Yeah, that is what I figured his argument would be. He does not even understand the scarcity argument. It is not that ideas are not scarce, it is that ideas are not scarce once they are made public. But what did you mean about “rival”?
rival goods, cant be used by two parties without conflict, i.e. material property. in an environment of obvious scarcity , this would be rapidly noticed, and soon people will say, paintings by Van Gogh are scarce.) in an environment of apparent abundance, (i.e. sand on the beach), it may not occur to people that sand is rival, since there may be enough for all that have a need for it and to go get their own, and find that they arent in conflict.
non-rival goods, are goods where there are no conflict over any two users of some good, i.e. ideas, feelings, patterns etc. all the usual IP stuff.
Do you think you could post the link? I’d be really interested in reading them. 
Also, I’m not entirely sure which type of property rights I would subscribe to (English Common Law type, Lockeian type or possibly another type?) So I’d love to read some other peoples ideas on this.
Also, I’m not sure if IP is not scarce, but, like I said, I’m not entirely nailed down to one certain viewpoint on this yet. I have heard very compelling arguments one way or the other. What I do agree with is, that regardless if IP is property or not, no initiation of force can be taken against someone who has not contractually agreed to abide by a certain law. They can’t be responsible for violating a law that they do not hold to be a law. Market reputation and DRO contracts will find clever ways to handle these. I know this creates a host of problems between property disputes, but I’m not sure if I need to have the answer just yet. I believe people will be able to work out an agreement on what is and what is not owned by individuals.
In my own personal viewpoint I believe that if a person transforms an unaltered peice of nature in a positive way (ie the property value increases because of his actions), his claim to the land is upheld over any other claim to it. I do believe you can own property by claim as well, though I believe that someone who has homesteaded its rights take precedence.
I do not believe in objective rights. I see them as a false safety blanket. I prefer to see rights as only subjective viewpoints which can be collectively agreed upon and defended. Those who disagree with basic moral codes (NAP) will be very secluded from society and have extreme amounts of trouble operating in ANY society. Religious folk can seperate themselves from those who do not agree with their ethical beliefs, and will pay the price by not having the ability to contract with those people. Same goes for those who disagree with owning property. Unfortunately for them, the human race is expanding, and will hopefully continue to expand. Fortunately for them, the universe seems to be infinite. 
(good luck getting off earth without a space ship or suit though…)
Good point. I am definitely not a huge defender of IP, simply because it kicks open the door to statism. Though regardless if it is property or not, it can still be defended from a contractual standpoint. I am glad to have this forum. It is SO difficult to find anyone to run my ideas by where I live (in Austin if your curious).
I don’t know if an way to produce is ever actually made public though. I think it requires someone to disassemble/reverse engineer it. This could clearly be included in a contract to be held as punishable. I went over this in my previous post, so yeah.
The same could be said for any restrictive covenant. If you agree to it, or I buy out any real or potential non-party competitor, tough toenails. I happen to think Microsoft has used sheer market power to drive some very good competitive alternatives out of the market that will be a long time coming back.
Value is subjective.
I think you are missing a major piece in the puzzle: the government threatens to enforce Microsoft’s contracts.
Without the state subsidized legal system, the market would be a whole different kettle of fish.
No one is missing that. The government enforces everyone’s contracts.
No one repeats this more often, in more varied ways on this forum than Byzantine.
Not true. Anyway, I think he meant to say that the government enforces Microsoft’s patents and copyrights.
Of course it is, but case in point, MS-Word. It is software developed by people who can’t write, for people who can’t write. Corel WordPerfect was a true writer’s program. Lawyers and fiction writers do not think in terms of bullet point paragraphs; they have to think in terms of the whole document while simultaneously building it detail by detail. That’s not how most businessmen think and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the nature of the beast. But since most people can’t write, everything–including OpenOffice–is Word format. MS had zero incentive to make its OS/software friendly with WP, so it used good old-fashioned market share to muscle them out. Same thing re: Quattro Pro vs. Excel or Grandview vs. Word.
At least there’s Quicken, which “thinks” about finances the way most people, as opposed to most spreadsheet-obsessed bean counters, think about finances.
Lexis/Nexis, because it doesn’t have to employ lawyers doing topical research like Westlaw, enjoys far superior market share for its cheaper product. But Lexis doesn’t “think” like its lawyer-customers, who nonetheless use the product because of competitive pressures to hold down costs. Rather, it “thinks” like the database engineers who developed it.
My by-now-off-topic point in all this is that the market does not necessarily produce “correct” or “moral” results, and there will be consumers whose preferences remain unsatisfied at any price not because of government, but because their preferences may be too rarified to attract capital.
I’d have to disagree. At any price? Surely someone could code any of the programs you listed to export to MS format. I dont think it would be too difficult.
I’m not sure what this is intended to mean. Could you clarify what a moral market result is? Thanks.
Like me wanting a private space craft and not being able to afford it? I dont think it fair to classify this as not producing the ‘correct’ result, rather, I believe resources will be directed where they will be more productive.
Nit picking. Obviously I meant that the sorts of contracts MS gets enforced are also enforced for others unless someone here is willing to argue that MS has an explicit state granted monopoly.
All other things being equal, Microsoft’s restrictive covenants (and there are a lot of them) with their vendors and customers are enforced like everybody else’s. I think those play as prominent a role in maintaining MS market share as the patents and copyrights do. Like liberty student pointed out, even if government enforcement of contracts is an externality, it’s one that already built into everybody’s cost structure.
Even in anarchy, there will be an agency (insurer, war lord, clan chieftain, mercantile association, etc.) that can bring to bear sufficient force–either physically or financially–to enforce contracts.
Well, for example, many people consider pornography immoral. The market obviously disagrees.
Abortion is a good example too. Abortionists will have to outbid anti-abortion activists for protection for their practice. If a PDA can make more money because more people will pay to keep the abortion clinics out of town than otherwise, then the abortionists and pro-choice activists are just SOL. If you’re pro-choice, you may consider that an immoral result for the folks who don’t have sufficient purchasing power to buy out the majority’s preference against abortion.
I’m not sure what you meant by “moral results”. Anywho, my point is that those “correct results” are subjective. I want Microsoft to produce an OS that never crashes. Thus, to me Microsoft isn’t producing a correct results. However, to someone else, it might be the okay, and thus, the correct result for Windows to only crash once a week.
Are you saying that no one uses quattro, or WP, or Windows XP (and for that matter, Windows 2000/NT)? I remeber reading somewhere Gary North still uses a DOS-based word processor, and that Murray Rothbard never used a PC to write his works, althought he lived till the mid 1990s. Apple’s OS is better (me being subjective here) than Windows and its price reflects that. If you want something that will get you through college, Windows is perfectly fine (as long as your not downloading porn or using Kazaa). Wanna edit you home videos? Get a Mac. Wanna edit your videos much more cheaply, but have a horrible time doing so? Get a PC. I’m in rant mode now. 
They might, but then they get their clients screaming at them that they can’t open their attachments. For that very reason, my industry stopped using Quattro Pro and WordPerfect virtually overnight even though nobody wanted to see it happen. Microsoft just draws too much water even though their software is buggy, clunky crap. I don’t see that changing for a long time, not that that means I want government anti-trust lawyers making things otherwise.
I think MS may have eased up on jamming its competitors’ products, but I think it took litigation to do it. We’ve plumbed the depths of my knowledge on this so I’ll gladly defer to others.
Now, an on-point point: the Intel fine is just yet another bankrupt government shaking down the private sector. Laws have become so complex and ridiculous that any body, any where, at any time is comitting some sort of violation. Enforcement therefore depends purely on bureaucratic whim and like a petty mafioso, when government needs money they just open up a statute and go shake somebody down.
Paul Craig Roberts has written a lot about this inversion of the legal process. It used to be, a person did something, and the prosecutor went to FIND the law to see if it was a crime. Now, the prosecutor FINDS the person, and the law is so diffuse and totalitarian that the “crime” is already there just waiting to be applied.
Except that the market is composed of the same “many people” who consider it immoral. IOW your analysis based on aggregates is nonsense.
I agree with you on a great many things, but when you go to this point (and some others here do as well), I have to disagree.
You’re completely missing out on the long tail, and niche markets. A free market will provide for niche markets. What you are describing, where the market is dictated by the majority (presumably through some economy of scale) is what we have under the state.
In a free market, majority preferences will not buy out anyone. There will be entrepreneurs who will cater to abortion clinics even if the majority does not support them. Something that the pro-life crowd (that I am sympathetic with) has to realize, is that men, and people past the age of child rearing are generally not customers for abortion clinics. There is a big difference between being against abortion, and actually being eligible for abortion and not choosing to exercise that option. The market is not everyone with an opinion. It is everyone capable of being pregnant, coupled (pun intended) with their capacity to pay.
Given that Dr. Block has expressed that the earning capacity of women is compromised by child birth, I think women of means will certainly be most likely to pay for, and gain from an abortion.
Anyway, this notion that a free market will be homogeneous, might makes right, majority preference will rule, everyone will trend to the most economical choice, rather than finding ways to make their choices economical, I feel is very misguided.
Please forgive me if I have misconstrued your opinion, but I see the so-called right libertarians on this board adopt this stance at times, and I feel it is very narrow.
Again, the abortion clinic will have to outbid the anti-abortion activists for protection. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. Same for any other marginal activity.
(It occurs to me that if abortion is not a marginal activity, the problem from the anti-abortion perspective will solve itself.)
Many does not equal most.