Stranger, AJ may be onto something here. I suggest we’re better off keeping information in an information universe, separate from – yet perfectly analogous to – the physical one. It’s intuitive to everyone that information is NOT physical. It is also intuitive to everyone – as is even reflected in language – that creators own their information (Cameron’s movie, Mises’ book, Mathworks’ program) regardless of what physical media it has been copied on. The Avatar binary sequence could be saved on a drive, DVD, written on paper, memorized by an idiot savant, recited by a school-girl – it’s still the SAME binary sequence, the same information created/produced, thus owned, by Cameron.
Insisting that “information = physical media” paints one into a corner in which he must defend information as property by physical property rules. This inevitably converges the debate into one of separate contracts (signed or not, agreed by all or not, etc.). If information is property in an information universe, such contracts become obsolete – a much cleaner, simpler solution, IMO.
So, it sounds like you are conceding. Maybe you would be happy to restrain your argument to your imaginary “information universe” and keep out of our physical one. That would mean to stop posting this creationist nonsense.
Without IP law, people would still refer to a work as the author’s work. We can recognize the origination of an idea without having to grant this person some fictitious “ownership” of a pattern or concept. With your way of thinking Gödel’s theorem would be owned by Gödel (or his great-great-grandchildren now I suppose). Anyone who wanted to discuss his idea would have to pay tribute to him.
IP advocates recognize the absurdity of following their doctrine fully. This is why any rules you draft are arbitrary. Owning every little binary pattern would grind the world to a halt. We would be in a constant state of war over our “pattern property”. This “debate” reminds me of other statist fearmongering. You guys talk like nobody would bother creating any great works without IP monopoly. For more of our civilized history there were no IP laws, just like there was no fiat money.
I have conceded nothing. Stranger is doing a splendid job at defending his arguments. I am merely proposing an additional (potentially simpler, cleaner) argument for information as property. There’s nothing creationist about it. Do you know the meaning of the words you’re using?
If you say so. Now do you mind stopping your strawman-ing (and throwing random mud-balls hoping some of them stick by chance) and contribute something of value to a discussion for a change?
Read the bolded parts above. Projecting a little, aren’t we? "Owning every little binary pattern cubic meter of space would grind the world to a halt. We would be in a constant state of war over our “pattern property” “physical property”. Let’s abolish ALL property as a concept, then?
In principle, there is nothing wrong with introducing the notion of an information space, nor of homesteading parts of that information space. However, it is clear that information space doesn’t share all the characteristics of real physical space. For that reason, it is not apparent prima facie that the arguments for property rights and homesteading within real physical space automatically carry over to information space.
It seems that to make a successful argument by analogy with real physical property rights, one would have to
Identify exactly which characteristics of real physical space motivate or justify (consequentially and/or ethically if that’s your thing) real space property rights and homesteading.
Demonstrate that information space shares these same characteristics.
Thank you! Someone should have said this 123 posts ago!
Also, I just realized that there is a serious theoretical problem with z1235/Stranger’s positions - it is a problem in computability theory called the language equivalence problem. Is it possible, in general, to decide if two languages* are equivalent? If the domain of languages is any language which can be defined on a universal Turing machine (general purpose computer, such as you are using right now), the answer is no - it is an uncomputable (basically, unsolvable) problem. To translate this to ordinary English, this means that it is impossible to decide if two computers produce the same output simply by inspecting them. So, it is always possible to make copies such that it is impossible to decide, by inspection, whether they are equivalent or not, that is, whether they both output the movie Avatar, for example. This is worse than the “just because you can’t defend it doesn’t mean it’s not yours” situation, it means that information is inherently indefensible. If the physical universe were like the information universe, in this regard, there would be no fences or security because such measures simply could not exist.
Clayton -
*These are computer-theoretic languages, not necessarily natural languagees
An objection like this shows that you still haven’t understood the difference between information and ideas. Avatar is not a language, it is data, the output of a process. It is this fact that makes it scarce. It is certainly possible to compare Avatar to a counterfeit copy, as the input that goes into the produce is a unique event in the universe, and so is the output of the process.
The process itself, of making the movie Avatar, is not under copyright. You can hire your own actors, use your own recording equipment, and edit your own Avatar at will, so long as you do not use the data of the original Avatar as input. If you use the process independently of the original data, then it is impossible for you to be even close in the information universe.
I agree 100%. The main purpose of this (‘Information as Property’) thread was to make progress toward (1) and (2). As expected, the attacks to the analogy and my replies in its defense focused on exactly those issues. If/when I get the time I could probably write a distilled version of them in another post (I wish I had the time for a sabbatical and write a book, instead.). For now, I think most of the answers are already contained in this thread as we touched on the main characteristics of property: appropriation, demarcation, scarcity, and rivalry in both the physical and information space. Honestly, digging deeper into the paradigm by responding in this thread increased my appreciation for it.
I still don’t understand on what basis the “clearly” in “clearly not rival” comes from. We’ve piled up argument after argument demonstrating how human action and even now science shows that information is rival.
I would love to understand your argument but I don’t. Do you mind elaborating? Are you saying that one could encode/encrypt an Avatar 10GB binary sequence to the point at which it becomes unrecognizable as Avatar any more? If so, I thought I already responded to that (in one of the two posts here awaiting your reply). If not, I’d love to learn more about this.
I just thought about another answer to your defensibility attack from before. A prospector discovering and homesteading a gold mine on Mars could simply keep it a secret (hide the map in his safe) or publish the discovery and the instructions on how to get there on the cover page of the New York Times. Would the latter weaken in any way his claim to ownership of the mine? I would say, no. I could be wrong, but a claim to property is NOT weakened/strenghtened by the owner’s ability to defend it. If it was, wouldn’t that be tantamount to “might makes right”?
As I’ve repeated a few times before on this fora, I am not married to ANY idea, concept, and paradigm. I love building/discovering/collecting them for their own sake and I welcome bricks being thrown at them. If I can defend the structure by catching the incoming bricks, then I can use them to make the structure stronger. If I’m unable to defend it then the structure just wasn’t meant to be and it’s better torn down sooner than later. As free market proponents we all agree on the optimality of creative destruction and inefficiency of subsidies (of the mental sort, in this case). Nothing should be left standing longer than the market would allow it. The market of ideas, in this case.
That’s not going to work. Fallacy 10 says that intellectual property is valid as long as it remains a secret or protected by convoluted security mechanisms. However, no system of justice can be invoked to protect that property, because that would be wrong somehow!
A 10GB binary sequence in a 10GB-dimensional information universe is as rival as a cubic meter of space is rival in a 3-dimensional physical universe. They’re both rival in their respective universes. The creator of the valuable (to the market) 10GB sequence is the owner of the information area in which it resides. The prospector, finder, first appropriator of a cubic meter of space is the owner of the physical area in which it resides. No two agents could own the same binary 10GB sequence because the likelihood of both of them arriving at the same (or similar) sequence independently is as small as the likelihood of me literally walking into you, as allowed by quantum mechanics laws.
Cameron owns his information property (in the information universe) and he rightfully gets all the rent the market is paying him for “visiting” there and enjoying it. By copying Avatar and selling it to the public (in the physical universe) you are trespassing/aggressing against his property in the information universe and receiving rent from property that’s not yours. So this rivalry in the information space has actual repercussions in the physical space, as the capital (in rent) you steal from Cameron is quite tangible indeed.
Just a thought on scarcity: One could say that space and matter are far from scarce (10^80 cubic meters + 5x10^80 atoms available in our universe). And yet we, as humans, have found it useful to consider space and matter as property.
yes. i have no idea what you dont understand about physical objects being rival and intangibles not being rival. too bad you can’t explain what you disagree with.
if it were rival then there would be a possible conflict in use. but there is no possible conflict in use. hence non-rival.if you and i both travel to the bizarro world of 10GB-dimensional information universe. we could both use all the information for our own independent ends without frustrating each other by so doing.
Not quite. Read again the part of my post that you left out. There obviously IS a conflict when you claim to own Cameron’s property in the information space, and Cameron WOULD be frustrated by your trespass/aggression:
this is not a technical conflict in use. its mere disapproval in anothers use. yet the other persons use has no effect on the claimants use. it is not at all like conflict in the use of a chair because we both can’t be the primary sitter concurrently.
we will always be able to both use whatever information in the information space. not rival.
There could hardly be anything technical in the information space. Of course, if you define rivalry strictly in physical terms then there wouldn’t be any of it in a non-physical universe, but that’s circular, at best, and hardly an attack to the analogy.
Let’s go back to the gold prospector who found a gold mine on Mars and published its coordinates in the New York Times. Do you consider the mine rival? If not, would you fly to the mine and start digging after you saw the location in the NYT? After all both you and the owner could dig from different holes without conflict and interference. You think the owner wouldn’t/shouldn’t mind?
im defining rivalry in terms of conflict in use. think about power. a chair is rival, there are ways two people might want to use it that would conflict so that if one acted the other person would not have the power to do his act(without interfering in the first persons act) and with the conflict happening ‘over the chair itself’ and not in some other thing. no such claim can be made about information. gold mines are rival. information about gold mines is not rival. both our knowings do not conflict. my knowing doesnt remove from you the power to know. im suprised that the concept of rival is in such dispute. Does anyone have citations from literature that define ‘rival’?