If I can get an e-mail from Tim Berners-Lee asking you to stop using his WWW, would you do it?
Your saying yes would motivate me to try to get in contact with him.
Your not describing “private property”. What we have here is a massive conflation in understanding of various terms, and key libertarian components. Like property.
Hi,
I’m not exactly a proliferate poster here, or an expert in either Austrian economics or libertarian theory, but I’ve had a crack at rebutting Onar’s article at my personal blog, here. I tried posting it on the forum, but couldn’t get it to work without messing up the HTML. If anyone knows the trick to doing so, and could help me out, I’d be thankful.
filc wrote the following post at Sun, Oct 17 2010 8:05 PM:
If your statement were in any way true then we would not purchase books from bookstores, but rent instead. It amazes me that you don’t follow your comments to their ends.
I don’t know where you are getting such an outlandish idea. Purchasing limited-rights media is much more convenient than renting.
Jeffersonianatheart wrote the following post at Mon, Oct 18 2010 1:46 AM:
I’m not exactly a proliferate poster here, or an expert in either Austrian economics or libertarian theory, but I’ve had a crack at rebutting Onar’s article at my personal blog, here. I tried posting it on the forum, but couldn’t get it to work without messing up the HTML. If anyone knows the trick to doing so, and could help me out, I’d be thankful.
Your post is a very long string of obscenities, that may be why the forum rejected it.
Yeah, the version I tried to post didn’t have the four letter bits in. Still didn’t work, sadly. You get the R rated version!
As mentioned earlier, by the same token then espionage and peeping is perfectly ok. All privacy laws must be abandoned, because they protect information. The original owner of a secret does not lose this information in any way if others get hold of it.
IP communism is even more radical an idea than this. According to IP communists, scarcity alone is not enough to produce ownership, rivalry must also be involved. This means that any kind of exclusivity is impossible. I cannot stop people from entering my house at any time, I can only get them to move out of the way when I need access to the kitchen or the bathroom. I cannot create a private club or society with closed membership. I cannot create any kind of good where exclusivity is the core value, most importantly paper money or credit. No modern system of contractual money (as you also noted) can exist in IP communism.
IP communists, having no economic foundation for their theories, are utterly unmoved by any of these problems. If you try to engage them into an economic argument, they will simply ignore it and make a claim to the purity of libertarianism and its sacrosanctity. It must be noted anyway for how dangerous a school of thought it could be if left to proliferate.
wow, you are hella confused about rivalrousness
As far as I can tell, no one who’s anti-IP is proposing the above. This includes Mr. Kinsella himself (at least when he wrote Against Intellectual Property). We all recognize one’s right to restrict others’ use of the property that he creates and/or distributes. The only difference is that we see the existing legal framework for contractual arrangements as being sufficient here. So there’s no need for additional legal restrictions (such as “intellectual property” laws).
Sorry for the drive-by posting. I plan next on reading and responding to Mr. Aam’s blog post itself. Also, I for one am flattered that Mr. Aam has joined this forum so quickly to defend his positions, no matter how much I may disagree with them.
So you see no difference between copying and trespassing, even though the latter involves using someone else’s physical property and the former doesn’t?
Autolykos is right; it would be entirely legitimate for an author, or inventor, to restrict who owns “his” ideas by means of not making them public. Ben Tucker, no anarcho-capitalist by any stretch, argued as much when he said “You want your invention to yourself? Then keep it to yourself”. Authors are not, should not, and under any libertarian framework would not, be obliged to give away his work for free.
So you see no difference between copying and trespassing, even though the latter involves using someone else’s physical property and the former doesn’t?
The author or originator of the work maintains a lien on all physical property that holds his intellectual property, so obviously there is no difference between copying and trespassing. If you make a pirate copy of someone’s work, you are invading the lien.
Agreed. And if an author/artist is able to cultivate sufficient demand for his work in general, he could likely contract to be paid in advance, e.g. on a commission basis.
The funniest part is the “you’re a socialist!” “No you’re a socialist” part of the debate.
It’s like Salem circa 1692.
Either way, I still don’t see any valid explanations for why copyrights are different than trade secrets.
I’m for recognition rights at least, I know that. But other than that, IP makes no difference to me which way it goes.
(I’ll still be pirating it anyway )
We have a standard for posting here, these repeated ad hominems are not acceptable. If you wish to continue posting, please stop using these logical fallacies in argument.
Here’s a question that just brought up for me LS. And I mean this honestly, it’s not a trap, or an attack or anything.
This website is not physical property, how could one ban someone from it without appealing to some kind of right to informational/intellectual property?
Are there not terms and conditions that are to be accepted before one begins using the Mises Forums?
(I’ll still be pirating it anyway )
Funnily enough, even software pirates have a system of intellectual property amongst themselves. (They will want their ‘rips’ to be distributed with their own authorship files and denounce those who take their rips and claim it as their own.)
In that sense, pirates are less dangerous than IP communists - they actually recognize the necessity of intellectual property. Much like them the centuries old high seas pirates needed a code to determine the ownership of the loot they stole, and thus their piracy was not an act denying property rights but just simple banditry.
Here’s a question that just brought up for me LS. And I mean this honestly, it’s not a trap, or an attack or anything.
This website is not physical property, how could one ban someone from it without appealing to some kind of right to informational/intellectual property?
Note also that the forums are not rival - unwanted posts being made in no way stops anyone from posting.
Good point Mr. Civil. I guess that about sums it up.
Now, what if I hacked LvMI with a team. And overnight we switched all the Mises articles with Marxist ones but left Mises’s name on them, and encoded protections against them being put back to normal?
The webiste is not physical property, I have agreed upon no contract against hacking it. Have I aggressed upon the (members of) the institute?