Topic: Intellectual Property: Intellectually Bankrupt (Read 3976 times)

The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.

Emphasis mine. Very insightful, applauded.

But those traditions aren't necessarily opposed.  I used to label myself an "anarcho-capitalist" until I was exposed to the Mutualist and "Left-Libertarian" thought of folks like Roderick Long of The Austro-Athenian Empire (http://aaeblog.com/) and Kevin Carson of The Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).  I have since stopped bothering with labels, although I sortof like the ring of "free-market anti-capitalist".  But fundamentally, I don't see how the "American"-libertarian tradition of the non-aggression principle and homesteading principle are necessarily supportive of landlordism and bossism, since it ultimately depends on what action and time is considered to be sufficient for homesteading and abandonment of property.  For example, even the most hard-core anarcho-capitalist will admit that if you leave you home abandoned for a long enough time, that it will eventually be considered abandoned and thus homestead-able by new parties or the current renters. While I don't agree with the full-fledged socialists that immediately once you leave your door or otherwise relinquish control of your property that some random person can then break in and occupy your home, I do feel it is important to recognize that a robust libertarian legal system should recognize that property rights aren't perpetual.  And by robust, I mean that the anarchist society doesn't revert back into a form of statism run by powerful businesses or a collusion of private owners.  Indeed, as Roderick long has argued, The State is simply an absentee owner, just a very very large one.  The other set of insights that I have learned from the "Left-Libertarian" tradition is to recognize that most forms of economic and social oppression are indeed due to state laws.  For instance, the fact that most people live in homes owned by large banks is largely the result of the special privilege that The State (namely the Federal Reserve) gives to large banks, leading to an unfair economic advantage.  And the limited-liability protections of incorporation.  And of course IP laws that provide private businesses owners with all sorts of advantages which leads to powerful corporations controlling all important creative works, inventions, ideas, etc of society.

Well, as I've said before, your definition of anarchism differs greatly from mine.

I went the other way. I began to see politicians, landlords, employers, and the like taking advantage of honest workers just like how I previously only saw IP rights-holders doing. And so I so I abandoned (American) libertarianism for anarchism.

Same here...I was always (initially by default) not entirely opposed to IP, especially since I had worked as a musician/programmer/engineer/teacher/researcher (all industries that currently rely on IP), until I actually worked at an unnamed computer engineering corporation where I was exposed to the reality of the patent system (since I had to review all the gory details of a bunch of patents related to my work), at which point I started to question the whole concept.  Naturally I searched google to help understand, and it really only took a couple pages of reading Against Intellectual Property (pdf: mises.org/books/against.pdf which is an argument based primarily on libertarian ethics) and Against Intellectual Monopoly (pdf: micheleboldrin.com/research/aim/anew.all.pdf which is a utilitarian argument so you don't have to be a libertarian in order to follow) for me to become consistently anti-IP.  On a side note, Stephan Kinsella's writings also exposed me to the whole Mises and Rothbardian tradition, which led me to fully-embrace anarcho-capitalism.

I went through the same thing. I'm a software developer by trade. Piracy hurts my bottom line since I'm selling my software directly to customers. I went into the debate trying reconcile my desire for intellectual property laws with my views on Libertarianism but I couldn't do it while remaining consistent. C'est la vie.

Goatpig's trolling about energy and matter is a distraction - a strawman - that is beside the point.  Ip-freedom advocates aren't at all arguing about energy vs matter, but instead question the restriction on duplication of patterns that were obtained without coercion.

Really insightful post on the subject.

Bitcoin2cash, well said in the first post. I do artwork as my trade and understanding why IP isn't property was hard for me to accept for a long time, but I think if you want to be free, you have to give up that one rule you think benefits you. Though now I realize it doesn't benefit me to have a violent gang "protecting" my IP. They only really protect the big corporate interests.

I'm still waiting for him to mention the holographic principle. Anyways, the distinction isn't between physical and nonphysical but rather concrete and abstract. You can't own abstract objects only concrete objects.

goatpig, I think you should give in on this point. First of all, it seems rather tangential to the discussion, second... you're either wrong or this argument is meaningless.


Common != rigorous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter#Protons.2C_neutrons_and_electrons_definition

How convenient to forget about the second property of matter...

Einstein's famous equation E=mc² describes the equivalence between energy and mass. Quantum physics is not involved.

If you push something so that it goes faster, the energy from your push increases the mass of the object by the amount indicated by E=mc². This is quite a small amount, so we don't notice it in day-to-day life, but it is readily measurable.

In the same way, a battery gets slightly heavier when you charge it up, and slightly lighter when you discharge it. This is due to the extra energy in the charged battery causing chemical changes that result in matter that has a higher energy state (and is therefore more massive according to E=mc²). Freaky, huh?

Yes, you may claim that the "waves in your brain" or whatever are the result of your work done with your property (body) and therefore belongs to you. It's a weird claim but philosophically speaking it seems ok.
But if in the use of your property you cause consequences to my property, you have no right whatsoever to claim that my property now belongs to you.
For ex., if in the use of your legitimate creation you produce sound waves - which could still be considered yours - that hit my brain or my recorder, you're causing a (positive) externality to my property. Unless we had some sort of contract, that doesn't give you any right over what's mine.

The closest way you could voluntarily simulate IP is by using contracts. But for someone to be submitted to a contract he must have had agreed on it, and that's is the greatest problem with IP. If person A produces something and releases it to person B under some contractual rules, but B ignores such rules and passes such content to person C, person A has no recourse against C, only against B.

Calling a thief someone that downloads movies or music via p2p is plain calumny.

Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation.

Electromagnetic radiation is very physical indeed. 

Anyone who ever got a sunburn will agree. 


Let's get back to your stealing electricity analogy.

The only way for someone to tap into your electricity cable is to physically interact with it and to modify its physical properties (in this case the current flowing through it) without your consent.  Ergo, property rights violation.

What if someone obtains the contents of a book you have written, by photographing it with a telescope while you are reading it in your garden? This time there is no property violation because the physical properties of your book have not been modified without your consent. It's still exactly the same book. You could argue that the light bouncing off the book has been captured without your consent, but that light (and the information contained therein) stops being your property once it leaves your land.  It was your responsibility to ensure that doesn't happen if you want to keep the information secret.


 

Intellectual property requires governmental enforcement of some kind to exist.

Good night.

The way the government handles IP doesn't make IP bad, only the government. The same could be said about regular property.


Without knowledge of my intent, you are simply being violent. As I said, the only thing you can rightfully do, is to remove my property from yours. Or else, what if the cumulated time I left my bike on the curb amounts to a year, can you just pick it up and call it yours?

Nevertheless, this has drifted from the original point, on which I simply give up trying to prove my point. Good night to you, sir.

Most people call it real estate, but sure. Yes you can own real estate. So can I and I do.


I claim that if you abandon property, it becomes unowned and I can claim it. Leaving your bike on my lawn overnight probably isn't abandoning it but leaving it there for year definitely is. I can't draw an exact time distinction between the two but there certainly is a difference.