Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 34. (Read 105875 times)

Another term for such an organized group is a government.

Armed citizens are no more than a rabble with guns.  Faced with proper trained forces with tanks, artillery and aircraft, no individuals will take them on.  Especially if foreign states are interested in the territory and are financing one of the "police" forces.

What if the "force" is armed citizens themselves, who agree not to screw with each other's stuff, agree to choose a court both agree to go to for disputes, and defend themselves from any outside or inside agressors? Your scenario assumes that no one living under those police forces would care, will keep supporting them financially, and that most people are assholes.

http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law.html

Sorry but the ideas are ridiculous.  How can you start from the point that there is no state?  Humans organise themselves - its as much part of our behaviour as eating.  As for his dispute resolution - "Implicit or explicit in their agreement would be the legal rules under which such disputes were to be settled."

A simple example would be inheritance.  A Muslim man marries a Christian woman.  They have a son and daughter.  They get divorced when the man wants to have both children circumcised.  The man goes to a Sharia court and gets custody of the children. The woman goes to a Christian court and gets custody.

Under these circumstance, the court with the money for a bigger army wins.  And there is no real scope for compromise - either the daughter is circumcised or not.

So unless you want a society where the guy with the money for a bigger army wins, you need to have 1 law.  Saying its cheaper to allow girls get circumcised than to fight the other guys army is not offering any improvement on where we are now.

The other glaring problem is that if a dispute does result in violence between police forces, the losing force is gone forever.  They are dead.  As time goes on, there will be fewer and few competing forces until you end up with one single force.  In theory anyone will be able to set up against them.  In practice, money applied to armies has an exponential rather than a geometric effect and all newcomers will be to weak ever to get a customer.  So you've worked your way back to a...state.

I think you'll find that most everything can be made into an argument for slavery or compared to genocide.  For example, "First they came for the Jews...then they came for the owners of intellectual property...then they came for me..."

See how easy and how stupid that is?  Why waste your time on it when I'm sure you could think of an intelligent answer?

Here you go: http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law.html


Sorry, I can't help that your argument for copyright is also a valid argument for slavery.

Videos are for people who think slowly.  If the message is worthwhile, there will be a transcript.

Comparing being deprived of the right to profit from copying movies with the horrors of slavery is a childish appeal to emotion.  At least you haven't compared it to being in a concentration camp but  I'm sure you can find some minor inconvenience to compare it to.

"The key decision is one of values. Do you value the availability of cotton higher than the freedom of slaves? Once you have decided that, whether you have one single lawmaker or a thousand is just a detail."

I take it you didn't bother to watch the video, then.

Actually the monopoly of violence/law making thing is sort of a side issue.  The key decision is one of values.  Do you value the availability of movies higher than the ability to profit from copying movies?  Once you have decided that, whether you have one single lawmaker or a thousand is just a detail.

No idea, but there was no clean solution.  Oftentimes that grantee didn't even take possession of the property.


Yes, and that is why the heirs actually got to keep a clean title to the portion of the property that they were granted in the will, so long as all of their siblings got roughly the same.  The property just couldn't be transfered to a single heir.  If there was only one heir, or if there was only one heir that the grantee actually liked, a portion of it could be donated to an intitution.  I'm not positive, but I believe that MIT got it's land grant like that; Yale, maybe.


Because the grantee didn't own the property, because the king of England didn't own the property.  The king of England never had the right to grant a deed to begin with.  It was unowned property, as far as the young US was concerned.  Again, it was a compromise in a situation that couldn't be resolved within the normal case law or British Common Law in any clean manner.  They literally did the best that they could.


Not at all, but the giver must honestly own the gift.  You can't steal a pie from your neighbor and then give half to your girlfriend, it's still theft of a whole pie.  The argument that this land was stolen/claimed by the king, and taken from illiterate American Indian tribes was never presented in that time, but it's true enough even though most of those tribes were long gone or long dead by the time that it was an issue for the young republic.  Do you understand that the heirs actually did get to keep the property?

Honestly, I don't know enough of the details of how things played out.  I don't know if anyone tried it or not.  You see, the argument was that the property wasn't legitimately owned by the grantee, but the compromise was that the heirs would actually get to keep the property as their own, (having the greatest claim towards homesteading because they grew up there) thus making that part their own legitimately, so long as the property was divided roughly evenly among the grantee's/living owner's children.  In Europe, legacies were maintained by granting all land to the oldest living son.  In any agricultral society, land ownership was political power.  In early America, it was the right to vote as well.  There were many social pressures besides this one law to not follow the European standard. 

Given what you said above (in bold):

So what if the property (real estate/physical property) was transferred prior to death? Would not that contract be honored? Seems like borderline theft.

I can potentially see how a contract could be null and void, and hence unenforceable, for a dead man. A contract is between 2 live individuals for it to be valid, but that would be one way to continue the yet-to-be-deceased's legacy.

We must protect property rights, including the right to transfer said property.

1) Why should any government agency have any greater right to confer the property of the deceased to anybody else better than the deceased himself?
2) Why not just let whoever hasn't claimed it to homestead it? Wouldn't the heirs have a greater claim to the property than anybody else?
3) Why shouldn't wills, trusts or other types of bequeathing documents have any force and effect?
4) Does the person have to "deserve" something before he can receive it? Gifts fall into this category.

This comes about almost entirely because of the number one premise for our society: a monopoly on law making is required.

edit... "this" being "it makes it hard for you to get things changed as its easier to change things incrementally than to wait for a revolution". Without a monopoly on law, I could choose another provider of law.

see: Anarchy and the efficient law by David Friedman.

Interestingly, he appears to be a libertarian and believe in intellectual property law. However, he admits that this is because he is an author and wants to get paid for his work. He also admits that the proper amount of intellectual property law may be zero, he was merely approaching the question as an economist.

Indeed.

I guess I don't understand the question.

Its a balance between the freedom to copy and sell someone else's work and the ability to watch movies.  You feel the freedom is more important.  I feel the movie is more important.  

Legitimacy is a difficult concept.  People do organise into societies and do make laws aimed at making life better.  If you feel the entire basis on which society makes laws is bad, it makes it hard for you to get things changed as its easier to change things incrementally than to wait for a revolution.

Please answer the real estate/physical property transfer prior-to-death question.

Whatever real, physical wealth that the artist was able to trade his information for during his lifetime can logically be willed to his heirs.  Originally, the term for copyright protection was 15 years.  I consider that to be a good compromise even in the modern world.  Patents generally are still only 15 years, and society benefits both by the initial research paid for by the sick wealthy (and middle class with old school health coverage) and then all of society then benefits forevermore once the patent expires and generics can legally be marketed.  It's not a libertarian ideal, and wouldn't function without the explicit force of government, but from a practical standpoint it's one of the last injustices of government that I would be inclined to worry about.  It's logically inarguable that it's an injustice to deny the dying an effective medicine simply because s/he can't afford more than the cost of production, but in the grand scheme of injustices that result from government edicts, I can think of many greater and more widespread injustices.

Sorry I confused you. I never meant IP. There is no such physical property in knowledge. I meant physical property transferred prior to death. It was a continuation of the Vermont/Louisiana question. I give zero validity to IP. I'm not caught in any mental loop. You didn't follow your own thread (physical property).

You're caught in a mental loop.  Information isn't property, and doesn't act like property in the absence of monopoly force.  By definition, force or the threat of same distorts the free market, so it's no longer free.  It is impossible for a free market in information to exist in the presence of IP monopoly laws.  Can an artist contract for the exclusive rights of distribution?  Sure, so long as he can maintain the "business secret" without it getting out.  That's not impossible beyond his death, if he should choose to never release his art.  If he releases it in any form, his fans owe the distribution company no loyalty.