One of my favorite podcasts, Triangulation, featured in the latest episode an interview with the great John Perry Barlow–former member of the Grateful Dead (an innovator in viral marketing), IP opponent and activist for Internet freedom. (See his classic 1994 Wired article,”The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age,” discussed here on the Mises blog; also in Cat-v: “The ‘intellectual property’ oxymoron”.) Barlow there observes that before the Internet and digital age, copyright “worked” (whatever that means) because it was hard to make copies: to print books, make tapes and LPs, etc. But that the mid 1990s, that all changed when it became easy and essentially costless to make perfect copies of such items. And that this is one reason copyright no longer works. The state is less and less able to easily police and regulate emulation and copying, because its nature has changed, so it responds by escalating its punishments and fines.
Of course, this will not work any more than the draconian sentences imposed for use or sale of narcotics will stop drug use. It occurred to me that envisioning changes in the area of narcotics similar to those that have occurred in the field of informational goods can help illustrate how absurd copyright law is in the digital age. At present, illegal drugs such as cocaine and marijuana are produced from physically grown crops by criminal syndicates, refined into consumer drugs, shipped at great risk to the western markets for these drugs, sold in shady transactions, etc., with individuals at all stages of this chain subject to severe punishment by the state. The state is able to interfere enough with various stages of the drug production and consumption chain to raise prices and drive it underground, and to sustain its own lucrative role in the everlasting “war on drugs.” This is somewhat analogous to the state copyright was in before the Internet, when “copies” meant physical objects like paper books, vinyl LPs, and the like.
Now imagine if some kind of change in the production of drugs occurred analogous to the transformation that has occurred with informational goods. Before, to make a book or audio recording, a physical good had to be produced; copying was laborious or expensive; middlemen and studios were involved. Now, it’s easy to copy books or songs, and the copies can be perfect; and the author or artist can increasingly avoid the studios and publishing houses. Now imagine that the field of 3D printers evolves to the point where narcotics and other drugs such as pharmaceuticals can easily be produced by a consumer, on his own, with a little “pharmaceutical printers” — in essence, millions of consumers could own little private narcotics fabricators. Not only would there be no middle man, there would be no supplier. No sales of drugs, no marijuana fields, no transportation and distribution networks. Sitting next to your laser printer/book binding machine, which you use to fabricate whole bound books on the fly, and your 3D printer, which you use to make little gadgets and items, you have a pharmaceutical printer. Sure, most people use it to make a cheap version of cough medicine and pain medicines, and cheaper versions of highly regulated and patent-protected prescription medications. But some would use it to generate narcotics.
In such a world, surely the bluenoses would be driven almost insane by the thought of their neighbors secretly being able to produce and consume drugs in the privacy of their own homes. But imagine how nearly impossible any enforcement effort in the drug war would be come. The drug war has already led to severe encroachment on civil liberties, but in the new drug-printer age the only way to make even a slight dent in the new private drug production and consumption practice would be to have ultra-invasive searches and seizures, constant monitoring of personal web traffic to detect when drug-printer “recipes” were searched for or downloaded over the Internet, and so on. Still, the drug war would be even more futile than it is now, and would cause ever more damage to people’s lives, homes, property, freedom, and civil liberties.
And this is exactly the position copyright’s war on information and knowledge finds itself in now. Penalties are ramping up, the law’s scope and term keeps expanding. Copyright propaganda is on the increase, with Big Brother warnings ominously imposed in unskippable warnings at the beginning of DVD and Blu-Ray movies, and public service ads in magazines and comic books and TV’s warning kids that it’s “not cool to steal”. Western nations, as the home of the Big Film and Big Music and Big Publishing interests, are twisting the arms of other nations such as Russia, India, and China to adopt draconian Western-style copyright enforcement. At the same time, with the rise of torrenting and encryption, the attempt to enforce these laws becomes ever more futile. We can only hope its futility is recognized, and this relic of thought control and censorship of ages past is scrapped, before the Internet and our lives and liberty are ruined in the name of “intellectual property rights”.
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85 Responses
That is quite the thought experiment for drugs. Imagine reducing the cost of an eightball of crack from about $100 to less than a $1.00. And right in your own home. Then we could see what damage recreational drugs do to people, and just the drugs. Much of the ruin of drug abusers has been the financial costs and legal risks involved. Take those away, and while we might see more drug abuse, it wouldn’t be financially ruinous.
Even if it wouldn’t be a factor of 100 reduction, if the government was to get out of the way prices of narcotics would likely be reduced enough that it would be less financially ruinous now.
And we could focus more resources on the real crimes that some people interested in drugs are involved with.
In private arbitration I could even see how rehab would be expected for such people since they might not be able to pay back restitution without a loan, and the provider of the funds would probably expect them to get off the drugs to lower their interest rate (as otherwise they wouldn’t be as likely to get the payments due to the funds going towards more drugs).
Why would anyone do crack (even for a dollar) when they could do Ecstasy or LSD for similar discount prices?
True–I used an example that I’m familiar with. But if all narcotics were cheaper, then more people might choose to use different narcotics. It depends upon how it’s taken, and what kind of effect it has. I’d rather smoke something than inject it into my bloodstream.
So you pulled a Goebbels on us again. Just keep repeating them!
Why not print land as well “just for a thought experiment”? A socialist’s dream.
It has about the same chances and it would have the very same effects.
Mr. Kinsella,
Had you actually read Patry’s book, you would find that he is more in agreement than disagreement with you, and he gives a much more cogent explanation for the corporate conduct you discuss here.
In short, the struggle is over the distribution channels for the physical commodities, and the draconian measures are a response to losing control of those exclusive channels. This is not unique to any particular industry, but is a reflection of the dynamic tension between would-be monopolists who seek protection for their desire for complete vertical integration (think movie studio monopolies of the 40′s-50′s or record labels of the same period and somewhat later), and consumers trying to get what they want, no more and no less.
Yet as is typical of your arguments in general, you neglect any other consequence of your position other than reducing the draconian nature of the evil State. Larry saw instantly one of the serious consequences of your PP fantasy.
The war on drugs is wrong for a number of reasons, but freely available compounds of any type has a consequence of its own, not to mention the fact that, whether it is now being done rightly or wrongly, or if there is some alternative that would deliver what consumers really want more efficiently, one of those things consumers want is some assurance that what they are using actually does what it is purported to do, and nothing more or less. Also, drugs must first exist before they can be “printed”. One way to remove all of those things is to ignore them, to focus exclusively on the replication, and none at all on the creation, testing, or maintenance of safe sources of distribution.
All I am trying to say here is that your unconstrained call for socialization of distribution channels for drugs assumes there is something safe and desirable to distribute, and as to thinking through the other consequences, you appear selectively naive and/or overly optimistic. There is a downside to what you suggest, which you fail to acknowledge, even in passing.
This post is independent of Patry’s views and has nothing to do with them.
Right. And you guys support the granting of monopolies.
Well I’m not a consequentialist or a utilitarian. But if I were a consequentialist I would oppose the consequences that flow from empowering a state to grant monopoly privileges to entrenched whiners.
Of course if people resort to blackmarket half-assed home-brew printing of generic versions of drugs that are less safe than the namebrand versions, that is because your patent law has driven them underground; it’s the same reason I can trust the safety of a Kroger generic version of Tylenol/acetaminophen more than you could trust some black-market purchased angel dust, cocaine, or heroine. Thanks!
I hereby acknowledge that there is a downside to current monopoly privilege holders, to getting rid of their monopoly privileges. Just like there would be a downside to organized crime if we were to legalize prostitution, drugs, gambling, etc.
What a drivel, you just keep repeating your nonsense.
This might sink in some day:
A printer does not creat any new material, a printer, even a 3D printer, just reformulates it!
Can you comprehend the difference between the micro and the macro in the material world?
Andras, this is such a beautiful, rational, coherent, Deep, inspiring comment. I will take eons to study it, and I am sure I will never, even then, fully grok its real greatness.
Andras
By your argument NO-ONE creates any new material, they just reformulate it. That forms an excellent basis for the opposition to the grant of IP monopolies. Well done!
Sione
You are right, let’s print the universe into existence!
Let’s follow Kinsellan metaphysics!
@Stephan,
It is just GiGo. You see, you can do it in a sentence. You don’t have to labor on pages.
However, it might not generate your traffic quota.
You’re assuming the drugs won’t be innovated upon. If drugs are legal, then there is a whole market for drug improvement.
Hypothetical advertisement:
Why take yesterday’s crack-cocaine which is known to ruin lives when you can take the latest-and-greatest version of Acme Crack-Cocaine today — a drug that’s been chemically engineered so as to not have withdrawal symptoms, isn’t addictive, won’t deteriorate your brain, etc. etc.
P.S. – Just had a funny thought. Some day Acme might come out with a “throwback” version of cocaine just like Pepsi did a while ago.
@Stephan Kinsella September 15, 2011 at 1:47 pm
When you say this:
It brings Patry to mind, as does the balance of this paragraph on what you mean by “copyright’s war”. You claim it has nothing to do with Patry’s view, because you did not read him. That’s what I said, but don’t let facts get in your way.
I don’t think you read what I write, either, but just look for something to bark at:
“…monopoly…” “Woof!!”
Who knows what your obsessive need to categorize people in this way actually means, if anything? What is a “consequentialist”, someone who understands that all actions have consequences? Horrible! What is a utilitarian, an economist? Glad you’re not one of those! Despicable!!
Let me see if I can squeeze something meaningful from this… well what is it exactly?
“Namebrand”? I thought you opposed trademarks of any kind, so how do you identify a name brand? Without some form of coercive power, how are you going to keep the “blackmarket, half-assed home-brew” with the Kroger label on it out of my kid’s mouth?
That’s Great!! Don’t let the fact that I was not talking about the consequences to drug companies bother you. Just pick out whatever you need to construct your straw men. You are your own cottage industry in that regard.
No.
you support monopolies, then you shy from being called on it. cute.
right, we should be anti-labelers.
of course not. people are free to use marks to indicate who they are, the source of origin of their goods–just as people who are not cowardly nyms like you use their “names” to indicate their identity.
, so how do you identify a name brand?
Sorry, is a question supposed to be an argument now?
Again, is the fact that you are confused, and have questions, supposed to be an argument?
An argument? This is just sniping, and who needs it but you? Woof!
Is it just me or is it possible to nest blockquotes?
That’s kinda cool
Andras, people are working on 3-D printers, so this is not a dream, but a warning about the future. However, it is still 10 to 20 years away, depending on who you read.
Also, i think that copyrights and patents can still exist in such a world. For instance, the Mona Lisa could be digitally scanned, and the information kept by the museum, and if you want to make a copy, you might decide to download, and pay for, the info from whichever museum holds the painting. Sure, you might decide to keep a copy in your own computers of everything you think you might need, but it might be simpler and cheaper to just copy when needed from the patent and copyright holders, and then clear your computer memory for your next project!
Wow. I haven’t visited an IP-related thread here since several months ago. Back then, the proponents of intellectual monopoly wrote fairly eloquent and well-thought-out comments. It’s a bit shocking to come back now and see the gibbering foolishness they’ve been reduced to.
I stopped writing on intellectual property matters when my opponents were reduced to using invective, not reasoned arguments. I wondered if they could point to a useful drug like Viagra which had not been created by a company with a long research time and compensation by monopoly patent. I am still waiting for a reasonable answer.
Andras
Now, now little one! Wipe the dribble off your chin, take your hands out of your pockets, take a deep breath and calm down. There is no need for your thoughtless hysteria here. That you’ve undermined yourself and presented the basis of a refutation of your prefered position isn’t sufficient reason for you to resort to dishonest hyperbole.
Sione
RWW
The pro-IP arguments they each presented were refuted. Then, when they realised they had nothing valid or justifiable to argue, they reduced themselves to the gibbering foolishness you observe. There is a willful dishonesty amongst them, as well as a consistent refusal to learn from their mistakes when their errors are pointed out to them. Shameful really.
Sione
See- no answer from an anti-IP!!! Just more willful dishonesty from Sione. Wildberry keeps trying to help them, but they refuse to learn.
Point me to a country that developed computers without having a humongous regulatory state with a currency-destroying central bank.
You can’t? Okay, so obviously the development of computers is not just aided by, no it critically depends on the existence of a regulatory state and a currency-destroying central bank.
I have explained this a thousand times in IP threads, so you are either not reading my posts, ignoring my points and pretending I didn’t raise them, or you are too dull to understand it. This objection is on par with denying the existence of inertia because every object you put in motion eventually came back to rest.
Let me say this as simply as it can possibly be said: correlation doesn’t imply causation! I am amazed I would have to explain this to someone, but there it is. Every summer crime rates increase and so does ice cream consumption. So obviously ice cream causes crime! Or maybe it’s the opposite, and there’s just nothing like a good ice cream cone after some felonies! Dear lord…
Your complaint is ridiculous, just as much as Hilary Clinton “defending” high taxes by pointing out that the wealthiest nations on Earth are also the most highly taxed. It is obvious that when patenting is an option it would be disastrous to not patent what you develop, because someone *else* will patent it and stop you from producing the thing in question. All you support by pointing out that all drugs have been developed under patents is that patents exist and forgoing the option only gives someone else the option to unjustifiably push you out of the market.
It is absurd to think such an observation supports IP, or that it is the burden of the anti-IP side to produce evidence of a drug that was produced outside of IP, especially in a nation that has IP laws! My argument is that monopolizing production only raises the incentives to be the one monopoly producer, and more or less destroys the incentives to be any other producer. Giving GM a monopoly on car production will be great news for GM and terrible news for every other car producer, and that will lead to *less* production of cars, not more! How in the world does outlawing production of something lead to more production of that something!?
This is what amazes me about this low-brow “look at what happened” way of understanding the world. You seem more than ready to abandon logic and suggest that destruction equals production (Paul Krugman, anyone?) just because you saw a coincidence of destruction and production, and no one can point to a time when destruction was not coincident with production.
The task of theory is to explain the *connection* between experiences, not the experiences themselves. It’s not very impressive to know what happened. The challenge is to know that X happened *because of* Y, and *despite* Z.
My argument is that monopolizing the production of any good leads to less of that good, and this includes IP. This means that development of drugs happens *despite* IP laws, not *because* of them. It does not in the least imply that one cannot see a coincidence of drug development and IP, nor does it suggest that finding a lack of coincidence should be easy or even possible. It means that if everything were exactly the same, *except* there were no IP laws, there would be *more* production of drugs than there is now.
This is how all theory works. To say that gravity pulls objects towards the Earth does not mean it is impossible to see something near the Earth floating away from it, nor does it imply that there will be more or even any instances of things actually falling towards the Earth. It means that if everything else were the same *except* no gravity, things would have *less* of a tendency to fall towards the Earth.
I have run this argument countless times specifically in IP threads because Wildberry has employed the same fallacious reasoning to try and “refute” IP by pointing out that creative innovation and IP coincided. Yeah, and I take a big shit every morning at 6:00 A.M., so that’s obviously why the sun rises.
Your claim that this has never been addressed is a lie or a mistake, and I expect no better from people who defend nonsense.
I addressed your complaint. Are you gonna read my post, which is a rehash of things I have said on IP threads more times than I can remember, or are you going to skip over it and raise your hypocritical accusations next time?
Your dishonesty is much more blatant than you seem to think, for I have stayed on top of Wildberry and you apparently think I “refuse to learn”. No, I responded and instead of responding to my responses you jump into another thread and accuse me of not nodding my head and saying “uh huh” to the piles of self-contradicting sophistry that Wildberry spoons out over and over. You had a chance to join the debate and apparently you didn’t because you think your complaint wasn’t addressed, even though I have addressed that exact complaint more times than I can count.
So you exit the debate based on a false accusation and then proclaim the people you refuse to debate with “unable to learn”?
I always love it when people lose a debate by exiting it and insist they won it and just don’t want to “deal” with the counter-arguments anymore.
Typical sophistry. Let me point out that Wildberry is using his words (you know, labels for things) to condemn the use of labels.
Wildberry, your inability to avoid even the most basic self-contradictions simply blows my mind.
I suppose being “obsessed” with labels is a lot like being “obsessed” with logic.
Your argument refutes itself. The first computers were developed by the British government in WW2, to help with code-breaking. They kept this secret after the war so they might have an edge in code-breaking other people’s messages (A lot like your NSA).
Commercial computers were developed by IBM, and protected by patents and copyrights. So what is your argument?
I don’t know, the fact that those people fall into those categories. You seem to think that people just make up whatever categories they want. No, categories are based in reality. If they weren’t we couldn’t attach a word to a category and communicate concepts to each other. For as much as you quote “Human Action”, you must have forgotten the passage Mises wrote about how some categories, like social classes, are arbitrary, but some categories are fundamental, like the categories of action. Unfortunately I forgot what page this was on.
Seeing you are unable to consult a dictionary, I’ll hold your hand through this one too.
From dictionary.com: the theory that ethical decisions should be made on the basis of the expected outcome or consequences of the action.
Amazing. You’re on the internet, and dictionary.com is just a couple of clicks away. But too many clicks for Wildberry. No, someone who is not a consequentialist does not deny that actions have consequences. What a fabulous straw man. Change the definition of a word so that the arguments of your opponents are nonsense. *Golf clap*
See, bank robbery is justified because it makes the bank robber rich. Murder is justified because it makes the murderer satisfied to get an obnoxious person out of his hair for good. Why, everything everybody does is justified because the only reason actors act is to reap the consequences of their actions.
Your “consequentialism” implies that everything is justifiable. If the ends justify the means then everything is justified, because the only reason to employ means is to reach certain ends.
The obvious reason why consequentialism fails, and to be clear you *do* make consequentialist arguments whether you want to recognize the correct categorization of them or not (i.e. IP is justified because it means more creative production), is that the ends are *your* ends. Again, for someone who quotes “Human Action” all the time you should know that ends are purely subjective and that proclaiming that a certain economic order reaches *your* end of more creative production is a far cry from a justification of that economic order. No it is not an ethical argument to point out that if people just acted this way you would get what you want.
But the real kicker is that even if I accept for the sake of argument a consequentialist approach, your consequentialist argument is dead wrong! Intellectual property leads to less production of creative goods because IP is literally the outlawing and violent shutdown of some creative production! It again blows my mind that I say this to you *every* time and you just gloss right over it like it didn’t happen. You just can’t accept how self-contradicting it is to proclaim destruction is production, and then rely on a bunch of low-brow “look at the facts” argument to justify plain nonsense.
Repeat: Intellectual property means *less* production of creative goods, just as in the general case that monopoly production is *less* efficient, not more efficient, than competitive production (I am aware of Mises’ argument to the contrary, and I am also aware of Rothbard’s superior counterargument to Mises), because monopoly production is nothing more than an outlawing and violent shutting down of production!
So even if it were relevant for justification how much of what gets produced (again, you totally ignore opportunity costs, specifically that more creative goods would mean less of other goods), your argument is still a ridiculous refusal to acknowledge a contradiction.
Dear lord Wildberry! Let me take your hand again.
From dictionary.com, for utilitarianism: the ethical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons.
Utilitarianism is equally untenable, for it assumes that “happiness” is a measurable cardinal value that can be aggregated through some sort of “average” or even compared between different actors. Once again, someone well-read on Mises should know this is impossible. If a transaction makes me happier and you less happy, there is no way to determine that my gain in happiness is “larger” than your loss in happiness. It would be meaningless to make such a comparison, and the only meaningful comparisons are that I am more happy now than before, and you are less happy now than before. You can only compare different states of happiness for the *same* actor, not for different ones.
Utilitarianism is similarly using one’s own personal value judgments (assignments of utility) to justify a social order.
So in summary, you insisted upon definitions of words that you made up on the spot, which you would only do out of an insistence to not look up what they actually mean, and then used these new definitions to proclaim Kinsella’s arguments absurd?
The most ridiculous thing about this is that not only are economics and utilitarianism not the same thing, they are completely unrelated and Mises pointed that out constantly. He was actually consistent (as much as one could be) with his utilitarianism, and never let it come anywhere near his economics. Mises insisted over in over, in that book you quoted to me multiple times, that it is *not* the task of economics to prescribe policy or justify certain societies over others. The *only* purpose of economics is to explain what social orders lead to what effects. Economics *cannot* proclaim markets virtuous and socialism evil. It can only describe what happens in a market and what happens in socialism. That social calculation is impossible under socialism does not at all suggest that social calculation isn’t evil (and guess what, plenty of socialists argue just that).
He separated his utilitarianism entirely from his economics, insisting the whole time they have nothing to do with each other. “Human Action” is about socialists being *wrong*, wrong about what would happen under capitalism or socialism. “Liberalism” is about his personal advocacy of free markets, and his belief that, as an empirical fact, most people seem to agree that material wealth is a good thing and if they only understood that markets are the only way to produce material wealth most people would be capitalists.
Mises always insisted that it is beyond the scope of economics to prescribe policy. One has necessarily left the realm of positive, descriptive science and entered the realm of normative claims when prescribing policy. It disgusts me that you fancy yourself such a Misesean when you have so clearly missed so many of his messages.
No, you’re misunderstanding my argument.
IBM exists in a country that has a regulatory state with a central bank, so obviously IBM exists *because* of that regulatory state.
I never said anything about patents and copyrights. Computers developed in a nation with IP laws. It was also developed in a nation with central bank laws. You didn’t answer *my* question. Show me an example of a computer company that arose in a country with no central bank, or admit that computers exist only because of central banks.
Instead, you attempted an off-topic distraction by pointing out that computers were developed in a country with IP laws. If that’s all you have to say to prove or support that computers could only exist with IP laws, then all I have to point out is that this country had central bank laws too and apparently I have supported or proven that computers could only exist under a central bank.
I cannot believe you claim the argument that correlation does not yield causality is self-refuting. Are you saying you believe that ice cream causes crime, and that my morning shit causes the sun to rise?
I want to emphasize how ridiculous this response is. I happened to pick the example of computers, which was entirely arbitrary, and you simply pointed out that they too were developed under IP laws.
I never claimed they weren’t and that is so obviously missing the point I think you are being purposefully dense.
I also presented examples involving inertia and gravity to illustrate my point, and I can only imagine that your response to that is that inertia and gravity were discovered by people living under IP laws! Therefore gravity doesn’t exist because I’ve seen things fly, and inertia doesn’t exist because I’ve never seen something move in a straight line at a constant speed forever.
Also, the actual anti-IP argument, which I presented, is that monopolizing production literally means outlawing and violently shutting down some production, and it is a clear contradiction to claim such destruction means more production. As I should have known you did not respond to that at all. Apparently a direct contradiction, A is not A, doesn’t matter, because A exists under IP laws!
Nuke, what I am doing is taking your argumentative form and applying it to different premises.
Your argumentative form is: “There are no observed cases of A and no B. Therefore, A happens because of B, and could not happen without B.”
When A = innovation of drugs and B = IP laws, this form becomes your particular argument. The premise is certainly true. In order to test the validity of the above argumentative form, I apply it to different true premises.
I let A = innovation of computers, and B = a regulatory state with a central bank. Then, using the above argumentative form, I begin with true premises and arrive at the conclusion that innovation of computers happened because of a regulatory state with a central bank and that innovation of computers could only happen *because* of a regulatory state with a central bank.
I chose a regulatory state with a central bank because, being mises.org, I assume that the economic black hole that is a central bank and economic destruction of regulations is already agreed upon. In case that doesn’t drive the point home, I can choose A = an existing society and B = crime within that society, and conclude that society exists because it has crime and could not exist without crime. Why? Because we’ve never seen a society without crime.
If you are not satisfied with counter-exmaples, I can construct a more rigorous logical refutation of that argumentative form’s validity. If you switch A and B, the premise remains the same, while the conclusion swaps cause with effect, and so if this form were valid then it would be possible for A to be both the cause and the effect of B, but effects by definition follow causes and so this is conceptually impossible.
I am pretty amazed I have to go this in-depth to convince someone that just because two things are always seen together doesn’t mean that one happens because of the other, and that it cannot be that one happens in spite of the other.
Look, any product we now have probably depends on IP, not just computers. And they were probably developed and refined with patent protection in mind. Kinsella’s thought experiment in drugs sounds like cheap drugs are just around the corner- but I bet it turns into another paperless office prophecy! I think the compounds in drugs are too complex to be casually ‘printed’- each molecule would need to be carefully assembled. So I think he’s already on something whilst writing to us, but it’ll be a while before it can be cheaply ‘printed’.
What did Kinsella say that suggests printers create new material? Can you provide a quote or even just a paraphrase of what he said that suggests such a thing?
And what does that have to do with the “difference between micro and macro”?
I realise that a dedicated anarcho-capitalist will always take my words and use them however he/she feels, but I will try my best to explain my position.
the only Industrial countries that I have seen that were dedicated to being anti-IP were the Communist bloc. They practiced what you seem to be preaching, and their counter-example is one reason I approve of IP. I don’t recall them as being great centers of innovation, even though they had no ‘stifling’ patent laws. Also, when the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, they deliberately catered to inventors with a monopoly reward system, and the U.S. has benefitted from that.
So that is one example and one counter-example to think about.
And I am exiting the debate now so I can go home and work on my invention, from which I hope to make a great deal of money.
They all had/have rudimentary IP systems or IP-like “incentive” schemes (e.g. “Certificates of Authorship”), crippled as they were by the absence of markets where one could liquidate their monopoly rights for a sweet wad of cash.
AAMOF, the central planning machine diverted quite a lot of resources into (a) arms race and (b) pure sciences, thus compounding the calculation problem. There is no case to be made for/against IP on the example of the Communist bloc unless one manages to isolate IP from central planning (or aren’t they both of the same kind?)
“But the real kicker is that even if I accept for the sake of argument a consequentialist approach, your consequentialist argument is dead wrong! Intellectual property leads to less production of creative goods because IP is literally the outlawing and violent shutdown of some creative production! It again blows my mind that I say this to you *every* time and you just gloss right over it like it didn’t happen. You just can’t accept how self-contradicting it is to proclaim destruction is production, and then rely on a bunch of low-brow “look at the facts” argument to justify plain nonsense.”
I used to work for a company that worked on the London Underground. When you wanted to work on an escalator, you took the one AND ONLY key and turned it off. The isolators were all in one room and not near each escalator itself – but with the key you could work there undisturbed safe in the knowledge that no’one could copy it. There were no copies -losing it meant replacing the lock, and I know one person who drove home 200 miles with it in his pocket and had to drive back in the middle of the night with it.
This saved a tremendous amount. You don’t need to, for example, employ a second person to guard the lock, or pay people danger money for a lottery task where you might lose a finger/arm/life, constantly have to worry after every cigarette break whether it is on or off, have some system whereby people only turn it on after consulting some register (which could be bypassed or numbers mixed up or whatever) etc. Its off because the key is in your pocket -that’s all.
I think this is largely about the market’s solution to this famous problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
and there are many analogous free market scenarios which are at root similar to this. So I hereby propose that sometimes “destruction is production” (ie. destruction of the copied keys) and that your categorical hysterical statement is in fact wrong. There are many free market examples of this – but they are more subtle and so you can wilfully ignore them if you please.
Before you write some big long screed about how irrelevant this is, this is no justification for copyrights or patents. It is just another example of how the apparently self-evident and watertight statements by you and your hardcore NAPcapper chums during these debates are really a little more complicated _IF_ the real-world, and the desires and goals of the members of the free market, is of any interest.
Kid Salami,
you refuted the relevance of your own example. You told us that there is only one key. You copied the information. Now I know it, and I copied it too.
The whole issue of common knowledge refutes the explanations of IP, rather than supports them. People can make deductions even from incomplete and indirect knowledge. If the analogy with IP was appropriate, it would be either forbidden to observe anything, and/or to perform deductive reasoning. You can deduce the correct data from observing things which are not even causally related to the object you are analysing, it is sometimes sufficient that you know there is any logical connection you are aware of (for example if the states of the objects are complementary). Surely you can’t be serious about that?
The problem presented by IP proponents is not the need to keep information secret, but the request that third parties pretend they don’t know it without paying the author. It’s the hatred of causality that I pointed out in another post. In your own example, it would have meant that you violated the London Underground’s rights, and now that I reacted to your post, I violated them too. I’ve been thinking of flying to London next week, but I can’t anymore. I now know how the Underground escalator security works so I’m liable for damages. Heck, I can’t now even forget my keys, because I’d be violating the rights of the poor chap from your example!
It’s a fairy tale, imaginary world that bears no resemblance with reality whatsoever. The jabbering children are scared of causality, so they need magic to make it safe again.
Oh I recalled a joke.
Back in the times of Soviet Union, one day a newspaper comes out with blank pages. A foreigner is confused and asks the first guy he sees:
Q: Why are the pages blank?
A: No words are needed, everything’s obvious.
Its becoming more impossibler to debate anything here. I was specifically answering sweatervests one statement that desctruction can’t lead to production. And I in fact tried to prevent this kind of response by ending with:
“Before you write some big long screed about how irrelevant this is, this is no justification for copyrights or patents. It is just another example of how the apparently self-evident and watertight statements by you and your hardcore NAPcapper chums during these debates are really a little more complicated _IF_ the real-world, and the desires and goals of the members of the free market, is of any interest.”
Yet you STILL open with “The whole issue of common knowledge refutes the explanations of IP, rather than supports them.” It wasn’t about that, it was about something else. I’m sorry you didn’t see this.
Andrew, interesting. As I pointed out in http://blog.mises.org/9005/30-billion-taxfunded-innovation-contracts-the-progressive-libertarian-solution/ , Russia in 1834, the Soviet Union in 1931, had tax funded innovation awards, which is just a more honest way of doing patents.
Kid Salami,
you can abstract from your example a bit and reformulate it so that the destruction of the key is represented as using a capital good in a production process, and the output is security. The security gained in your example is valued more than the cost of the replacement of key plus lock. That is why the London Undeground management decided to make the rules they made. They gain more security. But it does not mean that the whole economy produces more keys (for all I know, it could cause the exact opposite). It also does not mean that the value of the keys will be higher, since that requires interpersonal utility comparison (which is, according to my understanding, what Sweatervest was trying to say).
To destroy competitor’s copies is not a use of production goods to gain more creativity. There is no reason why there should be a specific causal relationship between the two.
@Nuke Gray,
These “3D” printers use homogen materials and simple polimerization in a sophisticated way to get a block polymer. They are just an advanced die-cast system. They reproduce only at the macro(scopic) level. To create a drug of many you need to go to the micro(scopic) (in fact, nanometer) level. In other words, printing an arbitrary drug would require reaching chemical design diversity and sophistication at this micro level. Chemistry is very far from this leve of sophistication, it hasn’t even formulated the necessary concepts for this level. And the reason for this is because it is not practcal. It is not because we can not dream but because it has no bases in reality. Although biological systems are capable of high diversity and sophistication they are not arbitrary. They can hardly deviate from their original design and purpose, let alone, be freely programmed. Sorry junkies, weed will always give you marihuana but never cocaine or morphine.
So these “thought experiments” are rather delusional and desperate, similar to the communist’s “horn of plenty” to keep the flame up.
I’m sorry, I thought it was trivial from the beginning, the reason of my one-liners.
Moreover, even this cornucopia would not innovate. It would just recreate what we have already invented. In principle, what generic drug companies are doing now on an industrial level with a few year “handicap” after the original’s patents become public i.e., never again be able to be monopolized.
What a glorious sytem we have already!
@Andrew from Russia September 16, 2011 at 3:11 am
Not that this fact would have any bearing of the comparison…
What would be the point of IP without a market to exploit? What you describe is simply a work-for-hire system. The Politburo recognized the need for innovation, and simply offered an award to those who delivered it, and then retained it exclusively for their own purposes. Any subsequent benefit to the inventor would be at the discretion of the central committee, not from monopoly privileges in a market economy.
What, pray tell, does that have to do with an IP scheme?
@Andrew,
Communist Russia shamelessly stole and reprinted Chemical Abstracts, the mother of all chemical information, and you talk about respect for IP?
There is no limit to the ridiculous means folks here will employ to reach their foregone conclusion. This is not a venue for the discussion of reality, or even an honest exchange of views. If lap-dogs like Surda and Sweatervest, and demagogues like Kinsella are supposed to be an inspiration for liberty and freedom and the power of reason, we are in deep doo doo.
Wildberry,
I’ll paraphrase Homer Simpson here: Censorship, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Andras, Russia also copied our price system too. Did that violate the “market”‘s copyright? What in the world is the relevance of this? And the west “stole” GErmany’s patents and trademarks etc. as part of WWI reparations. So?
@Wildberry:
“Creating incentives” a.k.a. social engineering a.k.a. making the dog drool. (Since when do pro-IPers emphasize supply and demand over their beloved “incentives”?)
@Andras:
Why should one state respect privileges granted by some other state? It’s perfectly state-ish not to do that!
Actually the USSR was signatory to the UCC (Geneva Convention) since at least early 1970s and even practiced the © symbol (as a schoolkid I had to go a long way to find out what this strange symbol means), so there were some multilateral copyright treaties involving bloc countries, perhaps just not as intrusive as TRIPs.
The pharma printer thing may be hypothetical, for now, but I’m sure you patentarians will want to control how people use them, if we ever make them. You guys arleady want to control how people use their own printers–illegal to use it to print out a book-pattern on my own paper; and you are starting to come after 3D printers. http://c4sif.org/2011/06/the-ip-war-on-3d-printing-begins/
My guess is people like you are secretly relieved we don’t have private, cheap drug fabricators yet, since if we did, you’d have to come out against them too, you’d have to come up with yet another awkward “justification” for why the jack-booted thugs of the state are justified in bashing down someone’s door to make sure they are not using the printer in a way that violates Merck’s patents–you’d look just a bit too much like a fascist then, right?
Chemical Abstract has nothing to do with the state. It is a private information system abstracting all existing chemical information. Kinsella’s nightmare.
BTW, being a signatory to a treaty didn’t prevent the communists of anything. It was just a scheme to weaken the imperialist bastards. Don’t you remember?
@Stephan,
What are you talking about? What “market”‘s copyright? Is that another strawman?Your associations remind me of a diabetic in a quasi hypocomatose state.
Even your German example is not “exactly” true. The West appropriated German corporations including their patents. So the system remained intact.
The Russians, however, stole everything that wasn’t nailed down regardless of their use and built a phantom system. See also my response to Andrew below.
@Andras:
The state has something to do with labeling reprints as acts of theft. One state persecutes reprints of Chemical Abstracts as theft, another state persectutes reprints of samizdat literature as acts of sedition. One state claims it does so to protect “the fruits of labor” from “theft”, another one talks of saving the “working man” from falling prey to “imperialist infiltrators”. Different states, similar motives, similar tools. And private for-profit entities should care about their customers, not go around inventing enemies.
“you can abstract from your example a bit and reformulate it so that the destruction of the key is represented as using a capital good in a production process, and the output is security. The security gained in your example is valued more than the cost of the replacement of key plus lock. That is why the London Undeground management decided to make the rules they made. They gain more security.”
If you want yes, although that approaches it from a different angle from which it is easier to miss the interesting part.
“But it does not mean that the whole economy produces more keys (for all I know, it could cause the exact opposite). It also does not mean that the value of the keys will be higher, since that requires interpersonal utility comparison (which is, according to my understanding, what Sweatervest was trying to say).”
I didn’t say it did. If sweaervest agrees with me, that sometimes preventing the production of goods can be mean productivity increases (and the market members like and favour rules that produce more stuff in less time than ones which produce less stuff in more time) then he can say so and i withdraw my comments.
That is not my interpretation of his comments though, his statements seemed categorical – he also said
“monopoly production is *less* efficient, not more efficient, than competitive production… because monopoly production is nothing more than an outlawing and violent shutting down of production!”
I think this is almost always true rather than always true. (Note that my focusing on this one statement shoudn’t be taken as an endorsement of the other things he said).
@Andrew from Russia September 16, 2011 at 2:00 pm
If I show up to work, I get a paycheck. If I turn in a crook with his picture in the post office, I get a reward. If I steal a car and get caught, I go to jail. All of these are examples of incentives that have nothing to do with IP. The mere existence of an incentive does not “prove” or “disprove” the utility of IP.
In an IP scheme, there is a connection between the privileges granted and the market forces those privileges act upon. Your example of work-for-hire has no such connection, since as you said, the Soviet lacked a (legitimate or “white”) market.
And of course, supply and demand and market incentives, like the abilty to depend upon a concept of private property, are interrelated. In fact, one reason to favor IP is to support supply to satisfy demand. Any policy that interferes with that relationship is a intervention that distorts free-market supply/demand. So you see, we are left with the question of policy, a utilitiarian question of good and bad, of ends and means.
Of course you understand that, but you are, like many other ideologues here, more interested in identifying the enemy, and following the slogan, “No truth can utter from the lips of the enemy.”
You can take the boy out of the Soviet, but you can’t take the Soviet out of the boy.
A printer does not creat any new material, a printer, even a 3D printer, just reformulates it!
Right. Just like every other production process. Drugs are just reformulated carbon and other elements…
And what solution is that? I don’t understand why you are bringing up common knowledge.
This is no counterexample to the claim that destruction is not production and I am highly amused you consider “destruction is not production” to be hysterical. I suppose it is hysterical to say that, as an inviolable rule, “A is not A” is false, because apparently logic is separated from reality and serves some purpose other than to describe reality.
The destruction of the copied key does not increase the amount of goods available to people. It shifts the values of certain uses of the *less* goods, because a good was destroyed, not produced. You are quite clear about what is destroyed: the key. And yet strangely silent on what is produced. That’s because destroying a key is not producing anything.
I am not saying destruction is never useful. In addition to goods there are bads (like a copied key that ruins the whole safety procedure), and destroying a bad can be an end. But it does not increase the stock of means available. *That* is what production is. By no stretch of the imagination could one say destroying keys leaves you with more keys (it leaves you with more scrap metal, but if scrap metal is a good more highly valued than a key then this is production and *not* destruction).
But what if destroying keys, for whatever reason, makes people really want to make keys? Sure, that could end up meaning more keys, but when you let what people want vary anything is possible. Every economic analysis fixes the ends. If you don’t fix the ends then there’s no telling what people will do.
That is what Wildberry’s argument is. Some IP proponents readily admit that IP results in less production of creative goods, and say this is useful for various reasons. This is not a counter-argument to those claims. It is a counter-argument to the claim that burning books leaves you with more books. Maybe there *should* be less books, but that definitely doesn’t change the fact that burning books doesn’t leave you with more books.
It’s basically the broken window fallacy. Just like the broken window that stimulates the window market, the burned book and forcefully shut down unlicensed performance stimulates the book and performance markets. It may draw more money into the window market and raise the wages of window workers, but it won’t result in more windows!
This is a paragraph of nonsense. How does claiming “destruction is not production” involve not taking someone’s interests into account? Nobody’s interests are going to change the fact that “A is not A” is always false. You claim I ignore the interests of these workers you describe and I do no such thing. I never denied that destruction can be an end, I denied that it can be an instance of production.
That is a silly attempt at a distraction. Just another example? This is the first I’ve heard such an accusation, that I ignore the ends of people (but you of course take into account the ends of file sharers!). You have no basis to make that accusation here and I fail to see how anything I have said in the past ignores what people want.
Or maybe what you really meant by “desires and goals of the members of a free market” was “desires and goals of me”.
Interesting hypothesis.
This is the fallacy of guilty by association. Using this reasoning, giving speeches is evil because Hitler did it and he also murdered lots of people.
Communists were not bad because they opposed IP. They also believed in breathing air and doing math. That’s not a reason to stop breathing and counting. Communists were bad because they murdered more people than the Nazis. Surely you aren’t suggesting that IP opponents are plotting some genocide agenda.
You totally missed my whole point. Go back and read the post above that you ignored. The one that starts with, “Nuke, what I am doing is…”
Again: Correlation does not yield causation! Ice cream goes up whenever crime goes up, so surely one must cause the other, right? That is how ridiculous this reasoning is.
This is a glaring non-sequitur. The second part does not at all follow from the first. You are assuming your own conclusion that IP benefits creative production, even though that is saying “destruction is production”.
That’s not much to think about. Is that all the reason to believe that destruction is production? One example where both happened and one example where neither happened? Okay, then I claim ice cream causes crime. The example is summers of high crime and ice cream consumption, and the counterexample is winters of low crime and ice cream consumption.
In other words, an example and a counterexample are no reason to believe something.
Which you were able to invent by improving on ideas and inventions developed by people that you didn’t pay a dime. Thank god IP laws have been violated far more than they have been enforced.
Of course they “depend” on IP, because IP is in place here! By developing something in the U.S. right now, you are developing something in a nation with IP laws, and thus probably take them into account. At most you are claiming IP laws affect all production. That certainly does not imply it helps any production.
You’ve basically said, “Kinsella’s argument is good, but eh, maybe no”.
Well you could say that to anything ever, including the argument that innovation happened because of and not in spite of IP.
Excuse me, I never said anything about a 3D printer, so thanks for throwing out another misplaced accusation and demonstrating your lack of relevance here. You are a full-blown troll now.
Your mind seems about sophisticated enough to notice that Surda, Kinsella and I agree on this issue and then equate us in all debates.
Also, of course Wildberry doesn’t contribute to the debate, he just reminds us again that he disagrees with us.
Thank you Wildberry, this whole time I thought you were on our side!
No it’s not. You come in here and waste time with this bullshit, and then expect us to not throw it back in your face.
Hey everybody, I am a “lap dog” to someone whose book I’ve never even read. I’m very sorry Stephen, but I actually have never read your book.
Everything I argued here I was arguing several years ago before I had ever heard of Hoppe and Kinsella. I have told Wildberry this over and over, but he is a lying troll desperate to undermine these discussions.
Haha that’s right, destroying part of the supply is the way to support supply to satisfy demand.
You’re too much, Wildberry.
Yeah, like artificially restricting the supply to raise the demand. Which is what IP is. You can’t go two sentences without contradicting yourself.
Please show me where I have ever said or suggested that. Once again, instead of trying to participate in a debate, you call people names and lie about what they do. How old are you?
You can spit out cute one liners, but you can’t argue.
Dr Kinsella
We already have a device, analogous to a 3D printer, which is being developed for exactly the purpose in your scenario, among others. The original intention was to taylor the micro-structure in homogenous materials towards the end application (seeking better mechanical properties, aligning the “grain structure” with principle loads/forces/stresses, seeking specific control of strain/deflection due to load/load cycling/heat/heat cycling etc.) but we also have been active with composite materials, selective polymerisation, funtionally graded materials (a personal favourite), biotech and some pharma chemicals (which are simplicity to produce for the most part- you’d be surprised how straight forward). The science is not all that difficult, most of it already sorted. What we are dealing with is an engineering problem (really a project) and that is merely a matter of time and resource to complete. The race is already on and we are nowhere near the most advanced group, at least not in my opinion.
–
One has to chuckle at the nonsense of the desperately pathetic weenies who pretend to know about this topic while possessing no real experience in it whatsoever. What they have are some half-arsed ideas from who knows where (read in some popular “science” or “tech” magazine for juveniles, glanced at in a picture in a comic perhaps, heard from some “science” teacher, seen on a TV infotainment show, viewed on the web one time, etc etc etc). With these tiny fragment of secondary information they suddenly behave as though they are expert in the topic. They start ego wanking around the show, lecturing everyone, pretending to knowledge, talking big and loud, talking a load of tosh. They do a whole lot of talking, meanwhile we who are involved get on with DOING.
In conclusion, this class of technology is far closer than people think. The effects are already starting to be experienced. There is going to be a big scrap about this stuff. My expectation is that the IP guys will get most vicious and unusually evil when they realise what the possibililties are. Likely the IP jig is about played out. Bankrupt.
Sione
Master Sione,
Would you be so kind to provide some reference?
LOL. This guy is hilarious. I read about three of his posts and skipped the rest. Time and brain cells are to valuable to waste on this troll.
“I don’t understand why you are bringing up common knowledge.”
This much is true.
So you meant literally that the act of production “is not” the act of destruction. I might stand corrected – except that the problems are that this is just trivially true and so inconsequential, and that Wildberry did not claim anything contrary to this literal interpretation, so this just backtracking.
You say this because you are, like Peter, fixated like a dog with a bone on your own strategy of tracking (and only tracking) tangible items and ignoring communication – when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, see below.
Dead wrong. This is why I call your posts hysterical. They are long rants which constantly bemoan the fact that everyone doesn’t recognise your explanatory genius, yet you do not have sufficient regard for the words you use so as to arrive at a conclusion, you twist them to justify your pre-determined conclusion ie. you talk bollocks. Mises introduces “means” on page 92 of HA.
“Means are not in the given universe, in this universe there exist only things. A thing becomes a means when human reason plans to employ it for the attainment of some end and human action really employs it for this purpose. Thinking man sees the serviceable of things…and acting man makes them means”
So you’re wrong. Destroying the key means that “thinking man” changes his plans because the “common knowledge” has in some sense changed and now this change of plans has some “things” becoming “means” and some items that were previously “means” becoming “things” (wrt the immediate goal).
I agree with this – destroying keys will ceritus paribus, leave us with less keys. Incisive stuff.
TOTALLY missing the point, because you are constrained by the straight-jacket of your assumed conclusion.
Are you kidding with this?
No its not, you are all over the place. The broken window fallacy, even by the most idiotic proponent, doesn’t argue breaking windows INCREASES the number of windows. I’ve had enough of this, this drivel is not worthy of my time.
“By no stretch of the imagination could one say destroying keys leaves you with more keys (it leaves you with more scrap metal, but if scrap metal is a good more highly valued than a key then this is production and *not* destruction). ”
ha, I just read this again. So your telling us that destruction is destruction unless its production. More incisive commentary.
I think Mona Lisa is not patented or copyrighted under current laws. Therefore, it a bad example.
Kid Salami,
You mean causality. Oh, wait …
I don’t know whether such a drug exists (how about polio vaccine? afaik it wasn’t patented), but apparently such a drug wouldn’t be created if company couldn’t make profit. However, it mean that _immense_ resources taken to create such drugs would be used for creating something else. For example, tools and techniques to create more drugs in the future with less expenses. Of course, this view is based on premise that such tools and techniques are possible to create in non-copyrighted world, e.g. that the whole production process from `today` to `new drug` can be split into steps sufficiently small with regard to theirs capital requirements and time to market that whole process is profitable at every step.
“You mean causality. Oh, wait …”
No I don’t mean “causality” I mean “communication”, which is why I used that word. But your stance on either is not clear to me.
To save time, would you care to confirm outright that you don’t have or in fact need anything resembling an “argument” at all but only definitions, and that this is not a bug but a feature of your position. That is, you don’t need an argument as your stance is quite simple – that illegal acts are DEFINED by either
a) physical invasions of property or
b) acts which cause such to happen.
Everything else is BY DEFINITION legal and whether people in fact want to live in the system that these rules produce (and, additionally, whether such a system is in some sense stable) is totally and utterly irrelevant to you. This is true, is it not?
And you are fond of saying “causality extends to infinity” in response to arguments for IP, but this doesn’t apparently apply to your b) above. That is, i can’t blame my boss for letting me go early if I stab someone on the way home. This can only be because the “intent” of the actor is taken into account? If so, I might wonder why you say things like
” The problem presented by IP proponents is not the need to keep information secret, but the request that third parties pretend they don’t know it without paying the author. It’s the hatred of causality that I pointed out in another post. In your own example, it would have meant that you violated the London Underground’s rights, and now that I reacted to your post, I violated them too. I’ve been thinking of flying to London next week, but I can’t anymore. I now know how the Underground escalator security works so I’m liable for damages. Heck, I can’t now even forget my keys, because I’d be violating the rights of the poor chap from your example!”
where you suddenly and totally “forget” intent (and the different between action and behaviour) and go back to arguing as if only invasion and intentless-causality exist. It is impossible to debate when the goalposts shift like this.
Kid Salami,
I thought I showed that you selected a specific form of communication, while ignored other forms which lead to the opposite conclusion.
It is true that that is my position, or to make it more precise, (a) is sufficient, (b) is necessary. But that is not my argument. My argument is that my position is consistent, but those presented by my opponents are not. Although it is hypothetically possible to construct a consistent theory with completely different assumptions, that is not what my opponents are doing.
While I have not been able to make my position more precise, I disagree that the intent is either necessary or sufficient additional condition to causality in the option (b).
I don’t believe we two discussed the relevance of intent before, therefore ….
… I don’t see how you come to this conclusion.
And of course you don’t explain why you brought it up. Such is the way you seem to want to approach this. You say something to me, I don’t understand what you are trying to say, and you respond with something along the lines of “of course you don’t”. Okay, well then you failed to communicate. Mission accomplished?
What is this, some Clinton-esque “that depends on what the meaning of the word is is”? You said, and I quote, “So I hereby propose that sometimes “destruction is production””. Yes, I am literal with my words when I’m trying to debate. I consider it misleading to do otherwise. I might stand corrected about thinking you mean what you say.
I thought so too, until people started questioning it. Also, I think you confuse trivially with obviously.
I’m sorry, you are the one that pulled that out of my post and responded to it.
Oh but he is. Wildberry’s claim is that IP laws stimulate the creative goods market, that there will be more creative goods with IP than there would be without IP.
The enforcement of IP is nothing more or less than the destruction of creative goods or the means to produce creative goods. It is shutting down servers that facilitate the production of many more copies of creative goods. It is burning books that are unauthorized copies. It is shutting down performances that are unlicensed.
Of course this does not lead to more creative goods. The IP proponents are saying that destruction of creative goods raises the incentive (by raising the marginal utility as per a smaller supply) to produce creative goods and thus leads to a net increase over time in the production of creative goods. First, I should point out that this argument does not at all depend on creative goods being the ones in question. I could run this argument with *any* goods and its validity will not be changed, for it is true of all goods that lowering the supply raises the marginal productivity. So if this is true for creative goods, it is true for all goods, and we conclude not only that IP is a good idea but in general destroying goods is a good idea because it stimulates the markets that are partially destroyed.
In other words, the broken window fallacy.
I “saw below” and didn’t see anything that connected to this. Anyways, I already asked you to explain how I ignore communication and you only restated it. In fact, what you are describing after this is exactly what I said about it.
This is a childish ad hominem. It has nothing to do with the argument.
You mean I think “is” means “is”?
Yes I remember this passage.
This is nonsense. What “common knowledge” changes? Why does a person recognizing something as a means affect “common knowledge”? It affects his knowledge. Again, I don’t know what this could have to do with common knowledge. Are you saying it becomes common knowledge?
Yes that happens but where did I contest that? I merely explained that the key is a bad, not a good, and that is why the people destroy it. How did that bring about a citing of Human Action? I am aware that things are only goods, or bads, because actors recognize them as such. I was relying on that to make my very point, which is that these actors recognize the key as a bad, i.e. a key is not always a “good”, it is a thing that could be just a thing, a good, or a bad. Your quote from Mises is entirely inappropriate for I was relying on that very concept to make my point.
Look, you said you claim “destruction is production”. If you don’t use words to mean what they mean, I can’t be expected to know what you are trying to say. I would not describe your key scenario as “destruction is production”, I would describe it as “destruction is useful”. I also would say you are wasting the time of these threads again because you have *nothing to say about IP*.
No I’m not missing the point. You don’t know what the point is. That’s why you never say it. You just say people miss it. You have no idea what it is yourself.
The point is your key example is not a counterexample of “A is not A”, and I’m glad you realize how obvious this is. Once again, you say “of course *that’s* not what I said”, and you didn’t explain what you really meant! It’s not my fault you said “destruction is production” and didn’t mean it.
The straight-jacket thing makes no sense, you didn’t even point out what conclusion that is. What, that IP rights are not property rights but attacks on property rights? Can you show my where I assumed this?
Do you have anything relevant to say?
I never said they did. Although if they admit that no more windows are made what is their point in saying the window economy is stimulated? I can’t speak for them, but what matters is I never tried to guess what they think. Maybe Keynesian economists don’t say that, but IP proponents do. That is my point.
And yes it is. You didn’t even try to explain how it isn’t, you just stamped your feet. The utilitarian argument for IP is that destruction of creative goods will lead to more creative goods. What else could it be? It is exactly what the broken window fallacy is. Destruction of goods lowers the supply and therefore raises the marginal utility of that good. Therefore, the incentive to produce that good is raised and this will stimulate the economy and result in more goods. If stimulate doesn’t mean result in more goods then what the hell else could it mean? I’m not a broken window fallacy proponent so I have to leave that to you.
IP destroys the supply of both creative goods and especially creative labor, therefore raising the marginal utility of that labor dramatically. Hence the typical IP proponent argument that authors and inventors are paid way more to write and invent, so that raises the incentive to be an author or inventor. If the point in saying that is not that there will be more authors and inventors than otherwise that what is the point!?
Except for the next response to it, of course.
You and Wildberry are the ones that seem to have a hard time with that.
Sweatervest,
I beg to differ. It could be, hypothetically, that there are two different classes of goods: originals and copies, which act as substitutes, and that more originals is more beneficial to society than more copies, given a specific normative scale. Of course, it would not be an argument compatible with praxeology, but purely logically it is a consistent argument.
I thought of this as well, as I have heard such responses from IP proponents. But if one could make the separation it would pull the rug out entirely from the argument, and the fact is IP does restrict the supply of original creations and creators and that is why those goods command higher prices and those laborers earn higher wages.
If people in society demand new, original creative goods, then the market price of new original goods will remain high and the wages of creators of new, original material will continue to be high (unless the number of new original creators goes up). No amount of copying can explode the supply of new, original material because the copies are by definition not new and original. The real question is how much you could expect to sell the only copy that is in your hands for, not how rapidly its price drops to zero after you put it out there and it starts getting copied. Authors should be paid to author, not to do something everyone else can do for free anyways, which is make and distribute copies.
You should get paid for the first copy, not all the rest of them. And you will if you have fans. You know you get fans? By letting people copy your creations!
This is what the IP proponents muddle, and probably intentionally. They think it is “fair” or deserving that someone writes one song or has one idea for an invention and then lives off that one little tiny bit of work for the rest of their lives. No IP is needed for you to make money by continually writing popular songs and repeatedly inventing new things. People will pay you because they know you are good at what you do and want you to keep doing it.
But my point remains. The only reason the IP argument works at all is because it restricts the supply of original authors and original creations, because obviously IP proponents have no interest in raising the incentives to copy, they want to raise the incentives to be an original author. The incentives rise through the higher marginal utility of creative goods/labor which is achieved by a lowering of the supply of creative goods/labor. If only the supply of copies/copiers was lowered then the marginal utility of original goods/creators would not rise.
It is the same argument always used in favor of monopolistic production, which is nothing more than destroying/stopping unlicensed products/producers and is therefore the same broken window fallacy that lurks behind almost every economic fallacy ever invoked.
The fallacy is independent of the good it is used on. I could just as easily say that making a distinction between licensed and unlicensed hamburgers and then destroying all the unlicensed hamburgers and arresting unlicensed hamburger producers is the path to a society with more and better quality hamburgers. Why not? Why does this work with creative goods and not with any other goods?
But it is owned, and the owner could decide to make an electronic profile, and sell copies of that profile to people who wanted an exact duplicate. We are speculating about what people might do in the future, when 3D printing becomes (so they claim) cheap and reliable.
I would have said that Ice cream reduces crime, because consumers of ice cream are sluggish and lazy, but maybe they commit crimes to get the ice cream! Or they might be easy victims of criminals once they’ve eaten ice cream! You’re onto something there!
“And of course you don’t explain why you brought it up. Such is the way you seem to want to approach this. You say something to me, I don’t understand what you are trying to say, and you respond with something along the lines of “of course you don’t”. Okay, well then you failed to communicate. Mission accomplished?”
I plead guilty to this. You transmit, you don’t receive, so saying things clearly and having you transmit back again without having decoded what I said acheives my goal of showing that there are angles to this you ignore or haven’t even thought of. I think its clear. Peter disagrees with me, yet he at least took the time to read it and digest it and managed to make a cogent point in response . Yet, as usual, you don’t understand.
Kid Salami,
I have been going about this the wrong way. I know you are not trying to say that the act of destruction is also an act of production, and broken window fallacy proponents don’t say that the act of breaking the window brings more windows into existence.
What I am trying to say is that in general destroying the supply of a good raises the marginal utility of that good, and this has been the basis of most if not all arguments in favor of restricting production in the name of aiding production, including the utilitarian IP argument. It is not claiming that the act of restriction is production itself, it is saying that restricting production facilitates productions. It is not a direct contradiction, but it is thwarting an end in the name of reaching an end.
All arguments that keeping the supply low facilitates the increase in that supply are correct but fail to really describe what is happening. The only reason the incentives to produce the good in question are higher is because the supply is smaller and it is relatively more urgent to produce the good.
A perfect example is goods that are outlawed altogether like drugs. Their price goes up hugely and draws people into the drug business, usually making them exceedingly rich in the process. If drugs were legal it would be much more difficult to get so rich so quickly selling drugs, probably impossible. One could argue that being able to get exceedingly rich very fast from dealing drugs is what provides the sufficient incentives to produce enough drugs for society. The drugs will sell for prices much higher than if they legal, and of course the cost of producing drugs has not gone up, so this means very high returns. This will draw in more drug dealers and we will see more drugs.
Well it is true that things will be great for drugs dealers (the huge returns obviously outweigh the risks in their minds), but what about the consumers? Even ignoring the potential legal trouble it certainly does not help them to have to pay huge prices for drugs. They get the same products for huge prices. But the high prices are what makes anyone want to sell drugs, right! This argument works on any good.
The reason why it doesn’t work is because as soon as those high returns actually draw lots of drug dealers into the market the prices will go down and the returns will go back down. The only way to maintain the high returns is to keep the supply low. As soon as enough drug dealers successfully supply the market with enough drugs the price of drugs will drop and drug dealers will no longer get very rich doing what they do. It cannot be a way to facilitate the production of drugs because it stops working as soon as drug production is actually facilitated.
I’m not so sure IP does this because I don’t think it even helps inventors and authors. It may help big pharm companies and record companies by making what they do more urgent but it usually hurts inventors and authors. Regardless of who gets helped, the higher returns only come from there being less producers, and that is never going to be a way to get more production. This is maybe the confusing part about IP, since the target is “copycats” and not the authors and inventors themselves, but to the extent only copycats are removed from the market and not authors/inventors the higher returns will only be for doing what the copycats did, i.e. production and distribution, not authoring and inventing. This could only possibly help the author/inventor when he takes on distribution/production himself. The producers of inventions and distributors of creative works will grow relatively huge, only by shutting down all the other producers/distributors that would otherwise be there. The returns for production/distribution grow only due to there being less production/distribution.
Granting licenses for the act of inventing/authoring to produce/distribute will only raise the incentive to invent/author if it results in less inventors/authors, for this is the mechanism on which it relies. Given how much people want to spend on inventions and creative works, if they must pay more for each invention and creative work they will buy fewer inventions or creative works. Thus fewer inventors and authors will see better returns. If there were many inventions and creative works being sold then they must be selling at a low price which destroys the high returns of production/distribution.
Sweatervest–wow, nice analogy re drug dealers.
Kid Salami,
here is a nice link: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and-bombers/
It’s about selection bias, but my point is different. My point is that Wald (the guy the story is about) used deduction and observation of object A (damaged planes that survived) to determine the state of object B (planes that were destroyed), even though there was no causal relationship between object A and object B.
This explains how futile it is to treat abstract concepts as having boundaries: they do not have them. An abstract object and its complement can be equally usable. In Abstract Russia, A is not A! Eat that, Ayn Rand!
As it happens, I live in Sydney, Australia, 3/4s of a day ahead of you. However, we have similar laws about IP here, so that makes little practical difference.
Haha well I’m glad you admitted to it, and when you say I “transmit” the only thing you could possibly mean is that you don’t receive! I’m not even sure what you mean by transmit. Yeah, I transmit what is in my head onto the blog and, if you read it, into your head. What else is communication? Shall I sit quietly while you tell me how the world works or should I present my analysis so you actually have something to argue with?
First of all, you assume you say it “clearly”. That is not up to you. You do not decide that your own communication is clear. That is for your listeners to decide, and I do not think you are clear at all.
Second of all, stating this as your “goal” only proves you are not engaged in an argument but are intent on lecturing me and then leaving the discussion. Your goal is to show me something and then not deal with my response to it, i.e. my attempt to show you something. All this means to me is you are already convinced you have the right answers (perhaps that is why you feel no need to even establish your position on the thing being debated).
You can say that until your face turns blue and it won't make it so. You never offer any evidence that I misunderstand your point, and don't even bother to clarify or even state at all what that point is. I offer quote-by-quote responses to you and yet you claim I don't take the time to read and digest? Maybe you don't take the time to realize that what I am saying is a legitimate response to you and you too quickly assume your own (to borrow a favorite of Wildberry's) foregone conclusion that I don't read you.
Maybe, just maybe Kid Salami, you don't always understand the points I make and too hastily conclude that I am not offering an honest response. I can't help it if you come into these debates assuming I am not here to debate. Accusing me of "transmitting" is, as far as I can tell, accusing me of responding instead of sheepishly nodding my head. To be clear, it would be trivially easy for you to respond to this with, "that's not what I meant". I think it is exactly what you meant, and I will believe differently when I hear a better explanation of what you really did mean.
And of course I should point out that instead of tackling my actual point about the IP utilitarian argument being a broken window fallacy, you waste a whole post complaining about how I don't argue the way you want me to. Welcome to debating Kid Salami, you're not the moderator. If everyone argued the way you wanted them to I'm sure you would "win" every debate.