Potentially could (a work of intellectual power) require a lot of investment, but that is not always the case. Often some of the greatest ideas comes from very little work. Should people be paid for their actual work (the hours they put into working out ideas), or for the fortune of coming up with a great idea while sitting under an apple tree? I hate using such examples, as Pro-IPs always throw the utilitarian argument when I do - but I still think it’s an important story to tell: That state given monopoly gives individuals more payment than they are really warrant for their work. Is that good moral?
We are mostly all rational egoists, in that we want to maximize the profit from the work that we do. It’s natural to want (state given) IP-protection, because it’s the number one human inventions that makes it possible to create big monetary outcome from as little physical (and metal) work as possible.
It’s not a good example at all (the crop one). The farmer has homesteaded the land property, invested his resources and worked to plant the crops, then maintained it until he later is able to harvest it. This is the farmer’s physical property, he is properly able to protect it against aggressors.
If you would go into any non-homesteaded land, find a tree that bears fruit, you could of course use your own physical and mental capacity to harvest that fruit and enjoy it. You could even (physically) stop others from eating any of the other fruit on that tree.
Additionally, see my other comment regarding crops and how stealing physical crops is utterly metaphysically different than sharing a story.
Most individuals who are violently raped get physical damage from the act. Additionally most get metal damage (as you confirm) which potentially destroys the individuals ability to function as a fully normal being in the human society. It’s just mentally absurd to use examples that involves torture (which rape is) to ones that have absolutely no effect on an individual. I could copy your book and sell it off to thousands of other people, completely without your knowledge. That would not harm you in any way, neither physical nor mentally. You would be oblivious to the fact altogether. Such examples has in my view, no relevance to the discussion of IP.
It’s not semantic. See my post The Non-Aggression Principle as a Limit on Action, Not on Property Right and IP and Aggression as Limits on Property Rights: How They Differ. What you denigrate as “material” is the standard libertarian (and Randian!) recognition that initiated physical force is in the end the only way to violate rights. This implies that the only right is the right against aggression, or “invasion” (see also my What Libertarianism Is, n. 9 et pass.); where aggression is defined in terms of a particular–Lockean-libertarian–conception of property rights (essentially the notion that the owner of a given scarce resource is the homesteader or his descendent in title).
It is not “materialist” to recognize that we have physical bodies–as Rand said, we are not ghosts–and that we require “freedom”–which means the freedom to act, to use, move, manipulate our bodies employing means (necessarily scarce resources–see Mises), that is, to act, which means, as even Rand recognized, freedom from physical obstruction of such action by others (i.e., aggression, trespass, invasion, initiation of force–as Ayn Rand said, “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate — do you hear me? No man may start — the use of physical force against others.”[8].
It is utterly ridiculous to characterize the opposition to initiated physical force as being “materialistic.” And of course people like Onar who support state IP privilege of course support the use of physical force being used by the state thugs to compel the targets of these laws to not use their own physical property as they see fit and/or to take from them their physical property (such as money).
the deeper you dig into pro-IP “arguments” the more you understand, that they are all very aggressive and emotional people… I mean, this thread is a proof.
I’ve reviewed the thread up to the point where you first replied to me. Based on my review, I’ve made the following conclusions:
No one else has pointed out that Marxists are not metaphysical materialists.
Whereas Kinsella simply states that “we [i.e. anti-IP libertarians] do not deny the existence of information”, I pointed out that metaphysical materialism per se does not deny the existence of information. The latter is a stronger argument.
You did provide some additional material (no pun intended!) on the existence of information, which I will address below. Forgive me if I repeat some of the arguments made by others in this thread, but I hope that my presentation will be more succinct.
Actually, the Kinsellan position on IP (to which I subscribe) distinguishes physical finity from economic scarcity. For example, breathable air is physically finite, as there are only so many oxygen and nitrogen atoms in Earth’s atmosphere. However, there are so many of them so as to make one person’s breathing not interfere with any other person’s breathing. Hence breathable air is not economically scarce.
If information has no existence except as a state of mind, copying a book would not mean copying information, since the contents of a book aren’t a state of mind. So you should logically have no problem with books, songs, and other creative works being copied for free ad infinitum. Otherwise, you must abandon your definition of “information” as “a state of mind”.
Another apparent problem with your theory is that it’s unclear how states of mind can ever be “used up” by anyone other than the individuals whose minds they are.
Anti-IP libertarians prefer to define “information” as “pattern(s) of material objects”. This means that all information is an emergent phenomenon of more fundamental material objects combining and interacting. Obviously it still depends on these material objects existing already. However, using one’s own physical property to construct a copy of something does not necessarily interfere with the thing copied. It’s this potential non-rivaly of copying that leads to the conclusion that ideas per se cannot be treated as economically scarce.
I don’t see how this follows from your previous paragraph. In fact, it would make more sense if you dispensed with any treatment of information in the abstract and focused on intellectual activity. It seems to me that the argument you’re really making is that you want to be compensated (i.e. with paid in money) for your intellectual activity. You’re trying to appeal to some abstract notion of “information ownership rights” based on intellectual activity to persuade others that you must be compensated for it. Under this notion, failing to properly (begging the question) compensate a person (such as yourself) for his intellectual activity is equivalent to stealing it from him, at which point it can be considered legitimate to force him to provide the compensation.
However, no one is entitled to any particular compensation for any labor he performs, be it intellectual or physical. To say otherwise would be like me repairing a broken bridge and then demanding payment from everyone who uses it. I’d be trying to internalize the positive externalities they get from my labor. But how can it be proven that I’m entitled to such a thing?
I hope this sheds some additional light on our respective positions. I very much look forward to your response.
The reason it is a violation is because it prevents the would-be moviegoer from using his own body as he wishes. The future movie experience is not and cannot be owned until an exchange has been made. If he had purchased a ticket beforehand, then the gunman’s action would constitute the theft of the very real title to the movie viewing. If he had not, then a much truer analogy would be for the fellow to go to the movie, and discover that the theater owner had decided, before any exchange had been made, to shut down for the night. The movegoer has been deprived of his expectations, and will be disappointed. But no right of his has been violated, because he did not own that which he expected to recieve. Similarly, expected future profit is not owned by the person expecting it. It is owned by the people who he expects to give it to him. But if they decide not to do so, and give it to someone else or to nobody at all, then while he may be justifiably disappointed, he has no right to it, because at no point did he obtain ownership of it.
No, we do not deny that the mind can be violated. In fact, we are completely opposed to the idea that anyone can own the contents of another person’s mind - which is one reason why we oppose IP, which posits that an originator of an idea owns the mind of every person who comes into contact with that idea, thereby causing the idea to enter their own minds and become their idea. It is only exclusively the creator’s idea so long as it remains exclusively in his own mind.
And you are apparently unable to see or understand that every conscious human action is in some way an expression of information gained from someone else. Every child who learns to walk and speak does so through expressing information he has observed in the actions of his parents. If the originator of an idea has the unlimited right to control its expression, then at any moment he can demand payment from any person who expresses it. This would make every person the slave of an idea’s originator, an idea just as morally absurd as that which I mentioned in the last post (and which you seem to have conveniently ignored): that IP requires an establishment of ownership by an idea’s originator of every bit of matter and energy in the entire Universe. Anything less would mean that someone else would have a right equal to that of the creator to express the creator’s idea without respect to his intellectual property claim.
In other words, either people are the exclusive owners of their ideas, or they are the exclusive owners of their physical property - both cannot be true at once. Either one utterly precludes the other. Therefore, intellectual property and all other forms of property are based upon conflicting moral propositions. You may call us “materialists” in reference to our acceptance of actual property, since you apparently acknowledge the dichotomy between intellectual and actual property. But if we are materialists, then you are an anti-propertarian.
Of course, one may attempt to limit the rights supposedly established by intellectual property. One may say that a creator does not actually have exclusive control of the expression of his idea, and thereby make allowances for some forms of ownershp of physical property. But then IP becomes an arbirary assertion of partial ownership of ideas, in exchange for an equally arbitrary, partial ownership of physical things. In which case, it is not a moral proposition at all, but a utilitarian one.
yuberries wrote the following post at Tue, Oct 19 2010 9:22 AM:
Well, this is certainly true. Now you are starting to talk about property as if it something REAL that needs to be studied in nature to be fully understood and I like that. As to your PVG lens, I sort of liked it as an analogy, but I would like to make one important modification to it that changes the whole dynamics: thresholds. Below a certain threshold the PVG doesn’t care, it sees nothing, and above a certain threshold it triggers an activation that some pattern needs to property protected. What you have then is a system that behaves very much like a BRAIN. Ben Goertzel, my old collegue at Webmind, once said that what distinguishes our 1 kg of brain from 1 kg of water is thresholds. Water is just liquid. Everything is connected and everything just flows into each other, and from this you can get no intelligence. But by adding thresholds that prevents activity from spreading in addition to the activation spreading you get interesting dynamics that could be used to generate a MIND and intelligence. The reason private property and the market is so intelligent compared to communism is precisely because capitalism puts up artificial barriers – fences and property lines – that prevents free flow of matter and energy in all directions. Communism is like a lump of water, whereas capitalism with all its fences, and property rights are like a lump of brain.
Now consider your own brain for a moment. If you just look at all the activity in your brain it looks pretty chaotic and volatile, not unlike the nature of information patterns you describe with your PVG lens. But now look on the INSIDE of the brain, from YOUR perspective as a consciousness. Does your consciousness appear chaotic and volatile? Or does it appear ordered, solid and crystal clear? My consciousness is certainly very ordered, and what creates this order are all the neuronal thresholds (inhibitors) in your brain.
Why am I saying all this? Well, it is to try to get you to see another image through your PVG lens. If you add thresholds for when intellectual property rights occur, then information exchange in society is going to stop behaving less like unintelligent communistic water and more like an intelligent capitalistic brain. Think of the global human information system as a global brain. The enabler of that brain is intellectual property. Most of what goes on in this brain is going to be “unconscious” (i.e. outside intellectual property), but a small and important part of it is going to be “conscious” (i.e. part of what is recognized as intellectual property) and that combination and dynamics of the exhange between the “unconscious” and the “conscious” information is very fruitful.
Of course, what I’ve presented here is not really an argument for or against IP, just a new perspective of what a world of intellectual property entails. You IP communists miss out on all the potential intelligence that can ONLY be generated by a system of thresholds. Yes, those thresholds are artificial, but so are fences, doors and locks. What is important is that the fences are put up in such a way that is logical, just, fair and good for all.
I guess the reason I am writing this is because I realize that most of you anti-IP people didn’t start out with a principled position and from there developed your stance. Most of you simply don’t want to pay for other people’s mental labor and are looking for ways to rationalize theft. Therefore I’m trying to appeal to the cool sides of IP, those that are not like the nightmarish hell that you make out PVG to be.
You re-stated at length precisely what I and others are asking–please identify the universal (i.e. without opinion) threshold for what seperates IP from non-IP and the reasoning to substantiate it.
Having an answer to the question will go a long way to justifying your position outside of the scarcity/non-scarcity issue.
Autolykos wrote the following post at Tue, Oct 19 2010 5:53 PM:
That Marxists are not metaphysical materialists I simply regard as silly. I know very well that marxists are materialists in every sense of the word. I’ve talked to them, claimed that they are materialists and they say “yes, we are materialists.” Though their materialism goes deeper and is more consistent than the IP communists/anarchists. They do not merely deny the existence of information, but of the mind. Hence they reject lockean property rights, not only in the intellectual realm but also in the physical realm. I chose to ignore this argument of yours because it is so silly and so ignorant that it was not worth responding to.
There are of course those who think that information exists independently of the mind. This are called platonists, but generally speaking that is not important in this respect. What I am referring to here is a FUNCTIONAL definition of existence, i.e. to abstract what the meaning of yout notion of existence from your ACTIONS. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “she treated me like I was air.” By this he means that she treats him as if he doesn’t exist. And this is what is common for all materialists. They treat information (or rather mental work) as it doesn’t exist. They might have words for it and accept that it’s nice, but their actions speak louder than words. Suppose that there was a village and all of them had fences around their property, but poor Bob experiences that no-one respects his fence. Everyone walks through his garden as they please, they enter his house without knocking and without asking. They take his food and pick apples from his garden. All these actions speak very loudly towards one and the same conclusion: Bob doesn’t really exist. He is treated as air. No-one respects his boundaries. And it’s not that he is bullied or anything, people simply don’t care to notice his existence or his objections. This is precisely how anti-IP libertarians behave with respect to information and mental work. They have ZERO respect for the fact that someone put a lot of effort into creating that information and treat him and his products as if they are nothing.
Well, I would have no problem with people copying information ad infinitum IF they didn’t USE it. “Using” it means to directly or indirectly apply one’s mind to its content. It doesn’t matter that there are millions of copies of a song out there so long as no-one listens to it. It is the act of listening, however, that pertains to information, not the physical music disc itself, because listening is a mental act.
Ah! But this is the crux. As a materialist this is completely alien to you, but once you understand this concept you will also immediately start to understand IP. Notice that you materialists are very concerned about the physical act of copying, but this act in itself is completely irrelevant to IP. As mentioned previously it is in the MENTAL ACT that information lies. Once you start thinking of information as something that exists exclusively in people’s minds it is easier to see how states of mind can be used up. While information can be infinitely copied, minds are a scarce resource. Minds can only contain such an such amount of information and dedicate their actions to filling it with a certain amount of information. Reading a book is to devote a limited resource (the mind) to an act of engaging in information. So even if you can copy information indefinitely, that is completely irrelevant because the mind is a scarce resource. There are only so and so many potential readers, and for every person that reads a book, there is one less person to read that book. That mental state has now been used up.
But getting you materialists to think of information in terms of minds and not in terms of storage on hard disks is frustratingly hard. I don’t think it is because you are stupid, but simply because you have programmed your brains in such a way that wipes the mental nature of information out of existence.
Yes, maybe that is what is needed. Any talk of information seems to get you materialists into the track of talking about the physically non-scarce nature of copying, as if that is somehow relevant to the question at hand, namely intellectual activity.
Indeed! IF someone uses a year of their finite life to write a book, and someone engages mentally in that book by reading it then that intellectual activity should be compensated monetarily.
Well, it’s really about respect. Poor old Bob was treated like air by his fellow villagers. They ignored his boundaries and just went into his garden and his house and took whatever they felt like. That’s a form of rape, and that is also what intellectual property is about. It is about respect of other people’s lives. A book isn’t just ink on a peace of paper. The information content of that book is PART OF THE AUTHOR, just like a leg is. Of course, it is not PHYSICALLY a part of the author (although sort of through the time and effort spent into creating it), but certainly mentally a part of the author. And to take that content without his consent is to rape his mind.
If someone doesn’t read an author’s book then of course he is not entitled to any compensation! It is only if someone actually enters the domain of the author’s mind, by reading his book that the author is entitled to compensation.
Actually that’s a very bad example, because in the real world capitalism would solve this in the form of PROPERTY. The person who OWNS the bridge will of course have to pay the guy who repairs it, and the owner then charges money for people to cross the bridge. To demand someone to pay for reading a book is like a bridge owner who demands people to pay for crossing his bridge. But in order for this to make sense you have to respect and recognize that there IS a bridge that you are crossing and that this bridge is OWNED by someone.
I invite everyone to observe how similar Onar’s pejorative description of “you materialists” is to Marx and Engel’s pejorative description of “bourgeoise logic”. You, employers of materialist logic, simply fail to understand IP logic! There is no need to actually address such faulty logic; instead Onar will call you names and patronize you for not thinking on the same order as himself.
While it (sometimes) is a useful mechanism to generalize (people) in discussions, I just hate being called out and compared to others who have a disregard for the current laws. Perhaps you are colored by too many discussions with communists and teenagers? In my circle of friends, I’m one of the few against intellectual property rights, but I’m also one of those who buy the most media. My DVD, Blu-ray and games library are huge and I’ve spent more money on it than I would like to think about. Just because I don’t believe in the IP rights and that the law is just, doesn’t mean I will stop purchasing and paying for intellectual works. I support the actors, directors, rock bands and more that I enjoy and like. I want them to create more content, so I pay them money. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t pay, and hence I wouldn’t get new record albums. The same can’t be said about a lot of individuals today who thinks intellectual property rights are just and moral, yet doesn’t feel they are doing anything wrong.
I have every respect for the creative works of other people. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t waste my money.
If someone is stupid enough to waste a whole year on writing a crappy book, he doesn’t deserve my money. If he was smart, he would ensure some sort of up-front payment for his creative intellectual work. If someone would need another book on philosophy, they could arrange a group savings and investment towards paying the writer for his time. If the millions of soccer-moms out there want yet another criminal roman, they can do the same. A lot of books are written based upon such a model, especially in the corporate and research sectors. Private companies pays for research, which can result in research reports or books.
In a real free market, we wouldn’t have many crappy books, as we have today. We would mostly have books that someone would be interested in reading and paying for. The Pro-IP response would obviously be: “Who would bother paying for a book if you can copy it for free?” My response is: “I would!” Is that not good enough?
I work as a software consultant, we do not have the same protection of our work as book authors have. There is explicit clauses in the copyright laws that gives property right on whatever I make, to my employer. Why can’t books be written (and researched) in the same manner as we today invest and produce bespoke software for customers? I’m very much interested in an answer to that question. (Don’t respond to the question in regards to Microsoft, that’s not how most of the worlds software is built and the “Microsoft-model” wouldn’t have the same value in a free (non IP) market as it has today with state-protection).
Whenever I attend a seminar at any conference, I expect to be able to utilize what I learn and even share that amongst my own network. I would apply my new knowledge toward my job and better results for my customers. When I buy a book, read that book, I expect to be able to use my new found knowledge and apply it to my work however I want. Yet, that’s not possible with today’s IP laws.
I cannot answer this precisely because determining these thresholds is a matter of hard labor. But to give an idea of what we’re talking about here: similar thresholds exist in relation to physical property. In homesteading, how do you determine the area, depth and height of the property? How do you determine how much work is needed to homestead land? Consistent communists use identical arguments as you, only against homesteading. They say it’s arbitrary because there are no natural laws stating that the area of a homsteaded land should be, say, 2 acres. They also say that property is artificial. Fences are limitations that are erected to artificially create scarcity that does not exist in nature. In general, all the communistic arguments against private property are used in one way or another by anti-IP libertarians.
The answer to you is the same as the one to give to communists in general: the process of determining the boundaries of a right is not arbitrary, but reality oriented. One seeks to find an easy way to implement a system such that there is a high degree of correlation between the amount of work put into the natural state and the property one gains for it.
I cannot answer this precisely because determining these thresholds is a matter of hard labor.
These are not equitable. Boundaries are not thresholds, or rather there is no such lower boundary in physical property–if you steal even one slice or crumb of my loaf of bread it is still theft. Would this not also imply that “stealing” even the smallest portion of your intellectual work–a letter, a bit or a note, etc.–constitutes IP theft? I don’t see how you can draw that parallel without reaching that conclusion and we arrive back at my original question.
Thank you for your answers Onar, I’m glad you can see what I see. You went up in my reasonability scale quite some points. I will withdraw calling your ideas garbage. I had already said that thresholds would be something left to the judicial or legislative system in place, whatever it is. However my two objections still remain unanswered. Could you at least answer the major one below?
My scenario exposes that in such an extreme “IP” theory, it would be illegal not only for third parties to share patterns unrestricted w\o consent from the author, but also the author, for disseminating his patterns to nonconsenting individuals. Would you consistently apply and support the ‘loss of potential’ argument both ways, from authors to people, and people to authors?
It’s not something that breaks the system by any means, but it is very weird to say the least, and would require a lot of social and cultural conditioning to get to that phase. Justin Bieber singing or dancing in public, for example, would be a grave, grave offence. I don’t think humans are intellectually capable of dealing with all the consequences (that being my second, weaker objection), and if it means I get to be called an intellectual communist, well, I am guilty as charged. I can’t advocate exclusivity in patterns, personally, it’s just too complicated and silly still. But at least now I understand how it could be justified. Carry on however.
If you’re able to at least develop a good legal methodology to get those thresholds sorted out in an agreeable way, I think people will be more receptive of the idea. But until then, PIRATES OF THE WORLD, UNITE lol j/k (I don’t even pirate stuff.. well, only a few pc games a year.)
In my circle of friends, I’m one of the few against intellectual property rights, but I’m also one of those who buy the most media. My DVD, Blu-ray and games library are huge and I’ve spent more money on it than I would like to think about. Just because I don’t believe in the IP rights and that the law is just, doesn’t mean I will stop purchasing and paying for intellectual works. I support the actors, directors, rock bands and more that I enjoy and like. I want them to create more content, so I pay them money. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t pay, and hence I wouldn’t get new record albums. The same can’t be said about a lot of individuals today who thinks intellectual property rights are just and moral, yet doesn’t feel they are doing anything wrong.