Draw for yourself the graph representing % of global GDP in production/consumption of intangibles (software, films, books. music, etc.) 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago, and extrapolate that 100 years into the future. Your anti-IP Archaic Capitalists (“mixing labor” on tomato farms, and bartering them for potatoes on Crusoe islands) will be remembered as a mere pimple on human history’s a**, and that is AFTER they’ve been ostracized onto the fringes of productive society as Communists and thieves. The writing is already on the wall, if you only opened your eyes.
There’s also plenty of evidence that they don’t view it as property.
If the people naturally view information not to be property how will you force them to change their natural tendency?
So your argument doesn’t necessarily hold because it is not based in reason, but in your vague interpretation.
It often is.
Humans use reason to overcome instincts. If we were incapable of reason, I would agree.
No one is trying to force anyone here, except those who advocate IP enforcement which is an absurdity that undermines physical property rights. Information can’t be “owned by everyone”… it can’t be owned! No one has ever owned “the sky is blue”
Instinct be damned, I’m human!
That’s pretty much what was outlined in human action. I’m not arguing against the notion that there are people who “treat information as property” just as much as someone believes a raindance will bring rain. I don’t get where you get the idea that I want to force anything on anyone. It’s those who advocate IP that want to force their conception of IP to supersede my property rights.
What prediction? I didn’t make a prediction. I am saying that IP undermines other property rights. That isn’t a prediction, it is a logical argument.
You are the one arguing from a collectivist standpoint when you claim “the people do such and such, so we should all do such and such”
You are the one that is being imposing with your rules.
I am just pointing out the contradiction of IP law with physical property law. Rand was wrong, too bad.
How does that apply to third parties? Say that Brian purchases a book from Adam, and explicitly enters into a contract with Adam to not reproduce that book, with penalties specified. He then explicitly violates that contract and makes a copy, leaving out anything resembling the contract and/or copyright, and leaves this copy on a park bench. Brian is of course liable to Adam, as there is a clear breech of contract. He pays whatever penalties are due Adam based on the contract, and the contract is now settled. Brian has his original copy of the book and is making no more copies, while Adam has what was owed him for the contract violation.
Charles finds the copy lying on the park bench. There is no indication that this book is in any way restricted. Charles has not entered into a contract with Adam. Charles makes many copies of the book, and gives them to Darla, Eric, Fred, Gus, Hal, Igor, John and Lisa. How are C. through L. bound by a contract to which they did not agree nor of which they were not informed?
To ignore human nature and instincts assumes they have no relevance to human action which is clearly incorrect. I can logically reason that people should not do drugs. That has no impact on whether people do drugs or not. I can logically reason that people should do drugs and that will have no impact on whether people do drugs. A better course of action is to ask why do people do drugs and under what circumstances and does this affect others…the same is true for information. We can observe that unregulated markets sometimes treat information as property and other times it gets treated as non property. It seems to me the scarcity of the particular information is the determining factor not your opinion of whether or not it is property.
You claiming that information can not be owned is contrary to the evidence we witness in every day society. You want to allow what most people would consider theft to be legal…see my hacker example.
Yes, your prediction is that without government there would be no IP protection…clearly false. Your prediction is that without government people will not consider information property…again false.
I am not saying people should do anything…that is what you are saying…you say people should not view information as property…I say well most of the planet generally thinks of information as property and you are proposing to make them stop somehow. When we look at what you propose it creates scenarios where theft will now be legalized.
There is no contradiction…scarce things that can be put under some measure of control are viewed as property…non scarce things are not. The marketplace property law is the only one that matters.
FYI, whenever i walk into a shop on the high street, i never see a sign saying , “please don’t take goods off the shelf without paying, that’s theft”
contrariwise, If i sit in a cinema more than not, i am advised that “Downloading pirated films is stealing…”
because knowing information, if that knowing disincentives you from making payments to people who own artificial legal monopolies over the use of that information… is theft …apparently.
its a good thing that the techniques for growing tomatoes are not the monopoly property of TomatoCorp otherwise the pizza I will enjoy this evening would have been very dry.
Your response demonstrates the inconsistency in your own argument. If information can be controlled as property via contract then the same rules apply to stealing the items in the said contract as to anything else. A more consistent argument for you anti IP types is to say that no contracts can exist regarding information because it is not property and no one has ownership of it so we cant make a contract about it. That argument would be still wrong but at least you would be consistent. For your argument to work it has to be 100% right in all circumstance because you are the one asserting that information can not be property. If we demonstrate in just one case where contracts can be used to protect information then you must be wrong because the information in that one case is being treated as owned property. All of your what if theories only address the question of who owns the information not whether information can be owned. It seems much more reasonable that if you have a copy and I have a copy of something that we both own it as opposed to your theory that nobody owns it. Once we understand that it can be owned then we can apply the same rules of ownership to information as we do to anything else. So the means of acquisition are important and limits on use are perfectly reasonable. Also, deliberate attempts to violate the contracts would constitute theft. Also, the care which the owner used for the information would also be a factor in determining ownership and use rights.
How you acquire the information matters. Secretly taping movies contrary to the theater and movie contracts is theft. If you acquire the information independent of the originator then it is all yours without restriction.
You are confusing the difficulty of enforcing information contracts with whether or not they are enforceable.
While I wouldn’t call it theft. It would most probably be a rules violation, and they could have a clearly written out fine of some ammount for breaking the rule of the theatre. Maybe movie studios would buy up movie theatres because the studios would have a greater incentive to enforce the no filming inside the theatre rule. Although maybe movie studios would just not let theatres with a reputation of letting bootlegers in show their movies.
Nope. That copyright stuff is part of the story told in the book. And the book is not a contract after all. And not all contracts can be enforced anyway. And so on and so forth.
If your consistent then the hacker can not be punished either for copying software code. Please be consistent. What they have lost is the ability to control the information they had due to the violation of the contract. Having not been given permission to copy results in the loss of being able to use the information as they desired.
We can change the setting a bit: What about someone who owns a place where short poems can be “sold” for a certain fee under the restriction that theese poems are only distributed further for a certain fee that goes to the original author. The Placeowner of course can enforce those rules on his properties, he does not need such constructs as “intellectuel property” to justify this rules, he uses concepts as sound to forbid certain soundwaves to be produced. But off his property, this rules are no longer enforcible, though the “buyers” of the poems are still have a contract with the placeowner: They may not spread the poems for free. But what happens when they do so and accept the penalty? Those who recieve the poems for free aren’t in any contract with the placeowner so that they are free to spread the poem without restriction to anybody paying no fee.
Here is where IP-advocats and -enemies clash: Advocats asume IP a priori and wonder about the outcomes of the enemies and vice versa. The discussion is somehow pointless in an anarcho-capitalist society because intellectual property may or may not be present materially like anything in such a society. What really is needed in this discussion is a non-utilitarian, non-normative discussion about the possibility of intellectual property - and its effects on property rights on tangible things as mentioned earlier.
Intellectual property seems to me not to be a sound concept because it violates the law of scarcity and concepts that are respected in other areas: No harm is done, when someone copies information from you, no matter how hard you worked to manifest it, because the information - better a copy of it - is still in your posession and you do not own the possible outcome of ‘selling’ the information, like you can not punish your neighbour for driving down the houseprice through his neglected, ugly garden.
P.S.: Please excuse me for my poor english, it is not my mother’s tongue.
I’ve missed some of the debate but someone brought up ‘Human Nature’. Attempting to define specific attributes of human nature, aside from Humans as a social animal and Humans act, will be futile and subject to the arbitrary whims and opinions of one individual to the next.
But he can be punished for accessing a network without permission and copying data. Y’see: you forget the fact that there was nothing sold when a hacker breaches a network. Please DO LEARN that salient fact. Failure to do so will result in you continuing to be wrong.
Fixing your quoting of me, as it seems you missed this the first time. Bold added, though the text is the same.
It says nothing about copyright or a contract in the book in Charles’ possession. He has made no contract with Adam, nor has he been informed that Adam would like to enter into a contract. How is Charles bound by such a contract?
Doesn’t that sound familar flic? Same thing discussed in that other thread ‘government on a different level’. When the arguments boil down to “human nature” the game has changed and somebody is bringing in the baseball bats and it’s not for hitting homeruns. The appeal has changed to ‘people need to be controlled’.