The Moral Basis for Intellectual Property

Economics Political Theory
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Brother Onar:

Actually it was I who pointed out the obvious outrage of the Amazon patent in this debate. But seriously? Is this what you are going to nail me on? That I have the ability to be critical of a system I am in favor of? Would you rather I react in the way that so many anti-IP people do: to defend obviously outrageous and insane consequences of abolishing IP? Example: we point out that no IP protection allows people to rob the author of his labor, e.g. by simply copying and distributing his work. The anti-IP people’s reaction? The author isn’t being robbed of anything! Piracy is morally perfectly ok! This is such an outlandishly unintelligent and shamefully vicious response that it makes you wonder whether you belong to the same species. Please point to similarly outrageous positions of the pro-IP people.

It is that you guys are almost always legal illiterates who have no idea of the contours of the legislative scheme you defend by your opposiiton to its repeal, even though you seem to agree with us on every obvious example of injustice we point out; even though you favor reforms to the system that would make you appear to be “abolitionist” to most pro-IP mainstreamers; and wehn we ask you waht the eff is the system you do support, you say “well I don’t konw I am not an IP lawyer”. So it’s just pathetic.

The anti-IP libertarians are actually correct: we oppose the state; we oppose yoru contorted economic view of the idea of property rights in “values” or the idea of a legal entitlelment to a “dessert” for “labor”; we oppose the state. We oppose unprincipled utilitarain thinking, no offense you. So don’t equate us, please. It’s an insult.

You may point to the unjustice of an inventor being blocked out by someone else’s patent who developed the invention in parallel, but we pro-IP people will agree with you that this is unjust.

Right–you want to have it both ways. At least mainstream IP fasicst hvae the balls to say what they mean. You guys shrink from all of the horrible obvious consequences of the terrible utilitarian statist monopoly-granting scheme you for some god-forsaken reason pretend you support, becaue you are libertarian enough to admit it in certain cases, but you don’t have the vision or honestly or integrity to take a principled stance. Instead you smuggle in your utilitarian-consequentialist reasoning without admitting that’s what it is.

We do not pretend that the other inventor does not lose something which rightfully belongs to him in this case, and precisely therefore we are open to modifying the patent laws in a way that minimizes the problem.

No. You do NOT want to minimize the problem. You want ot REDUCE it so people don’t complain too much. To minimize it means to abolish it.

But this is the exception, and you cannot abolish normal morality for the exception because that would truly be an unjustice. So long as injustice is unavoidable, occasional exceptional injustice is preferable to normalized systemic injustice.

NOt sure what you are jabbering about.

Also, note that we place certain limitations on IP such as an expiry date, freedom of fair use, a threshold for patentability etc. You critize us for being “arbitrary” when in reality we are concerned about the rights of ALL parties involved, not only the rights of the creator.

It is arbitrary since there is no libertarian princinple you can point to to find out what is the “right” amount of state monopoly to grant. This is pathetic statist utilitarian reasoning. It has NOTHING to do with libertarianism and it is a disgrace that people claiming to be for liberty and property rights support any vestige of this abominable state monopoly granting scheme.

In short, it appears to me that most people who are against IP really just don’t like to pay for other people’s hard work

Libertarianims is not about “paying for people’s hard work”. This is really depressing that you would think so. Just declare yourself to be a statist utilitarian and end this misery that you are even tangentially connected to the liberty movement. Put us out of our misery, please.

and want to be able to parasite on them for free,

I despise this kind of dishonest tactic. Shame on you. How dare you. You are obviously intelligent enough to realize when you are begging the qeustion. To call it “parastism” or theft is just assuming that there is a property right here. Shame on you.

and that they find it opportune to hide their gross immorality behind a thin veil of “principles” that allows them to invade other people’s lives. Will you find an abundance of pro-IP people with a similar motivation to violate other people? No.

They are worse: they use others’ ideas all the time, despite pretending to believe ideas can be owned. Effing hypocrites.

You say that you are utilitarian

I’m not a utilitarian [INSULT DELETED - Ryan]

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Onar, I’ll debate you on IP at debate.org. The community is indifferent to IP. I feel lame that you’re trolling Kinsella so badly.

[edit] I mean, if you think he’s a utilitarian, you’re the kind of guy who can’t find the doorknob. You don’t deserve to be wasting his time with your antics.

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Stranger is clueless with regards to software licensing, the license of the software have no direct correlation with the way it’s being developed or paid for. All open source software are paid for, in the same way as closed software, with the time anyone is devoting towards writing it.

I don’t know what you take me for but I do use and develop open-source software. If it became outlawed to limit rights to open-source software using licenses such as the GPL, not only would it no longer be possible for me to remain in business, there would be no point to continue sharing my work.

Actually one could consider Apple as the grand example on how an IP-strong company wants most people to be consumer-only.

As I said in the fallacies of intellectual communism thread, Apple is the perfect example of the demarcation between producer, open-sourceable software and consumer software. Apple borrowed the core systems for its desktops from the open source world and then invested enormous amounts of capital developing a closed-source application on top of it for the specific consumer demands of its market share. It even developed a closed-source application to make it possible to sell closed-source applications securely and efficiently.

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Even if we ignore the fact that some people eventually will come to be exposed to the work, even if they haven’t bought it, it is impossible to contain information. It will leak to the public eventually, from parents to children, cultural references, newspaper reviews etc. Therefore, ANY information that is not kept strictly secret is made available to the public. It may take some time, but eventually it sieves into the public domain, primarily from parents to children.

I think we may be using different definitions of information. Ideas may spread (sometimes before they are even announced, according to Nassim N Taleb), but information decays over time. Hard drives die, film goes bad, books get burned. That is why such a field as archeology exists.

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Hard drives die, film goes bad, books get burned.
That is why such a field as archeology exists.

so what? libertarians advocate standard property rights in those scarce and rival physical objects that you listed.

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so what? libertarians advocate standard property rights in those scarce and rival physical objects that you listed.

However, they reject the right of producers to retain some of their property after sale, which leads to all sorts of other aberrations such as the rejection of land covenants.

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Those are examples of media not information. Media can store information but they don’t have to. And the nature of the information stored can vary greatly.

You’d do well to stick to theory rather than examples. Neither one suits your argument, but at least with theory its a bit more challenging for the reader.

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Those are examples of media not information. Media can store information but they don’t have to. And the nature of the information stored can vary greatly.

Information outside of the material world is pseudo-spiritual goobledygook. A book with no information is not a medium or a book, it is just a bundle of paper.

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and when i read your book over your shoulder and write down the words I see into my own bundle of paper your complaint is that… ?well at least you disagree with the Onar guy about your intangibles being violated…

yet I see no border crossing, damage, or deprivation of exclusive material right in your book property when I observe your book and write into my own…

My eyes don’t send out beams that damage your books like powerful lasers…my pen writing into my paper, encoding patterns with the same semantic content as are in your book, do not do violence to your page, they do not constitute even contested ownership of your material property, there is no tort

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and when i read your book over your shoulder and write down the words I see into my own bundle of paper your complaint is that… ?

…you are invading my property as well as my privacy.

yet I see no border crossing, damage, or deprivation of exclusive material right in your book property when I observe your book and write into my own…

Then you are a dangerous lunatic.

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you have no positive right to privacy sans your right to physically exclude individuals from your physical land property. i.e. you can be private in your home, because you have a right to not have people physically enter your home. But when a guest at a dinner party, would you necessarily have a right that this or that other guest will not look in your direction ?

Then you are a dangerous lunatic.

right back at you… but do you have any reasons for thinking that if person A does not physically manipulate a molecule of person B’s physical property, he might yet be guilty of ‘border crossing, damage, or deprivation of exclusive material right in your book property’

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you have no positive right to privacy sans your right to physically exclude individuals from your physical land property. i.e. you can be private in your home, because you have a right to not have people physically enter your home.

On what basis do I have this right? IP communists never gave us an answer.

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I take the Hoppean offshoot of Rothbardianism, there are books of it. You may have read some?

If you are feeling charitable you might point the direction where the roots of your own justification for not just IP but also standard property rights come from ?

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On what basis do I have this right? IP communists never gave us an answer.

Except for the many, MANY times we have. But go right on ignoring them. As I said before, it makes our job really easy.

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I take the Hoppean offshoot of Rothbardianism, there are books of it. You may have read some?

Well I did read them all, and they are in favor of copyright and intellectual property, which any principled system of property would be.

Before anyone cries again, here’s the specific link to Rothbard’s very specific defense of copyrights: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp#7._Patents_Copyrights

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What Hoppe book should I read that discussed copyright and intellectual property favourably?

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What Hoppe book should I read that discussed copyright and intellectual property favourably?

I don’t recall him ever seeing it necessary to raise the subject, Rothbard quite clearly settled the matter in MES.

It is intellectual communism that is new and marginal, and it appears to be founded upon no literature other than Stefan Kinsella’s screeds against capitalists.

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I don’t recall him ever seeing it necessary to raise the subject, Rothbard quite clearly settled the matter in MES.

So you aren’t aware that Hoppe is against it? That Rothbardians like Walter Block are against it?

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So you aren’t aware that Hoppe is against it? That Rothbardians like Walter Block are against it?

Show us the proof of their rejection of Rothbard if we must be aware.

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Hoppe is in favor of IP? That is news to me. Maybe you haven’t been following the PFS.