Need a quick and easy answer, maybe an example to proove some friends wrong. They believe that firms would stop investing in R&D if copyrights, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets, were to be abolished.
So if there are five bakeries in a town, then none of them would try to sell something better than the others?
Just a quick comment. There is surely spillover costs (for the producers) without such state protection, yet, there is also transition times and lags. If one company invests in R & D eventually their increases in productivity will spill over to their competitors, but during the lag they may steal market share.
Utilitarianism
One reason libertarians support IP is that they approach libertarianism as a whole from a utilitarian perspective instead of a principled perspective. They are in favor of laws that increase overall utility, or wealth. And they believe the state’s propaganda that state-granted IP rights actually do increase overall wealth.
Now, the utilitarian perspective itself is bad enough, because all sorts of terrible policies could be justified this way: why not take half of Bill Gates’s fortune and give it to the poor? Wouldn’t the sum total of the welfare gains to the thousands of recipients be greater than Gates’s reduced utility? After all, he’s still a billionaire afterwards. And if a man is extremely desperate for sex, couldn’t his gain be greater than the loss suffered by his rape victim, say, if she’s a prostitute?
But even if we ignore the ethical and other problems with the utilitarian, or wealth-maximization, approach, it is bizarre that utilitarian libertarians are in favor of IP when they have not demonstrated that IP does increase overall wealth. (For further discussion of various problems with utilitarianism, see Against Intellectual Property, pp. 19–23.) They merely assume it does and then base their policy views on this assumption. It is beyond dispute that the IP system imposes significant costs, in money terms alone — not to mention the cost to liberty.
However, the argument that the incentive provided by IP law stimulates additional innovation and creativity has not even been proven. It is entirely possible — even likely, in my view — that the IP system, in addition to imposing billions of dollars of cost on society, actually reduces or impedes innovation, adding damage to damage.
But even if we assume that the IP system does stimulate some additional, valuable innovation, no one has established yet that the value of the purported gains is greater than the costs of the system. If you ask an advocate of IP how it is that they know there is a net gain, you get silence in response (this is especially true of patent attorneys). They cannot even point to any study to support their utilitarian contention; they usually point to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, as if the back-room dealings of politicians two centuries ago is some sort of evidence.
In fact, as far as I’ve been able to tell, virtually every study that attempts to tally the costs and benefits of copyright or patent law either concludes that these schemes cost more than they are worth, that they actually reduce innovation, or the study is inconclusive. There are no studies showing a net gain. There are only repetitions of state propaganda.
Anyone who accepts utilitarianism should, based on the available evidence, be opposed to IP.
from here
Do they also believe that firms would stop producing altogether if property rights were to be abolished?
Z.
They believe that the scientist, inventor, etc will have no motivation to develop new technologies without the incentive of profit made possible by said ip laws.
Not that firms would stop manufacture altogether, but simply that no progress in technological advances would be made.
It’s a baseless assertion. Point out that there were centuries of technological advances with no IP law.
I was going to go down that route, just take something like the wheel and all the advances made on the wheel, the competitors who manufacture tyres (tires) etc still put money into R&D
Forget IP, inventions and technologies. Would anyone produce anything if property rights were to be abolished – if no one had the right to own anything, including whatever they produce?
Z.
Maybe i should take the open source software example instead !
Forget IP, inventions and technologies. Would anyone produce anything if property rights were to be abolished – if no one had the right to own anything, including whatever they produce?
Z.
I think you need to review this section now.
Libertarian Creationism
Another reason many libertarians favor IP is confusion about the origin of property and property rights. They accept the careless observation that you can come to own things in three ways: through homesteading an unowned thing, by contractual exchange, and by creation.
The mistake is the notion that creation is an independent source of ownership — independent, that is, from homesteading and contracting. However, it is easy to see that it is not, that “creation” is neither necessary nor sufficient as a source of ownership.
If you carve a statue using your own hunk of marble, you own the resulting creation because you already owned the marble. You owned it before, and you own it now. And if you homestead an unowned resource, like a field, by using it and thereby establishing publicly visible borders, you own it because this first use and embordering gives you a better claim than latecomers. So creation is not necessary.
And suppose you carve a statue in someone else’s marble — either without permission, or with permission, such as when an employee does this with his employer’s marble by contract — then you do not own the resulting statue, even though you “created” it. If you are using marble stolen from another, your vandalizing it does not take away the owner’s claims to it. And if you are working on your employer’s marble, he owns the resulting statue. So creation is not sufficient. (See also Against Intellectual Property, pp. 36–42.)
Or, as Sheldon Richman explains,
A key reason [many libertarians support IP] is the importance attached to the act of creation. If someone writes or composes an original work or invents something new, the argument goes, he or she should own it because it would not have existed without the creator. I submit, however, that as important as creativity is to human flourishing, it is not the source of ownership of produced goods. … So what is the source? Prior ownership of the inputs through purchase, gift, or original appropriation. This is sufficient to establish ownership of the output. Ideas contribute no necessary additional factor. If I build a model airplane out of wood and glue, I own it not because of any idea in my head, but because I owned the wood, the glue, and myself.
Of course, this is not to deny the importance of knowledge, or creation and innovation. All action, including action that employs owned scarce means, involves the use of technical knowledge — knowledge of causal laws, for example. To be sure, creation is an important means of increasing wealth. As Hoppe has observed,
One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, production and contractual exchange, or by expropriating and exploiting homesteaders, producers, or contractual exchangers. There are no other ways.
But while production or creation is a means of gaining “wealth,” it is not an independent source of ownership or rights. Production is not the creation of new matter; it is the transformation of things from one form to another — the transformation of things one necessarily already owns. Using your labor and creativity to transform your property into more valuable finished products gives you greater wealth, but not additional property rights.
So the idea that you own anything you create is a confused one that does not justify IP.
Irrelevant to my point. The concept of information property encourages creation and trading of information in the free market in the same way that the concept of tangible property encourages the creation and trading of tangible goods in the free market. The abolishment of the concept of property in either domain would lead to the same market degrading result. I’ve already argued about this before (with you, as well) and don’t feel like doing it all over again in this thread.
Z.
The concept of information property encourages creation and trading of information in the free market in the same way that the concept of tangible property encourages the creation and trading of tangible goods in the free market. The abolishment of the concept of property in either domain would lead to the same market degrading result.
If you say so. Don’t you see why you need to do better than this?
I’ve already argued about this before (with you, as well) and don’t feel like doing it all over again in this thread.
Then drop out now and save us both the time. You can look through the last IP thread and answer what I clearly listed as important things that IP proponents need to prove. My points were ignored and some moron told me I need to read some irrelevant books.
What an irresponsible characterization of “utilitarianism”, from Kinsella.
What an irresponsible characterization of “utilitarianism”, from Kinsella.
Why?
His understanding of “utilitarianism” is that as “high time preference utilitarianism”.
what time horizon is ‘correct’ for performing utilitarian analysis, and how is this known?
From your perspective, whatever is the means to your ends.
From your perspective, whatever is the means to your ends.
Erm, typically I thought “utilitarianism” involved a faulty reification of society and assignment of ends to it. Sure there is the utility in individual action, but the “problem” here is that R&D, generally for the whole free society, would fall.
i doubt investing would stop but the way dollars were invested may change.