MaikU wrote the following post at Wed, Sep 1 2010 8:18 PM:
I may be too late in this thread, but what I have read so far, the main issue with IP in this thread is that those who are pro-IP assert, that and “idea” becomes a property only when it is named as such, for example, a song, a movie, a novel etc. That’s how I understand their definition at least.
Theydon’t say ideas can be owned, but when those ideas are built into something.. well, material, haha. If I write a song into CD, that song (not only CD) becomes mine and then if I try to sell this CD, anybody who downloads it illegally is violating “my property rights”.
Am I right, pro-IP people?
You cannot understand the basis of intellectual property unless you have a better idea of what information is beyond an idea.
Ideas do not factor at all in intellectual property. They are a strawman used by the IP communists to legitimize their expropriating agenda, one that the OP has shown to contradict itself.
I wasn’t asking about the individual justifications for the individual exclusions. I was asking about the general justification for the general exclusion. We say that exclusive rights to physical property arose for certain reasons, and we advocate that people should respect those exclusive rights for certain reasons. We come up with economic reasons for the exclusive rights to physical property. Those reasons are apart from the individual reasons which somebody in a society might come up with, or might even not come up with, in order to exclude somebody from their physical property. I am asking what you think are the reasons why exclusive rights to “information property” arose, and why you advocate that people should respect those exclusive rights, not about what somebody might say to somebody else if they are excluding them from their “information property”.
I didn’t claim that ideas are relevant, only when they are “materialized” into certain pattern, like a song, movie etc. There is not my intention to straw-man, only to understand your position.
Do you define “overwhelming power” such that it must necessarily win every possible conflict?
How are costs being measured here? How is minimization being determined?
Why is it necessarily only in the interests of anyone who does not possess “overwhelming power” to minimize conflicts?
I’d say there’s no precise definition of “property” that all property theorists agree on. However, the anti-IP camp defines “property” such that “ideal objects” cannot be included under it. Nor can all tangible objects fall under the anti-IP definition of “property”, for some (such as “air”) are not considered scarce (i.e. rivalrous). Does that make sense?
Furthermore, as z1235 points out, anything we call an “object” is really an abstraction. Yet “tangible object” is an abstraction that corresponds to empirical sensations, whereas “ideal object” is not. And again, while ideal objects require representation within tangible objects, there is no particular representation of an ideal object that can be said to be “the real representation”.
Of course, there’s also no collection of atoms that have been in your body that you can point to as being “the real you”, either. But humans don’t intuitively perceive other human beings as being patterns of atoms. As z1235 (among others!) also points out, it is subjective valuation that drives human action. At a certain level, one could say that the anti-IP camp is arguing that people intuitively perceive some things as patterns, and that those patterns are distinct from their physical representations; therefore, because the patterns can (at least often) be duplicated without disturbing the existing representations, they aren’t perceived as being rivalrous.
What people do (or can) perceive, however, is whether someone is the original creator of something. I think this is the part of the IP concept that could remain in a free-market society. After all, it’s one thing to copy a book and sell it as a copy; it’s another to copy it and (try to) sell it as if it were not a copy, i.e. an original work. To me it’s quite possible that the latter action would be seen as fraudulent even in a society “governed” by free-market principles. In addition, as I and others have mentioned before, there are potential limitations on use that can be contractually agreed upon for a given product.
You made no mention of original appropriation/homesteading in your original definition of property. If you’re implicitly adding this to that definition, that’s fine (although I wish you’d be explicit about it). At this point, I have to ask how homesteading involves any kind of “production”, as I understand that word to mean.
Let me put it another way: you throwing a party at my house while I’m on vacation would constitute trespass (assuming I didn’t want you to do that), while me producing a copy of a pattern that you originally came up with in no way trespasses against your use of that same pattern; nor does it cause any damage against the pattern or (presumably) the product that embodies it.
I think you’re conflating the notion of scarcity found in some of Hoppe’s writings with that of Mr. Kinsella and the rest of the (his? anti-IP camp. With the latter, expending labor on something doesn’t per se make it scarce.
I fail to see how stating the obvious (“property is not a contract”) has any relevance here. Nowhere did I assert otherwise.
The rest of your paragraph here is rather incomprehensible to me. How is “a non-contractual, legalized use of property” equal to “legal nonsense”? Maybe I don’t understand how you’re using those terms. And saying that “contracts do not cover unknown third parties because they are third parties” adds no meaningful information IMO. My point was that, unlike IP law, which does cover unknown third parties, “IP contracts” cannot do so.
MaikU wrote the following post at Thu, Sep 2 2010 2:38 AM:
I didn’t claim that ideas are relevant, only when they are “materialized” into certain pattern, like a song, movie etc. There is not my intention to straw-man, only to understand your position.
As the OP demonstrated, ideas can also be “materialized” into criminal action. Should criminals have the right to use their ideas?
I did not use the words “necessarily” or “every possible” - the State possesses overwhelming power with respect to any of its subjects (and, usually, any group of its subjects) and can win any conflict with them. When has anyone ever successfully refused to pay taxes without a revolution? You will pay your taxes or you will be jailed or killed. There is no such thing as politely refusing to pay your taxes.
The costs of conflict are clearly higher than the costs of non-conflict. The benefits of conflict if you win are usually greater than the benefits of non-conflict but the costs of conflict if you lose must be counted, as well. They may be even greater than the benefits you had expected to gain from fighting (in other words, you might lose more than you could have hoped to gain by force). Hence, unless you can be reasonably sure you will win a conflict, you must discount the benefits of winning against the costs of losing by some estimate of the probability of each event.
Those who possess overwhelming power can be reasonably sure to win any given conflict. Marginally advantaged competitors do get beaten by the underdog in every sport and the history of warfare is no different. If you go to battle with 1000 men against an enemy consisting of 1000 men, you are rolling the dice unless you have some major technological advantage (which translates, again, into “overwhelming power”).
The rational course of action of someone who possesses overwhelming power is to use it to increase his property. Agents of the State with the capacity to wield the apparatus of State to their private advantage (the Puppet Masters, as I call them) would be acting irrationally not to do so. Of course, no one willingly gives up their property (unless they’ve been sufficiently well brainwashed by government schools) so the expropriatory acts of the State on behalf of its directors victimize targets who would resist if they were not faced with the overwhelming power of the State. Watch an interview of Aaron Russo who became an anti-statist after the IRS changed the laws on bullion trading and penalized him for past violations of the new rules, ex post facto. This is the rule, not the exception.
I don’t get what you saying. Criminals are punished based on their actions against other humans, not on something non-agressive, like writing a song onto CD.
The distinction between a degree and a category is a boundary problem in its own right – mostly of a semantic nature, at that. A category is oftentimes a manifestation of a sufficiently large difference in degree (ice, water), or a semantic acknowledgment of a phenomenon’s importance (Eskimo’s dozens names for ‘snow’). As I said, atoms are generally not considered property, but objects (matter, land) which are solely comprised of them are. Somewhere between an atom and an object must lie a definitional boundary of physical property. In the same way, somewhere between a trivial idea (or the trivial bit sequence ‘101’) and a 10GB “Avatar” pattern lies a definitional boundary of information property. Both (physical and information property) definitional boundaries are not set in stone and are manifestations of (decided by) the subjective valuations of human actors comprising the market.
From a wider perspective, I view the concept of property as mankind’s heuristically evolved (market driven) incentive scheme that reflects the subjective preferences of human actors toward more (rather than less) wealth and prosperity (i.e. more property). Capitalistic (property ownership) systems trounce communistic (free for all) systems handily toward that end. Property theoreticians then come in and try to build an “ought” from such heuristically derived “is” by data-mining (curve-fitting) physical property attributes (scarcity, rivalry, tangibility, etc.) onto the concept of property. Slapping cause-effect models onto fundamentally heuristic phenomena is the favorite bread-maker of professional theoreticians and can produce fodder for many a Ph.D. theses and books but, from experience, not much more than that.
So I place the question of IP in the above context. IMO, if human actors end up subjectively valuing larger (rather than smaller) information wealth, then the evolutionary heuristics (the free market) will establish (prefer) the superior incentive scheme toward that end – i.e. information as property, versus its communistic (free for all) alternative. The ongoing explosion in creation and exchange of information products (software, entertainment, productivity tools, etc.) over the last few decades suggests a direction for this preference: more information, richer information universe. Hence, my belief that the incentive scheme (information as property) toward such an end would only become stronger as a concept.
Finally, the above is just an analysis, an observation by a detached yet curious mind. I have no horse in this race.
So the distinction in your opinion between those two different words is mostly about what they mean.
I wasn’t talking about different categories as in different words or something. If, on one hand, we are talking about states of matter, the difference between ice and water of course is a difference of degree, but, on the other hand, we are talking about appearances, the difference between them might be a difference of category. I wasn’t talking about words, but of our perspective.
If you focus on the difference of how much it costs to develop something, you might say that the difference between choosing what new spin to take with baking food at a bakery and developing a whole new drug at a pharmacy reseach and development business is just a difference of degree, in terms of how much it costs to do. So you might say that it would be crazy to have “IP” in the first case, but it might be a good idea to have “IP” in the second case, but that we should let the market decide what the boundaries are in those differences of degree.
But, if you focus on something else, such as whether the end-result of your information is a “static” thing, such as a book, a CD, a movie, or whatever, or whether the end-result of it is a “dynamic” thing, like exchanging oil with certain people, I would say that is a difference not of degree, but of category, and it is pretty arbitrary to say that we should have “IP” in the first case, but not the second case, unless you can come up with the reason why that difference is just a difference of degree relevant to how it would work in a market.
It isn’t relevant here, but that is just a bizarre myth.
If I own something, how could I not own its atoms? If I own a pot of boiling water, how could I not own the molecules vibrating at a certain speed? Aren’t the molecules vibrating at that speed just the water boiling? Aren’t they just two different levels of description of the same thing? Don’t we own things, not levels of description of things?
I wasn’t even talking about that. I was talking about the difference between “owning” what marks to put on a piece of paper, which every pro-“IP” person thinks of as a good application of “IP”, and “owning” where to sell oil, which no pro-“IP” person thinks of as a good application of “IP”. I want to know where the difference is between those two cases. If you think that it is a difference of degree, show me what perspective we have to see it from to see it like that, and we will see whether that difference of degree has anything to do with incentives on the market, how it would work selling it, and so on.
I don’t understand that section at all.
The “IP” system has been getting hit pretty hard for the last few decades. How do you explain that?
Categorizations are subjective and purpose-dependent – a means human actors use toward the end of logical consistency for their point of view. (E.g. Racists focusing on skin color as a category). To the list of “static”/“dynamic”, “tangible”/“intangible”, and “scarce”/“non-scarce” categorizations we could also add whether an object (entity) can be demarcated (distinguished) from another member of the set (universe) or not. The reason I stay away from analyzing “ideas”, patents, and processes as property in this discussion is because it can often be hard to demarcate/separate one from another. For you, it is convenient to focus on the tangible/intangible categorization because that allows you to lump both (1) “ideas” that are hard to demarcate and (2) information patterns that are easy to demarcate into the same “intangibles” category and use the deficiencies of (1) to attack (2).
The problem of demarcation creeps up into physical property, as well. Air and water (though also comprised of atoms) are somewhat hard to demarcate hence tricky to view as property despite their tangibility.
As explained above, for me, that perspective is mostly one of demarcation, i.e. quantification of separateness. The more complex an information pattern, the larger its distance from other information patterns in the information universe, hence the easier it becomes to demarcate (distinguish) as a separate entity (object). The degree is one of informational distance in the informational universe.
Believe it or not, the atoms comprising you now are not the atoms that comprised you three years ago. When talking about self-ownership, which atoms do you own exactly and when?
That hurt. I was mighty proud when completed it, as I thought that it explained my motivation in this debate at a deeper level. Values, are subjective, after all.
“At a certain level, one could say that the anti-IP camp is arguing that people intuitively perceive some things as patterns, and that those patterns are distinct from their physical representations; therefore, because the patterns can (at least often) be duplicated without disturbing the existing [physical] representations, they aren’t perceived as being rivalrous.”
“At a certain level, one could say that the anti-IP camp is arguing that people intuitively perceive some things as patterns, and that those patterns are distinct from their physical representations; therefore, because the patterns can (at least often) be duplicated without disturbing the existing [patterns], they aren’t perceived as being rivalrous.”
Which version did you intend ? There is a slight ambiguity.
I’ve suggested that this same ambiguity may also show up in Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property. On page 33, Kinsella writes:
“Ideas are not naturally scarce. However, by recognizing a right in an ideal object, one creates scarcity where none existed before.”
It’s not totally clear whether the scarcity is created in the idea or in the tangible, physical representation.
I think it makes a difference which one is chosen here.
Do you agree ?
Another question:
As you see it, can the physical representations be reproduced without disturbing the original physical representation?
If I see a car in someone’s driveway, can I go to the manufacturer and ask them to make me a physical representation just like it, without disturbing the original physical representation ?
You kept addressing (1) to attack intangibles (vs tangibles) as a property category, while I keep addressing (2) to defend separability (vs non-separability) as a property attribute.
I am only guessing, but I think object separability has a lot to do with transaction costs and it enters every agent’s cost/benefit analysis before deciding whether to pursue/protect a property claim. The more separable the object (property) in question is, the easier it is to demarcate from others and to prove ownership of it. That’s why I said that I don’t predict that patents (or processes) would make it as property in a free market. Their separability (amenability to demarcation) is very low thus increasing transaction (conflict resolution) costs beyond their viability.
anti-IP camp. With the latter, expending labor on something doesn’t per se make it scarce.