Topic: Hardcore libertarians: explain your anti-IP-rights position to me. - page 2. (Read 6806 times)

Thanks for sharing that article.  An interesting read.  It's amazing how many corporate types and lawers are completely confused and taken off-balance when they come across the notion of free licenses.

As a musician myself, I share many of the sympathies with this artist as well about how copyright and contracts get in the way of art.

 Coming in late to this thread, but here's a perfect example of how IP laws and strict copyright can stifle creativity.

 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/15124514188/when-copyright-contracts-can-get-way-art.shtml

 Long story short -

 Museum hires artist to create art for exhibit, artist agrees but has stipulations, museum agrees, artist creates said art, museum requests unlimited revisions and produces a contract to be signed, artist declines, weeks of negotiation follow, museum caves to original terms of oral agreement, everyone is happy, museum decides to not use the art, artist releases art anyway because of Free License.


 In other words, after creating the art and after negotiation, the museum decided to not use her art.  If it had been under traditional copyright, the museum would own those images.  But because they decided not to use them in the exhibit, they would never have seen the light of day.  As a result of the artist wanting a Free License, she was able to release the images, free, to the public.

It's a consequence of the differences in the situations. It's not granted by anyone or anything, it's a logical consequence of the arrangements. It's like how the sky looks blue and the grass looks green. It's a directly-perceivable consequence of their differing natures, readily apparent both to people who understand what colors and how they work and to people who have no idea what colors are or how they work. Just as nature included in us a mechanism for the perception of colors, nature included in us a mechanism for the perception of rights.

Requiring certainty is kind of absurd. Even if I blow up your car, it could have blown up by itself a few minutes later.

One school of thought is that you have to prove the loss was more likely than not, and if so, you're entitled to the entire amount. (The 51% rule.) This seems pretty unreasonable to me.

Yet another is that you're entitled to the expected lost value. So if I deprive you of a 35% chance to make $15,000, your recovery is $5,250, the fair market value of a 35% chance of making $15,000.

Another is that you're never entitled to recovery for low probability losses, but you're entitled for the full recovery once a loss is at least somewhat probable. This means that if you have a lottery ticket whose numbers you haven't recorded, no recovery is possible if I rip it up, even though you just paid $1 for that ticket.

My own sense is that the "fair market value" of the loss comes the closest to what is actually fair. So if I can prove that you deprived me of a 1% chance at $1,000,000, I'm entitled to a $10,000 recovery.

Yes, the right to do something is equivalent to the right not to have anyone stop you from doing it.

They're attempting to violate my property rights by carrying out an act that's intended to do so and has a high chance of succeeding. I've suffered no actual damages, but I think that's close enough to be considered a violation: I have the right not to be subject to serious attempts to violate my rights.

Well, I have a hard time imagining a real damage you could suffer that wouldn't involve damaging, moving, or rearranging the property. But I don't think I can object to this argument unless you're going to say that loss of potential revenue counts as a "real damage".

That's because there is no such right. The right is strictly a negative right, the right not to have anyone interfere with my car or my driveway.

That's only because you've mis-stated the right as a positive right. The right is not to have anyone interfere with my property without my permission. Since you have permission, you aren't in any way affecting my rights. Rights are not yokes that tie us down and prevent us from doing things. They are spheres of moral authority over which none may intrude.

Only because there is no such right at all. Imagine you have two glass structures, substantially identical. There are two people and one of them hits each of your glass structures with a hammer, intending to damage it. Assuming neither structure breaks, have they violated your property rights?

The property right is a zone of authority. It's your property, so you say what happens to it. If someone violates this right, and you suffer damage as a result, that damage is recoverable in court. The damage could be physical damage to the property, it could be loss of use of the property, or it could be anything else so long as it's a real damage and it's fairly attributable to the action that violated that right.

Let's do a simple substitution to illustrate how absurd this is.

"It cannot be the case that I have the right to swing a baseball bat in the park and you can still sue me if I do so and damage your face. If it's my right to swing a baseball bat in the park, it's your obligation to protect your body from a baseball bat."

Your right to swing a baseball bat is, of course, not absolute. In general you have the right to swing your bat, but my right not to have my face bashed in takes precedence. That places an implicit limit on your right to swing.

Likewise, in general you have the right to shine your flashlight, but my right not to have my property damaged takes precedence. That places an implicit limit on your right to shine it, but the limit doesn't have to be as broadly drawn as you've proposed: we don't have to ban you from shining the flashlight through all windows with no regard to what's on the other side.

Yes, rights do conflict, which is why we've come up with ways to resolve those conflicts.

Your right to drive your car in your driveway is not absolute. Suppose I'm standing in your driveway, with your permission, when suddenly you decide it's time to drive your car down the driveway. You run me over and I sue you. You'll quickly find that my right not to be run over takes precedence over your right to drive.

My right to have my fragile glass structure remain intact is not absolute either. Your right to drive in your driveway takes precedence, assuming reasonable circumstances (driving at a normal speed, in a vehicle that produces typical levels of vibration, with no malicious intent, etc.).

Because I'm not the one who damaged your house. Refusing to fix your house is different from knocking it down. The culprit you're looking for might be an earthquake, a strong wind, or termites, but it isn't me or anyone else who simply declined to take action to stop an event they had no preexisting obligation to stop.

No, I'm addressing it by pointing out that you're misinterpreting the events in the hypothetical. There was physical damage to the car: you rearranged its parts against my wishes. It wasn't permanent, but if it caused me to miss the meeting, then it must have taken some time to repair, and that time is the only tangible damage I've suffered.

If you believe there's some way your sabotage could have caused me to miss the meeting without costing me any time, would you mind spelling it out? I don't see how I can respond to the hypothetical if there's important context missing.

Yes, exactly. It cannot be the case that I have the right to shine a flashlight in your window and you can still sue me if I do so and damage your film. If it's my right to shine a flashlight in your window, it's your obligation to protect your property from a flashlight.

It won't work, rights would hopelessly conflict. How can I have a right to drive my car down my driveway if you can sue me if my doing so knocks down your fragile glass structure?

Your scheme will cause hopeless conflicts. How can you have the right not to have vibrations damage your fragile glass structure and me have the right to drive my car onto my driveway?

You seem to be recognizing as rights things that simply are not rights. There is no right not to suffer damages. Life is damage.

Nobody would want to live in your world. A person doing normal activities that they have every right to do could wind up liable for massive damages even though they didn't violate the rights of others one bit. Say I build a car that blows up if anyone utters the word "cheese". Does this mean nobody can ever utter the word "cheese"? Does this mean there's some rights conflict? No, it doesn't. There's no right not to have your car blow up. The right is about a zone of exclusivity, not about freedom from adverse consequences from the rightful actions of others.

Say my house is in danger of falling down. I ask you to fix it and you refuse. Say then my house falls down. Why didn't your not fixing my house violate my right not to have my house damaged? There has to be (with a very few special expections) a wrongful act, an act that violates the right.

You're disputing the hypothetical rather than addressing it. The hypothetical is that no physical damage to your car takes place but you can prove you missed the meeting and suffered damages.

My right to control the configuration of my property includes keeping you out of my house, just like it includes keeping your paint off of my Rembrandt. Again, this derives from the nature of physical space: the house can't contain everyone and everything all at once, so someone has to decide what goes inside, and that person is the owner. Same goes for the museum.

Are you saying you're entitled to ruin all my film unless I agree to outlaw shining flashlights through windows?

What's the purpose of this Rube Goldberg system of rights and wrongs? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to say that what happens to me and my property as a result of your act is what determines whether I've been wronged?

I beg to differ. If what you call "property rights" don't even fulfill the basic requirement of stopping someone else from breaking my stuff, then they're so watered down as to be worthless.

Sometimes one person's rights conflict with another person's rights, but we don't need to demolish those rights in order to resolve the conflict.

A meeting with a potential client has no tangible value, even if I wish to have his money and I'm "near certain" my wish will come true. It's not mine yet.

That doesn't mean there's no damage from your act, though. Clearly reconnecting the wire cost something, otherwise I would've reconnected it in zero seconds and gotten to the meeting on time. It cost me the time it took to diagnose the problem and reconnect the wire, and we can assign a value to that time.

All rights have contours. These are not the contours of intellectual property rights. Even the right to life and to be left alone has contours. For example, say you're on the way to the hospital. I stop by moving in front of you to you to ask you what time it is. Suppose it could be proven that my stopping you delayed your arrival at the hospital and caused your death. Well, tough. This type of 'minimal invasion' simply doesn't violate the right.

You surely have a right not to have someone shine a million watt spotlight in your window at night. But if my flashlight brushes across your window, there is no violation of your rights. Again, that type of minimal invasion simply doesn't violate the right.

Exactly. You need three elements:

1) A wrongful act, that is, one that violates a right.

2) A harm, that is, provable damages.

3) A connection between the wrongful act and the harm.

Trespassing on property is a wrongful act. Physical damage to property is a harm. Property rights and not just the right not to have your property harmed, they're a right to not have your property trespassed on or messed with without your consent. Physical damage to property is not the only harm that can result from a trespass.

There are tons of exceptions to these rules though, there have to be or you get very seriously crazy result in weird cases. Some of those exceptions are absolutely required to have a sensible legal system and some of them are judgment calls that reasonable people can disagree on. For example, I could see a Libertarian society making an exception to the requirement of provable harm in the case where the wrongful act is a trespass that violates a significant privacy right.

People are against monopolies. Rename them. They are now called "property". People are now in favor of monopolies.

Trespassing is well covered. There's no real damages, though.

So if I break into your house (without damaging anything), go through all your stuff, and put everything back the way it was, that doesn't violate any of your property rights?

This seems circular. How do we know whether an act is "wrongful" without knowing whether it violates rights?