Nice post at C4SS by Kevin Carson:

Copyright Argument Implications: Is Competition Theft?

Posted by Kevin Carson on Jun 3, 2011 in Commentary • Comments (0)

A prominent libertarian author recently issued a challenge — in rather emotional terms — to a prominent libertarian opponent of “intellectual property.”  Never mind who — actually there’s been more than one such recent exchange between prominent libertarian figures, with almost identical arguments.

The author asked whether it should be considered theft to reprint their book — with their name on it — without permission.  Doing so, this author argued, would deprive them of a certain amount of potential profit on the sale of their own book.  And in the process, it would turn that portion of their labor in writing the book into slave labor.

First of all, I’m skeptical of just how negative an impact the abolition of copyright would actually have on authors’ income.   In most cases, where the author serves a smaller niche market and charges only a modest markup over printing costs, it’s doubtful whether it would be worth it to undercut them.

Actually setting up a book for print involves considerable inconvenience.   If you take a facsimile PDF document of someone else’s book and set it up as an on-demand print job, you’ve not only got to charge a price that covers the basic cost of the on-demand publisher’s services plus the value of your time and trouble, but also overcome the visibility of a preexisting distribution outlet already associated with the author’s name — one that probably comes up on the first page of Google or Amazon results.  So why would most people go to the trouble of searching a POD equivalent of The Pirate Bay for your book, and trying to figure out from the listings whether it was complete, whether it had the same pagination as the standard edition (important if you want to quote it in scholarly work), and so forth — all just to save a buck or two?

There are considerable rents attaching to the time and trouble of setting up a book for publication, as well as for authentication and convenience.  So long as the author doesn’t get greedy and charge a premium significantly over the amount of this rent, they should be relatively safe.

The main effect of abolishing copyright in music and written work, I think, would be to wash out the excessive name-value premiums added to the work of the big blockbuster creators, and the middleman profits of the publishing and record industry.

Second, the idea that someone has a right to a certain rate of profit — and that market competition which deprives them of this rate of return is “theft” — is ludicrous.  It’s as idiotic as the claim by Property Values Nazis that their alleged right not to have the value of their house lowered trumps my right to have a clothesline or compost pile on my own property, or to park my car on the grass.

Nina Paley caricatured this kind of argument beautifully in one of her “Eunice and Mimi” cartoons.  EUNICE:  “Copying a song instead of buying a copy is stealing!”  MIMI: “Doing  for yourself what you could pay someone else to do is stealing!”  BOTH:  “Competition is theft!”

If anything, the “slave labor” accusation should be on the other side.

“Intellectual property,” like tariffs and all other monopolies, is a barrier to the free movement of labor and capital into certain legally defined areas of production, which has the effect of maintaining artificially high prices that would not exist under free market competition.  “Intellectual property,” in our corporate global economy, performs exactly the same function the tariff did in the old national industrial economies:  It regulates the conditions under which one is allowed to produce a particular good for a particular market, so that the beneficiaries are able to charge a monopoly premium.  Rather than erecting territorial barriers around particular nations like the tariff, “intellectual property” builds walls around global corporations.

What’s more, erecting barriers to the conditions under which labor can produce a certain good gives the licensed producers of that good an artificial degree of control over the terms on which labor is employed in that particular form of production — thus shifting the balance of bargaining power away from labor and toward the employer.

So it would be far more plausible to argue that the extra hours we work to pay the copyright or patent premium on a good, or the extra hours we must work for the same income in producing that good because one producer has a state-conferred monopoly on hiring labor to produce it, are slavery.

As noted on The Escaist: Apple Patents Anti-Piracy Technology. ‘Nuff said.

An article in The Register, Microsoft’s patents shakedown betrays spirit of Gates: Innovative products, not intellectual property, rule, discusses Microsoft’s use of its patent portfolio to wrangle royalties and license fees from others. So Microsoft built its billions and monopolistic empire on state copyright, and is now increasingly relying on state patent grants to grasp for more.

As noted in The Register article US state bans Netflix, Napster password sharing, the evil RIAA has been successful in lobbying Tennessee to make password sharing “for online content-subscription services such as Netflix, Napster, and SuperPass” a crime. Sharing one’s password in this manner is the digital age equivalent of loaning a friend a book or inviting a few friends over to watch a movie on DVD. And it could be handled contractually by the service provider, in any case. Why make it a crime? As the Register notes,

It’s now just as illegal for you to give a friend your Netflix password so he can stream Casablanca as it is to, say, tap into someone’s cable TV line, walk out of a restaurant without paying, sneak into a movie, or use someone’s car or “other moveable property” without their permission.

The RIAA was of course behind this. And they won’t stop with Tennessee, or at the state level:

The RIAA has also been pushing for increased penalties for illegal content streaming on a national level. Last month, for example, it expressed support for a US Senate bill, S. 978, which adds streaming to illegal uploading and downloading as felony-status criminal activities.

I have a feeling that if the Founders could have seen how the experimental copyright and patent clause of the Constitution would have turned out …. it would not be in there.

From Skip Oliva, on the Mises blog:

The Copyright Cartel — aka the Motion Picture Association of America — was back before Congress yesterday demanding more subsidies for Hollywood’s business model. Michael O’Leary, the MPAA’s head lobbyist, demanded the House Judiciary Committee expand the definition of “felony” copyright infringement to include streaming of content over the Internet (as opposed to mere downloading, which is already classified as a felony). O’Leary repeatedly emphasized the need for more copyright subsidies to protect Hollywood’s essential “creativity”:

In addressing the subject of illegal streaming, it is important to note what this debate is not about. It is not a debate between technology and innovation and the creation of content. That is a false choice raised by too many people. This issue is really about favoring legitimacy over theft – about promoting and preserving creativity and production and punishing people that seek to profit through stealing the hard work of others. Technology and content should agree on that point.

Streaming technology is an emerging way to deliver content and information to consumers the world over, and it is a technology being embraced by our industry – more than 352 legitimate business ventures such as Hulu, Crackle, Netflix and HBO GO use streaming to deliver their products today.

The activity that is the subject of today’s hearing is not innovation, it is theft. Streaming technology is rapidly becoming the most popular mechanism for transmitting stolen content on rogue sites. Users have instant access to illegally distributed movies and television shows without the risk or inconvenience of sometimes lengthy downloads.

O’Leary really does a hatchet-job on the definition of “innovation.” According to him, it’s not innovation when people develop new technologies that provide “instant access” to information, but it is innovation when the federal government threatens to imprison people who copy — not “steal” — information that was previously released to the public. When O’Leary says he favors “legitimacy over theft,” what he really means is that he favors preserving the status quo over innovation. He wants the government to subsidize an obsolete business model — and that is what copyright ultimately is, a business model — while falsely presenting himself as a defender of the new.

Let’s consider the canard that copyright is necessary to protect “creativity.” O’Leary said Congress must criminalize non-MPAA-approved internet streaming as part of “promoting and preserving creativity” and to mitigate the “the negative impact that [copying] has on the lives of our creative community.” This would be the same “creative community” — the major studios that compose the MPAA — that is on pace to produce a record number of sequels in 2011, as noted back in January by Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo:

Sequels (including prequels and spin-offs) comprise over a fifth of the currently scheduled nationwide releases, tallying 27. Last year, there were 19, and the previous high was 24 in 2003.

[ … ]

The majority of sequels are repeats of the last two years: Eight movies follow 2009 movies, while six follow 2010 movies. Sequels to 2006 movies are the next best represented at five. The longest time between sequels will be The Muppets‘ 12 years, followed by Scream 4‘s 11 years, Rise of the Apes‘s ten years and around eight years each for Spy Kids 4 and Johnny English Reborn. None of those are a match for the waits for last year’s Tron Legacy (over 28 years) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (nearly 23 years).

Just this past weekend, the top three grossing films were sequels — “The Hangover, Part II,” “Kung Fu Panda 2,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean [IV]: On Stranger Tides.” The top ten also included the fifth film in the “Fast & the Furious” series and one film (“Thor”) based on a comic that debuted in 1962.

Now sequels don’t necessarily mean there’s a lack of “creativity,” but this recent sample size certainly suggests that is the case. I’ll note here Roger Ebert’s review of “The Hangover, Part II,” which, again, was the top-grossing film in North America last weekend:

If you saw [“The Hangover”] (which grossed $485 million, so you may have), there’s not much need for me to describe the plot this time. It’s the same story. Director Todd Phillips seems to have taken “The Hangover” screenplay and moved it laterally from Las Vegas to Bangkok while retaining the same sequence of scenes: Call to bewildered bride to be, flashback to wedding plans, ill-advised bachelor party, four friends waking up with terminal hangovers in unfamiliar hotel room, ominous signs of debauchery, desperate quest to discover what happened, etc.

It may be the same story, but it still managed to gross over $200 million worldwide in about a week. This suggests audiences aren’t all that enamored with “creativity.” There are plenty of highly original films that never find a commercial audience. In truth, movies are no different then any other product. Customers often value consistency over originality. In any city you will find high-end restaurants that will serve you a $15 gourmet hamburger; you’ll also find a ton of McDonalds and Burger Kings.

The point is that copyright has nothing to do with creativity or originality. If anything, the original idea has no use for copyright. The original idea often struggles to find a place in the market. Once an idea takes hold, however, there’s a natural desire within the market to emulate — or copy — that idea to adapt it for other uses. This is where copyright comes in; it tries to stop the creative process at the source of the first idea.

This makes the entire process more bureaucratic and expensive. Consider those 27 movie sequels. Sequels are not a cost-saving measure. They are usually far more expensive than the preceding films. Of the 20 most expensive films to produce in US history, 16 were sequels or remakes. This is partially due to copyright. Consider the third “Pirates of the Caribbean” film released by Disney, reportedly the most expensive film ever made at around $300 million. Imagine what would happen if Disney couldn’t legally prevent other studios from copying the film. I don’t mean Internet downloads of Disney’s product. I mean what if another studio could have gone out, hired the same cast, and produced their own film under the same title. If there was actual competition to produce these films, the costs would almost certainly go down, and there’d be a much higher chance someone actually develops an original script. In every non-IP-based market, competition breeds innovation, which breeds lower costs in the long run. Only in IP-dominant markets — i.e., movies and pharmaceuticals — do costs continue to rise despite a lack of innovation.

What the MPAA wants is to bring technology down to the level of the movie industry. It wants government cartels, higher costs, and less consumer choice. Anyone who defends that as “promoting and preserving creativity and production” is simply lying.

From the heroic Mike Masnick at TechDirt:

Talking About Why The PROTECT IP Act Is Bad News…

from the talking-heads dept

Yesterday, I went on The Alyona Show on RTTV (which I’ve appeared on a few times in the past) to discuss some of the problems in the PROTECT IP Act. Not much new if you’ve been following the debate, but glad to see that some TV programs are concerned about this:

For more on COICA/PROTECT IP and related legislation, see my posts Son of COICA: New Copyright Bill Introduced; Patent Reform is Here! O Joy!; Pirate-slaying censorship bill, COICA, gets unanimous support; The Mountain of IP Legislation, and Masnick’s posts The Senators Who Say Merely Linking To Certain Sites Should Be A Felony and Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos. As the latter notes, under provisions of the proposed PROTECT IP Act,

If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link… you could be facing five years in jail. This is, of course, ridiculous, and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand. Should it really be a criminal act to embed a YouTube video, even if you don’t know it was infringing…? This could create a massive chilling effect to the very useful service YouTube provides in letting people embed videos.

Of course, the state wants to impose a chilling effect on the use of the technology like cameras, encryption, YouTube, that threatens its control by helping citizens communicate and expose the state’s crimes. I believe in days past, say, before the Internet, IP was bad but it was not even in the top 20 or 30 of harmful state policies. But nowadays I believe it is in the top six most evil and harmful state laws, institutions, and policies:

• the fed/central banking/fiat money
• war
• income tax
• government schools
• drug war
• IP

IP is extremely insidious because, unlike the drug war, tax, or war, it is held out as a type of property right. Thus, in its name, the state can spy, fine, and jail, or even enlist private citizens to enforce these laws on their own behalf, as mini-state agents. Truly, we are becoming an IPolice State.

Update/Related post: Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?

How to Slow Economic Progress, Mises Daily June 1, 2011. Archived comments:

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FYLR· 15 weeks ago

FYLR!

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Sasa radeta· 15 weeks ago

Monopoly by its very definition means “the only seller.” Communists cannot live with the fact that a property owner (of a house, for example), is also a single, unique seller of this property or services derived from it.

The same goes for IP-communists: they hate property rights so much that they want to attack the most important property rights – full ownership control of services derived from inventions and original works authorship.

Currently, authors have economic incentives to mass-produce their works and sell limited services (personal use) of copyrighted materials to general public. IP-communists want to limit the scope of property rights to such extent that general public should be allowed to assume full ownership over all works that were designated for personal, non-commercial use ONLY. This communization and organized theft would completely destroy all profit motivation in today’s markets for copyrighted goods (a vast majority of all works produced). These fanatics would bring us back to the Dark ages, motivated by economic ignorance and good intentions.

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3 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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tomkow45p· 15 weeks ago

Kinsella has no arguments against intellectual property that cannot be made against any sort of property right and those arguments are risible. They consist of :

1) They are rights enforced by the state.
2) They keep non-owners from doing what they want with the property.
3) The owners of the property don’t deserve it .
4) We’d all be better off if we shared.

Thus your ownership in your car is enforced by a government bureaucracy for which (among other things) the state taxes owners and buyers. That ownership gives you a monopoly on that car’s use and prevents other people from doing stuff with their own property (e.g. driving it from place to place in your car). And everyone would be better off if your car were shared with other people who want to use it!

“But the materials to make cars are scarce, ideas aren’t!” . Yah, right. You try coming up with a patentable idea and then let’s talk about how scarce they are.

There is lots wrong with US Intellectual Property Law and there are serious libertarian arguments to be made for revision. But those arguments all seem to elude Kinsella; perhaps because he is, in the end, hostile to the idea of property itself.

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6 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Inspector Ketchup· 15 weeks ago

In our fast paced world, it might serve small ventures better to simply produce, market and sell the product instead of patent it. That’s more resources invested in productivity. The patent process is long and expensive and by the time you have your patent, your produce might be out of fashion. Also, a patent is just a license to sue and if you’re a small firm, you certainly don’t have the resources to sue a larger one.

Patents are obsolete.

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1 reply · active 15 weeks ago

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zaq hack· 15 weeks ago

As I have argued in other places on IP, the elimination of IP would fundamentally transform the economy in ways Kinsella does not acknowledge in this article. Would it put a bunch of leeching lawyers out of work? One could hope. Is the present system unworkable? Undoubtedly; since reforms in 1793, the system has escaped the strict review of an eye like Jefferson’s. Would scrapping the whole system increase innovation and prosperity? Unknown and unknowable – it is possible, but it is not the guaranteed outcome prophesied.

The fundamental reasoning for my skeptical position on this topic is based on the motivations of the inventor. The inventor will act to maximize his own gains for any given invention. Today, there is a path to the mass market which is copyright and patent. Without that protection, many ideas may not be published or come to the attention of others at all. Who can make software in the face of Microsoft or Google? What incentive does someone have if their efforts to create something are simply swept up by a “more efficient” user of resources?

What then happens is obfuscation: Drug companies could contract with certain clinics or hospitals for the administration of certain cures. They could work to keep the compound secret via contract with patients, doctors, and/or other components of the supply chain. There would be no “generic” of an item because another company would have to re-engineer the compound or process completely.

Special machines would be subject to rent or lease agreements and not purchase. A company like Caterpillar could create a new earth-moving tool, but they could also work toward a contract model where they retain ownership of the actual equipment (since that is the only item of value to Kinsella). HP could invent a new printing technology, but then make it only available for use at a local Kinko’s instead of making them available for purchase.

Business models based on IP would change as the behavior of innovators trended toward greater secrecy. Controlling and contracting for access to the idea would replace patent law since control of who has access would then be the inventor’s only way to maintain monopoly status. Teams of lawyers would shift gears from enforcement of Microsoft’s patents into enforcement of Microsoft’s contracts.

Is IP a monopoly enforced by the state? Yes. Lots of people on this forum bristle no matter how you parse that statement. If the market were truly a level playing field of actors, I would perhaps feel differently about IP than I presently do. As an innovator, however, I know how my own behavior would change – and I am certain I am not alone in that sentiment. While a theoretical and perfect market may not need IP protections, such a system does not presently exist.

A more utilitarian position would be to make two changes to the existing system: (1) Using Jefferson’s criteria from 1790-1793, establish a system of grants based on an objective “point value.” See Bill James’ jury trial system for reference. Presently, we grant too many patents and copyrights. (2) Reduce the incentive of exclusivity to a period of 3-5 years. In 2011, this is enough time to go-to-market with an idea. If you are not established in the market within that time, someone else can obviously make better use of your idea.

Elimination of IP is the opposite extreme of our present system. Neither provide the best answer.

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3 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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TwoZero· 15 weeks ago

“Who can make software in the face of Microsoft or Google? What incentive does someone have if their efforts to create something are simply swept up by a “more efficient” user of resources?”

Aaahhhh.. but according to the anti IP folks all that matters is what’s best for the consumer. More efficient = better, Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

It’s not the more established, bigger companies fault that they have the resources to take advantage of economies of scale, and use lower prices to push out the much smaller start ups with far less resources
and no patent protection.

It is cheaper for the consumer that way, therefore it must be superior.

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4 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Wildberry· 15 weeks ago

As far as I can tell, in this well-written re-hash of Kinsella’s original Against IP article with nothing new, except perhaps a new emphasis on the censorship angle.

He still fail to address directly the externality issue, which ironically is the gist of Sasa’s comments. Tomkow has a way of summarizing his entire arguments far more succinctly than I have ever been able to do. It is, however, satisfying to see at last an article by Kinsella where responses against his arguments outnumber those in support, counting myself, of course.

The fact that original IP laws came from royal decree is hardly surprising, given that England was a monarchy at the time. That IP cannot be a natural right given its limited term is hardly convincing, given that the natural right to life, last time I checked, also expires when you die. Ho hum.

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2 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Wildberry· 15 weeks ago

The fact that the crown and the church had an interest in censorship is hardly surprising, and irrelevant to the contemporary circumstances surrounding the current function of IP laws, but that doesn’t stop Kinsella from giving it a try.

It is hard from me to get emotional over the thought of Susan Boyle not having complete freedom of expression by covering a Lou Reed song, because someone with right to prevent her use exercised that right. I’m amused that Kinsella enlists a scene from Britain’s Got Talent episode to make the point, perhaps thinking we would all share his outrage, but it’s a little hard for me to even visualize how that might have come out; I’m thinking of Provarotti singing the Light My Fire by the Doors.

Somehow, I’m happy to do without, and if copyright laws can prevent that from happening, then that’s just another reason I’m all for them.

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2 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Wildberry· 15 weeks ago

Those familiar with the case will recall that Colting lifted most of the original book by Salinger, including the main character, his personality, supporting characters, some of the actual dialogue, and wrote a book set 60 years after the fictional time of Catcher in the Rye (notice any similarities?) and published the book with a statement on the jacket about being the “long awaited sequel to one of our favorite books” or something like that.

It was the very definition of a derivative work, so if Kinsella thinks we should all be outraged by the fact that Salinger (or his heirs) won the case, it can only be because of the very existence of copyrights in the first place, without which there could be no derivative work rights to violate or enforce. It is hard for me to be outraged that we were deprived of a rip off a book that was overrated in the first place.

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7 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Wildberry· 15 weeks ago

This is not the abuse of otherwise good law, as Kinsella thinks proponents are sure to claim, nor is it the “law itself that is the abuse”. The abuse is clearly by Colting, who for whatever reason, attempted to take the shortcut to literary achievement by re-writing a book that has already been published, and then attempting to short-track marketing expenses by riding the shirttails of Catcher’s fame.

To put it simply, justice was clearly served.

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2 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Wildberry· 15 weeks ago

And another thing…I hate this new software that requires a message to be broken into parts. It ruins the continuity. How is someone as verbose as I supposed to deal with that?

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2 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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John Cunnane· 15 weeks ago

This issue reminds me a bit of the minarchist/anarchist debate so to see Wildberry advocating for IP seems consistent and to see Kinsellas arguing against also seems appropriate.

I can only add my practical experience. We are homebuilders and have borrowed from everyone but have copied no one. We have a small to mid sized firm that is considered “cutting edge” by the national builders. They appear to have copied much of what we have done on a much larger scale. We try to move on to the next product before they have offered something consistent with our last. Small firms have little appetite for patent disputes and we acknowledge that if we have “seen farther than others it is because we have sat on the shoulders of our predecessors”.

Homebuilding is not pharmaceuticals or technology but there are parallels.

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7 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Jonathan Reno· 15 weeks ago

“IP is particularly applicable when R&D costs and timeframes are very high and manufacturing costs very low. Writing and pharmaceuticals have much more in common in this regard. It is not sufficient to say that an industry or production process has an intellectual component, but when the production IS essentially an intellectual product, IP protections make much more sense.”
oh my god, us anti-IP peeps have never heard the R and D argument before. None of us have ever taken micro 101. I’m sure kinsella is about to reverse his stance.
ok. seriously. Kinsella has addressed said argument myriad times. one – if IP encourages the production of goods requiring heavy R & D, then it follows that without IP there would be a relatively increased incentive to produce goods that don’t require heavy R & D. For the utilitarian, the question becomes do we give up more value by forgoing the latter, than we get of the former? For the Austrian, this question cannot be objectively answered. per rothbard, interpersonal welfare-utility comparisons are impossible.

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11 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Jonathan Reno· 15 weeks ago

IF high fixed costs, and long time frames justify monopoly, then we should be granting monoplies to more than just essentially intellectual products.

if you tried to make a qualititative distinction between esssentially intellectual products and other products, where do you draw the line? do you have a non-arbitrary distinction?

finally: “And another thing…I hate this new software that requires a message to be broken into parts. It ruins the continuity. How is someone as verbose as I supposed to deal with that? ” – agreed.

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9 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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James C· 15 weeks ago

property is the solution to scarcity. the notion of intellectual property is as ridiculous as someone owning the air in the atmosphere. the only way intellectual property can be justified is if it is honestly believed that an idea could not have been created by any other human being, both currently alive and in the future. this is obviously not the case, as often times multiple parties file for the same patent, which is finally resolved by something as arbitrary as who is the first to gather the funds necessary to pay the patent office upon filing. i completely agree that intellectual property is a violation of property rights. people are free to invest capital into producing whatever good they please, regardless of how similar it is to any other good already on the market. to demand some licensing fee for permission to sell a good is for all intents and purposes, extortion.

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DomV· 15 weeks ago

I have a hard time with this actually. We libertarians like to say that private property is a ‘natural right’, but then have a hard time defining ‘property’. The main argument we reach for is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle But, I don’t quite buy this. It feels like a special case, and one that almost never happens in real life.

I am trying to dig into the theory that ALL property rights are, at their core, about ‘monopoly’, conflict and force. So far, most responses look like this… :P. Ancaps don’t like it when govt is the one doing the enforcement. However, I see it as a core function of govt to protect (and define) private property. (Therefore I am a ‘minarchist’, not an ‘anarchist’??) That I have found people crazier than me, makes me happy for some reason. 😉

As a software developer, this fits in greatly with the ‘open source’ movement. ‘Open source’ makes sense along the lines of the ‘Bieber’ strategy above. Put your stuff out there for free, and you will saturate the market. And a lot of benefits follow from that.

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5 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Seba· 15 weeks ago

Without IP there would be no software bubbles & companies developing the same software year after year. I think it would be good because people would dedicate resources to more realistic activities; hardware would be more expensive, which is right as it’s the base for software to run. Ideas are not scarce goods.

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Seba· 15 weeks ago

Sorry. I meant Hardware would be more expensive than Software. But Hardware will probably be much cheaper because more resources probably will be available to build it. There wouldn’t be so much replacement fever as there is with software and different enterprises building the same applications everywhere… Less time dedicated to design X ver 1.0, then 2.0, then 3.0, then 25.0, and more time dedicated to real economy.

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zaq.hack· 15 weeks ago

@Kinsella – You are getting defensive about your circular logic and ascribing to me straw men which I have not raised.

If I borrow your car, who owns it? Although the car is in my possession, we agree to abide by certain rules which are established by you, the owner. Leasing and renting are various forms of limiting the rights, by contract, of the person in possession of a limited resource by the true owner.

If broad intellectual property rules are discarded altogether, use of new ideas will tend toward this model, as well. If the state cannot enforce the “ownership” of an idea, then the originator of the idea will seek to enforce that ownership, himself. To this degree, a greater level of secrecy will arise which is a hindrance to technological progress. Intellectual property allows an inventor to mass-market his idea; to share it with many people in an established “fair use” fashion. The overhead required for secrecy would necessarily limit access to those goods produced by the innovator.

Your headline is “How To Slow Economic Progress.” Perhaps I am reading this incorrectly, but is your intention to sloweconomic progress? Or is your point that state-enforced intellectual property constructs are slowing economic progress? I have couched my responses and refutations in terms of what causes the greater progress. I have not said that IP is a natural right (actually, the opposite); instead, I have said it serves as incentive to innovators. That incentive, however warped the current system may be, exists today. A better system requiring less intrusion, fewer lawyers, and fewer grants of intellectual property protection would lead to significantly greater economic progress. However, this is where you and I part: Abolishing the concept of intellectual property altogether would, I believe, do harm to technological and economic progress.

If your belief is that state-enforced intellectual property is immoral, unenforceable, and should be destroyed regardless of whether it benefits economic progress or not … then simply change your headline.

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5 replies · active 15 weeks ago

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Guy· 15 weeks ago

Just curious, the article mentioned that IPR tends to lead companies to research on more patentable items rather than on general stuff, are there any specific examples of this phenomenon I could check out or read about?

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David· 15 weeks ago

ITT: Wildberry fails by using consequentialist arguments against deontological claims.

You might as well be arguing that humans can be property because it creates a net benefit to humanity through cheap labor. It also promotes innovation because it allows the slave owners to focus on more scholarly pursuits because they don’t have to waste as many resources on keeping up the plantation.

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3 replies · active 15 weeks ago

The Max Planck Society is rightly concerned about the effect of copyright on science, in particular  its restrictions on the use and communication of scientific knowledge. They call “for a science-friendly copyright law that would promote the fast and unobstructed exchange of scientific findings and meet the requirements of everyday scientific work …. Particularly worthy of note here is the demand for a legally-anchored and contractually non-negotiable right of secondary utilisation for the originator.”

Revision of copyright law – the concerns of science and the “third basket”

Unrestricted access to scientific information and research data is vitally important for scientific progress and for scientific work in general. The discussion surrounding a revision of copyright law in an information society therefore have major implications for science.

The two previous amendments to the copyright law (“first and second basket”) did not address many scientific issues and interests, as the primary focus was on other fields. A third law on the regulation of copyright, the so-called “third basket”, is intended to specifically address the concerns of education and science.

With its joint statement on July 9, 2010, the Alliance of German Science Organisations drafted an appeal for a science-friendly copyright law that would promote the fast and unobstructed exchange of scientific findings and meet the requirements of everyday scientific work – something that is currently largely governed by digitalisation. Particularly worthy of note here is the demand for a legally-anchored and contractually non-negotiable right of secondary utilisation for the originator.

Another major concern of the Alliance of German Science Organisations is the creation of transparency and legal certainty for scientists in copyright issues. The legislator is therefore being requested to create reliable, unambiguous, easy-to-handle and fair legal parameters for scientific work with published information.

Unbound is an interesting new service that can help authors guarantee a minimum market for books before writing them. It’s similar in some ways to some of the services I discuss in Funding for Creation and Innovation in an IP-Free World, such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and The Point (used recently by Austro-libertarians Bob Murphy (to challenge Paul Krugman to a debate–$56k pledged so far) and Vijay Boyapati to raise almost $20k for the Mises Institute–see Jeff Tucker’s The Age of Micro-Patronage)).

Unbound is a new way of connecting with writers. Most of the writers on our site will be well known, others will appear here for the first time.

What’s different is that instead of waiting for them to publish their work, Unbound allows you to listen to their ideas for what they’d like to write before they even start. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If we hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing (if the target isn’t met you can either get your pledge refunded in full or switch your pledge to another Unbound project).

There are several levels of support, each with different rewards. The higher your pledge, the greater the rewards you’ll receive, from your name in the back of the book to lunch with the author. Plus you can alert your friends and earn Unbound credits on the site when they support a project too.

But that’s not all. As soon as you make a pledge to support an Unbound project you gain access to the author’s private area or ‘shed’. Here you can get updates on the book’s progress, watch exclusive interviews, read draft chapters, find out information about the author’s backlist and join discussions with the author and other supporters. It’s a portal into to a new community of writers and readers: a place to comment on and contribute to a work in progress.

Then comes the exciting bit. The book is written, designed, edited and printed and we send it to you, either as an e-book or a beautifully bound, limited edition hardback (or both). For the first time, you will be able to hold in your hands a book that wouldn’t have existed without you.

See also my posts Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property; The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright; Innovations that Thrive without IP; also Triangulation Interview with Cory Doctorow (various creative ideas for making money from book publishing).

A FT piece Why it is right to fight web pirates, exhibit the typical schizophrenic confusion of those who criticize IP law’s “excesses” while refusing to take a principled stand against it.

The article concerns the so-called “e-G8” summit–“when Nicolas Sarkozy invited the leaders of the world’s biggest technology companies and high representatives of Silicon Valley to Paris to mull over the future of the internet”. But “a culture war”  broke out due to the competing views of the IP/media interests and the more anti-IP/Internet freedom camp:

At one extreme in the showdown in a hot tent in the Tuileries gardens this week was the French president, who has backed one of the strictest anti-piracy enforcement laws of any country. He insisted to the technologists that “the world you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules, and all the basic principles that govern societies do not apply”.

At the other end were activists and open source advocates such as John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor, warning governments to back off. The internet was not broken now, they said, but efforts to protect publishers, film and music companies could break it.

The author, John Gapper, tries to have it both ways, by explicitly straddling the middle: “The truth, inevitably, lies in the middle …  Governments need to tread lightly to avoid damaging innovation but the internet cannot become a safe harbour for illegality.”

The EFF’s John Perry Barlow is correct that IP law and anti-piracy measures will end up empowering the state to not only block IP piracy, but to censor “expression that you do not like.” And so is Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who said that society can make the internet “safe for the next Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber or make it safe for the next Skype or YouTube. You have to choose”.

Gapper thinks it’s ridiculous to imply “that enforcement of intellectual property rights is, by definition, antithetical to the nature of the internet,” but of course it is. At least he recognizes that “Publishers are partially to blame for their own crisis of legitimacy,” and that current remedies are too harsh: “Small fines for peer-to-peer downloading, akin to a gentle nudge in the right direction, might be a better remedy.”

Interesting post by David Friedman, Current Experiments in Self Publishing, who writes:

Modern technology, which greatly simplifies self-publishing, raises the possibility that the conventional market structure may be replaced by a new model in which the role of the publisher is reduced or eliminated. That future is here and I am there. My second novel, Salamander, is  up on Amazon.com as a Kindle file and has received its first (positive) review. We will have to see whether it attracts enough readers who like it, review it positively and tell their friends to read it, to make up for the lack of a publisher’s endorsement and marketing. I’m not quitting my day job just yet.

That is not my only experiment in online self-publication. My wife and I have produced a collection of medieval and renaissance recipes—about 350 of them, each accompanied by a description of how we make it—along with related articles, and are in the late stages of publishing it as a physical book using CreateSpace, Amazon’s POD subsidiary. The process turned out to be surprisingly easy and inexpensive. By the time we are done, it will have cost us less than a hundred dollars, mostly postage for proof copies—it is amazing how many minor errors  can survive one, two, or even three rounds of proofreading. Once we are done—real soon now as one friend likes to put it—the book will be available via CreateSpace or Amazon. All we have to do is collect royalties.

Read more>>

David’s approach is similar to mine for Libertarian Papers, except that for ebooks I am using BookBaby, an ebook aggregator, to put the ebook version on kindle and 3 other ebook platforms.

See also E-books rewrite an industry, by Andrew Hill, FT.com (May 25 2011).

In this Mises blog post, Skip Oliva writes, in part:

Justices Willfully Blind to Individual Rights

May 31, 2011 by S.M. Oliva

The US Supreme Court issued a decision today that expands the potential liability for patent infringement. Justice Samuel Alito spoke for the Court:

After respondent SEB invented an innovative deep fryer, obtained a U. S. patent for its design, and began selling its fryer in this country, Sunbeam Products, Inc., asked petitioner Pentalpha Enterprises, Ltd., a Hong Kong home appliance maker and wholly owned subsidiary of petitioner Global-Tech Appliances, Inc., to supply Sunbeam with deep fryers meeting certain specifications. Pentalpha purchased an SEB fryer that was made for sale in a foreign market and thus lacked U. S. patent markings, copied all but the fryer’s cosmetic features, and retained an attorney to conduct a right-to-use study without telling him it had copied directly from SEB’s design. Failing to locate SEB’s patent, the attorney issued an opinion letter stating that Pentalpha’s deep fryer did not infringe any of the patents that he had found. Pentalpha then started selling its fryers to Sunbeam, which resold them in this country under its own trademarks at a price that undercut SEB’s. [continue reading…]

From MSNBC:

Punk band “Elway” says it’s being squeezed by its namesake

As we approach the launch of Memorial Day weekend and in turn a potential wasteland of NFL news, it’s time to start getting information from unlikely sources.

Like the punk rock equivalent of PFT.

In Colorado, an obscure punk band that has named itself “Elway” apparently has landed on the radar screen of Hall of Fame quarterback and Broncos V.P. of football operations John Elway.  The band Elway claims that the quarterback Elway has, via a lawyer, asked the band to change its name.

Read more>>

Copyright and patent are not the only villains of the IP universe; trademark can be used to censor and stop competition too.