So are you saying anything?
Z.
you homestead the rival good. in this case the rival good is mineral deposit.
analogies live or die by the relevance of the differences. sorry you missed that.
So then I can also homestead information, since much like mineral deposits information will be entirely consumed very quickly if it is not the private property of the first homesteader.
The Minerals argument is a red herring, and another fallacy you’ve committed here is to demand that we can’t debunk your argument without having an alternative argument.
what you say is true of a particular media.that is a particular piece of tangible property that is understood by interpreters of information as being a source of information.
but is not true of information itself. information itself is conceptual. there is no information without an interpretational scheme.
if you insist on completely conflating media with information, then please desist referring to information and please refer only to scarce media. you shall find that there will be nothing to stop me making scarce media of my own that has qualities similar to your scarce media. our media encodes the same information.
if you find there is a difference , subtle as may be, between media and information then we can talk about that.
So have you shown how the differences are relevant to the analogy, or you are simply going to proclaim them as such?
Z.
I have said that information and tangible material are not both equally property; because one is rival and scarce and the other is not rival nor scarce.
WTF?
Clayton -
he doesnt think that cd’s encode information.rather, he thinks cd’s are information. and because cd’s can be consumed, he therefore thinks information can be
Thank you for pointing this out. I really should not be wasting my time dignifying that line of discussion with responses.
Clayton -
I used to hold to IP… but even when I held to IP, I realized that it was a pretty iffy concept and if I had read the counter-arguments to IP back then, I certainly would have realized right then and there - statist though I was - that IP is BS. I guess the urge to rationalize what is, no matter the cost, is difficult for some people to resist.
Clayton -
The equivalent to the media is the oil well, not the deposit itself. Oil wells are cheap to make, simple to reproduce and, once an oil deposit is known, anyone can tap into it. Now if you want to hold to the idea that an oil deposit is rivalrous, you will also have to concede that information is. Much like with an oil deposit, information can be extracted and supplied to the market only to the extent that its marginal value is greater than the marginal cost of producing more from the well. Beyond that point, the deposit is worthless. To grant unlimited access to an oil deposit then is create a race between all oil producers to extract as much oil as possible before this marginal threshold is reached. In information, the same race happens, as all producers of media attempt to supply the market as quickly as possible, with complete disregard for the damage to the source they are causing. The same thing happens with fish, forests, or any other natural resource.
But of course, real economists do not consider this race to be “efficient production”, since once the resource has been destroyed through this process another resource must be produced in order for the market to be supplied again. Why would capital be invested in the production of another resource? Only if this investment is protected with a property right in the discovered resource.
As we see, property in information is exactly the same principle as property in any other natural resource. And of course, communists neither believe in the ownership of natural resources as they do in the ownership of information, as the objection in both cases is exactly the same.
If the communists would just admit that they are communists, then I would not be able to raise an objection to their attempts at refuting property rights. Since they won’t admit to being communists and claim that private property is justifiable, then they must provide us with their theory of property, how property can be acquired in a world of scarcity yet excluding one instance of scarcity (which they sometimes admit information is, sometimes not, sometimes both) that doesn’t also create an exception for many other kinds of sometimes-scarcity.
That’s fine. Both a digitized image (at large enough resolution) of the napkin or the written text (as ASCII characters turned into bits) can be represented as 10GB sequences making them members of the 10GB-dimensional informational universe. What of it?
?..My informational universe and informational property within it, as concepts, are as “mythical” as the concept of physical property. They are all concepts created by humans for humans for the purpose of resolving conflicting and rival property claims.
Not really. All books are by nature “digital” (i.e. quantized) as they are simply discrete finite-length sequences of letters (which come from finite sets, say size 200, in order to include all letters used by mankind). Thus the informational universe of all possible books is comprised of all possible letter sequences of whatever length would be needed to accommodate the longest book ever (to be) written. The writer of each book becomes the owner of a piece of property in the informational universe of books, which is a subset of the larger (more encompassing) universe of all possible 10GB patterns.
Believe me, I know quite a bit about signal processing and information theory. Any analog signal, if quantized by intensity and sampled in time and/or space with high enough granularity (bandwidth) can be easily transformed into a digital (thus binary) sequence and occupy its own spot in the 10GB-dimensional informational universe. Vice versa, any digital signal can be presented (transformed back) into what our senses perceive to be an analog signal (CD music, movie Avatar).
So? Is the concept of physical property or ethics or freedom any more “real”? Everything we are discussing here is a ultimately a human construct/concept, including our concept of a 3-dimensional physical universe with 3-dimensional objects in it. It’s a model/construct that best allows us to operate and thrive as agents but that doesn’t necessarily make it any more “real” than our senses would allow.
Is that a promise or a threat? [:)]
Or he could just represent the sequence of ASCII characters (letters) into a binary sequence and claim THAT piece of the 10GB informational universe as his own. All instances of a 10GB representation of his book would demarcate the boundaries of his homesteaded property in the informational universe.
Actually, it is exactly the separation of the information from any physical medium (in a physical universe) – and placing it into an informational universe – that IS my case.
Z.
They are both rival and scarce in their respective universes. Hence, information is property in the informational universe and tangible material is property in the physical universe.
Z.
There are not different universes, there is our universe. i deny your bizarre ontology
As you wish. One can bring a cow to the water but he can’t make it drink.
Z.
What on earth?
If you insist that “information = physical media,” then you cannot consistently claim that the information is being “extracted,” “consumed,” “damaged,” etc.