Are you in your automobile right at this moment? No? Well, I ought to be able to use it then, right? No? Why not? Are you saying you have a “monopolistic grant” on the right to use it?

Is this the worst scenario you could come up? Because, man, that is SUCCESS.

very well argued in all posts. If I may, I’d like to provide you with the definition of scarcity that I arrived to, that might help you make your arguments even better.

My definition says that scarcity means the existence of mutually exclusive alternatives: exercising one of them makes it impossible to exercise the others. It does not necessarily mean that any of the choices invalidates all the others, merely that there are some that fulfil the criteria. For non-scarce goods on the other hand, there is no such thing and all options can be exercised simultaneously.

PS. as a musician you might enjoy the four chord song.

Please define “plagiarize”.

how did you take their music?

Another thing we seem to be ignoring is that if this corporation owner furthers his own ad campaign with one of my songs, then he must think that I wrote a pretty good piece of music. I would expect that if it went over well, he would seek out the author of the music and offer to pay him to make more music so he can use it in his future ads. He can even strike some deals with me to release my music only to him first, so that it only becomes available to other advertisers after it is already being used in his ads. Such is the nature of a free market. Instead of putting guns in peoples’ faces we find a common solution. If anyone is gaining from my production of music, they have an incentive to pay me to keep making more. And as the sole owner of the ability to create, I can name my price, knowing that if he wants the kind of music I make, there’s no where else to go for it.

Musicians, and all other producers of creative works, would be far more successful without IP laws. The ones that will get screwed are the distributors, because the internet has brought the cost of distribution to basically zero. That is not because of IP. IP has become a huge issue because the internet has rendered huge distribution companies with lots of lobbying power obsolete and pushing IP is the only conceivable way to keep them around.

Finally, I really do think it is absurd that I can grab an instrument and “homestead” some sequence of notes or chords. The heir of whoever first played the I-IV-V chord progression should be taking the entire music industry to court!!

You would if the government illegalized certain ways of obtaining air. I think you are assuming that there is any legitimacy to comparing people who run internet sites like thepiratebay.com with people who sailed around in ships murdering and plundering. Noticing that the same word is being used to describe them, which is literally for the purpose of stirring up support for IP rights, and then pointing out that the latter kind of pirates only pirate economic (scarce) goods doesn’t help at all to establish that ideas are scarce, which they are not. Drawing analogies between internet “pirates” and the other kind of pirates is pointless because those two have nothing in common save for the name people ascribe to them.

“Ideas are scarce. You simply think they aren’t because you are able to engage in parasitism.”

You really seem to like getting into other peoples’ heads, as I know you also like to try and convince IP opponents that they are “really” communists (for what it’s worth, comparing an opposition of intellectual property to some sort of advocacy of communism is a “red scare” of McCarthian grandeur. Again, you seem to have this already-formed theory of property rights that has never been laid out systematically, which is being used to make this claim that whoever disagrees with it is attacking the institution of private property.). Well, either way, I’m not gonna be so silly as to speak for anyone but myself, so I’ll tell you that I, an opponent of IP, that’s not why I think ideas are scarce. That’s one of the silliest straw men I’ve ever read. Government engages in parasitism with everything else, and I don’t hear Kinsella saying that means whatever the government takes isn’t property anyways.

Scarcity in the economic sense has nothing to do with the size of the supply, and it sure as hell has nothing to do with the existence of people that break government rules. Economic scarcity is, in my opinion, easier to understand by interpreting it to mean rivalry. A good is economic if and only if its use/consumption is necessarily rivalrous, that is that use/consumption by one person and a certain time implies that no one else can be using/consuming that good at that given time. Rivalry is essentially what scarcity means. Even if there would infinitely many houses in the world, it would not change the fact that houses are rivalrous. There is still only one house at a given location, or with certain other goods inside of it, and so houses are still scarce in this sense. There may be infinitely many houses in general, but still only one house right here.

This kind of scarcity determines which goods are economized and which are not. Oxygen is abundant only in this sense that one person’s breathing does not interfere with anyone else’s. There is a fixed, finite amount of oxygen in the world and whether there is “enough” to go around for everyone is a pointless question (what if someone really wants to use all the oxygen on the planet in some outrageous physics experiment?). It is non-scarce only in the sense that it is non-rivalrous. Me using oxygen does not mean everyone else cannot.

Ideas are exactly the same in this sense, and unlike air this can never possibly change. There may be a day when oxygen use becomes rivalrous and it will be economized and owned, but ideas will always be non-scarce. There will never be a state of affairs where my use of an idea, so long as this use is in accordance with *physical* property rights, can interfere with anyone else’s ability to use that idea. This is because one’s ability to use an idea is an extension of his physical property rights, including his body. Ideas are always non-rivalrous and are hence not subject to ownership. The reason anyone owns anything is because in order for them to use them, nobody else can be using them.

This is why it is absurd to consider an idea an ownable thing. The problem with me stealing someone’s car is that he no longer has a car! He can’t use his car while I’m out joyriding in it. If I use an idea that was presented to me by someone else this does not at all stop him from using that idea however he would like to. I lose nothing by other people using ideas that they heard from me. You can’t lose what you don’t have. You can’t lose “profits” that you never got. Saying that you lose something when other people profit from ideas they got from you is as absurd as saying that competitors in any business are “stealing profits” away from you.

Finally, every instance of a so-called IP right is no more and no less than a trespass on a physical property right. The instant you gain the “right” to copyright your music recording, every owner of a hard drive or any other storage device loses rights over the use of their physical property. If you took IP to its logical conclusion then physical property rights evaporate entirely, including people’s ownership of their bodies, and all action becomes impossible, because every action, even action itself, is the use of an idea, and so if you really believed in IP rights you would never be able to do anything, because you’d have to ask permission from the first person that did it first, and you couldn’t even do that, because you haven’t yet asked permission from the first person that thought to ask permission for something.

I am a musician, so there’s no need to pretend.

“I take your music and use it on all my ads without your permission.”

I think it is absurd to consider “giving permission” to hear or store recordings I have released, so this would not apply to me, but let’s pretend I do get pissed off, for some reason, that you decided to advertise my work and give me more exposure than I, not owning a corporation, could ever do on my own. Thanks to your ads tons of people know my name. Unless you also plagiarized, but that’s not an IP problem (lying has nothing to do with any property rights, whether one considers IP rights legitimate or not).

“I sell a lot of my goods using it due to the popularity of your music. You complain to your fans, but my corporation is huge, and my stuff is useful, so and despite your protestation, people begin to associate you and you music with my products.”

So, what, I should be able to use the force of law to make people associate my creative works with what I think they should associate them with!? We are getting dangerously close to thought police, here.

People can associate with my music whatever they want to. I think it is paranoid to even concern myself with such affairs.

“my revenue is increased, with absolutely no licensing compensation ever being in your future.”

Your revenue increase also depended on you using the idea to make an ad, and use music in an ad. Should the first people that did that be pissed off and demanding compensation as well?

“How’s that scenario workin’ for you?”

Again, and this is coming from a musician, nothing would make me happier than to hear one of my songs in a commercial. In fact, it would vastly increase my opportunity to become a professional musician and live off of my creativity. Having one’s work in a nationally aired ad is a pretty strong resume builder. The only way to make it in such a business is to get your name out, and getting all pissy and litigous over people using and spreading around your creative works is the best, fastest way to doom everything you ever create to obscurity.

Furthermore, this is by far the most common method of argumentation used by IP proponents, some sort of attempted guilt trip into believing ideas that have never been supported by a systematic theory of property (IP proponents have never, in my experience, attempted to formulate their theory of property rights, they just jab at the ones pushed by Hoppe and Kinsella). It honestly reminds me a lot of hardcore liberals trying to cloud my judgement over things like socialized healthcare by putting me in the shoes of those destitute people I am intellectually screwing over. So what if I got pissed off by this situation? Since when are property rights those things that would piss you off if you didn’t have?

Sure it’d be great to write one song, one night’s hard work, and live like a king for the rest of my life and provide the same for my kids. And there’s nothing wrong with that happening. But relying on threatening and coercing everyone that owns a hard drive or a tape recorder in order to make it happen? Only a government would be involved in such a destruction of justice.

The public goods theory is indeed a fallacy.

“collective action problems are real”

The public goods theory does not address the existence of so-called “collective action problems”, although I am already suspect that we are forgetting that only individuals act, even when they act in cooperation.

Public goods theory attempts to make a division between different types of goods, and explain why a competitive market is suitable for production of some of them while a monopoly is suitable for a production of others.

No matter how you try to draw this line between public and private, be it though non-rivalrous consumption, zero cost of free riders, inability to restrict consumption, etc. it will always produce absurd results and fail to include what is generally considered a “public good”.

Lots of people benefit from be dressing nice, acting nice, and keeping a neat yard. Why are these things not “public goods”? A half-full movie theater can admit additional patrons with no cost to the paying viewers. Why are they not “public goods”?

“why do Austrians say that cartels in a free market are unstable? The answer is that the colluders face a public goods problem: they’d all be better off cooperating, but privately they have an incentive to cheat, and so the cartel breaks down.”

That is not at all what Austrians say. First of all, they would be better off *not* cooperating, at least in the short run, that is why an incentive to cartelize exists at all. Second of all, the breakdown of cartels has nothing to do with what goods they are producing. The whole purpose of the public goods theory is to define two different types of goods (public and private), this has nothing to do with cartels. Even a cartel that produces what public goods theory calls a “private good” would break down.

It’s not that cartels break down in a free market, they never form in the first place. An attempt to do so would be so expensive it could only be afforded alongside a profit by externalizing the costs, that is by charging the customers more. As long as it is in fact a free market the customers would only pay more if the cartel offered what they considered better service, which contradicts the definition of a cartel. To the extent that a certain organization of a business is against the interests of its customers, it will fail in a competitive marketplace, in the same way a business selling dog poo ashtrays (thank you Mogambo Guru) would fail. No public goods theory enters the picture, at least when an Austrian discusses it.

I haven’t seen him make any serious points worth addressing. What he usually does is
attack anything that Kinsella says. He picks it apart in ridiculous ways, offers lame analogies,
and continues to avoid the central issues of property and rights.

Just look at his post above. He says that property rights are monopolistic grants. He plays
with words and analogies so much that he can’t distinguish between a right and a grant of privilege. He
equivocates between different concepts constantly. You can never get anywhere with such people, and they add nothing to the discussion.

Now the scenario you mentioned would work fine for these guys. They put music on one of the NBA games free of charge. People played the game and associated the music with the game, I’m sure. They did it for the exposure and make more money because of it. So the scenario worked well.

Ideas are scarce. You simply think they aren’t because you are able to engage in parasitism.

You are a brilliant, hard-working, creative musician. I have a huge corporation.

I take your music and use it on all my ads without your permission.

I sell a lot of my goods using it due to the popularity of your music. You complain to your fans, but my corporation is huge, and my stuff is useful, so and despite your protestation, people begin to associate you and you music with my products. Every time a song of yours plays, people think of my products, and my revenue is increased, with absolutely no licensing compensation ever being in your future.

How’s that scenario workin’ for you?

Good ideas are rare.

The basic theme is: Monopoly = Bad.

In the case of industry, it’s easily argued this is the case as it is anti-competitive and hurts consumers.

In the case of original ideas, it’s not easily argued, as there are literally tens of thousands of original ideas created each day, the IP of which is under a time limitation, after which it becomes public domain.

And beyond which, ideas themselves compete with each other, a novel idea one week could be eclipsed by an even more novel idea next week.

But remove the value on ideas, and what happens? No need to compete any more, all ideas are equal in value… And what value do you think will ultimately be placed in this case?

Definition of COMMUNISM

1 a : a theory advocating elimination of private property
b : a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed

So technically, you are correct.

Anti-IP advocates aren’t “Intellectual Communists”, they are “Intellectual Property Communists”.