Eh…true. One could always say “maybe my grandma did it” or “I honestly don’t remember,” and it would be difficult to prove otherwise. If one could show that one habitually ended up with such media, maybe the case would be different.
I don’t think obs of justice in and of itself is statist; however, it certainly shows potential for abuse, similar to the witnesses for hire forced into that position due to the nature of the drug war.
I’d like to 2nd Jack on the well-mannered discussion.
The original information is the intellectual property. So you protect the original information you protect the IP. They are the same. You still are unwilling to explain what is actually happening in the marketplace. On the one hand you agree that people will have ideas put these ideas on paper and then protect these ideas which makes perfect sense. Then you add there is no possible way they can protect their idea. It is a complete contradiction.
Again, explain why people are protecting their ideas when you say it is physically impossible?
Classic anti-ip dodge of the arguement. Nowhere have I mentioned any state IP laws. I have only talked about the free-market. You can only argue in context of the state IP laws because the free-market does not act how you predict it will. In a free-market your theory that people will not protect original information/IP is demonstrably false. I have demonstrated it with the Coke example and there are many more cases just like that. If you eliminated the state tomorrow people will still make successful efforts to protect what is traditionally thought of as IP and do things to maximize the value of that IP. It is happening now in the free-market and would continue.
Two things, your reputation is what other people think in their heads so you have no control over that, so you can not own exclusively what other people think in their head. What you could do is pay people to not say or write bad things about you. IP protection is not about controlling what other people think it is about the actions they take with the information they receive. The actions can be controlled primarily with contracts but there may be other mechanisms as well like not giving you the information.
Secondly, IP is what you think in your head and you have complete control over that. You are the owner of your thoughts but if you have contracted to not take actions on those thoughts then you are bound by that. Also, if you and I think the same thing then it is no less my thought because you also think it.
Finally, the probability of you and another person having the exact same idea or invention is very low. So again, IP protection is not about controlling people’s thoughts but controlling their actions regarding an idea/information of agreed upon value that you are supplying to them. That is a perfectly legitimate free-market function, it doesn’t violate your rights, it doesn’t limit your mind but it limits with your agreement the permissable actions that you can take.
If you agree that contracts are a permissable form of IP protection in a free-market then there is nothing left to discuss and you are in fact an advocate of allowing people to protect IP. It would be great if you and LS could actually discuss what is really happening as opposed to repeating your tired mantra.
You and LS are confusion exclusivity with ownership. I can own something without being the exclusive owner and until there is another owner then I am the exclusive owner. If maintaining my exclusive exercise of ownership through contracts is beneficial and voluntarily agreed upon what on earth is wrong with that?
It’s not worth it. Life has so much more to offer than arguing with some internet crank who just keeps repeating the same positions you have already defeated earlier in the argument.
The property is not exclusive argument on it’s face is totally indefensible and ridiculous. Then add in the you own it though if it is in your head. But when someone else has it in their head you don’t own it. Maybe you both own it. Maybe neither owns it. Maybe the angels square dance on Thursday nights. But when you make a contract you can protect what is in your head (also known as keeping your own secret, so really we’re protecting ourselves against ourselves).
Whatever.
@NUK It’s the same crap over and over. I’m sorry if I ever led you to believe you could argue with him and it would eventually reach a conclusion. It never does. He can continue like this for hundreds more posts. He’ll never admit he was wrong and he’ll continue to misrepresent your position.
It’s just a waste of otherwise productive time.
i am close to agreeing LS.
i just wonder whether Max is willing to go so far as to claim that it could be sensible to talk about Reputation Property, in similar terms as he talks about IP and we talk about Pyhsical (i.e. real) property./
because of course free market individuals might be expected to ‘protect’ all three ‘things’
I confronted him on this awhile back in a thread by PeterWellington. What is the definition of property?
Forget the utilitarian arguments, forget the emotional arguments, forget the moral arguments.
What is property? Is IP property?
The rest, contracts, safe deposit boxes, the market, is all moot if we can’t come to a conclusion on an objective definition of property.
I don’t believe IP is property, for the simple reason that it is not scarce. As Max tried to indicate, it is exclusive only until it is not. Sorta like saying water is dry until you get caught out in the rain. It simply does not pass muster.
So while I enjoy people trying to explain how liberty works, or how IP or non-IP could work, it all seems so redundant and pointless. When you have to justify reality, then you’re fighting a losing battle. The facts, A = A are what you can lean on regardless of language, time, or situation.
Why do you bother responding and then do not even add anything other than your whining? Like I said you can’t defend your arguements, you can’t deal with reality. Just keep pretending that in a free society everyone will be in universal agreement with whatever you say. Your a gutless coward.
Good agree with LS but unlike him you should at least have the guts to defend your own arguements. You have to think for yourself, if you only rely on what you read without your own critical thinking you end up like LS just repeating something out of a book with no ability to intellectually defend the flaws that exist when confronted with reality.
i have defended my own arguments. i have pointed out glaring contradictions to you that you have glossed over as semantics. its not semantic, its you being wrong.
you’ve made ridiculous statements about thoughts being property that cant be born out. having a thought, and owning thought property are two different things, the first is fine the second is nonsense. you claim that because actors in the marketplace spend money and say that they are spending money to protect their thougts, that the thougts they feel they are protecting are due the title ‘property’, just because it seems to you that things that people value are property. i value friendship. i dont own any friends. think on it.
Just try an answer one real world example. I know it is hard for you to stick to reality but here goes:
In a free-market with no government: Someone(A) thinks of a song and writes this song down on a piece of paper. A now wants to sell this song to someone(B) who pays a price for the song and agrees contractually to not reproduce the song or allow others to reproduce the song without A’s permission.
Please don’t add any additional scenarios or other circumstances to the base scenario:
Since your arguement is that in a free society either no one will attempt to protect IP(or whatever you would like to call it) and or any attempt to protect it, since it doesnt really exist will fail please answer the following:
Please explain why either party is prohibited from engaging in the above scenario?
Please explain why this will not happen in a free society?
Please explain why B would not be bound by the contract?
As an outsider to this contract please explain what action you plan to take to prevent the above scenario?
Finally, if there are examples of people doing this activity how does your theory explain that?
And on this, I can see you are fixated on the word property. Would you say that most people believe their thoughts are theirs? If you actually look at what people do in a free-market then you will see that people act as if they own their thoughts, they view their thoughts as belonging to them, that is they view their thoughts as their property no matter what you think. How can you say that you have ownership over your body but not your mind?
You have. As have I. This is what Max does. He attempts to shout over and ignore what was already posted. Note, he has not clarified if IP is actually property, only that it has value, which as you demonstrate, you might value friends or love or warm sunny days, but that doesn’t mean you can own those environments or emotions absolutely.
Rather than continue to feed his need for attention, I was wondering what you thought about Jeffrey Tucker’s article on LRC today.
The authors make a very important point with regard to ideas. If you have an idea, it is yours. You can do with it what you want. If you share it (sing, speak, broadcast, let others see the products of your ideas), others then have copies of it. They are entitled to do with their copies of the idea precisely what you can do with your idea. They can use it how they want provided they don’t prevent others from doing with it what they want. This is a simple application of the non-aggression principle that governs a free society. Whether it is fashion, language, know how, or whatever, people are free to copy.
Ideas, then, are what Mises calls “free goods”: copies are potentially limitless. They “do not need to be economized.”
“Intellectual property” is the completely wrongheaded idea that, in the words of the authors, someone has the right “to monopolize an idea by telling other people how they may, or more often may not, use the copies they own.” This strikes at the heart of progress because it means not improving what exists but rather prohibiting others from using and improving it.
JT has been making a lot of utilitarian and moral arguments. But again, I think the only argument that matters is if IP is property or not. If it isn’t, then whether people foolishly spend money to guard a vault of books or require NDAs of everyone, and pay to enforce those contracts is moot.
Do you agree?
i agree with this, max has failed to wrestle with this, (Reputation Property anyone?); likely because he intuits it must lead to him conceding the point.
also agree with this. Its kinda sad that mises cant be around to argue these ideas with us…
also i wonder whether Reisman has ever been given a copy of Kinsella’s work on it or the Book JT has been blogging…
but im going to risk feeding the trol because he really dropped a howler on the above post
isnt this like me going into a Fruit store and the shopkeeper will only sell me one of his products if i promise that i wont allow my brother to to buy Papaya from any other store.
err…its a contract involving me in either the impossibility of controlling a 3rd party if i have no power over them:; or possible worse, its a criminal contract which commits me (for fear of breach of contract) to break NAP and coerce my brother.
No, it’s more like me telling you that whilst you’re on my property you can’t say certain things. I don’t have to presume to own the words to say this. Just the property that the contract concerns.
I simply do not agree that there is not such thing as IP. How is creating an idea any different than homesteading a peice of unowned land? You have to put the capital down, to work it, make it useful, create it. Once you have done all of these things, the idea and the land are both useful. The land is scarce, there is only one of it. So it is not right for someone to come in and say, you created this value, I did not. But I am going to take this value from you because it is aviliable. So how is does it fit, that when you create an idea, put your hard work, the same work that was involved in working the land, in to createing something that can be easily copied. An idea can be copied and be made aviliable to anyone at no cost. This means that the idea, its self is of no value to the person who created it, because everyone elses subjective value of that idea is “0” because it is aviliable just like air, or water is aviliable. This makes all of the capital that the producer of the idea sunk into the creation of the idea a sunk and lost cost. Does this mean that the producer shold forgo creation of easily copiable ideas inorder to produce bread, simply because he can not profit from creating ideas? Or would he or she have to survive on the generiousity of others for their well being.
I do not disagree that people should be able to create the same goods as one another, like the arguement about Pizzas in the article by Jeff Tucker, but I do think that people should have monopoly privlidge on goods they produce. This does not mean some one can not also bake bread, or make pizza or make a Plasma TV but it does mean that one can not go in to a factory and take the blueprints for a new car, building, or any other good and then simply use them to sell that good at a lower cost than the person worked on the blueprints or the idea. This seems tant amount to stealing, in my opinion.
If it is not so, then Mr. Tucker please let me know when you are done with the manuscript for your next book. I will be over shortly to take it and sell it to a publishing company for a few hundred dollars, this is what is best for the market, correct? that way, more people will be able to access your book and they will have value brought to them.
MaxLiberty is quite correct. One doesn’t need to presume to own any ideas, or whatever. Merely property, once I own that property, provided there are no logical inconsistancies I can make whatever contracts regarding it that I desire.
If one were to rent a house in a village of Jewish people, one could attach a contract to the renting of that house specifying that one must not sing, or write down or whatever a certain, new, Neo Nazi song. I don’t see what the difference is if that house becomes a CD.
How is it ridiculous that property can not be born out? Why do our professors not want us to simply copy work of another author? Would they not be getting a superior product if we did? How come we can not simply all turn in the same paper, to our professor, we may have all indendentaly come up with the exact same idea. Please let me know. I value many things that are not exactly mine. But I also value my thoughts, that is why I sign this post. Why I expect to be reconizged for my intellectual prowess. (not my spelling as you can tell) But, would it be right for someone else to claim this post as their own, and when someone expresses interest in it to make a profit on my ideas? Please let me know.
Benjamin Burkley
Copyrite 2009
patent number 1283837175493
This post may not be copied or reproduced in anyway with out my express written concent.
By reading this post you have implicetly agreed to these terms.
hope all is well.
You sure knocked that strawman over with relatively ease.
You’ve really obfuscated the point in question with a number of other issues. No, I can’t go into your factory to steal the blue prints. If I stumble acrooss a good produced by your factory may I copy the design? Of course, provided I haven’t contracted with you otherwise.
Scarcity.
Giles, allow me to try and explain
In a free-market with no government: Someone(A) thinks of a song and writes this song down on a piece of paper. A now wants to sell this song to someone(B) who pays a price for the song and agrees contractually to not reproduce the song or allow others to reproduce the song without A’s permission.
person c hears person A through the wall singing the song as A writes it down C goes on stage late that night and performs it to a packed house.
person A then sues person B for having allowed C to reproduce the song without A’s permission.
Two reasons. The first being the same reason that people pay taxes, and it has nothing to do with it being correct. It merely has to do with it being that way. The second, they want to know what you can produce.
Because you’ve contracted with your school/ professor. IP has nothing to do with this.
No, because the sentiments expressed in the post are misguided.
In which case A is to fault, not B. A has no leg to stand on when it comes to his attempt to sue person B, so what? This example is not relevant.
If A, invites B to his house on the grounds that he does not swear in front of the children of A, known as C, and then A swears and C hears, he can not sue B. On the other hand, if B swears and C hears he can take actions against him. Contractual agreements regarding the use of property don’t presume to own anything except the property in question.