He doesn’t sell you his book, he sells you media under a limited agreement. If he could not do this, he would not sell you the book, as he would have to safeguard his property in other ways. For this reason it is in your interests as a consumer for copyright to be secured.
So he’s allowed to profit from the information, but not allowed to profit from the information.
By what twisted reasoning did you conclude that freeing slaves would IMPROVE the quality of food given to you by your master that you so hypocritically enjoy?
Yes, that is what contracts do, they stipulate how and why someone can profit from something.
but if you read to a bunch of people or sell the book to someone, or let someone borrow it, are they not free from the contract that you entered into? or is part of the original contract also not to allow anyone to see or hear of the work without also forcing those people to agree to the same contract?
There’s no problem with contracts, and I’ll agree with you here in this scenario. If he original buyer agrees not to copy the book exactly as it is and resell it. But then, he might change it just a little and sell that. Is that OK?
The problem for me is when people uphold IP and physical property rights at the same time. What a patent does is that it makes it illegal for someone else to do something that they please with their physical property. It’s contradictory to hold the two together. And even if that were to be argued as not contradictory, who would have the moral authority or knowhow to infallibly decide how long a patent should last? That’s a problem of utilitarian calculus and socialist economic calculation.
And if it were changed a little more?
If I were to learn something from the book, would I be able to write about it and publish it?
I was about to bring this up as well, not only as an IP issue, but also as a plajarism issue, which some were making a stance against even though they were also against IP. At what point is it not plajarism to call something your own work if you change it a bit here and there?
what if you were influenced by the writing style? or wanted to write a sequel? Would that be allowed?
Jeffrey Tucker covers something analogous here: http://mises.org/daily/3864
this IP debate seems mostly about copyright with a bit of patent thrown in. Lets introduce some Trademark talk. What will be the effect on branding without trademark rights? I think trademarks are important to businesses to help distinguish their products, and build trust/distrust with consumers. Maybe there would be some sort of private trademark registery and businesses seen to violate these private agreements would be ostracized from the business community?
That can get tricky really quickly because we have all the problems with IP + the one about reputation. Reputation isn’t something physical, but then again, undermining or using someone else’s reputation could be fraud. Or reputation might just be a completely subjective thing which each actor’s valuation of a company.
We can make an entirely new thread dedicated to that subject.
As long as you aren’t copying the media.
Do you not see a grey area forming here?
What’s the difference between kind-of-copying and copying?
Nope. Copying means using the media to create another media with identical information.
I am having some trouble with this whole fraud thing. Certainly it seems like a violation of a contract if you explicitly lie like in the example where someone claims to be selling pure gold when it is in fact fools gold, and the seller knew it was fools gold. Equally, it seems fradulent to claim to have written a book that you did not, simply changing the name, or more simply claiming to BE the author. Same with running a restuarant and claiming that you have a 5 star rating from the Restaurant Safety Consumer Report Company when in fact you only got 2 stars. But there seems to be a lot of gray area in terms of not being explicitly fraudulent. Could you not simply create your own company also called the Restaurant Safety Consumer Report Company and give yourself a 5 star rating? You could even buy the real thing copy the whole book but change your rating and publish and distribute. Seems rather costly, but reputation is important.
I am confident there are answers out there that are not .: govt but I am curious as to what those are