well…if you reprinted them and claimed yourself to be “pattern originator” the person responsible developing and researching the communicated concepts and you actually didnt do that…i would think that to be less than ok. a falsehood, iow.
if someone paid you for the material believing you were the concept originator ..well, if they benefited from the information then thats a good, but they were probobly wanting to support the actual concept developer. i suppose disdain would vary from person to person.
repeating or selling various forms information that you acquire without claiming authorship…well, i guess people have to buy things somewhere.

*ahem – kicks pebble*

*leaves quietly*

“— defined, specified, and demonstrated…”

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Your second chance to get it was in the closing sentence of my next reply:

“… unambiguously concretized and demonstrated”

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Here’s your last chance:

objectification : concretization of an abstraction.

.

You weren’t ask for a set of procedures, you were asked for the meaning of “objectification.” Metaphors are for the weak of mind.

Gratuitous and purely decorative phrases like these undermine the credibility of the points you attempt to make, and are ultimately degrading to yourself, and the blog as well.

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“He tells us that a sandwich as such is not subject to IP rights because one of the underlying factors of production (bread) was already in the “public domain,”

I did not. It illustrated the fact that IP is not necessarily a total object, but can and usually is an isolated modification or addition to a protected or unprotected item …

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“the ‘public domain,’ whatever that is. Actually, we
know what it is: a period 50 years after the creator’s death. Why 50 years?”

Wrong again. The ‘public domain’ is the state of being not or no longer protected. For IP, it must begin well after the creator’s death. If it ended at his death, the creator could not profit from his creation, because no one would buy rights that could end if the creator were killed or died immediately after making the sale. The length of the period is neither inexorably fixed nor arbitrary. It is conditional upon the factors that determine how long it would take IP buyers to recoup and profit from their investment. Present parameters could easily be quite different from those that would obtain 500 years from now. These must be defined in law just as all other equally conditional issues of justice, like punishments of crimes and such, are established and enforced by the government as designed by the populace.

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By the way, to use the term “appeal to authority” you must first learn how to distinguish learned knowledge from dogma and how to demonstrate that a statement is one or the other. Just asserting it doesn’t suffice.

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“…defined, specified, and demonstrated to be a viable improvement.” How do any of these three steps establish ‘objectification?’ ”

You make a sketch, you spec it and explain it, and then you make a prototype to show that it really does what you claim it does i.e. that the improvement claimed is viable. The degree of improvement is not a consideration and the effort required prevents frivolous claims. The Wright brothers objectified their claim and were due protection while all the other designs that did not fly were not. All claims to rights, to be enforceable, must be unambiguously concretized and demonstrated to be valid.

Here’s another howler:

“A government cannot protect IP until and unless it is objectified — defined, specified, and demonstrated to be a viable
improvement.” How do any of these three steps establish “objectification?” (Let’s leave asise the question of establishing
“viable improvement” from the perspective of [subjective] human ends, rather than in some narrower technological sense.) This
is an example of another pro-IP trick: use physicalist language and metaphors to obscure the distinction between IP and valid
property. It’s ironic: IP defenders reject the scope of property rights in things as being too narrow, yet they clearly feel
the need to craft their own defenses of IP in precisely same language as ordinary (ie, justifiable) property rights. (You
“objectify” an idea, “hence” you can own it. What crap.)

Stephan`s response is here; mine follow in the same thread:

http://blog.mises.org/archives/011035.asp#c627755

IP rights cannot protect unspecified and undemonstrated future variations of a creation. A government cannot protect IP until and unless it is objectified — defined, specified, and demonstrated to be a viable improvement. To protect a sandwich *as such* the creator would have had to provide specifications for all possible variations and make models or exemplars as standards against which to measure all future claims of improvements.

The original sandwich was itself only an improvement on a previous creation (bread) that would have been at that time in the public domain. Per Rand (if the original sandwich could have been patented or its recipe copyrighted), the IP rights would have expired 50 years after the creators death. Thereafter the original sandwich would be in the public domain and only unique improvements (recipes for specific new combinations and measurements of ingredients) could be protected.

Rand made a clear distinction between property rights in material objects like land and IP. The former are unlimited, because their value can only be maintained by continued applications of reason and action. IP, however, can have value for a long or even infinite time without requiring further effort. Therefore she advocated a limit of 50 years beyond the creator’s death. That would insure value for the creator by guaranteeing any buyer of the rights time to profit from his investment in the event that the creator would die on the day of sale. It would also guarantee that others could not profit from it without contributing to its value.

The purple light is the medium by which I spread knowledge.

While I`ve read Rand, I hadn`t actually followed how the idea of IP affected her own life.

My own view has come around to the idea that state-created IP is abusive and has been hijacked by rent-seeking. Firms and individuals that want to maintain information as property should do so without state grants, other than the use of courts in providing remedies for theft.

But that the idea of IP itself as “property” does not seem absurd to me in the least; the prevalence of the idea is an example of the way that communities adopt and internalize rules and apply them rather reflexively (and feel them morally) and is a testament to the capacity of humans to minimize tragedy of the commons situations (as Yandle and Ostrom have noted). The problem is simply that IP has slipped its moorings and become abusive to the point that we need to start working (via legislation, no?) to lessen the evident parasitism and abuse.

Absent the state, my notions of “property” are pragmatic (and consistent with Ostrom`s empirical studies of resources): property is what the owner possesses and can defend, which reflects both communities` acceptance of the legitimacy of such claims, and individual`s recognized stake in/claim on community property and institutions.

“When someone creates an application of an idea to an entity, and that application did not previously exist, only he has a moral claim to benefit from whatever potential position that application can generate in the value hierarchies of others, because that position is a direct result of his and only his thoughts and actions.”

Obviously, this would characterize a sandwich *as such*; prior to the genius who conceived of putting meat between pieces of bread, the application did not exist, and after his idea, changes to the value scales of others are generated as a result. Hence, by your thesis, the originator has a moral claim to the value thus generated.

Now, however, after confronted with the absurdity of all sandwich eaters owing a tribute of some kind to the originator, you tell us that only “unique” sandwichs are worthy of such consideration. This is another good example of how IP proponents rely on moral bluster in principle and ad hoc adjudication in practice.

Yes. A recipe for a unique sandwich, or soft drink, or wonder drug, or fuel additive, or ….

“I think your theory is a pretty open-ended grant of privilege.”

Characterization is cheap. Showing that it actually applies will require a greater investment.

” then the question is not one of more or less liberty, but of whose property rights should take priority. ”

You are engaging in the well-known approach called question-begging. I have tried my best to show you why ideas and patterns cannot and should not be considered “property” and here you come back saying “whose property rights should take priority?” as though your suggestion that ideas and patterns should be considered “property” has been accepted. How is this a valid response to my (rather long) post questioning the very validity of your stand that ideas and patterns can and should be considered property?

Since I seem to have been ineffective in conveying my point, let me try to present it differently.

My point is that your notion that ideas and patterns can and should be recognised as “property” is absurd. I am giving below my reasons starting by stating my basic definitions and axioms.

Definition : Rights are fundamentally a moral concept sanctioning man’s actions in a social context. The sanction required is not any external sanction (such as those of others) but one’s own long-term well-being and the nature of the reality that one faces (including the reality of one’s own nature).

Axiom : Life is a sequence of self-generated self-sustaining actions. The most fundamental Right of any human being is the Right to Life.

Argument :

The logical corollary of the Right to Life is the Right to Liberty. The latter is nothing more than the freedom to act to sustain one’s life in consonance with one’s nature.

The Right to Liberty is self-limiting – action that violates the Liberty of another person cannot come under the scope of “Liberty”. That’s because reality abhors contradictions and hence, you cannot claim for yourself a right that you deny to others. The means of violating a person’s Liberty is to initiate force against him and hence such action does not and cannot get moral sanction.

The Right to Property is little more than a manifestation of the Right to Liberty. Action to sustain life is fundamentally to gain or keep value. You can take value that I have gained away from me with or without my consent. The latter is possible only through the initiation of force. Since the latter does not have moral sanction, neither does the action of taking away the value I have gained without my consent. This, IMO, is the real meaning of the concept “property”.

By this understanding, only that can be considered property, which has been gained by one person and to take which away from him without his consent, you (or I) need to initiate force against him.

By this yardstick, physical goods can and should be designated “property”. Ideas and patterns can be taken from one person without the initiation of force. Hence, it is absurd to try to label ideas and patterns as “property”.

The notion that ideas and patterns be considered “property” is further damned by the obvious fact that while their taking does not constitute an initiation of force, preventing the “taker” from acting as per his rational mind necessarily constitutes an initiation of force. Thus, IP becomes no more than a means by which those who claim to have generated ideas get to enslave everyone else who “takes” them from the “producers” of ideas and tries to use them. Rather morbid, as I see it.

The rest of your “explanation” is meaningless unless you address this point of mine and show why you are not enaging in question begging but in logical argumentation.

Incidentally, my approach out here is to argue based on certain undeniable and self-evident axioms (what you call a priori) and the use of Logic to arrive at my conclusions. So, my approach is well within the boundaries that you tried to prescribe for the discussion. Your approach, however, does not meet your own standards. It definitely does not meet mine.

See, Silas–I would never misspell privilege like that. Doesn’t that prove it? Heh.

For example, a sandwich? I think your theory is a pretty open-ended grant of privelege.

I am sorry to say this because I don’t really want to offend you, but to quote a great man: “the language is the language of english, but the sense is the sense of nonsense”

That one must embody that which generates the value does not entitle one to regard the embodying matter as the source of value. Absent the buckets of chemicals my friends consist of, I could not value them. But the chemicals are not the source of their value to me – their minds and the contents thereof as manifested in their choices and actions are. Matter is just the medium of value.

When someone creates an application of an idea to an entity, and that application did not previously exist, only he has a moral claim to benefit from whatever potential position that application can generate in the value hierarchies of others, because that position is a direct result of his and only his thoughts and actions.

Consequently, all property rights are rights to intellectual property that must be embodied to be protected. Knowledge, ideas, and labor cannot be protected — only combined applications of them in the particular format of their embodiment.