You are deceiving someone as to the nature of an object as you are undertaking an exchange. That is fraud.
I just explained why I cared about who the author was.
Do you have a complete inability to absorb what other people say? I’ll respond to you once more. Its getting unproductive, to be polite.
I edited my post.
How about this: Without IP, you legitimize theft of economical winning potential. In a free market, the best one makes money. The author is definitely better than the copier.
Did the author come up with the idea, or did they implement it? The second person who had the idea can implement it.
If the second person implements it better than the first, they can create a partnership where the second person implements ideas and pays the first one to come up with them.
If Coke wants to enter a market, and then Pepsi finds out about a market and beats them to it, is this theft?
If the person who makes the most money is the best, and the author doesn’t make the most money, how is the author the best? Of these two statements you make, you can only take one of them to be true, but not both.
FTFY.
Not necessarily. In the market, the one who lowers scarcity is the one who can profit.
Say I discover a sunken treasure of gold doubloons on the high seas. If I keep it a secret, I can make money by contracting a ship to retrieve it and then sell the gold [thereby lowering the scarcity of gold]. If I tell everyone about it first, I lose the ability to profit from that secret - even though I am the discoverer [I lowered the scarcity of information about secret places to find gold, but I gave it away instead of selling it]. The discoverer of an asset does not necessarily profit; it’s the one who gathers or utilizes the asset (or secret knowledge of it) that can profit [by reducing scarcity]. In the market, it’s the one who lowers scarcity that has the profit opportunity.
The discoverer of a sunken treasure may have effortlessly stumbled upon it, or spent his whole life looking for it. It doesn’t matter. Once the locational information is divulged to the public (deliberately or by accident), the scarcity of that information is gone, so its market value falls to zero. Something analogous to IP laws in this case would mandate that the discoverer be entitled to all profits from the find, or at least first dibs on salvaging it.
In the same way, the “discoverer” (author) of an intellectual work may have created it effortlessly, or it may be his life’s work. It doesn’t matter. Once the data content of that work is divulged to the public (deliberately or by accident), the scarcity of that data is gone, so its market value falls to zero. IP laws mandate that the “discoverer” (author) be entitled to all profits from the data content.
If for some reason the treasure hunter cannot make a profit without first disclosing to the general public all the information necessary to benefit from his discovery, he probably cannot make a profit at all - someone will beat him to the punch (salvage companies), and that is not our problem.
If the author cannot make a profit without dislosing to the general public all the data necessary to enjoy his work (he in fact must!), he probably cannot make a profit at all - someone will beat him to the punch (file sharers), and that is not our problem. (He can still do live performances, speaking engagements, ad endorsements, etc., and get critical recognition and fame - so we needn’t feel bad for him.)
The Austrians believe that copying information is not theft because information can not be owned according to them. In the case of computer hacking, if the Austrians are consistent, then there can be no restitution for hacking into a computer and copying data. Even if there is some damage to the computer or loss of use of the computer this is the only possible basis for restitution according to the Austrian theory. Generally speaking the loss of data will be much worse than the minimal loss of computer time or any repair that might be required to fix the initial hacking.
Many hackers will gladly pay to replace your $1000 computer so they can have the much more valuable data inside. Yet another real world example of this flawed view of information.
Did you even ask Zach’s permission before you used the quote feature and reproduced his IP willy nilly.?
you are a devil!
The fact that the “loss of data will be much worse than the minimal loss of computer time or any repair…” is irrelevant. To twist my arm to force me to do your homework is a violation of my property rights (my arm). The “value” placed on the arm doesn’t matter, since as you point out, it’s all subjective. Because something has value does not make it property - we are concerned with rights, not value. Pepsi would perhaps pay millions to get a rep from Coca Cola to tell them their secret recipe. However, the private contract entered into by Coca Cola and the rep is legitimate, and it may include restrictions on disseminating information, that is, the speaking with the mouth and brain the rep owns. This does not make the information contained in his brain “property”, per se, but rather the brain and mouth that would need to be acted upon, either voluntarily or coercively, to release it. The person owns his computer, his arm, and his mind, and engaging with this these things without his consent, regardless if he is aware of it or there was what you perceive as “damage” does not change the fact that his property rights have been violated. You are entering his computer without his permission.
This is a position I happen to agree with.
There can be no restitution for the copying of data, but if you had actually read what I had posted, you would see that to access that data, you must manipulate the physical hardware of the computer. Doing so without the permission of the owner would be to violate his rights; this is what restitution might be needed for.
I agree.
Yes, for the most part. It sucks to lose your homework/tax returns/business information.
If my computer has my credit card info, bank account info, and the like, then I can see why they would want it for the information. If it’s a corporate computer, they might also want to know what sort of vulnerabilities the corporate network might have. There are other reasons to want hardware; writing a driver for a wireless card, for example. The IP people do not always like that latter case. After all, they have built that piece of silicon first, so they proclaim an exclusive right to that pattern.
I’m not sure if this thread is being continued, but a thought came to me that I would like an opinion on:
If what I said above about a contract preventing a person from releasing certain information is enforceable in a world where IP doesn’t exist, i.e., the Coca Cola example, as the medium of the information (brain, mouth*) is* property, would it be legitimate for the music industry to include a contract with their releases requiring consumers to agree to not share its contents? There would still be the same enforcement issues, and perhaps this would eliminate this scenario. But within the scope of rights, am I missing something?
Why does it follow that what is not tangible cannot be ownned? Are anti-IP-ers materialists? Don’t they believe that ideas exist?
If you cannot have rights to information or information cannot be regulated, doesn’t this mean that threats are ok? Threats are not tangible…Just like copying a book harms the author mentally and not physically, a threating a person only causes mental harm.
Ideas do exist and good ideas are scarce. The problem with intellectual property is that in order to enforce it you need to violate other more fundamental property rights.
So threats are ok?
I don’t think threats are OK - I’m not sure how threats would be handled in a libertarian system, but I don’t think that rejecting patents and similar schemes means giving a free-pass to threats.
Why not? What’s the difference?
Ideas exists but they are not tangible, however, they can be expressed in tangible form. Say you have an idea for a car. The concept of the car is not tangible, however, that concept can be expressed in tangible form by making schematics and drawing it on paper. Also, it can be expressed as a tangible car itself. Anyway, how can you steal the idea? To steal your idea would mean to remove the idea from your mind and place it into mine, which is not what happens. instead, that idea is copied into my mind, thus you are not deprived of the idea. Watching a scary movie harms me mentally, should I sue Hollywood?
Maybe you can explain why they are the same thing ? By the way, threats can be legitimate…
- I can tell you “give me your money or I’ll shoot you” - an illegitimate threat.
- Or I can tell you “pay me back what you owe me or I’ll sue you” - a legitimate threat.
Why?
Because I’m threatening to do something illegitimate. I’m trying to violate your property rights by ‘threatening’ to use of force.