I understand that libertarians have different viewpoints regarding IP. What do you say to people who argue that IP protects people’s opportunity to make money on their intellectual work?
There is a practically infinite variety of opportunities one could protect. Protecting any arbitrary set of them will destroy some other set of opportunities. Libertarianism isn’t about opportunity as such. It is about political justice. And to me it is manifestly unjust for one to lay hands on another for singing a song or copying a book.
There is a vast vast literature on this, most of which has emerged in the last year. I suggest that you first look at Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property (online in literature)
A quick response to the above is that entrepreneurial freedom is what protects protects people’s opportunity. IP only extends the profitability period by granting a state privilege to one producer and coercing everyone else to prevent imitation of profitable activities, i.e. IP wrecks the market mechanism.
You’ve already been over this ali. What gives?
Why should the opportunity to make money on any work be protected?
See this section of Long’s article on IP. Basically, he says some of the ends of IP are legitimate, but should be achieved through voluntary rather than coercive methods.
Some people will say, to respect the hard work it has taken to come up with a new book, CD etc.
So if build the ugliest car evarrr and it performs horribly, and no one wants to buy it, then the government guarantee that I have a profit?
No, but some IP supporters will say that the government should guarantee that only you should have the opportunity to profit from it.
So monopolies are justified?
Property monopolies are justified. The question is if the concept of intellectual property is justified.
You mean private property. I would ask you how can you own a series of music notes in a certain progression, such is what constructs a song, such is intellectual property, how can one own the C chord at a specific time and place?
Some will say that it’s not a matter of owning a chord, but complex ideas that it has taken a long time to work out.
So those people would say, if it takes hard work to create some intellectual work, and there is a market for that work, then there should be a profit opportunity for the creator? That would be a circular argument, because there is only a market for a work if IP is protected. Without IP protection, the vast part of the market disappears, because the scarcity mostly disappears.
Say a man has worked hard to develop his trademark high-five style. Why shouldn’t he be able to patent it so that no one can take it from him. Doesn’t his hard work and social genius entitle him to protection from copycats so that he will be one-of-a-kind?
Of course not. The only reason there is IP is because it used to be possible to record and not to easily copy. But now that it’s very very easy to copy, it’s the same situation as the high-fiver: we wouldn’t think of allowing people to trademark gestures because they’re too easily copied. Just because certain firms have built a whole business model around artificial protection of IP doesn’t mean IP needs to continue.
Should sensittive information be protected by law?
The problem with many libertarians in the area of intellectual property is their flawed views into property. Now, all of us believe in property, but the flaw comes in our view as to how we obtain property. Many beleive in the idea that John Locke promolgated, that is that we mix our labor into a certain piece of materials, and those materials become our property, since we own our bodies we should mix part of our bodies with it and make something our own. This is a very flawed assessment. Production is neither necessary nor sufficient for the ownership of property. Rather, what we see when a person homesteads a claim on property is that a person has a better claim on the property than those who are latecomers. If you grab an apple off of an unclaimed apple tree, you did not produce the apple, nor did you really and truely mix our labor in the creation of the apple, yet you have a property claim on the apple. Also, did you produce your own body? If we were to hold that production is necessary and sufficient for the creation of property, then we have a dilema, since I am for certain that all libertarians beleive that each person has a property right in his own person. So, we acknowledge that production is not necessary for the acquisition and ownership of property.
Now, if somebody else comes for the apple that you claimed as your own, does he or she have a right to the apple? No. You claimed the apple by retrieving it FIRST and have a better claim on the apple due to the primacy of the claim. If he takes the apple and mixes his labor with the apple and makes a pie, does that mean that he owns the pie? Not at all. You still have a good claim to the apple, and the pie is yours. An even more subtle example, and this is one that Stephan Kinsella uses to illustrate this point. You own the products of your own body. By that axiom, you own your own spit. If you were to spit into the ocean, you are mixing your spit with the ocean. You still don’t own the ocean. You have lost your spit to the ocean, but you don’t hold any property claim to the ocean based SOLELY on the mixing of your spit with the ocean. Or the atmosphere. If I exhale into the air, assuming that the building is not sealed from the outside air, I own my exhalations, but I don’t own all of the atmosphere after my exhalation. I cannot go to another person who is inhaling and give him a cease and desist order, and I am certain that all libertarians acknowledge this point. So production is not sufficient.
So we are left with two ways of acquiring property, that is the appropriation of resources for personal use: homesteading and by contract. I can increase wealth by production, but that is NOT a way of acquiring property. If I acquire by contract wheat seed and then plant the seed, I did not gain control of the resulting wheat crop by production, but rather by acquiring the seed. The production that I undertook increased the value of the seed and resulted in the seed being converted into something more useful to the rest of society. Production and ownership here are coincidental, but they are not causally linked. Let’s say I am asked to plant seeds owned by X. I undertake the act of production, but I still don’t own the wheat. When it is harvested, the wheat still belongs to X. What I did was increase the value of my person, to the point that I increased my wealth by the amount that was contracted for the conditional lease of my person. In other words, even if I mix my labor into a certain good, if somebody has a prior claim on the materials, then I can never own it without a contractual arrangement.
Where this falls into the libertarian theory on the issue of intellectual property is this. On material resources that are claimable (that is, any resource that is scarce by nature), we have a right to do whatever we wish with those resources, so long as it does not interfere with the rights of another person to do whatever he wishes to do with his own resources that he has a legitimate claim on. For instance, if my choice use of a pesticide spills over onto my neighbor’s flowers and damages the flowers, then I am infringing upon the rights of the owner of the flower garden. But if I take my own paper and ink and copy a book owned by X, then I am not depriving X of the right to enjoy his property, but I have produced something that is of greater value than the raw paper and ink. “Intellectual Property” is not something that is exclusionary, it is not an economic resource. It is something that, like air, everybody can partake in without depriving somebody else of the right to use whatever air that he or she would need to use. My use of a pattern to improve something does not deprive you of the use of such pattern. If we were to recognize a property right to the first person to “homestead” a certain pattern, then could we not give rights to those who “homestead” the air, the right to exclude people from breathing and using the air? It is a slippery slope, but logically we could have a single person homestead the air under that kind of philosophy.
I think that IP is necessarily a violation of the right to property, since with IP laws, what the government does is allow one person to prohibit another person from doing with his own property whatever he or she wishes to do short of interfering with another’s claim on scarce resources.
Such as? Trade secrets and secret negotiations would fall under contracts. As in, IBM would have Microsoft sign a non-disclosure agreement when they negotiate a deal. Coca-Cola would have its chemists sign a “you can’t talk about your work at Coca-Cola” agreement.
Great first post austrianfan77. Welcome to the community!
austrianfan77 adds something useful, so I’d like to re-work what I wrote about to encompass it:
We have and advocate a system of private property because being able to claim and own property is useful and leads to prosperity (among other reasons). For that, though, it is only necessary to make sure no one deprives anyone else of property.
In the case of physical property, depriving someone of property can generally only mean one of two things in practice: stealing the property, or damaging/destroying the property. So for many centuries theft and property damage have been punishable offenses.
However, since all property was physical, stealing property automatically meant depriving someone of property. By calling music, books, etc. intellectual property, IP advocates took advantage of humans’ built-in semantic biases - just like Orwellian names like the Patriot Act. By talking about stolen property there is the natural tendency to see this as wrong, because it is wrong in the case of physical property (and stolen is a loaded term with implications of depriving someone of something).
But the reasons why it is wrong for physical property do not carry over to IP, because no one is being deprived of their property. Nothing is being stolen, merely copied. But by continuing to use words like “steal” and “property” IP advocates maintain control over the powerful but subtle semantic aspect.
Even though no one is being deprived of anything, there is a subtle connotation that someone’s property is being stolen, hence they are being deprived of that property. Instead they are being “deprived” of profits that they could have had with State-granted monopoly privilege, so it dovetails nicely with their case.
Nevertheless, intellectual property is not property.
Another way to attack it: Imagine if physical objects could be replicated out of thin air by some kind of Star Trek replication technology. Files could be downloaded containing all the data needed to replicate anything: award-winning apple pies, Gucci bags, Coca-Cola, even upgraded replicator units.
Naturally, most companies that now provide unique physical objects would go out of business. They would surely lobby to protect their physical “IP,” but what would we say to them? You are no longer needed. Your business model no longer works. That is not our problem.
This is the end position that many Austrians have. Which if true then any contract about information should be considered invalid. Information is simply an intellectual creation. Can you own information? Can you buy or sell information? If the seller isn’t the owner of the information how can he sell it and why do people buy it if it is free?
Austrians love to insinuate that the market absent the government would have information free without restrictions for everybody and no one could ever buy or sell information because it would always be free. The market and the human species treats information like property whether you like it or not. The continual examples of a branch of study claiming to be based on the axiom of human action that in fact continues to ignore human action when testing their theories is quite amusing.
I will clue you in…the Austrians asserting something is true doesn’t make it so. Observe what happens absent government intervention and you have a very good idea of what the nature of the market and the human species is. Theories that contradict that will never succeed. There are lots of examples without any government intervention where people buy and sell information and restrict its use through contract.