You are right that when you conceive of an idea, it is yours and yours alone. But when you share it with me, it is not something you can reclaim from me like a piece of tangible property lent or rented out. And if it is a good idea, beneficial to man’s welfare, it is no less profitable to you if a million other souls are making use of it while you are trying to use it, the way you would not be able to use your car or your house if a million others were trying to use that. And the economic and aesthetic benefits of everyone being able to build on one another’s ideas and inventions without fear of legal reprisal are hard to quantify or even imagine. Or they would be hard to imagine, if we did not have the advantage of seeing something like it firsthand on the Internet.
But the most important consideration in this debate is not economic, but moral. If a presumed right requires unjust acts to enforce, it is not a right at all, or at best unenforceable in a just society. IP rights are a violation of others’ real property rights, and even intellectual freedom. The most fundamental IP protections violate the 1st Amendment, stripping us of freedom of speech, if we dare to repeat what we have heard from the copyright holder. If I use a literal, actual printing press to disseminate a good idea other than my own, my freedom of press is violated, and you, the copyright holder, get to violate my tangible property rights for your IP rights. But if I can trace some hint of your idea back to something I once said in front of some witnesses somewhere, we can go at it round-robin in the courts until we die. Worse still, if I come up with a brilliant idea that is in some way based on your idea, you have the right to my idea, the fruit of my intellect, if I should dare try to share it with anyone. Without IP rights, there is no conflict, no paradox, only freedom. You come up with good ideas that benefit humanity, and I disseminate them, and humanity benefits from them.
There is some sense in which you can keep the recipe for your “secret sauce” secret from competitors for a competitive advantage, but when you fail to maintain the secrecy and use the force of government to make up for it, you’ve crossed the line into violating others’ property rights. The government cannot legitimately enforce IP rights, because it is a force of coercion and intimidation without any legitimate claim to its own property or mandate.
But the most important consideration in this debate is not economic, but moral. If a presumed right requires unjust acts to enforce, it is not a right at all, or at best unenforceable in a just society. IP rights are a violation of others’ real property rights, and even intellectual freedom. The most fundamental IP protections violate the 1st Amendment, stripping us of freedom of speech, if we dare to repeat what we have heard from the copyright holder. If I use a literal, actual printing press to disseminate a good idea other than my own, my freedom of press is violated, and you, the copyright holder, get to violate my tangible property rights for your IP rights. But if I can trace some hint of your idea back to something I once said in front of some witnesses somewhere, we can go at it round-robin in the courts until we die. Worse still, if I come up with a brilliant idea that is in some way based on your idea, you have the right to my idea, the fruit of my intellect, if I should dare try to share it with anyone. Without IP rights, there is no conflict, no paradox, only freedom. You come up with good ideas that benefit humanity, and I disseminate them, and humanity benefits from them.
There is some sense in which you can keep the recipe for your “secret sauce” secret from competitors for a competitive advantage, but when you fail to maintain the secrecy and use the force of government to make up for it, you’ve crossed the line into violating others’ property rights. The government cannot legitimately enforce IP rights, because it is a force of coercion and intimidation without any legitimate claim to its own property or mandate.
That's true, as we've seen it become easier and easier for people to freely share music, the quality of music has steadily increased. Why, just think if people still only wrote music as well as Bach instead of having Lady GaGa!
ReplyDeleteSarcasm aside, though laws regarding IP were non-existent when Beethoven was composing and are stringent now, I think the key factor is technology instead of laws. Authors tended to live miserable lives and were abused by publishers since they had no copyright protections for their works well into the 19th century.
Your arguments are vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum. If my rights to property are inviolate, how if I buy up all the land around yours and then deny you access to your own land? Do your rights get to trample mine or vice versa?
With IP, you seem only to be referring to ideas that then take shape in corporeal form. Books, stories, music and so forth only have value insofar as one can charge for access to the idea. If it is freely available to anyone, then it does become valueless to the creator.
There is some sense in which you can keep the recipe for your “secret sauce” secret from competitors for a competitive advantage, but when you fail to maintain the secrecy and use the force of government to make up for it, you’ve crossed the line into violating others’ property rights.
That sounds like an argument in favor of corporate espionage and against the viability of NDAs. Can you legally bind me to secrecy when my freedom of speech is a fundamental right? Even if you call it a contract between individuals, you'll end up relying on the government to violate my free speech rights in order to enforce any penalties.
I think IP laws are probably too draconian as currently written, but I think your idea throws the baby out with the bathwater.
That text color choice worked out well! Sarcasm aside, I wasn't trying to post that in black.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, it violates no one's property rights to have arbitration, or for society to voluntarily submit to the judgement of judges who are paid for their time, but not allowed to make laws or rule over anyone. Such judges would rule in individual cases, as our courts were originally intended to, not make law or "interpret" it. This is important for a discussion of contract enforcement.
Anyway, who says authors are entitled to live luxuriously while most of those around them live miserable lives? But with government in charge of protecting IP rights, we have innocent women going to jail and "owing" $100,000's because their 9-year-olds went crazy on file-sharing sites. Authors having to work part time at the hardware store seems like a lesser cosmic injustice.
But the principle of terrestrial justice is unambiguous. Coercive force to make women pay $100,000's for the way their children use their computer is unjust. Refraining from coercing anyone on behalf of anyone else is just.
The examples you present are interesting, but rely on your interpretation of libertarianism, wherein society is flaccid and helpless without government. Do adults need government to protect them from trans fats? Or can they choose to eat healthier without a nanny state holding their hand? Likewise, can a man and his ring-tracted neighbor work out their own problems with an arbitrator, and so that both can remain participants in society? I say there are imaginable ways to work around such a problem, but better ways that would be imagined only in such a situation. In any case, two free men can freely choose a judge to judge between them.
Obviously, NDA's also fall under the same heading: tell it to the judge. Even if there were no judge, what would a free society do with someone who has a history of breach of contract? Banks extend a little credit to those of limited creditworthiness, more credit to those who have proved somewhat higher creditworthiness, and lavish huge credit card balances with rewards points upon those with excellent credit. All this with government interfering to "protect" us. How much more would a reputation be worth if we had to interact voluntarily?
"Books, stories, music and so forth only have value insofar as one can charge for access to the idea." (Sorry I don't know the html tag for italics.)
And that takes the cake! It certainly is more ridiculous than anything I've written in recent years. What do people buy them for, if they can't charge (nearly as much) for them?
You assert baldly that it is not just for a parent to be held responsible for the breaking of laws by her minor child. You then assert baldly that it is never just to coerce anyone on behalf of a third party. I have some Holocaust survivors who might like to dispute that last assertion. (If you happen to be one of the imbeciles who cite Godwin's Law as if were an argument, substitute Kurds or any other oppressed group who was freed by force of arms.) Taking your first assertion, who are you to decide that is unjust? If I assert its justice, will you demonstrate its innate injustice or will you appeal to an authority? If the latter, what will you say to anyone who doesn't recognize that authority, as indeed you do not in the case of "government".
ReplyDeleteYour faith in the perfectibility of man is touching, but perplexing as well. You fail to give any mention to malice on the part of two people whom you would send to arbitration to resolve their difficulties. If I have the whip hand, I may not want to humbly submit to a judge unless I had no choice in the matter.
Okay, so I know your religious beliefs (to a degree); we are brothers. But it confounds me how you can imagine that this essential non-existence of the government can be anything like possible. Was not this the original state of man? No human governments? And what happened? We (humanity) created them. The natural state of fallen man is to live in a society where a great deal of power is collected in the hands of very few men. The reason is because if you have diffused power among people, it doesn't take long for some men to find ways to begin to gather it again. The genius of the US constitution is that ways were found to limit it to a large degree. Time will only tell whether or not it's been more than temporarily successful. Quite a few ancient empires and kingdoms lasted longer than our brief exercise in self-government. I agree, it would be far better if we could get everyone to forego coercion and humbly love their neighbours as themselves. But, assuming that the world continues as it is, where such a state does not obtain, what is your fallback for dealing with, oh, Attila the Hun?
Men will band together for the purposes of evil; the solution is not to forbid men banding together for the purposes of good.
Of course music only has value if you can charge for it. If your neighbour is giving away the same idea for free, will you bother to buy it? People buy them to have them, not because they are similarly fungible as money is. You posit a world where no one pays for anything creative; tell me why then anyone would spend much time making anything creative. Would such a situation apply to pharmaceuticals? If only the government refused to keep anyone from giving them away for free, we would soon have far more wonder drugs than we could shake a stick at (if that's your idea of medicine).
You're going to have to argue from a stronger position than universal good-will toward men.
Authors having to work part time at the hardware store seems like a lesser cosmic injustice.
ReplyDeleteIf you're interested in serving cosmic justice, you might want to read Thomas Sowell's book on the topic, The Quest for Cosmic Justice,.
(I could not finish my several hundred word reply, so here's a brief retort.) If music only has value if you can charge for it, that is news to, well, every musician ever. In fact, why sing at church? To increase the contribution? And you imply that the same holds true for everything IP-related, including ideas, but that opinion is inevitably apostatic: if Christ's words, teachings, ideas only held the value that He could charge for them, monetarily, what good was anything that He did? He died on the cross for our sins, but He did not make Himself or any of us any money by doing so, so that invalidates the His teachings.
ReplyDeleteYou can make more money taking overtime at work by never speaking to your children again; after all, what monetary gain can you expect from it?
This is a very strange argument from someone who criticized the subjective theory of value as materialistic.
And I did not posit a world where no one pays for anything creative, just as I did not advocate forbidding banding together. In fact, I don't advocate forcefully forbidding anything mutually voluntary, including how people choose to use their computers or their pharmaceuticals or their homeopathic concoctions.
Are you so smart that you know everything that does or doesn't have medicinal value? Do you have confidence that bureaucrats become that smart once they take their seats in their overcapitalized offices inside the Beltway? Then why prohibit people from testing these things in a mutually agreeable way apart from the diktat of the FDA?
Has technology ever managed to progress in the absence of government patents? Why don't we find someone who has studied history to ask whether practical science has ever, anywhere managed to advance without government?
Maybe you should write a book called "Silent Spring" about the cessation of music that would take place without government protection.
Your faith in the perfection of bureaucrats is touching, but inconsistent with your religious beliefs. You're going to have to argue from a stronger position than a Candide-like optimism about government.
(P.S. The "cosmic injustice" line was an apparently too-subtle jab at the implication that government is needed to sort out incomes amongst authors, musicians, and others in society.)
And I suppose that now that Mr. Reznor is venturing outside the wall that the State has built around his income (http://theslip.nin.com/), he will die a pauper in the gutter?
ReplyDeleteYour first paragraph sounds an awful lot like an admission that music has a value that cannot be quantified monetarily, which I believe you argued against last time. I thought that this was the founding idea of praxeology or whatever it's called was that everything has a value that can be expressed in monetary terms? That all things are fungible?
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to find that we agree some things have value that isn't monetary.
Moving on, your idea seemed to be that payment for things creative need only be done once since the buyer is then free to distribute the creative idea freely and without restriction. In fact, if you can be so clever as to get the idea without payment, there is no theft since the idea (in your statement) loses no value when transferred from one person to another. No loss in value, no theft.
On the other hand, if, like me, one thinks there is a value to (for example) music that is monetary as well as non-monetary that is diminished when the author has his idea taken and distributed without his consent, IP laws make sense.
For all the fallibility of the government, I still prefer it to the Hobbesian anarchy you're proposing. And that's assuming that it would even stay that way. After a while, these voluntary associations you imagine become governments.
Besides, this communal sharing of ideas has been tried, to a degree, in the socialist countries of the world. And we all know how much wonderful literature, art, music, and technology they produced. What little they did accomplish was derived from granting extra compensation for ideas to those who were creative.
Finally, sure, Mr Reznor will probably make out okay. But how if he didn't have the protection of his initial work? Name me someone else who makes what he does while having always given his work away for free.
I keep trying to post my reply, but it won't stick. Maybe it's too long. I'll try to post it in two halves. Let me preface it by saying that our disagreement is not in whether artists and inventors should be paid for their work, but whether the mechanism should be a governmental ones that violates other rights, or a private sector one that might wind up paying less, but does not violate anyone's rights.
ReplyDeleteThere were advances in medicine before government prohibited patients and doctors from seeking each other out without the blessing of the AMA's monopoly. People even occasionally got better! In fact, Jonas Salk did not have to pass $200,000,000 FDA trials to vaccinate people against polio. If you know anything about history, tell me how we're doing against polio.
Yes, with Obama on the job, surely the government's appointing of medical monopolies is about to pay off, but I'd like to see the proof in the pudding before I throw my handful of confetti.
As I've pointed out before, I neither believe in the perfectability of man, nor do my opinions imply such a belief. They merely imply that voluntary interaction (such as at the grocery store) is a better way to deal with the imperfections in man, and with the scarcity of the world in general, than the coercion of man-made governments (such as at the local DMV). Of course the ideal way is for everybody to submit to Christ and emulate his love. He seemed to have a dim view of the odds of that, but He never advocated using force to obtain obedience to His will. In fact, such a use of force is a usurpation of His sovereignty. The rulers of the pagans lord it over them, and their mighty men are called "benefactors." Not so with Christ's disciples.
Let's delve deeper into religion. When the Israelites deviated from voluntarian arbitration to a coercive government to protect them from evil men who had banded together, what did God have to say about that? He said they had not rejected their judge, but Him (God). I suppose you might say that God did not oppose coercive government in general, but the departure from His particular system of judges and whatnot. That God wanting that setup was for that era alone.
But God criticizes with eternal criticisms: "[Your ruler] will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some to do his plowing and reap his harvest and make his weapons of war... he will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves and give them to his servants [or campaign contributors]." And so forth. The biggest difference, technological advances notwithstanding, is that the evil, greedy king God was warning them about would take 10% of their income, not 50% like our constitutional republic.
Is it any good to do what is right when you are forced to? If so, would God have created a world where anyone could choose to sin? Why not just tell Adam and Eve that a cherub warrior would chop their heads of with a flaming sword and they would spend an eternity in hell if they even thought about eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why not, as our government does, did He not punish for getting close to stepping on the periphery of the edge of the boundary of something near to doing wrong? Then Adam and Eve wouldn't have had the chance to doom humanity to a world of disease, death, and strife. If only our good conservative lawmakers had been there to advise God!
So does God value good deeds done to please men? Christ said that they have received their reward in full. What does Christ have to say about imposing God's will on those who do not want it? Precious little. Far from forcing people to do what is right, He went so far as to talk people out of following Him!
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteIf you believe that music has value that cannot be quantified monetarily, then I missed the sarcastic irony in this sentence: "Of course music only has value if you can charge for it." Perhaps I'm duller than your usual readers. Anyway, I never argued that everything has value that can be quantified monetarily, and I think it shows a lack of intellectual integrity for you to dispute what I'm saying without taking the time to read it more carefully than that. Either your reading comprehension is not up to snuff (which I doubt), or you did not take the time to read what was said before setting about disputing it (which is dismaying).
To facetiously paraphrase an early retort of yours, one might well look at Biblical claims of absolute truth and absolute morality and say, "This 'theory of everything' type of belief smacks to me of the tyrannies imposed by those who would deny..." etc. "Every action results in an equal and opposite reaction? This 'theory of everything' type of belief smacks..." If you stop learning what someone is trying to convey as soon as it smacks of something objectionable to you, it is presumptuous to try to dispute it. He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him. (I didn't steal that: it's still in the Bible; apparently I just copied it!)
"Besides, this communal sharing of ideas has been tried, to a degree, in the socialist countries of the world.... What little they did accomplish was derived from granting extra compensation for ideas to those who were creative."
That's nonsense. If socialist countries had done away with state-issued IP monopolies, what does your latter sentence even mean? Your argument is that we know that nothing good comes from doing what I'm suggesting, because these countries have already tried it and produced diddley-naught in the way of art and technology; BUT what they did manage to produce in the way of art they eked out because they didn't really do what I'm proposing. So they did but they didn't, and that proves me wrong? If ever a government had more to do with the creative process, and was less like what I'm proposing, than the U.S. government, it was that of the U.S.S.R.
Part 3:
ReplyDeleteSimply put, my view is that creative minds are better positioned to creatively come up with ways to profit from their ideas than, say, a bureaucrat. Even though, with the coercive power of the government at his disposal, the bureaucrat may actually get the creative genius more money than he would have otherwise, it is a truism that this can be accomplished only at the expense of productive people. Coercive entities do not produce or enhance the production of wealth, they merely redistribute it. While it is true that no one (yet) is forced to buy cd's they do not want, artists and their fans are artificially limited in the ways they can interact with each other, in contrast to the freedom of not having IP law. Once again, many artists freely distribute their songs on the internet in order to promote their live performances to which they charge admission. No IP law required. I don't know if the Grateful Dead were rich, or if they spent all their money on weed, but I doubt if they wanted for anything as they went around encouraging their fans to bootleg recordings of their live shows. The point is not that every musician will make as much money as Trent Reznor without the IP regime, but that musicians will not necessarily starve to death or give up their craft to work at Foot Locker if the state does not intervene on their behalf.
Same with inventors, who, it has been noted before, often do not become rich from their inventions, as the company that hired them has made them sign a contract relinquishing the royalty rights to their inventions. Still they invent. Why? Must be patent law. Or perhaps the uncoerced interactions of free persons would produce inventions and even, difficult as this might be to imagine, remuneration for inventions. Since so many inventors already work for corporations that take their patent rights away, presumably they would still work and invent without patent law. Corporations would have to use their own resources to protect their technological advantages, or (horror!) they might be spread throughout the industry and the advantage passed on to consumers.
But the bottom line has nothing to do with whether or not IP law makes us richer or more advanced (it doesn't), or whether it benefits me personally (it well might); the question is, is it right? It's not. It requires the abrogation of real property rights in favor of monopoly privileges parading as property rights. Whether or not property rights are absolute, in the realm of morality, property rights trump state-granted monopoly privileges.
Part 4 (Okay, I'm starting to see why A: Blogspot doesn't want to publish my whole comment at once and B: you don't read the whole thing very carefully. If brevity is the soul of wit, I suppose that makes me a dullard.)
ReplyDeleteFinally, I'm not proposing Hobbesian anarchy; I'm proposing non-Hobbesian anarchy. And so what if the (inherently moral) voluntary associations in an anarchistic society become (inherently immoral) coercive government? That would mean, in the intervening time, we had so much more freedom and prosperity than we would starting out under a coercive government.
Why take your view of anarchy not from someone who has studied it or proposed it, but from a man who set it up as a straw man against which to argue to advocate absolute statism? I wonder if you have a favorable bias to him because of his tigrine namesake. Nevertheless, if you want to argue against anarchy, the least you could do is read a book advocating it. Other than the Bible.
Sweet gravy waffles, boy! Next time just write a blog post. I've got a bunch of stuff I haven't had time to post about (several books and movies and a few articles), but I'll get around to writing a post in response when I get some time.
ReplyDelete