Intellectual Property Rights

[Danoff]

This article is an awesome breakdown of intellectual property rights (gets a little lost at the end, but is otherwise solid). I've long considered IP to be the right to value created by labor rather than tangible goods. This author comes to the exact same conclusion using basically the same reasoning (if a little less abstract).

http://www.theatlantic.com/business...-resemble-stealing-and-does-it-matter/251277/

I know we have some anti-IP libertarians on this board, let's discuss.

 

[A2K78]

I'm all for property rights, however the idea of "intellectual property rights" is unfree because in the end its nothing but a form of government-granted monopoly and also a form of protectionism.

Anyhow this article is a great primer on why IP rights are bad:

http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2011/05/24/the-corrosive-effects-of-ip

 

[wfooshee]

Hmm. My government has granted me a monopoly to occupy a structure located in my hometown, and to treat it as my very own. It's called a Warranty Deed, and it's registered at the courthouse.

So I have infringed on the rights of anyone else who wants to "freely" occupy my house?

How is that property right different from an intellectual property I may have developed, authored, composed, or whatever, and intend to keep ownership of?

"Protectionism?" Really? I don't have the right to be protected from squatters? I don't have the right to profit from my authorship and creativity?

 

[homeforsummer]

I've long considered IP to be the right to value created by labor rather than tangible goods.

Same. Thoughts and ideas, concepts, abstracts, art etc. Something like music for example is a difficult subject. Technically, a song isn't a tangible good (you can hum a song if needs be, and you can't package and sell sound waves on their own), so it must be covered by IP rights. It only becomes a "good" once it's put on a CD, at which point the album artwork and the data contained on the CD become covered by normal copyright laws.

As an MP3 though? I'm of the belief that it's still IP, and I'm pro-IP so I think file-sharing is wrong. If you want to have possession of something, whether tangible or intangible, and it's the work of someone else, by rights you should pay for it.

I quite like the book analogy quoted in the article. If you'd fill up your kindle with thousands of free books, then what's wrong with popping to Barnes & Noble and emptying a few shelves? Is it any different?

Or downloading MP3s. I'm sure Wall-Mart wouldn't mind you going in with a trolley and clearing their shelves of CDs.

The internet is incredibly liberating, largely in a good way - freedom of information is probably the best thing about it - but I don't believe it should be used for essentially stealing the property, intellectual or otherwise, of somebody else.

 

[Tornado]

I'm all for property rights, however the idea of "intellectual property rights" is unfree because in the end its nothing but a form of government-granted monopoly and also a form of protectionism.

Isn't that... kinda the point?

 

[Danoff]

I'm all for property rights, however the idea of "intellectual property rights" is unfree because in the end its nothing but a form of government-granted monopoly and also a form of protectionism.

As has been pointed out, this is true of all property rights. The government has granted you a monopoly over the computer you're using to read this... what's the difference?

 

[Danoff]

@Omnis, @Imari

See the article in the first post, and this:

...and now it's time for a classic Danoff post.

Land is property, a commodity owned by individuals for a reason. It's not an arbitrary distinction, but a necessary recognition. Land is property for the same reason a stick, or an invention can be property - the investment of labor. Unworked unowned land is not property and cannot be property until some labor establishes as such. (Sticking a flag in it does not count)

This is the same reason that if you pick up an unowned unworked stick and carve it into a work of art, it belongs to you. Because to take it from you would be to deny you the fruits of your labor and retroactively force you into slavery.

I'll say again, though, that sticking a flag in a piece of dirt does not count as working the land or mixing labor with it. That's simply attempting to claim something without any rational basis for it.

Amended to a link, 'cos Eddie Izzard swears a bit

Denying you the fruits of your own labor and retroactively forcing you into slavery is the basis for property rights - not because you claim something, and not because you want use of it. You can own things you don't use.


This:

Ideas – recipes, formulas, statements, arguments, algorithms, theorems, melodies, patterns, rhythms, images, etc. – are certainly goods (insofar as they are good, not bad, recipes, etc.), but they are not scarce goods. Once thought and expressed, they are free, inexhaustible goods. I whistle a melody or write down a poem, you hear the melody or read the poem and reproduce or copy it. In doing so you have not taken anything away from me. I can whistle and write as before. In fact, the entire world can copy me and yet nothing is taken from me.

Is nonsense. It suggests that nothing can be stolen from you unless the person was denied its use. It suggests that you could take a dollar out of my bank account, and unless I needed my last dollar one day, nothing was stolen. It is entirely defeated by the counterfeiting argument in the article that I posted earlier, and a ridiculous view of property.

 

[Imari]

Is nonsense. It suggests that nothing can be stolen from you unless the person was denied its use. It suggests that you could take a dollar out of my bank account, and unless I needed my last dollar one day, nothing was stolen. It is entirely defeated by the counterfeiting argument in the article that I posted earlier, and a ridiculous view of property.

No. It suggests that there's a distinction to be made between physical objects and ideas.

Given that there's a number of situations in which they do not behave identically, to the extent that the human race has found it expedient to have completely separate words for them, I don't see why you'd treat them as identical for the purposes of possession.

If you can prove that physical goods and ideas behave the same in all situations, I'll accept that they should be treated identically. Until then, I shall maintain that they are unique enough that each should be considered separately. Specific to the argument that started this, theft of physical goods and theft of IP or ideas should be dealt with separately, as they are not the same thing any more than murder and slavery are the same thing.

In some cases the resolution may be the same, but IP crimes should be judged on their own circumstances, not with erroneous references to physical theft.


I'm not suggesting that IP "theft" isn't a crime. I work in research, my entire job is creating value through knowledge. BUT...I do not support the concept that IP theft is identical to physical theft.

 

[Danoff]

No. It suggests that there's a distinction to be made between physical objects and ideas.

Given that there's a number of situations in which they do not behave identically, to the extent that the human race has found it expedient to have completely separate words for them, I don't see why you'd treat them as identical for the purposes of possession.

If you can prove that physical goods and ideas behave the same in all situations, I'll accept that they should be treated identically. Until then, I shall maintain that they are unique enough that each should be considered separately. Specific to the argument that started this, theft of physical goods and theft of IP or ideas should be dealt with separately, as they are not the same thing any more than murder and slavery are the same thing.

In some cases the resolution may be the same, but IP crimes should be judged on their own circumstances, not with erroneous references to physical theft.


I'm not suggesting that IP "theft" isn't a crime. I work in research, my entire job is creating value through knowledge. BUT...I do not support the concept that IP theft is identical to physical theft.

Intellectual property and physical property are not identical. They have numerous distinctions, which is why we have different terms for them. It's only when we look at the aspects of them that actually matter for consideration of property that they are identical. Non-identical things can have identical features, and when those features are all that matters, the items become indistinguishable in the discussion.

I've stated the reason that property rights exist, and that reason is the same for physical and intellectual property.

 

[Omnis]

Why was this thread so hard to find? I tried searching like 6 times this afternoon before I gave up. Without having read anything linked in this thread, I will at least say this:

If you hold a Lockean/Objectivist view of the labor theory of property, it will of course lead you to IP.

I will post more later. I really love this subject and wish I were better versed to argue in favor of scarce resources as property. Therefore, I will lean heavily on people like Kinsella, Hoppe, and Rothbard.

edit: Oh my god, I just read that article from The Atlantic. What a mess. What is this guy arguing against? There is no clarity or consistency at all. Am I going to have to respond in line to every paragraph?

Please listen and/or read this speech/transcript for a legitimate framework on property and why Lockean property is wrong:
Speech MP3: http://media.blubrry.com/kinsellaon...lockean-mistake-liberty-in-the-pines-2013.mp3
Transcript: http://c4sif.org/2013/04/lockes-big...-property-ruined-political-theory-transcript/

 

[Imari]

Intellectual property and physical property are not identical. They have numerous distinctions, which is why we have different terms for them. It's only when we look at the aspects of them that actually matter for consideration of property that they are identical. Non-identical things can have identical features, and when those features are all that matters, the items become indistinguishable in the discussion.

I've stated the reason that property rights exist, and that reason is the same for physical and intellectual property.

Admittedly taken as a whole they are not identical, so the claim is that while IP and physical property aren't the same, the relevant properties of them as related to theft/ownership are identical, so they should be treated identically in situations related to ownership?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, just summarise to check that I understand correctly.

I'd say that the major difference I see between the two is that there is a difference in labour to create copies. Creating 100 artistic sticks requires (give or take) 100 times more labour than creating one. Writing a song and allowing 100 other people to know how it is played requires the exact same amount of labour as writing a song and keeping it all to yourself.

If your stick is stolen, you need to expend your labour again to get yourself back to the state you were in before the stick was stolen. If your song is "stolen", you don't need to do anything, you still have your song.

That's a big difference. If you're working from the basis of value created by labour, it seems a fairly major thing to be handwaving off as not important.

There's a bunch of stuff that happens after the theft that is (very) important too, but I think this initial difference between what is required to bring the creator's situation back to what it was originally makes me wary of going further without straightening it out.

 

[Omnis]

Please forgive the double post, but this is the best way to keep things tidy should someone else post in the mean time.

Quoting Atlantic article:

This affair has raised a lot of hackles among the infovore set, but I'm a little stumped about why I should be outraged. As James Joyner says, maybe this should have been a civil matter, not a criminal one (though Swartz did break into an MIT network closet to do all this), but beyond that does anyone really think JSTOR should just sit idly by as their entire archive is downloaded? Would the librarians at Stanford sit idly by if someone backed up a semi and started shoveling hundreds of thousands of books into it? Sure, there's no evidence that you're planning to steal the books. Maybe you intend to return them all in two weeks. But come on. Are we really all expected to be that stupid?

Likewise, Swartz may say that he had no intention of putting his 4.8 million documents online, but come on. It's a pretty safe assumption, no? Swartz's suggestion that he just wanted to perform a research project is a wee bit improbable.

As near as I can tell, Swartz is basically engaging in civil disobedience, publicly breaking a law that he considers unjust in order to generate publicity. Fine. But one of the tenets of civil disobedience is that you accept that you're breaking the law and accept the consequences. Now he is.

Indeed, Swartz did break the law. He used JSTOR and violated its terms of the service. He was 2nd party to and bound by an agreement, regardless of whether what was being accessed is or isn't property. I like how Kinsella more correctly refers to IP as Intellectual Privilege, because that's exactly what it is. JSTOR licenses its database for a fee to grant users the privilege of the information within. Once a third party gets a hold of this privilege and it becomes public information (what Swartz was facilitating before being arrested), there is little if anything that can be done, as information, by definition, is not property.

Think about a bookstore, for example. Why isn't it okay to take their books?

Because, unlike with file-sharing, I haven't deprived them of the use of the book, you will say.

But in the sense that file-sharers are talking about, Barnes and Noble is not using the book. They want to make money off of it, but they are not interested in reading it, or using it to prop up a shaky table leg, or impressing people who see it left on the coffee table. In fact, holding onto that copy of the book is costing them money.

It doesn't matter that they're not using the book. It is their property. It started as the property of the landowner that the tree grew on, and all of its constitutive property was agreed to become B&N's upon the agreement of its purchase after many such agreements took place for it to become a book in the first place. Use has no bearing on ownership, for the owner of property is free to do or not do with it whatever he wishes.

Stealing the book doesn't deprive them of the use of the item, in the primitive way that most of the analogies offered by file sharers seem to me to depend on. What it does is deprives them of one very particular use: the ability to sell the book for its set price.

But isn't this exactly the use of which you deprive musicians of when you download an album that you otherwise would have bought? Once you download it for free, they can't sell it to you.

Stealing the book does in fact deprive them of the use of the item, for they no longer have the item. The ability to sell a book is not a right. You need a buyer in order to sell. If buyers are free to not buy at a set price, then a seller necessarily has no such right to sell. Accordingly, there is no such thing as the right to the value of property. Value is not an intrinsic feature of property. It is completely subjective between individuals.

Counterfeiting

Counterfeiting is fraud. Is it non-rivalrous? Not after it is used to defraud someone-- ie, steal their property.

I don't understand what the point of this article was. Was it to point out how you can't just shout non-rivalrous to win an argument? We already know that, but the article doesn't do anything to support itself.

This:



Is nonsense. It suggests that nothing can be stolen from you unless the person was denied its use. It suggests that you could take a dollar out of my bank account, and unless I needed my last dollar one day, nothing was stolen. It is entirely defeated by the counterfeiting argument in the article that I posted earlier, and a ridiculous view of property.

It doesn't. Theft of property, by definition, must exclude its use by the rightful owner. If I take a dollar out of your thousand in the bank, you are excluded from the use of all one thousand dollars that you own. If a thing can be copied perfectly, non-destructively, ad infinitum, then it is not a scarce resource and cannot be property.

The whole reason we assign property rights to scarce resources is to preclude conflict over their use. If you have an idea that is freely transferable and inexhaustibly productive, then you have the privilege of it, not the right to it.

 

[Omnis]

Imari, you're missing the point. Labor doesn't matter. Labor is just a subset of action. You don't own it, it's just what you do. You own your body, your person. So your labor has no value. It does not matter how hard you work to make a chair if you're contracted to make a chair. Rather, the product that is a consequence of your actions has value. Therefore, you, in your capacity to act, have the value. Why? Because you can choose not to make the product unless compensated appropriately.

edited for clarity

For more info, see Rothbard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title-transfer_theory_of_contract

That's it for me for tonight. Bed time.

I'm interested in hearing what everyone has to say, but, again, I would implore all of you to first read or listen to Kinsella giving the talk I linked.

 

[niky]

If your stick is stolen, you need to expend your labour again to get yourself back to the state you were in before the stick was stolen. If your song is "stolen", you don't need to do anything, you still have your song.

In the entertainment business, a lot of your value lies in the uniqueness and quality of your product. If you're a bar singer, and going to your bar is the only way to hear your music, and your music is copied note for note and played in other bars, then that's loss of income for you.

Which means, you need to expend labor to write new songs to keep your business alive.

-

The way the new anti-IP set goes at it is by looking at the copying as a way to gain word of mouth exposure and new business. That actually helps indie artists gain exposure, but it doesn't really put food on the table.

For the major artists, when people have the choice of listening to your entire sets for free at other bars (pirated music) instead of dropping by your bar (official sales or licensed youtube channel supported by ads), your loss of income is pretty big.

Right now, the business is transitioning to advertising supported artists... but that just means more "celebrity" singers and less "artists" in the limelight. Kind of sad, really... but that's what happens when IP is difficult to enforce.

 

[Imari]

In the entertainment business, a lot of your value lies in the uniqueness and quality of your product. If you're a bar singer, and going to your bar is the only way to hear your music, and your music is copied note for note and played in other bars, then that's loss of income for you.

Which means, you need to expend labor to write new songs to keep your business alive.

Correct. But that's why I mentioned important stuff that happens after the theft. Like, the thief playing your songs in other bars and stealing your market.

But that's something that doesn't need to happen for the stick artist to lose value from his stick theft. Once it's stolen, he's lost his item of value, regardless of whether the stick thief sells it, trades it, burns it, or locks it in a safe for the rest of eternity.

For IP theft to actually be damaging, it's required that the thief make use of that IP with additional actions. That is not true of property theft. Stealing IP, in and of itself, does absolutely nothing.

 

[niky]

Stealing IP, in and of itself, does absolutely nothing.

Technically, yes, but it will depend on the nature of the IP.

If it's something like a cryptography key, or the password to a bank server, whether or not it's used, theft renders it useless.

 

[Danoff]

Why was this thread so hard to find? I tried searching like 6 times this afternoon before I gave up. Without having read anything linked in this thread, I will at least say this:

If you hold a Lockean/Objectivist view of the labor theory of property, it will of course lead you to IP.

I will post more later. I really love this subject and wish I were better versed to argue in favor of scarce resources as property. Therefore, I will lean heavily on people like Kinsella, Hoppe, and Rothbard.

edit: Oh my god, I just read that article from The Atlantic. What a mess. What is this guy arguing against? There is no clarity or consistency at all. Am I going to have to respond in line to every paragraph?

Please listen and/or read this speech/transcript for a legitimate framework on property and why Lockean property is wrong:
Speech MP3: http://media.blubrry.com/kinsellaon...lockean-mistake-liberty-in-the-pines-2013.mp3
Transcript: http://c4sif.org/2013/04/lockes-big...-property-ruined-political-theory-transcript/

Stopped reading here:

It makes no sense to grant these rights on ideas. I’m not going to go into that in detail here.

If you want to use someone else's point to make your argument, that's perfectly fine. Just do me the favor of digging through it and finding the bit that's relevant.

Admittedly taken as a whole they are not identical, so the claim is that while IP and physical property aren't the same, the relevant properties of them as related to theft/ownership are identical, so they should be treated identically in situations related to ownership?

Yes.

I'd say that the major difference I see between the two is that there is a difference in labour to create copies. Creating 100 artistic sticks requires (give or take) 100 times more labour than creating one. Writing a song and allowing 100 other people to know how it is played requires the exact same amount of labour as writing a song and keeping it all to yourself.

If your stick is stolen, you need to expend your labour again to get yourself back to the state you were in before the stick was stolen. If your song is "stolen", you don't need to do anything, you still have your song.

You do not. Allow me to explain.

You decide to labor to create a product, say a song, not for your own consumption but for sale. You spend a year writing a fantastic song, and you create a series of notes that is immensely valuable. Someone else takes this and makes it available to everyone else for free. You no longer have your song. Your song was created to sell, not for you to listen to, and that ability is gone.

Ultimately why do you ever labor at anything? To create value for yourself or others. This is economics. Ultimately why is theft ever wrong? Because the value that you created with your labor is taken from you.

Indeed, Swartz did break the law. He used JSTOR and violated its terms of the service. He was 2nd party to and bound by an agreement, regardless of whether what was being accessed is or isn't property. I like how Kinsella more correctly refers to IP as Intellectual Privilege, because that's exactly what it is. JSTOR licenses its database for a fee to grant users the privilege of the information within. Once a third party gets a hold of this privilege and it becomes public information (what Swartz was facilitating before being arrested), there is little if anything that can be done, as information, by definition, is not property.

This is dodging the point. Consider the issue at hand.

It doesn't matter that they're not using the book. It is their property... Use has no bearing on ownership...

Your entire basis for property ownership rests on being denied the use of it.

Stealing the book does in fact deprive them of the use of the item,

See?

for they no longer have the item.

What does it matter if they were never going to use it? Right?

The ability to sell a book is not a right. You need a buyer in order to sell.

This ignores the point. The ability to offer your product for sale is a right. Your right is to the value you have created.

If buyers are free to not buy at a set price, then a seller necessarily has no such right to sell. Accordingly, there is no such thing as the right to the value of property. Value is not an intrinsic feature of property. It is completely subjective between individuals.

This is a very common argument. It doesn't have to be intrinsic to be something you have a right to. Your right is to the value you have created... whatever that value is as determined subjectively by buyers in a free market. The fact that values fluctuate and that it is a subjective property doesn't mean that "accordingly there is no such thing as a right to value". I have no idea why that would follow.

You create a song and offer it for sale. It has some value, doesn't matter what, in the market. You created that value - this is economics and I think you agree with all of those statements. Someone else comes along and offers a competing song, now your song is worth a little less. You still have the rights to whatever the value is of the product you created. The work someone else did does not deprive you of the value you created. It, along with a million other things, change the value of your creation. When someone steals your song and makes it available to everyone, or simply steals it for themselves instead of buying it, they're obtaining the value you created for their own purposes.

Counterfeiting is fraud. Is it non-rivalrous? Not after it is used to defraud someone-- ie, steal their property.

Why is it theft?

It doesn't. Theft of property, by definition, must exclude its use by the rightful owner. If I take a dollar out of your thousand in the bank, you are excluded from the use of all one thousand dollars that you own. If a thing can be copied perfectly, non-destructively, ad infinitum, then it is not a scarce resource and cannot be property.

The ones and zeros that represent that dollar in the bank can be copied perfectly, non-destructively, ad infinitum (counterfeiting). It is not a scarce resource and as such cannot be property, right? So none of the money in my bank account can be property, right? It's not property until it's converted into a physical tangible bill rather than an intellectual abstract concept of value, right?

The whole reason we assign property rights to scarce resources is to preclude conflict over their use.

Nope. Otherwise you would not have property rights to anything you weren't using at the moment (no conflict, no property rights).

If you have an idea that is freely transferable and inexhaustibly productive, then you have the privilege of it, not the right to it.

You're just stating your conclusion.

Imari, you're missing the point. Labor doesn't matter. Labor is just a subset of action.

Murder is just a subset of action, and yet it has a lot to do with human rights. Human rights are entirely concerned with action. Property rights in particular, just like all human rights, stem from the fundamental issue of action. To pretend that property rights are about inanimate objects is to forget why rights exist in the first place.

Rather, the product that is a consequence of your actions has value. Therefore, you, in your capacity to act, have the value. Why? Because you can choose not to make the product unless compensated appropriately.

Sounds to me like action is all that matters.

 

[LeMansAid]

If your stick is stolen, you need to expend your labour again to get yourself back to the state you were in before the stick was stolen. If your song is "stolen", you don't need to do anything, you still have your song.

This has already been addressed by explaining that it's the value that is diminished or lost, but I thought I'd chime in with a "close to home" example.

Say Assetto Corsa's release coincided with a Steam glitch that allowed every single person with a Steam account free access...... Value lost. If done intentionally, why would that not be equal to traditional theft? You're going to simply say "Oh well, Kunos still has the code"?

For IP theft to actually be damaging, it's required that the thief make use of that IP with additional actions. That is not true of property theft. Stealing IP, in and of itself, does absolutely nothing.

If damage is the deciding factor then there's probably plenty of things that I could take from others even in my own neighbourhood that would not cause any damage to the owner. Plenty of people have all sorts of property that they have forgotten about, and will never use. Thing is, I have no right to judge that, only the owner has that right. Just as you have no right to presuppose what a songwriter, programmer, etc. will/won't do with their work.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Interesting debate. As a patent holder you're damn right I think intellectual property rights are a good idea - but as with everything, they need to be granted, upheld, and enforced with a degree of common-sense and morality. I don't think it's possible to level one single policy against all the hypothetical situations bought up in this thread. Different types of IP protection exist, and are more suitable for certain articles, for this reason.

Some people like to take, and some people like to create.

 

[gtone339]

Well, there's an interesting patent battle between Apple & Samsung. Hope it ends soon.

 

[Danoff]

Why was this thread so hard to find? I tried searching like 6 times this afternoon before I gave up. Without having read anything linked in this thread, I will at least say this:

If you hold a Lockean/Objectivist view of the labor theory of property, it will of course lead you to IP.

I will post more later. I really love this subject and wish I were better versed to argue in favor of scarce resources as property. Therefore, I will lean heavily on people like Kinsella, Hoppe, and Rothbard.

edit: Oh my god, I just read that article from The Atlantic. What a mess. What is this guy arguing against? There is no clarity or consistency at all. Am I going to have to respond in line to every paragraph?

Please listen and/or read this speech/transcript for a legitimate framework on property and why Lockean property is wrong:
Speech MP3: http://media.blubrry.com/kinsellaon...lockean-mistake-liberty-in-the-pines-2013.mp3
Transcript: http://c4sif.org/2013/04/lockes-big...-property-ruined-political-theory-transcript/

I'm listening to the speech. The very first bit he gets into with property rights already demonstrates that he's wrong:

This is exactly why the intellectual property idea is so fallacious. Intellectual property seeks to grant property rights in the ideas as well as we do in the scarce means. It makes no sense because you don’t need to put property rights on the ideas because they are not scarce. The entire purpose of property rights is to permit conflicts to be avoided in the use of the scarce means of action

Nope! Property rights are not some pragmatic, pulled out of the air, made up nonsense that we just threw into place because otherwise there would be conflict. That is the weakest basis for property rights I have ever read/heard. It's no wonder he doesn't understand IP, he doesn't understand property at all. I'll keep listening for more nonsense.

Holy crap, his whole basis for property rights is entirely based on utilitarianism and pragmatism. This is nonsense. He's conceding a complete lack of morality behind property rights, theft, and ultimately slavery as a result.

But the problem with Locke is the Labor Theory of Property. Again, the idea that you own things that you mix your labor with. This, obviously, is not true. For example, if I am an employee of a company, which Marx would abolish I guess, and I’m paid to mix my labor to build a chair out of the employer’s wood and nails, well, I mixed my labor with it, why don’t I own it? Well, because there is a contract and I never owned it in the first place.

Um... terrible example. In this example you're exchanging your labor for something you want. That's why you don't own the results of it. You've traded it for something else (pay). Why is this a problem with anything? Why does this disprove anything? Let's say you weren't exchanging your labor for pay. Let's say you started working someone else's land without their permission. Now you're mixing your labor with owned resources. Why don't you own it then? Because it's already owned. You can't re-appropriate someone else's property (their labor) by working on it. The only way to obtain property from nature is to work unowned resources.

It makes perfect sense, it's based on principle, there is no issue.

But this presupposes that these things are ownable. Not everything is ownable. My memories are not ownable. My love is not ownable. My past is not ownnable. The earth’s rotation is not ownable. These are characteristics, ways of describing the universe.

No it most certainly does not. Not everything is ownable, and that argument is not needed to understand intellectual property.

You could say, as a practical matter, that I own my actions or I own my memory because I can control them.

Now you're just punching a strawman.

However, even in today’s legal system, which characterizes the contractual realm that way, it doesn’t operate that way. So, for example, if I promise to sing a song for you at your son’s birthday party and I decide not to show up, then you can’t go get the cops to drag me there and make me sing, for several reasons. Number one, it wouldn’t be a very good song. I’m being compelled. And that is a practical consideration the courts use. Courts generally don’t enforce what is called specific performance which means they don’t actually treat contracts as binding promises. What they do is they make me pay $1,000 damages to the guy, in a contract law suit, which means really what the contract is is just a transfer of title to property. It’s as if I had said, “I’m predicting that I will sing at your son’s birthday party tomorrow. I’m just making a prediction because I know myself pretty well and I don’t think I’ll change very much between now and then. I can’t bind myself because I might change my mind. But I tell you what, to give my future self an inducement to sing, I will hereby transfer to you $1,000 in damage payments, conditioned upon my not singing”.

Wrong again. The contract is time-delayed transfer of value. If you fail to transfer the goods as described you can be ordered by the court to transfer an equivalent value.

But we don’t acquire our bodies and our bodies were never unowned. From the moment you were a legal person or a philosophical person, you were identified and tightly bound up with a body.

Using the law to determine the principle? Not a good move. You own your body because every single thing you do is a mix of your labor with your body.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Should the estate of a Nazi war criminal be entitled to enforce copyright on his written work?

This publisher says not.

 

[JKgo]

...This might be THE most interesting thread I stumbled onto here on GTP. Too bad it has died down a little.

This issue intrigues me 'cuz I'm in the midst of writing a novel and self-publish it, on (probably) Amazon or somesuch.

This book will be the result of my labor, and I'm expecting to be fully compensated, if you read it.
Simply put, without being protected by IP rights, I won't be fed.
I hope to read more from the well read and erudite GTP members...
Please come back, post more stuff!!

 

[TenEightyOne]

Sort-of-on-topic; what is the 'meaning' of an original painting as compared to a well-executed fake?

Does knowing that one of several Old Master works is fake somehow devalue the experience of viewing them all?

BBC.

 

[niky]

Should the estate of a Nazi war criminal be entitled to enforce copyright on his written work?

This publisher says not.

I'd disagree. Being a criminal does not invalidate your rights. The rights to financial gain from stolen property, maybe, but financial gain from your own writing? No.

 

[TenEightyOne]

I'd disagree. Being a criminal does not invalidate your rights. The rights to financial gain from stolen property, maybe, but financial gain from your own writing? No.

I have to agree with you; all cases should be judged by what's right legally rather than by how much any given party might have wronged in other cases.

 

[niky]

I have to agree with you; all cases should be judged by what's right legally rather than by how much any given party might have wronged in other cases.

And then, the turnaround would be... the estate of the War Criminal in question has to use that money to pay indemnity to the families of his victims.

As it is, however, the publishing house is profiting from someone else's written work without paying royalties for it, which is immoral and unethical in and of itself.

 

[Danoff]

I'd disagree. Being a criminal does not invalidate your rights. The rights to financial gain from stolen property, maybe, but financial gain from your own writing? No.

Being a criminal does invalidate your rights. It's up to society to determine a proportional punishment.

 

[TenEightyOne]

And then, the turnaround would be... the estate of the War Criminal in question has to use that money to pay indemnity to the families of his victims.

Precisely, and that's what happened (in the form of the reparations agreements).

Being a criminal does invalidate your rights. It's up to society to determine a proportional punishment.

I don't think it removes your rights though, and certainly not as a whole. Punishment (or a prior socially-agreed due process) can simply prevent you from exercising certain of them.

 

[Danoff]

I don't think it removes your rights though, and certainly not as a whole. Punishment (or a prior socially-agreed due process) can simply prevent you from exercising certain of them.

Someone who is "prevented from exercising certain [rights]" for committing a crime, say, for example, the right to leave the premises - like when someone is in jail, has lost the right to liberty. The degree to which they have lost their right to liberty (how many years behind bars) is socially determined in an attempt to find a proportional punishment to fit the crime. The reason you can put someone behind bars and not be a criminal, is because they have lost their own rights by committing a crime.