It has been well known for a while that the advocates of stronger enforcement of intellectual property “rights” are pushing forward. The effect is widespread surveillance of communication of the Internet as well as other communication channels throughout the European Union.
On a national level, the corporate owners of movie and music rights have gained increased power. The country of Sweden, the home of the world [in]famous The Pirate Bay, is an example of this; here the EU directive has been passed in its “local” form, which allows copyright organizations protecting Hollywood corporations’ privilege to gain court orders to get personal information of suspected file sharers. With this information they can contact the file sharer and demand that they stop what they are doing, and otherwise sue them using whatever information they have collected through that person’s ISP. Such power is not even granted the police, who need much more than vague suspicion to monitor people’s communication.
More recently, a law is proposed in Italy that requires Internet users to apply for and receive authorization from the Communications Ministry to upload video to Internet sites. The authorization required to upload your homemade video to YouTube is basically the same as what is required by television broadcasters.
The same type of law is rumored to soon be proposed in the French parliament as well. It is likely this issue will be raised on the super-national level as well with France and Italy calling for a European Union directive.
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Peter Surda wrote:
“There is no empirical difference between using someone’s immaterial good and not using it. You cannot measure the difference between such actions, the immaterial goods only exist in people’s heads. “Use” and “copying” with regards to immaterial goods are metaphors. They only mean that there is a causal relationship, and the results appear similar in some respect to the alleged property. In order for this to be a proper theory, you would need to conclude that all causally related activities are property infringements absent agreement from a previous actors, and all actions or objects that appear similar to someone as well. Are you prepared to make that claim, or are you going to assert that there is some sort of limit beyond where causality and similarity are irrelevant?”
This is brilliant work Peter. I never heard this argument described so eloquently before.
Peter,
Since Jay finds this argument brilliant I feel I should take it down
“There is no empirical difference between using someone’s immaterial good and not using it.”
Yes there is unless you don’t except confession as empirical evidence. Jay used Harry Potter. He gave the example and he knows it is Harry Potter, and he knows Harry Potter was not nature given or his own work, but the product of Rowling.
“You cannot measure the difference between such actions, the immaterial goods only exist in people’s heads.”
Yes you actually can. The difficulty would be the enforcement absent confession. And we agreed above that enforcement difficulties do not invalidate rights.
“”Use” and “copying” with regards to immaterial goods are metaphors.”
Metaphors of what?
“They only mean that there is a causal relationship, and the results appear similar in some respect to the alleged property.”
Causal relation is the foundation of property. And results appearing “similar” is only true for a third party absent confession. When you look at Jays copy it may seem similar to Harry Potter to you. But Jay knows perfectly well it is in fact Harry Potter he is associating himself with.
“In order for this to be a proper theory, you would need to conclude that all causally related activities are property infringements absent agreement from a previous actors, and all actions or objects that appear similar to someone as well.”
You are trying to bring in the externality argument here but you don’t know what externality is. I asked you to define it you didn’t.
Externalities are reflections of some specific object. IP is not an externality but the object itself. IP may also have externalities just as physical property has externalities. When you play a song you wrote, the music that is heard over the airways is an externality but the song itself isn’t.
@Kerem:
> Yes there is unless you don’t except confession as
> empirical evidence.
Confession is indeed not empirical evidence. The confessor might be lying, confused, emotional, incorrect or simply not aware of the process that occurred in his head in sufficient detail. We have no way of determining what is actually happening in one’s head and observing how immaterial goods “flow”. Not in the empirical way.
> Yes you actually can.
The features of the object or action that is the outcome of the alleged infringement are not influenced by whether the actual infringement happened. We have no way of determining the difference between these two states.
> Metaphors of what?
Metaphors as opposed to an empirical occurrance.
> Causal relation is the foundation of property.
But the problem arrises if you consider this a sufficient, rather than merely necessary, condition. If it was sufficient, parents would own their children. Soviet Union would co-own Atlas Shrugged, and would the typewriter manufacturers, her landlords, grocery owner and the heirs of Aristotle. There is nowhere to stop in the causality chain.
> And results appearing “similar” is only true for a third
> party absent confession.
Confession is not an empirical fact, and neither is similarity.
> You are trying to bring in the externality argument
> here but you don’t know what externality is.
The same accusation can be brought towards you with regards to property. However, that leads nowhere. There is no need to define externality in great precision. Suffice to say that it is just a fancy word for causality.
> IP is not an externality but the object itself.
This is one of the axioms that I have problems with. I showed before that there are cases where the only reason you have for claiming that a physical object “contains” an immaterial objects is the thought processes of one person. That invalidates this axiom. If the thought processes of one person determine the boundaries of an immaterial good, it logically means that the boundaries are subjective.
> IP may also have externalities just as physical
> property has externalities.
There is no way to differentiate between immaterial externalities and immaterial goods. Neither are based on empirical phenomena.
I don’t know much about the issues of IP and I don’t pretend to know a lot about debating, I just happened to start reading this thread.
Mark Hubbard seems to be considering the producers as the same people as the creators, and that would be a mistake. If I create something, I would usually sell that to someone to distribute on my behalf. Maybe I get a cut of what they sell, maybe I don’t. If I don’t sell it, nobody buys it, or I become the distributor. It depends on the arrangements I made when initially selling my created work, or if I’m distributing it, those are my choices on what I do with my created work.
But when it comes to the mainstream distribution of books, music, movies, etc. if there is theft, it would be from the producers/distributors who’s sole aim is to buy a product, idea etc., make that product at the cheapest possible cost and sell it for the most money they can get. Shrinkage, theft, loss, is on the distributors as part of their deal, not the creator. The creator with the IP rights has nothing to do with the distributor.
So for my understanding, we should have IP rights that extend from the creator for the distributors as well? That doesn’t make sense as they are trying to make a profit above and beyond the creator’s original work. That’s the one part of this whole debate I don’t understand. I understand wanting to protect the creator, but not extend it to the distributor as well. But then again, I don’t know the laws regarding that, so maybe there are some.
1) I don’t think that the difficulty of effective enforcement makes IP wrong, in and of itself. I do think it could be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. In the case of murder and invisibility cloaks, I certainly think the cure would still be necessary.
2)
Peter Surda wrote:
“There is no empirical difference between using someone’s immaterial good and not using it. You cannot measure the difference between such actions…”
I do think that you can measure the difference between people “stealing”, say, an ebook, and not doing so. You would simply “measure” the bank acount of the person selling the ebook.
3) Going back to Silas’ argument, let’s say that two people make a radio broadcast of themselves talking using the same frequency, at the same time, in the same area. They don’t do this with the intent to communicate with anybody else; they are just doing it because they think it’s cool (contrived, I know, but that is apparently allowed in philosophy these days). If someone happens to be listening to this, then what they would hear is a superposition of the transmissions; the two signals *would* interfere with each other. So, lack of intention to communicate over this frequency would not prevent interference from taking place. It’s just that the interference wouldn’t matter. Radio interference is not in the same conceptual class as interference in somebody’s plans. Radio interference is a physical phenomenon that does not depend on intent. Interfering with somebody’s desire that, say, nobody copy their IP, does depend on intent. Silas’ entire argument is based on a conflation of two different kinds of “interference”; one purely physical, one not.
@Russ:
> I do think that you can measure the difference
> between people “stealing”, say, an ebook, and not
> doing so. You would simply “measure” the bank
> acount of the person selling the ebook.
I believe you misunderstand. In this case, whether the person A “steals” an ebook “from” person B or not, the bank account of person B would show exactly the same amount of money. From this point of view, there is no measurable difference between those two situations.
Peter,
No, if person A *buys* the ebook instead of “stealing” it, then the bank account of person B would increase. There is a measurable difference between the two outcomes.
Dear Russ,
you misunderstand my claim. I claim that usage versus non-usage can’t be empirically distinguished. You think that I claim that legitimate versus non-legitimate usage cannot be distinguished. While the second claim might be in some cases true and in some not, it is not the one that I’m making.
My first message was held up for moderation so I changed the wording and posting again.
Peter,
Do you mean, for instance, that if a person “steals” a piece of software, and then never uses it, this cannot be distinguished from “stealing” it and then using it (without spying on the “thief”, that is)? If so, then I agree. Sorry for the confusion.
Dear Russ,
no, not really. Allow me to clarify once more please. If the only claimed difference between two situations is that one features the use of an immaterial good and one does not, then these situations are empirically indistinguishable. In your case, there is no real answer, since “stealing” a software is usage of immaterial goods already.
Let’s demonstrate it on the stick figure case. Let’s say that I read Harry Potter and then draw a stick figure. It could be the use of Harry Potter, or not. The only way to determine that is to follow my thought processes. But that can’t be done. Only I can do that (to a very limited extent), but this would not be an empirical observation. So, the two situations are empirically indistinguishable.
Maybe this example is too abstract. Let me go back to the example where I summarise a book, and the summary matches both Harry Potter and Ender’s Game (you can find it in earlier threads). The only way to determine which book I am talking about is to follow my thoughts. Again, the outcomes are empirically indistinguishable. It could be either of those books, or both, or neither.
Mark Hubbard:
“I don’t buy into the ‘if free content is put up, people will still buy it’ argument. It might have stood up for my generation, but not the new ‘generation theft’ now coming through the schools who are a culture of wanting everything for nothing. (You know I’m right in that.)”
You want proof? Scott Sigler. He puts all of his books up on in audio format on iTunes, Podiobooks, and elsewhere, as well as a downloadable PDF. His book “Contagious” debuted on the NYT bestseller list at #33.
More proof? Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” available at whatever price the customer named, made the band somewhere between $2.4 and 10 million. Keep in mind that a band normally only gets to keep about 6% of the revenue from an album release, but this time, they got to keep it all.
And I don’t buy your argument that today’s youth are any more self-centered than past generations. I think that the main difference is that they grew up with the technology and intuitively understand that dramatic shifts in how information is propogated have taken place, and how to take advantage of them. Free became the norm in large part because the recording industry was too slow and stupid to realize that this internet thing was starting to catch on.
Mark Hubbard wrote, “Tucker, it’s going to cost my R & D unit $3.5 million to develop this new widget. Hang on, [there is] no IP [so] there is no way for me to protect it. After I spend my $3.5 million, the factory next door can reverse engineer it and be producing it in a month. Tell me why I’m going to invest in the R & D if I don’t have a product at the end of it which is my property?.”
Use a different method of funding. Don’t have one? Then step aside and let those more capable do so, rather than using force to make your scheme viable.
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