LS, im awaiting your response to my post…
Yes.
I can sell a book I bought from you, and I can copy your book into a new book, and sell that. What would be wrong, woudl be to claim I am the author, when I am only the re-publisher. You would still be the author. It would be fraud for me to claim otherwise.
You must. Or you can just do what I just responded to. Ask me to restate or clarify my position. But I have a real hardon in this forum for people claiming I said or meant something I do not. I can argue my position, but I can’t argue positions people make up for me.
No. Should I continue reading?
You’re not the only person capable of figuring out cold fusion. Some people take days to read a book, some people read can read a book in a few hours. It’s presumptious to think that only one mind is capable of achieving a particular idea.
Only through the vectors that voluntarily contract with you.
No. I would rather you not hinder other people from discovering solutions by insisting you have a monopoly on an idea.
Reading comprehension is fundamental. Go back and read what I wrote.
No one asked you to.
Is it a strawman?
Yeah, we gunna suck out your brains with a straw. [8-)]
And for laughs, here is some confused Maxism. Check out this logical progression.
My mind is unique, the market puts value on it (could be zero, but regardless) value = property. Since labour is scarce, Labour is property.
Q.E.D.
Done.
I rarely if ever skip a response, but I am not sitting here waiting to answer every post. I do occasionally do other things. Occasionally.
I have also stated my definition of property, I just haven’t formalized it in one post. I wanted to give you the chance to do that while I ate and then prepared my own post, so that we would both have a definition we could both work from.
Anyways, I would define the rights of property as “an exclusive claim to use”, meaning the rights are not only in the good itself but in the use of that good… Now as to what constitutes property, I begin with the notion that everyone is a self-owner, meaning they can lay claim on the right of property over the use of their own self… From this we come to the issue of original appropriation, by which individuals claim property outside of self (and not through trade or prior-ownership). I find the homesteading principle most fitting here, but there are many problems with the scope of Locke’s “mixing labor with land” theory. Any and all resources (including ideas) can be homesteaded and then called property (I can bottle some air, and then claim rights of property over that bit of air), scarcity need not play any part in this process, only divisibility and separation. The rest is fairly simple to deduce, but I think you get the idea.
Equally presumptious to assume that you could. If relativity (a law of nature, so its always been there) was so easy, why did it take one man to discover it? You’re arguing that einstein was not unique? And yet again, If someone else comes up with the idea independently, there is no issue. Dont know how many times I have to state this…
How is this so hard to imagine? A construction worker will sign a contract to not use my cold fusion, because it provides him with a job. If he wont sign the contract, he doesnt get the job, and someone else will take it. You still havent stated how I will be
You call me
I call you
(of the mind)
I CLEARLY stated exactly the opposite of this countless times, including in the very post you quoted. Give me an s-t-r-awman!
Not inconsistent with my position.. i clearly point out that i’m referring to copyright, as all along this is what I was arguing for. We have moved the conversation on to cover a stateless society, and Jack and I are asking how a position based soley upon contract is inconsistant. I believe a limited state is necessary. I’m a randian minarchist. But the questions we’re posing now you still are not answering.
So now you’re saying
But what if, when I sold you the first book, you agreed to not do that very thing? Or, Q.E.D. answer the damn question rather than farting around in posts made days ago. We have posted a hypothetical, and you’re completely refusing to address it. I dont believe in your world, but I am playing along, and asking how contract cannot limit action.
Aside: I re-read the posts in question, and you did not agree with Giles that a contract could be made to sell you an apple wherein you could not consume the apple. I am sorry I misrepresented your position. Though the question still is posed, couldn’t such a contract be signed?
If ideas are not property, would it then not be a invasion of property rights if I were to (without interference to any other property) remove all ideas from your conscious (which would, I assume include memories, and invested learning, etc.) Or, can individual, specific ideas be owned as property in an indiviual fashion?
I think I’m ready to concede. I just realized why these contracts are indeed meaningless.
Rothbard once wrote about contracts in something I read that said no contract can compell a man’s future will. If he violates the contract, he would only need return whatever he gained as part of the contract, referring specifically to money payments or property transfers. There could be no legal contract that said “if you fail to show up on ___ date, you owe us $1,000,000” unless the contract arranged to pay the person that sum before the date.
I would agree that information fails to be classified strictly as property. It is not “returnable”. There can be no punishment for breaching the contract. Thus, it is meaningless. I am not suggesting Rothbard is infallible; only that I agree with him on liberty and contracts.
…although it may be considered fraud to agree to a contract you plan on breaking…
I am not ready to concede the economic point of copyright, however. I still believe there are benefits to a system that can best link consumer usage towards direct pricing of information goods. This may need to shift towards what I was trying to avoid - a gift economy + alternative goods markets. I’m going to ponder that for a while.
Jack, they don’t own the pattern of their brain, but the brain itself. for you to use that property in anyway without permission is unlawful.
of course i would consider privacy invasions also criminal; however, informational goods are not valued for their secrecy.
You can compell man’s future action, however. Otherwise you’re saying that an order for future goods (ie I order a ship to be built) is meaningless because it compells the shipbuilder to take future action of building a ship.
The punishment would be written into the contract. If I invent cold fusion, and you breach contract and use the idea for your own gain, I take all the money you gained, all the property you created using my idea. This would be spelled out in the contract. Hell, you could be executed for breach of contract. Some may say you cannot agree to this, but by saying you cant sign your life away, they’re claiming ownership of your life.
For those who don’t support the state yet believe in IP - what, exactly, do you propose to do with the inevitable millions of people who will pay no attention to your imposed barriers to entry into the market? What will you do with the tens or hundreds of millions who will buy their products when they offer them cheaper and better than the would-be monopolist?
Sarcity is related to uniqueness. Something unique, property, cannot be duplicated. You can own the same model and colour car as me, but only I can own my car. You can own your car. They are not the same thing.
The IP argument says that ideas are scarce, so scarce, that they can only have one owner. Forget for a moment that the current mechanism for determining who the owner is, varies from territory to territory, or that exclusive ownership expires when the state says so.
Now if an idea was truly scarce, someone would not be able to steal it, without taking it away from the original thinker. If it is unique, it cannot exist in two places at once.
That’s my argument based on scarcity. Pick any good, and you will see that it cannot be duplicated without creating a new instance of the product. You can copy a book, but it is not the original, it is a copy, and thus, it is new and unique. Likewise, people need to decide if ideas are unique, then how is it possible that someone can have an idea stolen, when they still have access to it?
The fact is, what’s being “stolen” is the exclusivity of the idea. The idea is only unique, as long as no one else has it. But as we all will admit, someone else, in another place, in another time, can come to the same thought, write the same words, figure out the same formula without any interaction with the “original” thinker. Which now begs the question, can you steal an idea, you have never come into contact with? Of course not.
I spent almost all day on the forum and didn’t get much work done. I won’t be around much tomorrow, but I will catch up on replies asap.
Thank you for replying btw. It is like pulling teeth to get anyone to discuss a definition of what actually constitutes property in these IP debates.
Personally? I would not produce anything but physical goods. I would never create anything that could be pirated, never invent anything new. And to those who would try and keep producing, they would go bankrupt, and the millions who would steal their work will have noone to steal from anymore.
And once you’ve crushed the ‘would-be monopolist’, from whom would you loot?
Hallellujah. I’m not familiar with your line of thinking, but I feel, no, I KNOW you are headed in the right direction.
Utilitarian and emotional/moral arguments get different mileage on this. People can get pretty far removed from objective reasoning when they are considering their own self-interest.
Then we’re just talking past one another. I’m no socialist of the mind. You’re a minarchist, who agrees there should be IP laws. IP laws are state granted monopoly privilege, and create artificial scarcity and market distortions.
I don’t expect you to give up anything to anyone if you do not want to (profit or altruism). But if you plan to use state laws to distort the market, and infringe on the abilities of your fellow man to act freely on the capacity of their own minds, then yeah we got a big problem.
Not a big deal. There are some people on this forum who have a bad habit of framing the debate by creating false positions. Needless to say, it is very hard to mount a defense in a debate if you aren’t entitled to your own position, but one your opponent forces you to play.
If I write something, I stand by it. If I am wrong, I’ll own up to it.
I don’t know, I didn’t pay a lot of attention because it all seemed off topic. In order to debate property rights with IP, we have to establish that IP is or is not property. I feel I can make a compelling case based on scarcity, or perhaps more precisely, uniqueness, that it is not property and thus the notion of theft, ownership, compensation, etc is all moot.
Then I would be violating a contract. No dispute there. Of course, I would probably not buy a book that I couldn’t read at the bookstore before taking it to the counter. I’d have to agree that whatever I read, prior to accepting the terms of sale was binding. And that’s just too much legal liability for a guy after some cheap paperback Sci-Fi.
I know. It is very sad. Hopefully you can see that limited doesn’t work, nor is it ideal. A state is fine, if it is voluntary. Coercion, in all instances is wrong.
Really? How pathetic.
LOL. Yeah, because there was absolutely NO innovation until the modern patent system emerged. Good thing there was a mercantilist state around to guarantee profits to the guy who invented the wheel!
You mean after competition crushes the would-be monopolist? Well, then there would be lower costs and greater efficiency, which would result in more capital savings, which would result in more investment, which would lead to more innovation, which would lead the the emergence of multiple competing firms, which would lead to lower costs and greater efficiency, etc.
Free markets bring about new and better processes. There is no reason to believe that a state is necessary for innovation and entrepreneurship to occur -except a stunning lack of imagination.
More pathetic than having my ideas robbed from me, my creations given away for free to all who would want it, my mind sacrificed at the alter of ‘anarchy’ as opposed to the alter of ‘socialism’? B/C I still see a direct correlation between the two.
Competition? You dare to say that blatantly stealing a man’s ideas and inventions is competition? I invent marvelous new technology, you rip it off and have the audacity to call that competition? You’ve created a new god to worship and call it anarchy. You’re no different than Marx in this regard, at least to my eyes.
And all the while you keep forgetting the inventor. You forget people are selfish. You forget that people value their labor, and their effort, and their own minds. So I’ll ask once more the question that no anarchist has ever answered me: Why would the inventor ever let the invention leave his mind when you are guaranteeing that he will never earn anything from it? If I invent cold fusion, why would I tell anyone about it if you claim the second it leaves my lips, its owned by everyone? If I could not profit from it? You call me pathetic for this, I call you pathetic to give away your mind at the alter of your anarchy god, or collective good, or whatever reason you would give to give this information away for free. This is socialism at its finest. You’re saying that your mind is worthless to the market. I say the market would claim otherwise.
And yet again, this entire argument is based upon a stateless society, whereby freely entered contract controls copyright. Quit throwing the current state on my argument.
**Edit: also, you ignore the other part of my question above. From whom would you loot? Once you’ve improved the effeciency of the ‘would be monopolists’ invention through free market competition, from whom would you loot the next idea to improve upon? Who would invest their time and effort to create the next ‘wheel’. Oh and referencing the wheel, which was invented before written history, is kind of rediculous, seeing how you cannot possibly prove that it was not a closely controlled secret during the inventor’s lifetime, which is all that I was arguing for, copyright with duration of inventor’s lifetime.
in this example, what does the contractor forsake before he is given the ship? money, then it should be returned. if he is paying on delivery, simply don’t pay. if the ship is delivered, then both parties would be viewed to benefit, at least at the time they signed the contract. of course, if the ship got built but money was not delivered, the builder shouldn’t simply get his ship back…
and there is obviously a gray line here…if the ship builder failed to produce anything but spent his advance and had no property, justice would compell his future action to repay his debt. i’m frankfully unsure how to remedy cases of much larger scenarios, such as how one could produce justice should he destroy something beyond his net earning potential.
Can you take away some portion of my brain that has learned a fair bit about your cold fusion invention? If I kill you in self-defense in attempting to prevent you from killing me, as the result of my breach of contract, should I be tried for murder? Under the state, would legal enforcement of the contract involve the state killing me in the name of justice? It seems at any moment if you did not consent and someone attempted to kill you, they would be claiming ownership of your life, independent if or when any contract was made.
Rothbard addresses these as the immutable properties of life and liberty, which can never be contracted away. They are superior to freedom of contract, as they are both a requirement.
How could they do anything but? Self-interest as expressed through action is surely not equivalent to selfishness or greed.
As far as my admiration of products that may be effected, I am determined to help find efficient means to produce them.
Absolutely pathetic. Your concerns has already been addressed ad nasuem in books like Against Intellectual Monopoly, on websites, and on this thread. No business model apperantly, can please you.
Other people already did and will make a profit inventing stuff/writing softwares/etc. So shut up your whining about how you won’t produce X without Y. Because clearly, you sucks at entrepreneurship and deserve to starve on the street.
Kiba, your ‘business model’ was disproven by me long ago. Work for hire is not an answer, as it only solves the small jobs that any college kid (aka you) could complete.
Compelling evidence. I see your schooling has taught you well. First i’m ‘fucking stupid’ now ‘i suck and deserve to starve on the street’. If you aren’t prepared to actually provide a response, please refrain from speaking to me.