Can I just point out that the pro-IP views here (from Sasha’s rather reasonable position to Bala’s backwards Randist mysticism*) rest on beliefs that we (the anti-IP side) simply do not share? I don’t think further discussion will get any of us anywhere, since those beliefs (or lack thereof) are not open to argument, as far as I can see. They are essentially axioms.

This is what I was getting at before when I spoke of two distinct societies eventually emerging.

* As a case in point, the idea that property rights are a corollary to the right to life.

Sasha,

The problem is that you are starting from a position which assumes that nobody is permitted to do anything without obtaining express permission from everybody else first. I just don’t think that’s workable.

For the sake of simplicity, in my previous posting (just above) I chose to omit the implications of easement and limited privilege in case of necessity, because Paul Lockett is confused enough without making discussion even more complex.

See Paul, you’re confused again:

copyright holders don’t sell full ownership rights over their works of authorship. Instead, they permit only a certain types of use for a relatively small sum money.

However, you can always pay a full market price to fully own some invention and completely avoid any restrictions in its use. That’s what companies often do. So I don’t understand what you’re arguing against.

Paul Lockett — you’re confused again. Nobody but you mentioned “partial ownership”.

I referred to authors (copyright holders) who refuse to give up their expensive and valuable property rights! They have every right as property owners, to grant only specific, limited kinds of use to general public, in exchange for relatively small individual payments. They don’t need any contract to protect their own property from unwanted use by third parties.

Is this simple enough?

Paul Lockett, I’ll try to diagnose (don’t get offended by the use of medical term) what bothers you…

When author creates something using his own labor and input he owns — would you not agree that he is the owner of this created item???? Wouldn’t this ownership right enable them to grant only a strictly limited access or use of their property to other individuals — in exchange for relatively small individual payments???? That’s what copyright is all about!

How in the God’s world would this “pre-supposing state granted intellectual property rights in order to justify them”???

By the way, you completely misunderstood what I said about the absurdity of your chair example. Your example was silly to insanity, due to the fact that a maker of ordinary and non-inventive merchandise (such as chair) would never be able to prove that someone replicated his particular “invention” and not discovered it on his own. That’s why common chair cannot be used as an example when it comes to patents… But this issue has nothing to do with fact that authors do not need contracts to protect their property (works of authorship) from unwanted use by any “third party”.

Also, slave ownership has nothing to do with owning non-human merchandise — and your sovereign right to grant limited use access to this property. By the way, you obviously missed my posting in which I explained that copyright holders are selling SERVICES derived from their goods – not a “partial ownership.

I hope this helps! Ciao.

Thanks Paul! I diagnosed the source of your confusion…. When I asked you to simply say whether the property owner could legally grant only a limited access to his property or only to permit only limited rights of its use (in exchange for money, for example) — you responded that the ownership:

…would enable him to sell the physical good, along with any additional contractual obligation he might be able to negotiate as part of the transfer.

So in other words you are completely oblivious to concepts of rent, time-sharing, terms of limited use, etc. For you, only the term “selling” exists and in your mind it seems to solely pertain to transfer of all ownership rights to someone who thinks that ownership rights to Microsoft’s inventions cost like $90-$1000 or so.

By the way, you demonstrate another legal illiteracy when you get all surprised by the fact that not all trespass results in tort of economic injury — and that the chair maker cannot reasonably argue that somebody ripped him of by restating his expression of common sense.

Thanks for comparing the alleged “patent violation” over a chair, with nothing less than murder — that really speaks volumes.

By the way, I hate to be the one who tells you this: but ownership rights always mean that you can legally control services derived from property. In other words, if you didn’t obtain expensive rights that would allow reprint, publishing, or other commercial use of these books — how can you seriously consider yourself their legal owner??? Just because you have a limited access to something, it does not make you the owner. Communists in factories and farms always had a hard time understanding this simple fact, hence the Russian Revolution of October 1917. was not a shocker.

is there a difference if microsoft never ‘sold’ any dvds with any sort of ‘partial ownership’ or contracted ‘post-sale’ restrictions but rented their ‘own’ dvds like netflix – where the dvd would be returned to microsoft after software code was read by a machine?

i know some have said that microsoft sells a lisence
(whatever that means) but if you sell something can you have any say over its use or is not really a ‘sale’?

or is this back to the value for value exchange? iow, money (value a) traded for specific uses of property (value b) – but no ‘sale’ (ownership transfer) involved?

i personally dont see how any information can be owned. i can see how contracts can define ones actions via agreements.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1305

“fishsticks” episode – for those who can uphold i.p. as a right, and still keep a straight face.

To believe in intellectual property is to be statist? What a horrific reversal of the truth. And funny that the author even acknowledges that libertarians are justly against a “right to health care” as that enslaves another.

This horrid concept of “copying isn’t theft” is what is actually statist. A ditch digger digs for a year and is paid for each day of digging. A person writes a book for a year, earning nothing for the present, but doing it in his spare time – and at the end of the year, the moment he shows the book, he is to be told “Thanks, sucker!” and receive nothing?

I say that it is statist to assume a right to that writer’s labor, as surely as to assume a right to the health care provider’s labor. One cannot be against a “health care right” as being statist, but then be for a “copy as you please right” and call it freedom. For both equally take a man’s labor, and give him only as you feel like in return, even if that is nothing at all.

The author says in this article that it would be too hard to track down all the violators, that only the coercive power of the state could even try. Funny, I’ve always thought that free market security companies would do better than state police forces, but he’s entitled to his opinion. I’ll stick with Von Mises. And yet the article writer’s chief opinion seems to be that if we can’t protect a author’s property, then to heck with it, he can have no right in it. Seems to me that if an old lady cannot defend her home from a mob, that this doesn’t mean that the impracticality of tracking down all the looters means she has no property rights – just that in that case, it’s harder to do anything about it. We say then her property rights were violated, we do not use it as an excuse to say she has no property rights.

And in practicality, one could have a private copyright system in a Libertarian society in which books were registered, and a person who copied without permission was brought to arbitration as surely as if they had stolen a car. And obviously only those who were blatantly copying the book for profitable distribution would be pursued, the lone individual would usually not be – but could be, if discovered, just as petty shoplifters are now. Just having such a system in a free market society would deter mass violations, which in any system is all one can hope for anyway.

The author then speaks of how forbidding others to copy is giving the author some kind of ownership of the universe, as he is thus forbidding everyone from using their own property to copy his book. So, let’s see – me telling people they cannot use their ink for writing that which they have no idea how to do on their own is me having statist control over their property. But they taking my labor and creativity for nothing is all good?

Thus we see by this article that a person wishing to have the right to benefit from his creation is a statist, and him not wishing others to rob him of his labor is him seizing control of theirs! I wonder, who suffers harm in this scenario? A man who works for a month, year or decade on a book and gets the price of one single book in exchange? Or the population of Earth, who having no idea at all of how to arrange their ink and paper in such a fashion as to be a bestseller, are now aware that such an arrangement does, after much effort, exist – but are told they must pay a nominal fee to use it?

The author of the article also speaks to Natural Rights, forgetting that a natural right to your own body/mind and what you choose to do with it must surely be the first natural right. Under the “copying isn’t theft” concept, a man’s body and mind are to labor to create, and those who don’t have their bodies and minds laboring in creation can take of him afterward for free. Oh, but he is graciously granted the choice to not use his mind or body, in which case if he creates nothing, he will not be accused of wrongfully withholding it from others!

Oh, but wait! If someone builds a hut, can he expect his brothers in the caves not to copy him? Are they simply to live in caves still? Such are the worries of those who wish to steal from others. But here’s the truth about those cavemen: I’m sure they probably will copy the hut builders idea. But I bet they’ll not only thank him, but throw a feast in his honor and sing songs of praise about him – why wouldn’t they, he’s their brother or cousin, after all. A quite nice payment for the stone age.

But in our modern times, it’s now claimed that there is no need for thanks or payment! After all, what took the writer so long? We’ve been waiting to use our ink and paper, or computer memory, to copy a bestseller, and each day the writer didn’t give us one to copy was a day that we were being restricted and “controlled”, in that we could not use our property that way until the writer first showed us how! Heck, we should have all sued J.D. Salinger for not showing us how to use our property to copy another Salinger book! We had begged him for decades, and he kept us from using our property to do so until he finally died, and escaped our justice!

See how aburd that is? As are all arguments for the seizing of the unearned.