Why So Much Anti-Copyright Rhetoric??

Miscellaneous General
21

“If you sell your book, it’s not your book anymore”

That’s why I’m not selling my book. I’m selling you the rights to read it without intent to copy it. It’s not your book.

“how does this follow?”

If you have used my book in order to copy it against the rules set for that property, restitution must be made. For it to be undone, the copy either A)has to be destroyed/erased, or failing that B) the copy is in ownership of the original book owner.

“I responded to that here:”

The rules for using the book are such that if you want to use it to make a copy in your mind, you are allowed to, but the rules don’t allow for you to use after you intended to copy it to another medium. It’s his property, he can define exactly how the book is allowed and not allowed to be used, and to pursue restitution based on any of those rules. Now as soon as you actually do intend to use to book to copy it, use of that book is cut off from you. Do not touch it. Do not request help to touch it. The rules for that book is that nobody who participates in trying to copy it are allowed to touch it. Your a) example is still a legitimate activity, but is impossible due to the fact that you now intend to copy it to another medium. I still have no property right in your mind, and you can write down what ever you remember from the time before you intended to copy it. However you are now unable to use the book in the way that you have a right to use it, and thus would be violating another’s rights if you used it in another way.

"Wait, now I broke into your house and stole your private journal? I’m pretty sure we are talking about you releasing a book publicly and someone else owning the pieces of paper your ideas are printed on.

If you actually read much of Kinsella on IP, you would understand that your giving a really basic and, in my opinion, rather tired and long disproven argument. That it isn’t necessarily “common wisdom” isn’t a valid argument. A whole lot of people participate in file sharing, and a whole lot more (artists/etc.) attempt to use civil law to make more money. All we can say is that people tend to arbitrarily wield power to aggress on others, if they feel it serves themselves and their actions will be viewed as legitimate.

Our actual task though is determining what is legitimate. What you need to do is prove that your stance is compatible with other libertarian grundnorms, or state that you profess whatever other flavour of authoritarianism and we’ll call it a day. Here’s what I want you to show: a clear criteria for the determination of when a copy-“right” expires; whySam’s Book of Poems is valid for copyright but another infinitely repeatable, non-scarce concept or pattern, like that of the letter ‘A’, is not; and again, how this is all compatible with libertarianism."

Again, you are not selling it to them. It’s rent, of a one time payment, for an indefinite amount of time. When you rent a house to someone, you sell them the right to live in the house. You do not sell them the right to demolish the house, paint the house, or any other thing you haven’t sold them the right to do. You might have even demarkated the right to live in the house. They have the right to live in the house without the intent to be arsonists. If they then intend to be arsonists, they are not living in the house under the rights that they have to that house. Whatever. Nobody is bound by contracts. They are bound by how they have given away or traded their property rights to others. Contracts simply spell out how that happened in the first place, as a sort of proof. I don’t need a contract with you in order to stop you from throwing eggs at my house, because I haven’t given you the right to throw eggs at my house. And I don’t need a contract with you in order to stop you from using my book with the intent to copy it because I haven’t given you that right.

22

That’s why I’m not selling my book. I’m selling you the rights to read it without intent to copy it. It’s not your book.

Oops, somebody, somehow (not me) scanned your haiku. You have no contract with them.

23

I believe copyright law can serve a purpose, although protection should definitely be temporary (maybe it could expire one year from the date of release?). For starters, I think people should receive credit for their original ideas, and a lack of copyright law could make that difficult. Additionally, if others can copy your work as soon as you create it, then finding new ideas could potentially become a high risk/low reward proposition.

My argument for this is similar to the infant industry argument. Give the creator of new ideas temporary protection for those ideas. This gives them a first-mover advantage in exchange for their time dedicated to creative pursuits. Once they’ve had a reasonable amount of time to gain market share for their good, or at the very least to establish themselves as the originator of the good, then competitors should be able to copy the work for their own use.

Beyond that, I would think that some additional protections should exist after the initial copy protection expires. I’m not sure what, but at the very least your work should be clearly cited by others. This could be beneficial in an example like this: you have a rock band that creates a new song, but you have difficulty selling it during your one-year protection period. Next, a big name band picks up your song and makes a name for it. if the work is clearly cited (Song Title X - Originally written and performed by Band Y) then people will know that your band was the creator of that work, and it may work to your benefit in the future if you create another song.

24

(maybe it could expire one year from the date of release?)

Please answer the questions I posed to Sam a couple posts up in regards to arbitrary time limits. Nothing else matters. Before you spin your wheels, I suggest this excellent article.

25

It doesn’t matter if it was a haiku I created. Did I own the right to use that paper with the intent to copy it? If I did, then they have violated my right to that paper. Otherwise, tough titties for me.

But the argument is that it is an ownable right because it is a right in a physical object, not in an idea or a pattern.

26

My point is don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Don’t attempt to discredit property rights in objects themselves in order to justify your desire to copy anything you damn well please.

27

Well, I think IP is not completely invalid but it’s largely bunkum. The idea IP in and of itself is not necessarily un-libertarian. It’s ultimately a debate over where a copy-seller’s rights end and where a copy-buyer’s rights begin. But such debates can only be had over things like individual compact discs or individual hardcopies of Harry Potter exactly because the costs of IP enforcement are heavily subsidized by the State. This subsidy, like all State subsidies, is insidious. Absent the subsidy of IP enforcement, IP would only be enforceable where the costs of IP-leakage are greater than the costs of IP enforcement. Since enforcing IP is costly, I believe that only the kinds of things over which people today form non-disclosure agreements would be enforced. Nobody could enforce CD copyrights without State subsidy, it’s just too damned cheap and easy to copy a CD.

You might see technological “enclaves”, ala iTunes/iPod, where IP is enforced through hardware-based DRM. But such systems are inevitably susceptible to copying. It might make copying more expensive than it would otherwise be but it could never make copying expensive enough to be prohibitive for the content offered.

Also, IP suffers from a metaphysical problem, already pointed out in this thread by others. Property in physical objects is conserved by virtue of the law of conservation of matter and energy. Theft, vandalism, and so on are defined in terms of how they alter the configuration of the physical world. But IP is not so defined. IP (leaving aside any specific definitions which may exist in real legal systems) is, in fact, a property claim over a class of physical objects. The problem with this should be obvious. I cannot own all objects in the class “red chair”. No property law system could recognize such a property title. For the same reason, I cannot own all portions of a hard drive, USB drive, Compact Disc, Digital Video Disc, or printed paper which contain a pattern that conforms to someone’s musical performance that I recorded. Yet this is exactly what IP, taken to its logical extreme, entails.

The problem is that patterns are not property. Patterns are not physical objects (this is debatable at the Planck-scale but that’s a different subject), so they cannot be property. This does not mean that actions (and, therefore, rights) cannot be restricted as a condition of sale. But the metaphysical idea of property as physical resources that have been divided by publicly visible boundaries into non-overlapping regions in space and time cannot be reconciled with the metaphysical idea of property-in-patterns. Property is always a specific, individual, physical resource (it could even be immaterial, such as electrical energy). Patterns define classes, not individual instances. As noted above, attempting to promote IP to the status of physical property results in artificial scarcity and unnecessary conflict. The whole reason property emerged in human society is to avoid and resolve disputes. IP creates disputes where none should exist by creating a fictional property right and empowering the “owner” of such fictional property rights to harass supposed “violators” of said property right.

Clayton -

28

Well, let’s look at this from a few different angles.

Let’s say you post a flyer on a public bulletin board. At the bottom is the notice “Copyright Sam Armstrong 2010 - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.” By broadcasting the contents of your flyer, I think you have automatically relinquished any rights you may have had to prevent or prohibit copying of that flyer. Your notice at the bottom of the page carries no more weight than if you had written, “I hereby own the firstborn child of all who read this piece of paper.”

If, on the other hand, you had laid the flyer on your kitchen table and I sneaked into your house with a hidden camera and snapped a picture of it, I think you have a reasonable basis from which to say I have violated your property rights. A piece of paper in your house is presumably private and I have no business sneaking around photographing things of yours without your permission.

So, we have to distinguish right from the outset between broadcasting something versus keeping something on your own property or person or in your private effects. The latter comes with a presumption of privacy, the former does not.

Most claimants of copyright want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to broadcast content, while still claiming that it remains effectively private.

But it’s not just that, it’s more than that. Once a single illegal copy is made, then all other copiers of that illegal copy would no longer be violating your rights because you would have no rights in that illegal copy. I hardly think this is the position you are advocating, is it?

Clayton -

29

In practice the no copy clause would be mostly unenforceable due to the impossibility of tracing every source of copying. It would also make the product less desireable (as copyright does now) to begin with, slashing demand even further. The idea is nonsense. Low cost of reproduction is what gives the original copy its high value to distributors and you are wise to make use of the mult-level marketing possiblities. This can be done with anything from music to new inventions.

30

Until someone refutes Stephan Kinsella, I consider every pro-IP argument to be a petitio principii.

31

It’s artificial scarcity.

In what sense? Information is costly to produce, disseminate and acquire, if this isn’t scarcity I’m not sure what is. The fact of the matter is that without ideas in property rights there would be far fewer incentives to produce knowledge, which is of course, why IP was necessary for the industrial revolution.

32

Until someone refutes Stephan Kinsella, I consider every pro-IP argument to be a petitio principii.

Fallacy 1,2,4, and 5.

(just kidding)

33

Don’t you mean ‘once a single legal copy is made’ ?

34

Whether something is difficult to enforce doesn’t mean it’s not moral. People can come up with ways to know who did what and prove it effectively. I think there is a place for trade secrets. What people have also come up with is placing recognizable tracers (like errors) in individual copies.

35

Here’s what I want you to show: a clear criteria for the determination of when a copy-“right” expires; why Sam’s Book of Poems is valid for copyright but another infinitely repeatable, non-scarce concept or pattern, like that of the letter ‘A’, is not; and again, how this is all compatible with libertarianism.

The first part is almost a nirvana fallacy: if no clear (perfect) criteria exists, then copyrights shouldn’t be used? That being said, plenty of historical data exists that can be used to come up with an idea of when most profits are made from selling a copyrighted work, and some standard can be set based on that.

The second part is pretty simple: the former takes significant creative effort, the latter, not so much. Additionally, allowing someone to copyright a letter would be a significant impediment to basic communication. Would my inability to send you an exact copy of a book be a significant impediment do the same?

The third part I’m not really concerned with, I was just talking about the benefits of copyrights in general. If I have to give an answer, I don’t think short term copy protection is a government overreach. If anything, it gives artists a reasonable opportunity to create art for a living.

Before you spin your wheels, I suggest this excellent article.

The article has its share of flaws.

  1. More frequent publication of new works - Long story short, times have changed considerably since the 1800’s. It’s a fallacy to believe that something that occurred one way under certain variables would occur the exact same way under completely different variables. For starters, writers of that time didn’t have to worry about someone reproducing their work on the internet. Additionally, I’m sure printing was much more costly back then, and the costs of shipping the books to retail outlets for sale was also more costly. It would be less costly to reproduce someone’s work today.

  2. Larger Initial Advances - What incentive does a publisher have to pay you anything if there are no copyright laws? You send them a copy for their review, and they print it without your consent while attributing the work to a more popular author. You could always try to expose them for the frauds that they are, but that could cost significant time and money with potentially limited results.

  3. Patronage 2.0 - The author assumes that because there are more possible patrons, that there will be more patronage. He also assumes that all writers will be able to find a patron for their work for the same reason, when there may be a limited number of patrons for one topic and a larger number of writers for that same topic. What if copy protections could enable all of them to write profitably without patrons?

  4. Self-Patronage - The author pretty much states that a writer can do other work to subsidize his hobby, and that access to the internet somehow gives writers a cheap outlet for their work. All hobbies are ‘subsidized’ by work, but I don’t expect people to earn money based on my extremely limited bowling abilities. However, someone can make no effort, copy my book, and turn a profit. The profits made on the book would not have existed unless I wrote it, yet I receive no compensation for writing it. As for publishing on the internet, with no copy protections, you could post an article today and have it copied in minutes to a bigger, more popular website, with no credit given to you at all.

  5. Online-Content Sites - As I said, with no copy protections, anyone can copy you without citing you, and potentially earn a profit without compensating you. Also, if one site pays you to post a blog, another site can copy your blog for free and gain a significant competitive advantage. This will discourage websites from paying you, since one of the reasons that they do is because no one can copy it to generate traffic for their site (thanks to copyright laws).

  6. The Best Option - The author advocates a combination of the above points, when each of the poitnts seem to have significant weaknesses. I’d like to make my own point here. In the event that an author could publish a work profitably, do you think that author could publish subsequent works at a profit? Consider the Twilight or Harry Potter books. After the first book sees success, publishers could line up to produce copies of any sequels that are written in anticipation of their popularity. The publisher that pays the author is almost guaranteed to lose because it is the only one that bears that cost.

36

My handling of the book does not differ between the two cases.

37

To say that is to revolt against markets in all other parts of it, too. Markets tend to eradicate profits; yet people, for a reason, tend to still seek those profits. When you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the question is this, why do people ever try to seek profits; for they will just tend to get eradicated. For example, if I notice a gap between the supply and demand of oil in a region, as an oil producer, seller, or whatever, I will try to sell in that region to make huge profits. But, if I do that, other people will ‘steal’ my idea and start selling in that area and get rid of my profits. So why should I even bother? Why do people ever seek to improve their efficiency, considering the other manufacturers will just ‘steal’ their ideas and increase their own efficiency, too? The argument that you are using applies to every situation in which people are seeking profit; yet you, and other people, use it only with what copyrights, patents, and whatever already protect simply because those are the things that are possible to do that with. How would people enforce such things in situations in which people, as entrepreneurs, are seeing gaps in demand and trying to fill them just by shipping things to different locations or something?

My knowledge of economics is pretty weak; so try to bear with me and fill in what I am missing. But I think that this is a pretty important argument. I see no reason why your argument does not apply to any seeking of profit whatever; for markets always tend to try to remove profits. Again, why should any person employ their ideas to find opportunities to make profits if it is inevitable that other people will just follow along, ‘steal’ their ideas, and eradicate their huge profits without trying as hard? Why should any one want to be the first person to improve their efficiency if they can just wait for an other person to do that and then follow suit, without wasting all of their time and money doing research?

38

  1. Should a seller of a piece of property be able to determine what the buyer does with the property once the transaction is complete? I mean if I buy a car from you I should be able to sell that car to another person or perhaps use it as a taxi or rent it out; right? Is there an argument to be made that the seller should have the option to sell, not rent or lease but sell, property and still retain control over it?

  2. The idea of an IP owner renting or leasing a piece of music, software etc with the conditions that it not be sold or ‘sublet’ seems to make sense. For example renting pieces of music online with software that makes it difficult for the renter to copy the music. Same idea could be applied to software. The idea of renting or long term leases might make sense. Are there any objections to this approach?

  3. The utilitarian myth; For those who believe in this please provide evidence that copyrights, patents etc. actually encourage progress and the development of new ideas. There seem to be several arguments against this

a) Music: Claiming to be the original artist to have written and performed a song is one thing; fraud, obviously. But in the case of sampling there’s far too much confusion. Let’s say I copy a 5 second drum break and then isolate each drum beat, stretch some beats, distort other beats, add in perhaps a self created piano sound, and move certain segments around. Now let’s say that the original piece of music and the new piece of music sound totally distinct. Would making the artist of the new composition pay money for the use of the 5 second drum break help to advance music?

b) The Don Quixote example: Don Quixote was written in two parts, with a gap of some years between the two. During the gap another artist decided to take up the pen and complete the work, before Cervantes. Instead of taking the man to court, don’t know if IP was that enforceable in Cervantes’ day, he decided to mock the man’s version when he completed Don Quixote. Cervantes didn’t fade from history, the other man has; what little we know of him is through the prism of ridicule. Cervantes was rewarded in the end because his execution of the idea was superior in the ideas of the general public.

c) The legal considerations when engaging in scientific research: I believe Kinsella makes this argument, as have others. I find it hard to believe that making companies engaged in research make sure that they aren’t copying anybody helps stimulate new ideas, new products etc.

In the case where credit is not given, or if a man’s proposal is rejected and then copied then fraud law can be applied.

39

Re: IP was necessary for the Industrial Revolution.

Where is your evidence? If anything it’s would be possible that things such as patents have hindered development. Alexander Graham Bell might have been gotten the patent and is credited as the inventor, but Elisha Gray worked on it independently of Bell. There’s evidence that he actually completed it before Bell and took his time in submitting it to the patent office. How could progress not have been helped by having more telephone manufacturers and designers in the market, instead of creating artificial barriers to entry?

Please provide solid evidence that IP was necessary for the Industrial Revolution.

40

I just explained why this is false. If I went further it would be to explain why the opposite is true.