What if I agree to exchange my bicycle to a rabbit chick in exchange for money with the agreement that the rabbit chick will not “copy” it and give the copy to another rabbit?

If a third party “copies” the bike with permission from the rabbit chick then it is breech of contract. If a third party copies the bike without permission from the rabbit chick it is theft.

Some Dude: in your example the property is not your idea, it’s a contract.
The fact that you built a pyramid first does not give you any rights over my rocks and land, I can still do as I please with my property, anything that you try to do to take some of my property for you or to prohibit me of using my property is a crime.
Great video!

ip is just the new wave of monopoly, the belief that since taxpayers are paying, we can fence our way to wealth.

newson-

ip is just the new wave of monopoly, the belief that since taxpayers are paying, we can fence our way to wealth.

Anti-ip is the same old collectivism.

You have a monopoly on access to your house/apartment. When are you going to start letting the public in, you greedy “fencer”?

Everyone look, he’s FENCING!

“Fiat money has no inherent value.”

Then why do people exchange goods and services for it?

to pro-ip libertarian:

hey, do i ask you to pay for a lock for my apartment? now do you understand? i lock my own place, and feed my own guard-dog, i don’t shake down my neighbours to pay for a sentry.

No post from the theft camp has addressed this…

Your statements are unsubstantiated assertions and question-begging. There’s been nothing to address so far.

RWW, do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?

To answer that you have to convince me, to take one example, how does an author or a musician support himself with the products from his mind: books and songs, in an age when Internet sales govern the market?

This Christmas Amazon sold more ebooks that dead tree books.

As I stated on Doctorow’s blog, ‘at no other stage in human history has civilisation had anything like the computer, and thus,the ability for one person anywhere in the globe to share one file with billions.’

Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property that he has put in the market under a contract of copyright. Copying is thus most surely theft.

My previous comment was in response to your previous comments.

RWW, do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?

How about you try communicating like a human being instead of in meaningless emotional jargon?

…how does an author or a musician support himself with the products from his mind: books and songs, in an age when Internet sales govern the market?

While I am taken aback that a supposed “Objectivist” would be such a blatant consequentialist, the issue you raise has been addressed here ad nauseum. It betrays your lack of both imagination and willingness to do some basic background reading.

Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property…

If you’re referring to digital content, you’re begging the question.

…that he has put in the market under a contract of copyright.

Odd that I don’t recall having agreed to such a contract.

Explain to me the ethics of ‘copying is not theft’.

Sorry, but when I am saying “Let people do X” and you are saying “We must forcefully prevent people from doing X,” the burden of the argument seems to be upon you. I eagerly await some meaningful argument.

‘Copying is denying the writer/songster payment for his property…

If you’re referring to digital content, you’re begging the question.

As I have said, arguments for theft are just so much sophistry.

And I started with a valid question, repeat: do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society?

Your answer – How about you try communicating like a human being instead of in meaningless emotional jargon? – in no way addressed the question.

But really, I’m interested in the ethics of stealing, what are they please.

Mark Hubbard,

” do you agree that taking ‘copying is not theft’ to its logical conclusion will lead to a second hander society? ”

No. So where does that leave us?

and you are saying “We must forcefully prevent people from doing X, …

Ludicrous.

Answer this:

I put an ebook online and the conditions of my site say you must pay me to download this. You simply copy and do not pay.

I put a dead tree book on the shelf of my bookshop, a price tag of $30 is on it. You walk in, pick up the book and walk out of my store without payment.

You will agree the second instance is theft. Why is the first instance not theft?

Mark Hubbard,

” You will agree the second instance is theft. Why is the first instance not theft? ”

Because in the first instance, you still have the e-book while in the second, you do not have the dead tree book any more. That’s the simple difference you are failing to see.

Bala wrote:

I claim to be an Objectivist too and have come to the conclusion (starting from Objectivist premises) that support for IP contradicts the basic principles of Objectivism. My conclusion is that supporting IP is tantamount to whim worshipping and evasion of reality – the two most serious acts of immorality that an Objectivist could commit.

I need a lot more detail than that: explain please.

Cheers Bala. That is a long thread, I probably won’t have a chance to read it until next week, though I can’t see how it could change my position – I find arguments for copying, again, to always exist on sophistry. And for those arguing it, I don’t think they have fully reasoned the implications this has for a laissez-faire market in an electronic age.

And as I said above, someone going to my site, and despite the contract I have put on my site, they copying my ebook without payment regardless: that is the immorality.

But I’ll read that thread … and will be gone for some time in the meantime.

Actually, you should have been more careful than to put your book in that format. I don’t actually need to “break into” your site to copy it. I could buy a copy legitimately and then copy it or let it be copied. That’s the point at which your argument becomes really weak.

No, that’s where you depart from both logic and morality, as with Russ above. You’re saying that if I put my dead tree book on the table in a cafe then I deserve to have it stolen. And that would be stupid of me, but it does not change the fact that the person who stole it is an immoral thief committing an act of theft. The act of theft is not contingent on whether I use encryption for my ebook or not.

You were right above: this issue turns on morality.

And you think that copying something that someone has left out in public constitutes theft? What a ludicrous argument.

Your comprehension is as loose as your morality Russ. Read what I actually said.

Oh look, Stranger brought his pro-monopoly, pro-ltv position to the Mises blog.

Copying no more steals value than growing my own apples steals value from an orchard down the road.

@Bala, you are the most heroic Objectivist I know, because you have the courage to work from first principles, instead of repeating the dogmatic nonsense of cult worship. Cheers.

Mark Hubbard,

” You were right above: this issue turns on morality. ”

Actually, the real moral question you are evading is whether ideas and patterns (your book, e- or otherwise, falls in that category) should be treated as “property”. It is only AFTER you acknowledge that they can be treated as “property” that you can even talk of “theft” and my act of copying your book as “thieving”.

It is this fundamental point that I am trying to address – that it is IMMORAL to treat ideas and patterns as “property”.

Let’s start from Objectivist fundamentals.

1. Man is a rational animal with a volitional consciousness.

2. Life is a sequence of self-generated self-sustaining actions. The purpose of all action is life itself and its sustenance.

3. Values are that which you act to gain or keep.

4. Man’s values are not automatic unlike those of other living beings. He needs to choose his values and then act to gain or geek them.

5. Man’s epistemology is reason. He uses his powers of reason to form concepts of existence and of causality within existence. He uses these to modify his environment and thus derive the values that will advance his life.

6. Man, in order to sustain his life, needs to act. The purpose of all such action is to gain the value needed to sustain it and to keep that which he has gained.

7. Man needs to be free to act as per the judgement of his rational mind in order to choose his values as well as the means to gain/keep them. To do this, he needs that force may not be initiated against him by other men as force is that which neuters volition and renders it impossible for man to act.

8. Rights are a moral concept defining and sanctioning man’s freedom of action in a social context.

9. Rights are a recognition of a particular condition of existence essential for the survival of man qua man, i.e., as identified above.

10. The Right to Life is nothing more than a recognition of the reality that for man to be able to survive qua man, no other man may initiate force against him.

11. To sustain his life qua man, man needs to be free to apply the values he has gained in the service of his life. This is the beginning of the moral concept “property”.

12. For man to be free to act to apply the values he has acquired in the service of his life, it is necessary that others do not act in a manner that deprives him of the freedom to act thus. This is the next step in the evolution of the concepts “property” and “property rights”.

“Property” thus is the moral concept that applies to the products of value that man acquires with the aim of applying them in the service of his life. The most important aspect of the concept “property” is that the owner should be free to act to apply the objects of value in the service of his life.

There are 2 categories of objects – material existents and concepts of and related to existence. Of the two, the former is “scarce” while the latter is not. The meaning of “scarce” here is that there is only 1 of a particular existent and therefore, if one man is in possession of a material object, another cannot. Therefore, if I have acquired a material object to apply it in the service of my life, your taking it deprives me of the freedom to act to apply it thus. The recognition of this condition of existence essential for the survival of man qua man is what we call the “right to exclude” that forms an integral part of the concept “right to property”. Without exclusion, it is impossible for man to have a concept of physical “property”. Hence, it is moral to treat physical objects as “property”.

Ideas and patterns, the 2nd category of existents, however, have the peculiar nature that they can be simultaneously used by any number of people without abridging the freedom of any of them to act to instantiate them. Therefore exclusivity is NOT NECESSARY for man to be free to act on them. Hence, there is no question of treating them as “property”. Any attempt to do so would be in violation of the basic Objectivist concept of Rights itself.

At the same time, ideas by THEIR very NATURE, are not amenable to exclusivity. Once an idea/pattern is instantiated and that object is sold, the idea screams out loud for anyone at all to grasp them. All it requires is a conscious human being acting as per his nature and forming concepts of existence and of causality within existence. This involves asking simple questions like “What is this?”, “How does this work?”, “How is this better than other known arrangements?”, etc.

To still insist that we should treat ideas and patterns as though exclusivity in them were possible, you would be guilty of evading the reality that they are not amenable to exclusion and acting to enforce exclusivity would be tantamount to worshipping your whim that they should be exclusive.

To say that the owner of the object that contains the instantiation should not do this is to demand that he lives a sub-human existence. If you further demand that he should not act to instantiate the idea that he has now obtained, you are once again demanding that he cease to live as a human being, i.e., act as per the judgement of his rational mind.

That would make you a supporter of the “right to enslave”, something no Objectivist would recognise as valid under any circumstances.

Thus, IP is contradictory to Objectivism.

Great post ‘some dude’: that’s the point the file stealers don’t want to deal with.

And don’t go thinking the Objectivist position is to sanction this theft: it’s not.

Bala: Actually, the real moral question you are evading is whether ideas and patterns (your book, e- or otherwise, falls in that category) should be treated as “property”. It is only AFTER you acknowledge that they can be treated as “property” that you can even talk of “theft” and my act of copying your book as “thieving”.

Yes, it does turn ultimately on this, and yes, my novel is not a damned ‘pattern’, it is property. Bloody hell.

Thus, IP is contradictory to Objectivism.

No, Objectivism is precisely against the stealing of another’s property. You advocate the initiation of force and fraud.

MichaelM’s arguments in the link you gave above would be a pretty good fit for my own, vis a vis, my novel is property. Copying is theft. He argued the point well.

I don’t consider you an Objectivist, Bala, I’m afraid you belong to that unethical street gang called file stealers, along with Russ. I despise you and your ilk: you are the barrier to the free society I wish to live in, not the harbinger of it.

And to return to ‘some dude’s’ comment, which I have also made above: your attitude on a fundamental level would knock the feet out from under a laissez-faire market. Mises would be turning in his grave.

I’m not impressed.

Why do you all seem to assume that the amount of art being produced under a pro-IP regime is the ideal amount? Obviously granting special legal privileges to something will promote its production; how do you know that the market is not being lead to an irrationally high level of art production by the privileges of IP law?

In any case, if people start distributing your novel themselves, the only way to argue that you have suffered damages as a result would be to say that you were entitled to have people buy your book, which is absurd, and if there are no damages, there is no crime.

Just having labored at something doesn’t give you any right to anything except the product of the labor itself, which would be the original manuscript, not any subsequent copies others might produce with their own property. You cries of “theft” seem motivated mostly by having invested so much into something for which there is no solid business model without government intervention, like so many other would-be monopolists.