the only effect, I can see (and you yourself have “proven”), is future possibility of profit. Sadly, like many people have mentioned before, one can not claim property in mere possibilities. It is still an Imaginary Property after all.
Burden of proof is upon you, you would be the one accusing someone of violating your rights. If you accuse me, I can present my alibi. My alibi would be that I discovered a tree with fruits after spending thousands of dollars traveling the world and living in the forest for one year. Since I have been living in the forest for one year, without any outside contact, I have a decent alibi that I made this discovery independent of your own, which happened on the other side of the planet.
Onar Åm wrote the following post at Wed, Oct 20 2010 3:03 AM:
Normally I try to be flexible with my opponents’ terms and their semantics. I don’t try to quibble when a different word than expected is used (e.g. “threshold” instead of “boundary”) as long as the meaning conveyed is appropriate, but in this case I must react because you seem to genuinely not understand what an analogy is. The example you gave is NOT an analogy, but another example or instance of a category. A cat as a mammal is not analogous to dog as a mammal. They ARE both mammals. The example YOU gave is just an instance of intellectual property. Analogies however refer to when there are essential differences, yet some impotrant similarities. Example: an airplane is analogous to a bird.
Okay, I understand English is probably not your native language, so I will overlook this. As a tip, here is a quote from Dictonary.com:
a·nal·o·gy/əˈnælədʒi/ Show Spelled## [uh-nal-uh-jee]
–noun, plural -gies.
Logic . a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be similar to another thing in a certain respect, on the basis of the known similarity between the things in other respects.
The relation between the two farmers was analogous to the relation between the book or music author and what you call the pirate. This relationship is similar in that it is only the ideas of the mind that have been duplicated.
But intellectual work and its fruit (the particular information pattern that results from that work) cannot be touched and therefore you deny that it is something real. THIS is the crux of the debate. Everything else, including the examples you gave, is just noise.
No. I’m sorry the crux of the debate is what is theft or larceny? You can’t have these without taking something away from someone. If the person still has the full use and benefit of what they had originally it can not be theft or larceny. You say a thought or idea is “something”. But you admit it is totally arbitrary.
If the knowledge copied is common knowledge or of common engineering grade then it is nothing unique and hence no information theft has occurred. If on the other hand, the farming technique is unique and very beneficial then the inventor of that technique has a right to protect that technique for a limited period of time (say 20 years) to reap the full benefits of it.
So you confirm that this is totally arbitrary and subjective. Thanks for making my point.
If most people can recognize the Enya clip, doesn’t that make it “common knowledge”?
Are you sure that, when they said “Yes, we are materialists”, they didn’t mean they’re historical materialists?
Quoting Wikipedia:
There’s also an entire section on “Marx’s Materialism”. So based on this evidence, I conclude that Marxists are not metaphysical materialists but historical materialists.
Although this doesn’t address my point about materialists actually not denying the existence of information (and thus the point stands as given), I do appreciate your candor here. In fact, your opposition to anti-IP libertarians has nothing to do with metaphysics and everything to do with ethics. Your real argument (as I figured) is that anti-IP libertarians don’t give “enough respect” to people who have created information – especially when that creation took a lot of effort.
Unfortunately, this begs the following questions: What is meant by “respect”? And how much of it is “enough”? Do you have answers to these questions? Can you prove that they are correct?
Okay, now you’re presenting a more coherent view on things, although I’ve had to infer some of it. Tell me if this sounds accurate to you:
- You define “information” as “state(s) of mind”. (I don’t see any contention here, since you’ve already said this directly.)
- Minds are scarce. (And again.)
- Therefore, states of mind are scarce => information is scarce.
- Using information means using a state of mind (i.e. changing your mind to that state, or applying it to your mind).
The thing is, however, that you seem to treat states of mind as scarce in a different way from minds themselves. Namely, you seem to treat states of mind as being metaphysically unique. Maybe I was wrong above – it seems that metaphysics actually does have a place in your thought after all. The reason I say that is because considering states of mind as being metaphysically unique necessarily implies metaphysical idealism. You treat the ideas (states of mind) as having a more fundamental existance than the minds which hold them.
With that in mind (no pun intended), your treatment of IP becomes clearer. Essentially, in your view, the first person who attains a given mental state exerts the most mental effort in doing so. He then produces something to represent that mental state to others so that they can also enjoy it. However, this “product of the mind” doesn’t (likely cannot) force others to go through the same mental effort as its originator. For them to enjoy the same state of mind without exerting the same effort for it (in the eyes of the originator) is thus, in your view, the same as stealing. They should then be forced to provide an equivalent for that effort. Who says what the equivalent is? The originator says.
Unfortunately, your notion of scarcity with regards to states of mind would mean that only one person at a time can have a given state of mind. Obviously that is not the case. Two people could be reading the exact same word of Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the exact same time. Furthermore, how exactly does one delineate one state of mind from another? In other words, how do we know when two states of mind are equivalent?
There’s also the fact that no one is obligated to use your definition for “information” over any other. Of course, as I mentioned before, we could dispense with talking about “information” altogether and concentrate on the concepts of “mental effort” and “states of mind”.
Finally, if states of mind aren’t scarce in the way you claim they are, then why should anyone compensate e.g. an author a certain amount of money for a book that he took a year to write?
I agree that it’s intellectual activity that is the main thrust of your argument.
Compensated by how much, exactly? Whatever the author thinks is enough?
If so, that’s akin to saying that, because it took me a year to build this robot, anyone who wants to buy the robot must pay me over $9,000. With this, we’re getting back to the discredited Labor Theory of Value.
I can understand being upset about someone passing off an idea of mine as his own. However, if he simply makes a copy of my idea and tells people “Hey, here’s a copy of Autolykos’ idea”, I’d blame no one but myself for letting him copy it so easily. But that’s just me. Many people feel entitled to money or other things (and typically certain amounts thereof) in exchange for the mental labor they performed. They think it has a certain value or price, if you will. What they’re apparently unwilling to accept is that no one else is inherently required to ascribe that same value or price to it. Quite frankly, it amazes me the amount of theorizing some of them will go to in order to convince others (and themselves) that this is not the case.
Ah, good point. Now I see what Yuberries meant by my bridge example being weak. 
To salvage the example, I guess I’d have to stipulate that the bridge is not owned by the person who repairs it – maybe it’s in the apartment complex where the repairer lives, and it didn’t get fixed soon enough by the apartment management for his taste.
Actually, no. Benefit is too weak a word. Control is more appropriate. I can argue that there is no loss in any way to a woman to be forced to have sex with men. Nothing has been taken from her. She still has her body, in full healthy condition, and she still has the full use and benefit of it. The key here, though, is that she has the right to CONTROL her own body and do with it as she pleases. So the “something” that has been taken from her is not material in any way, it is mental, namely the right to self-determination. THAT is the issue at hand here, not whether information can be copied and that the author still has the use and benefit from his original manuscript.
I admit no such thing. You are projecting your subjectivistic philosophy onto my opinions, but there is nothing arbitrary about respecting reality and being empirically oriented.
Wow, I didn’t see that one coming. What I obviously meant was that any normal mind will recognize the similarity between the Enya clip and Fugees, even if they do not know Enya or Fugees from before.
I can argue that there is no loss in any way to a woman to be forced to have sex with men. Nothing has been taken from her.
I would suggest that you don’t use this example in attempting to prove your point. Regardless of the harm you subscribe has not been rendered, the act of “rape” is not instantaneous and thus regardless of the absense of harm the person has been robbed of their time. In this respect if you want to apply the term “control” as coercion then it is applicable. No such direct coercion exists in your author example.
I am attempting to anticipate your response that you will claim the author is also robbed of their time, however they had previously invested it to create their “product”. This is not equitable in your example.
Actually, rape is not just “mental” harm, but physical too (damn, it is not even dualism), she was FORCED physically, not through magic or even mentally. You again try to equate different and not analogous concepts. That’s absurd, what’s wrong with you, people. Piracy is NOT forcing author to give his mind or his thoughts. Again, stop making such ridiculous analogies.
Autolykos wrote the following post at Wed, Oct 20 2010 4:00 PM:
Yes, I’m absolutely sure. They are certainly also historical materialists, but that comes in addition to the physical materialism. I recommend the documentary “The Bloody history of Communism.” It is made by muslims(!) and their target is really Darwinism. If you ignore this religious part of the documentary and focus on the philosophical narrative you will find a surprisingly accurate and relevant description of materialism and how communism is an embodiment of that philisophy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIeics8jHUY
Darwinism grealy impacted communist thinkers because they immediately drew a materialistic conclusion, namely that “we are only animals” and by this they meant that we don’t have free will. We are simply blobs of matter that are determined by our natures in response to the environment. What is interesting is how the communists react to this idea. Since we “are only animals” it means that we can do whatever we want with people. The documentary nicely shows how Lenin wanted to use behaviorism (psychological materialism) to mold people to become an image of his communistic ideal.
This is PRECISELY the line of reasoning of a lot of anti-IP libertarians. They say: hey, since information doesn’t really exist we can just do whatever we want with intellectual work. In the physical domain communism led to guiltless mass murder, in the intellectual domain communism leads to guiltless mass piracy.
The rest of your post is frustratingly confused, but I do see signs of emerging but very faint brain activity. You’ve probably been a materialist your whole life so thinking in non-materialistic terms is like learning to walk for the first time. Considering this you’re learning quite fast. At the moment you seem to be on the level of understanding of a four year old. Keep working at it and you’ll understand it.
Two states of minds can never be identical, but if we use our minds to abstract the essential similarity in two mind states we will see that the abstraction of the two states are identical. Even if they have different emotional responses, they do have certain things in common: they’ve read the same words and extracted from that the same narrative.
Also clearly you didn’t understand what I was talking about when I said that the mind is a scarce resource. Time is limited. You can only fill your mind with so and so much. This is true for all minds. Scarcity plays a role in TWO ways in intellectual property: 1) the scarcity of the mind that produce the information, and 2) the scarcity of minds available to consume the information.
I was shocked about your low level of understanding of market economy, or lack of ability to connect very simple dots. Maybe it is because non-materialistic thinking is so alien to you that you are confused. I dunno. In any case you write:
Yes, the author is free to set whatever price he wants, and the (potential) reader is free to NOT accept that price (and hence not read it).
OR the author sets a price and sees how many are willing to pay for it. That’s called supply and demand. That’s how prices usually are set in a market economy when dealing with physical products. Non-materialistic products are no different.
Yes, that’s just you, or more preceisely you projecting your own morality onto the situation. Many men from rather primitive cultures think that it is the girl’s own responsibility to make sure that she’s not raped, and if she is so unlucky to be raped they blame HER for letting herself be put in such a situation. You’re like those neanderthal men who think like that.
In general, you seem to have cooked up a wonderfully complex but completely wrong image of what information is and then make economic deductions based on that. Here is a tip: do any IP-adherents actually hold the position you’ve reasoned yourself to? If not, then you’re obviously not on track.
"The Moral Basis for Intellectual Property Rights"
THAT’S WHAT YOU SET OUT TO CLARIFY TO ALL OF US, SO WHY DON’T YOU LET US IN ON THE SECRET OF THE TIME LIMITATION?
I finally understood the analogy with the “Feudal society”, after all IP is also created by King’s grant (ie false title), and leads to a loss of liberty for all for the rest of us. However that would lead me to limit the time to 0. (Though that maybe wasn’t your point).
Why don’t you wan’t to let us in on the long explanation?
Don’t tell me Ayn Rand distributed it under as strict a contract as Galambos?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Joseph_Galambos
Are you prevented by contract to divulge the brilliant reasoning of the goddess?
Stranger your creating a false dichtomy between open-source and closed source software. You appear to be afraid to admit the truth about reality however.
Unfortunately for you capitalism has taken open-source software and really exploited it, and I imagine it will continue to do so. You and I have been through this before and you’ve always hit the same brick wall.
Linux is one of the most widely used development and server hosting platforms. The entire open-source industry exploded in growth during the recession. There are literally hundreds of thousands of articles, research, and information revolving around the open-source community.
Being in the server IT industry myself, I see Microsoft/Adobe and other closed source bloatware firms getting slapped around by these competitors. This angle you’ve taken as always has been an assertion, one that is entirely disconnected from the actual current condition of the software development market.
JohnDoe wrote the following post at Wed, Oct 20 2010 7:17 PM:
Obviously you didn’t understand what i said. False title is of course part of feudalism, but not it’s essence. It doesn’t really matter if it is a king or whoever who grants someone a title to some land so long as it is just. The problem with feudalism is generational DEBT. If you as an independent person take up debt that is ok, but it is not ok for you to pass on that debt to your children. Children cannot inherit debt. That is why IP only lasts about one generation.
According to Onar, an original thought worthy of the classification of property must satisfy the three basic characteristics below:
- Original, i.e. not “common knowledge” (if many people know it, it can not be original and it can not be property)
- Scarce, i.e. it must be non-obvious, the result of genuine effort (it can not come in dream, it can not be read in the newspaper)
- Must be acted upon, i.e. it must be reduced to practice or human action of some kind.
Once a thought or idea satisfies all three of these conditions (maybe more?), it is temporarily worthy of the classification of property. According to Onar, this property is homesteaded by its creator and belongs exclusively to him for “about a generation”. After that approximate period, the item is no longer considered property. During this generational period, the classification as property survives even if one of the original conditions are no longer satisfied. For example, even if the thought becomes common knowledge or becomes obvious, the original owner maintains a royalty bearing monopoly on this thought for “about a generation”.
This explains Onar’s concept of intellectual property (which curiously sounds an awful lot like the definition or qualifications for a patent). However, this explanation does nothing to justify the moral basis for this concept.
Separately he goes on to explain that copying this idea or thought, even the smallest recognizable fragment of it and even after it has been put into practice is some form of spiritual attack, equivalent to a physical assault on the soul of the original owner, because it deprives him of universal “control” over that thought. He goes on to equate this loss of control over his original thought to mind control imposed by external force over the owner.
I think this is a pretty good summary of his position and I could go back and insert his own words to support each point. Where this breaks down is the significance of this so-called loss of control. He hasn’t explained anywhere what is actually lost other than the potential for future profit. Perhaps there is something more spiritual that is lost, but he has not described that either. If one of my patents is copied and implemented is some foreign country that does not respect US patents, what have I lost besides these potential profits? If one of my photos is copied and used without my permission, what have I lost other than future potential profits?
As a patent holder, and copyright holder, I can tell you what else I would be giving up under the current law and that is precisely control. Under patent and copyright law I have the control over how and where the products of my mind are used. For example if I don’t like the philosophy of an author’s book or magazine, I can refuse to grant permission to use my photo. If a potential licensee of my patented technology has bad body odor, I may refuse to grant a license. Neither of these examples is about giving up future profits, they are about giving up control. I think it is this control that may be what worries Mr. Åm.
It seems to me the principal here is very weak. That principal is that just because I am the first one to think of adding a handle to a pail, I should be able to use the state’s power to prevent anyone else from coming up with this same idea independently and making use of it themselves. One thing I’ve observed in my profession is that given enough time, almost anyone can find the same solution to a problem. No invention is ever totally original, and often the measure of “first-to-invent” comes down to days or even hours between independent concepts of the same exact idea. If this is true, I ask again: What is the moral basis for this need to control?
[edited to correct misspelled name]
It seems like especially the part about rights wearing off would be hard to enforce. I’m reminded of a quote from Atlas Shrugged:
“One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”
So what is “intellectual property” anyway? If I dream up about 3 and a half meters in diameter half blue half yellow sphere with a number 42 on it, can I declare this image my property and prevent anyone from “imagining”?
oh boy… what I have DONE!!! EVERYBODY IN THIS THREAD OWE A 1000 dollars EACH!!!
Onar Åm wrote the following post at 10-20-2010 1:13 PM:
“If you as an independent person take up debt that is ok, but it is not ok for you to pass on that debt to your children. Children cannot inherit debt. That is why IP only lasts about one generation.”
But Onar, are you telling me that a Patent or a Copyright is a Debt? That is, the holder contracts the obligation to pay someone for the privilege of obtaining the monopoly? I know it used to be that way (you’d pay off the King to obtain your monopoly), but it is no longer so (not considering the general taxation issues).
Today IP must surely be a pure asset (benefit) to the holder of the title. Why should not his children inherit it? In what sense are these liabilities? And if they are liabilities why not abolish them altogether?
In the natural sense you are ofcourse correct in that (some) intellectual property is lost upon death of the person that holds it in his head, it also happens when you forget (ie the intellectual property returns to the state of nature).
However you seem to be indicating that if this person had trained his son (ie transferred his knowledge to his son) so as to ensure that all your valuable knowledge passed from father to son, then upon the death of the father the State (or individuals?) would be entitled to extract this intellectual property from the son as it would properly belong to humankind and no individual. In a sense the son would be found to be in possesion of “stolen property” maybe we even could label him a “Pirate”!
Maybe the difficulty in understanding your point is that you don’t argument anything without using analogies, and they tend to be misleading and/or difficult to understand. Appreciate your answer though, as it seems you have genuinly tried to answer my question.
–So what is “intellectual property” anyway?
intellectual property is theft.
Actually intellectual property does exist, that is you own your thoughts, your mental capacity, etc
What most here are opposed to are the legal monopolies that go under the names of Patents and Copyright, not intellectual property per se.
MaikU wrote the following post at Wed, Oct 20 2010 10:51 PM:
Here is some advice for you, and this also goes to a lot of you people in here. When you are debating with an opponent and you hatch out what you believe to be an implication of their position, then check to see if the best of your opponents hold this view. If you’re not even remotely close there are two possibilities:
-
you’re so smart and brilliant that you’ve figured out something that not even the smartest of the smartest of your opponents have figured out.
-
you’re thinking is so moronic that it is borderline ape manure.
Now, before you open your mouth and release a brain dump of your most recent idea think a little bit about which of these two possibilities are more likely, and act accordingly. If all the people involved in this debate made a habit out of doing this, we could have had a much, much shorter thread with much, much less noise and more relevant arguments.
Onar Åm wrote the following post at 10-20-2010 1:13 PM:
I’ve already explained this several times so I will be brief: In feudal times the serfs were renters. They didn’t own their own land. What’s more they worked the land and had no option, they were stuck to the land. Yet, they didn’t gain property rights with time, even if they mixed their labor with the land. And here is the clue: the children inherited the debt of their parents. They too were stuck to the land and so generations of serfs worked the land without getting an inch closer to building themselves property rights. They were slaves, shackled by debt.
Now, there is an analogy between renting and paying royalties for IP. BUT as we have discussed previously information doesn’t exist independently of the mind. The only way for a novel or a song to be instantiated is through the mental labor of another human being. So once a piece of intellectual property is released to the public people immediately start mixing their mental labor with it. Once it is in their head they’re stuck with it, they can’t escape it. Now, if IP is to last generation after generation, people would in effect become serfs. They would be eternal renters, and that obligation to rent would be passed on to their children. To avoid this, IP must expire after approximately a generation. This is especially true for patents since they have huge effect on everyone. Copyrights may last longer than patents because it takes longer for most books and songs to diffuse throughout society. You can live your whole life without ever having heard of Atlas Shrugged, but you’ll definitely have heard of electricity and cell phones.
Before you understand this line of reasoning there is really no point in answering you any closer.
David wrote the following post at Wed, Oct 20 2010 9:57 PM:
I hope your reading skills are not a reflection of your ability to correctly understand an argument. I have no idea how you’ve managed to do so, but after dozens of replies and mentions of my name you manage to spell it wrongly.
Your summary wasn’t half bad and I was thinking that you might actually have something of value to add to this debate. You even understood an important point about control. If you as an owner of IP don’t like socialists you should be able to prevent them from using your invention or reading your book, because it’s YOUR book. But then you just end up in the same ol’ same ol’ story. You’re now using the specific implementation of patents (which I think is thoroughly broken) to attack the principle that one has a right to own the fruit of one’s labor. Sorry, it’s not good enough. Try again.
Let me add that I think it is way too easy to obtain patents on something, especially in the united states. Remember the one-click-buy Amazon patent? A disgrace. It’s no wonder that it doesn’t take long for others to reinvent something when the bar is set this low for patentability. Generally this is a sign of sickness, that something is wrong with the implementation of patents. I’ve addressed this issue earlier in this thread at length, where I describe a parallel alternative to patents, namely academic property rights. In most cases I think that people will prefer such an IP over patents. Patents then should be reserved for true inventions where an author really is ahead of his time, and not just 3 months.
But the quick answer to your question is this: what is the moral basis for this need to control your own body? If you know the basis to this you also know the answer to your question, because they are identical.