You’re allowed to think anything you want.

It’s when you go to take the abstract concept comprising the idea and embody it into physical form that IP law takes effect.

And “money” (again, in a modern society) is *vastly* more often a contractual obligation that has no real physical embodiment than it is little pieces of metal and paper.

Hell, forget about money if you don’t like that particular example. A verbal contract that exists nowhere except in the minds of 2 parties is something that (assuming the contract allows it) can be bought, sold, and in all other ways treated exactly like property. Freedom to contract requires this.

Since you finally came to the conclusion that an idea is nothing other than bioelectrical configuration in one’s brain, explain to me how it can be stolen, copied or exchanged.
It’s on the same level as compassion, pride or love. They are just as much bioelctrical configurations in one’s brain. How can they be stolen?

Now you’re just getting metaphysical. If you think an idea is anything other than a bioelectrical configuration in your brain you’re kidding yourself.

An brain-embodied idea is no more, and no less, a physical object than an idea comprising a pattern of 1s and 0s in a computer. Be careful where you take that argument. You might not like the consequences.

Way to attack a straw man. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is that money is a contractual agreement more often than it is a physical object in modern society. You can still own it.”

I didn’t attack a straw man. I attacked your statement. It’s not what you meant? Not my fault that you did a shoddy job in selecting the terms you used. Money, even when it’s just zeroes in a computer, is a physical object. Don’t equate it with an idea, especially after I point out that ideas are a figment of one’s own mind and can’t be extracted, shared, stolen or exchanged.
Also, electronic and abstract are not synonyms!

To adress your sound recording example, I say that your license should impose on the buyer the condition that he will not allow it to be seen or heard. The moment a third party, unbound by any contract, hears the recording, he forms an idea in his head and he has the freedom to act on it in any way he wants.

As for patents, Stephan Kinsella had a bunch of articles on how they actually stifle innovation and are impractical and even detrimental to their stated goal of increasing research.
My position is that the fact that they are not derived from natural property rights and need a state to create them and enforce them makes them loathsome.

Way to attack a straw man. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is that money is a contractual agreement more often than it is a physical object in modern society. You can still own it.

Seriously: if I break into your bank’s computers and delete a number from your account and add it to mine, are you *seriously* going to say I haven’t taken your property? But it’s just a number!!! I may have committed trespass against the bank’s property (or maybe not… perhaps I attacked it electronically, since we’re not counting abstract property as property). Surely, since money is only a physical object, I have not stolen anything from you?

See how absurd that sounds?

But enough about abstract property. Let’s, instead, talk about contracts.

I think most people, libertarians included, would argue that in order to preserve the ability for people to freely contract, we must prohibit/punish tortious interference in contracts, no?

I.e. if I interfere with someone delivering a service to you that you have contracted for, I have harmed not only him, but you as well, and may have a liability towards either or both of you, depending on the circumstances. Typically, the liability would be to the party that took a loss due to the interference… particularly if the other party consented to it (e.g. as would happen if a contractor took a payment voluntarily from me in exchange for cheating you).

So let me ask you this: suppose that an artist created a sound recording, and only sold it to people on the condition that they will not allow it to be copied. Perhaps we should call this “licensing” rather than sale, but it’s just a contract either way.

If you come along and copy the buyer’s copy, with or without the consent of the buyer, have you committed tortious interference on the contract between the artist and the buyer? I don’t see how you can conclude anything but that you have.

Whether you would have a liability to the buyer or the artist would probably hinge on whether or not you had the buyer’s permission. Certainly the buyer will have failed in his contractual obligation to prevent copying, resulting in some kind of forfeit.

In fact, such a contract could (probably would) continue in perpetuity, rather than the recording reverting to the public domain after a time.

A copyright is merely a boilerplate version of that contract that applies to expressions of ideas by default. And, hey, as a bonus to society, it comes equipped with an expiration date.

Would we really be better off in a world where copyrights didn’t exist? In point of fact, they are a *limit* on an artist’s ability to perpetually control their idea. Perhaps you’d like to argue that copyrights *themselves* are therefore an interference in contracts. That would be an interesting twist.

Patents, I’ll grant, are a different sort of beast, and their merits may be argued either way. I find them to be a *practical* exception to natural property rights rather than a natural consequence of them, most of the time.

It’s really tedious and disadvantageous to progress to not offer this privilege to inventors, as they spend more time protecting the secrecy of their invention than they do inventing it. Trade Guilds were a really pernicious consequence of that prior to the founding of the US, which is one reason patents were enshrined in the US Constitution.

But I won’t insist on them.

“Money, in a modern society, is not a physical object. It’s an idea.”
What he means: Whoever had the idea for a medium of exchange is being trespassed against every time we use anything other than direct barter in our transactions!!!

“You don’t have a right to look at what I own even though you looking doesn’t effect physical integrity of the good in question.”
What he means: Even though I could build a high wall around my house or keep my painting in a vault, I don’t need to do that since I can just force you to keep your eyes on the ground and I have the long arm of the law behind me on this.

“If there is a novel called Harry Potter, it is because Rowling homesteaded it and she owns it. Because she owns it she has every right to exclude others from it.”
No, kitbuk, if there is a novel called Harry Potter, it is because someone manifested Rowling’s idea using ink and paper. Her idea and the physical novels one can buy are two separate things. All others are excluded from her idea, even if they read the Harry Potter book. Her idea will die with her. It didn’t transfer to the book. There is no idea imbedded in objects.
Let’s say I get an idea and build a battery. Then, I lose it somewhere on my travels. Someone from a tribe that had no contact with civilization finds my battery. He doesn’t automatically acquire the idea of the battery. He may use it as a paperweight. Someone else from my neighbourhood finds his paperweight and because his experiences are more similar to mine, he develops, for himself, and idea about how that object can be used as a battery.

You see, since we don’t have a hive mind controlling us (as far as I can tell), all discoveries are in actuality independant discoveries. All our ideas are separate, even when they reference the same object in a roughly similar way.

Look Stephan, …

[lots of crankish, incoherent nonsense excised.]

Is this helping you Stephan?

No, it would help if you would post this on the other post, to help illustrate my point.

“copying is interaction. Without acces to the the car the act of copying can not take place.”

Without access to information ABOUT the car (encoded in the light that reflected off it) copying cannot take place. Interacting with the light that reflected off the car is not the same as interacting with the car itself. WHY DO I EVEN NEED TO POINT THIS OUT? lol

I said:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you appear to be implying that A may not ethically benefit from any of B’s actions without B’s permission, because to do so would be “parasitism” which is “unnatural”. Please let me know if that is your actual position.

“It doesn’t have to be formal permission for every action but there has to be consent, so yes that is my position.”

If you paint a picture, do I need your permission to look at it? Is it aggression if I let the light that reflected off your painting enter my pupils? Must I close my eyes or be subject to violence?

I said:

Just as stealing a penny is a total rejection of the owner’s right to use their penny, huddling in an out of the way nook on a big boat is a complete rejection of the owner’s right to use their nook.

“Exactly. So the remaining state of the original is irrelevant after it has been copied.”

Are you seriously claiming that stealing a penny is the same as copying a penny?

“What the hell does ‘use’ mean?”

Thanks for highlighting my vagueness here. For the time being, I will define use as “physical manipulation or occupation”. An example of manipulation would be picking an apple off a tree. An example of occupation would be sleeping in a cave.

“Notice how you declare Harry Potter is not property.”

I don’t remember declaring that. Before I make any claims regarding “Harry Potter”, you will have to explain exactly what you mean by it. Are you referring to something that exists or something that does not?

I asked:

Are you saying that you have the right to use force against someone to prevent them from looking at or thinking about your property?

“Again, ‘looking’ is not interaction. Interaction is necessarily an active act, not a passive one like ‘looking’.”

What about thinking? Shall we call thinking “passive” in order to support your argument?

“Copying is [active].”

Here’s how the world actually works. Light reflects off your Bentley encoding information about some of its properties. The light then enters my eye. The information in the light is transferred to my brain where it is converted into a mental image. Afterword, the image is stored in my memory. Any succeeding interactions I have will be with MY memory, not YOUR Bentley. In fact, the ONLY thing that interacted with your Bentley was the light that originally bounced off it.

To recap: I DID NOT INTERACT WITH YOUR BENTLEY. If you have doubts about this, please check the definition of “interact”.

“You don’t have a right to look at what I own even though you looking doesn’t effect physical integrity of the good in question.”

If I can see your property without trespassing (in other words, if light reflects off your property and onto mine) I certainly DO have a right to look at it.

We libertarians are necessarily individualists. We believe in the negative rights that no one has to pay for and all these rights stem from property rights.

There are simple mental constructs that we can use if you are having trouble comprehending.

All the legitimate rights of an individual, the right must manifest for an isolated individual, like Robinson Crusoe.

For example,

Can Crusoe have right to free speech? You betcha.

Can he have a right to health care? No, unless he administers health car.

Can Crusoe have the right to do whatever he wants with the fish net he made, including destroying it so that it ceases to be a fish net? Yes of course he can.

Can he have right to free education? No.

Can he have right to copy some other individual creation? Hell no.

Is this helping you Stephan?

“I must be ‘interacting’ with its Platonic essence.”

LOL

Believers in IP (Imaginary Property) do depend on the existence of an otherworldly realm of platonic forms (ideal objects). Lacking any evidence for this mystical realm does not appear to trouble them, though.

“Notice how you declare Harry Potter is not property. You are “the someone else” that evaluates and gives judgment. In natural rights theory of property rights there is no such thing. The owner has ultimate decision making rights regarding property and that is that.”

The owner of a sheet of paper has also the ultimate decision making rights regarding his property.

If he decides to write a story in it, that he heard than he has the right to do so.

And if that story resembles that of Harry Potter or is the story of Harry Potter than he has every right to use HIS property to write that story down.

This is also your opinion. Else you would not state that the owner of a property has ULTIMATE DECISION MAKING RIGHTS!

“Again, “looking” is not interaction. Interaction is necessarily an active act, not a passive one like “looking”. Copying is.”

No. Looking is active. Every action is active.

By looking you make a copy of something in your brain.

By drawing you make a copy of something on a sheet of paper.

You are not the one to decide what should be allowed or what is active and what is passive.

That is socialist thinking of you!

“And I can prevent people from looking at my property. I have right to build high wall around my house, or keep a painting in vault and exclude you from looking.”

Yes, this right you have with your property.

If you do not show it, than nobody will see it and nobody could directly copy it.

Nobody here denies you the right to decide what should be done with your exemplar of a drawing!

“You don’t have a right to look at what I own even though you looking doesn’t effect physical integrity of the good in question.”

If you show it that someone else has the right to look at it because he has the right to his own body (self ownership).

Therefore he is ALWAYS allowed to use the information his body gives him (if there does not exist a contract).

And if the person who saw what you showed decides later on to write that down or draw a copy of it on a sheet of paper he owns or has the right to than he is allowed to do that because he is his self owner and can use the information he stored in his body.

So again: Why do YOU want to abolish the rights of property owners?

If you do not want for direct copies to exist than you have to store the original in a vault.

But if you show it or someone else does others are allowed to copy it. There is no right to own information and ideas.

It is just that simple.

I will give you a few recent examples. Home builders are currently complaining
that they are unable to build houses – because they cannot compete with excess
supply. Do you believe that? Any homebuilder today can build a house. What
they cannot create is a home of value. Without value the homebuider has no incentive
to create the thing. They are linked. Of course in this case the marketplace is
working. Supply greatly exceeds demand at current prices.

Another recent example (from the real world): Wall Street analysts expected Home
Depot and Lowes to benefit from the housing bust. Their reasoning which displayed
no knowledge of economics was that homeowners would invest in their houses rather
buy new ones. They ignored the concept of value. A homeowner has NO REASON to invest
in a home: the money put into the house will create no value. All investment is
NOT an attempt to create or maintain a thing, but to create and maintain a thing
OF VALUE. Destroy the value, you destroy the thing.

A car is another example. My car has crashed in value. If it breaks down I will have
no incentive to invest beyond a certain point.

Hobbes is attempting to say that ip is designed not to protect the thing, but to
protect the value. Exactly. Without that you cannot invest in the thing, invent
the thing, maintaing the thing, etc. That is the entire PURPOSE of the marketplace.
To assign relative values using a medium of exchange. Counterfeiting distorts the
pricing mechanism which creates investment and production.

The Soviet Union could create things. It could not create things of value.

“Looking at a car through a telescope is NOT interacting with it; it is interacting with the light that bounced off it.”

The issue is not looking. It is copying. And copying is interaction. Without acces to the the car the act of copying can not take place.

Thanks so much, ktibuk–this makes my time spent on this worth it–I have flushed you out. Now all on the fence can see the end result of the IP mentality: it means that owners of physical things have the right to stop others from “interacting” with these things, and “accessing” these things, which apparnetly means. … observing them or learning about them.

Thanks, ktibuk, for being honest enough to admit this, to reveal the utter absurdity of your views. This will be very helpful to those on the fence about IP.

Copying the shape of a Bentley and copying an aspect of a rock is not the same thing. One is a man made object with a legitimate owner, and the other is nature given.

Yes… and this is not question-begging at all. Not a bit.

Again, “looking” is not interaction. Interaction is necessarily an active act, not a passive one like “looking”. Copying is.

So… if I LOOK at your Bentley, tha’ts okay–it’s not “interacting” with it, and it’s not “accessign” it. But if later on, in my garage, I make a car, according to the Bently-patterns in my memory… THEN I am “accessing” your car, and “interacting” with it. Even if your car is now destroyed–hm,, I must be “interacting” with its Platonic essence.

VERY intresting theory you are cobbling together on the fly here, ktibuk–keep going, this is a riot!

“The right to control is the primary right. It is what ownership is all about.”

That is so true.

And this is what IP-socialists do not understand: They want to abolish this primary right by bringing in some kind of “the owner of an idea controls everything”-mambozambo.

@defender of “IP”:

Please answer the following question:

Person A sees a painting on an advertisement board.

Person A copies this painting on a canvas that he owns which he has in his house.

Is Person A in your opinion allowed to do that?

Why (not)?

If not: Why can someone else decide what Person A is allowed to do in his house with his property?

Please answer only to the above questions!

“If someone invents a new idea, by this argument he has the Right to Use that new idea by virtue of being the first to use it. Someone else using it *does* indeed diminish his right to use (or potentially use, or profit from) that idea. Exclusion of others using the idea is merely a means of securing his ability to use the idea.

It’s no less true than the “potential use” argument about physical property.”

You are wrong. That would be against the homesteading principle and the principle of property.

If someone owns an object for a long time and someone else “invents” a use for that object in your point of view the former would not be allowed to use his object in a certain kind of way because the latter “invented” this use.

That is pure nonsense and no way libertarian.

You are truly a socialist. Please live in North Korea!

“Money, in a modern society, is not a physical object. It’s an idea.”

Yeah a proof that you are truly either stupid or a socialist.
A banknote is a physical object.

Try to go into a shop and spend your idea. Maybe they gonna bash you up and put some brain in your head!

I hate those socialists.

@ktibuk
“The issue is not looking. It is copying. And copying is interaction. Without acces to the the car the act of copying can not take place.”

You are a liar. There is no access necessary if someone wants to copy the physical resemblance of an object. Looking itself is enough.
Someone looks on a painting and if he is skilled enough as an artist that would be enough for him to copy it.

So if someone else is presenting his objects to others he has no right over their representations in the heads of the viewers and what they make of this representations.

No, YOU don’t have any right about what others make of object representations.

If you insist on the possession of others minds you are either a totalitarian (a socialist) or just plain stupid.

What would it be?

Please don’t think of yourself as a libertarian. That would be a disgrace of all true libertarians. In your own “little world” you were not allowed to call yourself one.

The point of my argument, which you can choose to dismiss as amateur if you like, is that any absolute definition of property as only being physical objects is utterly absurd.

Humans value non-physical things. We treat them exactly like physical property all the time. The only reasonable question to ask is *which* non-physical things should be accorded status as property.

Absolutes are very rarely an accurate representation of the world. Now, just because I’m saying that some non-physical things are, and deserve to be, property, doesn’t mean that I think *all* non-physical things are property. It’s just nonsense to say that they can’t be.

Even physical property has never been considered absolute by any society in history, nor is that possible. Take easements, for example. I don’t think even the most obscene anarcho-capitalist libertarians (and I’m a minarchist libertarian) would agree that it would be ok for me to buy all the land around your house and erect a hundred-foot-tall barbed wire fence around it (all on “my” property, of course), in the middle of the night, trapping you within, and passively (without any direct aggression) condemning you to starve.