Onar,
"By Onar Åm in Political Theory
protect mental labour? because you hold the labour theory of value?
No, because of the lockean labor theory."
I guess you’re a better Lockean than Locke since he didn’t think his own homesteading/labor views supported a natural right to IP. see this post.
Onar:
"
“No one is guaranteed a profit just because they produce something.”
Well, duh! No pro-IP people that I know of are claiming this. "
Oh really?! Here’s Objectivist Diana Hsieh in a typical comment: “producers deserve to be rewarded handsomely for their efforts.” see also Inventors are Like Unto …. GODS….. ("the inventor of a book or other contrivance of thought holds his property, as a god holds it, by right of creation; with his silence or inaction the sustenance and advance of millions yet to be may vanish into the great darkness again. His brain has brought the seed out of the infinite, planted it in good soil, tended it with the care that only the sower can feel. Surely the world should not deny him a share of the increase he has brought about" … "if the creator’s rights are not protected, his survival is jeopardized. If another can market his creation, the creator is deprived of the money he wold otherwise earn.")
Of course such imprecise, muddled, unlibertarian thinking leads to pernicious ideas such as:
Libertarian Favors $80 Billion Annual Tax-Funded “Medical Innovation Prize Fund”; “$30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The ‘Progressive-Libertarian’ Solution“; “Re: Patents and Utilitarian Thinking Redux: Stiglitz on using Prizes to Stimulate Innovation.”
Nor I. I probably should have better clarified that I was looking for the the over-arching term applicable to all such subjectively driven motives regardless of what those specific motives are. I’m coming up blank.
I don’t agree that stealing potatoes is theft. After all, the thief has a right to his livelihood and has mixed his labour with the potatoes by taking them. Besides, he was the one who came up with the idea of taking them from somebody else instead of growing them himself. If anyone tries to take them back, their stealing the product of his mind. Prior-later distinction be damned.
And oh yeah. If you disagree with me, it’s because you’re a shallow materialist who fails to realize that ideas exist and that denial of IP leads you to insane conclusions. Man exists as a mind, not as a body. He is a teleological being, not a physical one. I also find it frightening that none of you are as smart as I am and lack common sense, defined of course not as ‘practical judgment’, but according to my own highly abstract esoteric notions of what it is.
Very well played, Stephen. I got a good chuckle out of that.
Suppose that a person makes a perfectly good copy of paper money. He becomes rich by simply printing a lot of money! What are the damages to the other money owners? Not a single copy of their money is missing. So what if this debases the value of the money? Tough luck. That’s what’s called competition! Supply and demand!
(Now it’s time for that common sense “waaaaait a minute…” to kick in)
You can argue that it’s fraud, but why? The printer of money has signed no contract obliging him not to copy money.
you are now tying a defence of IP to a defence of fiat money ? wowzers!
This promises to get even more fun !
I just thought of a way I can 1 up my last post.
It may appear to the materialist that a man taking potatoes from a farmer is theft, since the farmer has produced the crop with his own labour. He could just grow his own potatoes on his own land, and leave the farmer well alone. However this naive notion is entirely mistaken.
If he were to produce his own crop, he would actually be robbing the first farmer of the product of his mind. He is copying the first farmers method of roundabout production of sustainance without permission.
The only other option for the would-be thief, other than stealing the product of the farmers mind, is to develop his own method of obtaining potatoes, by physically appropriating them from the farmer. He is entirely justified in doing this, since considerations of survival take precedence over considerations of property. The second-comer is faced with a choice between taking the farmers physical property or taking his intellectual property.
What appears to the naive materialist as theft in the first instance, is actually, from the POV of the teleologist, the only legitimate method of production. The material theory of property is incompatible with the teleological theory of property. Since man is first and formost, a mental/rational being, having rights over the product of his mind, only the teleological theory of property is valid, while the material theory of property must be rejected.
Well, common sense tells me that what you wrote is just a bunch of baloney, and that you know it. “Man exists as a mind, not as a body” is an IDEALIST position, which is the negation of materialism, which causes the mind/body dualism. Well, I’m neither an idealist nor a materialist. I’m an individualist, and my life exists indivisibly as both mind and body.
What I find so shocking about you anti-IP is that you show very little understanding of the other position. Either that or you’re just heckling on purpose. Here’s a few examples of what you’re entitled to and what you’re not entitled to:
Example 1: you do NOT have a right to have a job or that your business is profitable. Thus, you cannot demand subsidies, force an employer to hire you or force your customers to buy your products. Correspondingly, you do NOT have a right to have your intellectual work compensated. Thus, you cannot demand that people MUST buy your books or that the government subsidizes it.
Example 2: you do NOT have a right to exclude other competitors because you have a right to make a profit. In other words, a farmer cannot legitimately prevent another farmer from producing competing potatoes. Correspondingly, an author does not have a right to prevent other authors from producing competing novels.
Example 3: A company can also not own a trade relationship, such how as the East India Trading Company owned trade with India, because that would mean that you own the relationship between independent people. Correspondingly, an company cannot own intellectual trade routes. A company can for instance not have a monopoly on selling Indian books in England.
In other words, there are and should be the same restrictions on intellectual property as there are on physical property. My question to you is: 1) didn’t you know this!? (In which case you are very uneducated) IF you know this then you’re just out to try to start a barfight, because you’re simply heckling, bringing nothing of value to the debate.
One of the reasons this upsets me is because you guys are, whether I like it or not, ambassadors for liberty. You present yourself as champions of liberty and how you behave and argue will reflect on the cause of liberty. When they see a bunch of insane hooligans completely out of touch with reality making uneducated and unintelligent arguments they are going to conclude that liberty is lunacy too, and that hurts ME and MY cause for liberty. I would therefore advice you to seriously strengthen your arguments so that you do not sound like baboons.
See, this is why I have no respect for you. It is impossible for me to state something in plain English without it being completely and utterly misunderstood (either by designed stupidity or on purpose or both). Where did I say a single word about the legitimacy of fiat money? Where? Where? Paper money does not equal fiat money. It may say “redeemable in gold” on those paper notes. That does not change the example one bit. I have never signed a contract saying that I should never make a paper note that is an identical copy of a bank’s paper money, so it can’t be forgery or fraud according to libertarian anti-IP logic. The bank who made the paper money available to the public released the information about the money into the public domain when they started circulating them. To make copies of that money is just healthy competition according to libertarian logic. It brings the price of money down and makes it affordable to more. Hurray!
(As a side not, I do not want to make fiat money illegal, although whoever, as private free banks, make fiat money MUST put a sign on their note which states the minimum fractional reserve of that bank. I believe that money like that will lose the competition against real money like gold.)
One more schoolyard insult and you’re gone.
ah, if you meant paper money substitutes which are titles of deeds to quantities of precious metals in bank vaults and whatever else then we can talk about that.
there is no tort in merely the act of printing up ‘fake’ deeds, there is no tort in selling them as objects of art to be hung on walls, there is a tort of going to the bank and claiming that you are the title holder to the quantity in the vault, since you are not ! in that circumstance the ‘fake’ deed is used as a device with which to claim physical possession over scarce precious metal from the true title holder .
There is a similar tort in purchasing a yacht with a ‘fake’ title deed to money in a vault that is not your money in the vault.
I don’t see how the issue of paper money substitutes helps you argue for IP.
I don’t doubt you’ll keep trying though!
Yes, I am, thanks to Locke. Locke was a giant, and I’m standing on his shoulders, and thereby I can see further and apply his insights better and more consistently than he could.
My view starts with the basic insight that life itself is a process of self-sustaining, self-defining, self-generating action. In other words, all living beings, humans included, really have a lot in common with highly liquid processes such as fire, vortices, clouds and rivers. These are not objects and do not have the same kind of solid existence as rocks. Yet, all living beings look and behave very, very much like objects. It’s the closest thing a process can ever get to becoming a solid object. However, since we are processes and not objects WORK is needed to maintain and define life. The living entity needs to PRODUCE in order to exist. It’s own body is self-produced. Production, work, creation are at the heart of what it means to be alive. The reason we own our bodies is because we mix our labor with it. We eat pieces of nature and then transform that nature through work into this semi-object we will life. THAT is the biological basis of property. Work, work, work. Whoever denies this denies biology.
Yea late night post… forgot to use quotes on “piracy” 
@ Onar: Congratulations, you’ve made a decent argument against paper money, or at least poorly designed tracking methods of paper money (regardless of whether said paper money represents real wealth or is the money itself).
Now make a decent argument for IP.
Why? The original owner still has his title. Nothing has been taken from him. He has not made a fake. He has copied the original.
Now, the reason you immediately understand why this is fraud/theft is because a PHYSICAL property is involved. The moment you use an immaterial property as an example your intelligence drops by 70 points and you resort to arguments which assumes that MENTAL WORK EMBODIED AS INFORMATION DOES NOT EXIST. In other words, you are so deeply entrenched in materialistic thinking that you’re not making the mental effort necessary to understand the existence of the scarce resource of mind.
Well, I’m out of here anyway. I would not however say that I am making schoolyard insults. I’m simply making accurate descriptions of reality. The intellectual level on this forum is so low that it truly deserves scorn. It’s a disgrace to the cause of liberty that it be sullied by intellectual imps. My final word of advice before I leave is: read up on materialism. Try to educate yourself and understand what it is, and then try to understand its alternative (no, not idealism, but individualism) which involves an integration of mind and body, of matter and consciousness. You guys really ARE materialists, but you’re so intellectually stunted that you don’t actually understand what it is or that you are materialists. That makes it 100% impossible for me to make arguments against you. I cannot argue with a cat either because he lacks the conceptual awareness to understand arguments. This is true for you too. Until you start acknowledging that you are materialists and what this involves, you will be forever trapped in a reduced state of consciousness.
Onar, your arguments have been taken apart every possible way. You’ve not substantially rebutted any of the criticisms made of your claims.
Calling people baboons is just poor form.
The moment the ‘property’ in question cannot be separated from the original owner or deformed , and is impervious to such attempts of separation or deformation, it become outrageously laughable to think that torts can occur in its regard.
Alll you are left with is your Labour Theory of Value appeal, which amounts to the right to stake a claim to an imagined level of market-value for goods derived from a work. well you have no such claims to imagined levels of market-value of goods outside of your ability to bring them to market and earn the price… so if you don’t have this for real physical property why should you have it for derivatives of intangible ‘so-called’ property.
See ya. Your style of argumentation that revolves around unsubstantiated claims, insults and logical fallacies is a poor fit. When you’re able to debate like a scholar maybe you will be able to advance your ideas. Acting like this isn’t going to convince anyone that your positions are sound.