Well, I suspect you would say that, given that it completely annihilates your position.

“By the way, you must be joking when you say: “Thee cost of inventions is of no relevance whatsoever to the issue of property.” ”

Of course it is irrelevant to the issue of ownership. I either own something or I don’t, irrespective of its value. Unless of course you think that theft is acceptable if the item being stolen has a low enough market value.

Maybe you should stop before you embarrass yourself further.

Man, it’s hard to explain how ridiculous your postings are… I’ll try to keep it as simple for you as I can. I told you your food example has nothing to do with our topic — and nobody mentioned “double compensation” (you are hallucinating again).

You say:
“No, what people have been trying to explain to you is that the owner of physical property is its owner and that contracts which might exist between other people don’t change that.”

That is exactly my position! I say Microsoft does not loose its ownership of Visual Studio just because it allows the limited access to this property to people like Russ. And I also said that by borrowing this strictly limited access from Russ, you don’t magically become owner who has the right to replicate that item. I also explained that it would be illegal for you to accept the proceedes of Russ’s trespass in the form of illegally created copy and that you will be liable for all economic injuries zou create with this item.

And once again: you don’t need a contract with a third party to protect your property against its trespass (unwanted use of your property).

By the way, you must be joking when you say:
“Thee cost of inventions is of no relevance whatsoever to the issue of property.”
HA HA HA HA HA
I basically said that owner must be compensated for the full price of the item that was stolen from him, while you argue that the issue is irrelevant. Of course you say that, since you advocate organized theft against productive individuals.

So the person who took the food would have to compensate the rightful owner and the person who ate it would have to compensate as well, so the owner gets double compensation. I’m sure that would be a great scam for the owner to exploit, but it’s not what you could describe as just.

“The issue here is that opponents of IP completely confuse what is whose property and how much valuable inventions really cost”

No, what people have been trying to explain to you is that the owner of physical property is its owner and that contracts which might exist between other people don’t change that. The cost of inventions is of no relevance whatsoever to the issue of property.

“You didn’t point out anything farcical about my position, by the way.”

The fact that you can’t see the farce that would result from realising your position speaks volumes.

The issue here is that opponents of IP completely confuse what is whose property and how much valuable inventions really cost (as opposed to cost of a personal use that general public gets). You didn’t point out anything farcical about my position, by the way.

Best regards.

In that instance, if I still have the ring, the original owner is entitled to have it back. If, in contrast, the homeless person gave me some food that they weren’t the rightful owner of and I ate it, it wouldn’t entitle the rightful owner of the food to claim my body as partly their property, simply because the food is now part of it. This is one of the biggest problems I can see with your position, it assumes property rights have some kind of viral nature which, if put into practice, would be farcical.

in britain, it was the success of pirate radio that made pop-music “popular” (“the boat that rocked” doesn’t do full justice to the story).

in italy, it was a similar story in the seventies. pirate radio provided programming that actually appealed to a market segment (youth) that wasn’t catered for by the state-licensed networks. pirate radios didn’t pull punches when it came to embarrassing the state authorities, whether for corruption or for incompetence.

“i cannot see why people have any positive rights to receive e.m. transmission without interference.”

Obviously, the case is utilitarian. If we don’t assume EM spectrum rights, then we forego the usefulness of EM communications. I know you think EM communications could be useful without EM spectrum rights, but even most anarchocapitalists apparently don’t find your argument compelling.

Sasha Radeta wrote:

“Unfortunately you persist on misrepresenting my arguments, while completely ignoring basic ownership right: to allow a limited access to your property, without signing away this property.”

I have never said that Microsoft cannot limit access to their property without signing away the property. I am only saying that for Microsoft to do so, a *valid* contract must be involved *before* the goods (the DVD and the money) are exchanged. Apparently, you are too dense to understand this basic concept.

- Since the contract violator falsely assumed ownership rights over the item he obtained only for limited use, he will have to pay for it. If Microsoft gets fully compensated (for multimillion $ theft), nobody will care about “third party” issue. So If we apply private property rights justly, this will be a powerful deterrence for anyone to assume that it is OK to trespass or steal such valuable property.

- Furthermore, a third party that receives proceeds of theft or trespass will also be held liable. If this wasn’t the case, we would have a legal money laundering for any kind of criminal enterprise. A person can’t legally “borrow” another person’s valuable property without owner’s consent, generate millions of dollars in revenue, and then just return this property, claiming you compensated the owner. Your “third party” cannot reasonably defend himself by saying he believed in “bona fide” that some average Joe was the rightful owner of this property. It’s like accepting a diamond ring from a homeless person and then claiming you believed this property was rightly his and not the result of theft of some source.

See, this is a good logical test for your libertarianism: whenever you argue that the rightful owner should not be compensated for market services derived from his property, you must know there is something wrong with your analysis.

Of course, if the original purchaser merely copies the original DVD and gives that copy to a third party, the third party doesn’t have any of Microsoft’s property, so he hasn’t commited any trespass.

Unfortunately you persist on misrepresenting my arguments, while completely ignoring basic ownership right: to allow a limited access to your property, without signing away this property.

You say:
“Your theory still takes for granted that a contract like a EULA that is unsigned (and thus not agreed to by the renter in the same way that a signed rental contract is) is somehow still binding.”

That’s not true. I claim that EULA gives only a LIMITED ACCESS or usage rights to Microsoft’s property. Signer of this agreement may decide to transfer this purchased right to a third party. However, this third party NEVER PURCHASED anything from Microsoft! Thus any unauthorized use on his part, such as replication without owner’s consent) is nothing but a trespass.

Than you go on to say:
I buy a Visual Studio DVD from a store. There is a sticker on the box that says “By breaking this seal, you agree…”. This sticker is not a valid contract. I have signed nothing, I have clicked nothing, I have agreed to nothing.

WOW! What a charade… First of all, you must have agreed on something, since this market exchange took place. Every market purchase is a voluntary exchange of buyer’s property for seller’s good and service. So now when you drop that “know-nothing” nonsense, we can go onto the next issue: what exactly did you purchase from Microsoft?

If you have signed nothing and clicked nothing, how can you claim that Microsoft signed away their highly valuable creation to you??? How can you prove that Microsoft gave you anything other than strictly limited usage rights (of which they informed you)? You only paid a micro-fraction of what would cost say IBM to purchase complete ownership rights over such invention! Summa summarum, no court in the right mind would believe that Microsoft intended to sell all their ownership rights to you — and that you were not aware of what you purchased.

Please try to make a better argument next time. This seems like a waste of time and space on this blog.

the e.m. spectrum is inherently a fragile media of transmission because the space (not the atmosphere, as i carelessly said earlier) between the transmitter and the various receivers is common.

i cannot see why people have any positive rights to receive e.m. transmission without interference. producers of e.m. material should not have the power to legally exclude competitors from a defined territory.

the radio industry worked just fine until the feds intruded. this article may be of interest -
http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_2/20_2_2.pdf

Here’s another example I just thought of. Again, let’s assume that the EULA dialog in the install program constitutes a valid contract, because clicking “I Agree” is equivalent to signing a contract. I buy a Visual Studio DVD from a store. There is a sticker on the box that says “By breaking this seal, you agree…”. This sticker is not a valid contract. I have signed nothing, I have clicked nothing, I have agreed to nothing. At this point, since I have agreed to nothing and the DVD has been transferred to me anyway, the DVD is my property. I go home, open the package, break the seal that is not a valid contract on the DVD sleeve, put *my* DVD into my computer and come up to the EULA dialog. I click “I Agree”. Is that binding? No. At that point the DVD is *mine*, not Microsoft’s, so I am free to click “I Agree” and ignore it. The contract limiting my usage of the DVD has to be agreed to *before* the DVD is transferred into my ownership. If the contract comes after the DVD is transferred into my ownership, the EULA dialog contract is meaningless; they no longer have any property rights with respect to the DVD at that point.

Would this hold up in a court of law? No, of course not, but that’s only because the legal system today doesn’t care about logical consistency. They only care about protecting the software industry. Silas’ IP theory would be much more straight-forward and consistent than an implicit contract-based theory.

Even if you accept that an implicit sticker contract is valid, that still leaves Microsoft open to the example in my previous post. If I install a hacked copy of Visual Studio, how can I be accused of violating a contract, implicit or otherwise, since there were no contracts to be seen?

“why would “big daddy” risk spending vast sums in the first place to take on the incumbent, when “big momma” is probably coming right down the track (barriers to entry only being the cost of transmission gear).”

The point is, Wally’s scheme may not be the best business plan, but under your philosophical system it is *just*; there is no reason why he couldn’t legitimately try it. This could destroy the utility of EM broadcasting.

“scenario two: it’s no point arguing the difference between physical, delimitable (tangible) property, and electromagnetic waves, which you yourself have declared unownable, if utilizable.”

Whether EM waves are unownable is not the issue, it’s whether EM spectrum rights are ownable. They effectively are, if there is a system of law in place to enforce them.

Sasha Radeta wrote:

“You don’t loose your home-ownership by renting your house, just like Microsoft does not lose its ownership of Visual Studio by granting you limited access through “terms of use.”

This is an excellent example. Buying is much different than renting. When a person rents a house, he normally signs a rental *contract*, delimiting what his rights are. When you “rent” a DVD from Microsoft, where is the rental contract? The “terms of use” spelled out in the EULA (end user license agreement)? How is this a real contract? Has the “renter” of the DVD signed anything? If not, how can it justly be said that it is a legitimate, binding contract? Can an “implicit” contract (one that is not signed) justly be considered a binding contract? If so, why? If not, isn’t a DVD “renter” actually *buying* the DVD?

Yes, the law in the US currently says that a EULA is a legitimate, binding contract. But I’ve never been focusing on what the law *says*. We all know what the law says; we all know that if you try to “pirate” Visual Studio and Microsoft finds out, you could be in trouble. As you made clear with your George Orwell quote, this is restating the obvious. What I have been focusing on, and you have been pointedly ignoring, is this; is the law *just*? Why should Microsoft have the legal right to do what it does? Saying “It would lose a lot of money if it didn’t.” is not a valid justification to me.

I now think I was wrong in saying that you are implicitly assuming IP, but this was not helped by your very unclear explanations (actually, not explanations, but just assertions). For example, you have never explained how the DVD is still somehow Microsoft’s property. You just asserted that it was so. SK was more on the ball, I think, by saying that your theory is a sort of simulated IP by means of (implicit) contracts. Your theory still takes for granted that a contract like a EULA that is unsigned (and thus not agreed to by the renter in the same way that a signed rental contract is) is somehow still binding. Why?

There are also problems similar to SK’s painting example. Let’s assume that a EULA dialog is a valid binding contract. Let’s say somebody hacks the Visual Studio install program so it skips the EULA dialog, then puts it out on the Internet. I download it and install it on my computer. I did not go through a EULA dialog and click “I Agree”, so I agreed to nothing. Can Microsoft go after me, even though I never agreed to anything? If not, then this contractual theory would be toothless in terms of preventing “pirating”. If so, how do you justify this? If you say they have the right to go after me, even though no contract was agreed to, then you are now throwing out the idea of contracts as justification, and are back to IP as justification.

In your example, Microsoft did not sell their DVD to you or your friend. They only granted limited use of their property in exchange for small amount of money (relative to what ownership rights over such valuable resource would cost another corporation).

I don’t mean to offend you, but it is funny how you can’t accept the simple fact that property owners don’t have to sign away their property rights when they allow limited use of their property. You don’t loose your home-ownership by renting your house, just like Microsoft does not lose its ownership of Visual Studio by granting you limited access through “terms of use.”

Capisce?

scenario two: it’s no point arguing the difference between physical, delimitable (tangible) property, and electromagnetic waves, which you yourself have declared unownable, if utilizable.

Here’s another way of looking at the issue. Let’s take two hypothetical cases in your preferred “laissez faire regime”.

1) The good people of Newsonville, Oklahoma have a number of radio stations. The broadcasters have all “staked out” their frequencies and areas, without resorting to any notion of EM spectrum rights, just with “gentleman’s agreements”. Then along comes Wally “Big Daddy” Warbucks, who is decidedly not a gentleman. He decides to build a bunch of big transmitters on his property on the edge of town. They transmit noise on all frequencies in common use, effectively rendering the other broadcasters’ transmitters useless. Why would he do this, you might ask? Maybe his plan is to ruin all the other broadcasters, effectively running them out of business. After all, if the listeners can’t get broadcasts, the advertisers will stop paying the broadcasters, and they will shut down due to lack of funds (or lack of reason for broadcasting). Then Wally can start transmitting his own shows. If anybody wants a show broadcast, he will have to pay Wally. According to your philosophy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

2) The people of Newsonville have their land staked out, without resort to notions such as property rights, but with “gentleman’s agreements” and fences. Then Wally comes along. He decides that Newsonville would be a great site for WallyWorld, a huge theme park he has envisioned. But the good people of Newsonville won’t sell. So he hires a bunch of mercenaries to bodily force the people off their properties. The A-Team are, unfortunately, otherwise engaged, so the people of Newsonville are effectivey screwed.

What is the essential difference between these two scenarios? I can’t see any.

“it’s just that i don’t see that legislation will add much more than a truckload of bureaucrats and technicians to draft and ensure compliance.”

I don’t see how the bureaucracy that would be needed for EM spectrum rights would have to be more involved than that needed for keeping track of land boundaries. All it would have to do is track frequency range and coverage area for a given transmitter. You wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “truckload of bureaucrats and technicians to draft and ensure compliance”, any more than you do to enforce property rights. If someone has a complaint, they take the complaint to court, the court looks up who owns the rights to the EM “boundary” in question, and makes a decision. EM rights needn’t require a separate enforcement arm such as the FCC.

“why should i be unable to use empty spaces in your particular “homesteaded” frequency to transmit data to my clients? this may well cause you no nuisance.”

Because in order to not interfere with one another’s broadcast, the two broadcasters would have to somehow coordinate their broadcast times. Otherwise, one broadcaster could plan on broadcasting at 6AM, only to find out another broadcaster has started using it at 5AM and still is. Now maybe the two broadcasters can come to an understanding, maybe they can’t. The easiest way to avoid disputes is EM spectrum rights. The broadcaster who owns EM spectrum rights could simply sell broadcast time to the second broadcaster, if no more “homesteadable” spectrum is available in the area. Thus the EM spectrum time-slicing problem is easily solved.

“the atmosphere, the medium of e.m. transmission, is a public good; no one should have the legal right to privatize any aspect of this public good.”

Technically speaking, this isn’t correct. EM waves require no medium in order to propagate. They can even propagate in the vacuum of deep space (and Einstein proved with his theory of special relativity that there is no undetectable “ether” that EM waves propagate through). So, there is no public good in the sense you intend. The EM wave itself, it is true, is a public good in the sense that it is not practically feasible to prevent people from benefitting from it unless they pay. That is why the radio business depends on advertisements, not on listeners paying.

“people don’t have rights to receive interference-free radio/tv signals.”

Then what you are saying is that we should not take advantage of EM broadcasting as a means of communications, just because the idea of enforcing EM spectrum rights bothers you? The words “permanent crankdom” are coming into my head. *grin*

“of course, if the signal providers are unable to come to amicable arrangements to ensure signal quality, that’s going to affect their business model. maybe people will migrate to internet, cable or whatever. stiff cheese.”

Again, what if a business model is not an issue. Let’s say that we’re in a “laissez faire regime”, except for EM spectrum rights. You go on the air to talk to AM radio talking head Sean Limbaugh about your idea that not having EM spectrum rights would work much better. A pro-EM spectrum rights consortium jams the signal to shut you up. If you object to this, they have proved your inconsistency.

“please note that airlines don’t “own” air routes, they own slots at the airports (worth a fortune). even without laws, i don’t believe airlines would be stupid enough to all fly at each other without some gentlemen’s agreement or convention. i just don’t think mid-air collisions are good business for the whole airline business. i don’t see the need for a government overseer.”

But now the government *does* oversee airline routes, at least I believe so. The FAA is responsible, yes? Without laws, some huge private organization would be necessary to replace the FAA. Another option would be that airlines *do* own routes. Then, if there is extra space open in a route, they could sell it to another airline. The idea of air route rights would effectively de-centralize the allocation problem. So does the idea of EM spectrum rights, especially since these rights are basically a local problem. No national body is needed.

“i’ve driven in plenty of parts of the third-world where there are no lane markers on the roads, and most people still stay on the conventional side of the road, just like magic!”

Heh. I would hazard a guess that this “magic” is really due to peoples’ instinct for self-preservation. It’s not at all analogous to EM spectrum “collisions”.