Topic: Intellectual Property: Intellectually Bankrupt - page 3. (Read 3985 times)

No need for weird sci-fi examples to discuss this point.

I produce electricity, which is immaterial, at the cost of my resources. Are you legitimate to plug your stuff on my power cable without my consent? According, to the "Libertarian" ideal, you wouldn't be stealing my power cable, only the energy it conducts. We can all see this is going to end bad.


This isn't a valid point. You can't bring is a purely pragmatic point into a fundamental discussion. The point isn't who is harmed the most, the point is "Is the product of my mind my property".

Don't care. I am making money off of my IP-less empire.

One could start a profitable slave trade business. Would that make such a business moral?

Do we need a gazillion intellectual arguments to prove your point?

Why not go with entrepreneurship to prove your point?

Hm, that's interesting, I'll have to think about that for a while. My first impression is that it would be the digital equivalent of kidnapping.

My turn.

Imagine you can create exact copies of physical objects as easily as we can copy information. Am I violating your property rights by making an exact copy of your car? How about making a copy of a car on the lot at a dealership? Does it seem like anyone attempting to operate a business with the model of selling something so easily copyable is a fool?

That guy from the free state project presented an argument that went something like this:

Everything is just information. Even physical matter is information encoded in a certain way. Therefore, if physical matter can be property then so can information.

Though experiment: Imagine you can upload your mind into a computer simulation, Matrix-style. Then some day, a hacker/troll creates a copy of you, without your knowledge or consent, and uploads it into a different simulation, where that version of you gets locked into a prison cell.  The first version would never know about this.

Does this constitute a violation of property rights? If yes, of what version of you? Of all versions? Just the version in the second simulation? Just the meatspace version?

Of course you could argue that whoever owns the computer hardware owns the information on it, but imagine that the hardware is a cloud of self replicating robots owned by nobody.

Intellectual property laws are incompatible with Libertarian philosophy. If you're not a Libertarian, the first part of this argument will do little to persuade you since you must first accept the two foundational beliefs of Libertarianism, the non-aggression principle and the legitimate assignment of property rights. Just a reminder of what these two beliefs entail:

1. The non-aggression principle is the position that violence cannot be used against property you don't own unless in self-defense of your own property.

2. The legitimate assignment of property rights is the position that everyone owns themselves, unowned property that they homestead and any property that is obtained through voluntary title transfers, valid contracts, gifts, gambling, etc.

Holding these two principles, it logically follows that intellectual property is illegitimate. If I own ink and paper, I get to do whatever I want with it as long as it doesn't violate your property rights or the non-aggression principle. That includes copying a novel you wrote, word for word and selling it, either with proper attribution or with no attribution at all. False attribution would be an act of fraud which invalidates a contract but that is a wrong committed towards the buyer, not the original author.

Some people might object that using my ink and paper to copy a novel is theft of your novel and therefore does violate someone's property rights. This mistaken assumption that one can own ideas stems from the belief that a person necessarily owns the product of his or her labor. That is false. If I own some wood and you steal it to make a chair, you don't own the chair. I own the chair and you owe me for damages to my wood. The only way labor brings about ownership is when mixing labor with unowned resources, land, things found in nature, etc. You can pen a novel, but you must already own the ink and paper. A cake pan can only be used by one person at a time. A cake recipe can be used by many people at the same time. Ideas, such as cake recipes, aren't scarce and therefore are not subject to property rights.

Telling me what I can and cannot do with my ink and paper, which is scarce, is claiming ownership of my property, which is theft because it wasn't done voluntarily but rather through the threat of violence or imprisonment.

Anyone that says this is all well and good but wishes to abandon Libertarianism for special cases where it would benefit every individual has a burden of proof. While it seems obvious that without intellectual property laws, people would be harmed through the loss of created work, what goes unnoticed are the people that are currently harmed by the very laws meant to protect others. There are cases of people wanting to make derivative works but cannot do so or will not do so for fear of legal repercussions. Such examples include books written from different points of view, such as the slaves from Gone With The Wind, video games that have been abandoned or not developed often enough, such as Chrono Trigger and Lemmings, music such as covers of Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga songs, and so on. We know that people will be harmed if intellectual property laws are repealed just as we know people are currently harmed by their very existence. The only question for those that want to abandon Libertarianism is, which outweighs which? Nobody can give a definitive answer and therefore it's irresponsible to support such laws, even on non-Libertarian utilitarian grounds, which aren't proven to be beneficial to more individuals than they are harmful.