Another very convincing rebuttal.
It wasn’t a rebuttal. I have no interest in rebutting your posts. They are self-refuting.
According to who? You? LOL.
You asked a yes or no question. He answered no. How is that supposed to be construed as a rebuttal?
Despite the fact I believe you do not make sense, I am responding.
Apparently it wasn’t a rebuttal, it was an expression of belief, and expressions of belief in response to expressions of belief by other people ought not be construed as arguments.
Since I have expressed a statement of belief you do not make sense, I have made no argument in this post for you to rebut, and this post is true.
Forgive me if this has already been mentioned in the thread, but I really do think that compulsory licensing is the answer to this. Here’s my article on it:
http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2010/06/ending-monopoly-of-ideas-compulsory.html
I watched Kinsella’s latest presentation on the Mises Youtube channel, and I have to say, I wasn’t particularly pleased. …I’m also not particularly pleased that he doesn’t seem to have discussed the idea of complusory licensing on his website. (If you find this idea appealing at all Stephan, please run with it. Popularize it. You have my full permission.)
One thing that I didn’t like about the presentation, and so many other arguments against IP, is that they gloss over the damage it can do to creators.
Kinsella simply laughs at the fact that someone said Dickens’ crusading against the lack of copyright laws in the US might have shortened his life. I don’t know about that. But I do know that he was pissed about it. He came over to America and rallied against it constantly.
Why? Because foreign authors had no copyright protection, which sprung from an American misreading of English copyright law, (I believe the Statute of Anne.) The entire thing sprang from a misinterpretation.
Englad followed suit. They also didn’t have copyright protection for foreign authors. Mark Twain was pissed about it. He had to travel to England (or maybe Canada, I’m not 100% sure) to try to get copyright portection.
Why should these authors not benefit from their work? Other people certainly did. Could Dickens really financially benefit from speaking tours in America?
Also, it had the unintended consequence of popularizing a bunch of English writers in the American market, because the books were so cheap because they had no copyright protection. Of course, American writers didn’t have the same advantage (so to speak).
Seriously, just take even a brief look at Piracy by Adrian Johns:
Here is a review from the Washington Post:
“Johns, a history professor at the University of Chicago, argues that ever since the medieval and Enlightenment eras, corporations have tried to defend their economic interests by searching for intellectual piracy in the private sphere of people’s homes. He says that all of our current debates about intellectual piracy — from Google’s efforts to create a universal digital library to the fight over how vigorous patents should be — have antecedents in the copyright wars of earlier eras.”
If you can prove damages, you have a claim. If you can’t, then this is a lot of hot air.
What are the damages specifically? How did you calculate them?
Why should these authors not benefit from their work?
Does someone forbids them to benefit from their work? Just because they couldn’t have a monopoly on IP in free society doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from their intellectual work (patterns) and ideas. If I tried to sell carrots and someone else did the same in area close to mine, could I complain about “not having a monopoly” on selling carrots in a certain area? That would be ridiculous.
The problem is a word “should” because it implies some privilege. In our current state, this privilege is exclude others by force of the state.
It’s sad to see that the Mises Institute is now in the hands of the so-called anarcho-capitalists who have a distorted concept of rights, man’s nature and freedom. The great economist Ludwig von Mises is rolling in his grave every time the anarchists at Mises Institute spout their anti-freedom, anti-reason rhetoric and irrational, nihilist defense of anarchism.
Today there’s a need to save laissez-faire capitalism not only from the utilitarian mentality and mystical morality of the conservatives, but most importantly from the perverted political ideology of the anti-freedom Libertarians.
It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. A shallow-minded school of social philosophers, the anarchists, chose to ignore the matter by suggesting a stateless organization of mankind. They simply passed over the fact that men are not angels. They were too dull to realize that in the short run an individual or a group of individuals can certainly further their own interests at the expense of their own and all other peoples’ long-run interests. A society that is not prepared to thwart the attacks of such asocial and short-sighted aggressors is helpless and at the mercy of its least intelligent and most brutal members .
Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Fountation of Economic Science (1962)
It’s sad to see that the Mises Institute is now in the hands of the so-called anarcho-capitalists…
What do you mean by “now in rthe hands”? You realize that the Mises Institute was founded by an anarcho-capitalist, right?
Mises wasn’t against anarcho-capitalists. He was against utopian anti-property anarchists (anarcho-syndicalists). Mises supported individual secession, which is anarcho-capitalism.
There is a massive difference between a syndicalist/communist and a capitalist.
Before you attack something, try to understand it. Ignorance is not a virtue.
I think it’s important to make a distinction between between books, the physical things, and the information they contain. Though information is not property, the means of sharing said information certainly is. There is a market for those means, whether books or internet access accounts, etc. Some people don’t mind reading the information off a screen; while others prefer to physically feel the pages as they turn, and are willing to pay for the option.
Huh?
My impression is that many of the Mises guys believe in consiracy theories.
What does that have to do with utilitarianism?
And should it be considered a virtue to buy the official government’s story of every important happening in human events?
Since I don’t subscribe to miracle theories to explain the Federal Reserve spontaneously appearing… I accept collaboration theories.
Was 911 an inside job?
Onar Åm is back with a new article!
This is subjectivism
Often you run into people who say that they do not believe in objective morality. They say that everything is subjective, but what do they mean by that? If I were to summarize the meaning of subjectivism in one image, it would be this: a gun.
That’s a quite provokative claim, but it’s true. If there is no such thing as right and wrong, then how do we decide what to do? More importantly, how do we decide who gets to make decisions over whom? Well, there is really only one way: whoever controls the most guns is right.
That is the basis of the ill-named system of government known as democracy. It is based on the notion that everyone gets a gun, represented in the form of a vote. Whoever can muster up a majority will get to decide what’s right for all, because the majority controls the most guns.
So the next time you meet someone who says that everything is subjective, bring the following image to mind to get an accurate notion of what he is really saying:
I don’t see how your last 3 posts are revelant to this discussion but I will bite anyway. About your last post - position that says there is no objective morality (intersubjective consensus at best) is obviously not the same as position that says that everything is subjective. I don’t understand why would you try to conflate these two positions. Also I don’t understand why would you equate moral or total subjectivism with violence. One does not necesarily lead to another. Moral subjectivism does not claim there is no right or wrong BTW.