Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 116. (Read 105893 times)

I'm not against IP laws but i will never support them.

A idea is worthless the moment you have it and for as long as you are keeping it hidden in your mind. The moment you put that idea in practice it becomes priceless , and the moment it's copyable it becomes infinite. IP laws don't protect the inventor from copycats it just hands him a monopoly on an now infinite resource. Now i'm not saying that the inventor shouldn't be reworded for it's idea but IP laws don't reward him , they just grant him monopoly then people can choose to buy it's monopoly infinite resource or not. And as good as a idea is, it  on it's own is worthless , being put in practice is just as important , and the most important is it's utility to people.

A good IP law would be one that promotes and advertises the original , maybe even make the copycats advertise the original so the public can choose to reward the inventor and reward the best practitioner , and one that wouldn't cost me a dime to register my idea.

Any law that ain't based on educating the public ain't worth having. Because in the end the public is the one who choses ,pays and profits. If they don't give a damn about inventors then we shouldn't have inventions. We have to educate the people to buy from those practitioners that support the inventor , if they don't then there isn't much you can do even with IP laws and in my opinion there shouldn't be something you could do.

I have to ask you: If you had the cure for cancer would you patent it and ask royalties or would you leave it in the public domain?

If you patent it are you any better then a drug dealer? Or a kidnapper (give me X*$ or you die)? Or you may choose to make it public domain after you die , that would make your murderer a hero? Or you may choose to keep it to yourself without ever disclosing it , would that make any difference to anybody , maybe to you if you had cancer , but that's it , the public won't know about it so there won't be any cure therefore no benefit. Or you may make it public domain and make contracts with some companies that can produce it and ask them to pass part of the profit and ask the people to buy from those if they want to support you. In my opinion not having something is far better than someone having a monopoly on something especially something infinite.


I would like to give Tesla as an example . He gave us many things but most of it's inventions were kept secret , and in the end he died penniless , and the public never benefited from all his inventions, most ended up in the states arms and will never get out of there. So how did we benefit here from the ip laws or even him?

Karmicads, thank you for a very insightful post on the IP debate.  It's rare to see such a balanced viewpoint; many of the more vociferous people here are often highly polarised in their opinions and it can be difficult to have a rational discussion that doesn't descend into slanging matches.

I would contribute a couple of arguments here, not necessarily applicable to IP law, but more generally to the validity of some legal system.  Take the road and cars.  Here the law says "drive on the left", there it says "drive on the right".  Now, it may well be that, given some peculiar asymmetry in human anatomy, or the laws of physics or chemistry, it is somehow 'better' that we should drive on one side and not the other, and all those countries where you drive on the other side have simply 'got it wrong'.  For sure, though, those countries that have it wrong are certainly better off than a country where there is no imposition and anyone can drive on whichever side they please.

Similarly, current IP law is almost certainly flawed, but I suspect that if there were no such law, we would never have had the steam engine.  This argument does not fare so well in defence of the current entertainment industry, though Karmicads has made it clear that he would be quite happy to see the greedy middleman eliminated.  However, in the global village, it is easily possible for a creative inventor or artist to be greedy aswell.

Here's a hypothetical situation for Karmicads to consider.  Suppose I sweat and labour for a week and manage to write a song that becomes a global craze, but I insist on some small contribution from every person that downloads or otherwise obtains a copy.  After a month I have received enormous wealth from the 'honest' downloaders, and have started a million legal claims of IP theft against the 'dishonest' ones.  Shouldn't there be some point at which this income stops being "earnings" and becomes "greed"?  Isn't there some point at which the inventor or creator has been paid a "fair" amount?

You can't really fall back to the argument that the market will decide how much a fair amount is (the "no such thing as inherent value" argument).  If that's the case, then you implicitly justify 'dishonest' downloading of my song - all downloaders, both honest and dishonest, *are* the market.  If they *all* download without rewarding me, then the market values my work at zero.

Excellent phrase.

I swear I've seen this somewhere else before. I think he ripped it off.

Chanting mantras as if to be presenting rational arguments, is incompatible with freethinking. So as a freethinker that presents me with a dilemma. You appear to be saying "You can't be in my club if you don't accept X Y and Z" That's called a religion. If libertarianism is a religion, then I accept your exclusion.


Well the world would be in a fine state, if everybody who ever had a good idea, kept it to themselves. As it happens, sharing an idea does nothing to change who 'owns' it. Credit is rightfully given to the originator of the idea, so It's my idea no matter who I do or don't share it with. It certainly doesn't sound very 'libertarian' of you to be attempting to dictate who I can or cant share my ideas with.  


Absolute nonsense. There are a myriad of things you cant legally do with your pen and paper, simply because you profess they are your possessions. You cant write death threats, defamatory letters, or pick up the pen and jab someone's eye out with it. Possession of an object is no assurance that you have the right do do anything you want with it. I already illustrated this in my OP, with the analogy of speeding. Is it theft that the law prohibits speeding, because it places restrictions on what you can and cant do with your car and your foot? Another way of looking at this, is that you DO in fact have the right to use your pen and paper in any way you wish. But with rights come responsibilities. You have the right to use your pen anyway you wish. However you also have the responsibility to accept the consequences of your choices. I don't much care for playing devils advocate on behalf of the law as there's loads of BS authoritarian control I deplore, but your claim to ownership of an object, as giving you free reign to do absolutely anything you wish is nonsense.

If it's not theft when one law is enforced, it's not theft when ANY law is enforced. Theft itself is defined in law, indeed by law. It describes particular situations and they don't include situations where the state exercises it's power to enforce the law. If you have a concept of ownership and theft that overrides law, then others are free to agree or disagree because it's purely hypothetical, but nobody id duty bound to honor your protocols. Meanwhile we have working protocols in place that not only enforce the limits placed on ownership, but protect the rights. You may complain about speed limits, restricting as they do, your freedom to use your own property as you see fit, but if your car is stolen and you go to the police to report it, then you are stepping back from your autonomous concept of ownership/theft and into the protocols of ownership and theft that the law mandates. We cant have our cake and eat it too. If the law is expected to protect us, we are expected to accept the bounds of freedom. It's certainly no 'anti-libertarian' to acknowledge the rule of law even if we would prefer to modify it.  


I also addressed this in my OP. It's rather futile to make any point about how a legitimate claim and contract can be unlawfully and unethically bypassed, If the point in question is should the author have the right to IP protection. The practical considerations of enforceability or policability of a law, has no baring ethical considerations of whether it is a just law.  To quote the OP:




I cant provide evidence that we are better off for the existence of any law. Until a person has a particular claim to violation of a particular law and takes it up with the authorities, then the protections of law are moot. Even then, the law can only serve in the specific interests of the plaintiff or person lodging a complaint. The benefits assumed, that the law acts as a deterrent in general, is a less quantifiable proposition. It's rather like the argument put forward by Hazlitt that the alternative repercussions of any economic policy may be less obvious. Building a bridge to create employment on 'public works' for example, tends to create the illusion of productivity and employment. It presents a positive impact for those individuals that can be directly seen, but less obvious is the cost encumbered by the taxpayer and where else those dollars may have been spent.

If you had read Hazlitt's book and really understood the extended consequence of "The Broken Window", I wouldn't expect you to pose such a contrived, parochial, one sided case. Hazlitt also repeatedly throughout his book, presents numerous affirmations of the collective value of invention and entrepreneurial innovation. You cant be much of an economist if you fail to comprehend the basic motives of effort and reward, wherein rewards are afforded to those who make an effort to provide something of value.  


You can? I didn't realize it was illegal to make reproductions or derivative art works. What I thought was illegal in art at least, is attempting to create a reproduction, and then pass it off as the original. However talented anybody may be in painting a convincing repro of the Mona Lisa for example, as far as I know it's not considered illegal to do so. But if you then attempt to sell the repro as the original, I understand that it will rightfully be seen a fraud. The context of value as it pertains to art, is instructive as I pointed out in the OP, that it demonstrates that there may be great subjective value in it, that goes way beyond the physical utility of the materials used. The artist creates potential value and that is endorsed by the demand for their work.

Nothing about that prevents another artist from attempting to emulate the original, but only the market can decide if there is similar value in the reproduction or derivative work. It should come as no surprise that derivative works attract less esteem and value, since they tend to aspire to emulate great works that are already highly regarded. In art there tends to be no second prize and that actually demonstrates the value of the originality imbued in a work by the artist. That is to say, paint, canvas and timber frames have some utility function that describes their value, but the value imbued by original creativity and the talent in expressing it, is something that market forces may deem to be of value way beyond the utility of the material medium.

Even in the absence of IP laws, it is obvious that the intangibility of ideas, creativity and talent, are worth paying for. For as long as original art has existed, we have demonstrated this by agreeing to pay for art whatever we perceive it to be worth. That is typically far beyond the material value of the media used in producing it. Nor do we simply total the cost of supplies and then add an hourly rate to account for the time the artist spent producing the work. No! The talent and skills inherited by the medium is expressed by an aesthetic or abstract function all of it's own. In the case of paintings, sculpture or other one-off original art, there is little need for IP to protect the value of the artist's talent, since you cant copy the work and still have the value of the original transfered. Your copy will be limited in value according to what the market deems worthy of your own work.

As far as a patent IP goes in the endeavor of invention, I hardly think you could make any valid case that it has on the whole, prevented progress of the kind characterized by improvements of a derivative nature from existing inventions. The primitive automobile was known as horseless carriage, due to the obvious derivativeness due to the evolution of invention, was not prevented from emerging. Nor was the ball point pen you profess so exclusively to own, possible to have emerged without it's historical legacy, in being derived from the quill and then the fountain pen. If you claim that IP laws make derivative forms impossible, than the onus is on you to support this assertion. Meanwhile, it appears to be self evident you are ignoring obvious facts to the contrary. Derivative works are apparently replete throughout the world of invention. You may very well make your petulant plaints, expounding your liberties to do what you wish with your pen an paper, but they might just as well been represented as a right to do the same with a fountain pen, a quill or a chisel and hammer. Instead you make them on a modern computer and ignore the value that all intermediaries of invention, have afforded you in the creative process.

If you think that's somehow unfair, that nobody want's to pay for your reproduction or derivative work and give you the same level of esteem or praise for your talent as they do for the original, that's just stiff luck really, but it has nothing to do with IP law. Market forces will ultimately determine the value of anything (whether IP laws exist or not), and the underwhelming lack of demand for repros, derivative works and copycat ideas, is a function of market forces, not IP laws. Even if I have massive investment in world wide IP protection, design rights and every imaginable protection made possible by law, that in no way assures me that my idea will translate to any measure of 'value' endorsed by the market.

I could spend millions on the chemistry required to develop an adhesive to stick wet noodles to your head and invest hundreds of thousands in IP protection for it. Then I could invest a million or more in production and marketing, so that everybody willing to pay a couple of bucks, will have the ability to shave their head bald and don an illustrious head covered with wet noodles. "You remember what it used to be like..." I might implore, "those frustrating hours in front of the mirror trying to get your noodles to sit there and look just right. All those bits of double sided tape that stick to everything but the noodles, and trying to walk along the street with an unnatural posture so your noodles would not slip off your head. Well now theres NoodleFix ^tm. Wet noodles are no longer a challenge for the fashion savvy noodle head. Just one thin coat, dump a bowl of noodles on your head, wait a minute to set and you're ready to go."

Can you imagine how much benefit I might attain in this case, from my investment in IP? How much benefit should I expect? I don't know, except to say that the market is the place to decide that and my temporary rewards are decided there in proportion to the value that my ideas confer to the community. It's not just some one-sided game that only rewards the artist/inventor. It's hardly even that. I will not be protected from the harsh realities of market forces. In the case of patent IP, it's an investment proposition like any other, with all the inherent risks and pitfalls of any investment. IP protection costs a pretty penny and only protects the inventor against outright copycat commercial exploitation.


Oh really? OK Let's test your assertion. According to Wikipedia:


Now it's your turn. Show me "someone suffering because they can't have the same thing generically and cheaper." And cheaper than what might I ask? Cheaper than the price it would cost if nobody had ever thought of it, or cheaper than the price you would pay if nobody had ever had to pay a cent to Samuel B. Fay for the benefit of his creative contribution? You wish to undermine the only mechanism of reward we have to simply be a cheapskate and pay the material price of production, while begrudging the tiny fraction of included cost awarded to the originator of the idea itself?

Following the implications of your overwrought appeal to "suffering" for want of "the same thing generically and cheaper", I can't help speculating that you are alluding specifically to the case of pharmaceuticals. Firstly, there is a fair argument to be made that nobody would be suffering any less, for the want of a new drug that is yet to be invented, but only for the want of some incentive to develop it in the first place. You may think that research and development just pops out of thin air and that suffering is alleviated by some miraculously fortuitous accident of chemistry, but those in the pharmacology industry might care to set you straight on that mater.

The argument over ruthless profitering and corporate commercialization is a subject that deserves a separate hearing and of course IP laws can be reigned into the fold of merciless corporate greed, but that is another issue, quite independent of whether the inventor deserves our reward for genuine value bestowed upon the community for their innovations. Once again, it's easy to see that middlemen, money mongers, profiteers and marketers might get the better of the profit for protection bargain, but that in no way, imputes the deserving claim, of the creative mind who originates the idea and gives us something of value. The inventor is more likely to be the victim of ruthless corporate greed and likely to be sold short by some corporate claim to their intellectual property. If you want to actually have access to drugs that reduce suffering (at all) then you need to reward the innovations and provide an incentive to produce them. Nobody is likely to provide you with "generic" alternatives, unless the product is developed by somebody in the first place. For that there needs to be some incentive.


Agreed!



I would only challenge that they hurt us due to their existence, rather than that they are are like many implements of state control poorly implemented, misdirected and flagrantly abused by those who have the money/power to do so. I have my own earnest grievances with IP law, but calling for it's abolition, appears to me as so much throwing away the baby with the bath water.


And you can?

I think Hazlitt makes the point as well as anybody so far, that the benefits of the alternatives to any policy may be far less than obvious. Would you be enthused, if expected to prove that the productivity and employment of that bridge consigned by the state, might be better spent on the alternative of letting the taxpayer spend the dollars saved and all the myriad of choices and consequences that are available to that end? NO! I have no doubt you would object. That bridge may be more obvious in it's immediate benefits than the case  alternative case for not having it at all. I wouldn't expect YOU to prove all the alternatives made possible by 'no bridge' in order to fairly argue either for or against it. You should know that the alternatives to anything, are a myriad of other alternatives. Arguing X vs Y, where X is a specific thing and Y is a myriad of diffuse alternative is rather like claiming hammers are useless, unless you can use them to nail smoke to the floor.

Nevertheless the state has to make provisions and policy choices. Some of them may be beneficial, others may be lamentable or even disastrous. Pointing to existing provisions and expecting a tidy quantification of all the alternatives to it, is absurdity to the n^th degree and you should know it. It should suffice to say, that it's reasonable to expect people to be motivated according to the laws of effort and reward. If they are encouraged (by possible  rewards), to make some effort to produce innovations and that those innovations create some mutual value in society, then it stands to reason that their potential for being rewarded for their creative produce, is enhanced and fostered, in such a way that they will likely be motivated to invent and create things of value. IP is supposed to foster such a reward structure. The expectation in terms of effort and reward, that it tends to do what it sets out to do, is self evident. Whether it is balanced or fair is another issue.


Again, I must caution that you might care to restrain your careless slinging of emotive accusations, such that I have ignored your claims to injustice. If anybody is ignoring anything, it's obvious to me that you have ignored my diligent efforts to address those very same claims in detail and  deal with them at their fundamental core. In the OP I clearly give a detailed examination to that very issue. So enough with your divisive BS about ignorance. It's only you, who is being ignorant here. As for practical grounds, for a system that rewards innovation, I invite your next response to be delivered to all forum participants on individually chiseled  stone tablets. Or am I going to far into our pre-technological past not to allow you the use benefits of the quill an papyrus scroll? Do you think it's more responsible to endorse a course of action, that undermines the reward structures underpinning our whole of technological society? The so called irresponsible coarse of action you allude to, happens to be the status quo, and while it is never certain to have been the best of all histories, you are sitting there reading this on the screen of a modern computer that just a few decades ago, would have been impossible to even imagine. If IP law doesn't help the advance of technology and innovation, as much as it possibly could, it's far from clear how it could be considered a hindrance.

What is beyond irresponsible and verging on absurd, is the endorsement of complete abolition of IP law and all the well deserved rewards of our creative ambassadors who you seem so inclined to take for granted. It's possible to create things without rewards, but it's far less obvious that without incentives to create things that anybody would be likely to do so. You don't need to be greedy to be an innovator. Moreover you're much more likely to care less about material rewards, however it's still possible to be beaten out of the market by greedy competitors when you emerge with your innovative ideas, so that you don't even have the chance to eek out a basic existence.  That is true EVEN NOW. I know this from first hand experience. Even with the current slew of IP laws to offer protection to those who can afford them, there are honest, deserving, innovators who will slip through the cracks and never be allowed to benefit from their own innovation. Would you mind telling me how the abolition of IP laws (as apposed to the reform of them), is supposed to help those little guys? Please explain how the little guy with a  great idea is supposed to benefit from the likes of predators who can think of nothing original themselves. Your Utopian world world of no IP laws, appears to be a parasites paradise.

I agree with the sentiment but what if you have an idea that requires you to hire programmers to implement?  Would you feel that you owned the product they made or that it should be available for free?

Bonus question: if as a result of your product being cracked, you have no money from sales from payroll, do you feel a moral obligation to pay your staff anyway?

Intellectual property is incompatible with Libertarianism.

If you want to own a idea then don't share it with anyone. Telling me what I can and can't do with my pen and my paper is claiming ownership over my pen and paper. That's little more than theft.

If you sell me a book, you are free to set the terms of the purchase. If you want me to sign a contract that says I can't make copies of that book, that's possible. However, if I violate that contract and show it to a third party, that third party is under no contract and can do whatever they want, including, making copies of it.

You can't even provide evidence that, aside from the issues of injustice in controlling the usage of property you don't own, that we are even better off without intellectual property. For every work of art you show, I can show another that doesn't exist because it was prevented from being made, being deemed a "derivative". For every patent you can show me, I can show you someone suffering because they can't have the same thing generically and cheaper. Intellectual property rights help us. That's self-evident. Intellectual property rights also hurt us. That's also self-evident. Can you prove which outweighs which? No, you can't. Therefore it's irresponsible to endorse a course of action that you can't even justify on practical grounds, even ignoring that it's injustice to control property that I rightfully own.

I have recently taken the time to review a particular thread, Read this before having an opinion on economics" which was begun (by bitcoin2cash) in support of a particular book "Economics In One Lesson." by Henry Hazlitt. I have decided to begin a new thread for several reasons. Firstly the name of the thread and the issue it was swiftly co-opted by,(that of IP) made a tangential subject of Hazlitt's book, while the name of the thread became a misnomer. Second the above thread didn't for my BTC, tend towards any equitable resolution, but rather, it trailed off without fully addressing some fundamentals, which were only lightly brushed upon. Finally that thread has been dead for sometime, so I thought I would try to give the Intellectual Property debate some air, with a more fitting title and start again.

Having read the thread completely, I also read through Economics In One Lesson, for some context over the whole thread (in case it was relevant). I was, I must say, presently surprised at what turned out to be a very inspiring affirmative book, that reminded me, that the more I learn about economics, the more it seems I already knew. Not to be a smart ass, but I've been saying the same sort's of things for decades and Hazlitt only confirms them. In light of the above thread, I was expecting an obtuse diatribe of sophist rhetoric, to justify a preconceived agenda. I think it's quite instructive that Hazlitt's book, lends so much import to technical innovation and invention and following the central theme of the book illustrated by the 'The Broken Window' analogy, we can clearly see an irony emerge in the application of this principal to the special pleadings of the Anti-IP brigade. In this book, Hazlitt makes no overt pronouncements of his views of Intellectual Property, but If read without bias, the treatise makes a case as damning to the special pleadings of Anti-IP crusaders as any special interest. Perhaps the most overt testimony Hazlitt makes for an endorsement of IP though, is the very first thing presented in the book. No not in the first chapter. Not in the preface. Not even in the Contents list, but before all that, his book sets the record straight:


I should note, this is not issue of contention for Hazlitt, who implicitly endorses IP in the tenets of his Economics, as well as embracing it as a function of his professional life. The irony goes to those who would elevate this publication with the merit it so clearly deserves and yet fail so completely to apply its lesson to their own position.

I can honestly declare I have a fair degree of ambivalence regarding IP as it stands today, not because I feel that it should be abolished, but because it so often serves the less deserving interests at the expense of those who it should be protecting. I personally have failed to find the capital required to launch innovations due to the complexity, paperwork and expense of patent law. I have also, foolishly (without non-disclosure agreements), trusted people and consequently had innovations that were the earnest fruits of my mind, used by people I can reasonably assume would not have otherwise had them and commercialized for good profit. Had I been better placed or supported, I would have been the (I will say 'rightful') beneficiary.

If anybody is going to benefit from the providence of a good idea, then it should at least in some part be the innovator themselves. The problem in a world without any reward structures for intellectual providence, is that it not only destroys the incentives of the creative endeavor but leaves those who would innovate in the gutter, while those who have no part in the creation of a valuable idea, to profit from the spoils. There should be no need to restate the free-rider problem. What concerns me, is not to restrict the liberty of the end-user from having the object and using it, but the misappropriation of the creative process that adds value to the finished product.

Argument's of shrill, petulant indignation. for the liberty of a person to obtain and posses the creative product, once divorced from it's physical medium, give no consideration for where the value of the thing comes from. All value is equated to the material instance of the thing and none to the value of the intangible creative component that makes the thing so much more than just a blob of matter. Disregarding the value proposition, in the creative processes is as limited and biased as anything Hazlitt mentioned in his book.

One thing we should dispense with from the outset, is the petulant recourse to a slippery slope of escalating retaliation, that some Anti-IP libertarian crusaders like to resort to. A LAW is a LAW. That doesn't guarantee it is morally just, not by any means. Almost everybody knows laws they find ethically unsatisfactory. I might prefer, to be allowed to go wandering naked in the streets and claim this liberty to be an unalienable right. I have the right to take this position as a matter of principal. In practice however, I have to acknowledge that I am a member of a (however imperfectly) democratic society and that however intensely earnest my own convictions may be, I am not above the law and that the rule of law applies to all the laws I do like, as well as those I don't.

The simple fact that any law when disobeyed, will lead to a similar escalation in punitive repercussions, does not give recourse to any argument about the ethical validity of the particular law that is being enforced. Whether it is littering loitering or looting, you will be expected to face the consequences. And yeah the law can be a proper ass. Most libertarians have a whole slew of contentious bones to pick, before we proclaim we're satisfied with the ethical values of the law. But as they say in the big house, if you do the crime, be prepared to do the time.

It's sufficient to say that you disagree with a law, but what makes it wrong, should not rely on the fact that it will lead to repercussions if not obeyed. The argument that Intellectual property is right or wrong either way, should stand or fall on it's own merit, not on the consequences of it being enforced. It goes without saying that an unjust law encroaches on our liberties but disobeying law is not one of our liberties. Pretending that it shouldn't be law, because of the consequences implicit in disobeying that law, is simply begging the question.

In a similar vein, I see there is a tendency to appeal to the un-policeable nature of IP law, such that if by some furtively covert means you could sidestep it, that somehow demonstrates that there was no ethical basis for the motive behind enshrining it in the first place. I'm referring here to the convoluted scenarios being entertained about how the contents of a book or a blueprint might fall into the wrong (or right - depending on your view) hands. Whether by X-ray glasses, telescopes or by the transgression of a third party, the laborious details are hammered out to show just how the Anti-IP crusader can 'get away' with an act of espionage, as if to proclaim that the futility of policing the law, somehow demonstrates their ethical precedence, in claiming it to be unjust.

What needs to be considered before all else, is the underlying justifications for our society having invested our reward system in recognizing intellectual accomplishment and the value proposition, engendered by those who are able to manifest it. What is considered to be 'property' by this standard, is the product of the social collective, who value the intellectual fruits of talented minds, that are (and rightly should be) entitled to fair rewards for their innovative creativity, toils and tenacity, from inspiration through, research, design, prototypes and on to licencing and production. It's hard enough for the inventor as it is to catch a break and the proposition that coming up with a good idea is easy, is what you might expect to hear from any damn fool who literally has NO IDEA!

You tell me that you have come up with any ORIGINAL idea that is as remotely useful as a paper-clip for instance, and that you have been through the trial and tribulations, from the first moment of inspiration to seeing you idea realized and rolling off the production line, then you tell me that good ideas are plentiful. You tell me how pleased you will be to stand there, having made neither cent nor satoschi, for the benefit you have bestowed upon the world, while some greedy tyrant, who sold out on you or just used your idea if you gave it up freely, is now on the way to being worth millions. I doubt that anybody so flippant as to claim 'ideas are plentiful', would ever have the slightest chance of ever being in this situation. Inventing is like rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat and almost nobody wants you to win, no matter how damn honest you are. Let me see the anti-IP crusader who has genuine valuable ideas, that are worthy of pilfering for profit set about realizing them or giving them up freely.

Otherwise, I would like to be enlightened exactly how, without the basic protection of IP, an honest but poor, diligent, hard working inventor, can have any hope of creating ideas so valuable that are worth stealing but be granted the benefit of taking them to the market. The original idea is obviously a subject of some value if anybody else might like to make use of it. That by the way, is NOT increasing the plenitude of ideas (hint: It's still the same idea if you simply copy it.). You cant proclaim that ideas are plentiful because they may be copied. Copying an idea and originating it are worlds apart In principal. If you are talented enough to have your own ideas worth paying for then you shouldn't have any need to endorse the profiting from ideas that are originated by others. Go have your own ideas if you profess them to be so plentiful. And nobody is precluding anybody from possessing and using the manifestations of an idea that is protected by IP. The example given in 'Against Intellectual Property', which point's out that: "If I invent a technique for harvesting cotton,
your harvesting cotton in this way would not take away the technique from me." is a prime example of disingenuous sophistry.

Theres a huge difference between being allowed to buy a cotton harvester, manufactured under licence and incorporating a royalty for it's inventor and not being permitted to use an instance of the intellectual property. You will not be asked to pay the price of having the monopoly to USE something, but simply to manufacture and market it. Of course the idea of invention are non-exclusive, that's the beauty; the inventor recognizes a need and solves a problem that is not just manifest in the single instance s/he first sees it and solves it, but by generalizing that solution s/he see the potential to solve the same problem on a much wider scale. It seems to me that the Opponents of IP cant make this distinction between USE and manufacture. In order to prevail in their views, they hold to rigid semantics of arbitrary definitions, wherein 'work' can only be valued if it is physical labor and 'possessions' or 'belongings' must be tangible assets not some some intellectual concept that you cant directly touch, taste, see, hear or smell. The concepts of their value system are held to be tangibles and that is that.

Since discovering bitcoin I have learned so much about economics and I have plenty more to learn yet. One thing I had always known, but has been reiterated over and again, in everyday life it is so easy to habitual forget, is that ALL value is subjective. I had long known and acknowledged the momentarily enlightening principal, that something is only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it. But to carry that with me and recognize that things do not have any intrinsic value is another matter. We all subjectively value things on our own terms. Yet it's hard not to think as if the ounce of gold or glass of beer is valuable in it's own right. We know there are many others who will agree with us and conspire to place value in the object. We are the ones who objectify things with value, whether individually or collectively. Nevertheless, all value embedded in anything of human value, originates from the subjective idea that is borne of this primal subjective desire. Value itself is an idea. There is nothing less legitimate about the value of an idea, just because it has no immediate manifestation in the physical world. As soon as it does, we may throw away the, idea and only value the item that has benefited from incorporating it, or we may see that  the intellectual providence or talent imbued in it by creative thought, is intrinsic to it and what gives it value. It is subjective value by any measure.

What has happened in history, is that we have started out with physical things, which can have value, only by virtue of their utility function or aesthetic appeal, then progressively the value of the creative intellect or art, has been liberated from the utility of the tangible medium.  A famous sculptor or painter could be rewarded well for the providence of their talent, but they could only expect a one-off payment for each piece of art they produce. Nevertheless the renown and popularity they might well deserve for their creative product, is likely be manifest in the inordinately high price paid if the art pieces were in good demand and were perceived subjectively to have aesthetic (or perhaps abstract conceptual) value. It's far from likely that highly prized art such as this is likely to have any price correlation to the canvas, the paint or the timber in the frame. The materials that make the piece, in other words, you might  ironically say, are actually immaterial. The reward for the merit of the artists talent is practically the whole essence of the value and the confinement of this art to it's physical medium contributed to it's rarity. The renascence painter may get no royalty today, nor would his descendants, but then the paintings sold could command higher value, because they were each one of a kind.

Moving on to the book publishing industry of more modern times, the ability to print copies of a book, enables the talent of an author to be shared by many more people, but obviously the individual rarity of the creative product is not as potent. Publishers aspire to selling in volume because theirs is a mass produced product. The author is rewarded the same way but to a lesser degree. If their work is highly prized they make more even if they make much less per unit value. It's easy to see that the publishers have a job to do and have to compete in the market for business. They ad an important component to the value that is the whole value of the book. Likewise the printers contribute paper ink and printing services that are factored into the whole price. The bookstores buy at wholesale and add their markup to cover expenses and profits, so that we can go shopping and buy a book. Now the Anti-IP crusader claims that the only one not deserving of payment is the one who wrote the book in the first instance. The one who provided all the creative talent to begin with, is begrudged the right to lay claim to the creative output of their own mind.

Sure you can point out that you have the physical means to download and print a book and that doing so is nobody's business because you are only using your own equipment. That A) what you do with your own equipment is your own business and B) any effort to impose a restriction on you is an imposition on your liberties. The question is this. Let's say you want the physical book because you want to give it to somebody (who still likes physical books) as a gift. If you HAD bought the book from a bookshop then, and so you had happily paid for the physical product of paper and inkalong with the editors services and the service that the bookshop provides, and everybody involved with the production of the book; are you then, still going to begrudge the only vital and necessary contributor to this finished product; the author? In that protracted gravy train, of middlemen and coat tail jockeys, would you choose the only person with any real talent and the one who provides the primary reason to produce a book in the fist instance, and say that the dollar they earn from a $20 book is unjustified? If their creative contribution were not worth paying for, you might as well go buy a pretty blank pad of nicely stationed paper, bound in a fitting cover and give that to Aunt Betsy, saying "I would have bought you the latest Daniel Steele title, but I couldn't bring myself to pay royalties for the authors talent".

Laws are fully intended to impose on your liberties.  Are we so self possessed as to claim that because we own our own car, gas pedal and foot that our liberty is being imposed upon if we can't go screaming through quiet suburban streets at 100 MPH? The risk of hitting a child chasing a ball onto the road might be nothing but an intangible, remote probability, at least till it happens. If the argument holds that it's your car and your foot and nobody has the right to tell you what to do with it, then undermining somebodies livelihood with your unlimited liberty to use your computer and printer may quite sensibly seem have little consequence. The point is not to invoke a contrived reductio ad absurdum equating copyright violation to killing children, but that we agree as a society, to limit the consequences of some potential outcomes, by surrendering some liberties. It's simply not true that just because you own something, it's your unassailable right to do with it, whatever you wish.

I'll be the first to admit that the copyright laws are way off beam, especially to the extent that they confer the rights to royalties well beyond the lifetime of the author/artist. But to contend that they should be abolished completely is also way beyond the pail. In exercising your 'liberties' to the extent of using your own equipment for self serve entertainment, I am somewhat ambivalent there. Most of what we help ourselves to that way, comes under the heading of stuff we never would have never paid for, if we had no choice. So there's an argument to be made that the artist is not loosing a paying customer. But what of the many paying customers who do willingly buy the real thing? If you remove the mechanism by which the writer/artist/performer is assured of their reward, there should be something in place to ensure they are offered what they deserve. If anybody should be cut out of the gravy train, the least deserving of such reform is the talent.

In music and other multimedia it's becoming more practical to get rid of the middleman and I have much less problem with that. I'd like to think people could be generous and voluntarily offer the artist a token of appreciation for their work, but in entertainment and aesthetic arts, it is much easier for the performer/artist to bid for their own reward. They are in the business of being known, popular and liked. It certainly seems unfair though, that two or three generations of a pop star's descendants/beneficiaries, get to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths and want for nothing, just because their granddaddy/mommy was somewhat talented. You might give a little coin voluntarily to who ever you like while their music/performance gives you entertainment, and that would rightfully dry up in the timely manner as the fans dictate.

You are however, hardly likely to buy a loaf of bread at the store, and say to the assistant: "Here, this is a 10 cent tip, because I want you to see too it, that the guy who invented the little plastic tag that keep my bread bag closed is rewarded for his inventive contribution." Ten cents is all he might cost you in your whole life, for his part in the cost of taking this innovation to market, but without IP laws he might receive nothing and possibly never did. The huge number of similar innovations we regularly take for granted, are embedded into our multitudes of products and services in such a way as we would never hope to individually reward the creative talent that has manifested in them. Moreover, we expect our products to compete on price so we want the best premium of value we can get, regardless of the fact that creative rewards are inbuilt. If anybody is taking a free ride there, it's not the poor inventor guy, who more often than not get's screwed over by the money people and marketing parasites. To axe IP wholesale, would do most damage to the deserving talent and intellectual benefactors of our current time.

Meanwhile there is still no valid philosophical justification, for why the virtuous idea or concept, should not be granted the imprimatur of a possession. It's a mater of fact that as a society we agree to do so, and that is because we have grown up in a world in which ideas have been gradually liberated from their physical constraints. The value of anything is subjective and society on the whole, is better off if we seek to reward that which we perceive to have value. In particular where practical invention is concerned the idea, if it is indeed a good idea, deserves some guarantee that just because it is comprised of intangible information, that the originator will not be sold short and their idea allowed to be stolen from them by opportunists, who will take advantage of the profitable value it may manifest without even acknowledging the originator.

It's all very well to cynically propose that you might have thought of the same idea independently but the purpose of patenting is to establish a priority. In a sense it's like solving the current block in the block-chain and 'staking a claim' to the treasure. I can remember the crude schoolyard protocol of 'finders keepers, losers weepers'. But that was often challenged by the plaint 'Hey! I saw it first'. Patenting establishes who has first rights to an original concept, even if the process is bewilderingly complex and expensive. We store information as a repository of value between the block-chain and our bitcoin.dat wallet files and so bitcoin demonstrates that information can be used purely as a store of value. We are way beyond saying that nobody can own information or a particular pattern. You can give me your wallet.dat file if you disagree. Information can be of mutual value and so it must be granted equitable protocols of origin, ownership and distribution. Who's to say what protocols are fair? I think we all are. I can think of nothing worse than the nihilistic anarchy, of throwing our arms up and saying "If you think of a good idea, it belongs to nobody". Even 'finders keepers' is more civilized and conducive of equanimity than that.

Sorry for the long rant.