From geek.com:

5 people who are making a killing off of piracy

Piracy gets a bad reputation from most of the content creators in the world, but not everyone agrees. In fact, some people have managed to make piracy, and a relaxed attitude toward copyright, work in their favor. Here are five such individuals who don’t pirate themselves (at least that we know about) but managed to turn this fact of internet life into good business.

Psy
Have you heard about this Gangam Style thing? The answer to that is almost certainly an emphatic “yes.” Gangam Style, from South Korean pop/rap star Psy has taken the internet by storm, and part of that success has come by taking a relaxed attitude toward copyright infringement.

There have been remixes, mashups,vre-postings, and of course, torrents of Gangam Style ever since it first caught on. Rather than go after people infringing on the content, Psy has leaned back and watched the advertising dollars roll in. The Gangam Style video on YouTube is now the most viewed ever. It currently has nearly 1 billion views. It is estimated that Psy will pull in about $8.1 million this year thanks to his internet popularity. Popularity he wouldn’t have had if no one had been able to share the song.

Read more>>

I had the pleasure of finally meeting in person law professor Tom Bell (one of the handful of IP attorneys to publicly oppose IP)¹ at Libertopia in San Diego last September.²

In a recent interview by Jerry Brito on the excellent Surprisingly Free podcast (one of my favorites), Bell discusses his views on copyright and his chapter “Five Reforms for Copyright,” in the recent book Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, edited by Brito (which is, ironically, and unfortunately, not published under any kind of Creative Commons license nor made available free in PDF form or otherwise; Mercatus page). [Brito’s book is reviewed by Tom Palmer here.]

Tom Bell on copyright reform

In his excellent and concise chapter, Bell argues that copyright has changed so much since 1790 that it has deviated dramatically from the original idea for copyright in the Constitution, and now poses a grave threat to our freedom and liberties. Bell argues for a return to the Founders’ Copyright, among four other reforms:

1. Reinstate the Founders’ Copyright Act,
2. Withdraw the US from the Berne Convention,
3. Develop misuse doctrine into an escape from copyright,
4. Focus copyright policy on consumers’ costs, not producers’ profits, and
5. Reconceive “IP” as “Intellectual Privilege.”³

Regarding relabeling IP as “intellectual privilege,” see my post Intellectual Poverty, suggestion other possible terms that could be used to more accurately describe patent, copyright, and other IP laws.

The Founder’s Copyright would be much narrower than the current metastasized copyright system: it would offer an initial 14 year copyright term followed by another 14 year term, if applied for (compared to life of the author plus 70 years, now, and automatic copyright protection); no criminal sanctions; only maps, charts, and books covered, but not movies, photographs, paintings, sculptures, plays, music, architectural works, boat hull designs, and software; only exact, literal reproduction is covered, not quotations of a portion of the work, not derivative works (like sequels to a novel). This would be a radical improvement in copyright and would probably get rid of 95% or more of its current mischief.

Brito is also somewhat skeptical of copyright and IP but is not an abolitionist; he adopts the utilitarian approach which holds that we want something between zero copyright protection and the very strong copyright we have now (see his discussion in Geoff Manne on copyright and Brito: What’s Wrong With a Copyright Alert System?; also Republicans More Radical than Libertarian Copyright Moderates and Stan Liebowitz on copyright and incentives). In Bell’s wide-ranging interview with Brito, he discusses a variety of problems with modern views on copyright. For example, he challenges the idea that copyright should be thought of as property; Brito seems to agree (see Classifying Patent and Copyright Law as “Property”: So What?); he observes the danger of this analogy: that the limits put in place on copyright to prevent its excesses (like fair use) could be imported back onto real property law and weaken real property rights (Tom Bell: Copyright Erodes Property?); and other issues.

The Hayekian Knowledge Problem and the Copyright Term

One other thing worth mentioning—in this interview Bell and Brito talk about the (Hayekian) “knowledge problem” being one reason it’s difficult to know what optimum copyright term to set (Brito and Manne make similar observations in another podcast episode; see Geoff Manne on copyright). And in the introductory chapter to Copyright Unbalanced, Brito writes (my bolding added):

You should be skeptical of Congress’s ability to develop a rational policy given the knowledge problem copyright presents and the public choice pressures at work. [p. 7, Kindle Edition]

… The fact that copyright does not emerge spontaneously does not mean it is illegitimate, or even unwise. What it does mean is that we should be cautious about how we create such a property right and how we define that right.

As F. A. Hayek showed, created orders are handicapped by the limited knowledge of their planners. This is in contrast to emergent orders, like customary or common law, which evolve slowly through trial and error. Such bottom-up processes are the product of human action, but not human design. As a result they incorporate dispersed knowledge and tend to match economic efficiency.

Copyright is a created order. Not only did it not emerge spontaneously, it is in fact a tool to create scarcity through state action. But why would we want to introduce scarcity where there is none? And why would we want to limit use where there is no conflict? [p. 11]

Good question. And, in a section entitled COPYRIGHT’S KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM:

The knowledge problem inherent in legislatively created rights is one reason why a delicate balance is difficult to reach. Not only are the contours of copyright centrally planned, but as Richard Epstein has noted, “There are in fact no ‘natural’ boundaries here, similar to the metes and bounds of land” to guide policy makers.

Conservatives and libertarians tend to easily recognize the knowledge problems in other government programs. For example, consider subsidies for renewable energy, which are also arguably meant to promote the production of a public good.

How does Congress know that the market is not already providing the right amount of investment in renewable energy? Without a government subsidy, there would still be investment in renewable energy technologies. By creating a subsidy, Congress is saying it doesn’t think it’s enough, but it has no way of truly knowing that.

Putting aside how Congress can know that there should be more investment in renewable energy, the other question is, how much investment is optimal? Without a market process to guide such investment, Congress can’t know how much is enough. So when Congress offers a certain amount of subsidy, it’s guessing. It’s likely offering too little or too much, with each error introducing its own inefficiencies.

The same challenges exist for copyright. Without copyright, there would still be songs written and movies made. Congress just thinks there wouldn’t be enough. So, it offers a subsidy in the form of copyright protection to incentivize more creative output. The same questions we asked about renewable energy present themselves: How does Congress know we wouldn’t have “enough” creative works without copyright? And assuming it knows that, how does it know the right amount of incentive to offer?

The first Copyright Act, which the Framers legislated, was limited to maps, charts, and books, which meant that other kinds of expressive works, such as songs and plays, were not protected. The Framers must have thought they would get enough such works without a subsidy. Were they wrong? Today songs and plays are protected, but fashion designs are not. Do we have the right balance now? How do we know?

The first Copyright Act also set a copyright term of 14 years renewable for 14 more, and required authors to register their works before receiving protection. Was 14 years enough, or too little? Today the copyright term is life of the author plus 70 years. Is that too much, or not enough? How do we know?

Also, requiring registration and renewal meant that only those authors who sought a subsidy got one. Only 5 percent of books published at the time were registered for copyright, and a small minority of their authors sought renewal, making the subsidy modest and somewhat self-regulating.

Today there is no requirement for registration or renewal, and anything you write is automatically protected whether you want it to be or not. Does such a massive trade of access for incentive get us closer to striking the delicate balance? How do we know?

This is not to say that because the ideal contours of copyright are unknowable, we should therefore have no copyright. After all, we also don’t know that zero is the right amount of copyright. However, understanding that there is a knowledge problem in copyright is useful. It tells us that while Congress may inevitably have to make an educated guess when it designs copyright, it should be humble and not take lightly the possibility that it will strike the wrong balance and introduce serious inefficiency. [pp. 13-15; endnotes omitted]

This entire approach is problematic, as I discuss in Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law and my post Knowledge vs. Calculation.

According to Hayek, there is dispersed knowledge in society that is difficult for any central planner to gather (or keep up with as it dynamically changes), and difficult even for the individual actors who possess it to articulate in an objective way, since it is “tacit.” Yet people’s dispersed knowledge affects how they buy and sell, and thus gets “reflected” in the overall price structure of the economy. Even this conception of prices “conveying” or “encoding” knowledge is problematic, in my view (as mentioned in the two linked pieces), but at most, it means that individual knowledge of relative resource scarcity is reflected in prices. This is because the knowledge of individuals, whether tacit or otherwise, that affects the prices they form, is these individuals’ knowledge (or forecasts or opinions) about the demand for, usefulness of, and supply and availability of scarce resources.  That is, according to Hayek, the free market economy and its price system provides a way to help economize in the face of scarcity; it helps allocate scarce resources more efficiently, by means of a price system embodying or reflecting or transmitting various knowledge individual actors have about relative scarcities of, and supply of and demand for, scarce resources.

The Misesian case against central economic planning is that in the absence of a free market price system, there is no way to calculate—no way for the entrepreneur to forecast and compare possible plans on terms of profit maximization, because resources are heterogenous and incomparable. The future is always uncertain, but entrepreneurs have no way of comparing contemplated projects in cardinal terms, without some common, numerical frame of reference. They cannot even determine after the fact whether a project was as successful or more successful than anticipated, or than alternative projects could have been, without some cardinal means of comparison. A free market price system permits such calculation because the entrepreneur can calculate in money terms and compare various possible projects and alternative uses of scarce resources and select the project expected (in his entrepreneurial judgment) to yield the greatest monetary profit. And he can use money prices to assess how a project has done (cost accounting). In this way, to the extent entrepreneurs are successful (profit), resources are allocated to their most valuable uses. The Hayekian case against central planning emphasizes the difficulty a central planning agency has in acquiring knowledge that is dispersed and tacit knowledge. But even here, the knowledge is knowledge of relative scarcities of resources, of the supply of and demand for these resources.

But is this the reason the legislature has difficulty knowing what the optimum copyright term (and scope, etc.) should be? No. There are, instead, several other, and far more fundamental, reasons legislators cannot be expected to get the “right” copyright term. First, there is the political process itself: entrenched interests like Disney, Hollywood, the music industry, and so on, push Congress to keep ratcheting up copyright scope and penalties and term, not because of any finding that it is optimum, but for political reasons (which Brito acknowledges, in referencing “the public choice pressures at work”; in observing that “humility and restraint are not qualities readily found in the modern Congress”; in observing that “The process by which the terms and scope of copyright are decided is a political one” prone to “rent-seeking”).

Second, in the case of allocation of scarce resources we know that each resource has an exclusive use and can only be used for use project A or B. If the resource is used for the “wrong” plan then there is waste. Thus, there is a need to have some system that permits optimum allocation of the resource. This is the function of a free market in which private property rights are respected and money is used for calculation. But the copyright monopoly is justified by its proponents as stimulating the production of creative works—essentially, patterns of information, knowledge—that have some “value” to society that is greater than the costs imposed on the economy by the copyright system. Information patterns are not scarce resources. It is difficult to imagine how the price system, even in the Hayekian conception, which is useful in helping allocate scarce resources to their most efficient uses by overcoming the knowledge problem faced by central planners, provides information about how much value a copyright monopoly generates and how much cost it imposes.

Tabarrok’s Innovation vs. patent strength curve

Third, the idea that legislators face a knowledge problem in knowing where the optimum is for copyright strength and term, relative to costs it imposes and benefits it allegedly generates, presupposes that there is an optimum. But there is no reason whatsoever to presuppose this. (See Tabarrok: Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin.) In the analogous case of subsidies for renewable energy, Brito notes: “It’s likely offering too little or too much”, as if zero is the obviously wrong choice even here. Why? Zero is the right choice for both renewable energy subsidies and for the subsidy of copyright. In the case of renewable energy subsidies, at least the subsidies likely increase renewable energy R&D and technology, since money is poured into it. This still does not mean it’s worth it, since renewable energy tech is developed at the expense of other technology or projects that are now unaffordable since tax dollars were siphoned away to stimulate renewable energy. But in the copyright case, there is no reason to believe that there is more creative work on net stimulated because of the copyright system in the first place; there is certainly good reason to believe that the patent system decreases net innovation. At the very least, the copyright and patent systems lead to severe distortion of their respective fields: culture and creative works, innovation and technology (Destructive Creation; Leveraging IP).

Imagine a similar approach being taken to the prison sentences being imposed for marijuana use. The prohibitionist might say that zero penalty is “obviously” “too low,” but he might also admit that torture and the death penalty for possession of an ounce of pot is obviously “too high”; thus, there is some optimum “in between.” It might be difficult to know what this optimum penalty is: is it a $100 fine? A year in prison? Ten years in prison? And then the prohibitionist could say, “Well, because of the Hayekian knowledge problem, it’s hard to know what the optimal penalty should be. But we know it’s between zero (legalization) and the death penalty; given this; a seemingly-arbitrary 5 year prison sentence is “closer to optimal”, or “better,” than a zero penalty or capital punishment. But the reason you can’t find the “right” punishment is that there is no optimum; or, rather, the optimal punishment is zero. But even if we concede that there should be some finite (non-zero, non-“infinite,” i.e. capital punishment) penalty for marijuana possession, and even if we concede we cannot know what the optimal amount of punishment should be, it is not because of the knowledge problem. For how could the most efficient free market imaginable tell us the “right” or most efficient amount of punishment to impose? The free market is efficient in the sense that it permits the efficient allocation of scarce resources. It is this ideal situation that the “knowledge problem” faced by central planners is contrasted to. What has this to do with coming up with a punishment of people who are engaged in a victimless crime?

And it is similar in the case of copyright, since there is no reason to think that there is a curve with a peak. Brito writes: “we also don’t know that zero is the right amount of copyright”. Well what kind of argument is this? If you don’t have some kind of proof that some copyright does increase social welfare, then why have it at all? Utilitarians seem to admit copyright puts limits on speech and imposes various costs on individuals. They believe this cost is justified if it leads to net gains in cultural innovation. But they have no evidence that it does. Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them to show that their utilitarian claims are true? Until they do, shouldn’t we refrain from imposing copyright on society? Just consider all the economic and societal interventions Congress could engage in if it could say “well, we are not sure this law is optimal or producing good results, but on the other hand, we don’t know that not having the law is optimal either”! How is this a justification for having a law and then trusting Congress to tweak it? If Brito is right that Congress cannot know what the optimal copyright term is, and cannot even know that zero is not the right term … why have copyright at all, even on utilitarian grounds?

Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve

The truth is that, as in the case of drug prohibition, the “optimal” amount of copyright is zero. This is true on both moral and empirical grounds. Moral: since copyright infringes on property rights (see Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes); empirical, since there is no evidence that patent or copyright lead to any net increase in innovation or artistic creation at all, much less an increase that is greater than the costs of such a scheme (and it is undeniable that IP distorts innovation and the creative fields) (see The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright; also Legal Scholars: Thumbs Down on Patent and Copyright). If the “curve” is monotically downward sloping—meaning that the greater the copyright protection, the worse off we are both in rights terms and also in economic terms—then the reason legislators cannot find its optimum is not because of the knowledge problem that plagues central planners trying to efficiently allocate scarce resources, but because there is no peak to find. But they truth is they are not trying to find the optimum; they do not even care. They keep ratcheting copyright terms upwards, enhancing penalties, increasing copyright scope, pushing it onto other countries, at the behest of Big Content special interests. They do not pretend to have the faintest clue that there even is an optimum, much less that they know, or that anyone can know, what it is.

(Update: Mises himself, a utilitarian of sorts (more of a consequentialist, I think) in the field of political ethics, also had a few murky statements on IP, which I note in Mises on Intellectual Property. An Austrian economist friend observed to me that:

The … thing that struck me as I read [your post] was Mises’s view in Human Action (pp. 657-659). He, too, claims that there is no optimum with respect to the configuration of patents and copyrights, but that different configurations of IP render different patterns of resource use. Each pattern of resource use is optimal for a given configuration of IP. But there is no way to compare the pattern of resource use under one configuration with the resources use under a different configuration. This seems to be a generalizable principle for Mises, that the configuration of property rights lies outside the market’s economizing process of resource use and, in fact, is a requisite for it.

In other words, the problem that plagues central economic planning, whether it’s characterized as Mises’s calculation problem or as Hayek’s knowledge problems, and which do not pose a problem for a genuine free market order, is not the reason a legislature cannot determine whether or not to have copyright or what form it is to take.)

Finally: the fundamental reason it’s impossible to compute these things in the first place is the subjective and intersubjectively incomparable and ordinal, not cardinal, nature of value. Not to mention the problem with counterfactuals and fact that there are many unseen, undeterminable costs to any such regulatory scheme.

Utilitarian scholars who argue the copyright system should be reformed because we are on the wrong side of the peak, but that there is a peak and that it’s possible for a corrupt legislature of a criminal state to find the optimum, or even to want to find it, are wrong. The optimum amount of copyright is the amount that is compatible with freedom and property rights: zero.

1. See Patent Lawyers Who Oppose Patent Law [update: this is a slight overstatement; Bell is not completely against IP, but is for fairly radical reform]; also Reason.TV: Too Much Copyright; Bell’s draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good; The Great Debate on Intellectual Property, in Cato Policy Report (January/February 2002); Tom Bell: Copyright Erodes Property?; Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property; other copyright writing by Bell. [↩]
2. See Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP (Libertopia 2012).  [↩]
3. Kindle Locations 2001-2007). Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Kindle Edition. [↩]

This is the opening of “Five Reforms for Copyright,” by law professor Tom Bell (one of the handful of IP attorneys to publicly oppose IP),¹ his chapter in the recent book Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess:

ON NOVEMBER 28, 2009, police arrested a 22-year-old Chicago woman named Samantha Tumpach, jailed her for two nights, and charged her with “criminal use of a motion picture exhibition”—a felony offense punishable with up to three years in prison. Her crime? She had captured two brief clips of The Twilight Saga: New Moon while recording her family’s surprise birthday celebration for her sister, who had come to the theater to watch the film.² Tumpach copied under four minutes of the movie in total and obviously had no intention of making a bootleg for resale. “You can hear me talking the whole time,” she explained.³ Officials eventually dropped the charges, but the damage had been done. Tumpach brought suit for malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and defamation.⁴ Her complaint did not, however, name the ultimate cause of her distress: a copyright regime that has grown too big and too powerful.

1. See Patent Lawyers Who Oppose Patent Law; also Reason.TV: Too Much Copyright; Bell’s draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good; The Great Debate on Intellectual Property, in Cato Policy Report (January/February 2002); Tom Bell: Copyright Erodes Property?; Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property; other copyright writing by Bell. [↩]
2. Dan Rozek, “Woman Arrested for Trying to Record ‘Twilight’ on Digital Camera,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 2, 2009. [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩]
4. Aliyah Shahid, “Twilight Taper, Samantha Tumpach, Sues Illinois Theater after Taping Twilight Saga: New Moon,” New York Daily News, June 29, 2010. [↩]

From C4SS:

How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition

Posted by Kevin Carson on Jan 4, 2013 in Left-Libertarian – Classics • Comments (1)The following article was written by Kevin Carson and published by The Freeman.

From Slashdot (h/t Wendy McElroy). For related posts about the interrelationship between patent and copyright, for example how Microsoft uses monopoly profits garnered from software copyright to fund the acquisition of patents that it can use to further hammer competition, see Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies;  Apple vs. Microsoft: Which Benefits more from Intellectual Property?;  Patent Cross-Licensing Creates Barriers to Entry; Google’s Schmidt on the Patent-Caused Smartphone Oligopoly; The Microsoft-Apple Gesture Oligopoly; Nortel Patents Sold for $4.5 Billion to Consortium Which Includes Apple.

So, now, companies can use copyright profits to acquire patents which help them enforce their copyrights.

New Sony Patent Blocks Second-hand Games

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 04, @08:09AM
from the one-console-to-play-them-all dept.

silentbrad writes in with a story about a Sony patent that would block the playing of second-hand games.“… the patent application was filed on 9 December 2012 by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, and will work by linking individual game discs to a user’s account without requiring a network connection meaning any future attempt to use this disc on another user’s console won’t work. The patent explains that games will come with contactless tags that will be read by your console in much the same way as modern bank cards. When a disc is first used, the disc ID and player ID will be stored on the tag. Every time the disc is used in future, the tag will check if the two ID’s match up and, if not, then the disc won’t work. The document goes on to explain that such a device is part of Sony’s ongoing efforts to deter second-hand games sales, and is a far simpler solution than always-on DRM or passwords. It’s worth noting that Sony has not confirmed the existence of the device, and the patent doesn’t state what machine it will be used in, with later paragraphs also mentioning accessories and peripherals. … There’s also the issue of what happens should your console break and need replacing, or if you have more than one console. Will the games be linked to your PSN account, meaning they can still be used, or the console, meaning an entire new library of titles would need to be purchased?”

Reposted from Distro of the Libertarian Left:

Intellectual Property is Theft!

Intellectual Property is Theft!: How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition

Originally published as How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition.

Kevin Carson (2009)

Copying is not theft. Monopoly is.

Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed by more than one person at a time. Intellectual property, on the other hand, creates artificial scarcity that does not naturally exist and can only be enforced by invading real, tangible property and preventing the owner from using it in ways that violate the supposed intellectual property rights of others …. Intellectual property also serves as a bulwark for planned obsolecence and high-overhead production.

Corporations rely on increasingly authoritarian legislation to capture value from propriety information…. Privileged, state-connected economic interests are becoming increasingly dependent on such controls. But unfortunately for them, such controls are becoming increasingly unenforceable thanks to Bittorrent, strong encryption, and proxy servers…. This has profoundly weakened corporate hierarchies in the information and entertainment industries. In this environment, the only thing standing between the old information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their so-called intellectual property rights.… Without intellectual property, in any industry where the basic production equipment is widely affordable, and bottom-up networking renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative production will replace the old managerial hierarchies.

 

Introduced May 2011.

Update: See Are anti-IP patent attorneys hypocrites?, collecting various posts about this topic.

Update: see J.P. Chandler’s Legal Foundations of a Free Society

***

A Romanian translation of my monograph Against Intellectual Property, Împotriva Proprietăţii Intelectuale, was recently published. It was with my blessing, but my permission was not needed, since I had released it under a Creative Commons-Attribution Only (CC-BY) license. I would release it under CC0 if this was possible and legally effective. But it’s not. (See Let’s Make Copyright Opt-OUT; Copyright is very sticky!)

Quite often some IP proponent will try the smartass retort, “Oh yeah? Well if you don’t believe in copyright I guess you won’t mind if I slap my name on your book and make a million bucks selling it, hunh?!” I mean, if the book would sell that well, why haven’t I made a million on it…. Why does the pirate think he can profit where I couldn’t? These retorts are never serious, and never coherent. Some of them imply the author is a hypocrite for merely having a copyright in his work, even though it’s automatic and impossible to get rid of. Some of them imply it’s hypocritical even to sell one’s book if one does not believe in copyright, even if the author doesn’t mind others copying it. They seem to think that if they just make this challenge, they can prove that copyright is justified. It’s bizarre. Others argue that I’m a hypocrite because I’m a patent lawyer, and oppose IP—and that if N. Stephan Kinsella is a hypocrite, why, that proves that IP is valid! QED! (See Patent Lawyers Who Don’t Toe the Line Should Be Punished!; Rothbard on Lawyers, Accountants, Locks and Safes–and patent lawyers?; Are anti-IP patent attorneys hypocrites?; An Anti-Patent Patent Attorney? Oh my Gawd!; The Most Libertarian IP Work.)

The latest example of the smart-ass approach involves the aforementioned Romanian translation. Someone took the translation, stripped off my name, and reposted it on another site, with an Intel-Inside like logo saying “Commie Inside.” Below is the first part of it, with automatic translation from Google Translate:

Against intellectual property

Today I translated this pamphlet in support of communism. You can contact me at the address communistinside@privateproperty.org for account details where you can make cash donations (fiat), the physical address where you can send donations and more money (gold), or the destination bitcoin 48NDR15end1glt6flnXfty2isd3LZw4jmK2saQ, noting that when bitcoin system will be broken and their infinite replication will be possible, funds will return to your property (to everyone), obviously the quotations bitcoin today (12/30/2012). Text can be purchased in physical form extremely rare autographed poster for $ 100 (one hundred) RON (edition 2012), Euro, U.S. Dollars $ $ $, Swiss francs or gold grams choice, do not offer credit . I thank Karl Marx brother Groucho idea and for a sense of humor. This text is original.

He seems to think he will anger me by taking my name off, by asking for donations, by calling me a commie, and by dishonestly stating that his “text is original.” Why would I care? Do as you please, Mr. Pro-IP Romanian. I’m happy to call your bluff. I hope you make some money off of this, but I doubt you will. All you did was impose a cost on yourself (time, effort) for no purpose whatsoever, since you made no point at all, and put forth no coherent defense of IP whatsoever. If you are trying to show what horrible things would happen in a copyright-free world … you failed, because this harms no one.

This is not the first time something similar has happened. For example, as I noted in Russell Madden’s “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”, [continue reading…]

Ed. note: Usually liability for copyright is “direct”—as a result of actions by a person that amount to copyright infringement. There are also types of “secondary” liability, such as “contributory” or “vicarious” infringement. Under the doctrine of contributory infringement, “One who knowingly induces, causes or materially contributes to copyright infringement, by another but who has not committed or participated in the infringing acts him or herself, may be held liable as a contributory infringer if he or she had knowledge, or reason to know, of the infringement.” As for vicarious liability: “A person may be held liable for the infringing acts committed by another if he or she had the right and ability to control the infringing activities and had a direct financial interest in such activities.”

Ms. McElroy’s article below discusses an attempt to expand copyright liability by adding a new type of “secondary” liability: negligent. But as noted in an EFF article cited by McElroy, arguments for the negligence theory of copyright liability  

ignore[]  traditional theories in favor of an unprecedented claim based on negligence and a 1932 case about boats.

It’s a creative theory. It’s also wrong.

First, there is no negligence theory of copyright liability. Zip, none, nada. Only direct, vicarious and contributory (which includes inducement) ….

This theory also ignores the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

—Ed.

The Negligence Theory of Copyright Liability

By Wendy McElroy

A new business model has emerged from America’s litigious nature: copyright trolling. A copyright troll is someone who uses copyright law in an opportunistic manner for no other reason than to make money through lawsuits or the threat thereof. After notifying an alleged infringer of impending litigation, the troll offers to settle out of court for a sum that is often less than the cost of defending a lawsuit.

The issue of trolling is distinct from the question of whether or not protecting intellectual property (IP) is a valid function of law. Arguably, those who support the legal protection of ideas – copyright and patent – should be more alarmed than those who argue against IP. Trolls typically use an overly broad interpretation of the law to extort pre-court profits.¹ The process results in bad publicity and occasional court decisions that are unfavorable for copyright enforcers. It also provides ammunition to anti-IP advocates. They can point to trolling as a reflection of the injustice and harm caused by IP laws.

One overly broad interpretation of IP law is currently being pushed to the forefront: the negligence theory of copyright liability. [continue reading…]

1. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504. [↩]

I was a guest on Jeff Berwick’s Anarchast (ep. 51, 36 min), released today. We discussed anarchy and how such a society might be reached; the basis and origin of law and property rights and its relationship to libertarian principles, and implications for legislation versus law and the legitimacy of intellectual property; also, utilitarianism, legal positivism, scientism, and logical positivism. Description from the Anarchist site below; MP3 download. For more background on IP, see the C4SIF Resources page; on legislation vs. private law, see The (State’s) Corruption of (Private) Law.

 

[KOL187]

Anarchast Ep. 51 with Stephan Kinsella

 

Jeff Berwick in Acapulco, Mexico, talks with Stephan Kinsella in Houston, Texas

Topics include:

– Stephan explains how he became an anarchist and some of the books that pointed him in the right direction including
– The Fountainhead (http://amzn.to/VnZwSL)
– Stephan is a practicing attorney that applies his legal knowledge with his libertarian philosophy
– He believes a free law society will only come about if a majority of people agree in libertarian principles
– Law is defined as a concrete body of rules that permits a group of people that want to be able to cooperate to be able to do so
– Jeff asks if it is necessary for everyone to agree with libertarian philosophy in order to have a free society
– Stephan thinks that a majority of people already have libertarian principles but have not been educated correctly in constancy
– He is more optimistic that most because he sees more people not accepting central planning than in the past
– Jeff thinks that there could be a backlash against free market ideas during a financial collapse where the people believe capitalism is to blame
– Stephan hopes that people will slowly find the state to be irrelevant and this will bring about a free society
– Jeff thinks that there will be a financial collapse that will make this transition unpredictable
– Stephan is an expert in libertarian Intellectual Property theory
– He explains the principles of property law
– What most people think is law today is not what law would be based on in a libertarian society
– Stephan explains the problem with legal and economic positivism
– The proper libertarian view is to be opposed to making law through legislation
– The problem with intellectual property is that you are able to use the force of the government against someone who has not aggressed against you
– Stephan explains the problems with the utilitarian Intellectual property justification
– The intellectual property system forces everyone to participate even if they don’t agree with it

Stephan is doing astounding work in libertarian legal theory you can find more in formation on his sites

http://www.stephankinsella.com/

https://c4sif.org/

For more information on The Dollar Vigilante, go to http://dollarvigilante.com. For more information on Jeff Berwick’s anarchist enclave, Galt’s Gulch Chile, go to http://galtsgulchchile.com. And, for more on the anarchist enclave in Acapulco go to http://dollarvigilante.com/acacondos. Come on down and be a guest on Anarchast and live relatively free amongst other anarchists.

Source: http://financialsurvivalnetwork.com/2012/12/anarchast-ep-51-with-stephan-kinsella/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=anarchast-ep-51-with-stephan-kinsella

 

 

• Stephan Kinsella, “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract,” Papinian Press Working Paper #1 (Sep. 7, 2024)

[Update: Oddly, as called to my attention by my friend Dick Clark, LeFevre has some quasi-pro-IP comments on the copyright page of his book This Bread Is Mine, which seem incompatible with his anti-IP thoughts noted below. Not sure if his thinking changed on this, or he was just confused.]¹

I’ve noted previously the anti-IP writings of earlier libertarian and proto-libertarian thinkers, such as Benjamin Tucker² and William Leggett.³ Among more modern libertarian thinkers, some of the earliest opponents of IP included Konkin, McElroy, and Rothbard. (See my posts The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism and The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism.)

Robert LeFevre, in The Philosophy of Ownership (1966), also evinced great wisdom on the topic of intellectual property, though it is not without error. But there are so many great insights in this short passage, e.g. “If an idea is so precious that you do not want others to use it, perfect security is possible by refusing to discuss it,” which reminds me of Benjamin Tucker’s thoughts on IP, discussed in Wendy McElroy’s Copyright and Patent in Benjamin Tucker’s periodical Liberty:

Tucker and the other contributors to Liberty who rejected intellectual property as a natural right were not hostile to copyright or patent enforced by contract. Nor did they deny a man’s absolute right to exclusively use whatever ideas he privately held. The point at which this exclusivity was lost, however, came when the idea was communicated without the protection of contract. Tucker insisted that a man who wrote in the public realm abandoned all claim to his property just as a man who spoke publicly abandoned claim to his spoken words.

The natural-rights side contended that the law must presume something to be property so long as it was valuable. If an idea had value, then it was presumed to be property whether publicly expressed or not. By contrast, Tucker advanced a theory of abandonment. That is, if a man publicized an idea without the protection of a contract, then he was presumed to be abandoning his exclusive claim to that idea.

If a man scatters money in the street, he does not thereby formally relinquish title to it … but those who pick it up are thereafter considered the rightful owners…. Similarly a man who reproduces his writings by thousands and spreads them everywhere voluntarily abandons his right of privacy and those who read them … no more put themselves by the act under any obligation in regard to the author than those who pick up scattered money put themselves under obligations to the scatterer.

Perhaps the essence of Tucker’s approach to intellectual property was best expressed when he exclaimed, “You want your invention to yourself? Then keep it to yourself.”

LeFevre also relies on a distinction between “tangible” and “intangible” in his analysis, one which I have used myself in previous writing but now think is better expressed in terms or materiality or rivalrousness. For example, in Against Intellectual Property, I sometimes used “tangible” to indicate scarce resources that can be subject to property rights. Hardy Bouillon argues that it might be more precise to focus on the difference between material vs. non-material goods rather than tangible vs. non-tangible goods, as the touchstone of things subject to property rights. As Bouillon writes:

Though some speak exclusively of tangible and non-tangible goods, I prefer to talk of material and immaterial goods. … The point about material goods is not that they are tangible, for some are not. For instance, atoms and many other small material units are not tangible; they are identifiable only indirectly, though this does not prevent us from calling them material.⁴ [continue reading…]

1. The copyright page to that book states: “THIS BREAD IS MINE is private property.
   .
   Readers are welcome to enter and browse to their content. It is regretted that the only way open to author or publisher to designate this book as private property is through the government copyright office. Essentially, the same chore could be performed by any good insurance firm or some other free market establishment. Since none such is in existence, and since it is deemed advisable to designate this book as private property, no choice exists for author or publisher. The book must be copyrighted, or it must be placed in that twilight realm where ownership is in doubt.
   .
   Perhaps in Some future and more enlightened time authors and publishers may find a way to designate their efforts as private property without invoking the taxing powers of the government and without calling upon the police powers to hold the world at bay with the threat of violence.” [↩]
2. Copyright and Patent in Benjamin Tucker’s periodical Liberty [↩]
3. William Leggett on Intellectual Property. [↩]
4. Hardy Bouillon, “A Note on Intellectual Property and Externalities,” Mises Daily (Oct. 27, 2009), previously published in Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., Mises Institute, 2009). [↩]

From the WSJ. Congrats, Objectivists, utilitarians, and other pro-IP libertarians. A high-tech firm is persecuted by Carnegie Mellon University. Perversely, Carnegie was represented by K&L Gates, which was founded by the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates—it’s perverse, given the billions made and monopoly position of Microsoft which is partly a result of the copyright and patent monopolies Microsoft has, courtesy Uncle Sam (see Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies; Apple vs. Microsoft: Which Benefits more from Intellectual Property?;  Patent Cross-Licensing Creates Barriers to Entry; Google’s Schmidt on the Patent-Caused Smartphone Oligopoly; The Microsoft-Apple Gesture Oligopoly; Nortel Patents Sold for $4.5 Billion to Consortium Which Includes Apple;  other posts on Microsoft).

Jury Finds Against Marvell in Patent Case

A jury in Pittsburgh on Wednesday found that chip maker Marvell Technology GroupLtd. MRVL -10.42% should pay nearly $1.17 billion for infringing patents held by Carnegie Mellon University.

If the jury’s decision stands, the award would rank among the largest to date in a patent case.

The university sued Marvell in 2009 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, alleging that the company infringed patents covering technology associated with “noise predictive detection,” which is used in data-storage systems.

Marvell, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., is known for chips used in data-storage applications.

Read more>>

Yes, Microsoft has patented hugging and shaking hands—well, sort of. See this Geekwire post (h/t Wendy McElroy):

Microsoft patents long-distance virtual handshakes, hugs

December 22, 2012 at 11:43 pm by Todd Bishop 17 Comments

It can be tough to stay connected over long distances. Yes, there’s phone calls, texting, Facebook, Twitter, IM, video chatting and everything else. But what if you could give virtual hugs to each other using battery-powered, Internet-enabled pillows?

Microsoft just patented that … and more.The company has been awarded a patent on “Force-feedback within telepresence” — the idea of using interactive, connected devices to bring physical interactions to long-distance communications. For example, the patent says, “Hugs, hand-shakes, grabbing documents, writing on a whiteboard, and the like can be detected so a specific feedback force response is implemented.”

Force feedback is common in video game controllers these days, and this idea of extending it to long-distance interactions isn’t new. For example, researchers from Carnegie Mellon in 2003 presented a paper (PDF) called “The Hug: An Exploration of Robotic Form For Intimate Communication.” Here is one of the scenarios they described, referencing the picture above.

“Mary lives in Chicago and her granddaughter, Chrissy, lives in Pittsburgh. They use The Hug to stay connected. One evening while sitting in her living room, Mary hears her, Hug’s melody and sees a warm glow in its belly, signalling that someone is sending her a hug. She picks up her Hug, squeezes its left paw and says “Hello.” She hears her granddaughter Chrissy respond “Hello Grandma.” As Mary and Chrissy chat, Mary strokes the back of her Hug, causing Chrissy’s Hug to vibrate softly (Figure 2). As time passes, their Hugs begin to slowly warm, radiating a comfortable heat. Once they are done chatting, Mary says goodbye, and squeezes her Hug’s right paw. The Hug plays another melody and glows, signalling that this hug has ended.”

The wording of Microsoft’s patent isn’t anywhere near that warm and cuddly, but it covers that type of thing and more. For example, the patent describes a handshake scenario: If someone on one end of the line shakes a device forcefully, that shake is felt with more force by the person holding a counterpart device on the other end of the line.

Read more>>

My Against Intellectual Property has so far been translated into Czech, Georgian, German, Italian, Portugese, and Spanish and, now, into Romanian, as Împotriva Proprietăţii Intelectuale. These are all linked at my Translations page, which includes translations of various of my publications into thirteen languages.