not to worry, some god at the patents office can divine its true nature and origin. that’s reassuring.

even true ip believers might want to ask themselves how they can persist in supporting the current regime, if they believe it’s failing so badly?

like so many other government initiatives, failure merely invites calls to redouble efforts, not to evaluate the actual viability of the scheme.

To put the burden of proof on you for a bit, Mr. Cohen, can you also demonstrate that there is such thing as IP.
By that, I mean objectively identify a logical, concrete boundary (as opposed to establishing an arbitrary or utilitarian boundary) between the circumstance of IP existence and nonexistence. Criteria for a patent’s expiration certainly is arbitrary. So, if IP exists, how to go about discovering what is a logical, observable, objectively reasonable limit to the nature of IP rights as opposed to the natural limits of physical property?

And to anyone who concludes that there is no IP, please demonstrate why there isn’t.
It isn’t because logical, observable, objectively reasonable limits to it’s nature haven’t been found (ad ignorantium).
It isn’t because the implications lead to a slippery slope of ridiculous obstacles as the undeveloped notion of IP rights snowballs into a freeze of technological progress (utility).

I’m not giving anyone a hard time here. This is very interesting to me and in many years of the topic coming up, I’ve not thought about it before as much as I would like.

I can tell you from person experience. For most of the last twelve years I have supported myself and several other people creating videos which were sold on the web. Piracy has reached such rampant proportions in the field I serve as to effectively render Intellectual Property rights moot.

Absent IP rights, the profit motive disappears, ‘entirely’! I am out of business. Everything I have created for the last twelve years is for all intents, worthless, as it is available all over the place for free to anyone unscrupulous enough to not care that they are pirating. Absent IP rights, and the enforcement of those rights, there will soon be NO profit motive for any creative work that can be easily copied in an electronic medium.

This is the end of Hollywood, the end of HBO, the end of anything other than the most mediocre ‘reality’ tv. We are entering an age where all creative work will either be old, or amateur. And I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

Of course people will demand that the government do something about the deplorable state of art, and so the government will dutifully step in and levy taxes with which to ‘publicly finance’ government approved art.

Again, to further this point of view and open it for rebuttal:
An inventor may invent, an author or musician may write, and a pharmaceutical company may develop- as a farmer may grow food- just for the love of bettering society. If not all primarily for the benefit of making money, though, certainly most people labor under the gamble that they may recoup their sometimes enormous expenses.
Profit is certainly the gamble entrepreneurs make when investing in creations.
Watt wanted fortune and fame. So did his competitors. Waiting was one of the costs of meeting their demands. Perhaps better to have their inventions later than never?
If “society” wants their fruits, “society” needs to offer them an agreeable benefit (such as money, or fame, or acknowledgement of ” their IP”).
Thanks in advance for your responses!

My position is that each extreme is incorrect. Voluntary contracts and tangible property, along with the enforcement of both, are legitimate, but anything more or less is not.

You would be wrong John.

IP Socialists would claim otherwise because all they argue for is that they are entitled to other people’s fruit of labor.

Can you justify solution 2 and tell me how it should apply in cases where, e.g., B steals something from A and then, generations later, a descendant of A demands that thing from a descendant of B? Or where B melts it down and combines it with some of his own property to make a product? Also consider the native Americans; do the descendants of those who were forcibly kicked out from their land have a claim to all the land we live on today? If not, why not?

Actually, after thinking about it for a while, I thought that perhaps it’s not the act of stealing something, but rather the act of destroying its original form, that makes the result into the thief’s property. That ethical system is functionally very similar to the system I stated as solution 1, where stealing something turns it into your property.

(Of course, the point where the original form can be said to be destroyed is kind of arbitrary–if all you do is paint it green, is it still the original owner’s property? What if you break it in half? What if you break it in half again? What if you glue one small piece of it onto something else? And what if you sell it to someone else? Etc. I think it’s cleaner if you simply say that the stolen property becomes the thief’s, and then the owner, in deciding on a punishment, can decide for himself whether he wants his stuff back or some other form of compensation. That would be kind of messy in some cases, though… as I mentioned, I suspect that proper punishments cannot be figured out a priori.)

Consider the situation where B sold the stolen property to C, who sold it to D, who sold it to E. E has made an agreement with D, paid money, and gotten something from D’s possession and put it into E’s own possession. Does E nevertheless not own this thing? I would hate to say no, although I could understand the response that E should have made sure that what he bought was not a stolen good (and ditto for C and D). There is cultural precedent for A having to buy it back from E, but… Meh, it’s hard to figure out, and the decision between these two ethical systems is not relevant here.

Regardless of whether B owns the property he just stole, he certainly owns the paper on which he writes down a copy of the information needed to produce an “intellectual work” like what he has just stolen. (You must either admit that or assert that, by stealing an intellectual work, B partially loses ownership of all of his property that could be used to copy what he just stole. I think that is kind of ridiculous, though I’m not absolutely eliminating the possibility.) If B owns whatever property he uses to make a copy of this information (including his brain and vocal cords), then he is perfectly within his rights to pass the information on to C through J, and each of them is perfectly free to pass it on to anyone else; the figurative cat is out of the bag.

Something else suddenly occurs to me. Just what do IP laws forbid you to do? You are allowed to memorize the contents of a book, presumably, but you are not allowed to make copies and sell them. Are you allowed to make a copy and not sell it? How about a partial copy? (See “fair use.”) It’s pretty arbitrary. I consider arbitrariness in the fundamentals of an ethical system–numbers or concepts that do not come from anyone or anything in the given situation–to be a damning flaw. So let’s see if the arbitrariness really is fundamental to the system of IP rights.

Is it arbitrary because the maker of the intellectual work has the right to prevent you from doing any kind of copying, but they voluntarily choose to waive most of that right? Could an author, in theory, decide that, for her next book, she is not going to waive her right to prevent you from mentioning any aspect of the plot to your friends? (Without that being stipulated as a condition of buying the book. Remember, once again, the IP rights that we’re arguing about is those that are not created by contract; I think everyone agrees that contractually created copy-protection is fine.) Could I decide, even though I have chosen to put this post where anyone with an internet connection can read it, to not waive my right to prevent you, the reader, from quoting any part of this post anywhere? Did Watt have the right to never allow anyone to duplicate his steam engine?

No. That’s absurd. Therefore, I think the theory of IP rights must rest on either some ridiculous empirical, ad hoc ethical system (“It is morally wrong to reverse-engineer and duplicate a machine you own, unless the design is 17 years old”), which I have already rejected out of hand, or on… utilitarianism. Hey, someone said that earlier. (“Utilitarianism” being the system where you assume that everyone’s happiness is a scalar quantity, and then you decide that anything that increases the sum of everyone’s happiness is morally allowed.) I reject utilitarianism, too. So I can’t see how one can ethically argue for IP.

Let me condense that into a question, then, to IP supporters: Suppose you say that IP is a natural form of property right, one that gives the creator of an intellectual work the absolute right to control the use of the information required to produce this intellectual work (even if the creator carelessly allows the information to spread around the world). How do you avoid the conclusion that anyone who gets a patent (or whatever form of IP-law protection), such as James Watt, would have the right to keep the IP rights for as long as he wants, and to pass them onto his children and basically have a perpetual, hereditary monopoly on this particular invention? How can you possibly justify giving them the monopoly, but only for X amount of time, with a natural-property-rights argument?

(It occurs to me that most of the second half of this post may have already been said in this thread. Which might be why this second half suddenly occurred to me. Oh well.)

“I’m thinking there are two possible solutions.
1. Once B steals something, it becomes his property…
2. When B steals something, it remains A’s property…”

You then conclude that it is possibility number 1 that you find more workable and elegant and base the rest of your though upon that conclusion.

However actual law reaches conclusion number 2. If B steals something from A, and sells the stolen thing to C, The thing remains the property of A. If everyone is found out, A may demand the thing back from C and C’s only recourse is to sue B for restitution.

As far as I can tell, the domain of the debate over IP is, therefore: should copyright restrictions be imposed on people who have not voluntarily agreed to them? Should someone (call him Bob) who somehow gets an instance of contractually copy-protected work, who did NOT sign a contract agreeing not to copy such work, be forcibly prevented from copying it anyway?

To me, the answer is obvious: no. The only difficult situation is if the way Bob acquired the intellectual work involved some illegal means.

If Joe breaks into Coca-Cola and steals their secret formula, and then he writes it down on paper and gives that paper to Bob (assume Bob had no prior contact with Joe), is Bob allowed to use it as he wishes?

This is kind of a difficult question, and it’s related to questions about all stolen property. If B steals something from A and randomly passes it onto C (C had no prior contact with either B or A), can A demand it back from C? What if C has demolished it, taken it apart? Is C required to pay for damaging A’s property? What if C has traded it to D, who has traded it to E, and so on?

I’m thinking there are two possible solutions.
1. Once B steals something, it becomes his property. While A does have the right to demand some form of restitution from him for the act of stealing–and this restitution may include returning the stolen property if B still has it in good condition (by the way, I think punishment is a difficult and perhaps a necessarily ad hoc issue)–the stolen property is B’s from the moment he takes it. Therefore, if B sells it to C, or breaks it up and sells the parts to D through J, then A cannot demand his property back from the others.
2. When B steals something, it remains A’s property. Then, if B sells it to C, C does not really own the property; B is guilty of fraud in addition to theft, and A has the right to demand it back from C. And if C sold it to anyone else, he is guilty of unintentional fraud as well; and if he broke the property up and built other things out of it and sold them, then the situation is really messy, because all those pieces still belong to A, but now it’s nigh impossible to get them out…

I don’t like 2; 1 seems pretty elegant, and a lot more workable. Ok, I have now decided that, when you steal something, it becomes your property. (I repeat: the act of stealing it is a punishable crime, and if it’s in pretty unchanged condition, I would consider it a reasonable punishment for the previous owner to demand that you return it, plus possibly some other penalties. However, it remains the thief’s property until such punishment is exacted; you would be free to sell or break or otherwise mess with it in the meantime.)

I therefore conclude, in parallel: Suppose B does something illegal to obtain the information required to reproduce A’s intellectual work. Then, on the one hand, A does have a property-rights violation claim against B, and it might be a just punishment for B to be forcibly prevented from distributing copies of this information if he has not done so already. However, if B has already distributed copies of this information to C, D, and E, or if he does so in the future, then A cannot demand that C, D, and E refrain from using or redistributing more copies of this information. (A could say “Pretty please” and pay hush money to C, D, and E to hopefully persuade them to shut up, but A could not use force on them.)

To all of you who claim that zero intellectual property rights imply that the cost for copying someone’s intellectual work is zero… you’re wrong. For one thing, it is extremely easy to copy such things these days (e.g. patents) because those who have copyrights or patents on them post them freely on the internet, which they do because of currently existing IP laws. If those laws didn’t exist, the producers of such works would not post them on the internet, or at least they would require you to verify your identity and then sign a contract that said you would not copy it, before they let you load the page. (Perhaps you cannot imagine an efficient solution like that. Perhaps your imagination will be far outstripped by that of the free market.)

It’s like issues with free speech. There are certain kinds of speech that I find extremely unpleasant to listen to. So, are my rights being violated when others say extremely unpleasant things to me? Answer: Where are they saying these things? It has to be somewhere. If they’re magnifying their voices with big speakers and aiming them at my window, I might consider that a property-rights violation. If I’m at their house by their invitation, then my rights are certainly not being violated, unless they agreed to not say such things while I was there. If I’m at work with them, then it’s the responsibility of whoever owns the workplace to decide what behavior is allowed there and what isn’t.

People who don’t think about this, who don’t realize that offensive or hurtful speech has to occur someplace and that the rules can be whatever the owner of the place sets them to be, who think that laws about speech have to be the same everywhere, are forced to come up with a ridiculous ad hoc mishmash of an ethical system. (“Well, I support free speech in general, but surely kids shouldn’t have to put up with racial insults in school, and surely one shouldn’t have to hear loud profanity and insults on the street, although it’s certainly ok for people to use swearwords in normal conversation, and …, but …”)

Likewise, people who don’t think about where you would have to be in order to make a copy of an intellectual work (how do you, say, acquire a copy of a book without buying it or borrowing it from the library, both of whom could easily stipulate–some of which, today, stipulate–that you may not copy it? How do you copy the design of a machine without standing in a place owned by the person who owns the machine?) are forced to this ridiculous conclusion: if there isn’t an aggressively imposed law preventing people from copying certain things in certain situations, then there will be nothing preventing people from copying those things in those situations. This rests on the same line of reasoning as the idea that, if there isn’t an aggressively imposed law preventing people from saying certain things in certain situations, then there will be nothing preventing people from saying those things in those situations; it is just as fallacious.

You do not have the right to steal it simply because it is easy to do so.

Copying is not quoting. No one here is defending theft.

In what way am I using strawman arguments? Kiba for instance would assert that he has the right to copy the movie, Lord of the Rings. He would assert that it is ‘unethical’ (!!!) for Peter Jackson and company to try to stop him.

Please come up with more strawman arguments. They are amusing. You should become a fan fiction writer.

The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is not simply an ‘idea’. It is a billion dollars worth of capital and labor that the creators have every right to sell viewership to. You do not have the right to steal it simply because it is easy to do so.