This comes from the topic “My Concept of Anarchy” in which a discussion of IP rights sprung up. So, let’s make it a topic of conversation.
This is a post from tgibson11 in response to myself:
I can agree that you cannot hold a “patent” on ideas. If you told a friend about an idea of yours and he turns around and starts producing it making millions of dollars off of it then you are out of luck. He is the one that put the idea to work and turned out a product which people then purchased. If he is a good friend he might give you a kick back for the idea but you certainly can’t sue him for violating your “intellectual property.”
But there is a big difference between just thinking of something and thinking of something and then using capital and energy to research, develop, produce and market that thing. Apple is the absolute owner of their products because they spend the time, money and capital to develop, build and market those products. For instance, the iPod is fully Apples own property which they produce and sell to others. No, they didn’t have the idea for a portable music player first but they did develop proprietary software and hardware which are theirs. No one is justifed in copying Apples software and hardware developments and repackaging them as something else. Doing so is theft of Apples property rights and is totally within their right as legitmiate owners of that property to seek legal recourse.
Yes, Apple is the absolute owner of the physical products they produce until they sell or give them to someone else. But Apple does not own every iPod ever made. I know what you really mean is that Apple owns the “idea” of the iPod. Your subsequent statements are merely unjustified assertions based on this…unjustified assertion.
You first need to explain how one comes to have property rights in an idea. Ideas are not scarce resources. The use of an idea by one person does not prevent its simultaneous use by another person (or any number of people). The person who invented fire was not agressed against when other people also started using it.
To consistently apply the concept of property in ideas leads to nonsense. Hence the mind-boggling complexity of modern IP laws. That is also the reason copyrights and patents have to expire after a certain period of time - before the nonsense becomes too obvious.
No it doesn’t. If I build 10,000 Super Deluxe Widgets they are my property. But I can sell those Super Deluxe Widgets to whomever I want but under the condition that you cannot make copies of my Super Deluxe Widgets, mass produce them and sell those. And that is exactly what happens when you buy an iPod and you see “(C) 2004 Apple Computers. All rights reserved.” Apple has spent the time, resources and energy to develop and produce the millions of iPods they use but they sell them to you with the understanding that you will not take their design and copy it and sell it for commercial gain. To do so violates the property right of Apple Computers (more accurately the shareholders of Apple).
What’s original about an iPod ? It’s just a fancy tape recorder. Oh wait. Did Apple come up with the idea of replacing a magnetic-mechanical system with solid state electronics ? Did they invent the transistor ? The IC ? Digital computers ? Programming laguages ? The list goes on and on…an iPod relies on an almost endless amount of prior knowledge wich is ‘free’…Perhaps Apple should pay to all the people who came up with all the innovations that enable them to build iPods ?
Apple is the absolute owner of the physical products they produce until they sell them. But the sale of those products is conditional and contractual. When you purchase an iPod you do so with the understanding that you will not steal their design.
An idea becomes property after one produces it, using their resources and energy to develop and build the item in question. We aren’t talking about the “idea” here now. I agree, you can’t copyright an idea. But you can copyright an “idea” if you have produced it. You analogy of the man “inventing fire” is ridiculous. No man “invented” fire because that is a natural phenomenon. However, iPods are nowhere to be found in nature and are the direct result of someone using their resources and that which nature provides to produce them.
Murray Rothbard covered this very well in his Ethics of Liberty when he stated:
I agree; if you sell someone an object on the condition that they will not copy it, they are violating that promise by copying it. Intellectual property rights go far beyond that, though!
I could sell you a fire too, and stipulate in the contract that I retain the exclusive right to produce fire. Claiming that I have that right doesn’t necessarily make it so. You have yet to explain how property rights in ideas are acquired.
Well, I bought my ipod at Fry’s Electronics so any contract on the end use would be with them instead of with Apple according to your argument.
Without IP laws Apple would have absolutely no say in what I do with my property even if they ‘bet the farm’ in designing and bringing it to market. Not one word unless I signed a contract that specifically stated what I could and couldn’t do with my property.
Once I dispose of my property this contract would be null and void for future owners, they could possibly go after me for violating the terms of our agreement but couldn’t go against the person I gave it to even if they decided to produce an exact copy and sell it in direct competition with Apple because they weren’t a party to the contract between myself and Apple.
This is where the contractual basis of IP falls apart, there is no way outside of a general law for the ‘property rights’ of the producer to follow the product beyond the original purchaser, once it escapes the custody chain it is fair game for anyone to capitalize on the design and theory behind its market success.
If you sold me fire you’re a good salesman since fire is a natural phenomenon not something “created” by man. And again, I agree with you in that you cannot acquire property rights in an idea. I’m talking about the product that is derived from that idea. I can invent a warp drive in my head but if I do not produce that warp drive then I have no claim to it. But once I begin producing it I have acquired my property right in that warp drive. If I sell it to you I sell it to you under the agreement that you may use it but you may no reproduce it.
See my previous post. I will concede that a person could voluntarily agree not to copy something as a condition of purchasing it. But that is not what IP law is about. IP law says no one may copy a protected idea, regardless of the existence of any contract or agreement to that effect.
First, it is not ridiculous. Someone probably spent a lot of time figuring out a way to create fire. Maybe they would patent the method of creating fire rather than fire itself.
Second, everything is ultimately part of nature. All we can do is re-arrange the elements of nature in certain ways. The rearrangement of wood molecules creates fire. A particular rearrangment of petroleum (plastics), sand (silicon), and metals results in an iPod.
IP says, once I invent or discover a certain way to re-arrange nature, no one else may re-arrange nature in that way without my permission. Ever. Absurd.
Unfortunately, Rothbard is not particularly clear here. He correctly points out that no one has property rights in ideas. He then goes on about how one could agree to not use certain ideas as a term of purchase, which he refers to as contractual copyright. So far, so good. But he fails to emphasize that the copyright only exists because of the contract. This has nothing to do with copyright as commonly understood in the IP world.
If I went over to my buddy’s house and merely looked at his warp drive and from that act could reproduce it how would I be violating your property rights since there was no direct agreement between us?
Property rights in anything come from using labor to produce them. So if I created a Super Deluxe Widget which has a very specific and unique design I have created something through my labor which I own absolutely (the design of this Widget). I then begin manufacturing thousands of these Super Deluxe Widgets stamped “Copyright Kingmonkey. All rights reserved.” I have reserved my right to the design of this property. It is the design that I own, which I have replicated and which I sell. When I sell this product I am transferring conditional ownership of this product, as I still reserve the rights to the design of it. If you use these Super Deluxe Widgets for a time and then tire of them and then transfer ownership to another person the original contract of conditional ownership is not void but transfers with the Widget. The new owners cannot duplicate and distribute my design of the Super Deluxe Widget because I never transfered ownership of the design in the first place but only a copy of it. I am not copyrighting the idea of the Super Deluxe Widget but the design of it which is a very tangible item and which is very much owned.
In the same way if I write a book the book becomes “mine” in that I have taken the effort and energy and labor to write down the words in a particular pattern. I own the book the same way I would own a piece of land which I have transformed into usable farm land. I can sell copies of that book but that does not mean I am giving you the right to claim you are the original creator of that book. I retain that right. All of the copies of the book you may own are owned only conditionally.
In the same way Apple fully owns the design of the iPod because they wrote the software, built the hardware, built the case, etc. of the iPod. They then duplicated it and sold it to consumers under the condition that no one can replicate the design of that iPod. To duplicate it and sell it would be a violation of Apples property right in the design of that product. And it doesn’t matter if you are the first, second or tenth owner of that iPod. It was purchased with the understanding that Apple reserved their property right to the design of that iPod and ownership of that design was never transfered to anyone.
They couldn’t have ‘created’ an iPod without hundreds of years of industrial development behind them. An iPod is a trivial item - it ‘deserves’ zero protection, if such a theory of IP protection made any sense to begin with - wich it doesn’t anyways.
That’s the only way that IP arguments work past the first sale, government granted monopoly rights on the design or whatever.
You couldn’t possibly have a snowball’s chance in hell in enforcing your design rights without a mutually consensual legal contract with the copier in the absence of a State granted monopoly on the IP incorporated in the product because you would have absolutely no legal case against them in a society with absolute property rights.
Just as was posted earlier, no two people can claim property rights on the same object in a free society.
You seem to be making up some variation of the Labor Theory of Value or something and are trying to justify rent seeking.
Now that I have had time to read that Rothbard quotation in context, it is even more confused than I thought.
Rothbard does believe that one can have property rights in ideas. This error starts off innocently enough in reference to libel or slander, with the assertion that one cannot be prevented from expressing one’s ideas (or forced to express them). Now this really has nothing to do with owning the ideas themselves. It is really just a result of ownership of one’s body.
Then he continues into his copyright discussion as quoted above. So far I agree with his concept of the contractual copyright, but he still wants to talk about owning ideas, which is in no way necessary to reach his conclusion - yet.
The problem, is the paragraph that follows, where he attempts to refute the scenario that I alluded to and Anonymous Coward pointed out explicitly. A purchases an iPod from B. A agrees to not reproduce the iPod. C sees A’s iPod, and is able to reproduce it. Rothbard concludes that C cannot legitimately reproduce the iPod because he cannot acquire rights from A that A never had in the first place.
This argument is confused even on its own merits, because A may have never even attempted to transfer any rights to C at all. C could have simply seen A carrying the iPod as he was walking down the street.
However, Rothbard’s conclusion does follow from the premise that A had a property right in the idea. If B had that property right in the first place, and never transferred it to A or anyone else, then C could not also legitimately claim it.
Like I said, I disagree with Rothbard on this. My purpose for this post was just to clarify his position, part of which was left out of the original quote, and part of which I mischaracterized in my previous response.
This the crux of the problem. If property rights come from using labor to produce something, then where does self-ownership come from? Wouldn’t one be owned by one’s parents instead (or God, the subject of another thread)? How does ownership in land come to exist? No one produced land. (This is where the Georgists will get you.)
Actually, property rights come from being the first to use something (homesteading). The reason this is crucial to the IP debate is because only physically existing things can be homesteaded. One can homestead a farm. One cannot homestead the idea of farming.
You also seem to be confusing Rothbard’s idea of the contractual copyright with the ownership of an idea (as did Rothbard himself). Ownership of the design is in no way necessary to derive the concept of a contractual copyright - in a sense, the ideas are mutually contradictory. If one really owned an idea in the first place, there would be no need for a contract to prevent someone else from using it - as Rothbard demonstrates immediately following the excerpt you quoted above.
It’s hard for me to tell what position you are arguing (maybe both?) - merely that Rothbardian contractual copyrights are legitimate (I agree, but the practicality is debatable) or that ideas really can be owned.
Also, you keep making a distinction between “idea” and “design”. I think what you mean is to say that there is no property right in an idea that has not been implemented - a la current patent law and your labor theory of property rights. I don’t think this a necessary distinction, but if you want to make it that’s fine with me. Just substitute “implemented idea” or “design” or whatever where I use “idea”.
Side note first: As brought out earlier I should really be using a different word to convey what I’m saying but having a not so great vocabulary I do the best I can. When I say design I’m talking about an idea that was brought to completion, implemented in a way. I could have a design for a widget but if I never produced it then how can I claim ownership of that design? I can’t. But once I implement it (produce it) I can claim ownership of that design.
Monopoly? Yes, it is on the design (implemented idea), but certainly not the idea, since you can’t own ideas. Apple has designed an iPod, the design of which they own because they invested the energy and resources in producing it. Yet, they cannot claim ownership of the idea of MP3 players because that is just an idea. So Microsoft creates their own MP3 player, the Zune, which they own the design for. But Microsoft cannot simply copy the exact code used in the iPod for use in the Zune, nor can they take any hardware developed by Apple, copy it and use it in the Zune. That would be a violation of Apples property right in the software code and hardware used in the iPod. And it doesn’t matter if the state has issued a patent or not. Apple was the first to use that code and hardware, they produced it, therefore they are the owners of it. Copying it is theft and a violation of their property right.
And it’s the same thing if they sell the iPod. They can sell them all they want but that doesn’t negate their ownership of the design of the software or the hardware. I can’t take the movie Silence of the Lambs, copy it and put my studios name on the credits. I didn’t write the movie, I didn’t produce the movie, I didn’t hire the actors, extras, spend the money to bring it to market, etc. MGM holds the rights to Silence of the Lambs. I can buy a copy of it but I certainly can’t make additional copies of it and claim it is mine or that I made the movie.
And as you correctly point out no two people can claim property rights in the same object in a free society. With the iPod Apple is claiming property rights on the design of the iPod and you, the purchaser, are claiming conditional property rights on a copy of that design. Apple has sold the iPod under the condition that no one steals their design, copies it, and then distributes it for a profit. You are still the owner of the iPod but not the owner of the design of that iPod.