Thank you for this post, Mikachusetts. This is a breath of fresh air!
This post of yours is probably the most ingenious application of authentic libertarian thought to the world that I love: music.
Maybe this might give you a bit of clarity: The problem with the libertarian IP debate is one of confused definitions. We are using fallacious concepts to describe the human action in question.
The word property should not be used. Instead, we should be identifying these laws in terms of what activities are permitted or forbidden on a certain geographic/defended space. For instance, in the case of music, instead of The Demics saying that the Talk Is Cheap album is their intellectual property and therefore protected by such and such intellectual property laws, the band should say: “If you play any track from the Talk Is Cheap album in public, you are required to pay us $1 per rotation or part thereof. If you sell copies of the Talk Is Cheap album in public, you are required to pay us $10 per copy. Now, understanding that the concepts of “play in public” and “copies” and even “selling” are subjective and up to interpretation, we, as represented by our security company will forcibly compel anybody with reasonable suspicion of having done the aforementioned actions to stand before an arbitrator appointed by the Acme Abitration Services International, Inc. We encourage you to inform your private insurance and security service providers of any actions on your part which may lead us, The Demics, to pursue a claim against you.”
In other words, there is no need to define the problem in terms of property.
+1 for giving a definition in terms of human action. Moving away from nouns is one layer of complexity stripped away, hopefully enough for people to see that the type and degree of IP protection would come down to prevailing norms.
As for what constitutes the Rite of Spring, we have to say that it is whatever human beings recognize to be the Rite of Spring. Let me explain. A computer can differentiate between HTML data and JPEG image data simply by examining the data to see if it conforms to the respective definitions. We can term the computer a “schema reader” for HTML and JPEG schemas. Similarly, the human brain is capable of differentiating between English text, French text and the Rite of Spring. It doesn’t matter how the brain does it, it only matters that it can do it. This makes the human brain a “schema reader” for English, French and music. (The “schema reader” terminology comes from Eric Beinhocker’s excellent book The Origin of Wealth).
Where things get complicated is when you take themes from multiple pieces of music and mix them together then ask whether it is a copy of the original or something entirely new.
— or better yet, you can just let the market demonstrate it.
For instance, if hordes of people line up to pay admission to attend a performance of The Wall, it does not matter if Roger Waters is performing it or not — it will still be The Wall.
It will either sell or not sell. Why consumers buy anything can never be known anyway.
I disagree because the same kind of definitional problem exists for all sorts of things that are clearly not saleable. For example, what is “valid English”? Well, there really isn’t any way to rigorously define “valid English” (this is provably the case) but there is an easy way to find out if something is valid English or not… simply ask an English-speaker (or, if you happen to be an English-speaker, decide for yourself).
That’s easy. The inherent value of a pot roast is nutrition. The inherent value of a car wash is a clean automobile. The inherent value of gold is as raw material for jewelry or industry.
So if I mistakenly believe that Stravinsky’s The Firebird is The Rite of Spring, does that mean its really The Rite of Spring? You don’t have to answer that, its rhetorical. The point is, when we attempt to define the its ontological status we either include a bunch of nonsense or exclude seemingly key elements - but its not a true problem! We don’t need to define it because we get along just fine relying on “family resemblances,” as Wittgenstein would say. We know what games are without defining them even when they are wildly different.
It does become a problem, however, when we rely on these ontological definitions to predicate real forces. Not just intellectual property, but even plain old property become hermetically sealed concepts that exclude variance by definition. Imagine if we created a rule that said “games can only be played on weekends.” How the hell would we enforce it? Well, we are forced to define and list every single instance or example of a game so that we don’t include a non-game or exclude a true game. Or, as enforcers we choose arbitrarily, or whatever fits into our ethical worldview (libertarians are sometimes guilty of this).
So that is what I see as the problem with IP and any of the libertarian contreversies. It is deeply rooted in the way the issues are approached - as a logic puzzle that can be solved through if-then counterfactuals.
Absolutely. The vast networks of intertwined relationships and knowledge are (I think) one of the most important ways that individuals can find context and therefore meaning behind anything we are trying to do. The market is one of those networks, language (in the active, evolving sense) is another.
You have to differentiate between formal pattern recognition (something a machine can do) versus pattern recognition done by the human (or other) brain. Even if it is possible, in principle, to reduce human pattern recognition to formal pattern recognition, such a formalism would not be significantly less complex than the human brain itself which is already one of the largest and most persistent unsolved problems in science.
When I say “the Rite of Spring is whatever the human brain recognizes it to be”, I do not mean that the human brain is infallible or that it is impossible for an individual to be a logical nihilist and refuse to distinguish The Firebird from The Rite of Spring (that would be a difficult confusion indeed!) Rather, what I mean is that any formal model is likely to be deficient in recognizing The Rite of Spring… either recognizing things that are not TRoS as TRoS or vice-versa, particularly in the boundary cases (different interpretations, transcriptions, errors, remixes, etc.)
There is an iPhone app called Shazam that can identify many titles of popular music just from the microphone input of the iPhone, so if you hear something on the radio and want to know what it is, you can use this app to recognize it. The internal operation of this app (the algorithm that it uses) is probably based on spectral analysis which plays an important role in the study of how the brain itself recognizes images and audio.