Somebody brought this to my attention in a Mises Facebook discussion thread.
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf (page 2 has a copyright protection logo).
Does anybody have an explanation for this?
I believe its a defensive copyright so no one can stop kinsella printing up copies of the book.
Easy - in the current copyright system, if an author does not assert copyright of his own material, someone else may, and once they do, the author loses all rights to reproduce things which he himself has written! So, even if you oppose copyrights, you have no choice to assert your copyright lest someone else assert it and lock you out of being able to disseminate your own damn writing!
Clayton -
That sounds about right.
I’ve thought about this before. Even though you may oppose copyrights (and patents) we live in a place where someone might take your work if you don’t copyright it. Is that ironic?
Yes. The explanation is in the book. I suggest you read it.
Yes. Stranger keeps throwing the fact that many (if not all) of the LvMI’s books are copyrighted. However, it has already been explained to him that these copyrights are simply defensive.
That’s… aarrrrrrrrrrrrgh! [:@] [8o|]
Glad I ordered this book a few days ago myself, it’s definitely about time I get up to speed on this idiocy.
I have to disagree with the instant rationalization of defense, but I can see why it’s used.
Nowhere does it require for Kinsella or anyone else writing a book to explicitly write the same version over and over.
Is it really that hard to make a neutered on purpose, copyright friendly version of a book, with an advertisement to your own private site where you can sell an unabridged, writer’s version (hell, even un-spellchecked, why not?) that isn’t copyrighted?
Even if nothing official,word of mouth would prove more than sufficient in the Internet Age in rounding people up around their inboxes to inquire about the full author’s version that might have to be paid for, but would directly benefit the author & wouldn’t involved copyright?
Why not try & use something called “Proof of Original Transmission” of information, than creation of an “intellectual work / property”?
Branding doesn’t require intellectual property anymore than say, people regonizing what your favorite set of clothes are, or what your favorite foods are.
Branding can be achieved by reputation, & reputation could replace copyright, which is an attempt to materialize abstract concepts and/or works, when the former two are abstract social ways that can achieve a form of protection non-coercively & without intellectual property, methinks.
Yes, I’m not offering complete answers here & I might be wrong, but I’m at least using my imagination to address the problem, which is what should be done.
Why not inject some science & history into this for once (to supplement the ideology), & admit information cannot really be created or destroyed, that all works in many ways can be derivative from others? Even this post of mine is not really original, I’m sure there’s been similar rebuttals before.
One could easily combat a supposed pirated work by writing different versions or not writing all of the written material at once, & can utilize market processes to combat copycats. You can do this through different mediums.
There is always a risk of information duplication when it is transmitted, so if you want absolute protection, don’t transmit it. Releasing a critique on intellectual property & even utilizing a copyright merley out of protection is backpeddling, because even if you use a more reasonable copyright, it doesn’t really set forth a good example upon exploring alternative concepts.
Elsewhere, people like the guy who came up with Copyfree, who makes a critique on both copyright & copyleft, are sadly little noticed. And more libertarians wonder why, despite a good paper being written, or doing the good lecture here & there, the assumption of intellectual property period (including defensive uses) isn’t questioned at all.
Then again, conversely, there is a trade-off for exposure within state-society, but quite honestly, it is not that hard to do a little entrepreneurial hard work, & promote it yourself via alternative ways. Time stamps, watermarks are great unintrustive ways to show a “marker” of work that would be copyrighted, & if the need arises, can be used to show evidence of the earliest emergence of a said work, or the point of creation, etc.
You could also just simply use online as a signifying of the work & send copies of the work upon request, & utilize markers, watermarks, or include a certificate of merit or purchase that show that you have acquired a legitimate copy of the work from the respective author.
Yes, there is nothing to prevent others from eventually utilizing the work derivatively, and there is always a danger of someone trying to rip your stuff off, but you can easily pre-empt this by making it memetically *and/or socially known and/or obvious that “:INSERT BOOK / PAPER TITLE HERE” was created by “:INSERT AUTHORS NAME HERE”.
I just fail to see how you can’t see the disconnect between “reputations does not equal intellectual property” & “let’s copyright an intellectual property critique for defensive purposes despite embracing contradiction & not utilizing alternative means via the market.”
If the use of the copyright was involuntary by the author of the work, however, I could probably understand. IMO, choosing copyright as a defense automatically implies “this work is intellectual property that must be protected from theft”.
The subtle assumption that defensive copyright is required so that people will actually buy and not steal, or that people interested int he work will be stupid enough to not know the difference between the genuine article & a copycat, seems like the reasoning of a paternalist.
Also, lack of copyright has not prevented people from being able to sell works via the internet & profit, least of all homemade mom & pops & un-official markets, trading with others, etc.
I realize the difficulty involved with weighing on whether one should use copyright at all or not, but the abolition of intellectual property as an assumed, common sense concept is not going to be furthered by rationalizing it’s existence temporarily.
It will happen when people lead by example, & show the consequences (or lack thereof) involved in not utilizing intellectual property, & worry about selling or making a good product than reputation (which is what a lot of intellectual property seems to come down to: reputation of the author, or the originator of the work).
Actually, according to the latest explanation by Kinsella, it’s a defensive copyright so Kinsella can’t stop anyone making copies of the book.
That sounds about bullshit.
Great argument.
No one presented an argument, or any evidence, that writers could lose their own works if they didn’t claim a copyright. It’s just typical Kinsella bullshit that changes every time he gets called out on it.
What stops another publisher from putting a copyright on a manuscript, if the author and the original publisher fail to put on of their own?
Nothing stops another publisher from putting a copyright on a manuscript using the creative commons license. In fact it specifically allows it.
If the book was published under creative commons wouldn’t the symbol be “CC”? I think it’s an all rights reserved copyright. In any case, I’m not sure that creative common license allows a different publisher to put a copyright on an existing manuscript and deny the original publisher the ability to sell or reproduce it. For example, this isn’t true of Wikipedia; nobody can take Wikipedia’s text, copyright it and then ask Wikipedia to respect the copyright (delete the content).
I concur. His linking to sources was great as well.
Linkage please.
You’re begging the question. There is no such thing as copyrighting someone else’s original work. This is what you are trying to demonstrate. However, you can copyright a work that is transformed from another person’s work, but you can’t deny the original author from his original work. Not even Kinsella claims that (anymore, anyway), what he claims is that someone who makes a transformed work can have his rights to his transformed work taken away by the original author.
Government is magic fallacy? government is sufficiently wonderful to correctly determine the original author of a work, even should the original author not take steps to copyright his work (i.e. register it with the government), and thereby gives the opportunity for others to attempt to so register the work