It’s my impression that in the last 5-10 years, there has been a striking movement towards the anti-IP camp among libertarians and Austrians. This is a result of the mounting everyday evidence of injustice resulting from the digital age magnifying the baleful effects of IP that have always existed; and the mounting scholarship, from a pro-property rights, pro-free market perspective, against both the moral and principled case and the utilitarian case for IP (resources listed in the final section of my “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide“).
I’m personally aware of dozens of people who have changed their minds or seen the light on this issue–including, say, myself, Jeff Tucker, and many others. For some things I’m writing and just for general curiosity it would be interesting to get a better idea of this trend. Please feel free to add a brief comment to this post specifying whether you have moved toward the anti-IP position in recent years.Update: Some here may also find of interest the Patent Rights Web Poll I did a while back, pasted below. Feel free to take it if you haven’t:
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On a patent practitioner email list I posted the following:
It seems to me that many small/medium companies live in fear of a big patent lawsuit. Even if they had their own IP, I suspect many companies would gladly give up forever their right to sue for patent infringement, in exchange for some kind of immunity from patent liability–at least, if they could eliminate the threat of an injunction, so that the worst penalty they might face is some kind of mandatory royalty. Surely IBM et al. would not take this deal, but I bet a lot of other companies would. What do you think?Second, in view of this, does this mean there is some kind of market for a service that would let a bunch of companies get together and “pool” their IP and have some kind of agreement (a) never to sue each other; (b) to have access to this pool of patents to countersue any company that sues any of the members.
This post drew some interest so I am doing a simple webpoll. I think the results might be interesting. (DIGG it here.)
In Seen and Unseen Costs of Patents, Jeff Tucker notes, “Intel’s CEO spoke for many when he said he would be glad to cut patents to a tenth of its current rate provided that others did the same.”
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Ok. I have to be clear that I’ve not fully made up my mind. Some elements I agree with, some I don’t. I just haven’t read enought about the whole matter to made a decision. Let me see if I can explain.
* owning an idea. While I can accept that someone comes up with an idea/concept, I can’t accept that someone can thus ‘own’ the idea such that no one else can use it. I prefer going with the idea of doing research where you cite your sources, but there is no concept of getting permission/paying for citations.
I am kind of reminded of Ayn Rand who felt that libertarians had ‘taken her ideas’ without her permission, when really the ideas existed before her.
* ownership of inventions. Ok, so maybe these are just like ideas, but to me they are a little different, in that someone can invest a lot of time, energy in building something. So why shouldn’t they be re-compensated? Its one thing if you do this work as part of your job, and so your company is successful and you reap that, but what about the ‘lone inventor’? Should not they be compensated?
On one hand am reminded of the case of the guy who came up with the car wipers but the car companies took his idea and never paid him (which I feel was unethical of them regardless of any legality of not paying him, something that lawyers can’t seem to get). On the other hand, I am also reminded of people who made minor little tweaks in a concept, then act like they created the whole idea (Eli Whitney, etc)
* ownership of written material. To me, if you write something, you own it. No one should be able to publish it without your permission. To me, this is no different then plagiarism. If that’s not ok, why should publishing something that someone wrote be ok? Now, I will accept that this ownership can expire after a period of time, and it goes into the public domain. The thing about this is that some people write for a living. How can you do this if you write stuff and its ok for others to publish it without paying you for it?
When your article came out, I thought it was nuts and wacky and had no practical relevance – not that I knew what was wrong with it. I think I took a position sort of like Callahan: this stuff has evolved and the world would be chaotic without it. It took me six years to process the reality and significance. Then the dam broke and I see that statist IP mentality everywhere. Now I see just how incredibly important this is, and how innovative your initial article was. It holds up after all these years.
I’m not sure if I’ve “moved” toward an anti-IP position, but I certainly have adopted one. It’s not a topic I had ever really thought about before reading Kinsella/Boldrin/Levine.
I was conflicted before I read AIP. I always ‘felt’ that IP laws were wrong but feelings are not principles. AIP gave concrete examples and explained why IP should not exist. My only complaint is that the book is very utilitarian in its reasoning. An austro-libertarian book on the evils of IP would be brilliant.
I used to believe that it was a ‘necessary evil’ and that the music, movie and games industry we have would not exist if we did not have ‘protection’ of intellectual ‘property’. Boldrin/Levine put it best when they compare pre-IP music (Mozart, Beethoven) to today’s pop music. D:
Kinsella has made a brilliant addition to the understanding of property rights in general, not just to IP. Kinsella/Boldrin/Levine have definitely corrected my understanding of IP laws. Great job!
if you can own an idea, then who owns that idea?
I hadn’t thought about this issue until reading your articles. Those articles changed my view, though I never had a strong opinion on IP.
Yes. I now see those initials and think ‘imaginary property.’ Imaginary property people use to take other people’s real property.
I’ve moved from a pro-IP position to… agnosticism. Not the best position to take when undertaking an LL.M. in IP law in Cambridge, but there you go.
I used to agree with Stephan_Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property but then realized how it doesn’t actually hope up to scrutiny, and then further moved in the pro-IP direction when I realized how two-faced the libertarian IP opponents can become on this issue, advancing arguments they would reject in any other context.
As I’ve argued before:
- Libertarians intuitively recognize that there is a scarcity when it comes to the EM spectrum, even though it’s “rights to form a pattern”, and “your broadcasting does not prevent me from using my own property to broadcast”, yet refuse to see the parallels to IP.
- Libertarian use the calculation argument all the time to explain how only the market can know how many resources to commit to what, and then suddenly decide this is a non-issue when the question revolves around how much to devote to idea production. And they do it by defining away the problem.
Silas, this forum is not intended for arguing about IP, but just to survey trends in libertarians’ and Austrians’ thinking about IP. As for EM–not every libertarian agrees with EM-as-property, and anyway it does not imply IP. As for calculation–this is the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever heard for IP–property rights are not based on the “need to calculate.” But this should be debated elsewhere. Your pro-IP view is noted (and it’s convenient you are in a technical field where you or your employer can benefit from patents, right?).
I know my friend Gil Guillory moved to the anti-IP position about 8-9 years ago too. I know a lot of people who have.
Silas,
There is no calculation argument for IP.
You simply need to look at the specific differences between tangible and intangible entities to see why.
Intangible materials are indestructable and ‘multiply’ when communicated to another person.
Tangible materials are fragile and cannot multiply. (Exchanges are a zero sum game)
You can sell an intangible entity which is in your possession without actually owning that entity.
You cannot sell a tangible entity which is in your possession unless you actually own it (without breaking some prior contract with the true owner)
An example: I can sell the information on how to start a fire with two sticks. I do not own this information but it is in my possession. However, I cannot sell a public telephone, even if it’s in my possession. I need to own it as well.
Ownership is required for tangible entities to be exchanged, and therefore have a price.
However, possession is all that is required for intangible entities to be exchanged, and therefore have a price.
As long as a price system imputed from consumer desires can emerge, there is no economic calculation problem.
…
I just read Stephan’s reply to Silas (it wasn’t there when I started typing this). I’m sorry to argue this here but I just put all this work into writing this, it feels a waste to not send it…
I just took an IP Law final exam yesterday, so this topic is fresh in my mind. I began the course with a lot of skepticism for IP. I took issue with corporations being allowed to patent human genes, breeds of corn, etc. But after studying the actual IP laws, I believe they are both necessary and drafted fairly reasonably. (One exception would be patent laws protection of both devices and methods. I am uneasy about the idea of property rights to a “method.”)
What I have a problem with is some of the applications of IP law, but I’ve concluded that its not the concept of IP rights that is to blame. As I’ve studied this subject over the semester, I read some critiques arguing that IP law is being heavily skewed in favor of patentees primarily by judicial application and enforcement of IP laws.
Specifically, patent litigation usually goes through a separate channel in the federal courts that is allegedly biased in favor of expansively granting IP rights. First of all, the federal trial court in the Eastern District of Texas is widely known as a favorable venue for patent plaintiffs’ suits (no idea why). And instead of appealing to a regional circuit court based on where they held the trial, patent cases are appealed to the Federal Circuit court in DC. The supposed rationale is that the Federal Circuit judges can be selected for their expertise in the complexities of patent law, and/or develop that expertise during their tenure on the bench.
It’s said that the Federal Circuit has developed a bias toward an overly-expansive view of what qualifies for protection as “intellectual property” whenever modern technology or science blur the traditional concepts in our IP laws. It certainly wouldn’t be surprising, given the countless other “special” government agencies that have fallen captive to the very interests they purport to regulate.
From the Federal Circuit, the only appeal is to the Supreme Court which is said to lack the expertise to effectively resolve many of these cutting edge, and often technically or scientifically complex issues.There were some interesting examples of the Supreme Court justices’ ignorance of patent law on display during the oral arguments of In re Bilski last month. (The case was about patenting a “business method”)
My ultimate conclusion is that we need legal protection for property rights, but that we also need to rid the laws of the ambiguity that disables it from being applied to 21st century technology and science consistently. I think it would be a big mistake to throw away the concept Intellectual Property rights just because the federal government has allowed its administration of those rights to become a magnet for litigation and protectionism.
@Stephan_Kinsella:
Silas, this forum is not intended for arguing about IP, but just to survey trends in libertarians’ and Austrians’ thinking about IP.
I was giving you my trend in thinking! I had to give the reasons, for it to make sense.
EM … does not imply IP.
Sure. It only implies “the exclusive right to form a specific kind if pattern.” What does *that* have to do with IP?
As for calculation–this is the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever heard for IP–property rights are not based on the “need to calculate.”
Good thing I didn’t say that then! I just said that the calculation argument is just as applicable to IP as to other goods. Whatever argument you make for the irrelevancy of calculation per se applies just the same to Mises’s and Hayek’s argument.
But this should be debated elsewhere. Your pro-IP view is noted (and it’s convenient you are in a technical field where you or your employer can benefit from patents, right?).
What is this? You say this should be debated elsewhere, and then throw an ad-hom that isn’t even very clever? Guess what, Stephan_Kinsella: you too have a lifestyle that benefits from physical property rights. Can I introduce that as evidence of your bias?
I know my friend Gil Guillory moved to the anti-IP position about 8-9 years ago too. I know a lot of people who have.
Really? Remind him of my request that he refute the three points I linked to, since so far he can’t even come up with a brief summary of why any one of those points is in error. That’s why you haven’t seen him say all that much on the issue over that period.
I have surely moved to the anti-IP position.
As a firm believer in property rights I had always thought that you should indeed be able to own ideas.
When I realized that in enforcing IP meant exercising control over other’s physical property, it was game over.
Thanks for helping me to see the truth!
Luckily, my first study of the issue took place without my having any preconceived notions about IP i.e. in Dr. Deborah Walker’s Intro to Economics class at Loyola, New Orleans back in the early 1990s. Therefore, I never held anything but the correct position on the subject as she is an anarcho-capitalist. (No offense, Silas.)
Silas, to me your weird “calculation” argument sounds like the old incentive argument with sorry attempts to throw back to Mises and Hayek.
But honestly none of this matters. No matter how many arguments from the pro-IP crowd we refute, the IPers will just change the definition of whatever the hell it is they support.
As for the actual discussion at hand, I’ve never really felt “comfortable” with IP, but I never had a very strong opinion on it until I started hanging around here.
Yes I have, thanks to you.
In my opinion, we should sell the *access* to the information;the physical access and the intellectual access (separately perhaps).
Different people will understand the same material differently based on what definitions and referents they hold for what they makes up of the symbols they perceives.
I think the ‘conversation’ that create understanding and mastery of an idea in another person could be sold and be considered as ‘labour’.
Before I became a libertarian, I was (in sharp contrast to most people of my generation) strongly in favor of IP (even though I occasionally felt guilt for having violated copyrights very similar to how I felt when I believed in God when I acted contrary to the Bible). After becoming a libertarian through the Ron Paul campaign (although I had strong libertarian instincts even during my days on the left and hated Bush for all of the right reasons; in retrospect, I think I was engaging in evasion during my pre-libertarian days), I realized that the arguments in favor of copyright were ridiculous and that copyright is theft, rather than the ridiculous allegation that copyright infringement is theft.
I think Silas’s core argument has long needed to be refuted, so here’s my attempt to do so:
Property rights in the TV and radio spectrum are justified because 2 stations cannot broadcast on the same frequency at the same time. If I stick a broadcast tower up and broadcast libertarian propaganda on the same frequency as my local Fox affiliate, I am violating their property right to the spectrum and am violating the rights of the people who expect to watch American Idol rather than learn serious intellectual ideas. This is not the case with copyright. If I copy the contents of an audiobook CD onto a web server I paid for (and the hosting company doesn’t prohibit me from doing this) and offer this audiobook as a free download to anybody who wants it, I am violating nobody’s rights. My copyright infringement does not stop the person who sold me the audiobook CD from continuing to sell the CDs to anybody who wants them, nor do I engage in fraud by alleging that the contents are something that they are not.
The premise that spectrum rights and copyrights are equivalent is invalid.
Jay et al.–nevermind on my comment about arguing. I simply meant that was not my intent. I hope people here will just stick to answering the question mostly, so the comments can easily be skimmed to get a feel for the trend. As long as a response is civil and intelligent, it’s permitted (Silas: n.b.: being a perpetual gadfly is not civil.)
Stephan, if by “gadfly” you mean staggering ignoramus, then I agree, Silas is a gadfly.
My own personal story:
The very moment I realised the importance of private property in economics, I immediately saw the contradiction concerning IP. After a few days of thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that copyrights/patents were invalid. However I felt that trademarks/business names/logos were not invalid.
It was only later that I learned of Stephan’s work and was delighted to find out that my line of reasoning was very similar to his. (Although I’m not sure where he stands on trademarks)
J. Kane: “after studying the actual IP laws, I believe they are both necessary and drafted fairly reasonably. ”
One needs to study libertarian theory too, to decide this. To say a statute enacted by a subset of a criminal gang is “drafted fairly reasonably” is to accept that state legislation can be legitimate. It cannot be.
Jay, re trademarks-I cover this in Against Intellectual Property.
I remain limitted duration pro-IP.
Human nature being what it is, the need for IP protections serve a utilitarian purpose. Time, effort and expenses of creation must not be stolen from the creator. Without some form of limitted duration protections, each creator would be forced to defend their creation at gunpoint.
That being said, the need for the protection MUST be limitted in duration. IMO, 7 years for an invention and 20 years on a copyright are quite sufficient. The very idea of renewals is contrary to the furtherence of creation. Hence, the IP protections MUST NOT prevent the non-commercial testing and analysis of the designs. The very idea that a creation with its subsequent IP protection prevents anyone from inventing a better mousetrap unless and until the IP protection expires for the basic design is grossly stupid. This currently exists and effectively halts any furtherence of science and technology.
I concur with the premise that automatic rights must be held as invalid. If a person has an idea and shares it, it no longer is theirs to claim any right of ownership. Tendering the concept that the idea existed prior to being stated is just a mental exercise and holds no validity.
Were we to accept the thesis of prior existence of the idea, we are forced to accept the notion that the idea existed prior to the emergence of man. Effectively, the idea is renamed conceptual possibility. This leads us towards the premise that there is nothing new and therefore deserves no protections.
Therefore, the utilitarian requirement for a limitted duration IP protection must be preserved only to the extent needed to allow a prudent person to recover expenses and profits from their labors. If the creator can’t make a profit within the timeframes stated above, perhaps they failed to create what the market was willing to purchase. Things are tough all over.
Were human nature more ethical, perhaps we could formulate a mechanism for rewarding the creator and then making the idea public knowledge and available for anyone to use without penalty.
The the reason behind the original concept of the Constitutional right of IP protections being limitted in duration was to permit improvements and competition in the marketplace.
Monopoly isn’t neccessarily bad. Extending the duration of the monopoly by renewals of IP protections is contrary to the Constitution that states, “… , by securing for limitted Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right … .” Mayhaps I’ve misread this, but the wording states creators and not buyers of the IP nor the heirs. Exclusive right is the right to sell, but the idea that the sale also transfers IP rights appears false. Does exclusive not mean exclusive?
Admittedly, this notion has its own line of arguments both for and against. I have no answers. Reason can only uphold IP protections if and only if the duration is severely limitted. If the life of a mouse is but 3 years at best, why should any cartoon depiction last 50 years of more?
Human nature, being what it is, dooms every philosophy to existence only as a mental exercise. Portions might be incorporated if they serve utility. The individual may use a hammer to drive a nail, but they might just as quickly use a rock. Few would argue against the utility of the hammer. Utilitarianism meets the needs of the people. For better or for worse, human nature demands a utilitarian viewpoint to philosophy.
I would submit that IP protections MUST be rethought with careful attention to duration of protections and just what should be protected. Ideas alone shouldn’t be protected, but rather the product. If no product exists, then no protection can or should exist.
This posting is NOT under any IP protection. It was my idea until I posted it. In posting it, I relinquished any and all rights I might have had. Furthermore, as I no longer have any rights to it, I can NOT held to bear any responsibility for its use or misuse.
Stephen,
Just did a quick search, found an online version in Journal of Libertarian Studies here on Mises.org and skimmed through to the section on trademarks. Exactly the same conclusions I came to!
Actually, I’m going to read the whole thing now. I’ve only ever read your articles before, I didn’t know “Against Intellectual Property” would actually be online … Maybe you should sue Mises.org for copyright infringement…
I was a raving Randian and Constitutionalist in IP until several things happened that changed my mind completely.
First off, Stefan Kinsella and Jeffery Tucker made several convincing arguments concerning the effects of the monopoly of and of the problems associated with concurrent invention.
Second, I had been working on my own project, not directly related to the IP issue, but rather Metaphysics and Physics. This project worked from the basic assumptions that all “things” are conciousness, and those things experience time. An interesting starting point to say the least. I was actually looking for flaws in the logic in order to refute some of the arguments of Physicist Dr. Thomas Campbell, but to no avail. His Big TOE stands un-vanquished, at least by my work. I have only managed to expand on it!
From those basic assumptions, I found justification for many natural laws, both physical and non physical including natural law justification of Identity (A is A), as well as a re-arraigngement of E=mc^2. I was very surprised by this.
But the source of an idea or a thought is not necessarily from within, in that all of the potential one must experience as time, has a source that is outside of the self. This fact of Being, (you can check Heidegger if you have any doubts), means that you can not OWN a thought, any more than you can OWN the air you breath.
So much for IP! What you can own is your Identity, your brand, your signature. But not the “substance” of conceptual reality. That space has access to every mind, not just your own.
I didn’t always have a thought-out stand on IP, but looking back at my actions in the past, I was an intuitive anti-IP person even 25 years ago. When I first found out that I was supposed to pay for a copy of software that I could get for free from my place of work or a friend, and that Microsoft or whoever could theoretically punish me for “pirating”, my mental response was always “Yeah, good luck with that.” I’ve always thought it’s intuitively obvious that software is not “property” in the same sense that, say, a computer is. All I’ve done in the intervening years is add to my intellectual arsenal arguments for why that is the case. I haven’t actually changed my views.
I came at this from an angle I don’t see mentioned anywhere.
Copyright and patent were created by statute. Unlike tangible property like my body, land, house, car, the rules of I.P. are entirely creatures of lawyers and politicians.
Remove the laws supporting I.P., and I.P. vanishes. Gone. And good riddance.
I see a use for fraud in the protection of reputation, and even a social norm of what we presently call “trademark” the same way we utilize signatures. And that’s about it.
The principled stand against I.P., the detailing of the abuses of I.P. that the laws promote, have made it possible to better detail reasons for objecting to I.P.
Because I.P. is the result of statute law, it is arbitrary. Reforming the rules to make them work “better” is irrelevant, because they are arbitrary. “Better” has no objective basis, it’s entirely opinion. One arbitrary structure or another, they remain arbitrary.
The only objectively “better” answer is to repeal the statutes that create I.P. and let the market find answers that work the same way that market evolution of services finds answers to everything else: By solving real problems that people actually want solved.
Hey, Russ, try Linux. Stealing Windows is like stealing cow dung. Why bother?
Free Libre Open Source Software still relies on copyright to keep the code available for everyone, but that’s because we live in an environment of I.P. so they deal with it.
Like Kinsella says about his customers, they file patents in self defense more than to try to gain some overt benefit.
I’m the opposite Stephan. In college I was essentially an ‘anarchocapitalist Objectivist’. Among a few other political disagreements with mainstream Oism was not believing at all in IP and regarding the only way to try to simulate it being contractualist agreements among all parties involved. It was always unsettling not recognizing the ‘mixing of labor’ of developing an idea or creative work, however, and in the past decade I’ve moved to a far more pro-IP stance.
Despite the ‘devils being in the details’ and still having non-trivial objections to some Oist viewpoints on the matter and especially modern US law on IP, I have come to regard the fundamental ideas underlying trademark and copyright (if not patents) as valid. However, I recognize it as a complex and difficult area and not just a matter of self-evident ‘IP is bullshit’ or ‘copying is stealing’ extreme. I still appreciate reading contrasting viewpoints such as from you and from Oists on Noodlefood and elsewhere. Anyway, I at least serve as evidence that there’s not solely a move to more anti-IP views
.
Technically, I have not changed my mind. Its been an evolutionary learning experience in observing how distorted copyright/patent law has become.
The Sony rootkit debacle inspired me to walk the path towards radicalism. While the Sony rootkit debacle exposed the evils of DRM through a spectacular “blow-up”, the onerous evils of DRM do not really become apparent until you begin to experience it. So as I became increasingly dependent on my computer, have suffered from DRM, and began to read blogs exposing the evils of DRM; I easily walked down the path of accepting that so-called intellectual property is a fiction.
Curt Howland wrote:
“Hey, Russ, try Linux.”
Hey, Curt. I also have several Linux boxen, but since most of my hardware is older, and because the distro I use (Slackware) is getting so bloated that I can’t easily install it on my old hardware, I am still in the land of 2.4.
“Stealing Windows is like stealing cow dung. Why bother?”
I have to have Windows for compatibility with work-related software. Beside, although Windows does have its problems (I recently had my browser throw up a search provider error apparently related to a corrupted registry, which magically went away!), it’s actually not so bad, as long as I am behind a firewall and am careful what I download. I’m not religious about software. If it makes my life easier, I use it.
I am completely convinced that the concept of “intellectual” property is incompatible with private property rights. Against Intellectual Property and the Mises Institute blog are the two drivers of this change in my beliefs. It took about 6 months of really thinking about the issues to come around. What really tipped it for me was the non-utilitarian arguments against IP laid out in Mr. Kinsella’s book.
The legitimacy of “intellectual” property is one of those subjects that is just taken for granted by 99% of Americans because it is never questioned or challenged. For this reason, the anti-IP position is one that I think will take a very long time to become mainstream.
I guess I used to sort of accept patents and copyright as necessary legal tools for companies to protect their investments in coming up with ideas, but never thought much about it. But the more I heard about their application in the software field, with the ridiculous things that were patented, I could see that they just created problems. It wasn’t until I started reading mises.org earlier this year and came to understand the basic “non-aggression” principle that I became strongly anti-IP. Understanding non-aggression started the dominoes falling on my previous view of most government as legitimate, and made the inherent conflict of IP with physical property evident, thus solidifying my opposition to IP.
I’m neutral on this issue, but favor attacking IP after the DEA, FDA, IRS, and BATFE have been abolished.
My tendency is to favor IP and copyright. I believe that the time invested in learning something should not be negated by a bunch of worthless losers (such as people who download “free” copyrighted music) taking advantage of ways around paying you.
If there were no copyrights, then even hit songs would never pay their creators. The song could be used in a movie without paying its creator or performer. Most people are only as good as the system they live under, and lack of ownership over patterns would disincentivize the creation of new patterns.
In fact, there should be more and better IP as we progress into the future, but that IP agreement should be contractually-entered-into and obeyed as a contract. This is the final frontier for voluntaryist law, and it would put an ocean of parasitic and government-force-wielding lawyers to good use.
My views on IP are not yet fully formed. A friend of mine, Dick Clark, who was convinced by Kinsella is one of the smartest libertarians I know. In honesty, I have not yet read the book, Against Intellectual Property. It is on my short list of books I need to read.
A few thoughts.
1) I don’t personally benefit much from IP laws, and IP laws are largely unenforced and unenforceable.
2) Keeping the laws on the books doesn’t make them more enforceable, but new technology continually does.
3) The primary benefit I get from IP laws is the benefit any artist gets from them: They are not put in the position of writing a hit song, hearing it blaring from every streetcorner, and dying of starvation on their way to the homeless shelter, because they never got a cent in royalties. In fact, many artists never got the benefit of royalties, had their contracts violated, and never benefitted at all from the music they wrote (nearly the entire genre of the blues comes to mind).
4) Expanding IP enforcement into the domain of filesharing would allow an immense tyranny to declare all things private to be public, and would allow for the immense violation of property rights, and privacy rights.
So, I am conflicted on this issue.
That said, I trust the government to do nothing right, so I am leaning slightly against IP. Of course, every time I think about that, I think of the guy who designed the windshield wipers, and Ayn Rand.
Why should the useless (meek) inherit the earth?
Some arguments strike me as weak, such as “Artists should make music because they love to make music, not because they are being paid.”
(This is a lot like the common argument for socialized medicine: “Doctors should cure people because they want to help people, not so they can make a buck…”). Both arguments deny the creator capital reinvestment caused by parasitic use of their product.
Also: there is an abundance of material on earth that is likely to be conquered by man’s mind at the advent of strong nanotech (See: “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler). At that point, intellectual property transactions will likely be the dominant means of exchange. Instead of a song, you will download the IP for a great tasting hamburger, and it will rise out of the same desktop factory-assembler that created your bulletproof jacket and your personal computational assistant.
Once thought is the scarcest commodity on earth, do we really want to disincentivize creativity?
A great paper on this is available here:
http://www.kurzweilai.net > Big Thinkers > Robert Freitas (the paper on concentrations and calculated values of the rare earth elements based on extraction rates).
Just my admittedly underinformed .02. I think IP will be the last thing attacked by libertarians, since it is not obviously destructive, and we are small in number, even in our greatest concentrations.
Jake Witmer
907.250.5503
Jake,
You raise up something which I think is of utmost importance not only in the issue of IP, but in all issues of all the social sciences. In transhumanist thinking especially, considering you bring up strong nanotechnology.
What does it mean that something “should” happen? When we say “Artists should be paid for their work” what do we really mean?
I am beginning to suspect those words are empty, outside of our subjective judgements of value. When we say “Artists should be paid for their work” we mean “I want Artists to be paid for their work.” In the objective sense, there’s no such thing as something that “should” or “should not” happen. Only things that will and will not, can and can not; Reality doesn’t want, it just is.
However when people say “should” they don’t mean “I want.” They mean “It is Right for this to happen and for it to not happen is Wrong.” And this is all well and good, so long as we know what Right and Wrong means.
However, I have not yet found any consistent way of defining morality without including subjective value judgments. Ultimately our sense of “justice” depends on chemical compositions in our brains. Change the chemicals, and that sense can change or go away entirely.
I think it’s more useful to make our reasoning about the world (Social Sciences included) without introducing morality.
Jake Witmer wrote:
“I believe that the time invested in learning something should not be negated by a bunch of worthless losers (such as people who download “free” copyrighted music) taking advantage of ways around paying you.”
My take on it is that if a person intends to become rich by making and selling something that is easily copied, then he has a poor business plan. If he then tries to compensate for the poverty of his business plan by having jack-booted thugs shove people around as “punishment” for the fictional “crime” of “stealing” his “intellectual property”, even though it is the nature of the thing that it is easily copied, then it is he that is the worthless loser, not the person doing the copying.
I have become fully anti-intellectual monopoly. The idea that one can fully own ideas or that the ownership of ideas is beneficial to society is plainly absurd. Freedom of ideas means that in the marketplace of ideas, good ideas spread quicker and are able to replace bad ideas in a timelier fashion. That spurs innovation and societal change, among other things.
I’m sure I’ve changed my mind plenty of times over the years.
I’m currently completely anti-patent and pro-copyright, although I think actual copyright law is incorrect. It’s both too broad and too narrow. Too narrow because you should be able to copyright any physical object and with no time limit. Too broad for several reasons. One in that if someone uses copyrighted materials to assert claims against others then that should put them in the public domain (e.g. temperature data).
Jake reminded me of a very critical point that I did not mention in my post. That is that those who claim an intellectual property are doing so by “stealing” your property right. People do not have a “right” to protect their property by “stealing” or other wise depriving you of your property writes.
Jake, speaks of the need for content creators to protect their rights. As a motherhood type statement, no one can argue against it. But as the Sony rootkit scandal pointed out, the content creators are not simply doing things to protect their rights but are actively depriving you of your rights. In the case of the Sony rootkit scandal, partially disabling your computer.
Furthermore, the content creators in their quest to “protect” their rights, are “inventing” ever more rights that must be protected by increasingly onerous legislation and enforced by the State. Clearly, if I find my rights being stripped away, I do not feel much sympathy or respect for the supposed rights of the content creators.
Why was copyright (just to pick one) rationalized? To “reward creative works”.
But it doesn’t. It rewards sitting on one’s seat and collecting royalties.
To say that copying “deprives” someone ignores the fact that the person who created it has already sold it or otherwise made it available. It’s done. If they didn’t make “enough” from the original sale, why did they sell it?
I don’t give away my work, but I don’t claim remuneration from anyone that copies my network designs either.
As any philosophical debate needs balance, not just by the teams, but also by each debater, I present a slightly different approach to IP as it applies to utility patents.
Patents come in two flavors: utility and design.
A design patent is shape and color, in other words aethetic appeal. A table lamp is a table lamp. It is the details of the design that sets one apart from another.
A utility patent is for something new and novel that has not existed before. Part of the patent requires a set of claims as to its utility. These claims can be held as primae facie evidence in a court of torts. It is effectively a warrant as to its use. If IP rights to utility patents were suspended, there could be no claims made against the product manufacturer. That waffle-headed 32 ounce framing hammer was designed and marketted as a whas-it. That a person crushed their thumb with it wasn’t anyone’s fault but their own. Bye-bye tort.
In one fell swoop, we could eliminate all warrantees, guarantees, royaltys and licensing. We could market stuff and let the buyer determine its suitability. Oh gosh. This would force people to think.
If a person makes a new and novel product, they could use methods to insure proprietary knowledge is kept secret. Afix a destructive device inside that acts as way of insuring the innards are kept secret. With no implied warrantee or guarantee, if the buyer attempted to open up the gizmo and it caught fire, blew up or spilled corrosive material all over the place, there could be no tort claim. Caveat emptor.
Though I intended to confine this to patents, another thought hit. If I have no IP right to anything I say or write, then I can’t be held accountable for anything I say or write. I could ascribe it to Stephan Kinsella, Albert Einstein or Barrack Obama. Let the market of public opinion determine the authenticity, value or what-ever.
BTW anyone looking into music industry and artists regarding IP will quickly find that the artist is just a trained monkey. The creation of the music needs no particular artist to perform it. For every monkey that makes it to the top, hundreds are playing one-nighters in taverns and night-clubs. This in no way implies that the artists playing one-nighters are in anyway inferior to those who made it to the top. Good thing the one-nighters aren’t being forced to pay royalties.
Both sides of the argument have a measure of validity. The problem is in finding a balance between furtherence in the field of endeavor versus renumerating the creator for their efforts. I have no answers. I trend towards the need for re-thinking IP laws and substantially reducing the duration of the protections.
I suppose that it began with the RIAA lawsuits from several years back. Before that point, IP had my tacit approval as a concept that was necessary and important. From there, the abuses just got worse and the scope of IP more ridculous. Patents on software, on genes?
By the time I read “Against Intellectual Property”, my skepticism was firmly entrenched, though it was directed until that point not at IP itself, but at those who would use it as a tool to intimidate and extort. Kinsella’s paper convinced me that it was IP itself that was the problem, not just those who abused it.
where i come from it’s illegal to smoke dope, but you can legally buy bongs from “smoking paraphernalia” stores. ha!
long before i knew anything about things austrian, this is how alice-in-wonderland ip laws appeared to me.
yes, you can buy a blank vhs tape, but god forbid you copy a favourite tv show! go ahead, photocopy 5% of a book under fair use, but 13% makes you an evil thief. everybody is a criminal, but nobody seems to debate the legitimacy of the laws. as others have said, the pure arbitrariness of it all should alert anyone with half a brain that something is seriously awry. borrow a book from the library or a friend, and steal the food from the artist’s mouth.
kinsella helped form my inchoate distrust of ip into a more logical opposition, so a thank-you for his dogged persistence. mises didn’t embarass himself much over ip, but everytime i think of rothbard and his mousetrap i cringe. a real clanger. i think this is one area where there has been major progress post-rothbard/mises.
i’d like to think debate on em rights is still a work-in-progress, as i don’t see em frequencies as something one can control outside one’s own property borders.
i think it’s best treated as a pollution/nuisance issue. that silas barta grasps at this one straw (the “silas-calculation-problem” is laughable), should suffice to cause reconsideration.
I am pro-IP for biotech and drug discovery. It works fine and makes it possible.
By the way, why not decrease the time monopoly gradually and see what happens?
I’m a composer, and I like those checks from BMI. This has been an impediment to fully hopping on the anti-IP bandwagon. But I’ve also had cases where IP law was an impediment to distribution of my own work. And I was in sheet music sales when Russia joined GATT and the price of Shostakovich quartets doubled, and the Sonny Bono nonsense. Much of the updating of music copyright was a bailout of publishers who had backed the wrong horses post WWII, and were about to lose the Ravels, Coplands etc. that were keeping them afloat.
My chief problem with IP is that the notion is intellectually incoherent; there can be no natural right to IP, which is created solely by government. And if something that was “property” can become “not property” and then become property again, was it ever property?
Mr. Tucker has been more of an influence here than you, Stephen, because of his writings on church music. I’ve got to take exception with Mr. Howland however: “It rewards sitting on one’s seat and collecting royalties.” I find collecting royalties to be wonderfully inspiring. If I’m not being compensated, it doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t create, but it does mean that I’m more likely to spend time on more remunerative activities. Also, royalties are the only way that the quality of an artwork can be market-compensated. If I sell a work for a set fee, I may not know its true worth to society, and sell too low, particularly if I’m in dire straits financially. If a piece becomes valuable to many people, both my publisher and I can benefit, instead of all the money accruing only to the publisher.
Yes.
I went from being skeptical about it to completely opposing it. And the state.
The issue of Intellectual Property is what introduced me to this website and along the way, the rest of libertarian thought.
MBrown’s anecdote about the windshield wiper inventor puts me in mind of what is supposed to have happened to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (creators of Superman) or Jack Kirby (creator or co-creator of most of Marvel’s popular characters). The publisher would stamp “for all rights,” or terms to that effect, on the back of the artist/writer’s first paycheck, and boom! Work-made-for-hire, on one’s own creation.
Have I moved toward an anti-IP position? Yeah — at least, I’m certainly giving the argument a lot more attention.
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