Your argument conflates unique patterns with scarcity. With a concept that people can homestead unique patterns. It’s the equivalent of someone owning the color orange, and only that person having the rights on deciding how the color orange is used. He may set it up so that he is the only one with orange paint on his house. This false scarcity would indeed drive up the value of his home and other orange home’s he’s given granted privileges for. Under those rules orange would be scarce.
He may license out this right to other homeowners allowing them to also paint their home orange, forking in huge sums of money while telling other people what to do with their home. It may appear good as orange homes’s value would increase. But fewer consumers demands are being met. He may make a stipulation that if you paint your house orange you need to pay him royalty fee’s, or just about anything ect…
This line of thinking only works so long as we believe we can create blanket contracts which grant us the authority over other people’s property simply because they have a similar pattern. When we disabuse ourselves of the concept that we can stipulate what other people do with their own property the behavior changes. we may find that many people’s homes become painted orange. Most importantly consumer demand is met naturally on the market. Instead of an single monopolistic orange provider we find many paint providers servicing the color orange. Most importantly the tools are available for more consumer needs to be met. A good economy is one where consumer needs are met. The example above where there is a single orange provider is an example of a bad economic system.
Removing the Orange monopolistic provider does come at a cost. The original orange owning homeowner’s home value will drop now that anyone can build their own home and paint it orange. Before people were willing to pay huge sums of money to buy the orange house, or buy the rights to paint their house orange. Now that the false legal scarcity of orange has been lifted abundance flows in and everyone is more well off. Not too mention the costs of painting your home orange becomes affordable for everyone!
Just because a pattern is unique does not mean it’s scarce. Unique patterns have nothing to do with the type of scarcity discussed here, as the pattern can be employed all over the place.
[Do you mind posting your above post on the Information as Property thread, as well?]
I don’t think it is. The color orange is just a concept. Just like the weight of 2 lbs, or the height of 6 ft, the electromagnetic frequency perceived by the human eye to be “orange” is just a frequency of X Hz. What part of the 10 gigabyte-defined information universe does this concept exactly occupy, and on what basis would the alleged owner of that concept claim to be its first appropriator (“homesteader”)?
The length of the string must be known and definite, or else there’s nothing to look for – as in the original Shakespeare proposal, the length of the complete works of Shakespeare is known (though I don’t know it off the top of my head) and definite. Unless, of course, you want to debate over different publishings, or if the later “discovered” works were really Shakespeare’s. Either way, once a definition of what string of characters constitutes “The complete works of Shakespeare,” it becomes possible to determine the odds of any like-length string matching that string. Though any given group is exactly as likely to match as any other group, the odds of a match increase with the increased number of sets. Over infinity, the odds approach one.
Approaching one is a bit ambiguous. I apologize. The odds of a like-length section of an infinity long random sting of key strokes not matching the complete works of Shakespeare is exactly one in infinity.
Stranger, you stated earlier that no copy is perfect, and that the rights of information property come from the source of the information. This means that in the case of movies, images, sounds, and other media that emit information by transforming them into the same transmission as they were originally copied in. Their source is the physical universe, and the original image is an imperfect copy of that source.
The rest of this is a bit of definitions I’m working on. A medium is any device that at one point used the ability to record information and currently has the ability to send this information to a minimum of one device that can record such information. A medium might also have the ability to contain media in itself or manipulate the information inside itself. The media inside the medium would also be knowledge, but the data inside the media would be information at an eventual point.
The universe is a medium that contains all media and information that a human may contemplate, by nature of the human mind being an internal media of the universe. How the universe manipulates the information inside of itself is knowledge, but the specific arrangements of information still exist.
Alright, from there, if the method of manipulating the information inside itself involved the leaking of information from one internal medium to another, then the information is inside the second medium. Further, the largest medium, the universe, does not have the ability to act, and more specifically, act to make it so that a medium that normally does not lose information upon sending information make it lose this information.
How much of these paragraphs are useful in this debate I am not sure, but the first paragraph is the main point. It all relies on the distinction between information and knowledge, which makes sense.
Exactly. The odds of no match is “the next best thing to 0”. Like I said, the odds of the randomly typing monkeys failing to produce Shakespeare is one in infinity.
Not to acting man it doesn’t; and scarcity is a praxeological concept. The information a man takes in itself is a lower order good. The media which bears it is a higher order good which, in combination with time, and perhaps some complimentary gear (a player), and labor (pushing play) produces it. Acting man only desires the medium by virtue of its ability to produce the lower order good. But the fact of the matter is, some media, to some actors, are not scarce. To a teenager with a high-speed connection, and file-sharing software, the relevant unit services of his computer, his parents’ copper wire, and other factors of production needed to download a song are not scarce. And so, to him, the song itself is not scarce.
The factors of production used to produce information may be scarce. But once produced, the background history of the information has no bearing on whether it itself is scarce.
Again, the history of a good, including its source, has no bearing on whether something, once already produced, is scarce.
Misleading analogy. Fish are not scarce solely by virtue of the scarcity of boats. They are scarce in and of themselves. But information is scarce only sometimes, and when scarce, ONLY by virtue of the scarcity of the medium or because of institutional constraints. IF the scarcity of the medium or the institutional constraints are done away with, THEN the practical scarcity of the information IS done away with as well. Again, not so with fish.
Exactly. Fish on their own does NOT fit the criteria that for an actor “even if all other members of society completely meet their requirements for these goods, more than sufficient quantities will still remain for him to satisfy his needs.” (Menger, again) But information as such does not, except only insofar as its media are scarce. If the media is not scarce, neither is the information.
Again, the teenager with a high-speed connection and file-sharing software does not consider the unit services of the media necessary for her to download the latest Miley Cyrus song as scarce, so she does not economize them.