There is simply no way that shipping would stop. A new market would spring up for PDA’s, but somehow I think the state would want to ‘offer’ its protection services for a fee.
The implication of the legalization of piracy, which is what the IP communists advocate, is that pirates will be protected in their acts of piracy by such very institutions.
This means that piracy that was once confined to minor clandestine outfits will now be possible at enormous scale under corporate operations, and there will be no protection available against any of it.
Thanks to tor and freenet (completely anonymous p2p networks) you can get everything for free without any consequence from a state. If people really only wanted free stuff then there is nothing stopping them now. Yet they still pay! Why is that?
Piracy is still a highly marginal activity restricted to low availability, lower quality goods than what can be obtained from the white market. If piracy were to be legalized, there would be no stopping capitalist business from offering pirate goods at the same availability and quality, and thus all producers would cease their activities.
"What harm is there to the author of a book if you copy the book (and there was no contract signed stating you would not copy it)? "
None (forget about the potential, future profit).
If you take the crops a farmer planted, no harm is done to the farmer, since he still has his body. For some, a miracle of productivity will have happened since crops will be enjoyed free of charge. This illusion will only last until the next planting season when the farmer has left the land and no one remains to plant again.
Property exists because the future exists. Extremely high-time-preference youths who enjoy software piracy do not care for the future. They just want to steal right now.
Equating piracy with IP piracy is unfair. Pirates rape, murder and steal. IP pirates copy. I can’t see how you can say this is the same. Sure you can try to make ethical arguments how wrong it is to copy but to equal it to murdering for the loot is not going to convince me to your case.
In the early 1960s Donald A. Wollheim, science fiction editor of the paperback publisher Ace Books, claimed that The Lord of the Rings was not protected in the United States under American copyright lawbecause the U.S. hardcover edition had been bound from pages printed in the United Kingdom, with the original intention being for them to be published in Britain.[citation needed] Ace Books then proceeded to publish an edition, unauthorized by Tolkien and without paying royalties to him. Tolkien took issue with this and quickly notified his fans of this objection.[25]Grass-roots pressure from these fans became so great that Ace Books withdrew their edition and made a nominal payment to Tolkien, well below what he would have been due.[citation needed] However, this poor beginning was overshadowed when authorized editions followed from Ballantine Books and Houghton Mifflin to tremendous commercial success. By the mid-1960s the novel had become a cultural phenomenon. Tolkien undertook various textual revisions to produce a version of the book that would be published with his consent and establish an unquestioned US copyright. This text became the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1966.[citation needed] Houghton Mifflin editions after 1994 consolidate variant revisions by Tolkien, and corrections supervised by Christopher Tolkien, which resulted, after some initial glitches, in a computer-based unified text.[26]
Equating piracy with IP piracy is unfair. Pirates rape, murder and steal. IP pirates copy. I can’t see how you can say this is the same. Sure you can try to make ethical arguments how wrong it is to copy but to equal it to murdering for the loot is not going to convince me to your case.
The modern breed of pirates is content merely with ransoming to make their living. I do not see them as particularly more evil than software pirates.
“This illusion will only last until the next planting season when the farmer has left the land and no one remains to plant again.”
Yet you can’t steal an idea from someone by copying - he still has this idea. If I would copy crops from a farmer (lets assume this is possible) then he would still have his crops, ceteris paribus only thing that he would lose is some fraction of market value of his crops.
Yet you can’t steal an idea from someone by copying - he still has this idea. If I would copy crops from a farmer (lets assume this is possible) then he would still have his crops, ceteris paribus only thing that he would lose is some fraction of market value of his crops.
You can’t steal land from a farmer by taking his crops - he still has the land. It’s the output you are stealing, and why is this output his? In fact it comes from many things, his investment, of course, but also the sun and the wind, which he does not own. Why should he own the crop?
The burden of proof is on the IP communist to explain why the farmer’s crops are his property, while one’s intellectual product cannot be. So far, IP communism is just a long series of rejections of authority with no fundamental basis for any kind of property ownership.
I have never seen an IP pirate demanding, under threats of violence, payment from authors for downloading stuff from internet. I think you got that backwards.
Indeed, as Kinsella recently addressed at the Supporters Summit, the first pirates were the recepients of patents. Because patent, has always been a state granted monopoly, not a natural right. So the very people who violated property rights, did so under the legal justification of patent.
But that aside, real pirates are violent. IP pirates do not cause any harm.
Indeed, and the ‘harm’ they might cause would be to destroy some of the ‘hypothetical’ future income.
If we are to accept that, then we also must accept corporations petitioning the government to prevent competitors from stealing their future income by providing better and cheaper products.
IDk, the “IP causes no harm” seems to me the same as saying a petty thief is somehow different than a mugger. If it’s thievery it’s thievery, whether violent or not.
I would just not touch any issue that automatically assumes IP to be thievery (were I in either camp here. Im just a pirate, care not what laws are made for this issue yarrrrr)
I think that there is resentment from a fact that you can copy a work for free without any hardship, work that potentially could require a lot of investment of various resources. So there is emotional harm too caused by failed expectations from business model that rejects or ignores needs of consumers. That is my current understanding of part of this issue.
Yes, partially. You materialists are essentially negating the mind (which is a limited resource). While it is true that information is an unlimited resource, the mind isn’t. It took time and mental effort for an author to write his book, and this is totally ignored and all the focus is placed on the unlimited nature of information. I like the analogy presented by a one of the contributors here with growing grop. In growing a crop a farmer is using three resources that are renewable and virtually unlimited: water( rain), light (sun) and CO2 (air). Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely take the crop from the farmer? The sun, rain and air are all still there. The soil is still there. And the profit for selling the crop is non-existent. It is only a hypothetical potential that could exist in the future.
All materialist libertarians immediately understand the fallacy of this reasoning because they are accustomed to thinking in materialistic concepts, but the exact same scenario with respect to the mind is the fertile ground for information to be produced simply does not compute. The mind? What the hell are you talking about? He still has the same information! It’s an unlimited resource! Nothing has been taken from him! Profits are only a potential!
I’ve highlighted the word “nothing” here to emphasize that we non-materialists say that “something” has been taken. The materialists however denies the existence of this thing. It’s nothing.
Hmm, so you noticed that, did you? Even though I said all the nice things about the rain and the sun and the air? And about the non-existence of potential future profits from the crops? Let’s now see if you can just replace “crop” with “intellectual work” and see if you are still able to notice it, despite all the nice things said about information and the non-existence of potential future profits.
Well, they are different, but they do have something in common, just like murder and rape have something in common. They are violations of the individual. I would actually compare pirating more to rape than to stealing. In a rape it is perfectly possible for the girl to come out without physically having lost anything or been harmed in any way. The rapist may have threatened her with violence, but as long as she obeyed she was not actually harmed. He may even have been very hygienic and used a condom to protect her from diseases. Physically she will be able to walk away from the incident without having endured any physical loss. Or put in the words of the anti-IP people her: nothing has been taken away from her. That of course doesn’t alter the fact that she’s been raped and that this is a gross violation of her MIND more than anything in this case. So I would definitely say that piracy most resembles rape.
I did, but I still can’t see that the intellectual work has been taken from him, or is gone, like the crop. My point is that these analogies won’t work for someone who believes that property rights should only apply to scarce resources and that ideas and information are not scarce - even if he accepts that they derive from a scarce resource (the mind). Therefore I think it is these concepts that need discussion, and that this thread is going off track at times.
Edit: I think that the discussion really starts somewhere here:
