Great column by Sheldon Richman in The Freeman, with yeasty discussion in the comments:
Slave Labor and Intellectual Property
On a misplaced analogy.
The libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of “intellectual property” has created some confusion. It’s understandable. For one thing, there’s an apparent inconsistency: If one favors property rights in tangible things, why not in intangibles? Pro-property IP opponents reply that the tangible/intangible distinction is decisive. When you take someone’s car without permission, not only do you have use of the car, but the owner does not. But when you engage in an IP (copyright or patent) violation, you have not literally taken anything. This is disputed, so let’s look more closely.
Jones invents (and patents) the wheelbarrow and uses it on his land. He intends to produce this great new device and sell it to a world that eagerly awaits it. Smith lawfully walks by Jones’s property and watches him using the wheelbarrow, realizing this is something no one has ever seen before. If Smith goes home and, using her own materials and labor, makes a wheelbarrow from the mental image stored in her mind, what has she taken from Jones? Smith’s mental image is hers. One could say it is the result of her own mental labor (observing, understanding, remembering). When she acquired it, in no way did she interfere with Jones’s access either to his physical wheelbarrow or his mental image of it. Jones had what he started with. That’s how it is with ideas. (Bear in mind that under current law Smith is guilty of patent infringement even if she never saw Jones’s wheelbarrow. Do not assume that patents are primarily about prohibiting copying.)
Smaller Profits
But, someone will object, if Smith competes with Jones in selling wheelbarrows, Jones’s profits will likely be smaller than if the government were to stop Smith from competing in that market. (That’s what patents and copyrights boil down to.) True enough. But now the subject has changed. Instead of talking about property rights in the product of one’s labor, we’re talking about property rights in economic value or potential profits. How can one own economic value? It’s in the eyes of beholders. How can one own yet-to-be-made profits?
But, our critic might say, those profits would have been made had Smith not done what she did. We’re back to square one. What did she do? Again, she used her labor and materials to build a wheelbarrow based on a image in her mind. That image was there as a result of nonaggressive action. Had she broken into Jones’s home, Jones would have a cause of action for burglary. But Smith committed no burglary in our story. Had a contract existed between the two parties with respect to the wheelbarrow, perhaps a breach occurred. That’s also not part of this story. The burden of proof would seem to be on anyone who thinks a rights violation took place.
My example may be rejected because Jones obviously took no precaution against people seeing his wheelbarrow. I think that objection fails. If he owns the very idea wheelbarrow (which is the implication of a patent), why should he have to take such a precaution? Lysander Spooner, who pushed the case for IP as far as it can be pushed, wouldn’t have thought so. If Jones leaves the keys in his car, that certainly would not be a valid defense for a car thief.
Slave Labor
In a recent discussion about copyright, my interlocutor suggested that the unauthorized publishing of a book in effect makes a slave of the author because the publisher profits off the author’s labor without consent. But that begs the question by assuming what is in dispute, namely that the publisher took something that belongs to the author. But what? The intangible book is an arrangement of words, however imaginative or novel. It’s hard to see how that can be owned. (We’ve already dealt with the lost-profits argument.) Of course there is nothing to stop fans of the author from launching a campaign to encourage people to buy the authorized edition. (J. R. R. Tolkien launched such a campaign for himself when The Lord of the Rings was issued in an unauthorized paperback.)
(I do not concede, by the way, that absent copyright, authors would suffer great hardship in the free market. Copyright advocates assert without good grounds that duplicating artistic works and complicated inventions is necessarily a low-cost and automatically lucrative endeavor, which is by no means the case. But that subject is for another time.)
The “slave labor” objection in fact proves too much. If Jones creates a new market by offering a novel product, is he exploited if Smith caters to that same market with a similar yet sufficiently different product? (Apple created a market with the iPod, but soon competitors came along that presumably did not violate Apple’s patents.)
Plagiarism
Finally, it is curious that the first thing that occurs to people on first hearing the anti-IP case is plagiarism: “You mean it would be okay for someone to take an author’s work, put his own name on it, and sell it?”
Two issues are conflated here. One can plagiarize without violating a copyright, and one can violate a copyright without plagiarizing. Under copyright law you may use brief verbatim excerpts of another’s written work without permission as long as you use quotation marks and attribute the text to the author. It’s called “fair use.” (Question for copyright fans: Isn’t even fair use a violation of an author’s rights?) If you were to use an excerpt that otherwise would qualify under the fair-use principle but without attribution, you would be guilty of plagiarism but not copyright violation. The same would be true if you quote Shakespeare without attribution. (Shakespeare wrote without benefit of copyright.)
On the other hand, if you publish Atlas Shrugged with Ayn Rand’s name on it, you would be guilty of copyright violation but not plagiarism.
For the sake of clear thinking, let’s keep these issues separate.
Well, is plagiarism okay? No, it’s not! Obviously it is dishonest and dishonorable to represent someone else’s work as one’s own. But note, according to LegalZoom, “plagiarism is not a criminal or civil offense.” Nor should it be. It’s a breach of good conduct, and there is a plentitude of nonviolent, non-State ways to deal with it, especially in the Internet age.
{ 65 comments }
I saw this at thefreemanonline.org. Great stuff, thanks for spreading the (non-exclusive) idea.
As an inventor, I learned early:
Do NOT patent!!!! The disclosure requirements BEG for rip-offs. then ya gotta hire a lawyer and yadda yadda yadda…We know where that goes.
Best method? Gear up and flood the market with dat sucka (whatever it may be), and if you can keep your method secret, by all means, do.
To contradict myself, go ahead and file a disclosure with the patent office (cheap enough) and maybe you can shop it to a big company.
Fortunately the very word ‘plagiarism’ has accumulated enough negative weight, like the word ‘pervert’ perhaps, that in and of itself most would not want to be accused of it. But many authors have profited from it, and continue to be on bookstore shelves earning money even though their methods have been exposed to the light of day. I don’t know if it would be proper to mention a specific author’s name here, but the info is available on one specific instance on the web site “Smart Bitches Trashy Books” (which see).
The thing about the wheel barrow is a simple enough example but does not deal with the issue that thought processes sometimes evolve simultaneously in different venues. E.G.: the very little credit Roslyn Franklin is given for her DNA findings.
This subject borders on the abstract, don’t you think? I don’t think it can be clarified using only our 26 letters.
Or even worse, the 1′s and 0′s used by the internet!
Nice Article. I agree with most of it. About the last paragraph, I understand that plagiarism is not an aggression against private property in and of itself, but once someone attempts to sell a plagiarised work, I would think that constitutes fraud. The buyer is paying the seller for a work written by a specific author. If this is, in fact, not the good that was exchanged (by actually having been written by a different author), then the buyer has been defrauded. Would you agree?
Some plagiarism is fraud, but not all. some fraud is plagiarism, but not all. They just overlap. I think, in fact, most plagiarism is not fraudulent in the actionable sense. And most fraud has nothing to do with plagiarism.
Makes sense.
It may be fraud, but it’s against the person buying the book, not the original author..
Agreed.
Totally. But buyers are defrauded in every day life in limitless numbers. The person in question in my small example lifted bits of fiction from various authours and fabricated a new story using them. Perhaps the buyer received great satisfaction from reading that story.
I love messing around in the gray area…
It definitely can become a gray area very quickly
Ironically, the pro-IP position is the pro slavery position. It defines property around a “right” to control people for the sake of “incentive”, rather than as a social way to deal with conflicts arising from scarcity.
They also defend it in a way that inadvertently vindicates the slave trade and establishes abolitionists as communists intent on ignoring legitimate property rights.
Good to see Virginia creating new words- what is an ‘authour’? One’s own hour? An author who charges by the hour?
As a product developer (a P.C. euphemism for inventor), I am in it for the money. My great idea is motivated by the current system of IP. I would have less enthusiasm to do what I do without IP, and the licensing rights this will give me.
I honestly think a nation without IP would also have less inventions and new products.
P.S. I also am very interested in gray/grey areas, naturally!
Authour is either a typo or a minority spelling of author depending on the level of your understanding of the English language and assumptions about the author.
Being the type of guy that is not only heavily into technology, but also art (as in creating my own) it’s very obvious how IP has a disastrous effect on a large number of industries and not only greatly retards progress itself, but greatly increases the cost of business for no economic benefit and makes it impossible for small players to compete against big ones in a industry.
that is: because of IP it is extremely likely that there is less people making less products for less profits.
“because of IP it is extremely likely that there is less people making less products for less profits.”
Because of IP, it is extremely likely the there are fewer people making fewer products for less profit.
Just sayin’
Wow. So glad you picked up on that. How can I express my embarrassment at my appalling lack of typing skills and familiarity with the English language? I can only beg humbly for your forebearance. I won’t be so crass as to point out that you meant fewer inventions. I know you have way bigger fish to fry. Just good to see you creating, in any old way. Gonna call you on grey/gray.
Forebearance given free of charge! Was it a spelling mistake, or were you trying to create a new word?
And ‘less’ can mean fewer, depending on your dictionary.
As for ‘gray/grey’, my dictionary lists ‘grey’ as the colour, and ‘gray’ as a name, derived from ‘grey’. Yours might say differently, of course. Shall our dictionaries get together and battle it out?
“As a product developer (a P.C. euphemism for inventor), I am in it for the money. My great idea is motivated by the current system of IP. I would have less enthusiasm to do what I do without IP, and the licensing rights this will give me”
In the absence of IP the income of inventors may go down but it will coincide with inventing being a *far* easier process (i.e not having to work around behemoth patent systems) and therefore cheaper, which will likely result in inventors getting higher profits. You would probably develop far better products more often if you weren’t dragged down by patents.
“As a product developer (a P.C. euphemism for inventor), I am in it for the money.”
As well you should be!
” My great idea is motivated by the current system of IP.”
Somehow I doubt this. Unless, of course, your great idea is simply a use of IP as opposed to an actual product which satisfies the wants of consumers.
“I would have less enthusiasm to do what I do without IP, and the licensing rights this will give me.”
That is fine. However, if your great idea is for a product that satisfies wants of consumers, then someone else will make that product. For you, the profit may not be enough without IP protectionism, but it will be for enough for someone out there, Then everyone will benefit.
“I honestly think a nation without IP would also have less inventions and new products.”
You are entitled to your beliefs. However, a reasonable perusal of the material on this site should be enough to disabuse you of that notion. IP is the restriction of ideas and inventions, not the promulgator of ideas and inventions. It reminds me of people who say that the number of taxis must be restricted or there won’t be enough taxis. Huh?
ps why nation? why not world, state, county, city, neighborhood, or street?
Because it is nations that create laws, especially patent laws! The USA was constituted with an easy patent system, compared to other countries. Great Britain, then the world power, felt compelled to copy the american system of patents to be able to compete with you! If you look to history, you see that Inventors move to countries with patent systems, and they try to escape countries without them.
That says nothing of the legitimacy of IP. All that says is that when given the opportunity to practice rent-seeking, many people will.
You can replace the notion of “patent laws” with “slavery laws” in your argument and come to the same conclusion. Given a choice, cotton farmers in the 19th century would flock to slavery-friendly areas. Does that legitimize human bondage and forced labor?
@ vcif June 7, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Nation, because laws only apply within the jurisdictions of their authority. Laws which bridge the boundaries of nations do so by treaty. One way to distinguish a nation is by the jurisdicational boundaries of its laws.
Also, I am a reasonable person, have seen the same stuff you have seen here, and yet come to a different conclusion. Go figure.
“Nation, because laws only apply within the jurisdictions of their authority.”
And from where does that authority derive, and what causes it to stop short at any boundary? If you answer, then you must admit that there is an issue of justifiability beyond what positive law states, for that is precisely what you must use to derive the authority of positive law (positive law cannot be used to derive its own authority). If you do not answer and rather claim there is no answer, then you admit this whole time you have been detailing a “might is right” position, and there simply is no question of justice or ethics but simply what people do. It matters not that laws are justified, only that they exist and are enforced.
@Wildberry
As sweatervest has already decimated your contention regarding nations, I will defer on that.
However, as for your assertion: “I am a reasonable person, have seen the same stuff you have seen here, and yet come to a different conclusion.”
This reminds me of this quote from Galen
“All who drink this remedy recover in a short time except those whom it does not help who all die. Therefore it is obvious that it only fails in incurable cases. Galen 2nd century A.D.
Methinks thou art incurable.
Sweatervest & VCIF
Since this is a team effort, let me address you both simultaneously…
Well, have you heard of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? They are historical documents that describe the concept of self-government by the consent of the goverened.
Without resorting to the parade of horrors that seem to distort your perception of principles (how ironic), I would like to hear your views on why you think the principle of self-government is un-libertarian, assuming you do.
Funny, I don’t feel decimated. Go figure.
The Galen quote is indicative of something, but I fail to see what it is. It sounds like you mean that you consider yourself curable, which begs the question, of what?
Consent of the governed? I never consented. How do I opt out?
You can leave and renounce your citizenship in favor of any other country that will have you…easy.
Wildberry: your comment is utterly evil. what is wrong with you.
What are you talking about?
You’ve reached new heights (or depths?) of hyperbole.
“You can leave and renounce your citizenship in favor of any other country that will have you…easy.”
What of the man who is unwilling to consent to governance by anyone but himself? How ought he opt out?
David,
I seem to have struck a nerve with SK, but I have no idea why.
If you or JRM are thinking that every individual should be able to create their own desert island, like Crusoe, then I don’ t know how that is possible, do you?
What nerve do you mean, “Wildberry”? Can you be more specific? Vague comments and allegations cut it among lefties, but not here.
Wildberry, why is it that simple minds always resort to, “then just leave,” whenever someone disagrees with governance becoming an institution instead of a system of principles. The best governance is self governance.
Why should someone have to be defined by a country? How about we just eliminate countries? How about renouncing the concept of citizenship? Where would you send those of us who don’t take oaths and sing hymns to the state?
Personally, I welcome you and your experience to share and benefit the rest of us. Maybe you could just do that instead of asking people to leave because you have reached your limits and depth of philosophical exchange.
@WiIldberry
1)There is no “team effort”.
2)YOU directly addressed me first.
3)Thank you for proving the point of the Galen quote.
“You can leave and renounce your citizenship in favor of any other country that will have you…easy.”
Ah… one of those.
SK: “Wildberry: your comment is utterly evil. what is wrong with you.”
Are you daft? What’s got you so riled up, although your childish name-calling is nothing new…
Keep going, WB!!! If they’re resorting to invective and vitriol, you must be doing something right!
“True enough. But now the subject has changed. Instead of talking about property rights in the product of one’s labor, we’re talking about property rights in economic value or potential profits. How can one own economic value? It’s in the eyes of beholders. How can one own yet-to-be-made profits?”
This is sophomoric gibberish.
Why does the Mises Institute persist in pushing this embarrassingly lame anti-ip stuff, especially when there is a serious, grown up literature on this topic (e.g. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/patent-failure/) ?
Tomkow,
What exactly about the post did you not understand? Perhaps if you asked relevant questions someone would take the time to explain it to you in terms you might better understand…
Anthony,
I’m sorry to be preemptory. I thought the problems with the quoted passage were self evident. It is the heart of Richmond’s argument, or at least it ought to be, but in fact there is no argument here at all only a series of rhetorical questions.
So let us remind ourselves of Richmond’s setup: One day Jones is lugging dirt in buckets around his yard and thinks “There must be a better way!” He retires to his garage and there– after some experiments with levers and wheels, a lot of calculation and a couple of proto-types– he emerges with something never before seen: a wheelbarrow.
Realizing that many people will want wheelbarrows, Jones hopes that he can make money by manufacturing and selling them. Problem is that if lots of other people start making knock-off wheelbarrows, Jones will make much less money than if, say, he had a government-granted monopoly on wheelbarrow manufacture. Indeed, given that Jones is working out of his garage, it’s almost certain that established companies that already have large manufacturing operations and huge advertising budgets will take the lions share of the new wheelbarrow market. Never mind Smith, how is Jones going to compete with Wallmart?
So the likelihood is that Jones will see little return for his inventiveness. Richmond casually acknowledges that this may so as if it were no big deal. But if it is so, its a big problem for all of us.
Because the worry is that the next time some guy thinks “There must be a better way!” they will remember poor Jones and instead of heading to the garage to tinker they’ll say, “Why bother!” , grab a beer, and go see what’s on TV.
That would not be good for the rest of because a lot less new stuff will get invented.
So what do we do to encourage invention? How do we reward inventors?
Well, we could start a government Department of Invention where civil servants were paid to sit around inventing new stuff. Think that will work? Me neither.
How about this: we reward inventors with cash prizes like the Nobel Prize! Oops, I forgot. Nobel got that money from patent royalties. Sorry! Bad example!
So what to do? Well, here’s what we came up with. We decided that what we would do is *pretend* that thinking up stuff was just like, you know, *real* labor. And we decided that we would pretend that the new idea that an inventor thought up was like, you know, a thing that they made with their own hands out of real stuff they already owned. And we told the courts that they should treat these ideas *just like* they were *real* property of the inventors and require that people not use them without negotiating agreements with the inventors as if they were “renting” something the inventor had *really* made .
Of course, we all know it isn’t *real* property, because as Richmond and Kinsella keep telling us *real*” property is only generated by magically mixing your labor with stuff you (um… somehow) already own. So out of deference to them (and other people who haven’t read Robert Nozick) we decided to call it, “Intellectual Property” (we were going to call it it “iProperty”, but Apple threatened to sue).
So does this artifact we call “Intellectual Property Law” really work to encourage innovation? That is an interesting issue about which Richmond and Kinsella seem to have nothing interesting to say.
The only thing that encourages innovation is a wealthy, prosperous society with a large body of technical and scientific knowledge and secure property rights. IP law of course invades and restricts property rights, and restricts the free flow of information, thus impeding innovation. Even if patent law stimulated more innovation (which it does not — see http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/07/02/yet-another-study-finds-patents-do-not-encourage-innovation/ ) it comes at a cost to society and the economy, and this cost reduces wealth and therefore necessarily impedes innovation; IP advocates have forgotten Bastiat’s lesson to not forget the unseen costs of regulations, state spending, policies, and so on. And they have no basis whatsoever to support their assertion that patents are necessary for innovation or even that patents stimulate more innovation. Their attempt at proof seems to lie the asking of a question: “how are inventors supposed to be rewarded in a system without patents, hunh?” As if asking a question, as if being ignorant, as if being confused, as if not knowing something, is supposed to be an argument.
As for Tomkow’s mocking of the idea that the state might hire inventors, or we might incentivize innovation with a cash prize–well actually this is done now to an extent (DARPA, defense industry grants) and is routinely proposed by his fellow IP advocates, since the logic of it is the same as the logic of the utilitarian argument for patents–so why he is mocking a similar view to his own is a mystery. (For examples of the patent-prize idea, see http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000000206
You mean like a plumber, mechanic, architect, etc. who are paid once for their labor?
In your story, the wheelbarrow inventor crafted his idea out of countless ideas that he didn’t come up with: levers and wheels, mathematics, the idea of prototyping, etc. With real property, if I make something out of property I don’t own, I don’t own the result of it either.
But unlike real property, their use isn’t limited. If someone owns a house, a million people can’t all inhabit it without serious problems. Yet with the wheelbarrow, a million people can easily make one. If these people were on the other side of the planet, Jones might not even know that his precious idea of a wheelbarrow has been “stolen”; he’ll use his to lug the dirt more efficiently, and be content.
I haven’t read Richmond, but apparently you haven’t read Kinsella closely. He specifically uses examples where mixing your labor with someone else’s property does NOT make it your own; only if you own the materials you use do you own the finished product. Further, this “um… somehow already own” is due to homesteading, also elaborated on in many places by Kinsella.
It inevitably encourages some people to invent, but you have to look at the entire picture, and how it violates property rights to achieve this encouragement (if violation of rights isn’t a problem, I can come up with many ways to encourage invention).
Millions of people can ‘make’ their ownwheelbarrow and millions of people can ‘make’ their own house. There is not a parallel in your example. Millions of people can not ‘use’ the same wheelbarrow or house. And you don’t need to know about pulleys and physics and prototyping to make or think of a simple wheelbarrow. I am Irish.
Patent laws do not prevent ‘improvement’ of an object or idea which is the way many inventors or producers get around it.
These discussions go so far afield.
Actually, Dyson, who invented the Dyson vacuum cleaner, first invented the Ball-barrow, an improvement on the wheelbarrow. His main problem was that wheelbarrow makers were too used to their wheelbarrows, even though the public loved his idea.
He uses patent protection, but improvements to the wheelbarrow are possible still!
Indeed they do, as you cite your heritage for some strange reason…
Travelpro didn’t say, “Why bother?” See the article.
P.S.: Please stop attributing “my” article to a somone named Richmond. I’ll have to sue him.
So if the government gives a monopoly license to GM to be the only car producer, society will have more cars because GM will make more money and thus there are higher incentives to be a car producer!?
What about how now thanks to patents poor Jones has a good idea but says, “screw it, it probably violates a patent anyways” and grabs a beer and watches TV?
Restricting the number of producers in order to raise the per-unit price of production may encourage more people to try and join this tiny club, but it doesn’t change the fact you are *restricting* production, not expanding it, and the end result is *less* producers! Monopolizing production literally *reduces* the number of producers.
As I have said before, *laws don’t shift the demand curve of any labor up*! Laws cannot make people more creative or creativity more useful! Making some creative work illegal does not raise the incentives to do creative work.
Another member of the Koch propaganda machine. Sorry Tomkow. There is no such thing as a property right to the product of one’s labor.
At the peak of the CB Radio fad, I worked at a corporation which made Cobra radios, called Dynascan on the west side of Chicago. I always have to bring that up. Every engineer had to sign over the patent rights of any thing he invented or improved. I was not even an engineer but had to sign a paper when I told them a better way to hook up the phones. My cousin works for some computer co. in Boisie (MICRON?) They make everyone do the same thing.
Why did you think this was worth posting?
If you have an actual criticism of the anti-IP position please do not hesitate. But seriously, don’t mention Mises’ name as you suggest that value is objective.
The “grown up” piece Tomkow links to is just a wonkish, unprincipled, unlibertarian “well patents are good in the field of chemicals and drugs, but let’s tweak it elsewhere to make it work better”.
Sophomoric? If I were just a freshman, would that mean I’m precocious?
Oh, gosh. I think I wasted my sarcasm on the wrong person. Sorry!
Dictionary.com shows them interchangeable and my daughter lives in Grays Lake. But it might be Grey’s Lke.
And of course it was a typo. You guys are so demanding. Gosh. Thanks for the “grant” and the sweeter reply.
There is a web site for fledgling writers called “Authonomy”. I can’t even pronounce it. I think it’s run by Harper Collins.
But now that the spelling has become common knowledge, you can give it a meaning! An author who charges by the hour? Something else? This might be your one shot at fame!
We declared it a typo, but if you insist, it can mean a peculiar type of writer that happens to be a favorite of a particular person. E.G: I am Nuke Gray’s ‘authour’. I frequently type colour and favour. I think it is the brain’s habit like putting a ‘t’ on all the ‘ough’ words. I am not a Brit and will repeat, from The West Side of Chicago. And I am on the verge of taking several more shots at fame which you will know about when you read my blog.
Once again, although I so enjoy this discourse, we should consider the venue.
I’m going to copyright the word before you and sue you for copyright infringements even though I plagiarized your word.
Copyright to your created works is inherent. It is in the constitution. You can pay someone to file it for you if you want. But I am just flattered. Sue away. Will I get some publicity?
“So let us remind ourselves of Richmond’s setup: One day Jones is lugging dirt in buckets around his yard and thinks “There must be a better way!” He retires to his garage and there– after some experiments with levers and wheels, a lot of calculation and a couple of proto-types– he emerges with something never before seen: a wheelbarrow.”
According to this, Jones invents the wheelbarrow because he wants to become more efficient at lugging dirt around. He has gained an ex post psychic profit.
“So the likelihood is that Jones will see little return for his inventiveness.”
Question: Was Jones’ action in inventing the wheelbarrow an act of autistic exchange or an entrepreneurial action? If the former, he has made his ex post profit; if the latter, he has made an entrepreneurial error if he speculated on being able to sell his wheelbarrows at a higher than market price later.
“Because the worry is that the next time some guy thinks “There must be a better way!” they will remember poor Jones and instead of heading to the garage to tinker they’ll say, “Why bother!” , grab a beer, and go see what’s on TV.”
Man does not act to frustrate his ends. If his end is to lug dirt around more efficiently, it makes no sense to not find a better way because he can’t sell the idea for a princely sum later. If my aim in writing this is to make you see sense, it makes no sense for me to not submit this post because I won’t get a copyright on this comment.
“I am Irish.” Me too, although I’m not sure how that makes us experts on IP, although I’m happy to accept the honor on behalf of the Auld Sod. Guinness and wheelbarrows, on the other hand…many a Harp would know about wheelbarrows and other means of conveying bricks. Faith and begorrah ’twas “hod carriers” they called us when almost single-handedly we build the Erie Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge and what have you.
It makes us experts on wheelbarrows.
hehe. I like how most people seem to try to intentionally defeat the purpose of humor.
@David If someone were to renounce their citizenship because the rest of the citizens didn’t do things his way, he would be labeled an extremist in any society. (or maybe simply ‘misfit’) Kids are taught cooperation on Sesame Street. Humans tend to form communities and there are certain personal considerations each member of the community should agree to acknowledge. Otherwise, Ted Kuczinski.
I know you are just commenting on another’s comment, but the linking thing gets too complex for me.
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