Your thoughts definitely helped me crystalize this issue. It had been bugging me for awhile but now I feel like I have a handle on it.

Hmm…let’s see….

A sculpture ‘cannot be brought into existence out of nothing’, as Rand says, you need stone, but once the sculptor has done his art, applied his mind and his passion, that stone is ‘something that had not existed before’ a new thing, an original thing, an expression of the uniqueness of its creator and by the process of the application of his mind to change the stone, his property – it could not belong to anybody else.

Why don’t we find the little shite who defaced ‘my’ stone and prosecute him? Oh, it was ‘his’ stone even before he carved it, you say? So it wasn’t his carving of it that made it his? Make up your mind!

You can. Whatever thoughts are in your head, you own. You can’t own a thought in my head, though, any more than you can own my left arm.

Let me know what you guys think.

“Frank was clearly a saint, he couldn’t be in hell, so therefore you *must* be an imposter.”

You don’t know what you’re talking about, darling! Frank wasn’t a saint, he was an alcoholic failed artist who gave up. He didn’t even have the balls to do anything when I started shtupping Nathan. All I was doing was trying to make my Frankenfurter jealous, so he’d throw me onto a bed and give it to me hard, the way I like! But he did nothing! Nothing! *sob sob* What kind of man qua man is that? *sob sob sob*

Oh, and Mark Hubbard, quit looting my ideas, you fifth-rate second hander!

Frank was clearly a saint, he couldn’t be in hell, so therefore you *must* be an imposter.

Speaking of imposters: in Sydney it was 4:37 in the afternoon when Hubbard said it was evening and he must be off to bed. Weird.

“One thing no one can deny, is someone had the idea (in my example, the wheel), first. And therein lay the IP. Chronology. The inception of your no-scarcity argument comes after this, but the IP is already created in the process/manufacture.”

Correct. Creation allows you, as first to market, absolute and total control over your idea.

There you go. A perfect monopoly without any statute laws to prop it up. Free market monopoly, and not one person on this site will contradict your absolute right to do as you like with it.

I have never heard a more stupid excuse for verbally abusing someone than the one you just laid out.

“Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights.

—-

How dare you quote from my book! Did you ask the permission of my estate and intellectual heir? You no-good second-hander! Thief! Intellectual socialist! Looter! Hypocrite lecteur! AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!!

(Oh, it’s so hot down here! Where is my vodka and tonic? Oh, there it is! Thank you, Frank, darling!)

Oh for heaven’s sake Jay, how many times do I have to say it.

Repeat: .. the site also states the I must ‘proceed boldly against evil’, which I am doing, so while my incivility is a contradiction, it merely reflects the contradictory greetings onto the site. But if any of the site owners ask me to leave, that brooks no contradiction, and I would leave the comment fields, and not come back.

I will not be civil to those who sanction looting, and attack the heart of freedom, but unlike looters’, I will be honourable. If any member of the exec. asks me to leave, including Kinsella, I’ll leave.

It’s evening Down Under, I’ve got to wrap up some work, then bed, so I’ve only had time to skim, and that will probably be the case until at least tomorrow.

But you’ve asked for:

If anyone is going to cite Rand in support of IP law, please find a quote that is clearer than this on the nature of her position.

Thus I’ll give you direct quotations from Ayn on patents and copyrights. I’ll be interested to see what you make of them when I check back tomorrow. I’ll simply copy and paste (with reference to source, so see, no breach of copyright). I find her to be consistent on this, and objectivism is most certainly pro-IP, as property rights are the mainspring of freedom:

1)

“Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights.

2)

“What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.

The government does not “grant” a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it—i.e., the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights’.

3)

“Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue. . . . In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain’s Copyright Act of 1911, which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc. for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights”.

4)

Note this one – chronology.

“As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Patents and Copyrights”

And then quoting myself from another thread here:

One thing no one can deny, is someone had the idea (in my example, the wheel), first. And therein lay the IP. Chronology. The inception of your no-scarcity argument comes after this, but the IP is already created in the process/manufacture.

http://blog.mises.org/archives/009357.asp

“If you have an idea, it is yours. You can do with it what you want. If you share it (sing, speak, broadcast, let others see the products of your ideas), others then have copies of it. They are entitled to do with their copies of the idea precisely what you can do with your idea. They can use it how they want provided they don’t prevent others from doing with it what they want. This is a simple application of the non-aggression principle that governs a free society. Whether it is fashion, language, know how, or whatever, people are free to copy.”

An idea becomes a free good once shared.

If the Objectivists are really concerned or upset with ideas being copied then I recommend they neither speak, write, or communicate with another human being again.

We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

I will proceed thought by thought.

“We inherit the products of the thought of other men.” Yes.

“We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane.” Yes, but who should we credit with the first creation of these things really prior to the car? They were developed in antiquity surely many times in isolation from each other by individuals who saw a need and found a method to satisfy it. Who should we be paying to satisfy that? I don’t think the “pre-industrial/post-industrial eras” argument holds up here because we are not talking about something that can be digitally copied/stolen. As for the car and the airplane, are we still paying the original inventor of the motorized cart or his descendants or the descendants of the Wright Brothers? I have seen Mark Hubbard assert in other threads that IP should be in effect indefinitely for each creation. Clearly the Boeing 777 is nothing like the Wright Bros. plane but it is based on the same fundamental concepts learned from physics, so does Boeing owe the Wright family? Those fundamental concepts in physics, should the originators of the understanding of lift also receive indefinite compensation for each subsequent usage of that idea? From Boeing to the amateur model plane hobbyist? Just wondering. But it seems like this would gum up the system so much that little could actually be accomplished and productivity would suffer, rather than be strengthened by this kind of law.

Moving on. “But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step.” This would seem to indicate that their are no truly original ideas, only ideas built on accumulated ideas from the generations preceding it. It seems as though based on that concept any one individual, given similar education and experience as another individual, would be just as likely to “originate” an idea as the other guy. In fact, without knowing it they might both come up with the same idea independently of each other. I have encountered this in my own life. About a year ago a friend of mine and I were discussing the issue of cell phone signals fading inside of certain areas of particular buildings that he and I are both familiar with. Through this conversation we “originated” the idea of a cell phone signal booster that would be mounted on the outside of a building to receive a signal and pass that signal along to a device inside the building where it would be re-broadcast so phones could pick it up strong where it was previously weak and then send the signal from the phone back outside so that the call could be completed. We liked this idea so we pursued it and started working on R&D. After developing a pretty solid plan I got online just to see if anybody had already developed something like this. As it turns out, there are several products already out there that do this and they have several patents a few of which were quite similar in nature to what we were working on. Our project was killed before it got off the ground. If we wanted to continue we would have basically had to completely scrap our design and start from scratch, which we didn’t have the resources to do. There is no way we could have continued and put something on the market without infringing on someone’s patent even though we developed our product completely independently of any of those others. And being just a couple kids a year and a half out of college we have no chance of defending ourselves against established companies with real capital. So from our perspective, this is a case where patent law stifled creativity, rather than being promoting of it. Basically the point is, we did not “steal” someone else’s idea, we didn’t even know if anyone else had had it, but we had one of our own and as it turns out another guy did think of it and he holds monopoly rights to it. I do not relay this story to whine about it, but rather to demonstrate a real experience with IP from the perspective of a potential entrepreneur, and to say that I have no doubt that my story is unique. I am positive this kind of thing happens on a regular basis with people everywhere. All that also to ask, is there such a thing as a truly original idea? I submit that there isn’t, just the recombining of previous ideas and observations built over history by many civilizations and this constant development of ideas is impeded rather than encouraged by IP law. I would also assert that that is a legitimate interpretation of that idea from Rand.

Moving on. “This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator.” If that creative faculty cannot be “given or received, shared or borrowed”, how can it be stolen? Theoretically, if I can share something with you or borrow or give or receive something, that something also has the capacity to be stolen. If creativity cannot be shared, it cannot be stolen. “That which it creates is the property of the creator” would to me indicate a physical tangible object capable of those other things, sharing, etc. Also making it capable of being stolen. That statue example that we enjoy so much works well here. If I make a statue carved from stone that I have legally acquired, it is mine by all definitions. If my neighbor sees it and likes it, he has several options available. We can arrange for me to share it or borrow it to him, or he can purchase it from me or I can give it to him as a gift. Other options might be that he physically steal it. That would be theft. The last option is that he sees it and decides to try carving a statue for himself. He can go acquire the materials and give it a try. Here is the part I don’t get, under IP this is theft. According to Rand he is just building off the prior ideas of others. She doesn’t seem to indicate remunerative compensation for this type of action. So from where in that quote do we derive that this is theft? Both statues are properties of their creators, they might be fairly similar but not the exact same. No one has been deprived of anything physical. So why does the first sculptor deserve monopoly privilege over the other? It just doesn’t add up to me.

Lastly, “Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.” Do you think she is advocating an infinitely regressive compensation structure here? That seems horribly wasteful and counterproductive. She certainly doesn’t indicate that learning something from someone else and doing something with that knowledge is theft. In fact she seems to condone learning from others as being necessary for survival. If every person is restrained from exercising their ability to create by first needing to compensate all others for their prior ideas, how in the world are we more free?

Rand, if anything, seems to be advocating the free transmission and usage of ideas so that we can better ensure our survival. She doesn’t seem to be advocating infinite monopolistic rights over ideas for eternity that must be compensated for in every development and transaction involving said ideas.

If anyone is going to cite Rand in support of IP law, please find a quote that is clearer than this on the nature of her position. And if that quote is found, that quote against this one will smell of inconsistency, which makes any good objectivist shudder I know.

If you have an idea for a widget and don’t want to have it copied, keep it to yourself. You don’t have a fundamental right to provide me with widgets.
How dare you rob me of the freedom to independently discover an idea for a widget and bring it to market by putting your own widget on the market?

You said: “That’s the only role of a state, to protect the rights of the individual. Without a preparedness and structure to use force against those who initiate force, then the one thing anarchists can bank on is they will become truly the victims of force: that of the gang with the biggest gun.”
I’ve already debunked this by saying:
“Anarchy doesn’t simply mean lack of government.
Anarchy means the rejection of the principles of government. In a society of individuals who have been principled, vigilant and coordinated enough to rid themselves of government, no replacement, such as a gang, or mafia, can prosper.”
Every individual has the right to protect himself against those who initiate force. In anarchy, individual preparedness would be higher since there’s no government to rely on. The structure would be appropriate to the size of the perceived threat.
Anarchists would recognize that someone whose modus operandi involves aggression will potentially threaten them. Why do you think it impossible for them to organize against your gang, if they already organized to bring down government?