PS: In a world without the artificially State-created monopolies of patents/copyrights, and with possibly only the very limited contractual rights that could be created to replicate those protections, it would be unlikely that books sold under license would be competitive (few people are going to sign a contract to read a book). Remember, that for thousands of years, there was no such thing as copyright or patent: no-one considered it a violation of artists’/inventors’ rights. A business model under a free market would be something like offering to make an invention public if a certain amount of money was given to you (you could demonstrate the invention, but not provide for the details of it’s working to convince people). Similarly for books, except with intros offered as a sampler. Reputation would also come into play. Furthermore, you would experience a lower cost of living, as the price of obtaining inventions/artistic works would be greatly reduced.

I again refer to Kinsella’s discussion of patents and copyrights, as well as Rothbards. In so far as either allows anything resembling copyright/patent (under libertarian principles), it is solely contractually created; thus, limited to the confines of what a contract can do. Firstly, the cost of enforcing such has to be burdened by you; just because you make a book doesn’t mean you have the right to force others to share in the cost of your contract on that book. Secondly, the contract is only binding on the person who agrees to it; if you put property notices on the book, they are binding on anyone who sees them. If, however, the person you sell the book to breaks contract, and removes the copyright notice, anyone who subsequently sees that stripped book isn’t bound by anything. No-one has a legal obligation to incur the cost of finding out if everything he sees is protected by a contract or not. Furthermore, in such a case, the only person who would be liable would be the person who broke the contract with you in the first place. True, the resources needed to copy resources are “scarce” (though not in much of a significant way…digital information can be replicated at a cost negligible to anyone). However, the ideas themselves are not scarce resources. Furthermore, your claim that your profits are harmed is countered by the arguments put forth by Tucker on this very board for why Mises.org puts books online.

I did so, as a form of reciprocal altruism. The people at the forum tended to be helpful to me.

Most of my inventions that I don’t get paid for I don’t care to share. It takes effort to even publish them. It took me quite a while to produce that post, take the pictures and explain it. Someone would have had to break into my house to have found out about it and utilized it for copying purposes. I only had two incentives for sharing it. Either I get paid or I value giving it to others for free (usually as a form of reciprocal altruism). In an academic environment one gets paid a salary to do exactly this kind of behavior. It is a kind of reciprocal altruist society. Unfortunately, many inventors are not academics and need to get paid in order to live.

Funny thing is that I don’t think it will be commercially produced precisely because it is “open source”.

The whole human race is too broad a category for me to get excited about helping for free. It includes people I despise like Osama Bin Laden. Entire cultures have profited immensely from western technology and have given next to nothing in return except hatred. I prefer to get paid and hopefully the buyer will pass the costs on to the beneficiaries. To me they are just free riders if they don’t pay in some way.

Same goes for reproduction costs. In fact the first illegal copy of someone elses IP can be quite costly. It only becomes nearly costless when you get into mass reproduction.

Just because costs are low does not mean they are non-existent.

IP when conceived of as non-Platonic is constructed in just the same fashion as any other private property, by rearranging existing materials. When one manufactures a car you are just making a copy. No one argues that cars are not scarce. There is a limit to the number of copies one can make.

In order to copy my IP you must steal the property in question in order to make the copy. It is theft to utilize someones property outside the bounds of the agreed upon terms. If I lend you my car an tell you that you cannot drive it outside the neighborhood but you then decide to take a trip to Florida you are stealing. Sure you can return the car afterward. But during the period you were using my car against my wishes you were a thief. If you gave the car to some third party and they drive it out of state they are also violating my property rights. Suppose that third party called me from Florida and said the car broke down. Don’t you think I have the right to say “Stop, do not drive my car anymore.” He can’t just say “Hey man how am I suppose to get back from Florida. I’m driving it back whether you like it or not”. He should have known to ask me before utilizing my property to do such a thing.

The same goes for copyrighted materials. You only own the reading writes to the book. You do not own the copying rights. You also do not have the ability to lend out the book to someone else for them to copy. Should you do this not only you but the other party is in the wrong. Even if the other party has already committed resources he is in the wrong. He should know it’s not his to copy because of the copyright notice. Furthermore even if you strip out the notice he should know better. Books don’t just appear out of nowhere. They are written by people for a living. He should check the source of the book before committing resources to an illegal copying operation.

The very act of copying the book requires you to utilize my resource. This is exactly my point of why it is a normal private property violation. You can’t go around utilizing other peoples property for your own purposes without permission.

The entire argument that it doesn’t harm me is also ridiculous. Of course it harms me. You are utilizing my own property in a way that is going to diminish my income.

I also dispute the idea that a misuse of a trademark is only fraudulent against the consumer.
If I had a sign that pointed to my business, Mackers Mortuaries, and you changed the direction of the sign then put up a fake business then I would also be harmed. Firstly it is an interference in my right of free association. Secondly you are pretending to be me. Your bad actions will hurt my business. Should your caskets be of inferior grade people might believe that I was responsible. You are defrauding not only the customer but also me because the benefits of our free trade is split between us. If someone bought a casket on my good reputation then part the value of that transaction was due to me.

If I owned a cookie cutter and you had some dough and I wouldn’t let you use my special cookie cutter that would restrict your use of your dough. But that does not mean I, in any way, assumed control over your dough.”

The reason this analogy fails is because you’re now talking about actual scarce resources, about homesteaded property. The dough is a scarce resource, and so is your cookie cutter. One can not be used without the resource becoming unavailable for others’ use. That’s part of what ‘scarce’ means.

Ideas are a completely seperate class of resource.

As for trademarks – if I started making cola and put them in cans identical to Coke’s, with the same trademarks and everything, Coke would not have any valid reason to bring me to trial because I did not infringe on any of their real property. However, if someone exchanged their property (money) for my ‘Coke’, they would be defrauded since they thought they were buying Coke cola, not my fake Coke cola, which would probably taste more like garbage than theirs does.

Only a consumer who actually traded property with me under such fraudulent conditions – trademark misuse, plagiarism – have a valid reason to seek compensation.

That’s the limit of the kind of legal action possible against those who use the intellectual resources someone else originally thought up: when actual, physical property becomes involved in an exchange but the rationale for the exchange is fraudulent.

I believe you are creating property rights were none should exist. The only property rights in ideas or the expression thereof would have to be contractually created (e.g., NDA).

Intellectual property is not a scarce resource, as we normally think of scarce resources. If I copy your book, you still have your book. Of course, if I *steal* your physical book, that’s a different matter. The unique thing about ideas is that they can be multiplied and replicated at virtually no cost, and without depriving the original owner of his share (see Benjamin Franklin’s candle metaphor). There is no problem that mandates property, as once and idea comes into existence, it is as superabundant and as limitless as the air itself.

Nor can the diversity of ideas be called a scarce resource. There is no limit to the number of ideas that can exist. Ideas are limited in supply only by the capacity of our brains and computers to store them, both of which are effectively infinite capacities. You can say there are more ideas now than there were 2,000 years ago. This is true, but that still does not mean there is a scarcity of any particular idea.

What there *is* a scarcity of is *individuals* who produce ideas, or who produce expressions of ideas. This, however, does not warrant the jump to treat ideas as if they are scarce.

Just because there is a continum between IP we can own and ones we obviously cannot does not mean we have to abandon IP completely. The same problems occur with regular property. How high do you own above your land. How deep below the ground. What about the example of owning an island in a river that shifts over time.

The purpose of the abstraction is not to own the meaning but to identify the unique aspects. There is a continum from complex to simple. The simpler the idea the harder it is to prove you didn’t come up with it on your own. Thus the less likely you trespassed against my property to get it. One could hardly write a book like say Peter Pan, then claim it was a “Story about a boy” then stop anyone from writing a story about any boy. That is just plain ridiculous and you know it.

Obviously I don’t need to copy your blank canvas to come up with my own. No physical copying means I didn’t trespass against the supposed IP you have in your “art”.

I’m not going to shift over to discussing trademark law now also. That is based on a different rational.

Wait a second. Sure it’s a scarce resource. Intellectual property is scarce just like other property. We have a lot more of it now than we did before. There is plenty of scarcity in this area. For instance, there has yet to be invented a cure for AIDS.

Duo: “The simple act of thinking up and making literature, art, or an invention magically grants this creator partial owernship of all the paper, CDs, video cassettes, pens, pencils, paintbrushes, canvasses, oils, steel, copper, iron, plastic, in the world? How does asserting such a property right in the absence of any form of homesteading denote anything but fraud?”

Nonsense. This was already covered by me and another poster. You are free to invent on your own and use your resources as you like. What we wish to prevent you from doing is using our property for copying.

If I owned a cookie cutter and you had some dough and I wouldn’t let you use my special cookie cutter that would restrict your use of your dough. But that does not mean I, in any way, assumed control over your dough.

What is being controlled are the copies of my efforts through shared ownership.

Here’s another libertarian that shares this position: http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/delaubenfels/delaubenfels8.html

I’ll take this as ceding all “rights” to patent scientific/technological cause and effect processes. So all we are considering now is copyright of artistic/creative expressions of unique fictional stories, paintings, movies, musical pieces and the like (precluding dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, manuals, etc.). I would think non-precisive abstraction would weaken an IP claim, and as you say, IP conceived this way would be much more restrictive. This is a considerably less onerous (already) situation than what exists today.

At any rate, say I write a book entitled The Dark Stormy Night. The copyright reads (which I copied from some book perhaps in violation of royalties due some legal firm), “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.” Ooops. Put it on my tab.

The contents of The Dark Stormy Night read, “It was a dark and stormy night. The End.” Every individual word is a part of this book. A single word such as “it” cannot be copyrighted. Any single word cannot be copyrighted without necessarily precluding its use ever again without permission of the originating author. The same would hold for the phrase “a dark and stormy night”. So what’s actually being copyrighted is not words but meaning. The author is attempting to control *meaning*, and how others also use that meaning. However, there are dark and stormy nights in the real world so it would be absurd to prevent another author from writing the “Whan Thee Nigh Was Doth Storma” reading “Stormy oh was the dark night. Peace out.” However, the *meaning* is essentially the same, though expressed differently.

Thus copyrighting *meaning* violated another’s right to exist and express himself regarding a similar experience in another fictional work. If “right” cannot be proved at this most basic budding of expression than it seems the probability of proving “right” would get not more but less in such an elaborate J.K. Rowling work for that work is likely to contain many such violations of others’ copyrighted meanings (in any context); as you cannot have “right” on something which is in violation of other’s rights, the copyright claim is null and void in its entirety; else you would have a cesspool of prohibiting meaningful expression by others, thus violating their right to exist.

How about a “modern artist” putting a blank canvass on the wall in an art gallery? Meaning can be relative, subjectively interpreted by differing actors. I could write a satire entitled Mrs. Peabody’s Melons which would necessarily be invoking another’s copyrighted meaning against their authorization, though expressing a unique meaning. There’s too much overlap to clearly delineate boundaries regarding any and all ideas, whether fictional or non-fictional.

From Human Action, “HUMAN action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life” (Part 1, Chapter I. Acting man in paragraph 1.I.1).

I forget which ancient Greek philosopher it was that asked if a certain river was always that certain river, as it is constantly changing, in flux. Meaning of ideas are like that. To own IP, unique universally specific meaning would have to be proved in all contexts for all possible interpretations which seems fantastical. The burden of proof here is on the copyright claimant at any rate.

Meaning has interrelated universal applicability, it is not (potentially) constant, for even the exact probabilistic order of letters and words. As it can never be established that a proposed work of fiction is in its entirety, “In order to stake an IP claim you would need a non-precisive abstraction. The abstraction would have to require the attribute of having been copied in a line of descent from an object for which the IP rights holder retained rights” (Brian). This would always be pure fantasy.

Take for instance trade-marking a name like “Madame Bovary”. Well, Madame cannot be trademarked, but lets assume Bovary had never before existed. The probability of someone else inventing Bovary (1/26 * 1/26 * 1/26 *1/26 * 1/26 *1/26) is extremely low. However, the probability of someone else inventing Bovarie is even lower. Meaning is necessarily indeterminate, composed of included ultimate given emotional psychical responses.

“The characteristic feature of a priori knowledge is that we cannot think of the truth of its negation or of something that would be at variance with it” (EPOE 1.3) This would be true whether precisive or non-precisive. It’s still fundamentally only a representation of reality. “What we know is what the nature or structure of our senses and of our mind makes comprehensible to us. We see reality, not as it “is” and may appear to a perfect being, but only as the quality of our mind and of our sense enables us to see it” (EPOE 1.3).

“There is in human valuations and consequently in human actions no such regularity as in the field investigated by the natural sciences. Human behavior is guided by motives (EPOE 1.5). “There is no way to eliminate from an analysis of the universe any reference to the mind. Those who try it merely substitute a phatmon of their own invention for reality” (EPOE 1.8). Copyrighting any individual aspect of that necessarily denies another ego’s meaningful response, and as all more elaborate constructions of meaning contain at least some of these basic meaning responses, you cannot copyright/own them. Non-precisive conceptions applying to physical reality only bolsters the case against IP. A concrete thing is *less* concretely unique to the author as it applies to physical reality which is interpretable by all. Meaning is necessarily *not* a single instance spatial point, but a fluid over-lapping amorphous thing that varies depending upon perspective.

This would be true if the book’s content was protected by property rights. But because the content is not a scarce resource, the fundamental rules of property rights simply do not apply.

The violation of contract you talk about is the consequence of the trespass on the contract violator’s property – his paper, his ink, his body – initiated by the author.

The simple act of thinking up and making literature, art, or an invention magically grants this creator partial owernship of all the paper, CDs, video cassettes, pens, pencils, paintbrushes, canvasses, oils, steel, copper, iron, plastic, in the world? How does asserting such a property right in the absence of any form of homesteading denote anything but fraud?

The author’s contention that his writing of the book grants him partial ownership of all bookmaking materials in the world was itself the first fraud in this case. Any contract based on fraud is invalid and unenforceable.

Something must be scarce and it must be exclusively possessed for it to find protection under property rights. Nothing covered by patents nor copyrights are scarce, and applying property rights to them invalidates the pre-existing property rights of all real property. There can be no ‘partial ownership’ either way, either of a book or of the materials used to make one.

The ‘fraud’ you accuse a book-copier of engaging in is only his re-assertion of his own, valid, property rights over his own book-making property. He’d be within his rights, perhaps, to file charges against the author for his attempt to fraudulently acquire partial ownership of his ink, printer, and paper by attempting to enforce such a contract.

You write:
“How are the goods stolen? The only way to steal a book is to remove it from the owner’s library. Making copies of a book you bought isn’t theft because:

a) no one else is deprived of the use of the copies they bought (or created); you’ve already compensated the owner and publisher by buying the book in the first place (or they were compensated by whoever originally bought the book you’ve come to own)

b) the original author had no exclusive claim on the fruits of others’ labor”

If you bought the copyrighted book you did so with the understanding that the seller was only selling you that particular physical copy with the restriction that you would not copy it. That is a different good than the same object without the copyright. If you then procede to copy the book you are committing theft by fraud.

If I showed you a field full of potatoes and sold you a “dig your own” potatoes ticket for twenty pounds then you proceded to walk into my farm stand an take a twenty pounder bag then you would be stealing. Why? Because they are different goods. The one in the farm stand was picked by me. Even though the goods are indistiguishable they are different. The “dig your own” are cheaper so buying them does not entitle you to the “pre-dug”.

In the same way a book can look the same but be different. However even that is not the case. The book is different in that it has a copyright notice.

You did not compensate the owner of the book when you bought it for “book plus copying rights” you only compensated him for “reading rights”. Thus if you copy it you commited fraud in your original purchase.

Whether the owner of a piece of property being deprived or not is not the issue. It’s not the issue with many private goods. If I run a cable from my TV out to the cable companies lines I am not depriving them of anything either. That doesn’t mean I am not stealing. Attaching a wire to their pole is use of their property even if it doesn’t deprive anyone of anything. If some homeless guy decides to sleep in your car when you are not using it then you aren’t deprived either.

I’d love it if J.K. Rowling would sell me a uncopyrighted version of her book so I could copy it and make lots of money. I would certainly pay more than the book stand price.

I don’t even understand your point b). How does J.K. Rowlings having copyright ownership over her own book, in any way, making an exclusive claim on anyone elses labor. Is this the fallacious belief that her writing the “Harry Potter” book prevents you from doing so? If so I already covered that. If Rowling had never written her book the odds of you doing so are less than my computer deciding to self levitate off my desk.

I wasn’t getting rid of abstraction. One can reject Plato’s belief that abstractions exist on their own plane of reality without rejecting abstractions. Thus one doesn’t lose much even in ones philosophy when doing so.

I am making the criteria for IP more restrictive by doing this. Not only am I requiring that the abstraction be about a concrete thing, I am also requiring that a violation of IP be defined as use of that concrete thing without permission for the purpose of copying it. In order to stake an IP claim you would need a non-precisive abstraction. The abstraction would have to require the attribute of having been copied in a line of descent from an object for which the IP rights holder retained rights.

It’s quite clear to me from this criteria that you couldn’t copyright the color red, or information about things other people own, or musical notes. It would be hard to prove someone didn’t come up with the idea of painting his car red on his own. Knowledge about the world can’t be copyrighted. I can’t copyright the fact water runs downhill. It’s something anyone can observe without actually trespassing against my property.

I am not basing my position on utilitarian grounds. Neither am accepting counter arguments based on utilitarianism. So I am ignoring all pleadings based on how much more efficient it would be one way vs. the other. Both sides claim more efficiency or that more lives would be saved. Even if I discovered that violating peoples IP rights was “more efficient” I wouldn’t be for it.

You cannot force someone to be silent. If you cannot force someone to remain silent on basic underlying (especially egregiously prevalent on patents of technological processes) ideas than forcing someone to remain silent on any particular expression of them is a violation of another’s right to exist. The mere fact of reading or listening to another’s ideas copies (potentially) them to your brain, thus you and the author both now have the same ideas in your head. The author’s claim that you cannot express thoughts (no matter how and where they originated), whether as summaries or as exact duplicates, in your head to another third party is a violation of your right to exist.

Nobody is prohibited from giving anyone else money for their work. If you personally feel that one should purchase works of art directly from the artist or his distributor you are free to do that. However, the fact that you could purchase the same work from a copycat scribe keeps the potential monopoly price a particular author could potentially charge royalties on from halting all technological progress if it were a key element to future advancement, such as the properties of mathematics. And given the efficiency of Xerox machines and file sharing programs they cannot be distributed for almost nothing. That benefits the author’s themselves and they receive also as consumers every other artists ideas for zero too and they are much better off because they get much more than they give. If art/thought is primarily a leisure class activity, after more pressing wants are satisfied, then that’s the way the distribution of labor works.

“Lend me your ears”—Julius Ceasar

a) no one else is deprived of the use of the copies they bought (or created); you’ve already compensated the owner and publisher by buying the book in the first place (or they were compensated by whoever originally bought the book you’ve come to own)

b) the original author had no exclusive claim on the fruits of others’ labor

When you copy and distribute a book, that is your mixture of labor with the original. The author has as much a right to continue improving his book by publishing additional editions and paying others to market the sale of those copies. His lack of entrepreneurialism or that of his publishers by ceding market share to others more willing to distribute his work is not an indictment against those secondary distributors.

The sense of entitlement to the distribution of an idea is the wrong here. How is $18 a CD or $15 a book the correct price? Mises.org has shown that the infinite reproduction of a work electronically doesn’t destroy the market of a physical copy.

Will everyone want to burn their own CDs or print their own books? These cost money and time. Buying ready-made works for pennies or dimes on today’s dollar will make ‘piracy’ relatively unprofitable, compared to today’s profitability that, like the drug war, exists to the extent it does only because of government interference in the free market.

No one has a right to income or a market of their own, enforced via coercion and restriction on natural rights.

To lower transaction costs in our society we have made copyright notices the equivalent of a contract. When you see the notice that informs you of the standard contract. Everyone is aware that they should look for this notice. You accept the contract when you decided to continue reading the book beyond the copyright.

Books can be stripped of their copyright notices and I covered that in the prior post. That is the equivalent of recieving stolen goods. I already gave the remedy, for books erasure of content. Just as you should know that great price on those TVs you are getting off the back of the truck are too good to be true, you should know that most books come with a copyright. There is a convention and it seems to work.

Why is any contract invalid? Let’s say I write a short story, Story X. I let you read the first paragraph, and you think it’s interesting. I agree to sell you the entire story for $10, on the condition that you don’t redistribute it, or take the exact same plot with your own words and publish that. You agree to the contract. How is that invalid on its face? The only condition on which I would sell it to you was if you’d agree not to redistribute it. You had the choice to either accept that term and give me $10 for the book, or reject it and not have the book. How is this invalid on it’s face?

Unless I sign a contract with you when I buy your book, how does my photocopying it and distributing it in any way amount to an act of aggression against you? Furthermore, what of the person whom I show this book, and who photocopies it, then distributes that? Unless you put a license notice on the bottom of every page, the person would not know this, unless I told them. How does their action, then, amount to an act of aggression against you, which they can be forcibly prevented from doing? What if they scan it into a computer, remove the license notice, and put it online. Anyone who then downloads it has no way to know that the book’s under a license, so they are in no way committing an act of aggression against you. You can make efforts to inform people of such, but only those who you can prove that you made aware of the license, can you in any way argue aggressed.

RTR,

That last paragraph was most amusing. I could definately see Mises considering wishy-washy economists as being a socialist. Especially when the topic is the distribution of income. Anyone who attempts to artificially modify the distribution of income on the free market is acting socialisticially.

The inconsistency of defining IP rights by getting rid of platonic ideals is huge. It’s justification could only possibly work in the very limited number of cases whereby it was obviously true that an operating system was identical in every way, like a xeroxed book, copied song, or copied movie. I do not think there is any legal basis for these claims though as they can and are taken care of in the free market through contract and enforced through non-invasive measures like encryption. They only appear to be the majority of cases given current copyright/patent law, and that is only because the potential majority of other non-violating cases has been artificially choked off by current conceptions and enforcement of IP.

Just because you would need to get rid of platonic ideals to have a consistent libertarian conception of IP doesn’t mean they don’t exist (if “only” for human understanding and meaning) either given the logical structure of the human mind which cannot conceive in any “illogical” or “irrational” fashion.

It seems that it would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any and all offshoot derivatives of some idea were not or could not be independently created. Nor even should one be able to prevent the use of an idea in a novel way which the author had not contemplated, or perhaps even which he had not explicitly stated in his IP professment. In fact, you might epistemologically
call the use of an old idea in a new way a new idea, for instance a patented drug for fighting a disease being slighly altered to fight a different disease. To claim as a property right would preclude in operating systems markets some or
even many primary functions being common to differing products, none of which was in violation of the others, such as many layered Apple or Microsoft, applications windows on a monitor.

You’re right that platonic ideals would have to be gotten rid of for IP to work. Else it would be necessary for operating systems to have obtained rights from the inventor of the file cabinet. This would also prevent the inventor of the concept of a desk owning all objects containing 4 legs and a rectangular surface. That seems to solve the problem of the first and whomever or whatever
collection of whomevers he might pass such “rights” onto to conceive of the circle being able to charge royalties for everything circular such as wheels or
even some arguments. For if these things were truly property their right would be able to be indefinitely extended subject to amended fees which could halt all technological progress.

However, I think it’s a dangerous mistake to get rid of platonic ideals. In Epistemological Problems of Economics Mises writes “Concepts are always
logically prior to the understanding of the individual…nor can one speak of causes and effects in the individual case unless one possesses a theory that treats certain connections between cause and effect as having a universal range of applicability” (EPOE p.1). That’s the problem, any and all ideas have a universal range of applicability. It’s arbitrary to have ownership of either a platonic ideal or any specific IP derivative offshoot of it.

IP (even just basic copyright) of the theory of human action would necessarily entail the total enslavement of the rest of mankind, “as holding ownership over all objects created by direct or indirect copying from the originator of the idea whether authorized or not” (Brian) would be absurd. We would wander aimlessly as drones chanting Igor like “yes master Mises.” Hence I’m of the suspicion that any and all contracts entered into regarding IP would necessarily be invalid. You have the right to remain silent is all.

Perhaps we do have too much plato to dust off or brush off our shoulders. Self-denial, defined as the act or power of denying oneself gratification, is a logical impossibility as the absence of action is the absense of existense. Human cooperation has evolved and is evolving to solve conflicts regarding physical property, which begins with the self. Ownership of any necessarily unlimited and universally related abstract IP concept or specific derivatives of them worries me. It’s like a record company arguing that all humming in heads of
proprietary music is a violation of copyright potentially subject to royalty enforcement. Will an invention come about to coercively test on suspicion of violation? Sounds like Soviet Russia to me. I think there wouldn’t be any way for one to even test a violation of one’s IP without violating another’s actual physical property at least firstly upon suspicion alone.

Sans IP I would see tremendous overlap of ideas in unique substitute good products thus that competition would constantly be commoditizing them,
continuosly benefiting even producers many times more as consumers (in the aggregate) than they could temporarily benefit as government created
monopolistic producers (given enough time) of a specific IP protected good unless one were to assume technological innovation is close to complete. Anything else would be a damning indictment against the free market. The reason
I can’t get my distinctly different better cheaper copy of MikeRoweSoft Vrindows is because government patent protection prohibits it even though it might have many more unique feature than it has in common with Windows.

If it could be demonstrated that a smaller piece of a larger wealth pie which is larger than a bigger piece of a smaller pie is the highly probable outcome for even the greatest genius (ala division of labor comparative advantage principles) who does not intentionally guard his knowledge from slipping/spreading to others with government enforced patents/copyrights, then he would be a fool to choose otherwise. It doesn’t even have to be mathematically proved. For if it were not so that would call into question the very faith, on the basis of efficiency, in the free market. It can be surmised, for what reason would there ever be for communication, let alone trade, with others. You would potentially have the ultimate inefficient coordination problem taking IP to its logical extreme.

Just in case you’re not buying my idea that platonic ideals do exist I submit that a marooned surviving child would still proceed through at least some various steps of the mind’s logical structure. These steps, or discoveries, could be meaningfully comprehended by others. Any claim to ownership “right” of that process, or a given expression of it, is necessarily a violation of another being’s right to exist as a human being. Both “rights” are mutually exclusive, therefore only one of them can exist. Declaration of IP has no more meaning than declaring ownership of the air or stars. It’s nothing but a call to arms.

I’d ask for a refund on the idea that ideas (pull string, light bulb is lit and cha-ching goes the sound of charged royalities to all who get ahold of that physical representation) are always physical representations that aren’t necessarily derivatives of logicaly prior categories. General principles exist a priori equally for every human mind to potentially discover. Claiming ownership of some derivative of that is akin to demanding your neighbor stop breathing your air. I’m not even sure that all (most I would agree) ideas can be physically represented let alone embodied.

The idea of zero, of nothingness, cannot physically be demonstrated. How can a being contemplate or understand the meaning of what not being would be?
(probably why metaphysical religion is sold as comfort, here have some Jesus on the house) One divided by zero is mathematically undefined. A pretended physical representation is the best substitute that could occur. Is the idea of action
“a” singular physical representation or every conceivable representation? How can a human mind distinguish the difference between finite and infinite? And even with regard to ideas that can be physically embodied if there are sets of representations for a given idea the idea could not be claimed except upon universal recognition and professment of all its possible representations which given the limits of human cognition is impossible. The same idea could originate independently from differing factors thus precluding that logical possibility by IP is onerous.

Getting rid of platonic ideals (or categories) seems radically un-Austrian and fundamentally against especially Mises’ a priori epistemological assumptions upon which the theory of human action is constructed. If those assumptions are dirty philosophy, well, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

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Excerpted in a “fair use” fashion from a transcript of the PBS documentary “Commanding Heights” to the necessary percentage limit my subsidizing tax dollars allow:

Onscreen title: Switzerland, 1947

NARRATOR: Hayek loved mountains. He said they breathed freedom. But he saw socialist ideals and the planned economy as threats to freedom, and so he organized a conference at a formerly fashionable hotel on the top of Mont Pelerin — Pilgrim Mountain.

RALPH HARRIS: Well, what happened in 1947 was that Hayek at last brought off a great dream, which was to assemble 36, mostly economists, some historians, and a few journalists, a handful of what he regarded as survivors, good eggs, good intellectuals, who understood the market economy and the whole of the case.

MILTON FRIEDMAN, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago: This was Hayek’s belief and the belief of other people who joined him there, that freedom was in serious danger.

NARRATOR: One of the delegates was a young economist from Chicago, Milton Friedman.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The point of the meeting was very clear. Hayek and others felt that the world was turning toward planning and that somehow we had to develop an intellectual current that would offset that movement.

NARRATOR: They met downstairs in the cocktail bar. The room and its furniture are not much changed.

RALPH HARRIS: The whole world was shadowed by the Iron Curtain, the Russian threat, by the failure to establish democracies in the Eastern European countries and by the prevalence everywhere intellectually of these ideas of collectivism arising from the war. The argument always was that democracy is impossible without a free economy. You need a free economy; free economy is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for democracy.

NARRATOR: The debates were passionate. At one point, Hayek’s former mentor, Ludwig von Mises, stormed out of a meeting.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: In the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian, people like myself, Mises got up and said, “You’re all a bunch of [damned] socialists,” and walked right out of the room. (laughs)

I find it wrong because intellectual property rights are properly grounded in physical property rights. They are a subset of physical rights. One cannot copy an idea without getting hold of a physical representation of the idea. There is no such thing as platonic ideas living in some alternate reality. Every embodiment of an idea is physical. Either as a written description, an object, or some other physical copy. You have to understand it this way, as holding ownership over all objects created by direct or indirect copying from the originator of the idea whether authorized or not.

In order to copy an idea you must have physical access to an embodiment of that idea or an unauthorized copy of it.

If you had no such physical access then you cannot have violated the underlying physical right against copying. Thus if you make an independent invention of the idea the patent holder has no right to exclude you. You have not trespassed against him.

With works of art, books, software, articles, it becomes obvious that if you have an identical article that it must have been copied. It is so astronomically impossible for you to have come up with an identical copy of Microsoft windows on your own, or a novel for that matter that we know you copied it. Thus in such cases we can ignore the fact that

This restriction is in no way an hindrance on your own use of your property precisely because there is no way in hell you would have ever been in the position to mold your property into said configuration without copying it. Just as an edict to prevent you from flapping your arms to fly has no effect because you couldn’t possibly fly by flapping them in the first place.

Of course as with any property right a libertarian system will need some way to make the claim clear. Just as with say land ownership you will need to clearly post and register your ownership with third parties to avoid disputes. The purpose of the intellectual property contract is more declarative than contractual. It is laying out how you are going to allow use of your idea, without the right to copy.

The idea that that contract is not binding on others is only partially true. If I contract with someone else to rent them my house without the right to modify the landscaping that does not bind on anyone else. They do not have to pay rent to me. However just because they are not party to the contract does not give them the right to come over and reck the grass, steal it or use it for nude sunbathing.

I also believe that in order for the intellectual property right to be valid one must take reasonable care not to broadcast that idea beyond those who are bound by the contract. I may want the opportunity to come up with my own ideas. The embodiment should be clearly labeled as such with some form of copyright symbol or label. Should I happen upon such an object I can avoid inspecting it.

Another reason for the label is so that I know it is a privately owned idea. Thus I can avoid trespassing against you by modifying my resources into an embodiment of your idea.

The case of unauthorized copying is similar to receipt of stolen goods. The remedy being that you should modify your resource so that it no longer infringes on my copyright. For instance, you erase the bootleg copy of MS Word off your computer, or you turn the booklet you copied back to paper pulp. You retain ownership of the physical resource. Of course, intentional theft may require different remedies such as recompense for enforcement.

There are of course going to be fuzzy areas as in many cases of other forms of physical property rights. “Who owns the aquifer” sorts of problems. One cannot reject intellectual property rights on this basis any more than one can reject the physical.

Let’s see how this applies to Microsoft. You friend purchases Windows XP and installs it on a single computer. The contract says this is the only amount of copying he is allowed. Microsoft retains rights over the use of the software in the contract. It’s labeled as copyrighted. He then hands the CD to you. The minute you copy it you are a physical trespasser against Microsoft. Therefore Microsoft is perfectly justified in sticking a gun in your face. Your friend is not authorized to allow you to utilize Microsoft property in this fashion and you know it. Clear as day. You copy it and you are stealing.

The claim cannot be made that no harm is done here. It is quite evident that this copying harms Microsoft because it decreases their income. In fact this very argument is used by the anti-IP crowd. Boo-hoo, Microsoft is so rich because they have copyrights.

The fact is that in order to get your copy you have to use Microsoft property. You may not think this is a big deal. But how can you then exclude people from using your property whenever they felt it didn’t harm you much. What if everyone in your neighborhood decided they could copy your “As Good As It Gets” DVD without harming you. If all thousand of your neighbors proceeded to do so you would no longer be able to watch it. The first neighbor would sneak by and take if for a quick copy. Then someone else would see he had it and he would think no harm in letting them copy it too. Soon it would be passed around everywhere without you knowing where it was. Harm even in small amounts when added together become serious.

So, if you throw away the notion that intellectual property rights are based on owning the platonic ideal, not only do you clean up your philosophy, but you get a clearer understanding of IP rights true basis, physical property rights.

So where is the inconsistency? Seems to fit perfectly with other libertarian values.

Copyright 2002 Brian Macker – Limited rights to reproduce granted to Mises.org