No matter how hard you try to avoid it, it is obvious that if a right exists and is enforceable on immaterial goods without IP, calling that right IP is confusing and superfluous.

> I don’t see how you can have the claim that
> non-IP is Free Market.
The requirements for the existence of markets on immaterial goods follow from (classical) property rights (right to use) rather the from IP (right to exclude third parties).

> It is a perfect invitation for rule by might.
This is a biased argument. I do not see how trespass of non-rival goods (most reasonable econo/legal interpretation of IP I was able to come up with) can be labeled “rule by might”. Rule of the quicker maybe?

> From the beginning I have stated that I don’t
> believe that the existing system is perfect or good.
While I am not sure I explicitely stated it before this comment, my criticism is not implementation-specific.

> Similar question is how you prevent overfishing of
> public seas and deforestation of public land.
Because the good in question is non-rival, there can be no overfishing in immaterial goods. As soon as the good is rival, the good old (classical) property rights kick in in the case of trespass.

> Show me your non-IP alternative approach with
> details.
“My approach” is obvious, you use good old contracts to lay restrictions onto your partners (e.g. require them to pay a price). You just need to make sure that they need to agree to a contract in order to get something important from you. Whether this is the “immaterial good” directly or something related. Just use imagination.

Some time ago I posted a comment on Slashdot of an example business model of how music industry can work without IP. It addressed how it can work without government. At that time, I was doing the same mistake as you now, using the term “IP” for any right applied to immaterial goods. Sans this small error, the post is still valid.

Cheers,
Peter

Stability to what? What does patent law stabilize? How does it accomplish this great feat of “stability”.

It gives nothing, and forces limits and costs that wouldn’t exist otherwise. You mistake the effects of the existing law and system for stability and What I’m trying to show you is that those effects are unnecessary!

I don’t want false stability at the threat of a law suit. I don’t want to sell ideas as though they were real property. I want to sell material goods, ideas made real.

I do know something of patents, ideas, and the law. I own a patent. It cost more than it’s worth. It’s “stability” unchallenged for several years now. I don’t feel “safer” having it. It get’s in the way of marketing and it must be updated all the time if I change the design and try to improve it!!

I understand what it means to Patent something and to continue to hold the foul beast! Do you?
IP law is make believe monopoly on thought.

It is a Positive Rights Law, which is un-enforceable, un-fair to many, and wholly unnessesary except to those who fear entering a market without a monopoly in their hands.

Cowards, afraid of their own limits and limitations.
Cowards, looking for a quick fix to their mundane market outlook.
Greedy Cowards afraid that anyone might better their design, and “steal” their one precious thought.

In a “Free Market”, monopoly by Fiat is NOT FREE.

“Patents are about offering practical new solutions to existing problems”

Patents are about restricting the market to one solution to an existing problem, and only one source for that solution for an unnaturally extended period of time.

Is this the comforting stability you speak of? How safe does it make you feel to have the hands of the State coddling your thoughts? Hmm? How innovative is it, how beneficial is it, to the market calculations that there is only One solution allowed? What rampant tempest of innovation is this coddling creating? Oh wait! It’s STABLE!!! (STAGNANT)

First of all, you are trying to argue that free market produces suboptimal results and a therefore requires some non-zero level of meddling with. I would like to point out that this is a normative claim.

Second of all, once again I see the problem frequent by IP proponents here: not understanding IP. You seem to think that you cannot own immaterial goods without IP. To you, without IP there are no contracts, no homesteading, no market and no legal support for immaterial goods. This is at best a confusing, and at worst simply incorrect claim. As I explained several times, when people say “ownership” they can mean several things (there are two basic prototypes that I elaborated upon before, see the accompanying picture http://shurdeek.shurdix.org/tmp/ip.png ), so if you are dealing with IP you should specify what exactly you mean. Even if only talking about immaterial goods, IP is only a subset of property rights. Other property rights apply to those goods regardless of IP laws.

Neither do Ideas. The difference is that Ideas are not exclusive. Real Property, by the nature of it’s being, is exclusive. Ideas are not like that. Your idea of the engine is not the same as my idea of it, or the idea of it that anyone else has of it right now. However, all of us have an idea that is exclusive in our minds. That is the limit of our ownership of an idea, our own minds. To create a exclusion by fiat in law, for a year or ten or more is to create a barrier to further innovation.

Furthermore, the innovation is in the creation of product, not in the thought itself. Which innovation has success should not be determined by law, but by the market for the product, not the market for the idea. Patent law does nothing for innovation. It does nothing for anyone except force a value on to an otherwise worthless thought. It places an added cost on to the creation of innovative technology that would otherwise not exist. It raises the price on an innovative product and limits the scope of expression of an idea to only one product. It places the expression of similar solutions on hold, or puts them out of reach by virtue of their similarity of purpose or design.

Patent Law is a hinderance, not a solution. It is the solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. In a way, it is a self fulfilling prophesy. If patent law didn’t exist, the only thing preventing you from creating a product is your access to skill, materials, time, and capital. Competition is not a barrier to product creation or marketing. Patent Law is the only barrier not associated with true market forces, and the only thing that can prevent you from developing an innovative product. Competition and market forces are a bonus. Competitive dueling in the market drives innovation. Patent lawsuits stifle it. Patent law creates problems for innovation that wouldn’t exist without patent law.

So, you also think that the amount of information you got was worth 2 cents to see more, but when I disclosed more information for free, the added information made the idea more tangible to your mind, and so you figured it was more tangible to other minds as well. So what? Do you think you could build one? Or do you eschew the building because someone else might be able to build one as well? Is the market for the idea so small, that the mere possibility of competition is enough to reduce the value of a complete design from 2.1 cents to nothing? Isn’t the IP itself worth something to you?

If the threat of competition is so great, why build anything at all? Ford’s model A must have been a hell of a deterrent to people. Look at the lack of competitive designs we have today.

And if I continue to divulge the details of the design to the commons, as it should be, what is it that is preventing you from using it? What is preventing you from creating a design of your own? Not me. Not the potential of competition. It is your inability to create this particular design with your own abilities. It is your failing. Or did you forget that I too, could still build one? Or were you looking to deny me my mind for your 2.1 cents? What were you going to do? Patent it?

IP alone is not enough to have anything of value. Skill, knowledge and Will are requirements that must be met to bring IP to market. Without the means to create, you could know the details of any machine, and still have no product and therefore no value in the IP.

Only an entreprenure and an engineer could take what I have disclosed so far and turn it into something real, a real working prototype, or marketable product. The real value lies in the production, the part that takes skill and work. The IP, at least for me, was simply a way of passing time contemplating a problem, and developing a design with promise.

Personally, I don’t have any more time available to me to build it than most other people. I could make one, but I have no use for one at the moment. But if I sit on the idea, it never gets built. If I give it up to the commons, then perhaps someone who has the time and materials could make one and I could buy it from them. I wouldn’t buy the IP, I would buy the product! Then I would would have something I could use.

Nobody could build it without investment! Nobody. Machines don’t build themselves. Materials suitable to the various parts have to be aquired, shaped and assembled. Skill and knowledge in building machines must be employed. Time and effort must be invested in the creation. This is what makes a product worth something. An idea is simply a theoretical solution to a problem. A product is an actual solution to a problem. Only the investment of the entreprenure creates a real solution.

Here’s another tidbit for you:

The sidewall of a tire is a perfect diaphram for this machine. It is durable, heat and UV resistant, and has a very high tensile stregnth. The body of the machine can be made from any air-tight material that is rigid and non compressable. Plywood painted with house paint would due. Cut a hole in the middle for the piston to sit in and stack a few up with wet paint and viola! Cylinder!

The piston is a milk jug. Or coffee can. Or paint can that is drilled in the center at both ends and bolted onto one end of the shaft. The piston does not touch the sides of the cylinder or the ends of the cylinder, it just displaces the air in the cylinder and moves it from end to end. So the lighter and stiffer the material used, the better. The Piston does have magnets attached to it at both ends, if it is a non-ferrous material. If it is ferrous, then the magnets can be attached to the cylinder ends instead.

Two rounds of stiff material are similarly drilled and bolted to the other end of the shaft with the bead of the sidewall sandwiched between them. This forms the diaphram.

Too much information for you Andras? Feeling a little threatened by all the competitive minds out there scrambling to build this thing?

If just one person out there builds one it will be a miracle of creation!!!

Without that creativity, IP is worthless.

Without the threat of patent law and all the costly ramifications thereof, I could be buying one of these next year, and for less than it would cost me to build it myself. I would gladly give over any of my IP to someone who could build the things and make them available to me.

You can have it Andras, for FREE! Just make one for me too buddy!

As I pointed out several times, an explanation more fitting a free market economic theory is that the inability to make profit without a monopoly is a sign of a poor business model, and the inability to come up with an alternative is a sign of lack of imagination. Reminds me of an article I read on this site when someone was recollecting explaining free market principles to people in charge of planning in a communist country. Their response was that they can’t imagine people moving to get a job and therefore central planning is superiour.

I agree that the mechanical methods of the modernists failed at producing conventionally appealing music. This can be attributed the relative lack of consonance which robbed the music of the sensation of resolution. Just as the ear rapidly becomes accustomed to constant key changes, it becomes accustomed to constant “atonal” dissonance.

The “death” of classical music was accompanied by the rise of jazz. Jazz musicians were able to make rapid progress while maintaining the use of diatonic harmony because the contrapuntal and harmonic rules of jazz are quite different that those of classical music. When confronted with the limits of conventional jazz harmony in the mid-nineteenth century, its practitioners followed the path of the classical composers by first taking jazz harmony to an extreme, creating bebop, and then abandoning the traditional harmonic rules altogether in free-jazz.

Like the development of modern classical techniques, bebop and free-jazz were too dissonant for the public. Their development marks the end of jazz as a popular art form.

I enjoy modernist music, bebop and free jazz. I see the failure of subsequent musicians to revitalize these art forms as testament to the remarkable conceptual abilities of the musicians involved. It is worth noting that very little advancement in the field of counterpoint has taken place since the time of Bach.

I think we will have to consider the significance of the artist’s role in formulating problems and the scope of these problems to be a matter of opinion. I do not see a similarity between “the part of the artistic process where an artist decides what ‘problems’ he intends to solve” and “solving the endlessly solvable ‘problem’ of: What’s for dinner?, or even more broadly, how do we stay alive?”

In Human Action, Mises’ analysis of the work of “The Creative Genius” touches on this subject. I find this passage, with its uncharacteristic introspection, to be particularly moving.

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap7sec3.asp

Why? Because you are afraid of the consequences of IP protectionism. If there were no possibility of patent protection, then full disclosure to the public would not be of any concern. The idea would either be capable of raising capital investment, followed by prototyping and production or not. It could be done by you, your friends, or anyone else who reads these blogs.

Because we have the threat of Patent Law looming over our heads, I cannot publicly disclose my idea without running the risk of excluding myself from it because some one patents all or part of the idea instead of me. This condition dramatically lessens the potential size of the capital market I need access to in order to sell it in the first place, as an idea.

In a world of no Patent Law, I can spread it around and fish for investors who, like me, see promise in the concept. All others who see no promise, will fail to invest time, effort or capital.

Some may see value, and after considering the idea, form one of their own, perhaps better, perhaps not. They may get as far as a prototype or product, and having done so, if the costs are low enough, may be able to make that same product available to me, which I buy, evaluate, and perhaps re-design.

“You have to decide what you want. Profit from it or offer it to the commons.”

I prefer to offer it to the commons. I have no investors, and I have no means to pay the legal fees and other associated fees of filing for a patent. In this case you could say I’m a “starving inventor”, who would not have a problem finding investment, if I could disclose the IP without fear of losing it myself.

“According to the current law you have no IP. Not because you don’t want one but because your invention is not ready to be patented.”

Precisely the point. The IP must be made real, either in the paperwork phase, the prototype phase, or the product phase to be patentable. Paperwork is often used to “seize” a concept at the patent office BEFORE the prototype or product phases have been realized. This is called patent trolling. I or you or anybody else who is interested in creating this engine, or one like it, is going to have to pay a patent attorney to do a patent search for various aspects of the IP that are already owned by someone else.

2.1 cents is not enough capital to even begin the process in the Patents are Protection world.

My point is that patents don’t protect IP. They protect the patent owner from competition, and they protect the public from innovation.

Paragraph Four:

The cylinder material must be a rigid material capable of withstanding mechanical shock along its length, and be a decent thermal insulator. The most critical component is the diaphragm. It must be constructed of a flexible material that has a high tensile strength. It’s throw, or the distance it can travel from one extreme to the other determines the limits of the movement of the shaft, and it carries all of the forces applied all the time. With the diaphragm extended in the high pressure phase, the piston is in a position just off of but close to the magnets at the hot end of the cylinder. When it moves to the other end, the diaphragms limits will stop the piston just off but close to the magnets at the cold end of the cylinder. It is the closeness of the piston to the hot and cold surfaces alternately, that allows the majority of the gas to come into contact with the opposite side, and thus increase or decrease volume. Hot gas raises the pressure and causes the diaphragm to pull the piston away from the cold side, where the gas exposure has been minimal. The movement of the shaft moves the piston with it, to the other end of the cylinder, the gas moves around the piston to the opposite side, where it is now away from the source of heat, and instead exposed to the cold surface where it releases the heat it has just accumulated at the other end. The volume of the gas decreases and the pressure drops inside the cylinder and on the internal surface of the diaphragm. Now the external air pressure overcomes the magnets at the hot end, and the shaft-piston-diaphragm assembly jumps to the cold side, moving the cooled gas back to the hot end of the cylinder.

Is anybody getting what I’m doing here?
I hear 2.1 cents. Do I hear 10?

“Without an IP regime there is no way to have an invention market”

Really? No way? How about Design, Prototyping, and Production? Where is the value? Is it in the IP itself or is it in the created products? Is a set of plans more valuable than the thought they express? Is the prototype more valuable than the thought it actualizes? Is the product more valuable than the thought that inspired it? YES!!!.

It is the realization of the IP that has value. Four paragraphs of production later I have a re-bid of 2.1 cents!!! Don’t you get it?

Andras, you are calling it worthless yet you are the highest bidder. How do you justify this conflict?

At the same time, the more I disclose, the further from the Patent office YOU get! Yet the value increases! Why?

I honestly think that the artist as problem discoverer and solver is an implied case for Nathan’s article. In general I think it’s implied period, and also probably able to be expressed in a dozen different ways. Besides which, the perception of 19th Century Romanticism as “dead” was just that, perception. There are thousands, millions of ways to combine tonal techniques into new forms of music even within the Romantic style – I think the answer of why we don’t is a lot more simple than some artists might like to believe… that is: we get bored. We also have the very human tendency to reject what our “fathers” did.

The problems and solutions in art are entirely fabricated obviously, as there is no real consequence to doing any particular thing indefinitely – other than that it’s simply not creative anymore and we don’t view repetition as particularly valid or useful art. I mean, clearly the art “problem” is always the problem of how to create something new… So I guess I don’t see what you want Nathan to explain. If he didn’t express directly that the purpose of art is fundamentally to provide a purely creative outlet, I had assumed that that was merely implied – and to not cover the part of the artistic process where an artist decides what “problems” he intends to solve is a lot like omitting that the reason a chef puts a steak in the pan is because he is solving the endlessly solvable “problem” of: What’s for dinner?, or even more broadly, how do we stay alive?

But you’re right, Schoenberg was answering a different question all together, which is cool and all, but I don’t think it accomplishes what he *thought* it was going to do, but that’s another discussion entirely. A third discussion to have is my personal contention that Schoenberg, along with many of the other modernists of different schools – Babbit, Stockhausen, Crumb, etc. – were more or less directly responsible for the comparative “death” of classical music in the 20th Century, largely because they went about answering the musical “problem” in ways that became mechanical, difficult to listen to and unable to express the emotional content that music needs to convey to reach the majority of humanity.

IP protection is the only means by which the idea can be “stollen” or the originator can be denied access to the market.

Case in point: I recieved one “threat” of exploitation by one of the bidders, who, taking advantage of IP law:

“I’ll give you 2 penny’s for it. When I own a monopoly over your idea I’ll exploit you till your dead and laugh at you for sacrificing and giving up your idea and mind to me. You will get a marginal return and I will make billions. Thanks!”

The market evaluation was swift and decisive. With such a small amount of the idea presented, it generated two bids of one cent and two cents right away. With more information produced, a better understanding of the concept will yield higher bids. There are three phases to product development, Paperwork, Prototype, Product.
We are in the Paperwork phase, with two paragraphs describing the engine.

For the IP, it’s still worthless. Until it is a prototype, or a product, it has no intrinsic value. If I produce more paperwork, such as plans, or a full description of the design theory and materials needs, then the market will have more to evaluate and consequently, more capital will be bid for its production. I may sell the plans, or I may give them away, but in either case, if a product is to be produced, capital must be raised as either time or money or both to produce it.

In our world of IP “protectionism”, this would be to the exclusion of everyone in the market who values it, but does not own the patent. Once patented, it becomes less valuable to the market as a potential product. Only the patent holder can evaluate it’s possible entry into the market as a product. In an anti-IP world, no such restrictions apply. Anyone who sees value in the IP can begin raising capital and time to get to phase two, Prototype, and then to phase three, production.

But until someone evaluates it, there is no capital to raise. In order to evaluate the IP, it must be made real, as plans, prototype, or product. (Again, so far, the capital bid is up to two cents for two paragraphs of product)

Thanks for participating in my experiment. You have made my case for me!

Paragraph three:

The engine is a Stirling engine, and so uses external sources of heat and cold to operate. Unlike most Stirling engine designs, it does not use a mechanical movement or gearing to accomplish the delay needed to build pressure. Instead, it uses magnets at each end of the cylinder to hold the displacement piston in position while the air displaced changes it’s volume, either greater volume if it’s on the hot side, or lower volume if it’s on the cold side. A diaphram connected directly to the shaft that the displacement piston is on, is responsible for transmitting the force created by the expanding or contracting air inside the engine. The air pressuree on the diaphram must excede the magnetic force holding the diaphram-piston-shaft assembly in place, andd once that pressure is high enough, the assembly moves rapidly away from the magnet it was stuck to, and forcefully towards the magnet on the other side of the cylinder. Once there, it remains stuck until the air pressure reverses, and the cycle begins again.

I call this the Magnetdyne Gama-type Stirling Engine. It is self-starting and always comes to rest on the cold side of the cylinder, so that when heat is applied to the hot side, the cycle can begin.

I hear two cents, do I hear 10? LOL!

You are correct in pointing out that public esteem for the works of Bach tapered off for a period after his death and returned in the early nineteenth century. Also, I should have made it clear that, while Bach’s work is the primary material used in counterpoint classes today, species counterpoint predates Bach.

As I see it, Mr. Nathan addresses only a portion of the creative process. His analysis ignores the role that artists play in producing what he refers to as the “problem” when he breaks down the creative process in this manner:

“Perception is the research phase. Information obtained about the problem is gathered and stored… Conception involves comparing the known facets of the problem with all past experience… The resulting ideas …are then externalized in the representation phase.”

Nathan does not explain why such problems exist, or what these problems might be. In music, these problems are not at all obvious. Some artists feel a strong need to produce new musical techniques, while others do not. One composer’s problem may not be regarded as such by other composers.

Even when problems in musical technique seem obvious to many, particular composers can produce unique and dominant (no pun intended) solutions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many composers believed that the techniques of Romantic music had been fully explored, and worked to develop a new vocabulary. Some solutions to this problem, such as polytonality and the use of tone clusters, were invented simultaneously by multiple composers.

The most influential solution, the twelve-tone system, and the subsequent development of the serial genera, are entirely attributable to Schoenberg. The nature of this solution makes it clear that Schoenberg’s conception of the problem was superior to that of his contemporaries.

The problem was that tonal harmonic techniques had been taken to an extreme, and that all sonorities were beginning to sound acceptable at all times. The suspense initially produced by the use of old chord progressions in ever more elaborate modulations had developed into a general feeling of nebulousness. A byproduct of the new harmonic combinations was intense chromaticism.

Most solutions which were produced at that time are dissonant combinations of or variations on tonal musical techniques which result in even more intense chromaticism. Polytonality uses multiple scales in different voices. Tone clusters expand on the idea of the chord and can occur as un-analyzed passing chords in tonal music. Dissonant counterpoint excludes all sonorities which would be technically correct under the traditional rules of counterpoint.

Schoenberg’s solution is not a combination of or variation on tonal musical techniques. It is a combination of non-musical techniques and musical techniques. Unlike other solutions, it allows for endless variation without reference to any tonal technique. Although twelve-tone music is, by definition, chromatic, it can be used to produce consonant diatonic passages.

Schoenberg saw that the attempt to produce new sonorities by recombining tonal musical techniques was a dead end. Rather than produce esoteric new combinations of tonal techniques, he looked for a new method of producing and analyzing combinations of notes. Essentially, Schoenberg set himself apart from all other composers by choosing to solve a different problem.

In music, solutions are dependent on the existence of problems. The conceptualization of problems is as dependent on the artist as the production of solutions. This is why I believe Mr. Nathan’s description of the creative process is incomplete.