At the risk of sounding simplistic, I’d say your definition of “property” does not include ideas, while z1235’s definition does.
For the record, I agree with you and Mr. Kinsella on how “property” should be defined.
dear z,
Your analogy fails, simply because of the nature of IP. If I copy your piece of IP, for example, you still have yours, and I have a copy for myself. While “property” exists in the objective, physical sense-IP (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) does not. This is why current law uses words like “infringement” and “piracy” rather than “theft”-because copying IP simply isn’t theft. Sorry to be so brief, I’m busy at the moment.
If somebody starts selling oil someplace and making a profit, should we bar everybody else from moving in and destroying that profit?
If not, I don’t see where you could draw the line between “owning” certain ideas, such as what to print on a bunch of pieces of paper in order to make a certain book, what grooves to put on a CD in order to allow people to play certain songs, which switches to hit on a machine to make a certain product, and so on, and “owning” other ideas, such as where to move your oil and how to price it, where to open your clothing store, what industry to go into, and so on.
If I copy your credit card number, for example, you still have yours, and I have a copy for myself.
If I copy the title for your house, for example, you still have yours, and I have a copy for myself.
If I copy your $100 bill, for example, you still have yours, and I have a copy for myself.
If I swim in your pool whenever you’re not swimming in it, for example, you still get to swim in your pool, and I get to swim in it too.
If I drive your car whenever you’re not driving it, for example, you still get to drive your car, and I get to drive it too.
Conflict? What conflict?
Indeed. For easy conflict resolution, humans invented the concepts of (1) physical property that can be demarcated in the physical universe, and (2) information property that can be demarcated in the information universe.
A word game:
Which doesn’t matter until you use it in order to take my money.
Which doesn’t matter until you walk into my house and start messing with things.
Which doesn’t matter until you use it to transfer the things of other people to yourself.
What if I don’t want your sweat in my pool while I swim in it?
What if I don’t want the “wear and tear” happening because of you driving it?
If ideas are not scarce, period, then we may assume that any and all people have all the ideas they want or need at all times. Then ideas, as ideal objects, are not the cause or source of any dissatisfaction to anyone.
If ideas are not rival, period, then we may assume that any person that uses an idea does not deprive another of the use of that idea. Therefore, for any ‘first knower’ the existence of any later knowers does not impact on their having all the ideas that they had at the earlier times. Then ideas, as ideal objects, are not the cause or source of conflict/dispute/‘incompatible and competing productive plans’ amongst any people
That is not even the point. If “ideas” (information) were not scarce, then there never would arise a market for them in the first place. There would not be any demand for movies, because people could dream up whatever entertainment they desire at will in limitless supply, much like they can simply breathe all the air they desire at will and never need to buy air.
It is precisely the scarcity of information that creates a market for it, and is why there is a black market for it. And Mises, in Human Action, settles the debate thus:
Yet there is an exception to this general rule that monopoly prices benefit the seller and harm the buyer and infringe the supremacy of the consumers’ interests. If on a competitive market one of the complementary factors, namely f, needed for the production of the consumers’ good g, does not attain any price at all, although the production of f requires various expenditures and consumers are ready to pay for the consumers’ good g a price which makes its production profitable on a competitive market, the monopoly price for f becomes a necessary requirement for the production of g. It is this idea that [p. 386] people advance in favor of patent and copyright legislation. If inventors and authors were not is a position to make money by inventing and writing, they would be prevented from devoting their time to these activities and from defraying the costs involved. The public would not derive any advantage from the absence of monopoly prices for f. It would, on the contrary, miss the satisfaction it could derive from the acquisition of g.
If the producer cannot be guaranteed the exclusive control of the output G, then the intermediate good F is not even produced, G never comes into existence and there is nothing for people to copy in the first place!
What the intellectual communists call non-scarcity is in fact the sunk costs of producing a good. It is no different an expropriation then the expropriation of a factory that has already been paid for by its investor in order to “give the workers the full product of their labor.”
We now get to the important point:
Yeah, but you now have to show us why enforcing that “information property” idea is a good idea.
IP arguments almost invalriably assume a right to the value of property as opposed to its physical integrity, or some kind of welfare revenue right, a right to a profit, a right to some deserved reward.
Property and physicality are unrelated. Property exists only in conflicting action.
Conflicting action only happens in the public world. The public world is the physical world.
Conflicting action only happens in the public world. The public world is the physical world.
The very medium we are communicating through contradicts this statement.
(Can we turn off CKEditor? It’s 100% useless.)
Are you saying that the internet, our computers, wires, electricity, and so on, aren’t of the public world?
The forum software is falling apart. We can’t do anything about it right now.
Are you saying that the internet, our computers, wires, electricity, and so on, aren’t of the public world?
They are just infrastructure. The public has no contact with most of them or any inkling how they are arranged and could all be replaced without any of us noticing.
The public world is just the website, the data we are exchanging with one another, transformed syntactically into visible information as pixels on a screen.
Replace “public world” with “external world”. I don’t mean public as in public to the masses.
@OP: I agree with the general thrust of your argument. I have a few thoughts of my own to add.
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Most critics of IP sense that the most consequential applications of IP law (copyright, especially of movies and music) are, in a sense, absurd. I think this intuition is correct, whatever may be said for the methodological deficiencies in how IP critics arrive at this conclusion. The net effect of modern IP law is to price-fix IP goods and services, specifically, to drive the price far above what would obtain in an environment with weaker protection of IP by the public law enforcement apparatus.
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Scarcity can be defined objectively in some domains. Specifically, we can say that time, space, energy and mass are scarce in the sense that they are conserved. Hoppe takes scarcity as a necessary condition for disputes outside of the Garden of Eden but I have a hard time with his assertion that a dispute is impossible in the Garden of Eden since someone with a penchant for dispute can always create artificial “scarcity” by saying “that apple in your hand is my apple” regardless of how many other exactly identical apples there might be.
I prefer a slightly different approach that I think illuminates the issue more fully by starting with two ideas: physical resources and (physical) telic entities. All living things are telic entities. A rock is not a telic entity. A bacterium, on the other hand, is a telic entity. Telic entities act with purpose, specifically, they act to appropriate physical resources and reproduce. When a telic entity appropriates a physical resource for its use, it does so by exercising exclusive control over the resource. Because physical resources are scarce, telic entities often come into conflict and a struggle for exclusive control of a particular physical resource ensues. All physical resources are objectively scarce by virtue of the nature of the physical world. If you have an apple in your hand, you cannot get two apples in your hand by virtue of wishing that the first apple would have an atom-by-atom copy of itself magically made. Because of the nature of the physical world - that matter and energy are conserved - it is possible to have struggle for control of physical resources. Stated more strongly: it is impossible to have a struggle for control of something that is not scarce (and I think this is what Hoppe is ultimately saying) because the definition of a struggle is that it be over a specific thing.
Bit patterns are a wonderful example of something over which it is impossible to have a struggle. Just to be clear, this is not a normative statement. I can’t try to wrest a bit pattern from your hands. I can wrest a hard drive or a Compact Disc from your hands because these are physical objects that obey the laws of physics including the conservation of mass and energy (patterns actually also obey the laws of physics but the interaction between the laws of physics and information patterns is subtle and still somewhat open). So a struggle over a bit pattern is is only a struggle over a bit pattern in a manner of speaking. But if we restrict ourselves to a strictly physical definition of “struggle for control”, then legal disputes over intellectual property are actually proxy disputes for an underlying real dispute. The real dispute is over how the defendants will be permitted to use the physical media in dispute. The proxy dispute is the “intellectual property” dispute. An IP claim is actually a claim of property in a class of (scarce) physical objects. That is, it is still a struggle for control over scarce, physical resources, appearances aside.
Clayton -
I can use it however I want, as it’s no one’s property remember? It’s just numbers. The charges that appear on your CC account are also just numbers, intangible objects that are merely flickering on your computer screen and as such should have no effect on how we operate in the physical universe.
Or I could just sell your house and leave with the cash. The title is MY property and I get to do whatever I want with it, unless you intend to place some undue restrictions to my freedom to do whatever I want with my own property. Then you can run to Nir and ask him for a special exception to his ‘revenue protection’ clause.
But the copied $100 bill is mine. Who are you to say what I can or cannot do with my property, and on what basis?
Tough luck. My concept of property allows anyone to use anyone else’s property as long as the owner is not using it at the moment – to minimize conflict. What if I don’t want your crummy DVD copies of my information (movie, software) being sold on the market? (Tough luck, too?)
Tough luck. Too bad for you that people like me exist who firmly believe in their own concept of property. What are you going to do about it? Try convincing them that yours is the ONLY true concept of property given to you by God himself?
I’ve already shown why information as property is a good idea, but value is subjective. Everything is only as “good” as it is perceived as such by human actors.
I think that he means that people couldn’t evolve to have conflicts over things with each other in “the Garden of Eden”, not that people who evolved in our situation couldn’t just keep acting like they were in our situation even if they were thrown into “the Garden of Eden”.
This is just a word game, as I already said.
Where?
Of course, but people could also of course be incorrect about the means.
Yeah, I think you can’t quite get to Hoppe’s full assertion that conflict in the Garden of Eden is impossible (leaving aside the special cases of standing room and body) without appealing to some kind of “process over time” or “in the long run”, unless he means that anything which does turn into a conflict - such as a fight over a particular apple regardless of the fact that there are inexhaustibly many identical apples freely available - would have to result in some kind of bodily dispute before we would even call it a conflict, which bodily dispute would involve scarcity. But if that is what he means by his Garden of Eden illustration, I think it is less clear than it could be because it misses the point that gratuitous disputes between the pugnaciously minded are absolutely possible, even when such disputes are not in the material interests of the disputants. The point that needs to be illuminated is that scarcity is part of the definition of conflict/struggle. Without scarcity, you can’t draw the boundaries of the thing that is being fought over, so there is no fight.
Clayton -
I might as well use this for my real starting point in this thread.
The pro-IP and anti-IP camps are using two different definitions for “scarce”. Whereas the pro-IP camp defines it as something like “non-limitless”, the anti-IP camp defines it as “rivalrous”. These different definitions cannot be reconciled. For the purpose of debate, one must be chosen over the other. Until that time, the two camps will talk past one another ad infinitum nauseamque.
However, I think the anti-IP camp (of which I’m admittedly a member) has the advantage because it doesn’t ignore rivalry. It takes into account both that 1) matter is finite, and 2) hence one use of a given collection of matter prevents any other use of it at the same time…
Okay, I was about to compare that with the anti-IP treatment of ideas, but first I think an important distinction should be made with respect to finity. Matter is finite in both scope and quantity. A house does not take up infinite space, nor is there an infinite number of houses in existence. On the other hand, ideas are finite only in quantity. That is, there are only so many ideas that have been thought of (even if that number is extremely large). But no idea has a scope that is inherently bounded by anything in physical reality. Rather, all ideas are effectively infinite in scope. [1]
Of course, ideas do depend upon physical representations, which means there is a connection between ideas and matter. Furthermore, the process by which a particular idea is represented necessarily takes time and energy, both of which can also be considered rivalrous. However, these processes do not affect the scope of the ideas themselves. Just because etching Human Action onto a small 3D cube would be a time- and energy-intensive process doesn’t mean that, in theory, it could be done an effectively infinite number of times. [2] Nevertheless, it does affect the willingness of others to copy a given representation of an idea. So no, there is no market for information – there are markets for the scarce (i.e. rivalrous) resources used to represent information!
I am taking time and energy to write this forum post. Once it’s written and posted, anyone can copy it for free, ad infinitum. So why do I still write it, if I’m not getting any monetary compensation for it?!
Need I say more here?
[1] If one wishes to quibble, I’ll say that the scope of all ideas is really abundant in the same sense that air is abundant – there are so many ways to represent ideas relative to the physical material needed that rivalry, for all intents and purposes, need not exist.
[2] That is, enough times that every human being alive today could have more copies than they know what to do with.
Z1235,
Just curious, If ideas can be property, why the arbitrary expiration dates set by governments?
For the sake of a consistency on your behalf, are you ready to support unlimited IP and patent rights, and criticize the current system for granting the owner only a limited amount of time until the rest of us can just take it away?