Against Intellectual Property Rights (1 Viewer)

[volition]

Ok I'm going to try and present the argument against IP, just taking together bits and pieces from different articles/sites :

The ethical argument:
To enforce IP is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. It'd be like violating freedom of speech or press.

The problem is, once the information is already in somebody else's head, you can't really have any claim to it. Otherwise, you'd end up owning other people.

When this is applied to patents, the situation becomes even weirder. Does that mean we should all pay a fee to Newton's estate every time we used one of his principles like gravity? Can a person really own the rights to laws of nature?

The economic argument:
Economically, property rights exist because of scarcity. When you take something from a person, that deprives them of that thing, meaning they can't use it anymore.

But information is not like this, getting it doesn't reduce somebody else's share, so property rights in IP are not needed.

Sure, it could be argued that without IP rights, people might not be motivated to write books/research new drugs, but this has to be weighed up with the costs of what is essentially a state-imposed monopoly.

Some of the costs of the patent system include:

• If there were no patent system, businesses wouldn't have to worry about defensively spending money to get patents to use in counterclaims
  
• Patent litigation costs involved, filing and maintenance costs
  
• Patents normally apply only to 'practical' applications of ideas, and not so much for theoretical or abstract ideas. Maybe businesses would be more inclined to actually research these now.
  
• It may also be the case that people are more induced to invent 'patentable' inventions, and spend less time actually making improvements

Information based argument:
These days, with increasing use of computers and the internet, the information that would otherwise be publicly available is increasing becoming costly and difficult to get access to. You also have to question what the point of copyright laws would be in a world where anyone can basically make thousands of copies of a document and send them all over the place. It'd kinda be like trying to outlaw peeping toms in a world where everyone has x-ray vision.

Alternatives:
Maybe instead of having IP rights over something, a person who copies somebody else's work and claims it as their own, can be sued for defrauding the people who bought the work? In this case, what you would do (as the true author of the work), you could buy a copy (so you can claim to be a customer now) and then bring a class action against the copier.

There's also stuff like DRM or signal scrambling in the case of cable TV. It's not a complete solution though, because there will always be ways around it like P2P or signal descrambling.

Maybe we could have some kind of voluntary compliance system, where via organised boycotts, the original creator is able to 'protect their work'.

I'm curious to see what you guys think about this

 

[iamsickofyear12]

If you can summarise that in 3 sentences I will read it.

 

[volition]

If you can summarise that in 3 sentences I will read it.

lol ok
1. ethical argument - The problem is, once information is already in somebody else's head, you can't really have any claim to it. Otherwise, you'd end up owning other people.
2. economic argument - Information is not like physical property, getting it doesn't reduce somebody else's share, so property rights in IP are not needed.
3. information argument - Given how easy it is to copy stuff, it'd kinda be like trying to outlaw peeping toms in a world where everyone has x-ray vision.

 

[iamsickofyear12]

When this is applied to patents, the situation becomes even weirder. Does that mean we should all pay a fee to Newton's estate every time we used one of his principles like gravity? Can a person really own the rights to laws of nature?

You can't patent anything. You couldn't patent a law of nature or something that everyone already knows. It has to be specific.

But information is not like this, getting it doesn't reduce somebody else's share, so property rights in IP are not needed.

Sure, it could be argued that without IP rights, people might not be motivated to write books/research new drugs, but this has to be weighed up with the costs of what is essentially a state-imposed monopoly.

It does if the person who gets it sells it in competition with the person that came up with the idea in the first place.

As far as I am aware that is the main argument for intellectual property rights. You make it seem really simple. It is much more than books and new drugs. It would include all innovation. No one would have any incentive to improve anything because others would just be allowed to take it from them.

Creating a state-imposed monopoly is the whole point. That way a person can make money from their idea and other people can come up with new ideas to compete... but like I said you can't just patent anything so it most situations it doesn't overly restrict competition. Intellectual property rights help competition.

These days, with increasing use of computers and the internet, the information that would otherwise be publicly available is increasing becoming costly and difficult to get access to. You also have to question what the point of copyright laws would be in a world where anyone can basically make thousands of copies of a document and send them all over the place. It'd kinda be like trying to outlaw peeping toms in a world where everyone has x-ray vision.

But they do manage to outlaw them. Of course individuals pirate music and programs and such, but you don't see businesses copying the ideas of other businesses, at least not all the time, because they would be fined/banned from doing it.

Maybe instead of having IP rights over something, a person who copies somebody else's work and claims it as their own, can be sued for defrauding the people who bought the work? In this case, what you would do (as the true author of the work), you could buy a copy (so you can claim to be a customer now) and then bring a class action against the copier.

What would that accomplish that existing laws don't?

Maybe we could have some kind of voluntary compliance system, where via organised boycotts, the original creator is able to 'protect their work'.

Wouldn't work. No one would boycott a product that would make them better off.

 

[Serius]

Wouldn't work. No one would boycott a product that would make them better off.

huh? isnt that the whole idea of boycotts? you refuse to pay for goods or services because you dont like what they represent or what the company does, even though you would be better off purchasing.

 

[iamsickofyear12]

huh? isnt that the whole idea of boycotts? you refuse to pay for goods or services because you dont like what they represent or what the company does, even though you would be better off purchasing.

Large scale boycotts are hardly effective... there is certainly no way it would work on a large enough scale to act as a replacement for intellectual property rights. People will always come back to putting themselves first.

 

[withoutaface]

Up until recently I avoided taking a stance on IP because it is by its nature very abstract and contentious, but here's my ideas:

Basis for IP as property
Property exists as a fundamental extension of a man's ownership of his body. The concept states that if he uses his body, along with natural resources he acquires through legitimate means (I can explain this further if you like), anything produced by the mixing of his labour with said resources should also belong to him. This further applies to mixing labour with capital goods to produce a consumer good or lower-order capital good. When man produces ideas, he mixes his labour with existing information which he has acquired from legitimate means, therefore those ideas should be his property.

Furthermore, ideas can be both consumer goods (e.g. book, song, etc) or capital goods (e.g. a recipe for a cake), so they act like other property in this regard.

This is not to say that if someone else comes up with the same idea as me, independently, that they are not free to use it as they see fit. It is, after all, their idea also by the arguments I've already made, and it would be up to me to prove that they did not derive it independently in order to gain any compensation from them.

The ethical argument:
To enforce IP is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. It'd be like violating freedom of speech or press.

The problem is, once the information is already in somebody else's head, you can't really have any claim to it. Otherwise, you'd end up owning other people.

When this is applied to patents, the situation becomes even weirder. Does that mean we should all pay a fee to Newton's estate every time we used one of his principles like gravity? Can a person really own the rights to laws of nature?

You've here implied that people can possess the information in a legitimate manner. If I produce a product and sell it along with a contract that forbids reverse engineering, then nobody can possibly "know" the idea legitimately, and so we avoid this entire argument. In the case of things which are easily reverse engineered, such as a song, it would perhaps be more expedient for contracts to dictate no reverse engineering to use for reproduction or whatever.

I'll write some more tomorrow or at some other point when I'm less tired.

EDIT: The economic argument can be tackled by the following:

1. Property exists because of the innate right to have exclusive dominion over what I produce. Scarcity is a utilitarian justification. Consider if Person A owns an oven, and puts it to use baking bread, and he can make ten loaves in a day. If Person B can take the oven from A, bake twenty loaves in a day, then gives A ten loaves plus the oven back, is B justified in taking the oven without A's permission? No, but in such a circumstance voluntary trade would probably occur where A receives eleven loaves and both are better off. Apply this to the case of a song, and we see that the artist loses nothing material by having a consumer download their work illegally, but would possibly gain a few dollars from them if such a download could not occur, ergo they lose out if they don't have control over their IP.
2. You're right to create a dichotomy between abstract and practical ideas, but they are both goods and they both have value (otherwise they wouldn't be created). The former are consumer goods in and of themselves, whereas the latter are generally capital goods used to create consumer goods further down the line.

The enforcement of such property rights could well occur through voluntary compliance, as has been argued by Rothbard here based on the success of merchant courts in the past, where non-compliance meant exile.

Once again I'm sure I'll have more to add later, and will probably reformat this into a blog post about IP.

 

[volition]

You can't patent anything. You couldn't patent a law of nature or something that everyone already knows. It has to be specific.

But in some ways this distinction between 'laws of nature' and something 'specific' are artificial. Laws of nature themselves come in varying degrees of generality and specificity. To give you an example from one libertarian:

if it is a law of nature that copper conducts electricity, it is no less a law of nature that this much copper, arranged in this configuration, with these other materials arranged so, makes a workable battery.

Part of the argument is that you can't really say "this is specific" and that isn't in any meaningful way. So it kind of makes the whole idea ridiculous in the first place.

It does if the person who gets it sells it in competition with the person that came up with the idea in the first place.

But you're speaking in the sense that they're competing, not in the sense that I meant it in, which is that the baker is not "deprived of his 10 loaves".

As far as I am aware that is the main argument for intellectual property rights. You make it seem really simple. It is much more than books and new drugs. It would include all innovation. No one would have any incentive to improve anything because others would just be allowed to take it from them.

Yeah ok, but then why are there examples of people who did invent things anyway?

Nearly all works written before 1900 are in the public domain, yet pre-1900 works are still published, and still sell.

In the 19th century, British authors had no copyright protection under American law, yet they received royalties from American publishers nonetheless.

Creating a state-imposed monopoly is the whole point. That way a person can make money from their idea and other people can come up with new ideas to compete... but like I said you can't just patent anything so it most situations it doesn't overly restrict competition. Intellectual property rights help competition.

I understand why you might want to do this, but at the same time... I just can't get over the idea that whatever number of years the state gives is hugely arbitrary and not based on any sort of moral principle. Whats the difference between 20 years and 2000 years as far as this is concerned?

in response to information argument:
But they do manage to outlaw them. Of course individuals pirate music and programs and such, but you don't see businesses copying the ideas of other businesses, at least not all the time, because they would be fined/banned from doing it.

Problem is though, now there are concerns that the government would have to take over the entire internet to be able to regulate the flow of information to actually accomplish this. This would be catastrophic, everything would be slowed to a snail's pace.

What would that accomplish that existing laws don't?

It'd be cheaper and more consistent than the current laws where so much money is lost to protect ideas from other people patenting them.

Wouldn't work. No one would boycott a product that would make them better off.

The private courts or whatever the artists/inventors set up could have voluntary hearings for alleged cases of piracy and the pirate could be asked to voluntarily pay restitution or face boycott by the other businesses who all kind of 'subscribe' to this court.

You've here implied that people can possess the information in a legitimate manner. If I produce a product and sell it along with a contract that forbids reverse engineering, then nobody can possibly "know" the idea legitimately, and so we avoid this entire argument. In the case of things which are easily reverse engineered, such as a song, it would perhaps be more expedient for contracts to dictate no reverse engineering to use for reproduction or whatever.

Sure this is a way that authors/inventors can protect their stuff, but this is via contract law. I'm more referring to the ethics of actually "owning information".

To put this into an example, lets say the pirate has breached the contract and reverse engineered the mp3s and put them online. Let's say some other people download those mp3s (who aren't a party to the contract), and now the author is trying to exert his claim over information that is now already in somebody else's brain, as some kind of absolute right. It doesn't seem to work to me!

Does the author now have the claim to the part of the guys brain that holds his song on it?

 

[withoutaface]

Sure this is a way that authors/inventors can protect their stuff, but this is via contract law. I'm more referring to the ethics of actually "owning information".

I don't see the distinction. I'm working in a universe where private arbitration enforces both attacks upon property (where property is not the human body) and contracts, and the contracts that I speak of merely establish that the idea remains the property of the individual author, but others may, for a price, gain some utility from it, much the same as hiring a car or piece of excavation equipment.

To put this into an example, lets say the pirate has breached the contract and reverse engineered the mp3s and put them online. Let's say some other people download those mp3s (who aren't a party to the contract), and now the author is trying to exert his claim over information that is now already in somebody else's brain, as some kind of absolute right. It doesn't seem to work to me!

Does the author now have the claim to the part of the guys brain that holds his song on it?

This is a scenario much the same as if I steal a car and resell it to someone else, which resolves itself as follows:

There could be no room, in a free society such as we have out*lined, for “negotiable instruments.” Where the government desig*nates a good as “negotiable,” if A steals it from B and then sells it to C without the latter’s knowledge of the theft, B cannot take the good back from C. Despite the fact that A was a thief and had no proper title to the good, C is decreed to be the legitimate owner, and B has no way of regaining his property. The law of negotiability is evidently a clear infringement of property right.

It would be up to the person who reverse-engineered in the first place to compensate the original owner for every copy they have distributed.

Further stuff on copyright:

Violation of (common law) copyright is an equivalent violation of contract and theft of property. For suppose that Brown builds a better mousetrap and sells it widely, but stamps each mousetrap “copyright Mr. Brown.” What he is then doing is selling not the entire property right in each mousetrap, but the right to do anything with the mousetrap except to sell it or an identical copy to someone else. The right to sell the Brown mousetrap is retained in perpetuity by Brown. Hence, for a mousetrap buyer, Green, to go ahead and sell identical mousetraps is a violation of his contract and of the property right of Brown, and therefore prosecutable as theft. Hence, our theory of property rights includes the inviolability of contractual copyright.

A common objection runs as follows: all right, it would be criminal for Green to produce and sell the Brown mousetrap; but suppose that someone else, Black, who had not made a contract with Brown, happens to see Green’s mousetrap and then goes ahead and produces and sells the replica? Why should he be prosecuted? The answer is that, as in the case of our critique of negotiable instruments, no one can acquire a greater property title in something than has already been given away or sold. Green did not own the total property right in his mousetrap, in accordance with his contract with Brown—but only all rights except to sell it or a replica. But, therefore Black’s title in the mousetrap, the ownership of the ideas in Black’s head, can be no greater than Green’s, and therefore he too would be a violator of Brown’s property even though he himself had not made the actual contract.

Of course, there may be some difficulties in the actual enforcement of Brown’s property right. Namely, that, as in all cases of alleged theft or other crime, every defendant is innocent until proven guilty. It would be necessary for Brown to prove that Black (Green would not pose a problem) had access to Brown’s mousetrap, and did not invent this kind of mousetrap by himself independently. By the nature of things, some products (e.g., books, paintings) are easier to prove to be unique products of individual minds than others (e.g., mousetraps).1

 

[volition]

It would be up to the person who reverse-engineered in the first place to compensate the original owner for every copy they have distributed.

Ok this could work.

Only thing is, that means there's nothing that can be done about that 3rd party guy redistributing it further and further (eg. P2P), because he's not a party to the original contract.

 

[jimmayyy]

what an interesting thread

EDIT: i just realised how sarcastic that sounded, but i was being serious