There’s a lot of debate in the libertarian community about whether ideas can be owned. Regardless of one’s position on this, everyone agrees that we still own the physical things storing ideas: books, cds, hard drives, and have a claim against anyone who copies ideas FROM my property. I.e. you might be able to make copies of your own CD but you can’t steal mine and make copies of it.
Contract laws can supercede basically whatever we decide about IP. Companies wishing to protect their IP can simply stipulate that before they will sell you something, you have to agree not to copy it. These kinds of contracts are 100% legitimate, and copying/distribution becomes entirely persecutable.
So if a company gave trade secrets and I copied them, distributing them for free, this might be okay depending on how we feel about IP. But if I had signed a contract saying I gave up my right to copy them, it is incontrovertible that the company would have a claim against me (but not anyone I had distributed to).
In conclusion, If everyone suddenly decided that they agreed with libertarians, companies could still protect their IP through contracts. Forgive the hubris, but so far as I can see, this makes the whole IP debate useless.
It’s not useless since we can make informed guesses about what sorts of information would likely be ownable and what sorts of information would not be. Personally, I’ve come full circle through the anti-IP position to the position that weak IP would likely exist even in a natural order society because of my changing view of law. IP would exist to the extent that lawsuits could profitably deter people from copying, which isn’t a large extent (witness the RIAA with all its awesome, state-monopoly-protected revenues who still can’t browbeat people into not copying CDs and sharing MP3s).
But I still think it is a categorical mistake to call IP “property” since the human conception of property is grounded in the emborderment and control of the physical world, where all resources are ultimately scarce. IP is non-scarce.
Contract laws won’t do much at all. At least not if you assume like a real life justice system that don’t catch every crook and don’t get 100% compensation from everyone causing any damage.
There are few things for which contracts provide protection.
Trade secrets is one of those things, very few people know about it so figuring out whoever leaked it will be relativly easy. Lets say there is actually a way to figure out how much future income the company lost from this leak (there isn’t any way to do that though so basing compensations on such grounds rather then actual caused damages is pretty scetchy too) there are very few employees that will afford to pay said amount. So even in these cases companies will not get full compensation, but you can write severe penalties into the contracts which will discurage this thing from happening.
But when we come to more common information like music and so forth contract protection becomes utterly useless.
You can’t bind a third party in a contract. So if you buy a record and then rip it and send the mp3 to me I am free to whatever I want with that mp3 like posting it on the intenet. Millions of people bought this record so catching the specific person that broke the contract will be extremly difficult. Even if you could you could just let some bum take the fall and the company will get zero compensation anyhow.
So yes you could still protect certain exclusive information by contract but for common information the practical situation will be radically different in a case where you can own it (and prosecute every third party that get a hold of it) and one in which you can’t.
I still think it is interesting to consider whether the protection of IP helps or hinders intellectual and technological progress. Most libertarians argue that progress would accelerate without the protection of IP, correct? So if everyone agreed with libertarians, perhaps companies would realize it is actually in their interest not to protect their IP using contracts.
Well we have this image of companies just hoarding their trade secrets, but the reality is that they do sell/trade them amongst one another. Its up to the market to decide how to organize production of IP.
and have a claim against anyone who copies ideas FROM my property.
please distinguish between copying that necessitates depriving another of his propoperty/invasion of some kind and copying that does not. like physically taking the CD copying it, and then putting it back. versus non-invasive forms of ‘copying’ like if i press record on my stereo which can hear the sounds coming off your cd player…
yes; i should not take your newspaper and photocopy it, because I should not take it.
If you don’t want me reading the newspaper over your shoulder, go read in a place from which I am excluded and don’t have a powerful enough telescope for.
Distinction noted. I’m saying that non-invasive forms of copying could become persecutable through contracts. Companies aren’t likely to leave R&D secrets out in the open the same way as one reading a newspaper.
I will concede that in the absence of any pre-existing contracts, the IP debate is relavent. I just don’t think it will have any large impacts on the current market, since companies can just stick a pre-contract in front of every IP transaction.
But what of the practical consideration raised by hkarnoldson?
“You can’t bind a third party in a contract. So if you buy a record and then rip it and send the mp3 to me I am free to whatever I want with that mp3 like posting it on the intenet. Millions of people bought this record so catching the specific person that broke the contract will be extremly difficult. Even if you could you could just let some bum take the fall and the company will get zero compensation anyhow.”
The state is really bad at enforcing property rights. Private businesses can do a great job if they want to (its not always profitable), but for cases where the perpetrator is an open corporation, say like Intel or Sony, its not like they can go into hiding. My ultimate verdict is that its up to the market to decide which laws to enforce. Everyone might agree that X is theft but if it costs too much to enforce it there’s no point.
This is what I am speculating.
Right third parties are untouchable, and I think it would be too expensive to keep track of everyone who bought a CD. So there are some domains of IP where the only feasible plan is to accept that there will be a lot of free-riders.
The whole point of this thread is that nothing will really change no matter what we decide about IP. Trade secrets will be protected by contracts, and consumer music/books/games will still suffer from free-riders. The only possible thing that can change is the moral outlook of people DLing music coming to think it is wrong, and we’re not arguing for that anyway This is why I have always been utterly disinterested in the IP debate.
The whole point of this thread is that nothing will really change no matter what we decide about IP. Trade secrets will be protected by contracts, and consumer music/books/games will still suffer from free-riders. The only possible thing that can change is the moral outlook of people DLing music coming to think it is wrong, and we’re not arguing for that anyway This is why I have always been utterly disinterested in the IP debate.
Ahh I see.
I would from this guess that you must never have been to a country where the states attempts at enforcing IP laws for multimedia are almost non-existant. I lived in Moscow 6 years ago. There you only had to walk a few hundred meters to the nearest place where you could get a DVD that is illegal (but pressed in a factory and in all ways to the naked eye indestingusable from an original) for a dollar.
This is the practically situation you would get from contractual protection alone, and it is very different from the one in the western world where you actually have a lot of people that don’t download illegal stuff either because they don’t know how to do it or they are afraid of getting cought. They pay for expensive TV-channels, movie rental subscriptions and so forths.
To illustrate the contrast I can honestly say I wouldn’t know how to watch a hit movie (except if it happens to be on TV) legally in Russia if I wanted to.
Now I don’t think it would be quite that bad that consumers don’t even know how to benefit the original maker in a free-market. The makers simply don’t care about the Russian market in the current system with government interventions in there other more importaint markets, so it will shift exessivly into the copiers favour. But it does still illustrate the massive impact on behaviour our IP laws actually have. Which I don’t think you would get with a contract system, even a free-market justice system would not be that effecient that it could actually protect common information from leaking to third parties.
Naturally contracts serve a purpose, maybe even as far as actually being able to enforce a cinema monopoly on movies for a while. But I think it does make a lot of practical difference if information is owned or not.
The structure and sources of income for the entertainment industry would need to shift alot to be able to sustain it without IP law.
Not to mention how treating information as property makes the justice system completley rotten in it’s desperate attempts to enforce the unenforcable.
There are other very interesting applications of owning information. If information was owned the damage the music industry claim to have suffered in law suits would actually be valid. That is there claim that every copy is worth the retail price of a original.
This would mean that illegal downloading has caused the music industry alone damages to about 50 times the worlds total GDP
Well, it could be. I’ll hold off making that judgement since the state would currently stop companies from enforcing their own contracts.
We both agree you can’t persecute third parties, which US corporations can currently do. This is why some people are deterred, and particularly third parties like the ones we see selling DVDs on the streets in Moscow.
Well, it could be. I’ll hold off making that judgement since the state would currently stop companies from enforcing their own contracts.
It is pretty impossible to imagine any kind of successfull enforcement given there current business model. Naturally this doesn’t mean the end of the industry. But it does mean practical chances towards business models in which they can secure some income from segments where they can enforce a contract created monopoly. Cinemas, live shows and a bunch of new things and distribution methods where they provide a better service then free alternative.
Then there is the impact on the justice system itself that I mentioned also. I think most people agree that you have at least some degree of right to defend yourself even if the only way to avoid being hurt by the criminal involves putting a thrid person at some kind of risk. Given that that is allowed, at least to some small extent, it has pretty nasty consequences when enforcing ownership on information and how it is to be weighted vs physical property and so forth.
In booth of these cases alone I think there are good enough grounds that what we define information as has practical implications to make the question relvant as more then just a theoretical mind-game in ethics.
But we’ll never think the third party has no rights. The third party is entitled to compensation AND self defense.
Consider a non-IP example of contract law: I let you borrow my dog, but no one else is allowed to pet it. You let someone else pet it. By whatever contemporary law, I may or may not be allowed to smack the third party’s hand to the side. If I do, someone will be certainly called to pay restitution. Whether it is me, or you, or btoh who has to compensate the third party is up to whatever law.
So no, as long as third parties have rights, we don’t need to have an objective definition of information to deal with him. Contracts bind only the signature parties, and this is enough for enforcement. There’s no need to decide whether a third party has invaded my property rights.
The third party is entitled to compensation AND self defense.
As long as the person firing the weapon is the one that have to pay for this it would be fine. I however don’t think that is the case, if I kill a hostage while using the only means availiable to me to defend my life from an aggressor I am not responsible, the aggressor is. The situation is just like if someone puts a gun to my head and force me to shoot somebody, this is not a murder commited by me. It is commited by the person holding the gun to my head.
With this approach on IP owners we can datamine the internet and hack into everyones computers whenever they want. Since massive banket integritiy violations is the only means availiable to defend information to any noticable effect. Sure they are entitled to compensation but from the people doing the copying so we don’t need to care about cost.
Adopting a proportionallity principle won’t solve this either. As mentioned the retail value of all music copied is 50 times the world total GDP, we can destroy it all and still our defence will cause less damages the value of the stolen property.
Which is why i intentionally left it variable who would be liable for the third party’s misfortune. Some would argue that the terrorist who hides in a group of innocents is liable for their deaths. I don’t want to deal with this issue here as its only tangentially related.
But all the privacy violations would be open for compensation by whichever party. The idea behind the contract law is to prevent it from ever occurring in the first place, so I don’t think we need to worry about regular rights violations of third parties.
Also something im not really commenting on. I do agree that it wouldn’t work
So.. either contractual law covers IP or ideas as property is a conflation.
Isn’t this in effect the same as saying everyone has “equal opportunity” to access an idea, i.e. libertarian socialism?
The only difference seems to be that corporations would make ideas competitive, and build on what already exists by catering to the consumer while libertarian socialism would probably result in decidedly more “static” intellectual property, because there is lesser incentive to innovate.
But all the privacy violations would be open for compensation by whichever party. The idea behind the contract law is to prevent it from ever occurring in the first place, so I don’t think we need to worry about regular rights violations of third parties.
Since we are dealing with how it would turn out in practice that they are open to compensation doesn’t really matter. At least I very much doubt most of the warez and cracking groups and so forth that are the orginal contract breakers are extremly rich citizen that would actually afford to pay for all the physical intrusions into computersystems and so forth necessary to find them.
On the topic that you didn’t want to debate I think there is a difference between responding to a present treath, and acting after a crime is finished in a policing capacity which I neglected. In the latter I see now reason why the original criminal would be responsible for paying compensation rather then the policing party. However when and where a information “theft” will take place is a lot more difficult to determine predict then where a physical one does. I obviously do not have the right to station an army in your garden to defend my home from possible burglars, or roll a tank thru your house cause I suspect one of your tennants have my stolen TV. But what about defending my information that exists everywhere and obtaining it from minds I suspect it is inside?
I think we need to recognize that IP would make the justice system have to deal with some really messed up shit that will no doubt effect it in some way.
So none of this is unique to IP, which would seem to confirm my original idea that the IP debate doesn’t matter.
Its up to the market to decide which laws to enforce. I doubt courts would be willing to deal with the claims of a hundred thousand violated third parties just so microsoft can try and find warez groups.
Cognitivist, I have no idea what you’re saying… maybe that a lack of ownership of ideas is collectivist? Maybe. The point of this thread is that contracts make whatever we decide about IP useless.
This is why I have always been utterly disinterested in the IP debate.