I meant profit in the psychic sense, which can also include monetary profit. People act. Action realizes profit.
Stop conflating stealing, i.e. reproduction of an idea by indirect and non-consensual force against the originator of that particular property, with competition. They are fundamentally different phenomenon.
“Stop conflating stealing, i.e. reproduction of an idea by indirect and non-consensual force against the originator of that particular property, with competition. They are fundamentally different phenomenon.”
Where’s the line between the two, though? To me it seems as if it’s arbitrarily drawn by government.
Saying that it is an act of stealing presupposes IP. There is no point in debating IP if we are presupposing its legitimacy in the framework of our arguments. We can’t have “IP is valid” as a premise of argument that brings into question the validity of it unless we are trying to prove it is invalid by the law of contradiction, which we aren’t. Which brings us back to this:
Because of marketplace competition.
Stop conflating stealing, i.e. reproduction of an idea by indirect and non-consensual force against the originator of that particular property, with competition. They are fundamentally different phenomenon.
That isn’t stealing. Your idea/book/CD remains intact. IP laws create artificial scarcity where none exists. Concepts and patterns are infinitely repeatable, being from the realm of noumena rather than phenomena.
If copying isn’t theft, then how come copying and piracy hurt sales of commercialized intellectual property?
IP proponents have never proven that piracy has harmed innovation, yet they all too often assert what you are. You really can’t complain about losing sales from artificial monopoly. It’s like a thief arguing that he should get to keep what he stole because punishment would hurt his bottom line. It’s rather ridiculous.
Makes sense to me, if my primary goal is to increase my wealth.
Since the removal of IP, I’ve been able to get much more stuff for cheaper, so we shouldn’t have IP enforcement.
Makes sense to me, if my primary goal is to increase my wealth.
Yeah, statists have a thief’s mentality and violent tendencies. We are accustomed to it.
@Clayton: I prefer the principle I have heard Hoppe explain, that you are entitled to continue your activity on your property without disruption. That would mean that you can’t put up pornographic billboards in a residential areas because it disrupts the activity of living there.
However I don’t see the relevance to this case. A network intrusion is not like the billboard it is like the 1mw laser beam. Sending a stream of either physical particles or optical impuses into someone elses property which then makes his property re-arrenge itself. A billboard doesn’t actually have an effect on my property except in the case it might be blocking out the sun so my grass don’t grow it can’t tell my property to go around changing it’s properties.
Granted the intrusion is activated by a node I connected to and not by the hacker, but I didn’t give that node premission to send anything it wants my way either. Also it makes very little sense to hold a computer responsible for it’s actions rather then the person that is in fact controlling it.
In principle a network intrusion is really no different then stealing a gun and shooting someone with it. What a hacker is doing is just that: taking control over someone elses property and making it do stuff to my property that I don’t want.
I don’t know how different it will be in practice. Like we discussed, one of the major complications of contract enforcement of IP is the potential damages to third parties. This problem is also inherent in all forms of self defense.
My point was that it is much more difficult to defend and police information. When someone steals your TV it still only exist in one place in the physical external world. Information not so much … it gives incentives to a justice system that is also trying to protect information to expand police powers beyond one who is only trying to protect physical things.
Well, yeah, Hoppe and Rothbard both acknowledge the concept of ‘easement’ in property rights, which I think maybe makes the billboard a bad example. But there are two problems here. First, we are trying to construct a “pre-legal” theory of property suitable for use in defining legal disputes! So, we cannot rely on complex legal principles like “easement”. Second, the disruptive nature of the billboard is an accident of my poor choice of example… if we go back to the first person to have electric lighting, there is no easement by virtue of long use and if that person turns on his lights at night and the neighbor complains, does that actually constitute an intrusion of the irritated neighbor’s property? We cannot allow the subjective state of the irritated neighbor to be the measure of his property rights, else property is defined by an individual’s grumpiness. Sure, if you shine a searchlight onto the bedroom window of your neighbor he’s going to be irritated and I think that comes close to constituting a violation of his property rights in the activity of sleeping peacefully in his bedroom. But what if the irritated neighbor is just jealous of his rich neighbor who can afford the new-fangled electric lights and is just making an issue out of envy? His claim that “the photons are entering my property” is true and deserves an answer. What is the answer? If the neighbor were shining a floodlight or a high-powered laser, we would say that the photons entering the property - though intangible - did constitute real invasion of property. But it seems to me to be unreasonable to classify the light spillage from the electric lights in one’s home as “property invasion.”
But that’s just exactly what I’m trying to highlight… what about plugging your computer onto a network indicates its “intended” use?? As far as I can see, nothing, and I’m not trying to be pedantic here, either. I am willing to consider things like customary expectations or easement or what have you. But a computer network is nothing more than a large number of pieces of electronic equipment connected together and transmitting electrical signals. You are claiming that certain patterns of signals constitute property-rights violations. The problem with this is that it’s subjective… it’s like taking the irritated neighbor’s irritation as evidence that a real property rights violation due to light spillage has occurred.
Now, if I maliciously connected a piece of electrical equipment designed to fry the motherboard on your computer from the other end of a network cable, that would constitute a property rights violation since I’m destroying your equipment and I’m doing so by invading your property with unusually large amounts of electromagnetic power. It would be like lighting your house on fire by using a laser beam from a remote location. Sure, I didn’t walk on your property but I did cause its destruction.
It seems to me that you want to treat these two different sorts of actions as if they are the same, as if, by sending a certain pattern to your computer, I am doing the same kind of thing as if I shined a laser beam at your house and lit it on fire - but if I had sent a slightly different pattern, I would not have been shining a laser beam. Remember that computer networks are glorified telephone networks which are glorified telegram networks which are glorified postal networks. How can sending information constitute a property-rights violation, even if that information is being sent to an automated information-processing device whose operation can be derailed by bad patterns, if it is vulnerable to such patterns?
Clayton -
If the neighbor were shining a floodlight or a high-powered laser, we would say that the photons entering the property - though intangible - did constitute real invasion of property. But it seems to me to be unreasonable to classify the light spillage from the electric lights in one’s home as “property invasion.”
It’s a continuum problem, but a rather minor issue IMO. A woman could claim that the vibration of atoms from the eyelashes of the creepy guy who winked at her cause a fly to fall in her soup, but this is rather hard to prove. Maybe that is a bad example too, but the point is that there are all sorts of minor physical interactions. The question is what is significant enough for a judge to act on.
But a computer network is nothing more than a large number of pieces of electronic equipment connected together and transmitting electrical signals. You are claiming that certain patterns of signals constitute property-rights violations. The problem with this is that it’s subjective… it’s like taking the irritated neighbor’s irritation as evidence that a real property rights violation due to light spillage has occurred.
This isn’t about patterns of signals. The hard disk of a server is magnetically charged in a certain way that causes various routines, say a firewall against access to sensitive information. The machine is designed to work in a certain way, to restrict access unless a password is typed for instance. Subverting this process is similar to throwing a wrench in a machine designed to spit out tortillas.
This. And plus, it’s an invasion of privacy.
Let’s say that I set up a display of light bulbs in front of my house, connected to a panel of buttons that I place at the edge of my property. Next to it I put a sign that says: “Feel free to play with the buttons to turn the light bulbs on and off. However, don’t press all the buttons at once, since that would fry the circuits and I don’t want that.” Just because I’ve given them the right to press the buttons in certain patterns, that doesn’t mean that they can press them in any pattern. The situation doesn’t change when I move the panel of buttons thousands of miles away.
In the real world there are more parties involved, but the basic principle is the same. This is the kind of thing you would agree to when you contract with your ISP (no hacking, no DoSing, etc.).
Hacking is not a property rights violation per se.
Imagine a black box that passively listens to the network (input), then changes the internal state based on the signals received, and sends out signals itself (output). Hacking is just sending combinations of signals that lead to unexpected outputs not intended by the owner.
If you connect that box to a neutral network, you have absolutely no right to complain which signals others send over this network.
This becomes obvious with WLAN. You dont need to physically connect to a network. If someone sets up his WLAN network in a way that makes it vulnerable to hacking from neutral property, it is his fault.
clear case:
A establishes a WLAN network on his property (homesteading the rights, to make the point absolutely clear). B sets up a WLAN network on his property, with a coverage that includes part of As property. A sends electromagnetic signals (he homesteaded that right earlier) until he finds one that makes B’s computer do weird things (like sending sensitive information to A).
While this is clearly hacking, there is no property rights violation, and no crime.
Hacking violates property rights in a similar way as speach violates property rights - both change the internal state of the one listening (if you hear something, your brain processes the information, therefore changing its state in the process). Both can be part of a crime (in connection with property rights violations) but never a crime themselves.
The solution is simple - if you dont want to get hacked, do not connect to physical networks without “no hacking” contract clauses. Prevent access to your network from neutral property. Using firewalls (software, hardware, and “inch of air” for really important things) and encryption is a better idea anyway.
As for IP itself - while it is true that in a free market, noone can impose his particular world view on the rest of society without a LOT of guns, there is still a major problem: If legal fantasies are widely accepted, they will still cause friction - and ideas are such an important part of modern society that it WILL cause friction or even war. Just in this thread, people have mentioned the idea that invading third party property to find WareZ groups is some kind of self defense. Nope.
It is not at all similar. I will try giving an illustration that is logically equivalent but avoids the new-fangled technologies of computers because everyone may not be equally familiar with how they actually work.
Imagine a mechanical device that accepts punch cards as input and produces punch cards as output. Stored in the mechanical device are certain patterns which are “private”. Anyone may mail punch cards to the location of this machine and its operators will load the punch cards and start the machine running, then mail back the punch cards that the machine produces as output. Such a construction is logically indistinguishable from a computer connected to a digital network, except the costs involved. Hank, the hacker, decides he wants to know what the private patterns in this mechanical device are. Looking over the diagrams of the machine, he realizes there is a weakness in its design and he can uncover the private patterns by mailing in a very specific set of punched cards, which he does. When he gets the punch cards in return, it turns out he has recovered the private pattern!
Now, where was the property rights violation? Even if he had sent in a malicious pattern that mechanically destroyed the machine by causing it to go haywire, I don’t think there would be a property rights violation unless Hank was stupid enough to say “I wrote those punch cards in order to destroy your property” … without a specific statement of intent, we cannot divine what Hank’s intent was and to say that it is possible is to allow the law cross over into the realm of the subjective where I don’t think it belongs. Maybe Hank just made a mistake. Maybe extra punches got knocked out of the punch cards. Who knows?
A contract could help in this case but then there are a lot of logistical problems with contractual connections over the internet. Who are you contracting with? How is their system connecting with your system and where does their liability end? What if Hank intercepts Alice’s traffic and makes it appear that Alice is sending malicious patterns when it is actually Hank that is sending them (essentially, framing Alice)? Since the vast majority of the traffic sent over the internet is of extremely low economic value, it doesn’t make sense to attempt to write and enforce contracts.
In summary, the Internet is a “use at your own risk” system, like any commons. There can’t be protections on “the Internet” because the Internet is not and cannot be anyone’s private property, it is just the result of a whole bunch of private property owners connecting their devices together to communicate with one another.
Clayton -