Actually for all practical intents and purposes, they are identical to within 99.999% - which exceeds reasonable probability - and would meet requirements of proof in a court.
Edit: Anything that was significantly different to the point that it was of inferior quality, to the degree that a jury could not determine it within reasonable doubt, in that case it is not the same thing, and it wouldn’t matter because the quality would be so bad, nobody would gain much by listening to it.
Reasonable probability of what? The recordings are not the same thing. My stance against IP is not predicated on this point. It was merely a critique about your lightbulb example. You stated that music was unique in that it could never be copied exactly. But nothing can be copied exactly. This is not a quality unique to music recordings.
Feel free to elaborate.
Clayton -
Read these sentences:
“A recipe is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“A drawing is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“My mixed drink is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“My ham sandwich is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“Fashion is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“An algorithm is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“A boat hull design is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“A database is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
“A semiconductor maskwork is different, because it’s a unique expression, and if someone duplicates that verbatim and sells it off, that to me is stealing my work.”
Just because you have put labor into it does not make it ownable.
There is nothing different. You are just getting your thoughts confused, most likely because you are a music artist and thinking industry X (Music) is somehow different. (see sentences above)
Then you should be against Intellectual Monopolies. Intellectual “Property” Laws conflict and interfere with real property. (See Kinsella lectures/speeches, and Against Intellectual Property).
Kinsella example I stated above about the muddling of words “property” and “monopoly”.
The government is a complete failure in everything it touches, and the granting of monopoly privileges is no different.
You guys keep missing something tho. Ownership of property means a monopoly over that piece of property, that’s what sovereignty means. You have total rights over that property and can exclude others.
Where a government backed monopoly is wrong is its use of force to stop other from competing for customers, as if company A with the gov-granted monopoly owned a certain territory or owned certain customers.
It is illegitimate for the US postal service to use laws to lock out competitors for mail service, because to do so the US postal service passes laws saying that you don’t own your own mailbox and that no one but the USPS can put mail in your mailbox but them, which is clearly false. I own my mailbox. There’s a contradiction there.
But there’s no contradiction in having a monopoly over that whihc you do rightfully own, and there’s no gov-granted monopoly, no need for coercion, to maintain control over that which you do own. Legitimate property-monopolies do not need gov-coercion to enforce them. Ownership of property is one of these legitimate monopolies.
Finally found the Rothbard quote I was looking for:
There is, however, an exception to the right to use and disseminate the knowledge within one’s head: namely, if it was procured from someone else as a conditional rather than absolute ownership. Thus, suppose that Brown allows Green into his home and shows him an invention of Brown’s hitherto kept secret, but only on the condition that Green keeps this information private. In that case, Brown has granted to Green not absolute ownership of the knowledge of his invention, but conditional ownership, with Brown retaining the ownership power to disseminate the knowledge of the invention. If Green discloses the invention anyway, he is violating the residual property right of Brown to disseminate knowledge of the invention, and is therefore to that extent a thief.
Violation of (common law) copyright is an equivalent violation of contract and theft of property. For suppose that Brown builds a better mousetrap and sells it widely, but stamps each mousetrap “copyright Mr. Brown.” What he is then doing is selling not the entire property right in each mousetrap, but the right to do anything with the mousetrap except to sell it or an identical copy to someone else. The right to sell the Brown mousetrap is retained in perpetuity by Brown. Hence, for a mousetrap buyer, Green, to go ahead and sell identical mousetraps is a violation of his contract and of ‘the property right of Brown, and therefore prosecutable as theft. Hence, our theory of property rights includes the inviolability of contractual copyright.
A common objection runs as follows: all right, it would be criminal for Green to produce and sell the Brown mousetrap; but suppose that someone else, Black, who had not made a contract with Brown, happens to see Green’s mousetrap and then goes ahead and produces and sells the replica? Why should he be prosecuted? The answer is that, as in the case of our critique of negotiable instruments, no one can acquire a greater property title in something than has already been given away or sold. Green did not own the total property right in his mousetrap, in accordance with his contract with Brown—but only all rights except to sell it or a replica. But therefore Black’s title in the mousetrap, the ownership of the ideas in Black’s head, can be no greater than Green’s, and therefore he too would be a violator of Brown’s property even though he himself had not made the actual contract.
Murray N. Rothbard (1998-08-16 00:00:00-07:00). The Ethics of Liberty (Kindle Locations 3549-3567). New York University Press. Kindle Edition.
Seems to me, on this basis, that while copy of an idea would not be theft per se, any profiting on it would be, since the originator of the idea has the highest right to it and never sold or gave away the right to earn money from the idea.
In this way, property rights in ideas would indeed become eternal as with physical property ownership, and rights holders would license them broadly, just as one might lease actual property.
In your opinion he has the highest right, but that doesn’t make it libertarian.
I’m with this guy.
Key difference. Real property is scarce. Go listen to the Hoppe lecture on Property Rights.
And Rothbard was wrong with his views on IP. Kinsella covers this in his IP class, and also his Libertarian Legal Theory class (he released it for free here):
What Rothbard was trying to do was come up with some sort of way to emulate IP Laws through contract. What this would do is bind two parties in some sort of deal (like a Non-Disclosure Agreement). This only allows you to go after Party B though if they break the contract. For example, if you tell any other party about the secrets of my company, you agree to pay me $100,000.
This sort of contract is legitimate (but how effective and enforcable it is, that is up to the market to decide).
What IP Law does is binds EVERYONE to said mythical contract. If B tells C, and C tells D, and on and on to Z. The government gets to go and shut down C-Z even though C-Z have never signed, nor broken any contract. This is illegitimate.
Kinsella covers all of this more elegantly in Against Intellectual Property, and the IP class, so I will just say to listen/read those.
Under that scenario described in the Rothbard quote, do you have to have a contract with each person you sell a piece of music to? Or is it implicit when you place the © symbol on the piece of work that by listening to / partaking in I suppose what you could call is the “knowledge” of that book, CD, movie, etc, they are now agreeing to that conditional ownership?
Tex: Isn’t commonlaw copyright the same as property under common law? In that: ignorance of the law is no excuse? You are liable because it’s a simple set of laws and there is a societal contract in force and you did know what you were doing? Even if there are no penalties for c-z, still they are in posession of stolen property and it has to be returned to the owner / confiscated.
Edit: going to check out those lecutres now.
Edit: Clayton: my elaboration is everything I’ve posted in this thread so far really - those arguments so far really remain my position and therefore my rebuttal, as inarticulate as it may be.
Are there supposed to be youtube videos on this page:
There are spaces for them, but nothing is loading for me in any of my browsers. Or is it just mp3 files?
In the Jeff Tucker lectures, he mentions that people’s minds are not hard drives. It is not possible to wipe and erase away the ideas with all zeroes. Once the idea is released, it is out there forever. It can be infinitely replicated, so there is no way to confiscate it.
If the world worked in such a way that people’s memories were erasable, you would bet your ass the government would be deleting ideas left and right. Luckily, ideas do not exist in the realm of scarcity.
Kinsella some of the “common law copyright” arguments in his class.
As a side note, this reminds me of the professors who try to copyright their lectures:
http://archive.mises.org/010783/
If it was up to those professors all of their ideas would ideally be deleted out of your brain once you walk out of the door. But they go for the second best thing, not being able to take notes of what you heard.
Edit:
There are embedded Google Docs slides. Just search the page for “mp3 download” and it points you to each of the links. If you are still having trouble, I would not mind uploading them to Mediafire for you. Good thing there is no copyright (ok ok you caught me, I meant as close to no copyright as possible) on them, I might be STEALING Kinsella’s property!!!
He is still a Libertarian, just wrong on IP. IP is very arcane, and as Kinsella mentions, even patent attorney’s get things wrong with IP all the time.
So… you’re saying Rothbard isn’t libertarian…? >_> Are you sure you want to say that?
Here’s a Kinsella article directly on IP law I’ve begun reading, for those interested:
***Edit: Post read, I see a lot of holes and problems with Kinsella’s formulation on IP :\ His central reasoning on IP is particularly confused, as it ignores creation of an idea and assumes a creation coexists with someone elses’s version of that thing. Hmm. I was hoping to find some new, revelaltory insight that would change my mind, but instead I am left wanting by you guys’s Kinsella worship :\
Furthermore, he assumes an IP law could not arise as a function of private law, and I disagree entirely. A private law society would have a broad-basis libertarian legal code courts and individuals would subscribe to, and it could be placed there, with free competition for versions and implementation.
Furthermore, he injects the concept of ‘scarcity’ into the definition of property. The source he cites for that section excludes any mention of scarcity at all. Suppose we’re in the garden of Eden and there’s a bajillion apples all around, apples are non-scarce. Would that mean that if you pick one apple that that apple is not now your apple? Of course not. Non-scarce things can be owned as easily as anything else.
Not impressed, guys.
Guess I’ll have to delve into his 6 lecture course next. Hope I find something better than what he put forth in this article. For all his qualifications I’m surprised there’s such large holes in his reasoning.
Hey Anenome: read that one.
Nobody is arguing that. Just like you can remember the painting in your mind that you saw at the museum. You can try to reproduce it. If you are a sevant, you may be able to do so with stunning realism - I would say that would be legitimate it’s still not the original. I don’t mind if someone remembers the music in their mind - maybe they have a photographic memory! But I object to them making a verbatim (for all intents and purposes) copy and selling it or mass distributing it without my consent. As per the Rothbard example, which is a great way of explaining it: admission is conditional.
Again, one area where this is getting complicated is the confusion between IP / patents - which I am somewhat against / ie undecided on - and it’s far too complex for me to get into right now (not that anyone else can’t go ahead and discuss it…) - I’m purely interested in keeping it simple for my own sake to understand properly and relate it to something that concerns me - that is namely music - which also includes books, and movies and artwork for that matter - they’re all in the same boat.
Same here, Mike. Seems like selling your copy of someone else’s creation would be just as illegitimate as trying to sell land that was not yours.
Right Anenome - and I think there’s a valid argument in the fact that (not to be offensive to the others on the thread) you could ask almost anyone on the street this and I think 98% of people would answer that yes it is theft. Only people who are outright theives would say “too bad”. Again, I’m not calling the others here theives - it’s just that in absense of a better explanation / theory I’m finding that theirs is seriously falling short. A lot of the arguments seem spurious and don’t connect the dots but create new dots, leaving the old ones still there, unconnected.
In other words, it’s a commonly accepted thing that such creations are unique pieces of property. In other words, it is something ingrained in common sense. And I think there’s an argument there as well for it’s validity. If you asked someone however, do you think it’s right to prohibit drug use, you get a non common sense answer anywhere you go - at best you’ll get a 50/50 response. But if you say “If I take your TV from out of your house while you’re out without asking you is that theft” or “if I shoot someone and they die is that murder” You’ll get a 99% response. Copyright in it’s simple common sense form as described by Rothbard in the quote you posted seems also to fall into that same category. That’s reason not to dismiss it without very sound reasoning, and in fact although I really did expect to find it here, I’m not.
I find it disturbing that libertarians, ostensibly the world’s foremost supporters of property rights and production are refusing to admit that a production of the mind can be owned. That an author who writes a book does not own that specific arrangement of words in toto. If anything, the major abrogation of rights is not the ability to own an idea for death + 70 years, but rather the idea that it gets taken away by public domain at all. Would you support a law that says all property gets taken away 70 years after the original purchaser buys it?
And here we have libertarians saying there’s no such thing as intellectual property at all.
And for all the buildup on Kinsella, his argument seemed quite weak to me, with major holes in the most important reasoning. Hmm. I mean, I’m still reserving judgment a bit, 'cause I haven’t done enough reading into Kinsella, but thus far I think you guys have been bamboozled by flawed reasoning.
If I produce a new idea, I am the only one with that idea in the whole world. So there’s no question of me owning an idea that’s also in someone else’s head. I own it, my idea. I have monopoly rights over it just as surely as if I had homesteaded a piece of property.
You may be able to fit that idea into your head too, and sure that’s not theft because you can’t remove it from my head either, but should you have a right to profit on my idea? Somehow that’s something I’m awfully suspicious of.
Because it means an artist could paint something, and then someone could take a photo of it and sell that likeness as if he had produced the painting, as if it was his. But it’s not his. He’s reproducing it. And though it doesn’t steal something from the producer, it does steal value.
This might make the painter more popular and in the long run lead to greater notoriety and fame, but that should be up to him to control as well. It’s not theft to simply save a photo to your harddrive, that’s just copying. But I’m not at all sure you should be able to resell a copy and compete with the guy who created it in the first place.
Seems to me, he who creates it should have the exclusive right to profit on it.
If you don’t accept that, then you’re accepting the idea that ideas should be communalized, for the sole reason that they don’t have physical existence.
Ideas are always harder to apply when they become more abstract, and it’s certainly more abstract to deal with intellectual property, but does that automatically mean an idea can’t be a property? Really?
So, an author A writes a digital book. He sells it to B. B can just turn around and compete with A to sell the same book? Really? You’re all okay with that? I think the major portion of whatever value B earns, A has a right to. I thought we were in favor of people being able to keep what they produce. If B sells a book, it’s been sold on A’s efforts primarily.
And now, having read some Kinsella, I’m less and less sure he has a good answer to the quandry :\ What’s more, his argument devolved to negative utilitarianism, that the patent process was not actually on balance good for society. And he’s a patent attorney, so, may be some bias at work? He actually admitted to not liking patent law generally in the first place.
@Mike: OK, since you’ve read it, I"m going to use that as my reference. Please respond to this argument:
The entire edifice of IP law is based on an elementary confusion of easily distinguished categories by use of ill-formed metaphors.
Clayton -
Anything can be owned in terms of the law. If the law allowed for it, people could have slaves. So it’s not a question of whether it’s possible to have ownership of an idea, the question is whether it is just. As Clayton pointed out, when you claim to own a pattern of words, you are in effect stating that other people may not use their own pen and paper to recreate those words. This is wholly different from normal property rights, where you exclude others from using your own property. In the case of IP, you are excluding others from using their own property. It doesn’t get much more anti-libertarian than that.
Also, ideas reside within the mind. Your reputation exists in the minds of everyone else but yourself, as that is exactly what a reputation is, what other people think of you. So if you claim to own your reputation, what you are saying is that other people may not “use” or “damage” your reputation without your permission…which is ridiculous, as a reputation is what other people think of you.
It’s the same with patents. You might invent some new mechanism that makes flushing toilets more efficient. But if you patent that mechanism and claim you own it, you are in effect excluding people from using their own toilets if they desire to install that mechanism. You are claiming a property right over their toilet.
It’s the same with copyright. You might write a melody and copyright it. What you are doing is saying that anybody is free to hum, whistle, sing, play their piano, etc., unless of course they play certain pitches in a certain order for certain lengths. Again, you are excluding other people from their own property.
Just because they might profit from it doesn’t change that fact. If you don’t want other people to use your idea, don’t make it public. Keep it a secret. If it’s a really unique idea, maybe no one else will ever think of it. But when you claim ownership over ideas, you are in fact excluding people from using their own property. And that is anti-libertarian.
Not excluding. I’m only saying they shouldn’t be able to profit from what I produced.
If I produce an original pattern of words, it’s not much different from having turned a plot of land into plowed land–a specific arrangement of atoms versus a specific arrangement of words. Since there are an infinite number of ways to say things, my ownership of a specific pattern does not diminish in any way their ability to say something with their property. The courts would simply bar plaigiarism. No gov needed, contrary to Kinsella’s claim.
Yes, I’m familiar with that example, but it’s inapplicable. A reputation is produced by the opinions of others, and thus cannot be owned. An idea is completely different. An idea can be discovered by one person. A reputation cannot be. A reputation cannot be sold or packaged, a book can be.
No, only over the new thing about the toilet that I created, that wouldn’t exist without me. They didn’t have X new invention without me. I produced that idea, it is mine. The product doesn’t come into existence without the creator of the idea, so it’s illegitimate to talk about it as if the two things were simultaneous.
No, I’m only saying they shouldn’t be able to profit from it. Fair use is fair use.
Ideas can’t be sold without disclosing them. So I don’t buy it. How would any purchaser of an invention know how to value an idea without hearing the idea? Based on our ownerless theory of ideas, any investor could simply ask to hear the inventor’s new idea, then walk out and produce it himself since, according to you guys, ideas can’t be owned or protected as property.
You’re fine with that?
If someone plucks from the realm of ideas a new one, that’s so different from someone plucking an unowned apple? People can keep eating apples, but they can’t eat my apple. Similarly, if I have an improvement for a toilet, their toilet as it is now continues to work, but I should be compensated as the discoverer of that idea if they decide to buy that idea, not some random person who heard about my idea but is perhaps a better marketer.