But then again, perhaps that is why is is famous. Had he gotten a patent, he would not have been copied, but he might still have died without money and the insult to injury would have been obscurity:
Mahmut Aygün, the Turkish immigrant who revolutionised German fast food with his tasty creation, died at age 87 this week after a serious illness. Aygün came up with the now ubiquitous döner while working at the “City Imbiss” snack shop in West Berlin in 1971. Cutting meat off a huge rotating spit, he was inspired to put it in pita bread and dress it up with vegetables and yoghurt sauce. Selling for two marks, the döner quickly became a staple of German street food alongside Teutonic favourites such as the bratwurst. Although Aygün went on to considerable culinary success in Berlin, he didn’t make money from the thousands of kebab shops across Germany that copied him because he failed to patent his invention. Still, he will be remembered by countless legions of döner kebab fans around the world.
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Well, I am Turkish and I can tell this food is nothing special.
But the point of bringing up these ridiculous news in defense of IP socialism is very much obvious and I will make this point every time this straw man argument is made.
Nobody is defending the patents (and patent laws) that can be the subject of independent discovery. Please stop trying to use these idiotic laws and related real life cases to confuse people and try to be intellectually honest by addressing the main issue.
Are individuals entitled to their own creations, products or not?
Can I patent an ignore button for ktibuk?
ktibuk seems to forget that you cannot own something intangible like an idea. You can homestead land, sea, and possibly sections of air. You cannot homestead ideas. Hence, intellectual property rights are non-existent.
Witoslawski:”you cannot own something intangible like an idea. You can homestead land, sea, and possibly sections of air. You cannot homestead ideas. Hence, intellectual property rights are non-existent.”
It is ridiculous, I can own air, here empty space but I can not own ideas. Why can’t we, just because you declared so? Socialists always try to mess with property rights.
May I own my own ideas? May I have ideas at all?
Here’s a question for you pro-IP people. What if I own a store and I sell an invention that has been patented but never brought to market. Will you hire goons to kristallnachtmy store to break the invention or how will you stop me in a libertarian society where I am not harming anyone?
Marcello,
What would you do if someone goes into your store pretending to shop and then stays and eventually moves into it. He is only occupying the space not your store. Would you Kristallnacht him?
False analogy. My store is my property. If your patent would give you the “right” to stop me from using my own property that is not even effecting you then how is that suddenly your decision to make?
@Marcelo,
And my IP is my property. How do you know about the invention other than being disclosed by the patent? A patent is a contract between the inventor and the public that for limited time of exclusivity granted to the inventor the invention is (permanently)disclosed to the public. You definitely breached this contract by not honoring the temporary exclusivity. Although it is not my job to pursue criminals I would consider you a criminal for selling what is not yours
I always ask this question but noone answers:
Do I have a right to my trade secrets? (My trade secrets are the results of my research done on and by my property and it is not patented. It might be put into practice but only partially during the research. It is only a formula, a draft, a plan or that kind of a potentially high value product. However, it is still not ready for mass-production (for instant gratification of IP-socialists). (Sorry I couldn’t help)
Do I have the right to protect it with force?)
“And my IP is my property. How do you know about the invention other than being disclosed by the patent? A patent is a contract between the inventor and the public that for limited time of exclusivity granted to the inventor the invention is (permanently)disclosed to the public. You definitely breached this contract by not honoring the temporary exclusivity. Although it is not my job to pursue criminals I would consider you a criminal for selling what is not yours”
I never agreed to this contract. What now?
“I always ask this question but noone answers:
Do I have a right to my trade secrets? (My trade secrets are the results of my research done on and by my property and it is not patented. It might be put into practice but only partially during the research. It is only a formula, a draft, a plan or that kind of a potentially high value product. However, it is still not ready for mass-production (for instant gratification of IP-socialists). (Sorry I couldn’t help)
Do I have the right to protect it with force?)”
I told you this question was vague before, but I’ll elaborate now. You have the right to prevent people from snooping through your files, as this is trespassing. You have a right to your trade secret so long as you *keep* it secret. You do not have the right to “protect” a secret (of any kind) in a way that aggresses against the person or property of another. If someone (who is not bound by explicit contract) correctly guesses, or deduces, or overhears your trade secret, you do not have the right to use force to prevent him from disseminating the information.
Mike,
What am I allowed to do if one of my employees sells my trade secret to the competition? No trespassing is involved.
andras says:
“A patent is a contract between the inventor and the public…”
“the public” doesn’t exist. “the public” cannot enter into contracts. only people can.
andras says: “A patent is a contract between the inventor and the public…”
Newson says: “the public” doesn’t exist. “the public” cannot enter into contracts. only people can.
Pardon my wording: … a contract between the inventor and the people of the country. Like every legal document, including the Constitution, a patent is binding even if you don’t agree with it. The same way as any legal protection of your each and every rights.
The bounderies are arbitrary but “strictly” enforced.
thank you for clarifying that point, andras. but the constitution was supposed only to enshrine negative rights, not positive ones.
Bla, bla, bla, I know the Constitution is unconstitutional. It handles IP as any other property.
As a good socialist, when you face your contradictions you just simply evade.
“But I can not own ideas. Why can’t we, just because you declared so? Socialists always try to mess with property rights”
The case against intellectual monopoly is based on observation of the real world, and thorough consideration of economic, moral and other questions related to the topic. So no one declares it, instead we closely follow chain of cause and effect to allow us comparing the originally stated goals with received results.
In fact, because it is pro-IP tools that needed to be declared and enforced on top of the natural state of things, all the anti-IP does is raising serious arguments in support of removal of those existing pro-IP declarations.
As for socialists, indeed we should defend property against anyone trying to steal it. And there’s no better school of thought than austro-libertarian when it comes to real defense of life, property and liberty.
It’s just that ideas are … well, you guessed it: ideas. We can keep them for ourselves, or share it with others, just as happened to the few thoughts of mine contained in this comment. That’s it. Once they’re shared, we can only “control” them further if we resort to the use of violence or threat thereof against others, who would otherwise peacefully build upon these shared-out ideas, without commiting any violent harm onto us.
Also, it’s nice to try to understand your opponents points before starting the argument.
Speaking of understanding, it is not that big of a mystery why someone would want to oppose anti-IP:
1. First, we’re taught that intellectual monopoly is right and good, and we use it when making our everyday decisions, like base our business on it etc.
2. Then come the people arguing there are serious flaws with the pro-IP stance, going all the way back to moral roots and laws of cause and effect. They do this in highly articulate way, meeting all the standards of honest truth seeking, making it hard to ignore.
3. What options do we have then? If what they say is true, it means we have been subscribed to the wrong idea. And that hurts. So it just can’t be true, right? Right?
Ireland,
Your whole IP Socialism position seems to hang onto the technical issue of protecting property. You seem to think, if you think you can not think of all the ways you can perfectly protect it, we should abolish it all together.
You are right. You have to follow cause and effect. You have think things through. Which you yourself are not doing.
You seem to argue that Robinson Crusoe can not own anything, homestead anything, make anything his own until Friday comes to the island and there arises the possibility of conflict.
Property laws are not conflict resolving, positive laws that were created by man to better society. Libertarianism and positivism don’t go together. Property laws are natural laws, dictated by reality of our universe.
How can something be property, mine, before I “share” it but become “society’s” once I do? Isn’t there something wrong here? I used my scarce resources while producing it. I spent time which I will never get back, and put “a piece of myself” into the product, and I own it in whole before sharing with anyone but once I “share”, too bad.
If there is a problem after the “sharing” then that problem is not a property issue, which is an ethical issue, but an enforcement and protection issue which is technical. This line of reasoning is the same as conceding that you may own in fact own a piece of jewelry while you are secretly hiding in your house, but once you wear it an make it a target of thieves and it gets stolen, too bad. You should have kept it to yourself.
Of course while protecting property other peoples property should also be taken into regard but that is the case with any property. I can not harm my neighbours property just because I want to protect my house.
The same is true for IP. So patent laws disregarding the fact that many ideas can be independently discovered by different people are flawed.
And I will concede IP is very hard to protect all the time, and there will be times the creators can not protect it and enforce property laws. You came up with a rather simple but useful idea? Although it may be copied you may not be able to prove it was copied. Or maybe the transaction cost of commercializing some IP is so high that it is better to give it away for free, for fame and glory or advertising revenue.
But this is no reason to abolish private property all together. Abolishing private property is socialism and the people here should know socialism is immoral and ineffective.
Straw man. A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. [en.wikipedia.org]
Interested reader will kindly notice that pro-IP comments consistently argue against things which are NOT the point brough forward by the anti-IP group. Thank you.
ktibuk,
i’m supposing that your ip stance would mean you would exclude out of hand anarchism as a valid political model.
otherwise, with differing and competing jurisdictions and legal codes, how could ideas be universally protected?
ideas could hop from an ip-happy state to an ip-free state b, and there be lost forever to the ip socialists.
taking this global, isn’t this the very problem that the us has with countries like china? that unauthorized copying will always gravitate to ip weak states, and only by enforcing an internationally standardized ip code (with universal vigour) could any real protection be offered.
Straw man argument is exactly what IP socialists are doing.
Notice all the posts from Kinsella and Tucker. Also notice the examples given in the book they are promoting.
They are basicly against patent laws, which have problems beyond IP being a property or not.
They build a straw man equating patents with IP, and thus try to abolish private property.
They have no intellectual courage so they can not bring up pirates copying full movies and songs as examples but only examples that doesn’t really create any problems, like ‘humming a tune while walking” or “forgetting a book on the beach”. But when libertarians bring this copying thing, they change the argument to the scarcity issue.
Which is a non issue anyways because the act of copying without the consent of the owner is aggression. And aggression is an ethics issue, unlike scarcity which is an economics issue.
Just like fraud, or theft without confronting the owner.
You have to ask the question, in which circumstances would the owner let someone copy his work, unless he gives out it freely? The answer is clear. By the threat of aggression. So we may conclude that, copying something without the actual consent of the owner is aggression. Just like fraud is actually aggression, although no real threat is used.
Also IP socialist keep claiming that the owners of IP are actually trying to coerce the copyer. Which is both absurd and unbelievable. Of course they keep bringing up patents which are actually guilty of this to confuse.
There are two person. A wrote a novel, B copied it. Would there have been a book or am act copying if A hadnt wrote the book? No. So the situation must follow the following steps as far as logic goes.
A writes the book, B aggress against A by copying the book, without A’s consent. B initiated the aggression there fore any force A may use after the fact is in fact ethical.
IP socialists always confuse property with protection of property, and they also confuse property with value. Logically protection issue must come after the homesteading. Protection issue can not precede homesteading. To claim this is logically absurd. Property is having the right to do whatever one wants with something. Robinson Crusoe owns the fish he catches, he can do whatever he wants with it. He doesn’t have to wait for Friday to come to the island, to make the fish his property. If he did he would die.
Also somethings economic value, has nothing to do with property rights. Something maybe so abundant that it may in fact be free. But “free” is about value and valuations. It is not an ethical concept thus it is not directly related to the property issue.
Some IP may leak. It is hard to control IP. It may become a free good. But even this doesn’t change the fact that the IP is the producers. This may not mean anything as far as exchange economy, but it means a lot ethically.
Even the IP socialist subconsciously knows this. They may advocate mooching of the creator by being a parasite, but when it comes to giving due to the creator they seem to not be able to go that far and deny the creators part in all of this.
Yes, Rawling created Harry Potter. You may mooch of her but at least give her her due, right? Promise it wont cost you nothing. And when you are used to taking something for nothing, giving something that doesn’t cost anything couldn’t hurt, right?
There are so many fallacies in IP socialists claims that it is hard to expose all of them on comments sections on this blog.
But if you follow this blog enough you can see the IP socialists blogging here are actually the worst enemies of their positions.
Since they don’t have a comprehensive, contradiction-free theory, the more they post the more they expose themselves. They even use all the classical socialists arguments. They analyze IP as it relates to economics but they don’t dare bring up or respond to calculation arguments. Just repeating a bunch of memorized lines.
So keep at it boys. You may be bloating the blog with this IP thing and cause people to spend their scarce time on these instead of on stuff about the worst financial crises the world has ever seen, but IP is an important issue to.
“Mike,
What am I allowed to do if one of my employees sells my trade secret to the competition? No trespassing is involved.”
If he had been contractually bound to keep it a secret, you could sue him.
“Which is a non issue anyways because the act of copying without the consent of the owner is aggression.”
This is pretty much what our disagreement boils down to. If you’ve read Kinsella’s book, and still come to this conclusion, I think the discussion may simply be at a standstill.
@Andras:
> And my IP is my property.
Let me repeat that again. The law does not know anything about intellectual property. The various IP concepts defined in the law are not defined as property.
If you download a copyrighted song, it’s legal. If you write a program around a patented idea, it’s still legal. It’s when you try to distribute them, when it becomes illegal. If we applied the same rules to real propererty, it would be ok to occupy someone else’s shop and use the goods it’s to your liking, as long as you don’t sell them or give them away.
Copyrights and patents are market regulation. They are not property rights. Only in Ktibuk’s mind.
Cheers,
Peter
IP-Socialist defenders seem to think the protection of ideas supersedes property, but want to have it both ways when you bring it up.
What I do with my own property is of no consequence with what you may have done similarly or identically in the past.
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