What a load of bull.

Is it that hard not to copy something that you havent created? Do you really have to steal music, movies and books?

Todays patent laws might prevent you from using some tech that you have invented yourself and that is wrong. I will be with you to try to repell those laws, but if you insist you are entitled to the copy of some others creation, you are nothing but a thief.

Also Chads suggestions is reasonable.

You may use linux which has been made free by the creators.

But you want to force microsoft to supply you free copies of windows. You assume you are entitled to a copy of windows.

You are not. Whoever created windows doesn’t owe you anything. You don’t own his fruits of labor, or him. He is not your slave.

I find it funny that you propose us, anti-IP people, to live without “fruits” of IP. As if we have a choice – IP is imposed on us by the boot of the law.

How about *you* living without things which would be totally impossible if IP laws were actually enforced in a consistent manner? Let me see… you’d be without majority of medicines, without cars, without computers, without Internet?

We’d be spared your inane defense of the arbitrary monoply grants on thoughts, that’s for sure.

Sasha, you do realize that when you are discussing something with someone, and they have taken pains to present their interpretation / definition / unconventional usage of some loaded word, and then they use that word (resting on that interpretation) to structure their argument, it doesn’t take things in any productive direction to claim they got their definitions wrong? The word is just a ‘best fit’ placeholder to make exposition of their position easier.

I don’t have a problem with Ms. Rowlings renting out her book in book rental outlets with all kinds of ridiculous terms of service that no one will agree to, and eventually the rental store goes out of business because modern technology renders it a stupid idea – or maybe it succeeds wildly because people are retards, who knows. The success of the rental store is not relevant, only the fact that it’s a legal way to run things.

But if she offers to “SELL” her books in book “STORES”, then the consuming public would be obliged to take that offer at face value as the sale of the ‘full item’ that Sasha insists only happens in the big million-dollar publisher’s deal.

Sasha claims that the sale of, say, a news magazine at the corner store, is really only a PARTIAL sale. Trying to treat the advertised ‘full sale of this object’ as a ‘partial sale and the customer should know that without being told’ is what I would call fraudulent.

How can it be that one must purchase the right to use something in a particular way when that something may already be used in such a way without force? If no force is necessary for a particular use, then has the claim of control of such use truly been demonstrated?

I guess we are looking at two different dictionary definitions.

tres·pass [tres-puhs, -pas]
–noun
1. Law.
a. an unlawful act causing injury to the person, property, or rights of another, committed with force or violence, actual or implied.

Which dictionary are you using?

Trespass by definition is “unauthorized use.” Nothing more and nothing less. Trespasses can be accidental, but if that trespass is used to create an injury to the rightful owner, this amounts to tort.

Anyway, if you purchase one kind of use of any product, you simply don’t have any rights to use it in any other way. I think we agree on that – regardless of what you say about “third parties” who, in the most cases, can’t simply memorize and replicate the entire content of CDs and books.
—-

JonBostwick,

Nobody is legally required to sell you the full ownership of their property. According to Mises, you own something if you control all services that can be derived from that good. The way in which you demonstrate the control of those services is by selling certain uses (services), while withholding others. For example, I can contractually rent my house, providing only a limited set of services to rent-seekers.

According to the very definition of ownership, mostly authors, publishers and record companies are full owners of books and CDs. When you buy a limited use of those items, you don’t become a full owner. I know this is hard for you to understand, but you simply don’t pay enough money.

As far as your Gm example goes, it’s completely irrelevant. GM does not have to sell their full ownership rights to you. If we abolish all IP laws, your contracts with GM would state your limited use terms – and everything would stay the same.

===

Chad said:

“If there are individuals who do not want to be bound by the current system of copyrights, trademarks, and other IP protections used for practically all media goods (that is, information encoded on a physical object), then they should withdraw completely from that system (rather than flagrantly violate that system through illegal copying and such). Don’t buy (or sell for profit) copyrighted books, DVDs, or CDs. Don’t install or use any software that requires a Terms of Service acknowledgement. If the system is so completely wrong-headed and economically inefficient, then I say it is time for its opponents to demonstrate their convictions by withdrawing from it.

Next, those IP opponents should organize a competing system using only originally created media goods (books, movies, operating systems, etc.) that they developed themselves using their own scarce resources (time, money, physical resources, and energy). These new media goods would have absolutely no IP protections in place and would state that “All rights are granted” (versus “All rights reserved”) for anyone who owns a physical instantiation of that media good (ex. actual DVD, CD-ROM, etc.).”

AMEN brother!

But who is preventing people from doing that already? The problem with anti-IP crowd is that they don’t realize that full-ownership of CDs and books has its price. That price is maybe steep (that’s why publishing companies pay it to cash on limited use sold to general public), but that is a fair market price for unlimited use of such goods. Even if we hypothetically abolish all IP laws, we can’t ever abolish the fact that we usually purchase only a LIMITED USE of goods through either implied or explicit market contracts (market exchanges).

It’s impossible to say whether any of those people would have voluntarily agreed to some sort of “copy-deterrent” performance bond in the absence of the universal, non-contractual copyright enforcement presently in vogue; as it is, the presence of aggression obviously makes any such coerced agreement null and void. In any event a copyright notice or ToS agreement represents at most what Rothbard would call a “mere promise”, involving no transfers of titles to property and thus unenforceable even if it were voluntary.

Regardless of how Sasha and others try to twist things, the current copyright regime rests on the government’s will and power to do basically whatever it wants by mere aggression, not on any kind of voluntary contractual arrangement. That such a complex arrangement would come about in the absence of aggression-backed copyrights is pure speculation; in any event, it hasn’t come about yet, and the only copyright-related agreements anyone could have possibly entered into in the current environment are clearly involuntary due to the presence of coercion and thus non-binding.

This is exactly the same things socialist say when we capitalist say, “go ahead live your dream, form communes, get rid of private property among yourselves, but please don’t force us”.

Of course some of them tried it in the past and starved and that maybe the motivation behind this rejection.

In any case, parasitic systems like socialism need some victims producing, so others can steal. So they need the capitalistic society that honors IP.

But for anti IP people it is not enough. They want to socialize the whole thing.

And they get upset when I call them socialist.

In a free society, socialist have a right to form communities and practice socialism, communism, what ever they want. But this is usually not enough.

We are seeing a similar thing here.

Governments invented IP. I think the burden of proof falls on you to prove that IP can survive without government fiat.

A PROPOSAL TO ALL IP OPPONENTS:

If there are individuals who do not want to be bound by the current system of copyrights, trademarks, and other IP protections used for practically all media goods (that is, information encoded on a physical object), then they should withdraw completely from that system (rather than flagrantly violate that system through illegal copying and such). Don’t buy (or sell for profit) copyrighted books, DVDs, or CDs. Don’t install or use any software that requires a Terms of Service acknowledgement. If the system is so completely wrong-headed and economically inefficient, then I say it is time for its opponents to demonstrate their convictions by withdrawing from it.

Next, those IP opponents should organize a competing system using only originally created media goods (books, movies, operating systems, etc.) that they developed themselves using their own scarce resources (time, money, physical resources, and energy). These new media goods would have absolutely no IP protections in place and would state that “All rights are granted” (versus “All rights reserved”) for anyone who owns a physical instantiation of that media good (ex. actual DVD, CD-ROM, etc.).

If some “entrepeneur” purchased a physical music CD under the no-IP system, made 10,000 copies of it on their home equipment, and then sold those copies on eBay with none of the profits going back to the CD’s original creators, then those who originally put their scarce time, money, and effort into producing that CD would have no grounds for crying “foul” in any way. After all, that eBayer owns a physical copy of that CD and should be able to do anything he wants with it, right?

Once the system with absolutely no IP recognition or protections was put in place, let it then compete in the marketplace with the current IP-protected system. Then, we could see which system one has a more viable business model in actual practice.

Actually, my assertion that violating your hypothetical contract would merely negate it was not derived from the seperate assertion that copy-right is not a transferable legal right. But lets explore your “limited use” theory.

Suppose that I buy a new car from GM with the agreement that I will only get the car serviced by GM. This is not an enforceable contract, ownership requires right to use. Either I get to get to repair my car where ever I want, or GM did not really transfer ownership of the car to me. The two clauses are exclusive.

So GM, in an attempt to get around this, decides to rename the same contract a “permanent lease.” This also fails because, regardless of the term GM uses, the contract is not a lease; GM does not retain ownership of the vehicle.

If GM wants to ensure the car is only serviced by GM it would have to agree to an actual lease. If the agreement is an actual lease, then its the same situation as when we enforced our book, sans right-to-read, contract. If the agreement is broken GM can have the car returned, in other words, they can negate the contract. But they can not demand future payments continue to be paid. If GM did demand to paid for a lease that no longer existed, that would be theft.

No matter what kind of hypothetical contract you devise, you will never create an agreement requiring the copy-right violator to pay damages that would be enforced in a libertarian(or free market) legal system.

Oh, sorry. I thought you were talking about the boy-wizard, since I never said that copies of the novel “Harry Potter” don’t exist.

The boy-wizard “Harry Potter” doesn’t exist, therefore nobody owns him. Nobody owns any other of the characters in the Harry Potter series either, for the same reason.

Are you going to claim that Harry Potter, the character, is owned? If so, then I will have to perform the first duty of an intelligent man.

The novel “Harry Potter” exists.

The nail, struck on the head.

Everyone is born with absolute freedom to do *whatever* with *their* stuff. That stuff starts out being just their body and mind, but quickly they acquire other items of 100% wholly-owned, unfettered property such as clothing, land, and tools for measuring and manipulating physical things, like cameras and microphones and computers and such – an every-shifting envelope of physical being surrounding a single core ego.

Being wholly owned and unfettered, all of these things inside this envelope of ownership dance freely to the command of the owner – who at no point ceded any right to do *whatever* with *his* stuff.

The only valid form of anything remotely approximating IP is deliberate and explicit ip-by-contract, such as NDAs. Sasha can claim such a contract is implicit in the ‘terms of service’ of a book publisher or restaurant or theater, and that’s fine – and it can be considered that the physical act of being handed a book, or served a meal, or being allowed admission, is granted in exchange for assent to the terms of service – all fine and fair and good. But the contract thus-entered does not stick like some invisible scum to all the downstream results of the exchange, silently but inexorably infecting all that it touches. The contract was established between two parties – and between two parties it remains.

The IP advocates protest that this is not enough to protect what they want protected – to that I say, I am sorry for their disapointment, but tough beans, I guess.

George Orwell: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

If society owned harry potter, society could deny me the use of it.

Well F$%# me sideways, that’s exactly how it works, now isn’t it.

* socialism *