A tip: not only is Sieben plenty intelligent, he’s much more emotionally mature than you are, so you’re not going to get a rise out of him, no matter how much you swagger. So you might as well stop trying.
Sieben,
I really don’t like bad thinkers, and after having seeped through this thread I’m covered in sewage. Therefore I am not particularly keen on further sullying my mind, but on the other hand, debate.org is in fact a more controlled environment with less noise. To end this debate on a good note I will therefore accept your challenge, even though you have not proved to me that you are worthy of my time which I could be using to produce intellectual property to make a living instead.
Okay. If you want to wait a bit, that’s fine. My name is the same on debate.org, so just issue me a challenge. Be sure to set the voting period to something reasonable like a month (I accidentally set my first debate’s voting period to be infinite… big mistake).
Guys, it seems we have harmed his mind and therefore probably committed a few torts along the way.
If only we had figured out earlier that potatoes dont vanish when they are stolen/… no wait… ideas do vanish when they are copied… no wait… how does the clever analogy which is proof of ones superior intelligence go again?
Not to mention Onar is honourable and humble, and can admit when he makes trivial mistakes in the course of doing the great work of teaching us why its proper to enforce IP.
Okay, for a moment I thought Onar had signed off. While this overall discussion has been very helpful for me, his frequent Ad Hominem arguments have not been productive. Now I’m getting closer to a solid position here, but I still have a few gaps I would like help to fill in.
Going back to the simple case of an author who wants to sell his book and does so with reserved rights or a limited grant to the buyer who has voluntarily agreed not to reproduce, yet someone “reads over his shoulder”. I think we have confirmed Rothbard’s position that no one can obtain rights greater than what were available from the source by the discussion of the third party victim of the stolen car. (If you acquire a stolen car, whether by fraud or by homestead, your claim remains inferior to rightful owner who has a record of the voluntary exchange.)
I had the wrong Rothbard link in my previous post, the discussion below is on page 121 of the Ethics of Liberty, here.
Violation of (common law) copyright is an equivalent violation of contract and theft of property. For suppose that Brown builds a better mousetrap and sells it widely, but stamps each mousetrap “copyright Mr. Brown.” What he is then doing is selling not the entire property right in each mousetrap, but the right to do anything with the mousetrap except to sell it or an identical copy to someone else. The right to sell the Brown mousetrap is retained in perpetuity by Brown. Hence, for a mousetrap buyer, Green, to go ahead and sell identical mousetraps is a violation of his contract and of the property right of Brown, and therefore prosecutable as theft. Hence, our theory of property rights includes the inviolability of contractual copyright.
A common objection runs as follows: all right, it would be criminal for Green to produce and sell the Brown mousetrap; but suppose that someone else, Black, who had not made a contract with Brown, happens to see Green’s mousetrap and then goes ahead and produces and sells the replica? Why should he be prosecuted? The answer is that, as in the case of our critique of negotiable instruments, no one can acquire a greater property title in something than has already been given away or sold. Green did not own the total property right in his mousetrap, in accordance with his contract with Brown—but only all rights except to sell it or a replica. But, therefore Black’s title in the mousetrap, the ownership of the ideas in Black’s head, can be no greater than Green’s, and therefore he too would be a violator of Brown’s property even though he himself had not made the actual contract.
So, I’m still not finding any explanation yet as to why or how Rothbard is mistaken.
Taking this book example further, it would suggest that if the third party reading over the shoulder of one who had a book with limited rights, decides to print copies of this book, the production and/or possession of these books is aggression against the rightful owner, since they were produced without the right to copy. (Remember the first book was sold contractually without that right to reproduce.) Isn’t this the same as the way that the buyer of the stolen car is aggressing against the rightful owner who has the superior claim? Even if this third party wasn’t aware of the copyright, he hasn’t acquired the permission to reproduce any more than the finder of the abandoned stolen car has the right to keep it. Doesn’t the author of the book still have the right to repossess the fraudulent copies of his book? If the third party continues to reproduce these copies, after he is aware of the copyright, isn’t he aggressing against the author?
Define identical copy.
Edit: How is identical measured?
I have a question for you. Since pro IP argues mental harm are you willing to live with that concept?
If you pollute on my mental property distributing filth are you going to accept responsibility?
Mental harm is a two way street.
I think I have consistently advocated you own something as long as it is 100% in your control and if it is not 100% in your control it is a claim in society.
Grayson Lilburne wrote the following post at Sat, Oct 23 2010 5:29 AM:
My experience is (unfortunately) that high intelligence can be very destructive once the brain becomes infected with a false idea. Then that person will use his superior intelligence to defend an idea that any decent, normally intelligent human being immediately will recognize as completely insane. That superior intelligence devoted passionately to unreason will then have a lobotomizing effect on his mind, reducing his effective intelligence down to the level of a baboon. This is precisely why so many supersmart socialists are complete crackpots, and unfortunately that is also the case with many libertarians.
All smart people should be aware of this danger and constantly monitor one’s own conclusion against common sense. If your line of reasoning ever leads you to a conclusion which makes you go “waaaait a minute, that can’t be right, can it?” then you’re in the danger zone. That’s the sum of your values and concepts trying to warn you that you have messed with some pretty basic premises in your belief system. Then there are two possibilities: 1) common sense is wrong, 2) the basic premise of your reasoning is crap. You don’t know which of these two possibilities turn out to be correct, but in 90% of the cases common sense wins out, and you should therefore have deep respect for it and consider that your claim needs to be really, really scrutinized before you can conclude that common sense is wrong, and your non-intuitive conclusion is correct, because when your common sense is wrong, it probably means you’ve stumbled across some pretty deep errors in your belief systems which need to be fixed, and this is not something that is done easily and overnight.
Well, how many anti-IP people on this forum are using common sense to challenge their reasoning? I’ve seen frighteningly few. Here’s an example: common sense dictates that an author who sells zero books because his books have been pirated and who starves to death because he didn’t make money from the book has been robbed of his livelihood and even his life due to piracy. Anyone who claims otherwise are, by the standards of common sense, completely, completely, utterly bonkers. This is the point where you’re suppose to say to yourself “waaaaaait a minute, that can’t be right, can it?” Anyone who doesn’t ask themselves this very basic question at this point and finds a darn good answer to this question is effectively brain damaged. They have rendered themselves incapable of useful thought. Their minds are destroyed.
Now I leave it up to you to decide who fits the bill and who doesn’t.
Good points and research David.
As far as the 3rd party issue… Assuming the original work of authorship qualifies for property protections, similar to the way copyright is treated…
Morally: Once a 3rd party is made aware they acquired illegitimately derived property (however the means), they would be morally obligated to remove/return their copy. Future copies derived from their illegitimate copy would be immoral as well as subject to sanctioning.
Legally: In an anarcho-capitalist society, sanctioning could be handled by a private organization - through voluntary contracts people agreed to as part of other economic transactions (similar to private rights/insurance/enforcement organizations). In a minarchist society this might still be enforced by a limited government.
Of course, people in any society can go renegade and ignore all that, but the immorality and sanctioning will be a deterrent that will minimize aggressions.
I somewhat agree with the initial statements about highly intelligent people believing in erroneous ideas; I have seen it first hand & have dealt with the consequences of calling people out on it. I would probably disagree on what is defined as “erroneous ideas”, however.
But everything else sounds like speculation until this standard of common sense is clearly defined; until then I can’t take your arguments seriously.
For that matter, I’ve seen much similar and more convincing style of arguments elsewhere @ Amerika.org. The writer’s there though usually tend to define the terms they are using though.
Additionally, every generation in history likes to think that “their” common sense or morality is the best.
Piracy = lost sales might eventually cease being common sense for many when markets adapt to better compete with current piracy, which is offering (temporarily) more superior means of distribution, cheaper prices, & more choices.
If I could purchase music at rock bottom prices through legal torrent trackers, but allow to pay far more of a premium for live preformances to compensate, & do it legally, I would, if only to lessen the chance of persecution by the State on my own person.
Piracy will always exist, btw. No amount of common sense is going to get rid of the phenomena.
You are polluting my mental property. I demand remedy.
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but I was sort of taking for granted that the meaning of common sense is, well, yeah, pretty common sense. BUT if you insist, I will give a more intellectually protrusive explanation of what common sense is. I actually wrote a sentence in the original post which briefly summarized what is meant by common sense, namely “the sum of your values and concepts.” To elaborate:
we humans have a fantastically accurate conceptual and particularly perceptual ability to categorize and understand the world, mapping out little facts about reality every day. Even though there are a million ways for us to accidentally kill or seriously injure ourselves during a day, we miraculously manage to stay alive and healthy most of the time. This is actually an extraordinary testimony to the amount of real world skill we possess. In fact, if you give a map and paper with instructions to a common man with common intelligence he will based on that map and instructions most likely be able to travel all the way to the other side of the globe and locate the little “x” you’ve made on your map with such stunning precision that he’s able to put his finger on the “x.”
Every single day we datamine reality with our senses and we are able to make sense of the things we see by neatly cataloging all those facts into a coherent knowledge network. If we could draw that network we would see that all the knowlegde we have acquired in our every day lives are so intertwined and interconnected that they form a neatly packed bundle. Fortunately we humans have a way to access that bundle of knowledge incredibly fast, by the process we call “intution” or “gut feeling.” Basically what our “intuition” does is to give a summarized evaluation of new data based on all our previous experience. If the new data fits neatly into the existing network (“makes sense”) then it is integrated with no further assessment. If however the new data contradicts a significant portion of our knowledge database then we will react and think that it “doesn’t make sense.” That is what I call “common sense.”
Here you’re making a similar argument that is common in the psychopathic middle eastern cultures, namely that if a woman is raped it’s her own fault and SHE should be punished (by death) for infidelity/out of wedlock sex. Of course, they have found a “market” solution to this, namely to bag women up in Burqas and never letting them out of the house without a male family companion at their side. In this case there is a psychopathic “market” solution to a psychopathic problem.
Also note that in this case YOU took the common sense stance that piracy = lost sales, but here on this forum you will find many people who say “lost sales? What lost sales? You cannot lose something you don’t own.” These people are prime examples of insane people who have left planet earth and gone to bonkersville. They are actually promoting a morality which allows people to completely guiltlessly pirate someone else’s hard work and not consider that they have taken something from him or that they have done something immoral in any way.
Yeah, but so what? Today piracy is a (largely) fringe problem. If pirate distribution were LEGAL (so that anyone can pretend to be the original) then piracy would obviously be a much greater problem.
Onar, this sort of common sense (armchair) reasoning, is typical from people who have exposure to philosophy and not economics, and so imagine everything they perceive as an objective truth, frequently without a meaningful epistemology or rigorous application of logic.
Economically, you are appealing with this example to a labor theory of value. You’re rejecting subjective value theory. The LTV is completely false.
Your author who sells zero books may be a lousy marketer. He might be a lousy author. He might have picked a boring topic. He might be writing books when we are in the age of YouTube. That he starves to death, has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with his poor entrepreneurial decision to produce something people will not pay for. No one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.
Also, I can speak to plenty of anecdotal experience that if your product’s market only appeals to [sic] pirates (people who will not pay directly for the product) than you are producing something which was never commercially viable in the first place. The market has rendered its judgement, and that product is found by consumers to be wanting.
Very few authors make their living exclusively from book sales, publishers frequently pay advances to established authors, writers also have opportunities to cross over to other mediums, like film and music, as well as to do incredibly lucrative speaking engagements.
But that someone writes something, and no one is willing to pay cash for it but would read it for free, speaks more to the failure of the author to develop a product of high value, than to the fact that people will prefer to pay nothing rather than something. Man is an economizing being.
FYI, a lot of the modern digital world is working on a model of “freemium”, a commercial product with a free component, which is used to attract the customers willing to pay for more features, depth and support. 30 day trials, free trials, shareware versions etc are examples of this.
At the end of the day, you misunderstand IP, particularly the fact that there are thousands if not millions of examples which destroy the objective claims you have made. A simple one, is the content of Project Gutenberg. If people are still willing to pay for hundred and thousand year old classics which are in the public domain, what pathetic author cannot sell his book of fresh, new and unique content, and who is to really blame for that?
It’s not piracy though.
I’m not sure what that has to do with the discussion. IP is not property.
Well, what if I said to you that I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, doing innovative business? What if I told you that I am thoroughly familiar with not only micro-economics, but also macro-economics and I know the classics (Smith, Say) and the (good) Austrians (Menger,Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Reisman) in addition to being well-aquainted with Keynes, Marx and other branches of economics? I would say I have had sufficient exposure to economics to understand it better than most.
Yet, despite my extensive knowledge of economics I still think that your position is completely insane and that you know next to nothing about epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. The rest of your reply was so confused that I cannot stomach to reply to it all. but I will just answer one of your points:
“No one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.”
Well, duh! No pro-IP people that I know of are claiming this. Suppose now that a farmer produces potatos and a thief at night comes and takes his crop and then justifies it with “no one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.” What would you say to those who defend this based on such an argument? You’d hopefully say that they were full of horse manure and their argument stinks. Furthermore you would say: “the farmer owns the right to control his product and try to gain a profit from it.” And that would be the right, non-insane answer. You would NOT claim that the farmer then adheres to the Marxian labor theory of value and that it was “just supply and demand” that left him with no profit.
I’m not sure that it will make the slightest impression on you that you’ve so seriously misjudged both my knowledge about economics and my (or any other’s pro-IP) arguments, but somehow I doubt it.
You can’t claim you own your body and also claim a part of your body falls outside the concept of self ownership.
“No one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.”
Well, duh! No pro-IP people that I know of are claiming this. Suppose now that a farmer produces potatos and a thief at night comes and takes his crop and then justifies it with “no one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.” What would you say to those who defend this based on such an argument? You’d hopefully say that they were full of horse manure and their argument stinks. Furthermore you would say: “the farmer owns the right to control his product and try to gain a profit from it.” And that would be the right, non-insane answer. You would NOT claim that the farmer then adheres to the Marxian labor theory of value and that it was “just supply and demand” that left him with no profit.
You are exactly right. So if I produce a huge amount of potatoes, thereby lowering the market value of the farmer’s patatoes next to nothing, I haven’t robbed him of his livlihood, right? He’s still free to try and gain a profit, right?
And what part of our body am I implying falls outside the concept of ownership?
Onar, check the comments section of our thing