I had an idea as an alternative to copyright. While one cannot homestead ideas (simply because one cannot occupy them like one can occupy tangible items), one can contractually limit what a purchaser may do. As certain rights are inalienable, such as life and one’s will, one cannot transfer these in a contract (so you cannot have a contract that says “I promise not to copy this book, and if I fail to do this I will throw myself out the window.”) However, one can require some sort of alienable right, such as to one’s property, in case of default. My idea is that, upon buying a book, one would have to sign a contract that would say that one will promise to not have the book copied in any way, whether by oneself or by another, and if one defaults one would have to pay some sum (My idea would be that one has to work to recuperate the opportunity cost of all books that have been pirated.) This way, in a free-market, writers would be able to write their works with little to no fear of financial loss from piracy.
Your suggestion is inline with voluntary association, but it won’t work. Besides people being unlikely to agree to it, its not enforceable.
If one person buys the book then puts it on the internet others have no contractual obligation not to pirate it. And enforcement against the one person who is violating the contract would be prohibitively difficult.
In a free society, ideas will most likely be controlled by technology, like copy protection CDs, not legal action.
However, you shouldn’t be looking for a way to enforce copyrights. We don’t need them. No one has a right to a lifetime income for writing one trashy novel.
Stealing is wrong because it robs someone of their labor. But if someone writes a book and I borrow it, photocopy it, and then return it; the person still possess all the fruits of his labor, his self ownership has not been compromised. I am allowed to use my property however I want so long as I do not infringe on the ownership rights of anyone else.
Technology has enabled ideas to exist in a limitless number of places at once, for very little cost. Wanting to artificially raise the cost of books to protect writers is no different than wanting to artificially raise the cost of corn to protect farmers. There is no excuse for it.
One wouldn’t really need to sign a contract. All an author or creator (of anything for that matter) would have to do is stamp it “copyright”. This would indicate to the buyer that the author is selling not the entire property right to the item, but the right to do anything except sell an identical copy to someone else. If the buyer then copied the item and sold it, he would be guilty of a violation of his contact of purchase and of the author’s property right (the part he didn’t sell), which would amount to theft. Restitution would then be decided based on loss of revenue to the author plus additional penalties presumably.
Essentially it is third parties that are the issue. At any rate, a common worry that arises is would research such as medical research be carried out in the absence of IP, given that it is argued that such research has a public good aspect to it. A proposed solution is the dominant assurance contract:
What would you do when you find a store selling your book without paying you and you have no contract with the store and they won’t tell you who gave them the first copy of you book?
Well, I can’t make them tell me anything. I have no right to initiate force against them, as they are a third party and not party to the contract. They have not taken away any tangible property from me, and as no human exists in the world of ideas and thus cannot occupy them they have not aggressed against me.
But I could do a number of things non-coercively, and that is the beauty of a free society. I could encourage other writers and publishers not to deal with this store, or encourage consumers to boycott them. I could offer them a share in restitution if they will tell me who gave them the copy. In fact, I could offer a share in restitution to whoever informs me of violators. Also in this same line, I could have the performance bond be the sum of the restitution for lost revenues divided by contract violators, so that every contract violator found would reduce the burden on the others (so if there are 4 violators and $100 lost in revenue, those 4 finding a fifth would reduce their burdens from $25 to $20.) The individuals who inform me of other contract violators would also have part or all of their share of restitution forgiven.
Ah, restitution, an important point and another good reason to oppose Intellectual Property.
Lost revenues is not a legal claim. If pirate a CD I have not inflicted damages. You can not determine “lost revenue”, as we all know, demand is greater when price is zero. If a CD is pirated 100 times that does not mean it would have been bought 100 times if pirating was not an option, in fact, we can be sure that it wouldn’t have been.
“Lost revenue” implies that the pirate has violated contract, failed to pay in exchange for services. But as we already determined, no contract existed.
“No one has a right to a lifetime income for writing one trashy novel.”
i say introduce a ‘fractional patronage’ system along the lines of this ( http://www.posfi.com/what_is_it.htm ) , ( http://www.posfi.com/applications.htm )
artists and developers seeking funding for new or sequel projects can place ads and get fractional patronizers to help fund projects.
But the thing is, you can demand whatever payment you want as restitution so long as the article in question is alienable. I can say that you have to pay me a million dollars if you copy my work, just arbitrarily; I can also say you have to pay me some sum for each pirated copy that I can find. It is the same as with a performance bond in any other case.
I think some sort of partronage system is definately in the cards for certain types of intellectual activity. Musicians can charge for live performances and filmmakers can sell advertising, but what is a science fiction writer to do?
I try to avoid prophesying freedom but I can tell you, people won’t stand for that. Not just the million dollar part, the arbitrary part. The whole point of libertarian law is provide restitution for legitimate damages.
Its conceivable that a private road owner would issue tickets exactly like highway patrols do today, it would not violate voluntary association. However, market forces pretty much ensure that private road owners will choose to behave very differently.
Make a movie. Create a website. Give lectures. ie work.
A good gauge about whether a profession would become significantly less lucrative under anarchy is the amount of time spent doing it. For example, professional athletes would continue to make large amounts of money but movie stars would make only a fraction of what they do.
So are you claiming the right to set an arbitrary compensation amount? …on the grounds that you do not have a contract? You lost me.
The store owner is not going to help you anyway. He’s going to want more books to sell and he’s not going to burn his supplier. Think about all those Bittorrent websites. They know perfectly well that what they are doing facilitates copyright infringement. But their business model depends on those infringements so without coercion they would never turnover information about their users.
Right. My point was I think the book medium is probably gone except when commissioned under some sort of patronage system.
What’s so wrong with the original creator selling not the entire property right to his creation, but the right to do anything with the item except sell an identical copy to someone else?
In other words the creator sells not the full title of ownership to the property, but retains part of it for himself to do with as he sees fit. He advertizes this fact by placing a copyright stamp or mark on the item. If the item is subsequently transferred to a third party, the restriction remains because that part of the title that the creator retained for himself (the right to make and sell copies) was never sold in the first place. Even though the third party has no contract with the original creator, he is still liable if he trys to sell a copy because he’s trying to sell something he doesn’t actually own. The right to make and sell copies is retained solely by the original creator, no matter who owns the original creation.
From a Libertarian perspective, why would this be untenable? Doesn’t it simply boil down to defining who owns what property rights?
The problem is that you don’t have a contract with the third party, so you have no right to tell him that he can’t print whatever he wants with the paper and ink that belongs to him. In your example the third party does own the book he is selling because he owns the paper and he owns the ink, and that’s all there is to a book.
The problem with IP is that the intangible right to IP can only be enforced by invading the rights of other people to their tangible property.
It’s also a matter of determining what is legitimately a property right.
Yeah, I made it all the way through the first line, “Economics gives invisible hand explanations for complex phenomena.”
Let’s look at the current system of medical research…
Someone gets a government grant to research a certain topic and if they somehow make a significant discovery they proceed to patent it and extract monopoly rent from the very people who paid them to research it in the first place.
Before publicly funded research was allowed to be patented, companies used to spend tons of cash on R&D in order to stay one step ahead of the competition but today almost all research is funded by government grants and the companies buy it from the inventors instead of financing it themselves. Big Pharma is notorious for this, they claim they need the excessively high monopoly guaranteed profits because of the high cost of funding R&D while doing virtually no research but instead relying on the public to fund the new discoveries which they capitalize upon.
There is no basis to make the claim that without IP protections all ‘public good’ research would cease. Some people genuinely care about their fellow human being, some want to make a name for themselves in their respective field and others need to innovate to make their products more attractive to the consumers.
I think the best argument against IP was an article here discussing how restaurants and the fashion industry are both thriving economic powerhouses with absolutely no protection from IP ‘theft’.
You want to see the end of medical research as we know it, wait until they socialize healthcare in the US. With no profit motive, due to governmental price fixing, there is little incentive for anyone to try to make their fortune in that field. As it stands now the US is pretty much subsidizing all the medical advances for the world’s socialized healthcare systems.
Damn, I’m all over the place with this post…think it’s time to get some sleep
Do you maybe have a link to the article?
Here’s a good one.
Ah, I found it, it was linked to from here…
But what if the original author sells his book under the following contract:
“I hereby sell you this book. You agree not to copy it. You may sell or transfer this book to a third party, but you may do so only by advising the third party that if he buys, receives or views this book he agrees not to copy it. If he does he is liable to me. If you fail to advise the third party of the restrictive covenenant attached to this book (by for example removing the copyright stamp) you are liable to me”.