the idea of a fishing net unique enough that one could prove that it was copied from someone else. Perhaps they saw a spider web and got the idea from that.
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“The correct argument against Brian is much simpler. A Macker copyright is in effect simply *asserting* “You cannot do such and such with this property, even after I transfer it to you. This condition is viral, and applies to anybody who receives this property, no contract required. Even if this property is abandoned and then homesteaded, these limitations still apply to the homesteader.” Well, that’s nice and all, but just asserting something doesn’t make it so, and creating something doesn’t give him that right.”
It’s no more a simple assertion than mineral rights are a simple assertion. I own the original copy. I go to sell it but not in whole. I am now a coowner with the buyer.
You can’t homestead something where you know the correct owner. If you found my wallet with my name on it you can’t homestead. Also you cannot abandon what you do not own. Since the buyer is merely a coowner of the copyrighted software, he may abandon his portion of ownership but that does not mean the other owner has abandoned his.
I may buy a piece of land encumbered by prior mineral rights ownership by Phil. I may well abandon my ownership rights in the land. That doesn’t mean that Phil has abandoned his coownership, he still owns the mineral rights.
Copyright ownership is no more “viral” or based on “mere assertion” than mineral right ownership.
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Brian Macker wrote:
“Patents attempt to own a platonic idea.”
Believe it or not, I agree with this completely. The problem, of course, is that I can’t think of anything that’s more of a Platonic idea than an integer (a simple counting number). And yet, all “digital content” is just that; an integer . Any piece of software, digital multimedia file, ebook, etc., is just an integer (or a series of integers, if it’s more than one file). Or if you ignore the file system formatting, the entire content of a CD, DVD, or hard drive could be easily construed as just one single integer. Granted, these integers are very, very, very large. Granted, it would be very difficult to “stumble” upon these numbers by chance. But still, they are just integers.
This would seem to me to mean that a copyright on digital media is an attempt to own a platonic idea.
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Brian Macker wrote:
“I may buy a piece of land encumbered by prior mineral rights ownership by Phil. I may well abandon my ownership rights in the land. That doesn’t mean that Phil has abandoned his coownership, he still owns the mineral rights.”
I have never bought property involving mineral rights, so I’m not sure, but don’t the contracts involved in the buying of such land specify that you are not buying the mineral rights inherent in the land?
January 18, 2010 at 7:12 pm
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As someone who used to believe in copyrights, and who in fact believed that a copyright over a given idea could last infinitely if (A) the “owner” lives forever or (B) the “owners,” without fail, transfer “ownership” to future generations through gift or through writing a will, I can understand why many of you might be afraid to come to reject the pro-IP position.
Here’s what did it for me, ultimately.
We agree with Rothbard that you cannot own another person, or the will of another person, or the mind of another person, or anything inside the mind of another person, right?
It is for this reason that Rothbard, correctly, rejected the validity of anti-libel and anti-slander laws. A person’s “reputation” is something that only exists within the minds of others, and since nobody has a right to control the minds of others, therefore nobody has a “right” to her or his reputation.
But once a person reads something, does not the content enter the person’s mind? I have read Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and it has therefore entered my mind, as is George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. And no matter how much one may try, one cannot nonviolently remove this content from my head. They only imaginable way to remove this content is through aggressing against me (e.g., murdering me).
Further, as Kinsella has pointed out, advocacy of IP entails an opposition to the inviolability of property in physical things. The state considers Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to be under “copyright,” which in effect means that if I want to take MY justly-acquired pen and MY justly-acquired paper and to write on it the words from that book, or even to write on it a story similar to the story in that book, the state may come and beat me down, imprison me, or steal from me. But why? It’s my paper, it’s my pen. I am not aggressing against Vonnegut in copying the book; but the state will certainly aggress against me if it catches me doing it.
I came around to rejecting IP when I realised that IP is theft. It violates natural law and the nonaggression axiom. It has no legitimate place in a libertarian society.
It took me a while to accept this, so I understand if you’re afraid. Take your time, but do think about it. Give it a great deal of thought. Go back and forth; consider both sides.
And, once you’ve finally made up your mind on the matter one way or the other, question yourself some more.
Best regards,
Alex PeakP.S. Loved the video.
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Alexander S. Peak wrote:
“Further, as Kinsella has pointed out, advocacy of IP entails an opposition to the inviolability of property in physical things.”
I hate to be a Silas, but advocacy of radio broadcasting rights also entails an opposition to the inviolability of property in physical things.
January 18, 2010 at 8:43 pm
January 19, 2010 at 5:12 am
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Dear Brian,
my argument against causality leading to ownership is that if it was true, all positive externalities and all causally related activities would become property violations. Children would become property of their parents. Soviet Union, by inspiring Ayn Rand’s work, would co-own Atlas Shrugged. The one asking a question would co-own an answer.
The issue is more apparent with immaterial goods than material. Even if we make the argument more strict by “going back” from “causality” to “use”, there is no way to determine what activity constitutes “use” of an immaterial good and what doesn’t. Let’s say I test 1000 of 2000 previously known possible protein combinations and determine that they do not possess a certain feature and then publish the results. Another researcher reads the article and starts testing the other 1000. Does that mean he “used” my work? That would mean that not only does the information present in an immaterial good constitute the use, but, absurdly, that the information absent from immaterial good constitutes its use. How about I take a book and write another one, by negating the contents of the original? For example: “Harry Potter was not the son of Lily and James. He did not have a scar on his forehead. His uncle and aunt loved him very much. Voldemort was not Tom Riddle. He did not try to kill Harry. Harry and Malfoy were best friends ever.”. Is that use? Logically, it is the exact opposite.
The “use” of an immaterial good is a metaphor. It does not actually reflect an empirical occurrance.
In summary, I consider this approach invalid, as it does not lead to demarcation of the property boundaries.
January 19, 2010 at 7:44 am
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Pro-IP-Lib,
First, I find your “you didn’t do enough labor” argument to be abominable. Is it really just the labor theory of value that you depend upon?
I say that because your idea of “enough” is not anyone else’s idea of “enough” and never will be. So all the “labor theory of value” does is increase contention.
You wrote,
“And the “non-scarcity” argument is not appropriate here. If it was truly non-scarce, you would just move on and find a substitute from the supply of limitless IP, you wouln’t need to copy theirs.”
Your assertion that non-scarcity isn’t “appropriate here” is false.
No one has ever said that creation is non-scarce. Creativity may very well be the most scarce of all attributes, and I’m all for people trading their production for anything and everything they can get for it (completely ignoring any “labor theory of value” since value is entirely subjective).
What is not scarce is the ideas themselves.
Any particular pyramid is the property of its owner, no one disputes that. Yet the Egyptian who came up with the pyramid is owed NOTHING by the builder of the Luxor hotel, just as there is no violation of property rights by any Mayan who built pyramids in Mexico, because the idea “pyramid” is in fact non-scarce once it has been created.
No one is going to deny his selling the idea for however much he got for it, because no one is saying inventors are somehow not allowed to profit from their invention.
I can use the set of words “It was a dark and stormy night” infinitely without depriving anyone else of that same set of words. Ideas themselves are non-scarce.
January 19, 2010 at 8:33 am
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What Mark Hubbard can’t seem to grasp is that while downloading his e-book without paying him may well be wrong, it is not “theft”, because it is not scarce and it is not property. He and others seem to think that the anti-IP’ers are all for some kind of collective “anything goes” philosophy, when that is far from the truth. Justice, like any high ideal or concept, requires a firm grounding in reality and percepts. Basing law on the idea that ideas are property is bound to lead to conceptual errors and injustices, as the occasional blog post here at Mises indicates.
January 19, 2010 at 2:15 pm
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I agree, Michael. The most common slur he used was a variation on “street gang”. A street gang in my understanding goes and attacks others and deprives them of things. They are aware of this deprivation, that their gain is another’s loss. So he really seems to think that we believe that copying is theft, that copying deprives the other, and that we simply deny this for personal gain without feeling guilty. I feel sorry for him. It’s as if he stumbled into this conceptual error, started getting very angry any time he thought about the topic, and now can’t even examine it rationally in order to correct the error. He’s like the monkey with its hand stuck in the bottle because it won’t let go of the cherry inside, even though that’s what’s keeping its hand from fitting through the bottle’s mouth.
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Dear Russ,
As long as one assumes photon frequencies to be less than physical, unlike the photons themselves (which are, despite their wave-like nature and lack of mass, physical), then yes, you’re right–my response is not perfect. Certainly we would not want to lump broadcast bands in which IP, despite both being non-physical, since broadcast bands have a natural scarcity unlike pure ideas.
Yours,
Alex Peak January 19, 2010 at 5:00 pm
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“….since broadcast bands have a natural scarcity unlike pure ideas.”
i guess this is so. the idea of the conestoga wagon now has had well over a century to accumulate itself in various conciousness….yet you dont see to many of them on the roads. the idea itself may be ever more prevalent but the instatiation of it has diminished
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“….since broadcast bands have a natural scarcity unlike pure ideas.”
additionally, do broadcast bands only have a natural scarcity to the point that the transmission apparatus can deliniate them?
would that be significantly different than the idea originator ideas being understood and replicated by others. -
“my argument against causality leading to ownership is that if it was true, all positive externalities and all causally related activities would become property violations. Children would become property of their parents. Soviet Union, by inspiring Ayn Rand’s work, would co-own Atlas Shrugged.”
You are arguing against a straw man. No one is saying that causality leads to ownership. In that case why limit it to positive externalities? If you think my argument merely boils down to causality then why not argue, “Brian, If you shit on my lawn that doesn’t mean you own it.”
You really are that far off track. In fact I gave you an example of a positive externality, my prized bull knocking up your substandard cow, where I would not have ownership.
I already stated this is not merely about causation, and it certainly isn’t merely about externalities. Your argument falls flat.
You want me to use the same arguments against property rights? OK, you claim that the reason you can claim ownership in land is because you improve it. Well that can’t be the case because. 1) I could come over an trim your hedges, improving them. Does that mean I own them? 2) My improvments to my own property will via externalities increase the value of your property, therefore improving it. Does that mean I own your property.
Do you think the fact that cutting your bushes in an unauthorize manner has anything to do with your position, or the fact that you already own the bushes?
Part of the issue here is that the book the third party is copying is already owned, and not by him. He can’t just use it without permission. That is a trespass just like my trimming your bushes without permission is.
By trimming your bushes I’ve mixed my labor/property with yours, without permission. Copying a book without permission mixes the labor/property of one person with another without permission.
You can’t seem to see the forest for all the trees.
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Alex Peak,
We agree with Rothbard that you cannot own another person, or the will of another person, or the mind of another person, or anything inside the mind of another person, right?
Right. But agreeing not to do something as part of a contract is not the same as someone owning a piece of your mind.
Suppose you were an artist and a beautiful woman contracted you to paint her nude, but only from a certain perspective, not showing her privates. As part of the job you sign a contract never to create any figure or image in her nude likeness again from memory.
Now you certainly will remember what she looks like nude, and may even be able to make a reasonable copy. However that doesn’t mean that you are a slave or that she owns anything inside your mind.
Had she not posed nude for you then you never would have been able to draw an accurate nude of her in the first place. So it’s not like the outcome of the exchange has left you any poorer in that regard. You aren’t less free after the exchange.
She certainly doe not own your mind as she has absolutely no way to prevent you from thinking whatever you want.
You can think about her all you want. You can describe her to others. Whatever. The only thing that is restricted by the contract is your right to paint an unauthorized nude, or drawing, or sculpture.
If you really really feel you must painter her nude again you can always ask to pay her, or get her release.
You have agreed to do one thing for money and it need not occupy any of your time for the rest of your life.
“It is for this reason that Rothbard, correctly, rejected the validity of anti-libel and anti-slander laws. A person’s “reputation” is something that only exists within the minds of others, and since nobody has a right to control the minds of others, therefore nobody has a “right” to her or his reputation.”
Well I think Rothbard is wrong for the right reason. Defamation laws should not be about owning ones reputation. They should be about fraudulent interference in the right to freedom of association. If someone maliciously lies about, say the local butcher, saying that he keeps his scales out of balance, then that fraudulently interferes in both the butchers and the customers right to free association.
It’s a crime for the same reason that yelling fire in a uncrowded theater would be. You’ve interfered in a transaction using fraud.
“But once a person reads something, does not the content enter the person’s mind? I have read Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and it has therefore entered my mind, as is George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”
Not in exactly the same way that direct copying would. Unless you are a idiot savant or something. Copying a book is not something you do from memory. Same is even more true of software.
“And no matter how much one may try, one cannot nonviolently remove this content from my head. They only imaginable way to remove this content is through aggressing against me (e.g., murdering me).”
Why on earth would the copyright holder want to remove whatever you happen to remember from your head. The whole point of selling the book to you is so you will read it.
When Microsoft sells you word they expect you to copy it to your computer. There are certain types of copying that are allowed by copyright.
“Further, as Kinsella has pointed out, advocacy of IP entails an opposition to the inviolability of property in physical things.”
Incorrectly.
“The state considers Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to be under “copyright,” which in effect means that if I want to take MY justly-acquired pen and MY justly-acquired paper and to write on it the words from that book, or even to write on it a story similar to the story in that book, the state may come and beat me down, imprison me, or steal from me. “
Well cross off the steal because that’s a loaded word in this context. Extracting restitution is not stealing.
The state as an agent of the copyright owner or the owner can prevent you from using the book as a factor of production in making a copy yes. What’s your point?
“But why? It’s my paper, it’s my pen.”
So? I own a pen and paper. There are many things I can’t do with them, like write on someone elses wall, or stuff it into the tail pipe of their car.
“I am not aggressing against Vonnegut in copying the book; but the state will certainly aggress against me if it catches me doing it.”
This is a false claim. You are agressing against Vonnegut’s property, by using it for a purpose for which he did not give you permission. He is part owner of the book which you are copying.
“I came around to rejecting IP when I realised that IP is theft.”
This is a unsupported assertion.
Although I’ve heard the argument upon which it is based. The argument goes that I own the pen and paper and yet you, the copyright holder, are preventing me from doing what I want with them. Since ownership is the right to control you have stolen from me.
This is nonsense. There can be many restrictions on how you use your property that do not amount to theft. You can’t smoke in my house but that doesn’t amount to a theft of your cigarettes.
So you want to use your pen and paper to copy Anthem. Ayn Rand has prevented this somehow, so now you claim theft. Well what if the way she prevented it was to never have written the book? What if she wrote the book but never sold it to you? Are those theft? Has she in any meaningful way reduced the scope of activities you can take with your pen and paper? Of course not. It’s not stealing.
So, now suppose she lets you read the book on the condition that you don’t copy it while it is in your possession. That doesn’t steal your pen and paper either. It just stops you from doing one activity that involves her property.
“It violates natural law and the nonaggression axiom. It has no legitimate place in a libertarian society.”
“It took me a while to accept this, so I understand if you’re afraid.”
Huh? I’m not afraid. I reject these arguments because they are wrong.
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Russ,
“So it’s OK to copy an idea that doesn’t involve words or numbers, but it’s not OK to copy to copy one that does? Hmmm, odd, and seemingly a bit arbitrary.”
It is not the least bit arbitrary.
Stop with the “ideas” nonsense. A book isn’t the equivalent of “an idea”. An idea is a platonic concept, that lives a some kind ghost on a parallel platonic universe of “reals”.
A book is a physical object that encodes a very complex pattern that is unique enough that without an original you could spend a quadrillion years writing and never reproduce it. You need the object to copy it.
In fact, you get caught selling a book called “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” that contains the same words as J. K, Rowlings book then we know you copied it, and did not write it yourself.
Because of that it is easy to prove in court that you got hold of a physical copy of the book and made a copy.
This is not something that is possible if you invent the wearing your underwear on the outside of your pants. You might just of thought that up on your own.
The odds of you writing an identical book on your own is so minuscule that it’s an impossibility.
“I have never bought property involving mineral rights, so I’m not sure, but don’t the contracts involved in the buying of such land specify that you are not buying the mineral rights inherent in the land?”
Yes, but don’t have this fetish about what is in the contract, because the legal convention could be the opposite.For example, when selling land the assumption might be that one never gets the mineral rights. We do that for the space above the land. You don’t own the airspace over your land. In some places you don’t own the water rights, in some you do.
There are all sorts of conditions on rental contract, retail sales, and contractor contracts, that are not spelled out in each contract, but are part of general legal conventions.
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> No one is saying that causality leads to ownership.
Actually, some IP proponents are. It was unclear to me that this is not your argument, so I apologise for the misunderstanding. I most definitely do not claim that I consider the assumption correct, on the contrary, I consider it absurd.My another point is however that there is no distinction between immaterial good and causality. You seem to be asserting that there is one.
> Part of the issue here is that the book the third party
> is copying is already owned, and not by him.
Part of the issue is that one cannot distinguish between that which you claim is “owned” and an externality. Neither are empirical phenomena. If you can claim ownership about something that you cannot observe or measure, why can’t you claim ownership about other things that you can neither observe nor measure either?> By trimming your bushes I’ve mixed my
> labor/property with yours, without permission.
This is all well and good, however the results of trimming versus non-trimming are empirically distinguishable. -
“Actually, some IP proponents are.”
No they are not. They claim to own the platonic ideas. They are saying, “I created an idea, and therefore I own it”. They don’t care whether you also created the idea independently. Their argument doesn’t depend on whether there is any causal connection between the two. All they care about is that they invented it first and got to the patent office first.
If I independently invent something there is no causal connection from what I did to what the patent holder did, and they are not using that argument.
“My another point is however that there is no distinction between immaterial good and causality. You seem to be asserting that there is one.”
You are going to have to clarify what you mean by both. What is an “immaterial good”? I assumed by that you mean a platonic ideal. Like a “circle”.
“Part of the issue is that one cannot distinguish between that which you claim is “owned” and an externality. Neither are empirical phenomena.”
I don’t think you realize what empirical means. If I swing my fist and hit you in the face that’s an externality and it’s quite empirical.” If you can claim ownership about something that you cannot observe or measure, why can’t you claim ownership about other things that you can neither observe nor measure either?”
You are responding to a sentence where the claim is ownership of a book. How is a book something that cannot be observed or measured?You are not getting it. The property owned is the book. A physical object, and not some ghostly immaterial thing. It is co-owed by the copyright holding author and the book buyer. The book and the words in it are physical entities that are empirically observable and testable. For example, one can look at two books, read them, and see if they are the same, or different.
The contents of the book are not magic. There is an actual physical arrangement in the real world of ink on the pages. Books don’t have immaterial souls.
“This is all well and good, however the results of trimming versus non-trimming are empirically distinguishable.”
As are two different books, a blank DVD from one containing MS Word, a blank book from one that has words and pictures, etc.If you make a copy of MS Word the results of the copying verse non-copying are empirically distinguishable. You had to use MS Word to make the copy, and you didn’t own it for that purpose, someone else did. Thus you are stealing a factor of production, and the most important to the generated value of the copy.
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Dear Brian,
> No they are not.
They (some, not all) most definitely do. The most evident example is Kerem Tibuk.> You are going to have to clarify what you mean by
> both. What is an “immaterial good”? I assumed by
> that you mean a platonic ideal. Like a “circle”.
Yes. There is no way to distinguish between those “properties” covered by IP laws, and an externality in general.> I don’t think you realize what empirical means. If I
> swing my fist and hit you in the face that’s an
> externality and it’s quite empirical.
But swinging your fist is not a platonic ideal, it is an something that actually happens and can be observed independently. Such an example is not covered by my claim. Are you sure you understand what I’m talking about?> You are responding to a sentence where the claim is
> ownership of a book. How is a book something that
> cannot be observed or measured?
You can own “a book”. But you can’t own the immaterial aspects of that book in an exclusive, unique way. You may very well forbid those you have a contract with any soft of activity (I disagree with Russ on this), but there is no reason why third parties should be bound by restrictions with regards to immaterial aspects of the objects and activities covered by that contract.> For example, one can look at two books, read them,
> and see if they are the same, or different.
Any empirical observation will unmistakingly tell you that they are different objects. They are only “the same” if your interpretation does not reveal significant differences. Both your interpretation and significance are subjective. Why do you consider the fact that there are two of them insignificant? There is no reason to make that conclusion.> The contents of the book are not magic. There is an
> actual physical arrangement in the real world of ink
> on the pages. Books don’t have immaterial souls.
Yet, the contents (as in the letters) are empirically distinct objects. Furthermore, even if you use the same font, the imperfections in printing process create differences. You automatically assume that these differences are irrelevant. There is no reason to make this conclusion.> As are two different books, a blank DVD from one
> containing MS Word, a blank book from one that has
> words and pictures, etc.
This is only because there is another physical element that is present in one and absent in another case. If the only difference between two objects is that one features the immaterial good and one does not, there is no empirical difference between them. You are probably confused because the objects you are comparing are noticeably different already.I made two other examples. One was Jay Lakner’s stick figure drawing that he made after reading Harry Potter. Is it a use of Harry Potter or not? The only way to know is to follow Jay’s thought processes. There is no other way to determine whether it is or not.
Second one was a book summary (I’ll repeat it here):
—————
This book is a story of a bright boy. He had trouble getting along with his family, but one day was selected for special (yet so far almost unmanifested) skills and sent to an elite school. The school allows him to hone his skills. He excels in combat disciplines and demonstrates great leadership abilities. Meanwhile, the world is being threatened by a powerful enemy. The enemy was temporarily beaten some time ago, but is planning a comeback. It is said that the special skills that the boy possesses are the only way to defeat the enemy. In the end, he defeats the enemy, but finds out that he had been skillfully manoeuvred into the confrontation by his own mentor.
————-Unless you heard this example before, you probably think this is a summary of Harry Potter. However, I claim you are wrong, it is not a summary of Harry Potter but Ender’s Game. How do you determine whether I’m right? There is no empirical way to do that. It could be either, both or neither. The only way to know is to know my thoughts I had while writing the summary.
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Peter,
If you don’t understand that the words I am typing right now exist and can be empirically compared to the next sentence to see if they are the same then I am done discussing this with you.
If you don’t understand that the words I am typing right now exist and can be empirically compared to the prior sentence to see if they are the same then I am done discussing this with you.
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I don’t understand what is your example supposed to prove. You seem to be under the impression that I claim that it is impossible to conclude difference. I claim that it is impossible to conclude identity.
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Well then I hope you are not a TSA agent, because there is going to be some awful long lines while you ponder the photos on the passports.
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Dear Brian,
how about you address the actual arguments I made? You are mixing unrelated things. In order to determine whether a photo refers to a certain person, we do not need to determine whether they are metaphysically identical, or whether the photo is a “copy” of the individual. The similarities that are produced by our brain while looking at the individual and the photo are functionally sufficient for the desired purpose. Indeed, we are aware that the photo and the individual are distinct objects and not the same one. We are aware that a photo is created by using a camera to capture the light that was reflected by the individual at some previous time, and that the effect is very similar to that which happens in our eyes. We do not need to conclude that they are “metaphysically same”, just that they are “similar enough for practical purposes”.
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“how about you address the actual arguments I made?”
You aren’t making arguments anymore. You are just being obtuse, making ridiculous examples, and bringing up orthogonal issues.
People know they are making copies of Microsoft Word, The Lion King, or Harry Potter when they do so.
January 26, 2010 at 4:51 pm
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Brian Macker said:
”
‘If you saw my products on display and went home and duplicated them, there wouldn’t be any damages.’So you think that someone can just look at a copy of Microsoft Word sitting in it’s package on a shelf, and then walk home and copy it? I don’t think so.
No, no one says that.”
Wrong. If someone had a mousetrap on display and went home and copied it, indeed there would be no damages. Someone might not have the ability, as is the case of boxed software sitting on a shelf) to copy, but the copying is fine.
“To copy something you need to get your hands on a physical instantiation of it, which is somebody elses property, not yours. The only way you could get one of your own is to buy encumbered with copying restrictions.”
Wrong. Technically you don’t need a physical instantiation and so your definition of copying is wrong. What if I downloaded the patent documents for a mousetrap? Guess what? I could copy it without needing a physical instantiation of it.
“No one acting in their own self interest is going to spend a million dollars developing software and let you buy a copy for one hundred bucks with full ownership rights. They would only sell you partial ownership, retaining the ownership of the right to copy to themselves.”
Your imagination fails here. Some companies spend money developing software and GIVE it away AND give full rights to it. Just because it is inconceivable to you does not make it impossible in real life. That’s the problem with people thinking they know better than the millions of entrepreneurs in the free-market.
“If you steal it, or violate the copyright holders property rights, to make a copy then you are using it unauthorized as a factor of production in the copy.”
You are already assuming theft / a violation of the copyright holders property rights is intrinsic to copying. But the anti-IP crowd denies that copying is theft or a violation of property rights. Now if you meant stealing as in physically going to a store and stealing a boxed copy of Microsoft Word, then there is a misunderstanding. NO ONE HERE is advocating that kind of trespass since it would physically deprive the owner of that object.
“It’s the same as if you broke into a factory at night, stole a mold, used it to make a bunch of copies with your personal raw materials, then returned the mold before the morning. Even though the imposition on the actual owner seems negligible you have still stolen the factor of production. This establishes co-ownership rights of the object you created by the person who owned the mold.”
No one here is advocating physical trespass. What if I didn’t break into the factory and made my own mold from one of their physical products? I have not stolen the factor of production but would there still be co-ownership? Of course not. The crime in your statement is physical trespass and physical theft, not the copying.
“It would then be up to a judge to decide what the ownership ratio was in the copied objects. In the case of computer software the value contributed by the raw materials and copying labor is minimal. A CD costs ten cents, and hard disk space is even cheaper. The run time on your computer is of negligible cost. Almost the entire value is due to the factor of production owned by the copyright holder.”
Really? We should let a judge decide ownership ratios? The value should be partially determined by the raw materials and copying labor? Let’s say that a piece of software cost $100 to develop and I make a copy on a disc made of diamond costing $9,000 and pay a technician $1,000 to do that. Does the ownership ratio turn to 100:1 in my favor? I don’t think so but some judge might basing his decision on your flawed criteria.
Honestly, do you really think defending government intervention in favor of a labor theory of value is going to last ten seconds on Mises.org?
“The software pirate is producing copies that the copyright holder has ownership rights in because of the unauthorized use of a factor of production. In order to right this wrong and make the copyright holder whole again some restitution is in order.
The pirate has invested perhaps .11 cents in the production value of the copy, while the copyright holders value contribution is the full sales price of the software minus .11 cents, and that’s per copy.”
Thus, one option for the court is to force the pirate to pay the copyright holder almost the full value for every copy, plus court costs, and other enforcement costs needed to track down the pirate. ”
Right. So if I invest $10,000 to make a copy while the full sales price is $100, the copyright holder’s value contribution is negative $9,900? And since the ratio of ownership is 100:1 in my favor, the court should force the “copyright holder” to pay me $9,900. Absurd.
“Also, potentially a penal fine proportional to the risk of getting caught to be paid to the copyright holder.
The extra costs that need to be expended to catch the pirate will easily wipe out any material investments he had made when the copying process is easy. While the harder the copying process is the longer the object being copied will have to have been misused as a factor of production.”
Irrelevant considering your premises are wrong.
“Thus the straight out thief who steals someone’s copy of a software, slips in into his computer, copies it, then returns it secretly is not somehow doing less damage. What he is in fact doing is contributing less value as a factor of production in the copy.”
Of course they are doing less damage. If someone breaks into my house (a wrong) and steals my wrench and then returns it without my knowing, that is less damaging than if he steals it and I know about it. Your contorted arguments are blocking common sense reasoning.
“Suppose it took a full week to copy a CD. Then the theft to make a copy becomes more obviously a burden on the person stolen from, but it also makes the value added to the copy by the pirate rise in value. It becomes a wash when it comes time to decide who has more interest in the copy. Sure the pirate invested a week in the copy, but he also stole use of the software CD for a whole week.”
The thing is that the physical CD is stolen. The owner does not have use of it. That is physical theft and no one condones that. Further, since most software installs to the hard drive, I would not be denied use of that software except if I wanted to install it. I don’t know where my XP CD is, but I can tell you that I haven’t used it in years. If someone had stolen it and spent a week to make a copy, it is clear who has more interest in the copy. Hint: it’s the thief who invested a week to do it. So does that make it right? No. Physical trespass is wrong. Copying itself, on the other hand, is fine.
“The issue of copyrights isn’t merely about Platonic ideals, it’s about physical instantiations of real objects, and factors of production, along with co-ownership of those objects.”
Wrong again. I downloaded Windows 7. It’s not a physical object but a magnetic pattern on my hard drive (or an electrical pattern on an SSD). So copyright cannot be intrinsically related to “physical instantiations of real objects”. It is also absurd, at least in your presentation, that it should be intrinsically related to factors of production or co-ownership.
“If you bought land without the mineral rights and those are retained by someone else then you do not own the minerals on “your” property. Should you try to mine those minerals then you would be stealing. Likewise when you buy software but not the copying rights to that software then you are not allowed to make copies, or you are stealing that use from the person who retained those rights. Which puts you in the same exact position as an actual theft who stole a physical CD.”
No it does not. Did you even watch the animation? An actual thief who steals my physical Office CD 1) has physically trespassed and 2) denies me full use of that CD. If I share my CD drive with Office in it over a network 1) they have not physically trespassed and 2) they have not denied me full use of that CD. That’s the huge difference that the pro-IP crowd continually fail to see.
“Keep in mind that all software in the world exists as physical entities, actual copies, in some form or another. It never exists as a Platonic ideal. Thus to copy you must be misusing some physical object. ”
Wrong. Counterexample: If I have thought up a program, that software is not a physical entity. Your conclusion therefore does not follow.
January 27, 2010 at 8:59 am
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As a starving artist, I can honestly say that I encourage people that enjoy my music to reproduce and distribute it to their friends. I would much rather people pay me for my artistic contribution, but that’s not always the case. For people that make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling record, this constitutes a loss of money. For people like me, it means that more people know about my creative property (yes, it is property. I made it, therefore it is mine) and hopefully it also means they’ll be more likely to come see me perform and shell out ten bucks to watch me do it live. The more people want to steal my record, the better chance I have of actually making money off t-shirts and concerts. I’m not saying it’s right, and I definitely don’t agree with blatant theft of creative property, but it’s going to happen. With all the small minded people that use the internet as a substitute for daily life, there will always be people that refuse to educate themselves on intellectual property and blatantly try to pass off the work of others as their own. It is these people that are truly lower forms of life, the ones who attempt to claim glory for something that another person has done.
January 27, 2010 at 9:16 am
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Bryon:
“With all the small minded people that use the internet as a substitute for daily life…”
This is an internet phenomenon? I’m trying to better understand what you’re refering to here:
“…there will always be people that refuse to educate themselves on intellectual property and blatantly try to pass off the work of others as their own”
It seems you are conflating music fans who file share with musicians? Are you only talking about sampling-artists or other musicians too? For example example, a band like Led Zeppelin who incorporated thousands of ideas by old blues artists, super-charged it and repackaged the gumbo for presentation to young white kids who mainly didn’t know any better?
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Bryon,
I’m not terribly clear either, let me try that again:
It seems you are conflating file sharing music fans with musicans, perhaps? Are you only talking about artists who sample or other musicians too? For example:, a band like Led Zeppelin who incorporated thousands of ideas by old blues artists, super-charged them and repackaged the gumbo for presentation to young white kids who mainly didn’t know any better? Are Jimmy Page and Robert Plant or say, Michael Bolton “lower forms of life” for this reason?
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“Wrong.”
Actually I was right since I was talking about MS Word, not a mousetrap in a clear plastic wrapper.
” If someone had a mousetrap on display and went home and copied it, indeed there would be no damages.”
No kidding. If I wear my baseball cap backwards and you copy it there would be no damages either. Your example, doesn’t apply to copyright. I’m not defending patents. You on the other hand are trying to use objections that properly apply to patents in an attempt to claim the invalidity of copyright. Which is wrong.
You didn’t however properly address anything I had to say. Many in the anti-IP crowd conflate patents with copyright. They conflate that to which copyright could conceivably apply to that which it couldn’t. I’m addressing copyright, and in fact you are wrong if you think you can copy Microsoft word at a glance.
“Wrong. Technically you don’t need a physical instantiation and so your definition of copying is wrong. What if I downloaded the patent documents for a mousetrap? Guess what? I could copy it without needing a physical instantiation of it.”
Again you are talking patents, not copyright. In fact, everything in this world is a physical instantiation, even the description provided in a patent is physically instantiated.
In fact a detailed enough description in another form is in fact a copy. So the patent registration would be a copy, a physical copy. That’s true even if it is non-functional in the copy. For example, MS word copied to your computer can do word processing, whereas the description on a DVD, a physical instantiation, cannot do word processing.
The definition of copying I am using is the one that would be applicable to copyrights. For example, if someone were to publicly display something that is easy to replicate then copyright couldn’t apply.
It is you who is using a ridiculous definition of “copying” in order to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve used a definition that is appropriate because it is a definition that requires trespass against the owner of the copyright. There is no trespass in the case of viewing someone wearing a hat backwards, or seeing publicly displayed goods like a mousetrap.
In fact your entire comment is one long overextended effort to misunderstand everything I have written. So I will not waste my time responding to the rest of it.
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“Actually I was right since I was talking about MS Word, not a mousetrap in a clear plastic wrapper.”
Nope, still wrong. AR said that there would be no problem if someone duplicated a product on display and YOU responded by pointing out the impossibility of duplicating MS Word. I pointed out that your response fails to answer his argument since there clearly are cases where duplication IS possible.
“Your example, doesn’t apply to copyright. I’m not defending patents. You on the other hand are trying to use objections that properly apply to patents in an attempt to claim the invalidity of copyright. Which is wrong.”
Nope. The distinction between copyright and patent is irrelevant in the example. The item being copied could be a piece of sheet music which does fall under copyright law and there still would be no damages. As the page title suggests – copying is not theft.
“You didn’t however properly address anything I had to say. Many in the anti-IP crowd conflate patents with copyright. They conflate that to which copyright could conceivably apply to that which it couldn’t. I’m addressing copyright, and in fact you are wrong if you think you can copy Microsoft word at a glance.”
No one thinks they can copy Microsoft Word at a glance, your suggestion otherwise clearly shows your failure to grasp the arguments presented. You think many of us are equivocating terms when the distinction is irrelevant.
“Again you are talking patents, not copyright. In fact, everything in this world is a physical instantiation, even the description provided in a patent is physically instantiated.”
Again you are making useless distinctions. In fact, both are intellectual property and therefore fair game for copying.
“In fact a detailed enough description in another form is in fact a copy. So the patent registration would be a copy, a physical copy. That’s true even if it is non-functional in the copy. For example, MS word copied to your computer can do word processing, whereas the description on a DVD, a physical instantiation, cannot do word processing.”
My comment was meant to be addressed to AP, not you. My mistake.
“The definition of copying I am using is the one that would be applicable to copyrights. For example, if someone were to publicly display something that is easy to replicate then copyright couldn’t apply.”
Easy to replicate? Like sheetmusic? Where copyright DOES apply?
“It is you who is using a ridiculous definition of “copying” in order to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve used a definition that is appropriate because it is a definition that requires trespass against the owner of the copyright. There is no trespass in the case of viewing someone wearing a hat backwards, or seeing publicly displayed goods like a mousetrap.”
If there is no baby in the bathwater, you wishing there were does not make it so. Physical trespass is wrong against the owner of a “copyright” or not. Now your definition of copying “requires trespass against the owner of the copyright” to which I had already responded by stating that physical trespass is wrong whereas copying is not. By your definition, copying is always wrong since it requires trespass but that is clearly not always the case.
“In fact your entire comment is one long overextended effort to misunderstand everything I have written. So I will not waste my time responding to the rest of it.”
I assure you that I am trying to understand what you have written most earnestly and with a pure heart. Perhaps you will not fail to respond properly next time.
March 4, 2010 at 8:00 pm
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This whole thing is simple. I own the book, I sell you the rights to keep and read the book, but I don’t sell you the rights to use the book to write down the exact words written in the book. If you do use the book to do that, you have violated the contract, and I can obtain the damages specified in section A. Also according to section B, any authorized or unauthorized copy of the book you make shall also be constrained by this exact contract regardless of whether or not it has also been written in this book, and I shall retain the rights to that copy as I do this copy. (Thus if any copy is ever made, it will also be under this contract, so it won’t be able to be copied without this contract also applying). By buying this book, you agree to this contract.
Simple, concise, and in keeping with all the contracts and natural law that we libertarians love so much.
March 4, 2010 at 9:09 pm
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Sammy,
I overhear someone reading the book out loud. I am not aware of any preexisting contract between author, and I do not agree to be bound by it before I hear this booking being read aloud. I repeat what I hear in my book. Did I violate a contract I am a party to?
In your example, what if a child, a minor, reads the contractually purchased book and repeats some of the contents in their own writing (assuming the child is old enough to read and write). At what point did the child become bound by the contract (the contract they did not agree to or even become aware of)?
check out this audio book: http://blog.mises.org/2010/02/against-intellectual-property-audiobook-version/
It’s under a 2 hour “read” (i.e. listen); it’ll clear up when a contract is valid, in this context, and when it is a stretch.
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Well the parent would be responsible for what ever the minor did, so that’s a useless conflation (just as I’m responsible for what ever my bull does in public). If the child is an orphan and is taking care of itself, then it is no longer a minor.
Second, the person who is reading it out loud is probably breaking the public reading part of the contract in the book, so it too can be stopped. Now I don’t think that I can justify stopping the person hearing it from repeating it, but that should be fairly easy to prove in court that he either did or did not use the book in order to reproduce it, depending on the likely hood of somebody being able to hear the entire thing, and then how much they reproduce of it word for word in another book. You can’t however hire or ask someone to read the book to you and then copy it, since clearly that is you (corporate group, conspiracy, etc.) using the book in order to copy it.
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I’d also like to note: It is not whether or not you know about the contract, It’s that the book is owned by someone, and even though they have expressly forbidden it’s use in copying itself, they don’t have to. I don’t get to shoot at your house until you forbid it. It is immediately known that I should not shoot at your house, no contract necessary. It is also immediately known that I don’t allow the use of my book to copy it (unless given permission). I own the rights to use my book to copy it, and I’m not selling you the right to do that. I am only allowing you to read it and keep it in your house (and perhaps lend it with this contract still intact with them). This fact is known by the average person that can read a copyright symbol. And that’s what the law should be, would be, and is based around. The average person.
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We’re getting closer.
I agree, forget the minor thing. It’s just adding confusion.
So to make sure I am not misreading you, what are we proving in court?
” Now I don’t think that I can justify stopping the person hearing it from repeating it, but that should be fairly easy to prove in court that he either did or did not use the book in order to reproduce it, depending on the likely hood of somebody being able to hear the entire thing, and then how much they reproduce of it word for word in another book.”
To me this means that the person overhearing, and not agreeing to a contract, is not guilty of any violation. If this is what you mean, then I agree with you.
“You can’t however hire or ask someone to read the book to you and then copy it, since clearly that is you (corporate group, conspiracy, etc.) using the book in order to copy it.”
I didn’t say that. Nonetheless, I agree that hiring someone to agree to a contract and break it for you is not permissible. On this point we also agree.
Have you had a chance to listen to the book yet? It is a good one, and nice and short too.
We are all in favour of contracts. The issue here is that you can’t just “declare” a contract into existence, and bind me by it, if I have not agree to be a party to it. If I do purchase a book from you, and agree to a contract, then I am bound by that contract. My wife, my family, friends and co-workers are not bound by that contract (they cannot be expected to unlearn things that I agreed to never teach them).
Here are a few more goodies:
“It is not whether or not you know about the contract, It’s that the book is owned by someone, and even though they have expressly forbidden it’s use in copying itself, they don’t have to.”
I cannot be bound by a contract that I am not a party to.
“I don’t get to shoot at your house until you forbid it. It is immediately known that I should not shoot at your house, no contract necessary.”
In my scenario, it is not broadly forbidden to overhead things and repeat them. In your scenario (and libertarian theory) it is broadly forbidden to commit an act of aggression against a person or their property (shooting at them falls into this category). If, however, it is generally accepted that I may shoot at your house, lets assume that it’s an activity you find “fun” and welcome the community to participating in shooting at you and your home. Lets assume surprise shooting at that. You cannot broadly permit this and then secretly in your bathroom whisper “deal’s off” and then charge me with an offence. As far as I understood your instructions, the deal was that shooting is permitting.
Back to IP, as far as I understand it, hearing things in the street and repeating them is broadly permitted and accepted, regardless of whether or not someone coped a c and a circle onto a document somewhere.
“I own the rights to use my book to copy it, and I’m not selling you the right to do that. I am only allowing you to read it and keep it in your house (and perhaps lend it with this contract still intact with them).”
We’re assuming rights are divisible. Now we’re leaving the realm of contract and have landed right back into discussing just what property rights are. Trust me, that audio book covers this topic better than I can.
“This fact is known by the average person that can read a copyright symbol. And that’s what the law should be, would be, and is based around. The average person.”
Not quite. The law currently concerns not communicating thoughts from your head if said thoughts have been declared copyrighted by someone else. You have to remember the “in whole or in part”. Even if I think up a phrase, that someone else has written and copyrighted, me “thinking up” this phrase does not entitle me to any right or ownership under current copyright laws. In fact, it makes me a criminal if I communicate the thought.
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Rights to property are divisible. If this were not the case, I’d be able to sue you for sending radio signals from you broadcast tower into my land. That is not however the case. I don’t own the rights to the radio signals in the vicinity of my home if I haven’t used it yet. If someone else uses it first, then they properly own the radio signal space in and around my house and can do with it as they please, assuming it doesn’t interfere with the rights I’ve already obtained there (e.g. Melt my house with radio waves). Another example would be a home owners association. The home owners association owns the right to set rules about appearance on all the houses within that association. When you sell your house to someone out side of the home owners association, even though they haven’t signed the contract to enter into it, they still have to abide by those rules because they still own the rights to set those rules, and the you couldn’t sell those rights because you didn’t own them. So yes, you can own only partial rights to property. When a land lord sells his apartments, the new owners can’t kick out the people who live there until their lease is up because the residents own the right to live there until the specified time ends. Because what literally happened was the original land lord said “I hereby transfer the right to live in this apartment for X amount of time provided Y conditions are met”. As long as those residents meet Y conditions, they own the right to live there. So yes you absolutely can divide up rights to property. And it can get as demarcated as the original owner wants.
“I cannot be bound by a contract that I am not a party to.”
Contracts are merely ways to record how property rights have been split up, and conditions on which those rights are to be transfered. You can not transfer other peoples rights to yourself without them having “hereby” stated that they have given them to you. And once you have “hereby” stated that you have given property rights to another, you cannot undo it without their “hereby” stating that they reject ownership, not fulfilling the requirements, or “hereby” returning it. The author does own the right to use the book to copy it, and conversely, the right to not have it used to be copied. If you do that and they haven’t given you permission, you have violated their rights. Now, there is only the question of what ‘use’ means. If hearing somebody read it as they walk by on the street doesn’t mean ‘use’, then they haven’t violated those rights. I don’t have the answer to that.
“Back to IP, as far as I understand it, hearing things in the street and repeating them is broadly permitted and accepted, regardless of whether or not someone coped a c and a circle onto a document somewhere.”
I agree with the whole shooting at the house thing (I forgot to add “unless given permission”), but that c inside a circle (properly) means don’t use this book to copy it. If it doesn’t say that or give any indication, then it is incumbent upon you to find out if you have permission to do so. Just as it is incumbent upon you to if you find a wallet, try and find the person who owns it to see if you can keep it, or not pick it up because it isn’t yours. If it is indeed impossible to find the owner, then you can homestead it and do so. If you don’t find the person who owns it, and then start copying, if and when they find out about it, they can claim ownership of it without compensation just as I can of my wallet that you found. I can also claim any copies made, because any copy made using my property are justly my property. And I can again, claim those copies without compensation. Why is this the case? Just at it is the case that “when in doubt, don’t shoot at a house, because if you do, the owner can seek retribution” It is also the case that “when in doubt, don’t copy an entire book, because if you do, the owner can seek retribution” and proper retribution is ownership of the copies without compensation.
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So I take it you didn’t listen to the audio book?
It really does break that matter down quite clearly. Have a listen and if you still disagree, let me know where.
Your examples seem well thought out but you’re missing this element of copyright:
If you come up with a phrase or series of words used together in a row, under current copyright law you own that “pattern”. You can include it in a book, or sell/retain your copyright. But if I follow a few months later and use the same words in together in a row, I am now in violation of copyright law.
In this example above, there is no purchase of the book. You may have sold one copy and I am in no way aware of it and have not overheard anyone. Why do you own the right to those words in a row and not I? Further, if this is truly a natural law, and these are rights that you own and I do not (there is no contract as you have stated above “Contracts are merely ways to record how property rights have been split up”), why can I not own the same rights, what has changed so drastically since you wrote those words down?
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Oh wait… I thought about this a little longer. I think I’m confusing my argument by focusing on when or how the so called theft occurs. I would do better if I were to discuss “what is property”, intellectual or physical and when/how “ownership” occurs.
Oh well, next time I’ll lead in with this. Great discussion though, thanks for the well thought out responses (even though I disagree, the debate is always helpful).
Cheers
March 6, 2010 at 8:55 am
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mpolzkill has probably seen “rip: a remix manifesto” where it’s perfectly clear that led zeppelin “stole” some riffs from earlier performers, ditto rolling stones etc.
it’s a great antidote to all the mickey-mouse clubbers
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4873370/RIP__A_Remix_Manifesto_-_Xvid-
Thanks for the link, Newson. I saw a promo for that, but I haven’t seen the film. I know about Zeppelin’s massive borrowings and wholesale appropriations because I’m a musician. I was one of those suburban white kids who didn’t know any better, but as I pursued music further I came to realize that those guys probably never had a half-way original musical idea in their lives. I say half-way because no one has what could be called original musical ideas, *they* were just outrageously derivative. I was kind of agreeing with Bryon (I think, he never did make things clear): straight appropriation of entire sounds and songs without crediting your source *is* obnoxious. I’m glad you brought up the Stones. IMO, they were far more artistic and ultimately creative in the usage of their borrowings. They also gave credit where it was due and helped introduce this ignorant suburban kid to the source materials.
Another example is Jake and Elwood Blues: the Blues Brothers. Almost completely devoid of musical talent, totally derivitive, a critical joke; but (if they were all still alive) ask James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway how they liked John Belushi and Dan Akroyd “using them” while simultaneously re-igniting their (at the time, 1980 or so) moribund careers and introducing millions of kids to their genius.
(and *they* didn’t spring fully formed out of some kind of musical Eden. You also could have asked Ray Charles about Nat Cole and all the nearly unknown American gospel greats from his childhood.)
Read more: Copying Is Not Theft — remixed (song and video) — Mises Economics Blog http://blog.mises.org/11464/copying-is-not-theft-remixed-song-and-video/#ixzz0kHXgMneA
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Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights,†Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,
All you seek to do is justify running your file sharing programs to plunder the wealth of individuals.
Re-examine your premises.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 4:53 pm
AR,
“You claims that copying requires violation of physical property is so absurd that I can hardly imagine how you could believe it.”
Refrain from using the word absurd until you understand the full position. You are on a site, Mises org, in which the writings of Rothbard are published. Get familiar with them because they violate your claims to absurdity. Seems unlikely that the many people who think this way came up with an absurd idea independently.
The reason it seems absurd is because you are ignorant of the full argument, which is kinda hard to put into a comment on a blog.
The fact of the matter is that with Microsoft Word you would need to get your hands on a copy in order to copy it. To even have a look at the interface requires you to have an authorized copy. What is absurd is believing you could copy it without access to it or someone who has access to it.
I am NOT claiming that for every possible scenario with everything covered by current copyright or patent law. In reality both laws as currently written are way to wide in scope. I’m only pointing it out for that one case for now, software. Once you understand that we can then work in the direction of getting you to understand other cases.
Software used to be protected only by copyright. Which would also prevent reverse engineering via looking at the interface or the object code, because you need physical possession to do that. However to have valid physical possession you need to have agreed to the copyright terms at time of purchase. You are bound as an employee of a company that owns the software, if you are using it.
Therefore it is impossible to copy without possession, or sanctioned and therefore covered use.
Patents are a different issue. Someone can mention to you that Microsoft created a word processor that wraps text automatically to the next line. It does not require that they copy the software in any meaningful sense to tell you this. Also they do not need to hand you a copy of the software for you to create your own software with this feature.
Copyright doesn’t prevent this kind of “copying” which really is not the same meaning. To confuse the two is to equivocate.
Later, and I disagree with this, programmers were allowed to patent software “inventions”. So if Microsoft patents “word wrap” that is a different thing that copyright. It’s no based on physical copying, but is an attempt to own a Platonic idea.
Of course, Platonic ideas can be arrived at independently (for example “one click”) and it is ridiculous to try to prevent others from do so. Patents are obviously wrong because the patent holder can restrict others who in fact invented something before the person who filed the patent.
BTW, back when software could only be copyrighted, companies attempted to get around this by having one division (or company) buy software and then write a description of the features, which was then sold to a sister company, or handed to another division. Then that description was used to write a new piece of software from scratch.
Sometimes it involved reverse engineering the actual object code into a description (which is really just a direct violation of the copy right).
Both ways are really just sneaky legal attempts to violate the copyright agreement.
These attempts was thwarted merely by adding to the software agreement that no reverse engineering of object code, or features would be attempted in order to produce a similar product.
In the case of catchy tunes, well that is problematic, and I don’t have the time to get into it. I think the case is clear for software, and books.
Like in many areas of law, and morality there are fuzzy boundaries like the question of when a man is bald? Often reasoning is not enough and the issue of which conventions should be taken is more a matter of strategy, legal costs, and social consequences than one of right and wrong.
Clearly, a musician should have the right to the fruits of his labor if he takes proper precautions to prevent forced duplication of his song into others minds.
I think this might be handled via contract. Before you are allowed to be trained in music (or join a school that does so) you might be required to agree to obey copyright rules with regard to music, before you attend a concert the same might be required, or buy a radio. (In a non-libertarian society it then may make more sense to just make this a legal convention across the whole society to cut down on transaction costs.)
I think copyrighting characters is ridiculous. I don’t think it would be right to be able to copyright the idea of a boy who talks with his stuffed bear, ala Winnie the Pooh.
One might trademark Winnie the Pooh, but that would not be copyright and is an entirely different issue.
Russ January 17, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Brian Macker wrote:
“Actually the physical device does prevent access by one user while another one is using it. Computer memory is not a broadcast medium.”
Oh, please. More disingenuousness. When I say that my use of an ebook does not prevent another from using his copy of the same ebook, I am of course referring to *COPIES*. Another person can use his *COPY* of the ebook at the same time that I use my *COPY*. Sheesh!
“The fact of the matter is that with Microsoft Word you would need to get your hands on a copy in order to copy it. To even have a look at the interface requires you to have an authorized copy. What is absurd is believing you could copy it without access to it or someone who has access to it.”
So what? How does this violate normal property rights or contractual rights? If you don’t steal somebody’s CD or DVD to make a copy of it, how is that a violation of their property rights? If I copy a friend’s DVD (with his permission), then I’ve not violated anyone’s normal property rights. Do you say that the DVD is not *really* his, but he only has limited rights to use it? OK, show me a contract that he has *signed* before he got the DVD, saying that he has agreed only to purchase limited rights to the DVD.
The only other way you could say this is wrong is to assume IP rights, which is assuming the existence of that which we are arguing about; begging the question, as SK puts it.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 5:20 pm
AR,
“Even an example argued about further up contradicts your assertion: a hypothetical, original pyramid somebody built, which it was argued would be protected by IP against anyone who tried to copy it. “
It does not contradict my position. I was only talking about copyright. You apparently still don’t understand copyright even as written now. You can’t copyright a shape you place in plain view of the general public.
Do I need to possess the pyramid in order to copy its shape? Obviously not. I am perplexed as to why you think my concept applies, that’s truly absurd.
BTW, originality has very little role in my conception of copyright. It just doesn’t matter whether I originated the idea that is inherent in the object I own or not. All that need apply is that I am owner of the object.
For example, I might uncover some ancient book, and homestead it. It is the only known copy. So I copyright the work, and start selling copies.
Now suppose you start selling copies also. There are two possibilities. 1) You copied one of the copies I own copying rights to. or 2) You dug up an ancient copy of the book on your own, homesteaded it, and started copying it.
In case, 1) I would have the right to stop you from selling your unauthorized copies. In case, 2) I do not have a valid claim. If it is case 2) you could produce your found original ancient copy to prove your case against me.
There is labor in this case of searching for and finding original manuscripts. It is not however the labor itself that establishes ownership. Ownership can be established in any of the traditional ways, by trade, homesteading, etc.
You could not homestead a text that is not an ancient lost one because the true ownership of the copyright on the text was never abandoned or lost.
It is possible for the copying right owner and the physical owner to become disjoint. For example, the copyright owner may accidentally lose all originals. In which case he would have to go to one of the owners of the physical copies to bargain for the right to copy the physical book. He might pay cash or might have to bargain away some of his copy right. This isn’t such a big problem because it is highly unlikely anyone would know he lost the originals, and he could probably just by an old copy at a used book store.
I thought about this in far greater depth on this subject than anyone who I have ever read that has published on it.
“You cannot build something in plain view and hold everyone who sees it to a contract you think you are entitled to.”
I agree 100% with this sentence, as did Rothbard in his writings. I am not responsible for the misunderstanding of others nor their faulting beliefs and arguments. Even if they seem to be “on my side”.
For example, I believe in natural rights, and that they have some objectivity, but I would never do so on the basis of claiming they were god given. Therefore when stand up comics like George Carlin claim that rights don’t exist, “We made them up like the boogie man”, because it the same scam as claiming they came from god, such claims do not work against my position. Certainly his sarcasm works against the “god given rights” crowd but not my position on natural rights, and how they arise.
Similarly complains about pyramids being in plain sight don’t apply to my claims. Like Rothbard I claim you can only copyright what you take due diligence to keep private (which include private by copyright contract).
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 5:36 pm
“Oh, please. More disingenuousness.”
I assure you that I believe what I am claiming most earnestly and with a pure heart.
“When I say that my use of an ebook does not prevent another from using his copy of the same ebook, I am of course referring to *COPIES*. Another person can use his *COPY* of the ebook at the same time that I use my *COPY*. Sheesh!”
But you were claiming the copying process was not rivalrous, which is false. You said, “‘When somebody copies your ebook, that does not deny you the use of your copy of the ebook.”. In fact, it does deny use during the copying process. You said “WHEN”.
If you meant to say something else then I suggest you reword instead of accusing me of being dishonest.
If you meant “after” then you should have said.
“”After somebody copies your ebook, that does not deny you the use of your copy of the ebook.”
I say, a big “So what”. If I wear your diamond ring when you aren’t wearing it that does not deny your use of it either. The problem with the copying issue is that both copies are mine, the one I have and the one you made. You used my copy, as a productive input to produce yours, and during that time you were copying I was denied access to my copy. Plus you had no right to use my copy in the first place. The entire value of your copy is due to me, not you. I own it.
“If I copy a friend’s DVD (with his permission), then I’ve not violated anyone’s normal property rights.”
That’s the problem. It’s impossible for your friend to give you permission. He is contractually bound not to to copy the CD himself or hand it out to others for copying. This is simple to understand.
Your friend doesn’t have normal property rights in the copy of Microsoft Word he has. It is a special kind of ownership that does not include full control over the object in question.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 5:58 pm
“The only other way you could say this is wrong is to assume IP rights, which is assuming the existence of that which we are arguing about; begging the question, as SK puts it.”
I only need assume property rights and contract rights. One then writes up a copyright contract to divide up property rights in an object. Now you have a copyright right that is based on both.
There are no mysterious “IP rights” involved.
Because of misunderstandings in this area people believe there are only two sides to the argument, the IP side and the anti-IP side. That’s not true.
Rothbard and I are both anti-IP in that we do not believe that anyone can own platonic ideals. We are both pro-IP in that we think copyright contracts are valid.
Russ January 17, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Brian Macker
“I only need assume property rights and contract rights. One then writes up a copyright contract to divide up property rights in an object. Now you have a copyright right that is based on both.
There are no mysterious “IP rights” involved.”
Really? Hmmm… strange. I’ve bought software before, and I cannot remember ever having had to sign a contract before receiving the medium. That being the case, I can’t understand how the manufacturers of the media can claim that I do not have full rights to the media (including the software on it).
There may not be “mysterious” IP rights involved, but there do seem to be mysterious implicit contracts, which people apparently can agree to without even necessarily being aware that they are doing so. Or mysterious “end user license agreement dialogues” that are somehow binding, even if they are only agreed to after the media and money have changed hands, not before. Quite mysterious indeed.
Peter Surda January 17, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Brian:
I think the label “copyright contract” is an oxymoron, copyright and contracts are disjunct sets.
Let’s say that I sell an ebook and in the contract it says that the right to copy is reserved. Unlike some other IP opponents (Bala and Russ come to mind), I think such a contract is valid. However, there is still no way it can bind a third party. Let’s say that the buyer copies it and gives the copy to a third party. In my opinion, the first buyer violated the contract and would be liable for damages. However, I have no contract with the third party, therefore he is under no obligation to follow my wishes with regards to the ebook. This is where copyright would be necessary.
Jay Lakner January 17, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Mark Hubbard wrote:
“I proved Ayn’s ultimate logic in my aesthetics post before learning Ayn’s ultimate stance as being the same as my own.”
Ok now I feel sorry for you. You don’t understand what a “proof” is. It reminds me of John Donohue’s “proof” that Bala is not an Objectivist.
“Bala’s conclusions are wrong and mis-represent Objectivism is a gross fashion.”
You have demonstrated again and again that you don’t even understand Bala’s reasoning, mainly because you don’t understand the fundamentals of Objectivism.
“And his arguing, and yours Jay, for you never actually mentioned Ayn’s position in your posts until I posted same, you have both been dishonest.”
I have been dishonest?
If you had one tenth of a brain you would realise that I have not put forward MY opinion on the matter one way or the other. Go back and read my posts in this thread, slowly.
All I have done is merely demonstrated your irrationallity. I have never once said “Bala is correct” or “Rand is correct”. I have only tried to explain to you that you do not understand either of their positions.
I have not tried to educate you on the subject. I have advised you over and over to go and educate yourself. In what parallel Universe have I been dishonest???
“You both profess to be followers of a philosophy, you intellectualised that philosophy into a position whereby you sanction theft, and in a way that would alienate the business community, and then you did not have the ethical base to stand back and re-examine your premises on that point.”
When did I profess to be a follower of a philosophy? You do not know my opinions on the matter. I have not revealed them to you.
I can tell you now that I am not an Objectivist. I have never been an Objectivist. If being an Objectivist requires that I become an arrogant, dim-witted, abusive, whim worshipping, statist, antagonistic forum troll then please excuse me if I pass on the decision to become an Objectivist.
“For me, if I had found myself sanctioning theft of property, then I would have to have assumed I was either interpreting the philosophy wrong, or the philosophy was not the freedom loving thing I thought it was and thus re-examined my relationship with it.”
There you go again. You are making an unjustified assumption … YOU ARE ASSUMING THAT PATTERNS AND IDEAS ARE A FORM OF PROPERTY. Bala has demonstrated, from fundamental Objectivist premises, that patterns and ideas should NOT be considered a form of property. You must refute Bala’s reasoning before you can justifably call it “theft”.
“I’m not impressed.”
I am very impressed … with my own patience.
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 7:10 pm
You’re a slippery sod Jay.
You said: Otherwise, all you are doing is giving Objectivists a bad name.
and:
Unfortunately it has now gotten to the point where most of the people I regularly chat to use the term “Objectivist” as an insult.
Well, why do you care given:
I can tell you now that I am not an Objectivist. I have never been an Objectivist.
Want to explain the contradiction?
This site’s attitude to IP is poison for the business community: nothing quicker will scare them off. I certainly wouldn’t be writing contracts with most of the people on this thread, including the patent lawyer who apparently doesn’t believe in patents (am I right?).
Again:
But here’s the real thing for me.
You both profess to be followers of a philosophy, you intellectualised that philosophy into a position whereby you sanction theft, and in a way that would alienate the business community, and then you did not have the ethical base to stand back and re-examine your premises on that point.
For me, if I had found myself sanctioning theft of property, then I would have to have assumed I was either interpreting the philosophy wrong, or the philosophy was not the freedom loving thing I thought it was and thus re-examined my relationship with it.
… what is your philosophy then.
YOU ARE ASSUMING THAT PATTERNS AND IDEAS ARE A FORM OF PROPERTY
Yes, see my aesthetics post.
Bala claims to be an Objectivist, yet:
Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.
Ayn Rand – Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights,â€
All the anti-IP’ers on this thread seek to do is justify running your file sharing programs to plunder the wealth of individuals.
He needs to re-examine his premises.
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 7:24 pm
You’re a slippery sod Jay.
You said: Otherwise, all you are doing is giving Objectivists a bad name.
and:
Unfortunately it has now gotten to the point where most of the people I regularly chat to use the term “Objectivist” as an insult.
Well, why ‘unfortunately’? Why do you care given:
I can tell you now that I am not an Objectivist. I have never been an Objectivist.
Want to explain the contradiction?
This site’s attitude to IP is poison for the business community: nothing quicker will scare them off. I certainly wouldn’t be writing contracts with most of the people on this thread, I couldn’t trust you to honour them. And have I heard correctly, Kinsella is a patent lawyer who apparently doesn’t believe in patents?
Again:
But here’s the real thing for me.
You both profess to be followers of a philosophy [strike Jay from that apparently, he is philosophy unknown at this juncture – you [Bala] intellectualised that philosophy into a position whereby you sanction theft, and in a way that would alienate the business community, and then you did not have the ethical base to stand back and re-examine your premises on that point.
For me, if I had found myself sanctioning theft of property, then I would have to have assumed I was either interpreting the philosophy wrong, or the philosophy was not the freedom loving thing I thought it was and thus re-examined my relationship with it.
… what is your philosophy then.
YOU ARE ASSUMING THAT PATTERNS AND IDEAS ARE A FORM OF PROPERTY
Yes, see my aesthetics post.
Bala claims to be an Objectivist, yet:
Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.
Ayn Rand – Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights,â€
All the anti-IP’ers on this thread seek to do is justify running file sharing programs to plunder the wealth of individuals.
He needs to re-examine his premises.
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 7:29 pm
(An administrator might want to take out the double up. It’s getting a bit glitchy in here.)
Bala January 17, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Mark Hubbard,
When you say this
” Bala claims to be an Objectivist, yet:
Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.
Ayn Rand – Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights,†”
you reveal the notion that ONLY someone who agrees 100% with Ayn Rand’s conclusions is an Objectivist. Therein lies 1 reason for you to check your premises.
” Which ‘begs the question’: Bala (and Jay) – as an Objectivist, what is your position on Rand, and this essay? ”
My position should have been clear to anyone with half a brain. I see the essay as poorly argued because it does not present a justification for treating ideas and patterns as property but raises it (the treatement) to the level of fundamental premises which it is not.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Russ,
“Really? Hmmm… strange. I’ve bought software before, and I cannot remember ever having had to sign a contract before receiving the medium.”
The contract is on the seal, and when the software is installed you have to click the “I agree” button.
This is mostly done to reduce transaction costs. I’m sure if you are willing to pay extra you can fly out to Microsoft headquarters, and meet with a representative, and some lawyers to do it the old fashioned way.
You are well aware of the conventions and are free to return your software for a full refund if you don’t agree to the terms.
We can restructure society to require a formal signing, but the current perfectly valid legal structure works differently and you are damn well aware of it. Nothing mysterious at all.
Who is being disingenuous?
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 8:10 pm
My position should have been clear to anyone with half a brain. I see the essay as poorly argued because it does not present a justification for treating ideas and patterns as property
Cross post:
Your posts are surely gibberish, Bala, just a random ‘pattern’. Or are you saying they have a meaning that uniquely attaches to you, the writer of them? Do you ‘own’ the meaning of those words in the ‘pattern’ as you have laid them down, or are you channeling them from some mystical other?
Yes, Rand ‘owns’ the ‘pattern’ of Atlas Shrugged.
Shakespeare ‘owns’ the ‘pattern’ of King Lear.
Those works express their unique minds, thoughts, philosophies, that which we all recognise as coming from them.
Do you believe in the entity of the individual, or is that just some sort or ‘construct’ in your thieving mind? You deny the existence of the individual mind.
Again, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and fellow nihilists: friends of yours?
[How’s your file sharing going? Good library being plundered is there?]
Without some type of equivalent of IP:
What commercial laboratory could exist without the ability to patent, hence profit, from their research? None – we would be utterly reliant on government funded research. No IP = Big State for scientific research.
What use would any business have investing money in R & D: none, you can’t patent/profit from the R & D, you’d be a moron to do it.
Would any of us from around the world be debating this issue today on this forum without IP. No. There would be no computer operating system.
Bala January 17, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Mark Hubbard,
(cross post) my response to the above…
What’s especially interesting is that of the two of us arguing out here, it is I who have read Ayn Rand’s essay “Patents and Copyrights” prior to starting this discussion. It is indeed very interesting that you even got into a discussion without even knowing what Ayn Rand had said on the issue.
Does that say a lot about your approach? It does, to me and (I am sure) any other intellectually honest person reading this thread.
Once again, could you please drop the question begging and address my core argument?
Incidentally, I did not say that language is a set of visual-auditory symbols. Rand did in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, expanded 2nd edition, page 10, lines 20-21. Could you please read that too before being derisive and making a fool of yourself (as you are doing now)?
Continued use of words like “own”, “ownership” and “thieving” when the very “property” status of ideas and patterns is in question is nothing more than more question begging. You are not making your argument any stronger.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 8:24 pm
“However, there is still no way it can bind a third party.”
Sure there is, via property rights.
Let’s say that the buyer copies it and gives the copy to a third party.
So the third party has now received stolen property. As I have said the copyright owner retains ownership rights in the copy made and I explained how that arises in detail. The copy is the property,not of the buyer but of the copyright holder. When the buyer gives that copy away to a third party he is selling or giving away stolen property. That is a concept of property rights.
In my opinion, the first buyer violated the contract and would be liable for damages.
He certainly would.
However, I have no contract with the third party, therefore he is under no obligation to follow my wishes with regards to the ebook.
He is bound to respect your wishes with regard to your property. He can’t just receive stolen goods and do as he wishes with it. Should he use that copy to make even more copies then he will be using your property as a productive good to produce even more copies that you will have ownership interest in.
Plus, he should be perfectly aware of the concept of copyright. Just like the guy who buys some TVs off the back of the truck, he should know as any reasonable person should, that the goods are stolen. He needs to take due diligence to make sure he’s not getting a deal that is too good to be true.
If you are third party buyer of DVDs of the latest movie releases from a guy on the street at $5 a pop then you are damn well aware you are receiving stolen goods.
This is where copyright would be necessary.”
No, that aspect is covered by simple property rights and thief. It would be no different from if the “buyer” hadn’t bought the book at all, and no copyright contract existed. If this “buyer” is instead a stealer and makes a copy then gives it to a third party then the third party has received stolen goods and is still not allowed to use the copy in any way. It’s not his. The thief had no right to give it to him.
Such stealing will tend to reduce the amount of goods produced for the market. Any software only has a certain amount of value for single use. There are very few people in the world that could justify paying for the creation of a word processing software product from scratch for single use. Maybe J. K. Rowling, but not your typical secretary.
If we fail to respect and enforce contract and property rights in these cases then software and books will in many cases only be produced if some single buyer, or coop could be formed that is willing to pay a one shot fee for the book or software.
Sure some people will write for the pure pleasure but that is a far smaller number.
The total market value of a book or software may be hundreds of millions, and yet any single buyer or potential coop may only value it at a few hundred dollars. If the actual production costs are higher than a few hundred it will not be written.
Furthermore, the creation of books and software is risky business. For every title that succeeds and repays investors there are tens or hundreds that fail. So that risk must be paid for. Now that hundreds of millions I mentioned doesn’t seem like such a big profit when writing the software costs a million, and 99 out of one hundred titles fail.
Copyright allows for more efficiency in the market. It allows the satisfaction of far more voluntary transactions than would otherwise be possible by reducing transaction barriers and costs.
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Last cross post – anyone wanting to follow this will have to go to http://www.solopassion.com
Continued use of words like “own”, “ownership” and “thieving” when the very “property” status of ideas and patterns is in question is nothing more than more question begging. You are not making your argument any stronger.
I’ve kept demonstrating to you why IP is property – and the definition for why is in the Rand quote given below on this thread. You are simply in denial.
What is especially interesting is that of the two of us arguing out here, it is I who have read Ayn Rand’s essay “Patents and Copyrights” prior to starting this discussion. It is indeed very interesting that you even got into a discussion without even knowing what Ayn Rand had said on the issue. Does that say a lot about your approach? It does, to me and (I am sure) any other intellectually honest person reading this thread.
Not particularly interesting, I’m a busy man. I’ve shown great honesty: at the start of this thread I said that if Objectivism was against the notion of IP then I would have to reassess my relationship to it. (Up until this point I’ve had no other point of conflict with Objectivism.)
Consider that to your own ‘well read’ position, knowing Rand’s writings, that she was for copyright, you call yourself an Objectivist, yet you would still gleefully rip her estate off by downloading her work and spreading it to all and sundry for no recompense. What does that make you?
Hint, it starts with t, then an h …
And by the way, as stated, my reasoning got me to the same position as Rand without having read her.
Mark Hubbard January 17, 2010 at 8:38 pm
DON’T STEAL THIS ARTICLE
On the Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property*
by Greg Perkins
See: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/05/dont-steal-this-article.html
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 9:02 pm
If you’ve ever read story line for “The Fountain Head” then you wouldn’t use Ayn Rand as a exemplar for understanding property rights and intellectual property rights.
What possible sane justification could Roarke have for blowing up other peoples physical property, not because it copied his designs, but specifically because the buildings were not proper copies. So flawed were the building that in fact that values of Roarke’s ideas were completely ruined in his view.
If I wrote a word process that worked and then someone else tried to copy mine but failed to even make word wrap function I wouldn’t even care. I certainly wouldn’t feel justified in blowing up the computer upon which he created the software, and especially if I was feeding him ideas about how I wrote my word processor.
Rand’s non-fiction philosophy is flawed, but her fiction is insane. She has an originator fetish.
Russ January 17, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Brian Macker wrote:
“The contract is on the seal, and when the software is installed you have to click the “I agree” button.”
The seal does not constitute a contract, in my book. And since I bought the medium, without signing a contract, before I clicked OK, as far as I am concerned that “I agree” button is not a valid contract either. The copy of the software is already mine when I click the button, so it’s just a meaningless nuisance.
“This is mostly done to reduce transaction costs.”
Yes, it reduces transaction costs. It also, unfortunately for MS, makes the contract invalid, as far as I am concerned.
“You are well aware of the conventions and are free to return your software for a full refund if you don’t agree to the terms.”
Bwahahaha!!!! I didn’t know you had such a sense of humor! Say I buy a house, and when I enter the house I open the storm door and there is a sticker on the inner door saying that the house is not really mine; I just have the right to live in it, as long as I don’t change the interior decorations. It also says that if I open the door, I agree to the contract. And say that this has become a custom recognized by law. Is that a morally valid contract? I certainly don’t think so!
“Who is being disingenuous?”
I am not being disingenuous at all. I am not claiming that I don’t know about the sticker “contracts” or the EULA “contracts”, or that I don’t know the current law regarding them. I’m just saying I don’t consider them valid contracts.
BTW, in “The Fountainhead”, the reason Roark blows up the Cortlandt building is because Peter Keating broke his promise (a verbal contract) that the building would be built as designed.
Brian Macker January 17, 2010 at 11:43 pm
You are playing games. So if you don’t think software contracts are valid then stop buying the software, and stop clicking the EULA. We have to have some kind of legal conventions, you can’t just make up your own, and live in your own alternate universe.
If the convention for binding contracts were to shake hands twice and spit into the wind and you did that then it’s pretty clear you are trying to pull a fast one when you renege on the agreement. You can argue all you want about how silly it is but that is the convention.
You break the seal, you click the EULA, and you’ve agreed to the terms.
What’s so special about making squiggly lines using ink on a piece of paper? The only reason I can see it being special to the courts is that it provides verifiable evidence you read a contract (or claimed to) and agreed to it.
Well breaking the seal and clicking the EULA serves that same exact purpose.
Apparently you think a contract can be assumed in the case of mere spoken words in the case of Roark, why not written words of the EULA verified with a click?
Besides you are just quibbling. We could make the convention that you have to sign a contract right at the store before you take delivery of the software, or whatever other means satisfies your legal fetishes. In which case, what I’ve said about copyright holds. One need only come up with a satisfactory means to agree to the contract, and copyright as I laid it out has a natural rights based justification.
On The Fountainhead:
I’m aware of the promise made to Roark but there was no quid pro quo for the owners of the buildings, he made the promise in secret, and Roark new the guy was a weak willed chump. The buildings were not owned by Keating, nor were they advertised as the work of Roark. By what twisted logic can C blow up A’s building because of a promise to B.
Someone could make a secret agreement with Monica Lewinsky that she influence Clinton to build his Presidential library in a certain fasion, but that wouldn’t give that someone the right to blow the library up, even if Lewinsky delivered a blow job to influence Bill in that direction.
It was also a batshit crazy plot line to believe that a jury would have let Roark off on such a theory. Maybe a jury packed with randroids, but not any sane jury. Even Tim Nichols had a more sane justification for blowing up a building that Roark, and he didn’t get off.
Brian Macker January 18, 2010 at 12:00 am
“It also says that if I open the door, I agree to the contract. And say that this has become a custom recognized by law. Is that a morally valid contract?”
If the conditions are ones that are morally valid to agree to by signing then why wouldn’t they be “morally” valid upon opening the door.
I could see your complaint if there was fraud involved and you couldn’t back out of the contract. Like if the paper says, you actually owe me twice as much chump, and I’m not giving you your money back.
Your example is kinda strange because supposedly you already sat down with the real estate agent and signed a contract. One would think such conditions would already be included. If there were a valid reason such as reduced transaction costs for posting a paper at the door, which you could walk away from, and recover your money, then what possible moral objection could you have.
What possible moral objection do you have to the current conventions regarding software. You certainly aren’t being defrauded. Sure the first time you come across the convention there is a learning curve but that is the case with lots of legal conventions.
hey include taxes in posted gas station prices. Do you think you don’t have to pay for your groceries because the convention is not to include taxes in the marked prices? You saw the posted prices in the isle, you did all the work of collecting the groceries, and now you get to the checkout line and they surprise you with an 8.5% increase on what you thought you agreed to. Guess what, you can leave the cart their and walk out the store if you want.
Likewise you can return the software.
Do you think Microsoft has somehow swindled you by adding an EULA, and one you have openly admitted to knowing about up front?
austronaut January 18, 2010 at 1:17 am
“The contract is on the seal, and when the software is installed you have to click the “I agree” button.”
The seal does not constitute a contract, in my book….”
is there a difference in a fundamental state of an agreement and a contract?
what makes a locked front door to a house mean “dont enter…private property” is i didnt sign on to the non-entry contract…a convention?
if i said “hey, lesser person…convention here says i can buy and sell you.”
could that also be a contract….a HumanSlaveryUserContract??
Peter Surda January 18, 2010 at 2:02 am
Brian:
And now we are back to the original issue. You can only bind a third party via the “stolen goods” metaphor if you recognise that immaterial goods are exclusive, non-unique, property. I challenge all three (exclusive, non-unique and property) premises, I don’t see how they logically follow from anything.
austronaut January 18, 2010 at 2:07 am
or at least the form of agreement as discussed in the eula and a contract?
David January 18, 2010 at 2:35 am
I’ve never commented on an IP discussion here or anywhere. I never considered the topic until I read one of Kinsella’s posts (don’t remember which one.) And I am definitely not an Objectivist (nor anti-Objectivist.)
But here’s what I know to be true after reading almost all 200+ comments on this thread and the 70+ comments on the thread that Bala linked to up top:
He constructed an argument that ideas and patterns are not property since they do not require exclusivisity. I, like a fool, have been reading comment after comment hoping, wishing that one person could defeat his argument.
Nor can I defeat his argument. I am forced to conclude that he is right.
Bala’s critical thinking skills also compel me to give Objectivism a second look.
Thank you, Bala.
Mark Hubbard January 18, 2010 at 3:23 am
Oh for Christ’s sake David, Bala is the prince of burglars. He is an ignoble little pissant thief, the end of capitalism and freedom. Grow up.
Read Perkins article:
http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/05/dont-steal-this-article.html
Read the whole SOLO thread, I dare you:
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285
Or are you, also, just a shitty ignoble, thieving little file sharer/stealer looking of for justification of your larceny?
This site is poison to the advancement of freedom, to laissez-faire, to contract and all that is honest and noble, to the capitalist system itself.
It is an affront to decent, freedom loving individuals: and remember, Bala the Burglar and Kinsella have no concept of the individual, thus of freedom of same.
Mark Hubbard January 18, 2010 at 3:23 am
Oh for Christ’s sake David, Bala is the prince of burglars. He is an ignoble little pissant thief, the end of capitalism and freedom. Grow up.
Read Perkins article:
http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/05/dont-steal-this-article.html
Read the whole SOLO thread, I dare you:
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285
Or are you, also, just a shitty ignoble, thieving little file sharer/stealer looking of for justification of your larceny?
This site is poison to the advancement of freedom, to laissez-faire, to contract and all that is honest and noble, to the capitalist system itself.
It is an affront to decent, freedom loving individuals: and remember, Bala the Burglar and Kinsella have no concept of the individual, thus of freedom of same.
Mark Hubbard January 18, 2010 at 3:30 am
Oh for Christ’s sake David, Bala is the prince of burglars. He is an ignoble little pissant thief, the end of capitalism and freedom. Grow up.
Read Perkins article:
http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/05/dont-steal-this-article.html
Read the whole SOLO thread, I dare you:
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285
Or are you, also, just a shitty ignoble, thieving little file sharer/stealer looking of for justification of your larceny?
This site is poison to the advancement of freedom, to laissez-faire, to contract and all that is honest and noble, to the capitalist system itself.
It is an affront to decent, freedom loving individuals: and remember, Bala the Burglar and Kinsella have no concept of the individual, thus of freedom of same.
David January 18, 2010 at 6:20 am
Mark Hubbard ,
What is the point of directing insulting comments like that towards me?
Russ January 18, 2010 at 9:01 am
Brian Macker wrote:
“You are playing games.”
No, Brian, I’m not just playing games. Contracts aren’t just arbitrary squiggly lines on paper. They are *PROOF* that you have agreed to certain terms, and without that proof there is no *CONTRACT*! That’s why, in a lot of places, verbal contracts are not enforceable; because they’re not provable. That’s the whole point of a signed contract!
I have already explained my objection to sticker contracts. It would be as if I invited you to my home, and on the lower right hand corner of my door, there is a little sticker that says “By entering this door, all your stuff are belong to Russ”. This would obviously be non-binding in any sane court. And even if you knew it was there, I couldn’t prove that without having a signed piece of paper, digital signature, etc.
And once I have a pattern on my physical property, without having signed a contract to get it there, all bets are off. Since it’s now on my property, this “instantiation” of the pattern (to use Silas’ term) is mine, and I can do as I please with it, including ignoring EULA screens. It would just as much be my right to remove the EULA screen, but I choose not to do that, simply because it would be too much work.
And I’m not living in an alternate world. I know full well that this interpretation would not fly in a court of law. So what? I’m not allowed to disagree with the government? I’m supposed to just shut up and love Big Brother?
austronaut wrote:
“what makes a locked front door to a house mean “dont enter…private property” is i didnt sign on to the non-entry contract…a convention?”
Yes. The convention is called “private property”. It’s up to pro-IP people to prove that patterns or ideas qualify, which I don’t think they’ve done. This is why current IP laws are silly. If the patterns were actually property, then the sticker contracts and EULAs wouldn’t be necessary, since you don’t need a contract with another person to protect your rights to your own property from him. In a sane world, the EULAs and sticker contracts would be considered an admission that the patterns *aren’t* intellectual “property”.
David,
Don’t worry about Mark Hubbard. Ignore him. He’s intellectually bankrupt. He has no actual logical arguments for his position. He fervently believes, nay, KNOWS, that he is objectively correct, but he can’t prove it. In fact, he doesn’t think he needs to prove it. His fervent belief is enough, just like with a religious fanatic. And if somebody questions the One True Belief, all he knows how to do is name-call and insult people. It’s a good thing we’re not in the same physical location with him, or he’d probably start “breaking some eggs”.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 9:39 am
Brian Macker wrote:
“Do you think Microsoft has somehow swindled you by adding an EULA, and one you have openly admitted to knowing about up front?”
No, I don’t think they’ve “swindled” me. I don’t think there is fraud involved. I just don’t think that a contract limiting use of property should be considered binding unless there is a way of positively proving in a court of law (e.g. a signature of some sort) that the contract was consented to before the goods and money were exchanged. That’s what the concept of a contract is all about; it gives the ability to prove that the parties involved voluntarily consented to something, and justifies the force of law being used to make the contract binding. I don’t think implicit contracts, such as a sticker or EULA, meet that qualification, and as such, there is insufficient jsutification for using the force of law to enfore them. The whole concept of an implicit contract is dirty pool, as far as I am concerned. Or as Q from Star Trek would call it; “legal trickery”. It’s a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.
And if having to get people to sign actual binding contracts increases the costs for the software companies, well, that’s tough. They’re already making twice the profit margin of “Big Oil” by making something that’s almost trivially easy to “manufacture” once developed. What, they want *everything* to be handed to them on a silver platter? Who’s living in a fantasy world now?
Peter Surda January 18, 2010 at 9:42 am
Dear Russ,
I respectfully disagree with your assessment of contractual restrictions. I believe that it is not the depth of the restrictions that is relevant, rather the “meeting of minds” and the attempts to deceive (or lack thereof). It basically means that a contract only occurs when both involved parties’ understanding of the contract contents coincides. This is how common law handles contracts (at least in the continental Europe). Otherwise, there is either no contract at all or fraud.
If someone places a stick on the back side of their door, the entree clearly wasn’t aware of the contents of the contract, so there is none. If I claim to sell apples but actually sell rocks, it’s a fraud. If I write a license agreement, its validity depends on whether it is clear to the user prior to him handing out money that the contract only involves limited rights. Since it is nowadays unusual to transfer full rights when selling software, it is more likely that the contract is considered valid. If you know that the programmer would probably not be willing to sell full rights, but pretend not to know when buying the software, then it is you who is committing fraud. Of course, in the absence of IP, even this is insufficient to bind third parties.
I agree with your assessment of Mark Hubbard though.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 10:21 am
Peter Surda wrote:
“…Since it is nowadays unusual to transfer full rights when selling software, it is more likely that the contract is considered valid. If you know that the programmer would probably not be willing to sell full rights, but pretend not to know when buying the software, then it is you who is committing fraud….”
But that is where a real contract comes in handy, doesn’t it? If I sign a contract for use of your software, then claim that I didn’t know that meant that I was not allowed to copy it for free, then you have a contract with my name on it that says otherwise. You can then say that if I wasn’t aware of the terms before signing, it’s my fault for not doing my due diligence.
Also, there’s lots of software out there that does allow full rights to *copy*; just not full rights to *modify* the code (e.g. putting your name in the credits in place of the actual authors) or *conceal* the source (e.g. GNU public licensed software). Of course, I don’t consider a GPL to be a valid contract either….
“…Of course, in the absence of IP, even this is insufficient to bind third parties.”
True. And if I buy software from a store, and then throw away the envelope with the sticker, make a copy of the CD and throw away the original, how could anyone prove that I am not a third party who found the copied CD “on the side of the road”? I’m not saying that’s moral. I’m just saying that it’s impossible to prove that I violated a contract, even an implicit sticker contract. And once I “pick up” the CD “from the side of the road”, the CD is my property full and clear, and the EULA contract inside is irrelevant. If a court says that I violated a contract, when it can obviously never prove that, then that’s bad law.
Brian Macker January 18, 2010 at 10:42 am
Brian:
“And now we are back to the original issue. You can only bind a third party via the “stolen goods” metaphor if you recognise that immaterial goods are exclusive, non-unique, property.”
The stole goods are all physical. Pay attention. At no point did I reference any immaterial goods. Holy cow.
Peter Surda January 18, 2010 at 11:09 am
@Russ:
I think you’re exaggerating the importance of written contracts. In general, the law recognises verbal contracts or even tacit contracts (I am not sure this is the correct legal term). While if you have a signed contract, you would have it easier to persuade the judge, there is no necessity for a specific form. There are certain exceptions, for example, a marriage contract requires two witnesses (again, in continental Europe, in US one might be sufficient, I am not an expert in this area).
@Brian:
Can you please clarify which physical goods were stolen? It is true that the original buyer violated the contract. But the physical goods remain with him. They are not with the third party, so the third party couldn’t have stolen them.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 11:21 am
Peter Surda wrote:
“I think you’re exaggerating the importance of written contracts. In general, the law recognises verbal contracts or even tacit contracts (I am not sure this is the correct legal term).”
Well, I know from painful personal experience that verbal contracts are not always enforced. It may be dishonorable to not admit that you have agreed to a verbal contract, but that is not the point. The point is, if somebody doesn’t admit that he agreed to one, and there are no witnesses, there is no way for a judge to prove that an agreement was consented to. Using force to bind people to an agreement is a very dicey thing. It’s like playing with fire. That’s why the law *should* have to make very sure that the terms of a contract were actually consented to before using force. That may not be the way the law actually is, mind you, but that’s the way I think it should be.
Peter Surda January 18, 2010 at 11:44 am
Russ,
in a way, you are correct. I’m just pointing out that the validity needs to be assessed on a per-case basis. Of course, it is much easier to screw people over if there is only a verbal contract and no witnesses, but there is no principal reason to require a signed contract in all cases. It depends.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Peter,
I think a verbal contract is acceptable if there are witnesses. With respect to IP, though, the point remains that there must be some way of *proving* beyond a reasonable doubt that the parties involved *consented* to the terms of the contract *before* the exchange of goods and money took place.
Note the emphasis on *proving* and *consent*. Even if you think it’s a reasonable expectation that the buyer knew about the sticker contract, so what? A real contract is not just about proving that a person *knew* of the contract, but that he *consented* to its terms. The idea that a person implicitly consents by buying and keeping the item seems to be mere legal trickery to me. There’s no proof of consent. It seems to me that in a truly *free* land, proof of consent should be required before using the force of law to bind a person to a contract.
The reason I keep harping on *before* is, if the exchange has already taken place with no contract in place, and then a EULA screen is presented, it’s too late. The goods are already exchanged, and belong to the current owner full and clear if no contract limiting use was agreed to beforehand. This rules out EULAs, even if you have every reason to expect that one will be there.
This is all beside the point, though. We both agree that contracts aren’t binding on 3rd parties without true IP, so a contractual pseudo-IP will never be both a libertarian and effective way of preventing copying. Only true IP could be that, if a libertarian justification for it could be formulated.
Brian Macker January 18, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Peter,
“Can you please clarify which physical goods were stolen? It is true that the original buyer violated the contract. But the physical goods remain with him. They are not with the third party, so the third party couldn’t have stolen them.”
Ok, I see you are not getting it. I own the copies. I gave a long description of why my labor was the causal factor in the copies existing, a factor of production, and how I retained my ownership. How I gained this ownership and why my ownership claim is the strongest. Perhaps some analogies will help.
Suppose a industrial woodchipper normally sells for $10000 and I make a deal with you to sell if for $1000 if you deliver all wood the wood chips it produces to me for the lifetime of the machine, and that this deal is binding on any resale of the machine. Then I own any wood chips that chipper produces as a factor of production. Plain and simple.
So you can see how this works right? Now suppose the wood chipper doesn’t produce wood chips, but new wood chippers. You feed in dead trees and out pop more wood chippers. Same deal but the agreement is that I own all wood chippers it produces. Then I would own all resulting wood chippers.
Well there are goods that act like this. For example, cows. Suppose you are a dairy farmer and I sell you a special breed of cow that I create that produces ten times the normal amount of milk. However, instead of charging you ten times the normal cost for a cow, I charge you only twice but with the restriction that you don’t have to breed the cow but if you do then I own all the calves, and furthermore any calf produced by any artificial means also.
Now if the cow is uses as a factor of production to produce any calves, by any means those calfs are mine. If you produce calfs (copy the cow) then try to keep those, or sell them you are stealing my stuff.
Furthermore, it may be that over time it has been found that it is almost never the case that anyone who sells cows wants to contract for sale on any other terms. The cows get branded with special brands, and are often sold with their tubes tied.
It may even become the assumed custom that a cow sale means, you only get to use the cow for milk production and meat, if branded a special way. It may be so unusual to sell a cow with free copying rights that it requires a special contract to be signed in order to prove that someone would be so stupid as to sell their cow this way.
That is the situation with books. Who in their right mind spends a year, or even five writing a book only to sell the first one for a mere $30 bucks along with the right to reproduce and sell at will. Next to nobody.
So the convention has become the opposite, the mere writing of a book means that as author you are the copyright owner. You might want to register the book you wrote for independent proof but that doesn’t establish your ownership. The fact you created it establishes that ownership, and that is all you have to prove, by any means possible. The only other convention we have is that when we sell it we put a copyright notice on it.
Everyone is well aware of these conventions. If you buy a book and want to do so on other terms then well you can call up the author and ask him to purchase a copy with full rights for reproduction. That’s done all the time too. You can purchase copyrights. Of course he isn’t going to sell for $30. He’ll probably want more like $100,000.
I also don’t understand this whole, “I never signed an agreement” by some people who wish to steal the product of other people. Especially when the social conventions are well known.
You know, I never signed an agreement saying would stay off other peoples property when they are not using it. That’s just a convention also, nothing I agreed to. Do I have to sign a contract with every single person on the planet to keep them off the lawn? Of course not. The better convention is the default convention.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Brian Macker wrote:
“You know, I never signed an agreement saying would stay off other peoples property when they are not using it. That’s just a convention also, nothing I agreed to. Do I have to sign a contract with every single person on the planet to keep them off the lawn? Of course not. The better convention is the default convention.”
Yes, the default convention for normal property is property rights, sure. But the difference between patterns, ideas and normal property makes it such that using the normal property convention for ideas and patterns becomes problematic. Do we really have an obligation to pay Ogg the Caveman’s descendants a royalty every time we sell something with a wheel on it? Do we really have to pay Zog the Caveman’s family a royalty every time we use the number three? Or Bill Gates for whatever large integer is burned into the .ISO image for Windows Vista? How about Harold Black’s family every time somebody builds a negative feedback amplifier? Or Rudolf Kalman’s family every time somebody uses a Kalman filter? Or Marconi’s family (or Tesla’s, or Popov’s, or Fessenden’s, as you prefer) everytime a radio broadcast is made? It seems to me that there are some problems here with considering these things the same as normal material property; for one, it would bog down creativity and free enterprise just a mite.
“I also don’t understand this whole, “I never signed an agreement” by some people who wish to steal the product of other people. Especially when the social conventions are well known.”
The fact that copying is currently illegal is certainly well known; that doesn’t mean people are even close to universally acknowledging it as a valid social convention, as normal property rights are, or else file sharing wouldn’t be so commonplace. (Actually, even normal property rights are not such a solid social convention, sadly, or people wouldn’t feel that it’s acceptable to vote themselves other peoples’ money.)
Brian Macker January 18, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Russ,
Well it’s worse for your position than you imagine, because there doesn’t need to be any EULA, or seal to break, in order for a copyright consent to be implicit in a purchase. The EULA and seal are mostly about other issues, not the default copyright rules. The default is that the author of software, or books owns the copying rights unless they forfeit them explicitly.
“And if I buy software from a store, and then throw away the envelope with the sticker, make a copy of the CD and throw away the original, how could anyone prove that I am not a third party who found the copied CD “on the side of the road”? I’m not saying that’s moral. I’m just saying that it’s impossible to prove that I violated a contract, even an implicit sticker contract. And once I “pick up” the CD “from the side of the road”, the CD is my property full and clear, and the EULA contract inside is irrelevant. If a court says that I violated a contract, when it can obviously never prove that, then that’s bad law.”
Absolutely emphatically wrong. You think pretending you found it by the side of the road is immoral but that stealing property you found by the side of the road isn’t.
Here you are talking about your concerns about morality and it’s clear you don’t even understand the simple concept of lost property. Just because you find something on the side of the road doesn’t mean you own it. You are not thinking like a reasonable moral person. You have to take due care in finding the proper owner.
I used to work as a bellhop and one day I looked down at the floor of the elevator and there was a roll of cash in a rubber band. It was not in a wallet and had no identification. Did I think that meant it was mine? Of course not. It was obviously somebodies because nature doesn’t tend to spit out wads of cash (or software CDs) but I certainly knew it wasn’t mine.
I figured that it was either another bellhops wad, because it was a bunch of singles, or a hotel guests. So I went back to the bell station and asked around if anyone was missing anything. One guys said, “Yes, I lost my roll.” So I said, “Describe it”. He described it correctly and I handed it over to him.
I never assumed that the money was mine. Had I not found the owner I would have gone to the police.
Lost property is not unowned property. You can only homestead lost property after due care in finding the owner.
Well in the case of a piece of software laying on the side of the road there are two co-owners. The owner of the copying rights of that particular software copy, and the use owner of that particular copy. Now after due diligence you may not be able to find the “use owner” who bought it, but you certainly can find the copyright owner because it’s written right on the CD. It will say Copyright 2001-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
You can certainly homestead the use ownership of the CD that you found. However you can’t homestead the copyright ownership.
You keep asking, “How can you prove, how can you prove”. Well society has recognized that it is very unlikely that someone is going to do hundreds of thousand of dollars of effort and just hand it over to someone else free and clear to copy at will. To prevent lots of freeloaders attempting to steal other people’s labor product they have made the legal convention such that the excuse doesn’t work.
Do you really think that you can just find a copy of Microsoft Windows 2007 and now you are in the software business? You think you can now set up a factory for disk duplication? What possible moral justification do you have for believing that? You think you get to steal hundreds of millions just because you found something by the side of the road? What, you think you earned it?
BTW, if you take a purse of a park bench that was left there and don’t try to find the owner that is theft. The convention is that you have to make an effort to find the owner. That’s to prevent people who see someone that left their purse on a bench for a moment from stealing it, and then if caught claiming, “but I thought it was lost.”
There was a string of purse and other thefts in one mall so the police left a purse out in the open unattended and waited. When anybody took in and tried to leave without looking for an owner, or turning it in to lost & found, they charged them with the theft. It stopped the crime wave. I also heard of a case where they were doing this with IPods.
Brian Macker January 18, 2010 at 2:22 pm
“Do we really have an obligation to pay Ogg the Caveman’s descendants a royalty every time we sell something with a wheel on it?”
No. Were are you getting these ridiculous ideas? Copyrights don’t cover wheels.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Brian Macker wrote:
When I talked about finding something by the side of the road, I meant something like a coach outside somebody’s home meant to be thrown away. Something like this has been abandoned by the previous owner, and can be homesteaded without going through the usual process of looking for the rightful owner. Sorry, I thought this was obvious. Maybe “social conventions” in your neck of the woods are different? *grin*
(BTW, when I find a lost object like a cell phone or whatever, I take it to the appropriate lost and found.)
“You keep asking, “How can you prove, how can you prove”. Well society has recognized that it is very unlikely that someone is going to do hundreds of thousand of dollars of effort and just hand it over to someone else free and clear to copy at will.”
Umm, Brian, society also recognizes the fact that it is OK to take away half of my money every year, and until relatively recently recognized that the ownership of fellow human beings was OK. Heck, until very recently, society has recognized that it was OK to yank its own youth out of their homes and force them into mortal combat. I’m not terribly interested in what “society recognizes” from a philosophical point of view. I’m not completely unswayed by arguments involving tradition or cultural evolution, but I’m not a mindless conservative or collectivist who lets tradition or society think for me.
BTW, ever checked out Linux and GNU? There have to be millions of man hours in that software alone, and they are a small part of the Open Source software out there. It’s all freely copyable. (They do put different terms in place, like you *must* make the source code available for any modifications you distribute, but it’s not done with a strict profit motive.)
Russ January 18, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Brian Macker wrote:
“Copyrights don’t cover wheels.”
OK, so you’re not for patents? Just copyrights?
Assuming this is the case…
So it’s OK to copy an idea that doesn’t involve words or numbers, but it’s not OK to copy to copy one that does? Hmmm, odd, and seemingly a bit arbitrary.
Peter Surda January 18, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Brian:
I gave an explanation, several times, why causality is not a sufficient condition to claim ownership.
With the rest of your argument, I congratulate you, this is a very tough one. However, I believe I can counter it. Your argument relies on the ability to uniquely identify the immaterial good in question. As I previously showed, there is significant doubt that it is possible to uniquely identify immaterial goods. Consider my counterexample. Let’s say that the contract about the wood chips or the calves would stipulate that in case those were sold, it would be you who gains 100% of the sales. The naughty buyer would indeed sell some of those, however give a proportion of the received money to a third party. We both agree that this would make the naughty buyer liable for damages to you. However, the third party would be under no obligation with respect to you, and as long as the naughty buyer didn’t mind, the third party would be able to do as he pleases with the money. Even if the naughty buyer went bankrupt you still would not have any recourse. The issue can be further demonstrated by showing that there is no “the” money, just like there is no “the” book (apart from the physical instance thereof). They are both “a”, an abstraction, characteristic or feature. There is no recourse to third parties with regards to the abstract.
Russ January 18, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Peter Surda wrote:
“There is no recourse to third parties with regards to the abstract.”
You’re thinking in terms of contracts; Brian is not. He is saying that a copyright is a simple right, like property rights, and not a derived right based on contract. (A Macker copyright is not contractual pseudo-IP. It is effectively “true” IP, even though he doesn’t call it that. *wink wink nudge nudge*) So, unlike a contract, a copyright would be binding on third parties, just like normal property rights, if Brian were correct.
The correct argument against Brian is much simpler. A Macker copyright is in effect simply *asserting* “You cannot do such and such with this property, even after I transfer it to you. This condition is viral, and applies to anybody who receives this property, no contract required. Even if this property is abandoned and then homesteaded, these limitations still apply to the homesteader.” Well, that’s nice and all, but just asserting something doesn’t make it so, and creating something doesn’t give him that right.
austronaut January 18, 2010 at 4:47 pm
this is somewhat confusing.
if my house purchase was a contract (signed, witnessed) and noone else signed the purchase contract it would be against convention to see my locked front door as just an inconvienient barrier to entry?
if a sticker on a software box says “EULA!! property of stinkysoft: by exchanging money for this information-laden disk you are given limited usage (meaning you cant use the disk in a way that would facillitate copying) but….but since there was no contract (signed and/or witnessed) it is just an improper convention on the part of stinkysoft…..just like a convention where selling and buying lesser peoples would take place??
iow, does the eula that is referred to establish a convention the same way as a locked front door on a house where noone else has contracted to purchase the house…so entering the house wold be there own convention.
does the nature then of information and data here come into play??
where somone copied my disk and thus was part of no convention or contract and everyone still has their own data and information??
austronaut January 18, 2010 at 4:54 pm
bu it guess if the stinkysoft disk i was in possesion of was stolen, it would be me and not stinkysoft trying to get restitution.
when a car is rented it is returned to the rental company but i wasnt aware of disks going back to software companies or where software companies brought their own disks to computers to install data and then took them back with them.
to the extent that propertizes information i am not sure.
{ 293 comments… read them below or add one }
January 16, 2010 at 10:06 pm
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newson-
hey, do i ask you to pay for a lock for my apartment? now do you understand? i lock my own place, and feed my own guard-dog, i don’t shake down my neighbours to pay for a sentry.
Yet you likely would call the police if someone broke that lock and got in, which you certainly shake me down to pay for.
That said, I would be amenable to discuss reducing government IP enforcement, as long as I could form associations for enforcement and sue the stuffing out of you civilly.
January 16, 2010 at 10:13 pm
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pro-IP-libertarian,
” That said, I would be amenable to discuss reducing government IP enforcement, as long as I could form associations for enforcement and sue the stuffing out of you civilly. ”
Isn’t this what this discussion is all about? If free markets were to figure out a way to enforce an IP regime as a means of rewarding producers of ideas and patterns, why would anyone be opposed to it?
January 16, 2010 at 10:13 pm
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Shay wrote: “But, let’s say you are given monopoly money. That’s obviously not a real dollar, so you aren’t mislead. Or say you’re given a CD-R copy of the music CD with a Sharpie-written title, or a photocopy of the book. Surely you don’t think those are the “real” thing. I take it you don’t consider these a problem, since monopoly money doesn’t devalue the dollar, it being a distinct thing from it.”
Of course they are the real thing if people are willing to accept them as the real thing. If people could not tell the difference between monopoly dollars and U.S. dollars, clearly those who print monopoly dollars would be able to earn enormous wealth at the expense of the people who produce real dollars.
Someone else said that copy-rights means that giving away your copy to a friend is stealing, but this is absurd. This is the same as giving your friend a genuine dollar! The IP producer has decided to produce a good in strictly limited supply and is only concerned with preserving this limit. The copy-right is therefore bound to the media, not the user. If the IP producer sold you a license, then you are stealing by including your friend in your license, or more accurately, you are an accomplice in your friend’s theft. (He has not been allowed to access this information.)
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AR-
Just like everyone else, their rights to income are limited to their right to freely exchange with others.
Right, but no forced or unagreed to exchanges. If you owned a store and I simply took all your product that isn’t exactly free exchange.
If nobody is willing to give you money for your art, you are not entitled to money simply because you have created something.
But you have agreed that their product has value by using your time and resources to copy it. (Although this is not to be confused with the labor needed for production, copying is not production.) You just don’t want to agree on a price and purchase it, or not agree on a price and not purchase it.
And the “non-scarcity” argument is not appropriate here. If it was truly non-scarce, you would just move on and find a substitute from the supply of limitless IP, you wouln’t need to copy theirs.
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Bala-
Isn’t this what this discussion is all about? If free markets were to figure out a way to enforce an IP regime as a means of rewarding producers of ideas and patterns, why would anyone be opposed to it?
Free markets have already figured out a way to enforce the IP regime – IP law. Both civil and criminal. I haven’t studied government enforcement to know how necessary or aprropriate it is, so I can’t speak on that. I do believe civil IP law is a good idea.
Most anti-IP people want to do away with both civil and criminal enforcement because they claim that IP is not really property. I disagree with this pretty strongly.
The anti-IP proposals that I have seen for replacements – electronic tip jars, sole reliance on advertising, patronage, etc. – haven’t seemed like very effective substitutes. They are either unilateral (one side deciding on price/acceptance), unrealistic, unenforceable, unprofitable, or some combination of those factors. The current IP regime is bilateral and enforceable so I think it is much more fair and in congruence with libertarian principles and values.
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pro-IP-libertarian,
” Free markets have already figured out a way to enforce the IP regime – IP law. ”
If you call the IP regime a product of a free market, I am shell-shocked and speechless.
January 16, 2010 at 11:06 pm
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Pro-IP that made me laugh. I suppose the war on Iraq and Federal Reserve are also products of the free market by your reasoning. Both are creations of the state legal regime.
Legal positivism. Some days it seems like we are so far from a genuine revolution in ideas.
@Stranger,
I’ve already refuted your argument about counterfeit money (contract fraud). Copyright has nothing to do with violation of contract, unless one has explicitly contracted with the content creator.
Try again. I’m sure you have a third argument within you.
January 16, 2010 at 11:23 pm
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pro-IP-libertarian wrote:
“And the “non-scarcity” argument is not appropriate here. If it was truly non-scarce, you would just move on and find a substitute from the supply of limitless IP, you wouln’t need to copy theirs.”
Oh, please, now you’re just being disingenuous. You know as well as I do that that isn’t what “scarce” means in this context. In this context, “scarce” means that there *could* be an effectively unlimited supply of the pattern or idea, since it is so easily copyable. It doesn’t mean you can pluck the pattern or idea out of the air.
“The current IP regime is bilateral and enforceable so I think it is much more fair and in congruence with libertarian principles and values.”
Except that it tells people they can’t do things with their own property, even though the “thiefs” are not taking away anything from the IP owners except the opportunity to make the profit they would like to make.
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“Oh, please, now you’re just being disingenuous. You know as well as I do that that isn’t what “scarce” means in this context. In this context, “scarce” means that there *could* be an effectively unlimited supply of the pattern or idea, since it is so easily copyable. It doesn’t mean you can pluck the pattern or idea out of the air.”
There also *could* be an unlimited supply of money, but that is not desirable for anyone but counterfeiters.
January 16, 2010 at 11:43 pm
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pro-IP-libertarian: If you owned a store and I simply took all your product that isn’t exactly free exchange.
Yes, but if I tried to bring you to court over it I would be able to list actual damages, namely the loss of my property: the products themselves. If you saw my products on display and went home and duplicated them, there wouldn’t be any damages. At worse, I could say that you caused “lost sales,” but that’s a spurious claim because I do not own potential future transactions. Even if your actions directly caused me to go out of business, it would be no more of a crime than when cheap Chinese labor puts American steel workers out of a job, which I would hope everyone here recognizes as just a part of life that people have to deal with.
The part where scarcity comes in is in assessing damages, not, as you say, whether or not somebody else benefits from it. People can get free value out of a lot of things without violating somebody elses rights, like if an amateur beekeeper moved next door to someone, who then decided to plant crops that require pollination. The fact that they couldn’t have grown those crops without the prior work of the beekeeper does not at all imply that the beekeeper can claim damages.
January 17, 2010 at 12:19 am
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oftentimes the software knocks back blog post with standard links. shorten them first with this tool, and they should get through the bug-screen.
mark hubbard rightly deserves to be censured, and is dreaming if he thinks he’s being censored.
January 17, 2010 at 1:55 am
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Strangers argument about counterfeiting is a valid argument and hasnt been answered by the IP socialists yet.
It doesnt matter what should have been done in the past, or what should be in the future but today fiat money is used.
Fiat money, is not a contract.
Fiat money is not a receipt for anything.
Fiat money is not a money substitute but money itself.
Fiat money is money.
And in theory this fiat money system can go on forever without destroing itself and it can even serve better than gold or any commodity.
All it has to be done is to keep the supply as constant as possible. If the authority responsible about the money stops inflating and fractional reserve banking is outlawed the money today can serve its function forever.
The problem is of course given human and state nature this is highly unlikely and who ever is in control of the money is going to inflate the money supply and with the fiat money he can easily do it. What makes gold good money is it restrains anyone from increasing the supply easily.
Lets say we have FED made of of super humans, or aliens without human temptations and they really keep the money supply as constant as they can.
In that case counterfeiting is just copying, which should be ok for an IP socialist.
What if the money holders lose purchasing power when a counterfeiter does his job? They are not entitled to a specific purchasing power are they?
January 17, 2010 at 3:00 am
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I swear. Every time I read the comments on these IP posts the arguments from the Pro-IP crowd just make my brain hurt because the logic (if there is any) is so twisted and tortured.
The barter analogy and the “Star Trek” replicator hypothetical completely obliterate the pro-IP stance.
Done and done.
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Russ,
If you are around, I am in the middle of an intense discussion out here
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285#comment-83368
and feel that your stepping in can do a lot of good. Would you be interested?
Thanks.
January 17, 2010 at 5:00 am
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Mark Hubbard wrote:
“And that sanctions theft? What a ludicrous argument.”
and
“No post from the theft camp has addressed this, because you can’t. You may want a second hander society where there are no writers, artists, et al, but a site supporting the work of von Mises is a damned strange place in which to find myself mixing with a coven of thieves and shysters.”
and
“As I have said, arguments for theft are just so much sophistry.”
and
“But really, I’m interested in the ethics of stealing, what are they please.”
and
“No, that’s where you depart from both logic and morality”
and
“Your comprehension is as loose as your morality”
and
“You carry on enjoying the plundering of another’s wealth”
and
“Honest traders are going to starve in your second-handers market. Don’t go thinking you’re advocating a free market, or anything so noble and good.”
and
“I don’t have the heart to stay with this thread. It’s quite sickening.”
and
“that’s the point the file stealers don’t want to deal with.”
and
“And don’t go thinking the Objectivist position is to sanction this theft: it’s not.”
and
“my novel is not a damned ‘pattern’, it is property. Bloody hell.”
and
“No, Objectivism is precisely against the stealing of another’s property. You advocate the initiation of force and fraud.”
and
“I don’t consider you an Objectivist, Bala, I’m afraid you belong to that unethical street gang called file stealers, along with Russ. I despise you and your ilk: you are the barrier to the free society I wish to live in, not the harbinger of it.”
and
“Mises would be turning in his grave.”
and
“I’m not impressed.”
and
“Another drone.”
and
“leaves you standing in your undies in front of the crowd.”
and
“A morality of man qua man prescribes the theft of property an an immorality.”
and
“Yet you think you can thieve the ebook based on pseudo -intellectual trickery.”
and
“Monopoly? Pfui. Scratch the surface of a file sharing gangster and you get illogical nonsense. You might salve your conscience but you are deluding yourself and advocating a user society where in this case the producer is slave to you and your gang.”
and
“Copying files is theft of property is immoral. You cannot rationalise any other position.”
and
“As I said, file stealers: you’re just a street gang of the worse sort. Tribal, enemies of freedom.”
and
“Bala, it appears I’m not the first one to see you for what you are: anarchist, enemy of freedom because the enemy of capitalism: you need to drop the Objectivist claim, you do that philosophy a disservice.”
and
“But that doesn’t sanction theft, you thief.”
and
” You represent and advocate the slavery of the producer to the tyranny of the many. Are you comfortable sitting there?”
and
“music sales are more and more denied them through the theft of the file stealing gang.”
and
“the file sharing street gang have taken over the major part of it so it no longer represents a market, just a lawless anarchy where, therefore, no freedom is possible.”
and
“the fantasist nihilism of anarchy”
and
“the sophistry of saying once you copy my electronic file I’m still left with it being just that, sophistry”
and
“What the anti-IP fools (there’s another for you shay) are advocating is less choice.”Hasn’t it occurred to anyone (apart from Shay) that Mark Hubbard is clearly not interested in a civil and logical discussion? It seems pretty clear that he is only here to antagonise and ridicule.
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Jay Lakner,
I can understand what he is doing and saying. He thinks he holds the moral high ground. The truth is otherwise, but how is he to realise it?
Would you believe it if I said that for all his vehemence on the “legitimacy” of IP, he has not read (till date) Ayn Rand’s essay on Intellectual Property? He accepted as much out here
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285#comment-83380
(Sorry that I am too technologically challenged to direct you straight to that comment of his)
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Bala,
Well I don’t get it.
Why would someone argue with such conviction if they have not first thoroughly aquainted themself with the subject they’re arguing about?
Why would someone start antagonising and ridiculing those who disagree if they don’t even understand the fundamentals premises of the subject?This kind of thing seems to be common too. Someone gains part-knowledge of a subject and then thinks they will be able to logically out-reason people who have been studying it for years. And when the holes in their arguments are revealed they resort to repetition, question begging, name-calling and general antagonism.
People can be such strange creatures sometimes. -
Jay Lakner,
” Why would someone argue with such conviction if they have not first thoroughly aquainted themself with the subject they’re arguing about?
Why would someone start antagonising and ridiculing those who disagree if they don’t even understand the fundamentals premises of the subject? ”Search me. The “religious” fervour of the half-trained human robot can be surprisingly intense.
” People can be such strange creatures sometimes. ”
Indeed.
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Jay Lakner,
Just re-checked Mike Hubbard’s blog on solopassion.com.
Thanks a ton. You said just what I wanted to but didn’t want to for fear of being called more names.
Actually, I am challenging them to prove me wrong but quite interestingly, every single one of them is just avoiding it. They all just want to go off on a tangent and engage in more name calling and labelling. Just goes to show that they probably do not have a counter-argument to offer.
Once again, thanks.
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Bala,
No problems
January 17, 2010 at 8:37 am
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Theft – Definition of Theft
“A person is guilty of theft if: he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.”
Reference: Section 1 of the UK Theft Act 1968.
The operative word here is PERMANENTLY!
January 17, 2010 at 9:36 am
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Stephan,
The important take-home from the discussion on Hubbard’s blogpost is that Objectivists (at least the ones out there) were unable to refute the point that IP is contradictory to Objectivist principles. As they seem to be the most fervent supporters of IP, the logical next step should be to escalate the issue by publishing an article that attempts to break down the orthodox Objectivist position on IP.
January 17, 2010 at 12:37 pm
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Stranger,
You originally argued that people against IP are IP-inflationists, wanting to inflate the supply of intellectual works, similar to how governments printing fiat money inflate the supply and devalue the currency.
I replied that unlike fiat money, intellectual works have inherent value, so inflating their supply doesn’t reduce their inherent value, rather it increases real wealth, because of their inherent value being unaffected.
You then argued that like counterfeit money, counterfeit books and CDs devalue the actual product, because they are indistinguishable to most buyers they increase the quantity of the product available and thus decrease their value.
I replied that Monopoly money (from the game Monopoly) looks quite different from real money and doesn’t devalue real money, and that likewise, a photocopy of a book or a CD-R copy of a music CD in a generic case look quite different from the original book or music CD.
You then replied that a photocopy of a book or CD-R are the real thing because people desire them.
Does this mean at you concede both my points above? You seem to be making each of your arguments without regard for consistency with the previous. I feel like each time it’s a different person replying to me. It’s not a big deal, since the practice is always useful.
January 17, 2010 at 1:02 pm
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“If you saw my products on display and went home and duplicated them, there wouldn’t be any damages.”
So you think that someone can just look at a copy of Microsoft Word sitting in it’s package on a shelf, and then walk home and copy it? I don’t think so.
To copy something you need to get your hands on a physical instantiation of it, which is somebody elses property, not yours. The only way you could get one of your own is to buy encumbered with copying restrictions.
No one acting in their own self interest is going to spend a million dollars developing software and let you buy a copy for one hundred bucks with full ownership rights. They would only sell you partial ownership, retaining the ownership of the right to copy to themselves.
If you steal it, or violate the copyright holders property rights, to make a copy then you are using it unauthorized as a factor of production in the copy.
It’s the same as if you broke into a factory at night, stole a mold, used it to make a bunch of copies with your personal raw materials, then returned the mold before the morning. Even though the imposition on the actual owner seems negligible you have still stolen the factor of production. This establishes co-ownership rights of the object you created by the person who owned the mold.
It would then be up to a judge to decide what the ownership ratio was in the copied objects. In the case of computer software the value contributed by the raw materials and copying labor is minimal. A CD costs ten cents, and hard disk space is even cheaper. The run time on your computer is of negligible cost. Almost the entire value is due to the factor of production owned by the copyright holder.
The software pirate is producing copies that the copyright holder has ownership rights in because of the unauthorized use of a factor of production. In order to right this wrong and make the copyright holder whole again some restitution is in order.
The pirate has invested perhaps .11 cents in the production value of the copy, while the copyright holders value contribution is the full sales price of the software minus .11 cents, and that’s per copy.
Thus, one option for the court is to force the pirate to pay the copyright holder almost the full value for every copy, plus court costs, and other enforcement costs needed to track down the pirate. Also, potentially a penal fine proportional to the risk of getting caught to be paid to the copyright holder.
The extra costs that need to be expended to catch the pirate will easily wipe out any material investments he had made when the copying process is easy. While the harder the copying process is the longer the object being copied will have to have been misused as a factor of production.
Thus the straight out thief who steals someone’s copy of a software, slips in into his computer, copies it, then returns it secretly is not somehow doing less damage. What he is in fact doing is contributing less value as a factor of production in the copy.
Suppose it took a full week to copy a CD. Then the theft to make a copy becomes more obviously a burden on the person stolen from, but it also makes the value added to the copy by the pirate rise in value. It becomes a wash when it comes time to decide who has more interest in the copy. Sure the pirate invested a week in the copy, but he also stole use of the software CD for a whole week.
The issue of copyrights isn’t merely about Platonic ideals, it’s about physical instantiations of real objects, and factors of production, along with co-ownership of those objects.
If you bought land without the mineral rights and those are retained by someone else then you do not own the minerals on “your” property. Should you try to mine those minerals then you would be stealing. Likewise when you buy software but not the copying rights to that software then you are not allowed to make copies, or you are stealing that use from the person who retained those rights. Which puts you in the same exact position as an actual theft who stole a physical CD.
Keep in mind that all software in the world exists as physical entities, actual copies, in some form or another. It never exists as a Platonic ideal. Thus to copy you must be misusing some physical object.
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Russ,
‘When somebody copies your ebook, that does not deny you the use of your copy of the ebook.”Actually the physical device does prevent access by one user while another one is using it. Computer memory is not a broadcast medium.
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I don’t like how the video shows the copying process as non-intrusive. Also it depicts the copiers in most cases being the owners who then give it away.
In the first instance the character on the right steals the lefts nose, makes a copy and hands the copy back to the original nose holder. What if he wants his own nose back, and not the copy? What about the fact that his nose was used without permission to make a copy? Should the fact of his ownership of that factor of production mean he has ownership claims in the copy to begin with? Of course it does.
The second instance of copying in this video is NOT a violation of copyright because the owner of the legs on the left makes a copy of his own legs and freely gives them to the character on the right. So it doesn’t serve as an example against copyrights at all.
There are many other copies made by the owners handed freely back and forth throughout the rest of the video.
The copy of the bike is ridiculous. You can’t copy a bike while someone is riding it by just grabbing an yanking. It would be intrusive to copy in reality. You’d have to ask the person to get off the bike, then start taking measurements, testing the alloys, sampling the tread pattern by means of a molding compound, etc.
January 17, 2010 at 1:56 pm
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I see the moderation issue was possibly a glitch.
The below is a cross-post of my last post to SOLO:
http://www.solopassion.com/node/7285#comment-83392
The issue of property
Somehow there is such a fundamental issue here. The street gang Bala is part of – sorry Greego, I get your point, but this is theft, and they justify theft – make the following argument:
If on the other hand, you say that you own the contents of the book, you are then claiming ownership of a pattern.
Language as an auditory-visual ‘pattern’, and that no man can claim ownership of an idea. They repeat this over and over on Mises.
For me, this is the deep, fundamental issue. Think about what Bala means by this, it’s quite extraordinary.
It strikes at the core of individuality. It states Atlas Shrugged is a ‘mere’ pattern, unattributable to an individual mind, that Rand can lay claim to none of the ideas, the philosophy, expressed in it. What Bala is implying is that there is no art, more, no beauty, and certainly no individuality, for beauty and aesthetics must flow from the individual mind.
Bala and his ilk seem to me to be the ultimate collectivists, believing in the hive mind only, that we are all linked to some type of Borg mind, and can express no individuality, no ‘property in what we write, or the ideas we express’ because we cannot lay claim to having had ‘our own’ ideas.
A great piece of music will have antecedents, obviously, but most certainly is the product of an individual mind, otherwise we might as well all just listen to lift music.
A great book, all great literature, is the product of individual minds. That’s why, Bala, plagiarism is important to this argument: the ability to spot plagiarism, our own Witi, is proof there was a text and test of comparison to the writings of another individual, and that individual’s property.
I do not see books as patterns, I see them as property, and I can bind a purchaser to conditions of use when buying my property.
Bala represents to me evil. A collectivist, Borg nihilism where no individual mind can exist, thus the notion of individual liberty, therefore, anathema – and justifying the file sharing street gang to theft on a truly huge scale. An ugly world of no art, no beauty, no aesthetics.
I’m still thinking, reading, but those are my thoughts to date. But that Rand essay, anyone, a precis. Perhaps Bala is the one to give us that.
[Can someone in this room give a precis of Rand’s copyright-and-patents essay in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal please. I’ve so much work I don’t have time to look this out, yet, and this will be my single post of today. Feel free to cross post back to SOLO where I shall be debating the issues over the next week or so – I can’t spread myself across two sites]
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@Mark Hubbard,
Ayn Rand once wrote:
“The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power–and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.” “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.”
Basically, every idea, every arrangement, every intangible entity permitted by the laws that govern our Universe, are all patterns.
If you disagree then you are simply not an Objectivist.
Mark Hubbard,
You argue with emotionally charged intensity.
You argue with arrogance.
You insult.
You ridicule.
You antagonise.
And you don’t even know the starting premises of either side of the debate!Please educate yourself first. You are embarrassing yourself when you make statements like: “Bala represents to me evil. A collectivist, Borg nihilism where no individual mind can exist, thus the notion of individual liberty, therefore, anathema – and justifying the file sharing street gang to theft on a truly huge scale.”
Everyone here can see you don’t have a clue what you’re saying. There are patient people on this site who are more than willing to explain both sides of the argument to you. If you admit to yourself that you don’t know everything and drop the superiority complex, we might be able to have an interesting and educational discussion. Otherwise, all you are doing is giving Objectivists a bad name.
January 17, 2010 at 2:33 pm
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Well Mark Hubbard, I really doubt the genius of your mind since I couldn’t find your books on thepiratebay.org or isohunt.com. I guess noone tought their time is worth sharing them. Therefore, the truly free exchange of ideas via sharing didn’t put any value on them, and the price you are chargnig people to read your unworthy ideas is the real theft here.
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“The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power–and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.” “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.”
Basically, every idea, every arrangement, every intangible entity permitted by the laws that govern our Universe, are all patterns.
Refer to the body of my post, Jay. What of individuality – art, aesthetics?
That Rand essay was apparently her opinion on copyright and patents: what did she say specifically as to that please. Was she for or against a form of copyright?
Further:
Without some type of equivalent of IP:
What commercial laboratory could exist without the ability to patent, hence profit, from their research? None – we would be utterly reliant on government funded research. No IP = Big State for scientific research.
What use would any business have investing money in R & D: none, you can’t patent/profit from the R & D, you’d be a moron to do it.
Would any of us from around the world be debating this issue today on this forum without IP. No. There would be no computer operating system.
And no I won’t lose the vitriolic attitude to those advocating theft of property.
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If you’ve read the thread Goergi you’d see I’m arguing from a hypothetical position. Although I have written a novel, last year, am even querying on it, although, you tell me, why should I bother if I can’t contract it’s use on purchase so as to protect my sale against file sharers?
Why? Why would I bother.
(Accounting gets me by in the meantime).
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By the way Jay, that Rand quote speaks to individuality: to property in what one writes. Yes?
Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.”
That’s uniqueness.
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“And no I won’t lose the vitriolic attitude to those advocating theft of property.”
This is the problem. You and I differ on how we see things, and this blog is for discussion of that. Many people here are moved by reasonable arguments, and would like nothing better than to have their current view shown wrong (not just claimed to be wrong, but shown so via a sound argument). Of course that requires that the arguer never believe himself infallible, and also be open to being shown wrong. But you assume anyone believing anything different than you is motivated by a petty desire to deprive others of things for personal gain. This prevents any merit of your view from being appreciated. If you really believe in IP, you do a disservice to it by giving it a bad image.
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Mark Hubbard wrote:
“And no I won’t lose the vitriolic attitude to those advocating theft of property.”Do you understand that NOBODY and I mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON ON THIS SITE is advocating theft.
GET IT INTO YOUR BRAIN that, using fundamental premises and logical reasoning, there are great doubts as to whether patterns and ideas can be treated as “property” in the first place.
Bala’s line of reasoning gets to the heart of the matter. Rather than insulting him, maybe you should read what he has to say and then go and think about it, deeply.
I would have thought it to be logical to try to understand the other person’s point of view before insulting the hell out of them.
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Address the issues in my aesthetics post Jay – uniqueness, proven in the Rand quote, speaks to the ability to take property in what one writes: works of art, including ideas, etc. Yes?
And another cross post from SOLO:
‘Thanks for your concern about my intellectual integrity Jay, but, if we’re worried about the image of Objectivists, then speaking as a professional in the business sector – which we are all reliant on for our prosperity and freedom – Objectivists telling the business community that they have no respect whatsoever for their IP and patents, indeed, sanction theft of same as being not unethical at all, I reckon are doing a whole lot more damage to the Objectivist movement than my gropings as I learn the ropes, so to speak.
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Ayn Rand was ‘for’ copyright:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.html
Quote: What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.
… He can copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.
The government does not “grant†a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it—i.e., the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal.
And apparently she was also for a minarchist IP system.
Which ‘begs the question’: Bala (and Jay) – as an Objectivist, what is your position on Rand, and this essay?
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In the above the italics (quotation) should have gone down to ‘disposal’.
So, what’s the thieving response to this please. I think Bala and Jay need to front up on the subject of their Objectivism.
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And I note that in your representation of Rand’s ‘pattern’ writings, Bala and Jay, you have dishonestly mis-represented her in the totality – per her actual position on copyright which was Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind. as I surmised in my aesthetics post above. (Just while we’re talking about giving Objectivism a bad name).
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Newson,
“to some dude:
go read the classics. all of the marvels of ancient literature; now how is it possible that these arose in the absense of ip legislation?”Copying was a laborious process back then that required the copier to retain control of the original for a long period of time. You needed the consent of the owner to do that. Writers often worked on commission to kings and since the full costs of writing we’re covered up front. Copyright is an innovation (like company stock) that allows for multiple buyers to fund a writer instead of one.
Also there were things called guilds, and they had rules their members had to follow. You had to join the guild in order to learn the trade secrets, the IP, and you were bound not to disclose them.
You weren’t even allowed to be a scribe in some societies without the consent of the ruler. So issues with unauthorized copying never arose.
So your question is the same as someone trying to sneak into a theater for a free showing using the excuse, “well how to they pay for TV shows”? Just because one payment model exists doesn’t invalidate all the others. If a King wishes to steal taxes from his subjects in order to fund Beethoven, and then distribute the music for free doesn’t mean that everyone has to follow that model.
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Mark Hubbard,
Bala simply points out that all intangible constructions are “merely” patterns. You use this to insult and antagonise Bala. Then when I point out that Ayn Rand said the exact same thing you try to assert that Ayn Rand meant something different.
They said the same thing. To insult one and praise the other is intellectually dishonest. Stop trying to mask your own ignorance. Stop trying to confuse the issue in order to save face.
Bala believes the starting premises of Ayn Rand. Bala and Ayn Rand believe the same thing. That is why Bala is an Objectivist.
The problem is that one line of logical reasoning (Ayn Rand’s reasoning) leads to the conclusion that copyright should exist while another line of logical reasoning (Bala’s reasoning) leads to the conclusion that copyright should not exist. You need to understand both before you can make a decision as to who is in error. This, you have not done.
January 17, 2010 at 3:45 pm
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“If someone built a unique pyramid that was protected by IP it doesn’t take anything from your property. And it wouldn’t even exist without their efforts. You are free to desing your own pyramid. Or even modify the design enough so it wouldn’t be infringing.
Thinking you have the same claim on someone else’s labor as they do is dishonest.”
i dont see how a one person who built a pyramid and then another who builds a pyramid is making a clami on the same labor….of the pyramid-itecht??
unless you are saying the the pyarmid copy builder somehow used the design of the pyramid designer and the the design, the notion of of the thing, is the labor and that a double claim has been made on teh design-labor of the first pyramid?
January 17, 2010 at 3:46 pm
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“If someone built a unique pyramid that was protected by IP it doesn’t take anything from your property. And it wouldn’t even exist without their efforts. You are free to desing your own pyramid. Or even modify the design enough so it wouldn’t be infringing.
Thinking you have the same claim on someone else’s labor as they do is dishonest.”
i dont see how a one person who built a pyramid and then another who builds a pyramid is making a clami on the same labor….of the pyramid-itecht??
unless you are saying the the pyarmid copy builder somehow used the design of the pyramid designer and the the design, the notion of of the thing, is the labor and that a double claim has been made on teh design-labor of the first pyramid?
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Mark Hubbard, you should go back and read one of Bala’s original messages on this blog, along with his replies. You might be surprised at what he was advocating, and the business he runs, and reconsider your slander.
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but i dont see how an increase of the physical value (another instance of) of a thing makes a dual claim on the labor of one (an original) thing.
i think the only exception to this might be with money.
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Brian Macker: So you think that someone can just look at a copy of Microsoft Word sitting in it’s package on a shelf, and then walk home and copy it? I don’t think so.
To copy something you need to get your hands on a physical instantiation of it, which is somebody elses property, not yours. The only way you could get one of your own is to buy encumbered with copying restrictions.
I was thinking more along the lines of, say, a novel design for a desk. A competent craftsman could replicate such a thing even if they would never have designed such a desk on their own, thus violating the IP of the desk’s design.
Doing the same thing with software would be more difficult but not impossible, and would have the same effect. If the program in question were the first word processor ever, reading the features listed on the box and writing your own word processor that does all the same things would still be IP theft by your reasoning; it would just be more difficult.
You claims that copying requires violation of physical property is so absurd that I can hardly imagine how you could believe it. One of the most contentious areas of modern IP, music, can be duplicated by any sufficiently skilled musician who hears it on the radio, yet despite the artist throwing the music into the luminiferous aether to be heard by anyone with a radio, that would still be IP theft by pro-IP reasoning. Or do you mean to claim that tuning into radio waves passing thru your house is a contract with the original artists?
Even an example argued about further up contradicts your assertion: a hypothetical, original pyramid somebody built, which it was argued would be protected by IP against anyone who tried to copy it. You cannot build something in plain view and hold everyone who sees it to a contract you think you are entitled to.
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Jay, after the event says:
The problem is that one line of logical reasoning (Ayn Rand’s reasoning) leads to the conclusion that copyright should exist while another line of logical reasoning (Bala’s reasoning) leads to the conclusion that copyright should not exist. You need to understand both before you can make a decision as to who is in error. This, you have not done.
I proved Ayn’s ultimate logic in my aesthetics post before learning Ayn’s ultimate stance as being the same as my own.
Bala’s conclusions are wrong and mis-represent Objectivism is a gross fashion. And his arguing, and yours Jay, for you never actually mentioned Ayn’s position in your posts until I posted same, you have both been dishonest.
You accuse me constantly of question begging, well you’re worse in that you’ve been context dropping.
But here’s the real thing for me.
You both profess to be followers of a philosophy, you intellectualised that philosophy into a position whereby you sanction theft, and in a way that would alienate the business community, and then you did not have the ethical base to stand back and re-examine your premises on that point.
For me, if I had found myself sanctioning theft of property, then I would have to have assumed I was either interpreting the philosophy wrong, or the philosophy was not the freedom loving thing I thought it was and thus re-examined my relationship with it.
I meant what I said in my aesthetics post: you believe in a Borg collectivist mind, the ultimate nihilism being the death of the individual and uniqueness. Ayn was ‘all about’ the very opposite: the best in man.
I’m not impressed.
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mSS,
“OK, here’s one for the proIPers: You’re saying, it seems to me, that you can own market share for a product.”
No, we are saying we can retain part ownership in the goods we sell by contract.
“You write a book, put it out in ebook format, and you should retain the right to be the exclusive distributor (if you choose) of that book.”
We retain coownership in any copies. That is, the person who “buys” it is really only renting the copy for certain purposes, none of which includes the right to copy it for resale or free distribution.
“Basically, you own the market for the ebook.”
Not really if the terms of the sale includes the right of transfer. That is how paper books work. The buyers can resell the authorized copies. There is no reason you couldn’t some come up with such a mechanism for ebooks, although it is pointless because the value added by making the copy is actually minuscule. At least with the paper book the copying process adds some value.“So then, why can’t any other business own it’s market share?”
Other businesses do completely own their market share. If I sell 10% of all donuts then I get paid for every one of those donuts that I produced.With an original work like a novel the writers work is a productive input to every single copy of that novel. In fact almost the entire value of the copy can be traced to this original labor and not the copying process. This proportion of value due to the author only goes up with an increase in the ease of copying.
The same is not true for donuts. My labor is only part of the productive input to the donuts I make. My labor has zero productive input into the donuts my competitors make.
“If I am a baker, and you come into my town to open a competing bakery, why are you not agressing on my market share?”
Market share in that sense destroys the analogy. The thief of labor occurs in the copying process, via the unauthorized use of the book to copy. I can own the market in things I had a hand in creating.
You are now equivocating to a different meaning of market share. Instead of the term referring to all the items which the author had a productive input into producing you are now switching to the idea of a percentage of total sales of similar items. Items that do NOT have any causal connection with the person claiming a certain percentage of the market.
“What, in precise terms, is the difference?”
One is a claim of ownership over ones own labor value. The claim is made via freely agreed to contracts with the buyers, The claim is against only those books which the author has had productive input into, not all books. Nor is it a claim that buyers should value his book at a certain percentage of all books sold.
The other is a violation of the rights of others to free association, and trade. The buyers never consent to refrain from buying other peoples bagels when they purchase the claimants. The claimant has no possible ownership claims over the bagels produced by his competitors, and he isn’t even making such a claim. Unlike the other case there is a claim to ownership of a certain percentage of total sales of all bagels. No copyright holder claims to a right to a certain percent of all book sales receipts.
Totally different scenarios.
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Final retort:
Every anti-IP thread here sanctions theft. (Rand would agree with that, Objectivism holds that).
The business community must be appalled, I know I am.
Rothbard was the anarchist and might have thought this, von Mises would not have, every such thread dishonours his name.
The aim of this site is to advance liberty … how do you advance liberty by advocating theft?
This is insane.
January 17, 2010 at 4:35 pm
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Dear Mark,
for all the talking you did, you avoided doing the important: demonstrating either the error in your opponents’ claims, or demonstrating the correctness of yours. While you may hold the opinion that you are right, you do not even attempt to prove it. Your emotions do not absolve you from the necessity of argumentation. You might not mind whether your opinion is logically defensible, but then please don’t pretend your emotions are logic.
I completely share Shay’s opinion, I would be delighted to tackle difficult counterarguments and would consider it a positive experience if my opponents persuaded me I’m incorrect. I am a firm believer in Popper’s principle of falsifiability. Regrettably, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Even in cases where the IP-proponents attempt to argue, they follow the argumentation lines that have already been attempted by their predecessors, and whenever I counter with a difficult challenge, they avoid the confrontation or perform mental gymnastics that make me wonder if they are trying to fool me or themselves.
I understand that you believe you would lose a lot with the absence of IP. This might be true or not, but it has no effect on the validity of of arguments.
Read more: Copying Is Not Theft — remixed (song and video) — Mises Economics Blog http://blog.mises.org/11464/copying-is-not-theft-remixed-song-and-video/comment-page-4/#comments#ixzz0jYahM6es
- January 15, 2010 at 2:01 pm
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Great.
January 15, 2010 at 2:11 pm-
one for me and one for you with the fbi slogan, nice video
January 15, 2010 at 2:19 pm-
No, the FBI slogan is none for you and all for me.
- January 15, 2010 at 2:19 pm
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No, the FBI slogan is none for you and all for me.
January 15, 2010 at 2:39 pm-
Wow, that was great!
Who’s the artist? he or she should do more of these.
January 15, 2010 at 5:11 pm-
Mmm. I am a Libertarian, and an Objectivist, and have followed this great blog for some time, however, only really reading the economic articles. I’ve seen many IP posts but not had the time to do anything other than skim through the odd one, but from that, and this post, I have gleaned a fundamental disagreement I have with the position of some of the posters here on IP.
In this context, I don’t care about the ‘technical’ argument: copying is theft.
If I write a novel, then sell it as an ebook on line, then I am entitled to profit from the sales of it: it is the tangible product of my mind. Everyone who copies it without paying me is initiating fraud and denying me what is legitimately mine.
Yes?
Does this ‘site’ have a position on this issue?
Any other position is destroying the ability of artists and intellectuals, to list just some groups, to make a living under laissez-faire, and that’s repugnant, and wrong.
I don’t have time to argue the point here, although I did argue these issues with Cory Doctorow in 2004 on his blog. At that stage I was posting under the handle of ‘tribeless’ (I only post under my own name now): Doctorow’s original argument is at the start of the link, then my ‘disagreement’ follows, I think going through about three or four pages of comments – (um, that was five years ago, and I was posting hurriedly there also, so excuse the typos):
http://craphound.com/est/000041.html
(If the link doesn’t come out here as clicky you’ll have to copy and paste: sorry).
March 7, 2010 at 4:52 pm-
Based on your Objectivist leanings, isn’t using the word Objectivist to describe your position on this subject a violation of Ayn Rands rights to her IP?
January 15, 2010 at 5:41 pm-
Anti-IP is just a new wave of inflationism, the belief that since media is cheap that we can print our way to wealth.
January 15, 2010 at 5:45 pm-
What if I agree to exchange my bicycle to a rabbit chick in exchange for money with the agreement that the rabbit chick will not “copy” it and give the copy to another rabbit?
If a third party “copies” the bike with permission from the rabbit chick then it is breech of contract. If a third party copies the bike without permission from the rabbit chick it is theft.
January 15, 2010 at 5:54 pm-
Mark Hubbard wrote:
“If I write a novel, then sell it as an ebook on line, then I am entitled to profit from the sales of it: it is the tangible product of my mind.”
No, Mark, an ebook is pretty much by definition not “tangible”. And if you intend on making lots of money by selling something that is easily copied, then you simply have a poor business plan. It doesn’t matter whether the ebook is a product of your mind or not.
January 15, 2010 at 5:56 pm-
Some Dude: in your example the property is not your idea, it’s a contract.
The fact that you built a pyramid first does not give you any rights over my rocks and land, I can still do as I please with my property, anything that you try to do to take some of my property for you or to prohibit me of using my property is a crime.
Great video! 
January 15, 2010 at 6:23 pm-
Great video.
But copying someone else’s intellectual work and reselling it – or crowding out a market by giving free copies away – is theft.
It is premised on the absurdity that any member of the public with copying equipment has an equal claim to the creator’s work product, which is immoral, collectivist, and a violation of natural law principles.
Cute rabbits and cute song, though.
January 15, 2010 at 6:26 pm-
ip is just the new wave of monopoly, the belief that since taxpayers are paying, we can fence our way to wealth.
- January 15, 2010 at 6:30 pm
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Robert Chiocca-
The fact that you built a pyramid first does not give you any rights over my rocks and land, I can still do as I please with my property, anything that you try to do to take some of my property for you or to prohibit me of using my property is a crime.
If someone built a unique pyramid that was protected by IP it doesn’t take anything from your property. And it wouldn’t even exist without their efforts. You are free to desing your own pyramid. Or even modify the design enough so it wouldn’t be infringing.
Thinking you have the same claim on someone else’s labor as they do is dishonest. When are you going to sign over your paycheck for your labor this week to me? It’s OK for you to take mine, right?
- January 15, 2010 at 6:34 pm
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newson-
ip is just the new wave of monopoly, the belief that since taxpayers are paying, we can fence our way to wealth.
Anti-ip is the same old collectivism.
You have a monopoly on access to your house/apartment. When are you going to start letting the public in, you greedy “fencer”?
Everyone look, he’s FENCING!
January 15, 2010 at 6:41 pm-
Stranger wrote, “Anti-IP is just a new wave of inflationism, the belief that since media is cheap that we can print our way to wealth.”
Fiat money has no inherent value. A hard drive full of intellectual works has significant inherent value over a freshly-formatted one. Critical distinction you missed.
- January 15, 2010 at 6:55 pm
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“Fiat money has no inherent value.”
Then why do people exchange goods and services for it?
- January 15, 2010 at 7:00 pm
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“If someone built a unique pyramid that was protected by IP.”
If I didn’t sign any contract with the owner of that pyramid and even thought he let me see his work, that gives him no right over my property and yes, I can do anything I want, even the exact same pyramid. If I said that I invented that kind of construction I would be lying, and that’s not a crime, it’s just not moral.“Thinking you have the same claim on someone else’s labor as they do is dishonest.”
But who built my pyramid was ME, you have no right over my property or work, so I do not own you anything(if you cry and get on your knees I can say to other people that you invented that, but you wouldn’t get anything either).“When are you going to sign over your paycheck for your labor this week to me? It’s OK for you to take mine, right?”
If you want to give me yours I won’t complain but I will not give you my property if I don’t want to, and I don’t know how you got to this comparison. - January 15, 2010 at 7:37 pm
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to pro-ip libertarian:
hey, do i ask you to pay for a lock for my apartment? now do you understand? i lock my own place, and feed my own guard-dog, i don’t shake down my neighbours to pay for a sentry.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:10 pm
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Russ said: No, Mark, an ebook is pretty much by definition not “tangible”. And if you intend on making lots of money by selling something that is easily copied, then you simply have a poor business plan. It doesn’t matter whether the ebook is a product of your mind or not.
And that sanctions theft? What a ludicrous argument.
newson wrote: hey, do i ask you to pay for a lock for my apartment? now do you understand? i lock my own place, and feed my own guard-dog, i don’t shake down my neighbours to pay for a sentry.
And what does that have to do with this argument?
I repeat: arguing for the sophistry that copying isn’t theft, is arguing for a second hander, user society. It destroys the ability of artists and intellectuals to make a living from their minds and their efforts under laissez-faire, and that’s repugnant.
No post from the theft camp has addressed this, because you can’t. You may want a second hander society where there are no writers, artists, et al, but a site supporting the work of von Mises is a damned strange place in which to find myself mixing with a coven of thieves and shysters.
Although I am heartened to see some on here do understand how IP is a property right, as important as the title to my home.
January 15, 2010 at 8:15 pm-
No post from the theft camp has addressed this…
Your statements are unsubstantiated assertions and question-begging. There’s been nothing to address so far.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:20 pm
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‘The ideas that change the intellectual climate of a given environment are those unheard of before. For these new ideas there is no other explanation than that there was a man from whose mind they originated.’
Ludwig von Mises – The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science
- January 15, 2010 at 8:28 pm
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RWW, do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?
To answer that you have to convince me, to take one example, how does an author or a musician support himself with the products from his mind: books and songs, in an age when Internet sales govern the market?
This Christmas Amazon sold more ebooks that dead tree books.
As I stated on Doctorow’s blog, ‘at no other stage in human history has civilisation had anything like the computer, and thus,the ability for one person anywhere in the globe to share one file with billions.’
Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property that he has put in the market under a contract of copyright. Copying is thus most surely theft.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:34 pm
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Sorry, Mark, but you’re not going to get away with pushing some pitiful variant of the Labor Theory of Value here. That entitlement mentality, so typical of Randist thinking, is one of the largest factors that led to my own divorce from “Objectivism” as I gained a real understanding of economics and a consistent ethical system.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:41 pm
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My previous comment was in response to your previous comments.
RWW, do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?
How about you try communicating like a human being instead of in meaningless emotional jargon?
…how does an author or a musician support himself with the products from his mind: books and songs, in an age when Internet sales govern the market?
While I am taken aback that a supposed “Objectivist” would be such a blatant consequentialist, the issue you raise has been addressed here ad nauseum. It betrays your lack of both imagination and willingness to do some basic background reading.
Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property…
If you’re referring to digital content, you’re begging the question.
…that he has put in the market under a contract of copyright.
Odd that I don’t recall having agreed to such a contract.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:44 pm
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Your two posts now are short of detail RWW.
… as I gained a real understanding of economics and a consistent ethical system.
Explain to me the ethics of ‘copying is not theft’. Give me the benefits of your ‘real understanding’.
Do you look forward to living in a world where your only choice of music is the kid’s heavy metal band in the garage next door?
- January 15, 2010 at 8:47 pm
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Explain to me the ethics of ‘copying is not theft’.
Sorry, but when I am saying “Let people do X” and you are saying “We must forcefully prevent people from doing X,” the burden of the argument seems to be upon you. I eagerly await some meaningful argument.
January 15, 2010 at 8:50 pm-
What right do artists have to make a living? None whatsoever. Just like everyone else, their rights to income are limited to their right to freely exchange with others. If nobody is willing to give you money for your art, you are not entitled to money simply because you have created something.
But, as for the question of how artists would make a living, there would still be commissions, and people do value hearing a performance by the original artist in concert or owning the original hardcopy of a painting, so it wouldn’t be impossible. You just wouldn’t be able to censor the use of your own work.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:53 pm
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‘Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property…
If you’re referring to digital content, you’re begging the question.
As I have said, arguments for theft are just so much sophistry.
And I started with a valid question, repeat: do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?
Your answer – How about you try communicating like a human being instead of in meaningless emotional jargon? – in no way addressed the question.
But really, I’m interested in the ethics of stealing, what are they please.
January 15, 2010 at 8:54 pm-
Mark Hubbard,
” And that sanctions theft? What a ludicrous argument. ”
Actually, what’s ludicruous is calling it “theft”. When I steal your car, you do not have the car any more. This is an integral aspect of the concept “theft”. Where there is no “taking”, it is absurd to call it “theft”.
When I copy your idea, you are not deprived of your idea (I did not lobotomise you). So, how do you call it theft?
- January 15, 2010 at 8:55 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
” do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society? ”
No. So where does that leave us?
- January 15, 2010 at 8:56 pm
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Do you look forward to living in a world where your only choice of music is the kid’s heavy metal band in the garage next door?
The spirit of creativity that would cause such bands to exist even in a hypothetical world without IP would also provide for every other imaginable taste in music.
The art of the Renaissance, and every period before, does predate copyright, you know.
- January 15, 2010 at 8:59 pm
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and you are saying “We must forcefully prevent people from doing X, …
Ludicrous.
Answer this:
I put an ebook online and the conditions of my site say you must pay me to download this. You simply copy and do not pay.
I put a dead tree book on the shelf of my bookshop, a price tag of $30 is on it. You walk in, pick up the book and walk out of my store without payment.
You will agree the second instance is theft. Why is the first instance not theft?
- January 15, 2010 at 8:59 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
” I am a Libertarian, and an Objectivist ”
I claim to be an Objectivist too and have come to the conclusion (starting from Objectivist premises) that support for IP contradicts the basic principles of Objectivism. My conclusion is that supporting IP is tantamount to whim worshipping and evasion of reality – the two most serious acts of immorality that an Objectivist could commit.
Wish to debate that? I think it would help because it would dispose of all your objections.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:02 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
” You will agree the second instance is theft. Why is the first instance not theft? ”
Because in the first instance, you still have the e-book while in the second, you do not have the dead tree book any more. That’s the simple difference you are failing to see.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:05 pm
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No, what you are failing to see is that your argument is, as I have said, a sophistry. You knew from reading the conditions of my site that I expected payment for the download, then you chose to copy and not pay. You consciously chose to steal ‘a copy’ of my ebook.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:06 pm
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Bala wrote:
I claim to be an Objectivist too and have come to the conclusion (starting from Objectivist premises) that support for IP contradicts the basic principles of Objectivism. My conclusion is that supporting IP is tantamount to whim worshipping and evasion of reality – the two most serious acts of immorality that an Objectivist could commit.
I need a lot more detail than that: explain please.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:17 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
Sorry if this sounds presumptuous/lazy, but I have discussed this same issue in detail with another person who (like me) claims to be an Objectivist and takes a line similar to yours. The arguments are lengthy and involve a lot of typing effort (yours and mine). So, I request you to check out this thread (specifically my discussion with MichaelM) and then start our discussion.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/011323.asp
Thanks a ton.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:30 pm
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Cheers Bala. That is a long thread, I probably won’t have a chance to read it until next week, though I can’t see how it could change my position – I find arguments for copying, again, to always exist on sophistry. And for those arguing it, I don’t think they have fully reasoned the implications this has for a laissez-faire market in an electronic age.
And as I said above, someone going to my site, and despite the contract I have put on my site, they copying my ebook without payment regardless: that is the immorality.
But I’ll read that thread … and will be gone for some time in the meantime.
- January 15, 2010 at 9:45 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
” And as I said above, someone going to my site, and despite the contract I have put on my site, they copying my ebook without payment regardless: that is the immorality. ”
Actually, you should have been more careful than to put your book in that format. I don’t actually need to “break into” your site to copy it. I could buy a copy legitimately and then copy it or let it be copied. That’s the point at which your argument becomes really weak.
- January 15, 2010 at 10:01 pm
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Actually, you should have been more careful than to put your book in that format. I don’t actually need to “break into” your site to copy it. I could buy a copy legitimately and then copy it or let it be copied. That’s the point at which your argument becomes really weak.
No, that’s where you depart from both logic and morality, as with Russ above. You’re saying that if I put my dead tree book on the table in a cafe then I deserve to have it stolen. And that would be stupid of me, but it does not change the fact that the person who stole it is an immoral thief committing an act of theft. The act of theft is not contingent on whether I use encryption for my ebook or not.
You were right above: this issue turns on morality.
- January 15, 2010 at 10:02 pm
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Mark Hubbard wrote:
“And that sanctions theft? What a ludicrous argument.”
And you think that copying something that someone has left out in public constitutes theft? What a ludicrous argument.
“You knew from reading the conditions of my site that I expected payment for the download, then you chose to copy and not pay. You consciously chose to steal ‘a copy’ of my ebook.”
Teeheeehee…. I didn’t know that reading a web site constituted a legally binding contract. I don’t consider a nondisclosure contract binding if it is not signed before the information not to be disclosed is transferred.
- January 15, 2010 at 10:12 pm
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And you think that copying something that someone has left out in public constitutes theft? What a ludicrous argument.
Your comprehension is as loose as your morality Russ. Read what I actually said.
- January 15, 2010 at 10:15 pm
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Mark Hubbard wrote:
“No, that’s where you depart from both logic and morality, as with Russ above.”
You’ll find I don’t suffer moralizing fools such as yourself gladly. So fuck off, you self-righteous twit.
“You’re saying that if I put my dead tree book on the table in a cafe then I deserve to have it stolen. And that would be stupid of me, but it does not change the fact that the person who stole it is an immoral thief committing an act of theft.”
When someone takes your book from a table in a cafe, that denies you the use of that book. Therefore, that is theft. When somebody copies your ebook, that does not deny you the use of your copy of the ebook. Therefore, that is not theft. Surely such an obvious point is comprehensible even by you?
January 15, 2010 at 10:17 pm-
Oh look, Stranger brought his pro-monopoly, pro-ltv position to the Mises blog.
Copying no more steals value than growing my own apples steals value from an orchard down the road.
@Bala, you are the most heroic Objectivist I know, because you have the courage to work from first principles, instead of repeating the dogmatic nonsense of cult worship. Cheers.
- January 15, 2010 at 11:05 pm
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So fuck off, you self-righteous twit.
Yes, that’s about the level of a file sharers argument. You carry on enjoying the plundering of another’s wealth, through your initiation of force Russ. But you’ll never be able to rationalise it. I guess it’s just about fooling yourself.
Dixie: I would have assumed the first principles of the cult of Objectivism would include ‘thou shalt not steal.’ Yes? As an Objectivist I certainly would’ve hoped so.
You talk of value, yet you don’t know what that is.
Still, you’ve proven one thing, it is possible to see a vacuum: here it is:
stranger brought his pro-monopoly, pro-ltv position to the Mises blog.
Pro-monopoly to support a writers ability to live off his own efforts – yeah right. Honest traders are going to starve in your second-handers market. Don’t go thinking you’re advocating a free market, or anything so noble and good.
I don’t have the heart to stay with this thread. It’s quite sickening.
- January 15, 2010 at 11:33 pm
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Mark Hubbard,
” You were right above: this issue turns on morality. ”
Actually, the real moral question you are evading is whether ideas and patterns (your book, e- or otherwise, falls in that category) should be treated as “property”. It is only AFTER you acknowledge that they can be treated as “property” that you can even talk of “theft” and my act of copying your book as “thieving”.
It is this fundamental point that I am trying to address – that it is IMMORAL to treat ideas and patterns as “property”.
Let’s start from Objectivist fundamentals.
1. Man is a rational animal with a volitional consciousness.
2. Life is a sequence of self-generated self-sustaining actions. The purpose of all action is life itself and its sustenance.
3. Values are that which you act to gain or keep.
4. Man’s values are not automatic unlike those of other living beings. He needs to choose his values and then act to gain or geek them.
5. Man’s epistemology is reason. He uses his powers of reason to form concepts of existence and of causality within existence. He uses these to modify his environment and thus derive the values that will advance his life.
6. Man, in order to sustain his life, needs to act. The purpose of all such action is to gain the value needed to sustain it and to keep that which he has gained.
7. Man needs to be free to act as per the judgement of his rational mind in order to choose his values as well as the means to gain/keep them. To do this, he needs that force may not be initiated against him by other men as force is that which neuters volition and renders it impossible for man to act.
8. Rights are a moral concept defining and sanctioning man’s freedom of action in a social context.
9. Rights are a recognition of a particular condition of existence essential for the survival of man qua man, i.e., as identified above.
10. The Right to Life is nothing more than a recognition of the reality that for man to be able to survive qua man, no other man may initiate force against him.
11. To sustain his life qua man, man needs to be free to apply the values he has gained in the service of his life. This is the beginning of the moral concept “property”.
12. For man to be free to act to apply the values he has acquired in the service of his life, it is necessary that others do not act in a manner that deprives him of the freedom to act thus. This is the next step in the evolution of the concepts “property” and “property rights”.
“Property” thus is the moral concept that applies to the products of value that man acquires with the aim of applying them in the service of his life. The most important aspect of the concept “property” is that the owner should be free to act to apply the objects of value in the service of his life.
There are 2 categories of objects – material existents and concepts of and related to existence. Of the two, the former is “scarce” while the latter is not. The meaning of “scarce” here is that there is only 1 of a particular existent and therefore, if one man is in possession of a material object, another cannot. Therefore, if I have acquired a material object to apply it in the service of my life, your taking it deprives me of the freedom to act to apply it thus. The recognition of this condition of existence essential for the survival of man qua man is what we call the “right to exclude” that forms an integral part of the concept “right to property”. Without exclusion, it is impossible for man to have a concept of physical “property”. Hence, it is moral to treat physical objects as “property”.
Ideas and patterns, the 2nd category of existents, however, have the peculiar nature that they can be simultaneously used by any number of people without abridging the freedom of any of them to act to instantiate them. Therefore exclusivity is NOT NECESSARY for man to be free to act on them. Hence, there is no question of treating them as “property”. Any attempt to do so would be in violation of the basic Objectivist concept of Rights itself.
At the same time, ideas by THEIR very NATURE, are not amenable to exclusivity. Once an idea/pattern is instantiated and that object is sold, the idea screams out loud for anyone at all to grasp them. All it requires is a conscious human being acting as per his nature and forming concepts of existence and of causality within existence. This involves asking simple questions like “What is this?”, “How does this work?”, “How is this better than other known arrangements?”, etc.
To still insist that we should treat ideas and patterns as though exclusivity in them were possible, you would be guilty of evading the reality that they are not amenable to exclusion and acting to enforce exclusivity would be tantamount to worshipping your whim that they should be exclusive.
To say that the owner of the object that contains the instantiation should not do this is to demand that he lives a sub-human existence. If you further demand that he should not act to instantiate the idea that he has now obtained, you are once again demanding that he cease to live as a human being, i.e., act as per the judgement of his rational mind.
That would make you a supporter of the “right to enslave”, something no Objectivist would recognise as valid under any circumstances.
Thus, IP is contradictory to Objectivism.
January 15, 2010 at 11:47 pm-
I see lots of posts here and there asserting “copying isn’t theft” and whatnot. It’s nice, but I hardly ever see anything about how an economy without IP would function. How would it function? That’s great you are sticking to your principles, but what would the pragmatic effects be? I cannot envision a scenario where much of any intellectual material would be produced unless writing books for the hell of it is someone’s hobby.
- January 16, 2010 at 12:00 am
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Great post ‘some dude’: that’s the point the file stealers don’t want to deal with.
And don’t go thinking the Objectivist position is to sanction this theft: it’s not.
Bala: Actually, the real moral question you are evading is whether ideas and patterns (your book, e- or otherwise, falls in that category) should be treated as “property”. It is only AFTER you acknowledge that they can be treated as “property” that you can even talk of “theft” and my act of copying your book as “thieving”.
Yes, it does turn ultimately on this, and yes, my novel is not a damned ‘pattern’, it is property. Bloody hell.
Thus, IP is contradictory to Objectivism.
No, Objectivism is precisely against the stealing of another’s property. You advocate the initiation of force and fraud.
MichaelM’s arguments in the link you gave above would be a pretty good fit for my own, vis a vis, my novel is property. Copying is theft. He argued the point well.
I don’t consider you an Objectivist, Bala, I’m afraid you belong to that unethical street gang called file stealers, along with Russ. I despise you and your ilk: you are the barrier to the free society I wish to live in, not the harbinger of it.
And to return to ‘some dude’s’ comment, which I have also made above: your attitude on a fundamental level would knock the feet out from under a laissez-faire market. Mises would be turning in his grave.
I’m not impressed.
- January 16, 2010 at 1:01 am
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to some dude:
go read the classics. all of the marvels of ancient literature; now how is it possible that these arose in the absense of ip legislation?to mark hubbard:
citing the ten commandments is a bit rich. i don’t recall jesus ever fighting to preserve monopolies, even it meant settling for the “low” art you seem to despise. and i guess you’ve never picked up a coin in the street without thinking of yourself a thief. - January 16, 2010 at 1:41 am
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Why do you all seem to assume that the amount of art being produced under a pro-IP regime is the ideal amount? Obviously granting special legal privileges to something will promote its production; how do you know that the market is not being lead to an irrationally high level of art production by the privileges of IP law?
In any case, if people start distributing your novel themselves, the only way to argue that you have suffered damages as a result would be to say that you were entitled to have people buy your book, which is absurd, and if there are no damages, there is no crime.
Just having labored at something doesn’t give you any right to anything except the product of the labor itself, which would be the original manuscript, not any subsequent copies others might produce with their own property. You cries of “theft” seem motivated mostly by having invested so much into something for which there is no solid business model without government intervention, like so many other would-be monopolists.
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