First off, I haven’t read Kinsella’s book on IP, so if he’s already addressed that on his book I’ll know next week when I read his book.
But if I wrote a book and said to every customer that buys it:
“On buying this book you agree on only using it for (insert list of things that I’d consider fair). You can’t do (insert a huge list of things that may lead to breaking my monopoly on it). If you agree, buy it, if you don’t don’t buy it”
So, by doing that, am I not making IP legitimate even in an ancap society?
Well the problem is if you loaned the book to somebody, they wouldnt be bound to contract you agreed to in buying it, thus they could copy it and anybody they gave copies to would not be bound to the contract either…
Lets say you sell me your book. you tell me that by buying this book, I cannot copy it, and I say, ok. And the trade is complete… Now lets say I sell that book to Mike, your contract with me does not transfer over to Mike…
you also have to think about this in the consumer’s point of view. The more regulation you are going to put on the consumer, the less they will be willing to buy your product
.we arent saying anything about whether IP will not be in an anarchy society… to say something with such certainty would be absurd,Austrian Economics as a whole stresses the fact that the future is uncertain. Most Austrians are just simply opposed to IP. That said, enough regulation would quickly kill your sales, especially if you are just starting out as a novelist.
Yes, it could exist contractually. It would be the equivalent of trade secrets.
As has been pointed out in the thread, that model would not be viable in a competitive world for things that you are trying to sell to large audiences (and are easily copyable).
More than the obviously adverse affects this will have on consumer perceptions, how much do you think the opportunity cost of enforcing your own micro-version of I.P. is going to be?
“As has been pointed out in the thread, that model would not be viable in a competitive world for things that you are trying to sell to large audiences (and are easily copyable).”
Maybe not for book of unknown novelists, but a lot of other things (drugs formulae, cars designs, etc…) this model would be easily viable.
“how much do you think the opportunity cost of enforcing your own micro-version of I.P. is going to be?”
I don’t know. But remember, keeping a monopoly on your creations gives you a very good advantage over your competition, I believe the demand for some kind of “IP police” would be so strong that eventually it wouldn’t cost that much to enforce in some way your IP policies, too much people wanting to keep their monopolies on their creations.
“That’s not intellectual property. That’s a contract based on physical property.”
So it’d be exactly like it is today, but now with a different name.
We’re not talking about a monopoly in terms of being the sole provider of a good or service, we’re talking about the provider claiming the right to tell his patrons exactly what they can and cannot do with the good or service he is selling them. You seriously believe consumers are gonna be happy with an “I.P. Police Squad” being subsidized to enforce this petty tyranny?
Capitao do mar - I don’t think your book analogy really works. In a society based primarily on the inviolability of property rights every one of your stipulations would automatically become null and void the minute I buy your book. It is not your book any longer, so you have no right to dictate how I should choose to use it. You could license the book to me on the terms you outline above, but then your argument regarding the “property” end of IP defeats itself.
However I do think some forms of IP would still exist in an anarcho-capitalist society for a very simple (and overlooked) reason: without some form of IP there is very little real competition. If anyone can choose to ape any existing product, right down to the packaging, there’s no telling if your “Apple” computer is produced by Apple or Microsoft or HP or Acer or anyone else. Under those circumstances, rather like under socialism, the incentive to produce, market and sell something truly successful drops off rather sharply. It becomes all but impossible to act in your own self-interest when your self-interest is impossible to protect. And, like it or not, the only way to protect your self-interest in these matters is to resort to a limited amount of IP.
It would be fairly easy to arbitrate these matters on a first come first serve basis, and I don’t think it would be financially worthwhile for Pepsi to sue the guy who wants to sell Pepso, but in cases where exact products were indistinguishable some sort of legal recourse would need to be available. Otherwise there will be no market in the true sense, and everybody’s life will be far, far worse because, ultimately, nobody would really know who was buying what from whom. And last I checked that wasn’t the goal of most anarcho-capitalists.
It would still be fraud to tell someone this product is one thing, and sell them another. It would also be in the interests of the companies themselves to make sure there are different brands. Walmart would not want to confuse customers and have two brands of Pepsi (one real and one fake). They would want to sell you what you want, and would thus want to distinguish between both kinds (imagine if you wanted the real Pepsi and bought the fake one, or vice versa).
Even if you threw fraud out the window, a little thought experiment, imagine three stores:
Store 1: Sells real Pepsi.
Store 2: Sells real Pepsi and fake Pepsi.
Store 3: Sells fake Pepsi.
Which store would outcompete the others? Which store would get repeat customers? Now throw in one more store
Store 4: Sells real Pepsi and sells fake Pepsi (with a different label on it)
Which store would outcompete the others? Which store would get repeat customers?
“You seriously believe consumers are gonna be happy with an “I.P. Police Squad” being subsidized to enforce this petty tyranny?”
They will certainly be happier than if they had died from cancer because they didn’t agreed on subsidizing this petty tyranny when they refused to buy the drugs that could have cured them.
“I don’t think your book analogy really works. In a society based primarily on the inviolability of property rights every one of your stipulations would automatically become null and void the minute I buy your book. It is not your book any longer, so you have no right to dictate how I should choose to use it. You could license the book to me on the terms you outline above, but then your argument regarding the “property” end of IP defeats itself.”
No.
Via a voluntary contract I can regulate how you use your property. Yes, the book is yours, but you’ve agreed to use it as I see fit.
Is this some kind of appeal to speculation? You know there are multiple ways to treat cancer…
In any case, just think of how us poor mundanes are suffering for want of pain medication. If only one company could license out Ibuprofen and Paracetamol forever we would all receive pain relief! But, alas, there is choice and competition so no companies wish to service this desperate consumer need and we are all left to bear the burden of our headaches.
Echoing one of the posters above, Kinsella does deal with the concept of IP contracts. But non-participants in the contract would not be subject to its conditions.
So if a third party somehow discovers the particular information being protected by the contract, he could not be held liable in making use of such information, but would be held liable for any property violations he committed in acquiring the information.
In the spirit of Stephan Kinsella’s philosophy concerning the invalidity of Intellectual Property, I requested taking his course on this subject through the Mises Academy for free–just a download of the lecture is all I wanted. The reply was that the course is not free. So much for upholding your principles.
I do quite a bit of online research of medical and biological topics. While almost every article has an abstract that’s available online, if you want to read the complete article, you have to either subscribe to each journal you use as a resource, of you have to pay per article for the PDF file between $30.00 and $50.00 each, which pushes the cost out of most individuals’ price range. The alternative to internet research, which is more costly in terms of time away from caring for patients, is to drive to the nearest medical school library and copy the article from the library volumes. This bottleneck protection of IP prevents, slows and makes more costly medical advances when modern technology could make this information available instantly to all.
About your statement you would place in your book about how it could be used. It’s unrealistic to expect that someone who buys your book wouldn’t lend it to friends and family, convert it to an eBook (breaking encryption if needed) to read on their Kindle, or let friends download their eBook for their own use. People share music and videos all the time. No statement in the book about not using it for all these regular purposes is going to prevent such use.
When I think about the pharmaceutical companies, they spend a great deal of money and time to develop and test new drugs. Only a fraction of their efforts yields marketable products. If there were no exclusivity for these drugs, once a drug was put on the market other companies could copy it and sell it for the same price without having invested time and money in its development. Isn’t that unfair? Isn’t that disincentive to develop a new drug? For many years, due to a number of factors, including limited profit incentive, drug companies would not develop or test new drugs for children. When patent extensions were provided, these companies began to develop drugs for children because the cost:profit ratio was improved. How do you encourage these types of advances without protecting IP to some extent?