Free Keene

Comment by Erik Voorhees

August 23, 2009 @ 12:17 pm

Can’t wait to get to New Hampshire!!! I don’t own a gun, they make me nervous, and they can be used for terrible things, but I’m damn glad there are some in New Hampshire who stand up for our inalienable right to bear them.

Comment by George Donnelly

August 23, 2009 @ 12:33 pm

Erik I’m sure if you take a firearms safety course and see enough other people practicing firearms safety while carrying you will quickly overcome your fears.

Comment by Paul

August 23, 2009 @ 2:07 pm

It seems like most MSM articles focus almost exclusively on open carry. If a bunch of people get together open carrying, it doesn’t matter what they do — the guns are going to be the story.

Comment by AnAmazedReader

August 23, 2009 @ 3:05 pm

This one was pretty priceless:

“There’s a great deal of control that is out of control.”

(perhaps the astonishingly articulate Ms. Goodwin is angling for the 2009 Yogi Berra Award for Intellectual Coherence)

Although this was a close second:

““I’m an Oath Keeper,” Bry said, pulling a card from his wallet that identified him as exactly that……“This is an organization to get the military to stand down and not force Americans into internment camps,” he said………Bry’s son, 9-year-old Kyle, had a black and orange airgun holstered on his side.”

Oh yes, you’re right; most people reading this article will take from it a tremendously positive impression of these folks. Barely literate, paranoid, heavily armed, and dogmatically convinced of their righteousness. What’s not to like?

Comment by CaptGooch

August 23, 2009 @ 4:14 pm

Excellent Anamazedreader.

When you don’t have any actual credible argument to the opinion being voiced by all means resort to ad hominem attack. Find fault with the messenger when you cannot fault the message.

Do you even know what an Oath Keeper is ?
I am guessing from your remarks that you do not.

You seem to ignore the unstated but obvious fact that the writer of the article made the decisions in what to put in and what to take out of the article so wouldn’t “intention of statement” rightfully be placed at Mr. Greisman’s feet rather than Mr Bry’s ?

Try here http://www.oathkeepers.org for actual information about them. If you have any desire to actually be educated rather than prejudiced about them.
[Yes, I am an Oath Keeper, since 1966.]

Oh and you might try using a less broad brush lest it get used on you in turn.
Things like socialist dupe, fascist provocateur and “Mob Rule” advocate just might spring to someones mind if they were to use the same broad brush technique.

Comment by QuestioningReader

August 23, 2009 @ 4:29 pm

AmazedReader’s right. This is not such a positive mention. It’s a human interest story highlighting the most “off the wall” aspects of a Free State Project related event.

Miltias, Oath Keepers, and bitter, paranoid open carrying ideologues. Why are these the only things mentioned? Because most people find it bizarre and fun to read about.

You know, like articles about dogs with incredible talents and people who find a box of treasure under their porch.

At least I hope that’s how people read it. Strange people with guns might not be as entertaining to most people as it is to me.

On the other hand, it is a mention. That’s good, right?

Comment by Zeus

August 23, 2009 @ 6:27 pm

This one was pretty priceless:

“There’s a great deal of control that is out of control.”

(perhaps the astonishingly articulate Ms. Goodwin is angling for the 2009 Yogi Berra Award for Intellectual Coherence)

Or perhaps you lack the ability to translate statements that don’t end in a proclamation of righteousness for a demented minority of people claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence to allegedly maintain social order?

I found it to be an eloquently simple statement describing how such a group of people, obsessed with controlling others, lack any control themselves.

It’s like coming up with a short-sighted plan to replace the sun’s gravity with the gravity of a black hole in order to maintain the position of the planets in the solar system. It’s overkill and ends in failure with the black hole consuming everything.

Not unlike how the tendency of tyrants to consume the liberties of others results in a police state.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Comment by Charlie

August 23, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

The Keene Sentinel has published many articles on libertarians and the Free Keene blog posts these original articles in full without so much as a quick cite to the original article. I think the Free Keene bloggers should do more to credit the newspaper. It’s also worth noting that at the bottom of the Sentinel Source website, it says:

All rights reserved. This material may not be broadcast, published, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.

Comment by Lpviper

August 23, 2009 @ 6:49 pm

Which ‘rights’ are being reserved, exactly?

Comment by Charlie

August 23, 2009 @ 7:02 pm

The right to the product of one’s labor, of course.

Comment by Anton Lee

August 23, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

I like how amazed took on another character. You’re doing it wrong. You’re supposed to put “Ghost of” in front of it.

Comment by CertainQuirk

August 23, 2009 @ 9:53 pm

Posted to SentinelSource.com:

Thank you Mr. Greisman. It’s nice to read coverage of an event that simply paints an interesting and informative picture and doesn’t try to nudge a reader to view it one way or another. Shawn Fair, Fleming, Colorado.

PS: ANAMAZEDREADER: Unlike the author of this article who revealed nothing of his character, you revealed yourself quite well. Read into that, and be amazed.

Comment by QuestioningReader

August 23, 2009 @ 10:09 pm

I’m not the same person as AmazedReader, just someone with reading comprehension and an admittedly uncreative self naming process.

Comment by Lpviper

August 23, 2009 @ 11:06 pm

Ok charlie, what if I buy me a copy and tape it to my front door? Or leave it on the coffee table where (Gasp!) some random non purchaser might read it? Or if I took a picture of it with my cell phone and sent it to the Pope?

What if? It would get more exposure for the newspaper, that’s what if.

I’m not convinced of a right to ideas, or to a collection of words. I think plagiarists would be easily caught in a society where major media were not so gubment-centric, and shamed and reviled as they should be. Why should we pay a gang of thugs to tell other people not to use our ideas at the point of a gun? How can such a thing reflect good will on the part of any artist or writer?

Comment by Zeus

August 23, 2009 @ 11:30 pm

It isn’t about a “right to ideas”. No offense, Viper, but I hear this mistake being made so often its become a repetitious cliche.

Ideas are nothing but easily-obtainable clay that we pass around on a daily basis through all manner of mediums.

Without the expended effort of a sculptor to shape the clay, it will remain little more than mud. Like an alchemist, a skilled sculptor can transform this base lead into artistic gold, from a jumble of valueless pieces to a single valuable whole.

Writers take words, which are free, and arrange them into brilliant novels, screenplays and poems. Artists take paint, colored goo, and create masterpieces with a specific arrangement of brush strokes. Musicians take notes, which anyone with an instrument can make, and arrange them into hit songs.

And no one has the right to someone else’s mental labor anymore than they have a right to their physical labor.

Comment by Lpviper

August 23, 2009 @ 11:39 pm

So then you contend it is aggression to use an idea that another has concocted? How can such a claim be positively proved? What if I thought it up all on my own five minutes before he did? Does the fact that he ran to the gang faster than I did make me an aggressor?

If I were a copycat and it were well known (Milli Vanilli, anyone?), I would have enough problems without having some ‘law enforcer’ breathing down my neck about it.

Define for me the break point. When does the copying of ideas become aggression, and how is the damage measured? What right of his fellow man’s is such a man violating? What loss of right should he suffer as a result?

You also say ‘Mental Labor’. How shall it be measured? How shall one be justly compensated for the ‘loss’ of it? Can’t you just think of the idea again, and then you still have it? How is an idea ‘lost’ or ’stolen’? How can it be anyone else’s responsibility to safeguard ‘Mental Labor’ besides the laborer himself? How will the thinker prove the ‘theft’ if no hard copy document in his own hand is discovered with the ‘thief’?

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 12:39 am

So then you contend it is aggression to use an idea that another has concocted?

No, I contend that ideas are freely distributed, non-ownable and valueless nanomemes that can, with skill and effort, be arranged into valueable works of art (generally by transmitting them from the mind to a container like a manuscript or a canvas).

It would be theft to use without permission these unique and specific arrangements of ideas (again, not the ideas that compose them) that the authors spent time and effort on to create.

How can such a claim be positively proved? What if I thought it up all on my own five minutes before he did?

So you thought up Othello five minutes before Shakespeare? Or perhaps Star Wars five minutes before George Lucas finished his manuscript? Generally, most people who create something not only leave traces of its creation all over the place but also tend to tell other people close to them. Some have such a unique style, they can be identified through that (Picasso vs Van Gogh, for example). Creations don’t come out of nothing. They are inspired by specific ideas that only the true author would know.

Does the fact that he ran to the gang faster than I did make me an aggressor?

No, the act of taking his work and redistributing it without his permission would. You didn’t expend the labor to create it nor did you offer to purchase the rights to it from him. No exchange of value was made.

Most people who disagree with me on this issue tend to assume I that if I don’t support the idea (pardon the pun) that intellectual works should be free (like universal health care), I must support government enforcement. I do not. I support arbitration and other peaceful methods of restitution.

If I were a copycat and it were well known (Milli Vanilli, anyone?), I would have enough problems without having some ‘law enforcer’ breathing down my neck about it.

Milli Vanilli were frauds, not copycats. And yes, people in a voluntaryist society would likely ostracize anyone who stole something from someone else — assuming they recognized it as stealing.

Define for me the break point. When does the copying of ideas become aggression, and how is the damage measured?

Again, for us to discuss this rationally, you have to get over the mental hurdle of believing “ideas” and “art” are the same thing.

Ideas are only the building blocks. I cannot stress this enough. Perhaps you’re familiar with the saying that “Ideas are a dime a dozen.”? They are considerably cheaper these days but a base idea still does not constitute a work of art any more than a single atom constitutes a human being or a planet.

What right of his fellow man’s is such a man violating? What loss of right should he suffer as a result?

If he’s stealing a work of art, he’s stealing the author’s past. All those hours of mental labor wasted in thinking about, arranging and creating the work. He’s also stealing the fruits of his labor, whatever that would have been.

You can’t steal ideas because they are how people communicate with each other. Ideas are like letters in the alphabet. Sentences, a specific arrangement of those letters, are the work of art. Letters by themselves are useless for anything but alphabet soup.

You also say ‘Mental Labor’. How shall it be measured? How shall one be justly compensated for the ‘loss’ of it?

Arbitration courts can decide these things.

Can’t you just think of the idea again, and then you still have it?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a single person who suddenly “thinks up” War & Peace, The Matrix, Crazy Train, Master of Puppets, the Statue of David, and so on all at once in the blink of eye.

Ideas are easy to remember and you can certainly forget them and remember them again. But you’re confusing ideas for works of art which is the entire point I’ve been trying to make.

How is an idea ‘lost’ or ’stolen’?

You’re still doing it, man. ITS NOT ABOUT IDEAS. You can’t steal ideas by definition. You can only steal someone’s specific, unique arrangement and expression of ideas. More often than not, they’re so large they have to be transferred to a container like a manuscript or canvase or CD or some other medium which can be stolen.

How can it be anyone else’s responsibility to safeguard ‘Mental Labor’ besides the laborer himself?

If someone puts up a sign that says “No steal this sign”, isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t you honor their wishes when it comes to their property or should you just assume that because they aren’t around to stop you or point a gun at you that you should be free to take whatever you want?

How will the thinker prove the ‘theft’ if no hard copy document in his own hand is discovered with the ‘thief’?

Again, most artistic people do not create in a vacuum. The work of art doesn’t just suddenly appear one day like magic. They leave scraps of creation all over the place. Bits of dialogue, character bios and plot outlines if they’re a writer. Earlier works if they’re a painter (plus they have a unique brush style). Also, they’ve likely shared the pieces of their unfinished creation with others, bouncing ideas off them, getting reactions and so forth.

In addition, the true artist will know the origins of their creation. How they came up with it, what ideas were blended into it, etc.

As additional protection, they could pass along copies to their chosen protection agency.

Comment by charley hardman

August 24, 2009 @ 1:09 am

This one was pretty priceless:

“There’s a great deal of control that is out of control.”

(perhaps the astonishingly articulate Ms. Goodwin is angling for the 2009 Yogi Berra Award for Intellectual Coherence)

your knee-jerk quest to leap on (or in this case create) the irrelevant does not of the speaker make an inarticulate boob. it does here again expose you as an idiot, for you have chosen to chortle based on the false implication that control may not be “out of control”, asserting via snark that 1) an object’s normal or commonly desired state may not be one of controlling while being controlled (absurd), and 2) such normal state may not change into the undesired loss or decrease of control over that object which retains or increases its control.

further — as the average adolescent knows — “out of control” is an expression often synonymous with “haywire”. obvious that the speaker used that sense, with the first “control” being the state. however trite the execution/intention, it’s blown away by your usual trip of cutesy pedantry while being pathetically wrong, and is — wait for it — coherent given the intended common definitions.

#1 tip for being a message board arrogant prick: fuck up only rarely.

How can it be anyone else’s responsibility to safeguard ‘Mental Labor’ besides the laborer himself?

about every eight weeks Lpviper the twat nails a subject harder than almost anyone else on this board.

if you don’t want your precious “works” to be used, keep them locked. instead of focusing on what others “may” do with an intellectual creation, simply ask what right the creator has to put a gun to your head (even by proxy) for using a copy of something he showed the world — while he retains the original.

none.

what’s being proposed is violence in the name of etiquette. sick. and this is a logic failure: “All rights reserved. This material may not be broadcast, published, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.”

the right to control distribution of a creation ends when that creation was freely distributed to parties who haven’t contracted to be so bound. it can be reserved no more than the cake that was eaten. those parties then have the right to pretty much do what they want with it — including asserting it’s their creation.

this truth shocks people nearly as much as the correct assertion that no one has a right to health care. the dirty work of state brainwashing from utilitarian violence-worshiping assholes.

Comment by Erik Voorhees

August 24, 2009 @ 1:32 am

Zeus… very well stated! Your response was reasoned and convincing.

I think if a man creates a “pattern,” whether that be a new engine, a poem, movie, or specific technique of production, then there is some justification in defending such as property, with nuance and conflict addressed in arbitration.

A novel is much greater than just the value of the paper and ink.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 2:10 am

if you don’t want your precious “works” to be used, keep them locked. instead of focusing on what others “may” do with an intellectual creation, simply ask what right the creator has to put a gun to your head (even by proxy) for using a copy of something he showed the world — while he retains the original.

Works of the mind function differently than physical ones. In the physical world, one takes physical resources and labor to create an object like a house or a car. The physical laws of the universe limit their reproducibility. An equal amount of resources and effort must be expended for every copy.

While ideas can be retained in the mind, works of art are often too complex to do so and must therefore be transferred to a physical medium (a container like a manuscript, a canvas, sheet music, a recording and so forth) to retain their structure and be experienced in their entirety.

Because of this required fluidity, they are naturally transferable from the mindscape to a physical medium. The downside to this is that digital (and some physical) media can be copied without expending much in the way of effort and resources.

Copying the work without permission or an exchange of value is still stealing the labor of the creator and depriving them of the fruits of their labor.

Because of the unique nature of such works, creators can only recoup their time and effort either by performing the work, licensing copies of it for a fee or quitting all claims to the work for single fee.

When you buy a book or a CD, you are purchasing the material container for the work (paper and ink or plastic disc) as well as the licensed permission to do certain things with the work contained within.

In most cases, what you cannot do is copy the work, slap your name on it and start selling it nor can you give away copies of it thereby lessening its potential value in the market. Why? You haven’t been granted those rights by its creator.

To ignore the wishes of the creator is to say “I find your work valuable enough to copy it and distribute it without your permission but not enough to recompense you or respect your wishes and do not care one whit whether you die a penniless pauper. Tomorrow, some other dumbass will create something else I dig and I won’t even remember who you are. Next time, get a real job.”

the right to control distribution of a creation ends when that creation was freely distributed to parties who haven’t contracted to be so bound.

If it was freely distributed at the behest of the creator, your argument is sound. This would be considered “public domain” (and not the government kind of “public” either).

A contract is a meeting of the minds where two or more parties negotiate and exchange of value.

A license, such as the GPL, the Creative Commons or Copyright, however, is a list of stipulations by the creator regarding use of their work. As the creators of the work, that is their right. Can they tell you what to do with the medium containing your personal copy of the work? No. But they can stipulate that you don’t lessen the value of the work by copying it and giving it away or selling it and making money from someone else’s time and effort.

As the GPL 2.x says, “You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it [which would be a contract]. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the [work or derivatives thereof].”

Comment by charley hardman

August 24, 2009 @ 3:00 am

The downside to this is that digital (and some physical) media can be copied without expending much in the way of effort and resources.

downside! ha.

what. the. fuck.

Copying the work without permission or an exchange of value is still stealing the labor of the creator and depriving them of the fruits of their labor.

obvious bunk. copying leaves them the fruits of their labor. you’re confusing, via brainwashing, an artificially constructed violence-threatening “market” with fruits of labor. the creation is the fruit of their labor.

of course, you use words like “steal” and “theft” because they imbue your vacant argument with the power those terms rightly incurred through thousands of years regarding scarce property. you’re bullshitting yourself first; that’s the funny part.

Because of the unique nature of such works, creators can only recoup their time and effort either by performing the work, licensing copies of it for a fee or quitting all claims to the work for single fee.

the untruth of that assertion is irrelevant, fortunately, for rights are not concerned with the only ways creators can “recoup their time and effort”. if you can’t do a thing without initiating force, fuck you and whatever unilateral “contract” you rode in on.

When you buy a book or a CD, you are purchasing the material container for the work (paper and ink or plastic disc) as well as the licensed permission to do certain things with the work contained within.

you sound like me when i first found out the details of the great fiction “copyright”. yawn. that was in the early 80s, BTW. yes, it’s possible to yap for hours, sounding erudite, and never address the rights underlying “copyright” (i.e., none). sidney shemel did it about as well as anyone, and i lapped up every chapter back when i was a brainwashed/unprincipled pup thinking himself the opposite.

In most cases, what you cannot do is copy the work, slap your name on it and start selling it nor can you give away copies of it thereby lessening its potential value in the market. Why? You haven’t been granted those rights by its creator.

in the great castle of the fictional land of unilateral contract, that sounds peachy. in the real world, i’m laughing at you right now, because you’re too fucking stupid and unduly arrogant to recognize that you’re, in economics terms, asserting a right to control the perceptions of others. for value is subjective, and by copying the work of another and distributing it cheaply i’ve not fucked with, in any way, the property owned by the creator. yes, it’s tidy and seems proper to in this case convert etiquette to a right, but it isn’t a right.

To ignore the wishes of the creator is to say “I find your work valuable enough to copy it and distribute it without your permission but not enough to recompense you or respect your wishes and do not care one whit whether you die a penniless pauper. Tomorrow, some other dumbass will create something else I dig and I won’t even remember who you are. Next time, get a real job.”

such terrible manners! again, not a rights infringement.

If it was freely distributed at the behest of the creator, your argument is sound. This would be considered “public domain” (and not the government kind of “public” either).

false. read again — this time accurately. also bear in mind that i was referring to an explicitly not “public domain” declaration.

A license, such as the GPL, the Creative Commons or Copyright, however, is a list of stipulations by the creator regarding use of their work. As the creators of the work, that is their right.

and it’s my right to disregard their stipulations, having not entered a contract with them.

Can they tell you what to do with the medium containing your personal copy of the work? No. But they can stipulate that you don’t lessen the value of the work by copying it and giving it away or selling it and making money from someone else’s time and effort.

i suspect you don’t even understand what you’re saying with typically imprecise language. yes, they can stipulate that; it is not, however, binding on me. the perceived value of their work isn’t my fucking problem. if their idea of “rights” includes threatening violence against others for not obeying their non rights-based edicts, i will go out of my way to help lower the perceived monetary value of their work.

However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the [work or derivatives thereof].”

happily, i don’t need permission to modify and distribute works others have placed in my grasp. let them lock their works through non-distribution or some nifty techno-wizardry. when i break into their homes/businesses to end that situation, i will have violated rights. short of that or similar, it’s an etiquette breach at worst.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 4:08 am

downside! ha.

what. the. fuck.

I love drunken street poetry! Good stuff.

obvious bunk. copying leaves them the fruits of their labor. you’re confusing, via brainwashing, an artificially constructed violence-threatening “market” with fruits of labor. the work is the fruit of their labor.

By making a copy — which you have no right to do since you didn’t create it and have no permission to do so — you make the work less scarce and therefore less valuable.

of course, you use words like “steal” and “theft” because they imbue your vacant argument with the power those terms rightly incurred through thousands of years regarding scarce property. you’re bullshitting yourself first; that’s the funny part.

I use those words because they’re true and no amount of absinthe-fueled denial or justification for *doing anything to something that isn’t yours* (like copying someone else’s work) on your part can change that.

the untruth of that assertion is irrelevant, fortunately, for rights are not concerned with the only ways creators can “recoup their time and effort”. if you can’t do a thing without initiating force, fuck you and whatever unilateral “contract” you rode in on.

You initiated the force when you put your mitts (both literally and figuratively) on someone else’s property and start doing stuff to it without permission or an exchange of value.

If you don’t like the creator’s terms regarding the works they created, there’s a simple solution: Leave it alone. Go find another film, song, story, or whatever that someone has released with terms that are more to your liking. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to accept the license. You can walk away.

Of course, you won’t do that because you want the work, you just don’t want to exchange value for it or respect the creator’s wishes. So you justify your theft to ease your conscience.

you sound like me when i first found out the details of the great fiction “copyright”. yawn. that was in the early 80s, BTW. yes, it’s possible to yap for hours, sounding erudite, and never address the rights underlying “copyright” (i.e., none). sidney shemel did it about as well as anyone, and i lapped up every chapter back when i was a brainwashed/unprincipled pup thinking himself the opposite.

I only support the notion of “copyright” insofar as it is meant to protect the works of creators. I do not support government as arbitrator and enforcer nor do I think it is the holy grail of protection. Licensing (such as via the Creative Commons) and dispute resolution via arbitration would be far more preferable.

in the great castle of the fictional land of unilateral contract, that sounds peachy. in the real world, i’m laughing at you right now, because you’re too fucking stupid and unduly arrogant to recognize that you’re, in economics terms, asserting a right to control the perceptions of others. for value is subjective, and by copying the work of another and distributing it cheaply i’ve not fucked with, in any way, the property owned by the creator. yes, it’s tidy and seems proper to in this case convert etiquette to a right, but it isn’t a right.

Arrrrh, matey. Whatever helps ye sleep at night.

and it’s my right to disregard their stipulations, having not entered a contract with them.

Without a contract or a license, you have ZERO rights to the work since you did not create it. This gives you three options: 1) walk away, 2) license the work, or 3) steal the work.

i suspect you don’t even understand what you’re saying with typically imprecise language. yes, they can stipulate that; it is not, however, binding on me. the perceived value of their work isn’t my fucking problem. if their idea of “rights” includes threatening violence against others for not obeying their non rights-based edicts, i will go out of my way to help lower the perceived monetary value of their work.

You are correct that the value of the work, real or potential, isn’t your problem. But without a contract or license, neither is ANY other aspect of the work.

happily, i don’t need permission to modify and distribute works others have placed in my grasp. let them lock their works through non-distribution or some nifty techno-wizardry. when i break into their homes/businesses to end that situation, i will have violated rights. short of that or similar, it’s an etiquette breach at worst.

Your DRM “solution” is a great way to shift the blame away from you, eh? Because you can’t keep it in your pants, we’re forced to put chastity belts on all the girls. That’s fair, moral and just. Not.

Comment by Lpviper

August 24, 2009 @ 8:12 am

Sorry Zeus, but I’m falling directly into Charley’s camp on this one. If I am deciding to utilize a combination of my brain power and the resources I have available to me to produce something that is exactly the same as a thing that somebody else is producing, I am a copy cat, I am probably a lazy jerk, but I am NOT a thief. The originator of that work can certainly run a smear campaign on me, and it will probably work, and I will probably deserve the ostracism I get.

But under no circumstances am I a thief. Ideas and collections of ideas are not real property.

Oh, and Charley, not a ‘twat’ either. Twit maybe but not twat.

Comment by charley hardman

August 24, 2009 @ 12:14 pm

re 04:08 Zeus:

when i copy something and it damages the source or some other property of the creator (e.g., breaking into his house and wrestling a delicate hand-written book onto a scanner), i have initiated force.

when you’ve evidence i copy intellectual works without the permission of the creator, pull your fallacious ad hominem joke for what it’s worth (nothing).

all works i copy peacefully onto my media, i then have right to because the only property involved (medium) is mine.

send up a flare when you figure out that non-destructive copying keeps published intellectual works out of the property realm. you call the increased efficiency of this process a downside. it’s a downside for your quack populist theory.

your “theft” theory must also include as a “thief” anyone whose actions lower in others perception of value. for example, if i think pizza hut sucks and campaign to inform others of my opinion, according to your stupid ass i would then be a thief if the action decreased pizza hut sales, because their income was lowered by me performing non-destructive action re their property. yet i haven’t touched their property without their permission.

for related lunacy from “libertarians” see this post i wrote on fractional reserve banking.

then read rothbard, because though he was wrong on FRB, he was right on almost everything else.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 12:35 pm

If I am deciding to utilize a combination of my brain power and the resources I have available to me to produce something that is exactly the same as a thing that somebody else is producing, I am a copy cat, I am probably a lazy jerk, but I am NOT a thief.

LP, its quite obvious from your statement you’ve never toiled away working on a story, a piece of music, a painting or a sculpture. People who create works of art (or “entertainment” as its often called these days) pour their heart and soul into the work over a matter of months, years and even decades. That you think the act of cloning it with the click of a button is as equal an effort as spending all that time and emotion on the work astonishes me.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster died penniless paupers. They created Superman.

Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Paine, Oscar Wilde, Bela Lugosi, Sammy Davis Jr., Antonio Meucci, Nikola Tesla and more. They all died penniless despite contributing works of art and entertainment and technology that changed the world.

A world where art and entertainment are no longer valued and no incentive to create, will be very bland indeed.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 1:09 pm

send up a flare when you figure out that non-destructive copying keeps published intellectual works out of the property realm.

You do likewise when you figure out that clicking a button to instantly and identically replicate a work that cost the author months or years to craft (and which could have been better spent in your bland nightmare world as a plumber or dishwasher) is stealing that author’s labor.

“I’ve finally finished my first big novel! We’ll never be poor again, Tabitha!”, King shouted to his wife. He waved the brick of a manuscript above his head, pride shining on his face.

“Fuck you very much.”, said Charley, touching the manuscript and magically sending millions of identical copies across the planet in the blink of an eye. “Good luck making any money off it now, stupid ass! Next time, get a real job!”

your “theft” theory must also include as a “thief” anyone whose actions lower in others perception of value.

My “theft theory” says that if ain’t yours and you have no agreement with the creator, you have zero rights to the work. Even if the work is a terrible piece of shit where they wouldn’t make a dime from it in a free market situation, your unauthorized duplication and distribution also steals from them the opportunity to ever know that because your interference has rendered it valueless.

Comment by RWW

August 24, 2009 @ 3:35 pm

Zeus’ arguments are all over the fallacy map. It’s like a soup of irrational lunacy.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 3:45 pm

Or maybe the current culture of “I want everything for free” one-click pirating has infected you as well.

Comment by Lpviper

August 24, 2009 @ 5:17 pm

omg he said pirating

wow

I went to the store and bought a Thomas E Woods book. I bought the Ron Paul book. I buy every new Rush album that comes out. I have used the one click feature to look at stuff that I later buy. I have also used it to look at stuff that has never been made commercially available, and thus I was unable to buy it.

I want very badly to buy Rothbard’s ‘Conceived in Liberty’ series of colonial histories. Can I right now? No. Can I enjoy them for free? Yes! The Mises Institute gives it away AND sells it! So I can enjoy it now, and when I can afford to buy the ‘real’ product and support the author or his heirs, I will. This seems eminently practical to me.

A percentage of people who enjoy a certain product will inevitably buy that product because they understand the value of that person’s work and wish to support it. I have heard of music artists who are releasing their products for free online and asking for donations if the music is liked. And they are prospering!

There is no need to coerce people to buy original works. People already want them. And those who ‘pirate’ these works and then do not purchase them were not going to make a purchase anyway.

Your posture is highly defensive, Zeus. Help me understand what you want done to the ‘pirates’

Comment by Kevin

August 24, 2009 @ 6:01 pm

“There’s a great deal of control that is out of control.”

That’s actually a pretty good line on short notice! I found the article to be upbeat in the main. It’s hard to come up with a good soundbite unless you rehearse it ahead of time.

Comment by Budd

August 24, 2009 @ 8:21 pm

I was a little disappointed at the festival. Yes, its nice to be with like minded people but we NEED to change the minds of people who disagree with us and try to gain their support, educate them on the value of freedom and the need to defend our rights even when conceding them seems reasonable for the common good. How are we going to get new people to show up next year? How are we going to get people who don’t agree with us to show up? How are we going to show them why they should change their minds and stand with us? I don’t have all the answers but I thought I’d raise the questions. When it comes to Liberty almost everyone bristles for a fight at any threat but we need to bring people over from the other side. I suggest that next year each one of us brings a liberal with us…or a neocon. They are the same animal, even if they have different spots. Both want the govt. to step in and take control.

Comment by Budd

August 24, 2009 @ 8:23 pm

And frankly, I wasn’t too happy about paying 5 dollars to get into what was billed as a free event OR paying 4 dollars for what amounted to a chicken nugget on a bun.

Comment by Zeus

August 24, 2009 @ 8:49 pm

I want very badly to buy Rothbard’s ‘Conceived in Liberty’ series of colonial histories. Can I right now? No. Can I enjoy them for free? Yes! The Mises Institute gives it away AND sells it! So I can enjoy it now, and when I can afford to buy the ‘real’ product and support the author or his heirs, I will. This seems eminently practical to me.

Ok, so the Mises Institute — which has an agreement with the author and/or his heirs — gives it away. Author’s Wishes Respected, end of story.

A percentage of people who enjoy a certain product will inevitably buy that product because they understand the value of that person’s work and wish to support it. I have heard of music artists who are releasing their products for free online and asking for donations if the music is liked. And they are prospering!

Good for them, but whether they prosper or fail miserably is irrelevant. That’s not for you to decide by making unauthorized copies against the author’s wishes. They’ll find out what the market worth is on their own unless their work gets spread all over the internet and renders it near valueless.

There is no need to coerce people to buy original works. People already want them. And those who ‘pirate’ these works and then do not purchase them were not going to make a purchase anyway.

You don’t know that. For every person who pays for what they like, there are thousands who would “like to pay” for the work but just never get around to it. Oops, slipped my mind.

How about instead, you respect the author’s wishes if they put up a sign that says “Don’t copy or distribute my stuff”. It’s not like people need to slap a sign on every hot chick that says “Please don’t rape me”. Self-responsibility.

Your posture is highly defensive, Zeus. Help me understand what you want done to the ‘pirates’

If they refuse to allow the creator of the work the right to set the terms of its distribution and start making unauthorized copies, they should be responsible for paying whatever the market price is for each unauthorized copy they redistribute and take a ding to their reputation. The problem with that is that it can’t be tracked accurately without unintended consequences.

Its far too late to do anything about it anyway. When pro-liberty people are supporting the taking of another’s work, the one area where they tend to do a 180, it’s far too gone.

So what’ll end up happening is DRM will make a comeback for awhile, a great many creators will fade into obscurity, and everyone will go with an app-based service like STEAM or iTUNES for their products and it’ll be hunkydory until one of these companies goes under and you lose a decade’s worth of goods when your personal library gets the plug pulled on it.

And we’ll continue to see braindead MMO’s replace intelligent single-player games. More reality show dreck on TV dumbing people down. Etc.

So I guess I’m shouting in the wilderness. The World of the Bland is inescapable and there’s no point in working on a novel or anything else creative.

Comment by dude

August 25, 2009 @ 7:19 am

I love to hear people use the words “scarecity” “non-agression” “contract” etc. to justify getting something magically for free.

It’s as if someone withdrew money from my bank account, and as long as I don’t find out about it, no one has agressed against me or broken a contract.

What about “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH”. If you somehow got something for free, and it wasn’t given to you, there is a cost that wasn’t paid. No amount of mumbo-jumbo is going to pay that cost. Congratulations something has been stolen.

I respect more somebody who just says, fuck yeah I stole it.

Comment by Dan

August 25, 2009 @ 7:33 pm

Zeus, there is no evidence that copyright laws do anything to encourage artistic creation. None whatsoever. It’s total speculation.

Did you know that during the Renaissance it was considered among the greatest honors to have one’s work copied by other artists?

If somebody has a truly good idea, there is always a way to make money off of it. If the artist cannot come up with a way to do so without coercing or restricting other people without their consent, then the artist should simply rethink his or her business model.

Comment by Zeus

August 25, 2009 @ 8:38 pm

Zeus, there is no evidence that copyright laws do anything to encourage artistic creation. None whatsoever. It’s total speculation.

I’m not sure I ever said that it “encourages creation” as much as I’ve said that copying the work of others and distributing it without permission is stealing their right to do as they wish with the result of their labor. Since you can only own what you yourself create or receive in an exchange of value for value, doing anything with something that isn’t yours is trespassing at best and theft at worst.

It seems like most libertarians and other pro-liberty people get this with physical property but do a total 180 when it comes to works of the mind, as if they don’t value a good book, song, film, show or other entertainment. Perhaps its just because it’s so easy to copy the work of others these days without having to invest any of the labor it took to create it?

Is there a guy standing at a door somewhere who says “Oh you’re a new believer of liberty, eh? Well, then you also gotta believe this completely nonsensical thing about mental creations that’s completely contrary to the rest of your philosophy. Welcome aboard.”?

If you remove the incentive for the laborers to labor, they will no longer labor.

Did you know that during the Renaissance it was considered among the greatest honors to have one’s work copied by other artists?

I suppose that might have been fine if anyone knew who you were and the only way they’d know that is because you had a wealthy patron financing your work, giving you room and board, etc. Had the printing press or the internet existed then, it would have been a completely different story.

“Van Gogh! Get out! You shall room here no longer!”

“What? Why?”

“Your paintings are all over the internets! Now everyone has a copy! You are of no more use to me! Begone and trouble me no further!”

If somebody has a truly good idea, there is always a way to make money off of it. If the artist cannot come up with a way to do so without coercing or restricting other people without their consent, then the artist should simply rethink his or her business model.

You blame the artist as the villain? He or she is somehow harming you because they won’t let you do whatever you want with their creations? You’re being deprived of something you didn’t even exchange anything of value for?

It’s a ludicrous position. A rocky island of complete and utter madness in an otherwise calm sea of reason and I just don’t get how so many who know the philosophy of liberty and the non-aggression principle can suddenly throw it all out the window and turn socialist on this one issue.

More than likely, the real answer boils down to “Because I want it and because it’s soooo easy to do.”

Comment by Lpviper

August 25, 2009 @ 9:01 pm

Socialist? Really? Explain to me how copying a work of art or music or writing is socialist.

Comment by Dan

August 25, 2009 @ 9:07 pm

Zeus, I’m not sure how to reconcile these two statements of yours:

-”I’m not sure I ever said that it “encourages creation””
-”If you remove the incentive for the laborers to labor, they will no longer labor.”

Isn’t the latter really just standing for the same proposition as the former, that we will supposedly have more or better quality works with intellectual property laws in place? If these laws do not achieve that end, then what specifically DO they accomplish? I personally do not believe that they make a bit of difference, I have many historical and present day anecdotes and examples to support this, and beyond that I have seen no evidence that copyright laws encourage more or better-quality artwork production (aren’t most musicians and artists “starving” anyway?) You also assume that the only incentive for creation is financial, and I don’t believe that is the case with most writers, singers, and artists.

I think what is essentially going on here is that you equate physical property with “intellectual property,” when some of us think that such a comparison is unwarranted and that the two are fundamentally different in nature. The major difference in my mind is that theft of physical property directly deprives the owner of its use, while replication of intellectual property does nothing of the sort, in fact, most copyright infringement will probably never be noticed by anyone, so inferring any sort of hard damages from it seems absurd to me. So does the notion that one can “own” an idea. How does one even prove copying, suppose I arrived at the same idea independently? I’ve taken copyright law classes, but I’m interested in your thoughts on the subject. As for damages, there are no direct, so all we have is speculation and I’m really not sure where to begin. Does downloading one song deprive the artist of whatever arbitrary amount of money they would have chosen to sell a copy of the song for? Not necessarily by a long shot. Does sharing the song online entitle the artist to the supposed value of whatever volume they expected to sell absent sharing? Certainly not. It seems much more rational and common-sense to simply reason that the actual value of the song is how much money the artist can make from it in some way, given that it has already been shared with the world. Perhaps this means thinking outside of the box, or actually performing the song, or signing copies, or taking donations. Any business model which has to go out into the world and strong-arm people who never contracted is not a good or moral business model.

By the way, by your logic, how do any novel writers make any money at all? Isn’t every one of their works available at the nearest library to the public for free? They don’t typically see any royalties from those checkouts. Borders was doing fine last time I checked, and so was J.K. Rowling.

Comment by Zeus

August 25, 2009 @ 9:33 pm

Socialist? Really? Explain to me how copying a work of art or music or writing is socialist.

I honestly don’t see how taking the work of someone else and doing stuff with it just because you can is any different than these health socialists who are saying “I want health care, I deserve health care and I should have health care for *free*.”

In that scenario, free really means “I want a gang of thugs to rob everyone so medical professionals can be paid to make me healthy.”

In the pirating scenario, the argument is this: “I want your [book, song, movie, tv show, article, etc], I can copy it with the click of a button which is all your fault, you can’t stop me, so I’m gonna do it and spread it to the four corners of the world.”

The pirate socialist wants creators NOT necessarily to just entertain them for *free*, but — even more egregiously — they want to take the choice entirely out of the creator’s hands. “You labored to create it but I’m not even going to let you decide whether to give it away, license it, sell it or whatever. I’m going to steal your time, your labor and your control over it.”

Comment by Dan

August 25, 2009 @ 9:57 pm

@Zeus

The difference is, again, that when somebody demands “free” health-care, they are either depriving somebody else of that care or forcing somebody else to foot the bill for it. It is a service analogous to a physical product, which has a finite nature, and thus stealing or obtaining it for free deprives somebody else of the privilege and is morally wrong.

“Intellectual property,” on the other hand, deprives nobody of its usage, so what we are really debating is whether somebody is entitled to receive some arbitrary payment every time an idea is utilized, just because they happened to register the idea with some arbitrary organization first. This, to me and others, is an absurd notion. By your logic, if I was born on an island and was never exposed to anything or anybody in modern society, and I conceived of and drew the Mickey Mouse logo in the sand because I liked the look of it, I would then owe the “owner” of that image (somebody I never met or contracted with) some kind of payment or portion of my entirely independent labor. How is that being free, if somebody else can own your very ideas and coerce you to pay them for your own produced work, simply because they happened to create a similar work first, perhaps before you were even born? That is not consent, it’s extortion.

Comment by Lpviper

August 25, 2009 @ 10:38 pm

yeah, ^^that^^

Comment by Zeus

August 25, 2009 @ 11:27 pm

Zeus, I’m not sure how to reconcile these two statements of yours:

-”I’m not sure I ever said that it “encourages creation””
-”If you remove the incentive for the laborers to labor, they will no longer labor.”

Isn’t the latter really just standing for the same proposition as the former, that we will supposedly have more or better quality works with intellectual property laws in place?

No. Taking away the possibility of an incentive (there are no guarantees it will be successful) will obliterate the industry.

That’s not about having more/better works or less/worse works but rather ZERO new works that aren’t rehashed junk painted to look different.

Why toil and labor to create something original when there’s zero chance of making a living at it or even decide what you’re going to do with it? It’s bad enough that good writers sell shit and make shit as it is but taking away even the possibility of that is not only dishonest, it’s heartless. Let them fail in the market because their work is bad, not because of your own greed and inability to remain principled in the face of one-click theft.

If these laws do not achieve that end, then what specifically DO they accomplish? I personally do not believe that they make a bit of difference, I have many historical and present day anecdotes and examples to support this, and beyond that I have seen no evidence that copyright laws encourage more or better-quality artwork production (aren’t most musicians and artists “starving” anyway?)

All irrelevant since I do not claim copyright encourages more or better-quality work. I do not support the copyright law as operated by government insomuch as I support the right of the creator to control the results of their labor. I believe licensing, for those authors who want it, is the solution most compatible with liberty.

You also assume that the only incentive for creation is financial, and I don’t believe that is the case with most writers, singers, and artists.

There will always be a minority of people who give things away for free. The problem is that it doesn’t matter whether they sell it or give it away. Either way, they are prevented from making that choice the second some pirate comes along and says “Ooh! I’m gonna make copies of this even though I don’t have that right since I didn’t expend any labor whatsoever in its creation.”

I think what is essentially going on here is that you equate physical property with “intellectual property,” when some of us think that such a comparison is unwarranted and that the two are fundamentally different in nature.

Insofar as they both require labor and belong to the creator until the creator decides what they’re going to do with it, yes.

But unlike physical creations, a requirement for mental creations is that they must be transferred from the mind to a physical medium in order to see them in their entirety, make use of them and to transfer them to others. Therein lies the problem.

Suppose you spend months and years of your life toiling away on your mental creation and one day you looked at your work and saw that it was a pitcher of infinite water.

You learn that you can take your magic pitcher and can keep pouring glasses of water for eternity to feed the thirsty masses. Some might do this for free just to make people happy and others might do it for a price so you can pay your bills, buy food and wear decent clothes.

Of course, there’s no guarantee people will buy it from you. While your water tastes great to you, the people in your village have very discerning tastes. They might rather have bottled water, a Coke, juice or some milk.

Much to your dismay, however, is the discovery that that a single magical incantation can turn every glass you pour into another magic pitcher without all that hard work you put into making the original.

If you start pouring glasses, chances are that everyone in the village will have a magic pitcher by the end of the week and they will neither care nor remember that you created the original and all your labor will have been for naught. You will be just as penniless (if not more so) and obscure as you were before spending all that labor creating the damn thing.

The major difference in my mind is that theft of physical property directly deprives the owner of its use, while replication of intellectual property does nothing of the sort, in fact, most copyright infringement will probably never be noticed by anyone, so inferring any sort of hard damages from it seems absurd to me.

Sounds about how the Federal Reserve works. “We’ll just print up another billion dollars this week, no one will notice.” Except they do. It’s called inflation.

In the realm of intellectual property, every unauthorized copy lessens the value of the original because it becomes less scarce. Top that off with depriving the creator of the labor they spent creating it and the right to choose what to do with it, and you end up with the Jolly Roger, an eyepatch and a bottle of rum, arrrh!

So does the notion that one can “own” an idea.

Of course owning an idea is absurd. In fact, its almost as absurd as confusing an idea with intellectual property. That’s like equating a grain of sand with the Pyramids at Giza or a single sentence to all the written works of mankind.

How does one even prove copying, suppose I arrived at the same idea independently?

You and I might both arrive at a single idea such as “I wish I could fly”. We might even arrive a similar string of ideas such as “an extraterrestrial from another world who possesses strength beyond mortal men, invulnerability, flight, can shoot beams out of his eyes and whose sole weakness is a naturally-occurring element.”

The chances of us both creating the unique, complex creation of Superman and everything that exists in his universe, however, is slim to nil. More likely, one of us would come up with Superman and the other would come up with J’onn J’onnz, the Martian Manhunter.

Did you know that when Alan Moore began THE WATCHMEN, he originally used a number of characters DC Comics had just picked up called the “Charlton Heroes”? For whatever reason, DC asked him to create his own instead of using them.

So he came up with very similar yet very different analogues. Instead of Blue Beetle, he created NiteOwl. Instead of Captain Atom, he created Doc Manhattan and his blue dingus. Instead of The Question, he created Rorschach. And so on. Very similar base ideas, completely different characters.

An intellectual property is NOT an idea. It is a potpourri of ideas, boiled and baked, carved and shaped into something far more complex and unique. This why some artists claim their works contain a piece of their soul and art critics can often tell who created a painting just by looking at it. They see the artist’s fingerprint, their soul, in it.

I can show you dozens of instances where characters and films and books are very similar (and of course they would be since ideas spread among all of us like neutrinos) and yet still unique to themselves.

Show me an instance where two people, completely independent of each other, come up with the exact same creation (not just an idea or similarity of ideas but something that is not unique) and you will either have a lying plagiarist on your hands or the first bonafide miracle of this age.

I’ve taken copyright law classes, but I’m interested in your thoughts on the subject. As for damages, there are no direct, so all we have is speculation and I’m really not sure where to begin. Does downloading one song deprive the artist of whatever arbitrary amount of money they would have chosen to sell a copy of the song for? Not necessarily by a long shot.

Arbitration courts can decide these things but the most likely solution is that thief would owe resitution at the going market rate of the property. Most songs these days go for a buck a pop. I see no logic or justice in charging someone thousands of dollars per song just because government says you can. That would be correcting a wrong with another wrong.

Does sharing the song online entitle the artist to the supposed value of whatever volume they expected to sell absent sharing? Certainly not. It seems much more rational and common-sense to simply reason that the actual value of the song is how much money the artist can make from it in some way, given that it has already been shared with the world.

Assuming it hasn’t been rendered entirely valueless (and there will always be some small minority willing to pay for a work they enjoy), this does indeed make sense.

Perhaps this means thinking outside of the box, or actually performing the song, or signing copies, or taking donations. Any business model which has to go out into the world and strong-arm people who never contracted is not a good or moral business model.

A business model that strong-arms customers is just as bad as people who redistribute things that don’t belong to them without permission.

By the way, by your logic, how do any novel writers make any money at all? Isn’t every one of their works available at the nearest library to the public for free?

Actually, very few novel writers ever break out big enough to get a deal. Those who do get a deal start out in the minor league of publishers where advances are just a few thousands of dollars (less than 10).

70% of published books do not recoup the author’s advance. In other words, they end up losing money.

One author I know, who is a terrific writer, only sold 3600 copies of his latest hardcover despite tremendous buzz and great reviews by some very famous people. At $25 a pop (before discounts out the ass, mind you), that’s less than a theoretical maximum of $90,000 generated and that’s without taking into account the manufacturing costs of the book, the retailers’ cut, the author’s advance, and so on.

The same is true for video games and movies. The big ones make mountains of cash. The vast majority of them tank and end up costing far more than they generate.

These are facts you are free to look up for yourself.

They don’t typically see any royalties from those checkouts. Borders was doing fine last time I checked, and so was J.K. Rowling.

For every Rowling there are hundreds of thousands of would-be authors all competing for a slim chance to make it big.

As for Borders, you couldn’t be more wrong. They’re in serious debt which includes a high interest rate loan of $42 million or so which comes due next spring. They even tried to get Barnes & Noble to buy them out last year.

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 12:01 am

Zeus, I’ve heard your position and I believe that I understand it, although I cannot agree with it. The main problem I have with it is your continued equation of copying a work independently, which does not deprive anyone of usage or enjoyment of that work, with “theft” or piracy of physical property or a service, which does deprive the owner of usage and enjoyment of that property or service. Even the federal government does not claim as you do that copyright infringement is a form of theft, because this is simply not a true statement. To call copyright infringement “theft” is an analogy at best, which in my opinion isn’t a very good one because of the fundamental distinction recognized earlier. If copyright infringement truly is immoral as you claim it is, I believe that you should be able to explain why without resorting to calling it “theft,” which most people understand as being immoral directly because it deprives somebody else of usage or enjoyment, which copyright infringement does not do.

The other main problem I continue to have with your argument is your continued assertion that somebody has the “right” to “control” anything derivative of their efforts, even when there is no deprivation of real property involved. Imagine two people composing music, person A and person B. As often does happen in the real world, imagine that the two song sheets end up being very similar. You are asserting that one of these individuals has the right to absolutely bar the other individual from playing or recording that song indefinitely in their own home, simply because they happened to finish it first, and then you further assert that that individual has the right to use force against the other person to recover some arbitrary amount of damages based upon speculation alone. How is that any different from somebody in government telling me that they are entitled to burdensome taxes from me because they set up shop on the land first, and made their laws before I was born? From where does this supposed right originate that you keep asserting exists, that gives one individual the power to forcibly prevent literally everybody else in the world (billions of people) from non-violently reproducing something within their own home, harming no one in the process? Again, that is not freedom, if other people can arbitrarily restrict you within your own home simply because they completed some independent and arbitrary action before you did. You accuse the individual reproducing the work of somehow rendering the product worthless, but this is very strange reasoning because the product is by definition worthless in the first place if it can be copied infinite times effortlessly. A product’s “worth” is how much people are willing to pay for it by definition, and for you to assert that a product is worth something other than that number is simply backwards, although government frequently does this through coercion regarding its own services.

The reality we live in is that some products CAN be reproduced cheaply and effortlessly without depriving anyone of usage. Although you may find it distasteful or unfortunate, monetarily at least, a particular work may be worth very little due to technology. We should embrace this and evolve, not rail against it in an unwinnable war against the tide. Artists already can simply find other ways to market their products or make money off of them. I have numerous suggestions as to how they may do this, but I am sure the free market will produce new ways. What you are proposing, by contrast, is removing the free market entirely and instituting enforceable monopolies to whoever registers an idea first with some arbitrary organization, the same thing that government currently does and is the cause of so many problems in the world. I cannot support either monopolies that arise out of coercion or restricted markets of this kind, because I find them backwards, anti-progress, and immoral.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 12:16 am

@ Dan

“Intellectual property,” on the other hand, deprives nobody of its usage, so what we are really debating is whether somebody is entitled to receive some arbitrary payment every time an idea is utilized, just because they happened to register the idea with some arbitrary organization first. This, to me and others, is an absurd notion.

I’ve already covered the whole “ideas do not by themselves equate intellectual property” already.

As for what is being deprived, the answer is three-fold: 1) scarcity, 2) the labor of the author and 3) choice. Every copy you make without permission reduces the scarcity of the property and thus its potential value in a free market absent your interference. By doing whatever you want with the creator’s property even though you contributed nothing, made no exchange of value and did so without permission, you rob the author of his past labor creating it and the ability to choose how to release it (even if he wants it to be free, you aren’t giving him the option to make that choice).

By your logic, if I was born on an island and was never exposed to anything or anybody in modern society, and I conceived of and drew the Mickey Mouse logo in the sand because I liked the look of it, I would then owe the “owner” of that image (somebody I never met or contracted with) some kind of payment or portion of my entirely independent labor.

1. If you never made it off that island, no one would know and the spread would be self-contained.

2. Since you drew it in the sand, it is impermanent and will be destroyed by nature. Again, the spread is self-contained.

3. You’re talking about a trademark, not a copyright. A trademark can be a image or a name or combination of both. They are meant to denote a specific company or product. Assuming you get off the island and redraw the symbol, no one will care because it hasn’t yet caused harm. Open up a theme park, a cable channel, a film studio and so on and use it as the company symbol and then you will finally have a problem because Disney doesn’t want your products mistaken for its products or vice versa. This confusion in the market might cause one company to benefit due to the work of another.

4. Trademark is based on first use in the marketplace.

I see nothing wrong with protecting the reputation of your business through trademarks so long as disputes are resolved via arbitration rather than by government.

The likely result of a victory would entail the losing party to modify their trademark so that it no longer resembles the winning party’s and to pay for court costs.

How is that being free, if somebody else can own your very ideas and coerce you to pay them for your own produced work, simply because they happened to create a similar work first, perhaps before you were even born? That is not consent, it’s extortion.

Your premises and your definitions are flawed, so of course you’re going to get a conflicting result.

Not once have I said anyone is coercing you to pay for their work BUT without a) permission or b) an exchange of value, nothing else gives you the right to that work. NOTHING.

If you don’t like the author’s terms, walk away. It’s not yours. You didn’t create it. You didn’t put any labor into it. You exchanged no value for it. Put your hands back in your pockets. Don’t give in to temptation.

Find another work that has terms you are comfortable with. If the terms are unreasonable to a large majority, the author’s work isn’t going to go very far so once again the market decides and that’s the way it should be.

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 12:37 am

Zeus: “By doing whatever you want with the creator’s property even though you contributed nothing, made no exchange of value and did so without permission, you rob the author of his past labor creating it and the ability to choose how to release it (even if he wants it to be free, you aren’t giving him the option to make that choice).”

First of all, I have (hypothetically) not done anything with the creator’s property. They will still be in possession of whatever it is that they physically created. That is their property and it would be immoral for me to steal it, because that would deprive them of usage. Likewise, if I make my own physical property into the same shape or form through my own labor based on information I received by looking at the work of the other person, that person does not have the right to then coerce me to destroy my own work or pay them an arbitrary amount of money simply because they happened to create it first. This is a coercive monopoly system by definition, which I hope you would agree is normally a bad thing. I am perplexed as to why you would choose to carve out this one area as an exception to this principle and bar literally billions of people from doing something on their own, harming no one in the process, simply because somebody else happened to do it first with their own property. Do you understand that according to this logic if you liked the design of somebody else’s home and decided to build your own home the same way on your own paid property, that person could then hire violent thugs to come to your home and extort arbitrary damages from you, even though you have done nothing to harm that person or anybody else and simply wished to live peacefully? That is the type of absurdity and barbarism to which these intellectual property restrictions invariably lead. I say let the free market sort out what such designs are worth, and any system that involves coercion where there has been no deprivation of actual property is immoral and arbitrary. The worth of a product is simply what others are currently willing to pay for it. Somebody can spend all day long bottling water from a stream. If other people have access to the stream themselves, then the worth of the bottled water is zero, determined by the free market. Yet under your logic here, you would force those people to buy the water bottled at some arbitrary price set by the bottler, under the reasoning that acquiring the water for free or bottling it themselves would deprive him of the fruit of his labor and by rendering his work worthless. The fallacy, of course, is that the work was always worthless economically. Maybe it has some emotional or other value, but that is the beholder’s own responsibility and not anyone else’s. Nor is it any matter that the stream existed before the bottling, as I believe Michelangelo once said, the work is already contained within the marble, he just frees it with his tools.

Let me ask a question, hopefully it will frame the issue in a different light. Suppose somebody spent 10 long years of their life devising a new buggy, one that is ultra-light, strong, and harnessed to the horses in a particularly novel and desirable way. This inventor reasonably expects to make a million dollars selling buggies to buyers. Then somebody invents a gasoline-powered automobile and the value of the buggy drops to essentially zero. By your logic, wouldn’t the inventor of the automobile have “stolen” the past work and life effort of the inventor of the buggy? Hasn’t this deprived him of his right to sell the product of his work at what it would have gone for, absent the actions of the automobile inventor? Doesn’t this harm the incentive to create, since one’s investment and time could be rendered worthless by a subsequent invention at any time? To me, the situations are analogous, and in neither situation would it be justified to retard free market progress and institute coercive monopolies to protect the made-up and arbitrary right to exclusively control the implementation of ideas, which no man should have over another.

Comment by charley hardman

August 26, 2009 @ 1:13 am

Do you understand that according to this logic if you liked the design of somebody else’s home and decided to build your own home the same way on your own paid property, that person could then hire violent thugs to come to your home and extort arbitrary damages from you, even though you have done nothing to harm that person or anybody else and simply wished to live peacefully?

zippy the pinhead gets around this (she thinks) by calling that process “arbitration”, giving a market taint to a state by some other name. arbitration, of course, requires agreement to participate. duh.

prediction: within five years zippy will leave the dark side on this subject, recognizing the rank stupidity of her repetitive unfounded fallacious ad hominem (”you hold that position because you’re cheap”), utilitarian (”something i don’t like would happen”), and arbitrary (”x ideas compose a work”) escapes — some of which she obviously considers brilliant and elucidating… perhaps even groundbreaking.

hey, zippy, how much does it cost to quote your bullshit arguments in this thread? don’t wanna get in trouble with your racketeer squad.

like most humongo-fools, zippy assumes that arguing a right is the same as arguing mandatory exercise of the right.

manners, non-reading blatherswack.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 1:55 am

If copyright infringement truly is immoral as you claim it is, I believe that you should be able to explain why without resorting to calling it “theft,”

Which I’ve done. You are depriving the creator of his labor, his choice on how he will distribute his creation and you are reducing the scarcity (which equates to value in the marketplace) without expending the same amount of resources (time, thought, etc.) the creator did.

The other main problem I continue to have with your argument is your continued assertion that somebody has the “right” to “control” anything derivative of their efforts, even when there is no deprivation of real property involved.

You find no deprivation in letting Marvel Comics (or anyone else) make their own Superman comics?

That there’s no deprivation in letting Uwe Boll, arguably the world’s worst director, write and direct new Star Wars films?

Is there any deprivation in letting some unknown director restart the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise (or Firefly if you prefer) without creator Joss Whedon?

How about having hundreds or thousands of versions of these so the market is flooded with them?

This way, when two creative brothers see what a fruitless endeavor it is to even bother with can just save themselves the time and effort coming up with a little known film called The Matrix and just pitch their script into the fire?

Imagine two people composing music, person A and person B. As often does happen in the real world, imagine that the two song sheets end up being very similar. You are asserting that one of these individuals has the right to absolutely bar the other individual from playing or recording that song indefinitely in their own home, simply because they happened to finish it first, and then you further assert that that individual has the right to use force against the other person to recover some arbitrary amount of damages based upon speculation alone.

If the songs are so similar that they cause confusion in the marketplace, there might a problem. The easiest way to resolve the dispute is through arbitration. The disputing parties could request a jury, literally of their peers (all musicians), to decide A) whether or not the songs really are that similar and B) whether or not it’s enough to cause confusion in the marketplace. If so, the best solution is to request changes that will make the songs different. Hell, the jury might even say BOTH parties need to modify their songs.

Before they even GET to that point, both parties have to be unwilling to work it out on their own. And what of the damages? The only damage I can imagine in this example is possible confusion in the marketplace. That’s not exactly worth a million bucks nor is monetary compensation in this particular matter appropriate. Money isn’t the solution to every problem.

How is that any different from somebody in government telling me that they are entitled to burdensome taxes from me because they set up shop on the land first, and made their laws before I was born?

They’re telling you that you owe them taxes because they have all the firepower and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, not because they set up shop before you did and made their laws before you were born. Those claims are just smoke and mirrors to confuse you.

How its different:

1. Government reserves the right to kill you, assault you, and steal from you at any time for any reason or no reason at all. You are a slave.

2. Someone with a real dispute with you is likely going to be required to contact you and explain the problem. If the two of you can’t work it out (or maybe you think he’s bonkers), he’s going to need to demonstrate the problem and articulable damages to the arbitration court. Only if they feel confident in proceeding with the case and risking their reputation will they then contact you and see if you want to give your side in the case. If it turns out he has no real case, he’ll have to compensate you for your wasted time.

Reason, accountability, competence and caution. Quite a big leap from the guns of government.

From where does this supposed right originate that you keep asserting exists, that gives one individual the power to forcibly prevent literally everybody else in the world (billions of people) from non-violently reproducing something within their own home, harming no one in the process?

I’ve already voiced what the harm is. As for the right to not have your property duplicated without permission, it is a moral one. The number of thieves is irrelevant. No one has the right to your life, your labor, your liberty or your property. Not even billions of people demand it.

Again, that is not freedom, if other people can arbitrarily restrict you within your own home simply because they completed some independent and arbitrary action before you did.

The only thing you’re being restricted from is tampering with someone else’s property. No one’s forcing you to tamper with it. No one has a gun to your head yelling “You have to copy it, by god or your brains go all over the wall!”

Self-responsibility. For every action there are consequences. Just say NO when it comes to redistributing work you didn’t create without authorization.

You accuse the individual reproducing the work of somehow rendering the product worthless, but this is very strange reasoning because the product is by definition worthless in the first place if it can be copied infinite times effortlessly.

How soon we forget about all that time and labor the creator poured into the original. The work is his so only he has a just, moral claim on how to distribute his work. To deny him this is to deny him the fruits of his labor. To copy his work infinitely without his permission is to reduce the work’s scarcity so that whatever value it might have had in the marketplace is now decreased.

A product’s “worth” is how much people are willing to pay for it by definition, and for you to assert that a product is worth something other than that number is simply backwards, although government frequently does this through coercion regarding its own services.

I assert only that tampering with the creation of another by copying and distributing it without permission reduces whatever value it might have had right off the bat by decreasing its scarcity and thus potential customers. As the number of copies approaches the number of people currently on Earth, so too does the value approach near zero. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

The reality we live in is that some products CAN be reproduced cheaply and effortlessly without depriving anyone of usage. Although you may find it distasteful or unfortunate, monetarily at least, a particular work may be worth very little due to technology. We should embrace this and evolve, not rail against it in an unwinnable war against the tide. Artists already can simply find other ways to market their products or make money off of them. I have numerous suggestions as to how they may do this, but I am sure the free market will produce new ways. What you are proposing, by contrast, is removing the free market entirely and instituting enforceable monopolies to whoever registers an idea first with some arbitrary organization, the same thing that government currently does and is the cause of so many problems in the world. I cannot support either monopolies that arise out of coercion or restricted markets of this kind, because I find them backwards, anti-progress, and immoral.

I agree that it is far too gone to be stopped now. The current digital culture revels in their immorality with amusing t-shirts proclaiming their penchant for distributing things they didn’t expend any effort to create. Even the majority of those who profess a love for liberty and justice have found a way to reason it away and make excuses.

As you said, the market will eventually prevail, we’ll just have to suffer the violent lashing out of old media as it struggles in its death throes. I just hate to see good creators caught in the crossfire.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 2:46 am

@ Dan

First of all, I have (hypothetically) not done anything with the creator’s property. They will still be in possession of whatever it is that they physically created. That is their property and it would be immoral for me to steal it, because that would deprive them of usage.

Great. So they’ve still got the copy they spent a significant amount of their life creating, and now, in the blink of an eye, so do ten million other people.

And that’s great if a) you wanted to give away your work virally and b) were afforded the opportunity to make that choice.

As for people of the future pouring their heart and souls into such work in the hopes of hitting the big time and escaping near poverty like many sports stars do, they’d be better off doing physical labor, at least until the successors to STEAM and iTUNES arrive and monopolize all forms of creative entertainment.

Likewise, if I make my own physical property into the same shape or form through my own labor based on information I received by looking at the work of the other person, that person does not have the right to then coerce me to destroy my own work or pay them an arbitrary amount of money simply because they happened to create it first.

In order to make a physical duplicate, you must expend the same amount of resources as the original creator to get exactly one copy. Not quite the same thing.

This is a coercive monopoly system by definition, which I hope you would agree is normally a bad thing. I am perplexed as to why you would choose to carve out this one area as an exception to this principle and bar literally billions of people from doing something on their own, harming no one in the process, simply because somebody else happened to do it first with their own property.

Again, I respectfully but vehemently disagree that no harm is done.

Do you understand that according to this logic if you liked the design of somebody else’s home and decided to build your own home the same way on your own paid property, that person could then hire violent thugs to come to your home and extort arbitrary damages from you, even though you have done nothing to harm that person or anybody else and simply wished to live peacefully?

They can do that now. Architects own copyrights on their blueprints unless they’re work-for-hire. They license them out. In a voluntaryist court of arbitration, however, any damages awarded would likely amount to the going rate for such a blueprint license IF the architect could prove you copied his work rather than retroengineered it just by looking at it.

That is the type of absurdity and barbarism to which these intellectual property restrictions invariably lead. I say let the free market sort out what such designs are worth, and any system that involves coercion where there has been no deprivation of actual property is immoral and arbitrary.

And still you equate “Don’t copy what ain’t yours” with “He’s depriving me of his work! I deserve to have it for free and do whatever I want with it! I ain’t hurtin’ nobody, I’m just taking something that ain’t mine and making millions of copies it against his wishes to spread around the world so that anybody who wants a copy can have it thus rendering any attempt to recoup the cost of his labor completely fruitless!”

Images of Monty Python flood my head. “‘Elp! ‘Elp! I’m bein’ repressed!”

The worth of a product is simply what others are currently willing to pay for it. Somebody can spend all day long bottling water from a stream. If other people have access to the stream themselves, then the worth of the bottled water is zero, determined by the free market. Yet under your logic here, you would force those people to buy the water bottled at some arbitrary price set by the bottler, under the reasoning that acquiring the water for free or bottling it themselves would deprive him of the fruit of his labor and by rendering his work worthless.

Afraid this doesn’t equate. It’s more akin to the waterbottler spending weeks filling up bottles with water from the stream so he can cart them to town and sell them at market and his wizard neighbor comes over, waves his wand and conjures up a copy of the water bottle cart which he then races to town with and throws bottles to everyone he sees.

Their thirsts quenched, the waterbottler now has plenty of water but no one wants to barter for it. He’s forced into the debtor’s prison because he can no longer pay his bills and dies forgotten and alone in a dank musty cell.

The fallacy, of course, is that the work was always worthless economically. Maybe it has some emotional or other value, but that is the beholder’s own responsibility and not anyone else’s. Nor is it any matter that the stream existed before the bottling, as I believe Michelangelo once said, the work is already contained within the marble, he just frees it with his tools.

Of course Michaelangelo said that. He was showing off for his wealthy papal patrons i.e. Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III.

Let me ask a question, hopefully it will frame the issue in a different light. Suppose somebody spent 10 long years of their life devising a new buggy, one that is ultra-light, strong, and harnessed to the horses in a particularly novel and desirable way. This inventor reasonably expects to make a million dollars selling buggies to buyers. Then somebody invents a gasoline-powered automobile and the value of the buggy drops to essentially zero. By your logic, wouldn’t the inventor of the automobile have “stolen” the past work and life effort of the inventor of the buggy? Hasn’t this deprived him of his right to sell the product of his work at what it would have gone for, absent the actions of the automobile inventor? Doesn’t this harm the incentive to create, since one’s investment and time could be rendered worthless by a subsequent invention at any time? To me, the situations are analogous, and in neither situation would it be justified to retard free market progress and institute coercive monopolies to protect the made-up and arbitrary right to exclusively control the implementation of ideas, which no man should have over another.

Completely different situation. In the scenario you propose, the buggymaker was beaten to market by a superior product, not because the automobile maker magically duplicated his competitor’s buggies with the wave of a magic wand and gave them to every man, woman and child on the planet against the buggymaker’s wishes.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 8:28 am

That scenario happened. William Durant was head of the best, most innovative horse carriage company in America. What happened at the advent of the automobile? His talent was appropriated to run an automobile company, Buick, and later he founded General Motors, now known as Government Motors.

Bill Durant did not hold on to the horse-drawn carriage for dear life and try to legislate against cars. He used his talents to enhance the success of the new technology.

Zeus, I have not seen a convincing argument for your side yet. The wizard conjuring up a cart full of water bottles was ridiculous because it wouldnt happen. Let’s say some guy is bottling the water by hand and sells it for a buck a bottle. Then a lazier guy comes along and builds a bottling machine next to the stream and sells his water for 50 cents a bottle. Should he be prosecuted for stealing the idea of selling water in bottles? Good idea right? Oughta get a patent for that…

‘I assert only that tampering with the creation of another by copying and distributing it without permission reduces whatever value it might have had right off the bat by decreasing its scarcity and thus potential customers. As the number of copies approaches the number of people currently on Earth, so too does the value approach near zero. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’

Again, Zeus, you ignore the appeal of buying original work from the original artist. It DOES exist, as I explained above. You must have a personal or emotional attachment to this issue. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? What the hell does that even mean? You know why there will never be free milk? Because if milk were overproduced to that degree, people would stop producing it because they couldnt make any money off it. Then, supply would line back up with demand and a reasonable price for milk would again prevail.

Your brushing aside of market mechanisms such as ostracism and the desire of consumers to support artists who create works that they enjoy is illogical. I humbly suggest that you check your premises, and think about not only those you wish to protect (what is seen), but also those who would not have access to certain ideas and art, not be able to build an appreciation for a certain artisan due simply to lack of exposure, not be able to bring a cheap product to market to help build that appreciation (what is not seen).

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 9:44 am

We can agree to disagree on the philosophical aspects of intellectual property or lack thereof, but I cannot comprehend how your system of “arbitration” for so-called copyright violations would be any different than the current judicial system run by the federal government, since it clearly does not require the consent of both parties to operate or obtain arbitrary non-free market “damages” from peaceful people who have harmed no one and deprived no one of usage of their property (except through some bizarre “scarcity” rationale with too many flawed assumptions about “control rights” to list).

It seems like, as others have pointed out, you are simply shilling for the government controlled monopolistic status quo which has produced the absurd result of 13-year-old girls and grandmothers being sued for millions of dollars (since any “damages” within your scarcity model are completely arbitrary and are not free market determined they will tend to be exaggerated to the extreme) for downloading a Britney Spears song, only you tear off the government label first and stick on the “arbitration” label to make yourself feel better about the violent coercion you are supporting and to give the illusion of a market where actually a monopoly exists by definition. You make some point about how these courts would be inherently more fair than the current system, but I am at a loss as to how the “arbitrator” ruling that violent thugs have a right to enter a non-present party’s’ home and remove something they created with their own two hands is any different than a “judge” doing the same thing, which happens now in federal court with reprehensible results.

Comment by Militant Agnostic

August 26, 2009 @ 10:35 am

So yes, we have a rally celebrating our first amendment rights, with many references to our second amendment rights. But the rest of our Bill of Rights, not mentioned so much. The speakers this year spoke on seventeen different topics, and based on the topic titles none of them, for example, addressed such rights as prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure, rights to a jury trial, rights to a speedy trial, or prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment–all of these rights have been severely attacked and even curtailed by the Bush Administration since the events of September 11, 2001. The very rally itself, based on our first amendment, seems to pay no head to the first amendment’s guarantee of separation of Church and State, so far as I can tell. I believe in our right to free speech and I agree with last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision which for the first time provided us with an individual (and not just collective) right to bear arms. My problem is with the endless supply of 2nd amendment advocates, armed and otherwise, who either do not even know what the rest of our Bill of Rights contain or, even worse, supported the policies of the Bush 43 administration that worked so tirelessly to take those rights away. It’s fine to say you’ll defend your 2nd amendment rights to the last breath–how about standing up for the whole U.S. Constitution for a change.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 10:44 am

Part of the ‘whole Constitution’ allows for a protective tariff.

I’m not interested in that, so how can I possibly say that I support the whole Constitution?

I support people being free to do what they want, so long as they arent hurting others.

Comment by Militant Agnostic

August 26, 2009 @ 12:16 pm

LPVIPER: You are, of course, free to disagree with any aspect of our constitution you wish. That freedom was guaranteed to you by our constitution’s first amendment. The gist of my post, which you would have picked up on had you parsed it a bit more carefully, is that all of the rights given to the people by our constitution and its amendments, primary among those the first ten, are equally deserving of protection. Cherry picking the 2nd amendment as worthy of protection while ignoring the rest of our bill or rights, or arguing that torture is lawful, despite the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, is a ludicrous position. That is my point. On the other hand, advocating for an amendment to take away a particular right (or group of rights) from the people does pass muster (see again, first amendment rights to free speech), although I find its practice to be antithetical to everything our country stands for. I think the only successful example (without bothering to research it) was the amendment outlawing alcohol, and we saw how that turned out.

As an aside, when an elected federal official or a member of the military take their oath, they are swearing (or affirming) to support and defend entire constitution, not just the bits they agree with. So yes, support the whole constitution, but work within its parameters to change things with which you disagree. Anything less would be … unamerican.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 12:25 pm

‘…all of the rights given to the people by our constitution and its amendments…’

Sir, the Constitution doesn’t GIVE me anything. I am a free man, and this Constitution was supposed to protect my rights, not issue and repeal them as the politicians see fit.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 12:28 pm

I’m not interested in working within the parameters of a document that I did not write, sign, or in any other way agree to be bound by.

I simply wish to be left alone and not have my wealth stolen from me by force to fund things that voluntary markets either cannot or will not support.

OK?

Comment by Militant Agnostic

August 26, 2009 @ 12:47 pm

LPVIPER said …
> … Sir, the Constitution doesn’t GIVE me anything. I am
> a free man, and this Constitution was supposed to protect
> my rights, not issue and repeal them as the politicians
> see fit.

Spoken like a man who either has neither lived in nor contemplated living in a totalitarian regime, or believes his rights were assigned to him by his nonexistent god, and not by our forward thinking founding fathers.

> I’m not interested in working within the parameters
> of a document that I did not write, sign, or in any
> other way agree to be bound by.
>
> I simply wish to be left alone and not have my wealth
> stolen from me by force to fund things that voluntary
> markets either cannot or will not support.
>
> OK?

Ah, put your money where your mouth is. Here’s how you can start: quit driving on roads funded or partially funded with federal dollars.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. –John Kenneth Galbraith

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 1:13 pm

You first, asshole. I’m tired of hearing that old saw. Very very few of us will stop using the roads to make a point of principle because it does not serve the ultimate goal of man, which is to improve his life and make his existence better.

The idea I am expressing is that the Bill of Rights was created to protect our rights from government intrusion, not to inform us of which liberties we were to be allowed by our new ‘masters’. OK?

Governments do not create rights. They can only violate them. OK?

Most systems that are under governmental control today, such as your precious fucking roads, were originated in the private markets and were run more efficiently than government operates them now. Believe me when I say the gubment has a PHD in fucking shit up, OK? They receive no price signals from market operators because they have no competition, ok? And the result is, labor and other resources are drawn to it, because it has no way of knowing what its ’services’ are really worth, and so it charges extravagantly (taxes consumers don’t get to haggle over) and it pays its workers way way way over comparable wages in the markets.

Your assertion that I need to isolate myself from the world to help free it is STUPID.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 1:21 pm

@ Viper

Zeus, I have not seen a convincing argument for your side yet. The wizard conjuring up a cart full of water bottles was ridiculous because it wouldnt happen.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Such is the power of digital pirating akin to the cloning wizardry of Xerox The Magician… Master of Multiplication and Premier of Prestidigitation! [insert smoke bomb here, play creepy eastern-sounding music]

Let’s say some guy is bottling the water by hand and sells it for a buck a bottle. Then a lazier guy comes along and builds a bottling machine next to the stream and sells his water for 50 cents a bottle. Should he be prosecuted for stealing the idea of selling water in bottles? Good idea right? Oughta get a patent for that…

Again, you presume that a speck of an idea is the same thing as intellectual property, that some hillbilly in the mountains of Tennessee thinking “Sure would be great not to get the flu anymore” is one-hundred percent identical to a scientist laboring, researching, testing and producing a flu vaccine.

Again, I tell you that ideas are the language of mankind, inescapable and piling up in our heads. By themselves they are useless but combined with our skills, knowledge and life experience, they can be transformed into something wondrous.

Again, Zeus, you ignore the appeal of buying original work from the original artist. It DOES exist, as I explained above. You must have a personal or emotional attachment to this issue. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? What the hell does that even mean? You know why there will never be free milk? Because if milk were overproduced to that degree, people would stop producing it because they couldnt make any money off it. Then, supply would line back up with demand and a reasonable price for milk would again prevail.

You just made my point, Vipe. “If milk [creative works] were overproduced [pirated] to that degree, people would stop [buying it and the author w]ouldn’t make any money off it.”

Pirating a work floods the market with it permanently, thus rendering the labor of the creator a waste of time he will never recoup and preventing him from even getting to make the decision as to whether its released for free or not. The second he transfers it from his head to digital media — which he must in order to see it in its entirety and to shape it — anyone can come along and duplicate it into infinity without investing any labor or evidencing any skill.

Your brushing aside of market mechanisms such as ostracism and the desire of consumers to support artists who create works that they enjoy is illogical. I humbly suggest that you check your premises, and think about not only those you wish to protect (what is seen), but also those who would not have access to certain ideas and art, not be able to build an appreciation for a certain artisan due simply to lack of exposure, not be able to bring a cheap product to market to help build that appreciation (what is not seen).

People pirate now. I see no ostracism, I see jubilance. I see a brotherhood of banditry bound by common enemies (MPAA/RIAA) use the spectre of that enemy to justify their harm to creators, their removing of choices, their stealing of another’s labor.

There will indeed always likely be a few people passing out alms for the poor but such a waste of talent it would be… what wondrous novels, films, songs, shows, games and so on will never be borne because there isn’t even the possibility of incentive for the skilled and talented to waste their efforts.

That we live in a world of kleptomaniacs who can’t keep their hands (and cloning wands) to themselves is tragic.

The first step in beating an addiction is to admit you have one.

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

Zeus, until you stop equating so-called copyright infringement with “theft” or “stealing,” no rational discussion can proceed. I believe I have already requested that you stop misleading people in this way and engaging in such hyperbole. Even the United States government does not assert that copyright infringement is “theft” or “stealing,” because there are fundamental differences, which I have already pointed out to you numerous times.

Comment by Militant Agnostic

August 26, 2009 @ 2:16 pm

LPVIPER: Ah, I see now. You’re not merely ignorant of the facts at hand, you are also stupid, and therefore have a valid excuse for your ignorance. I never would have engaged you if I had realized you were limited thus. I apologize. Good on you for making up for it with the profanity, you ignorant charlatan.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 2:35 pm

Zeus, until you stop equating so-called copyright infringement with “theft” or “stealing,” no rational discussion can proceed. I believe I have already requested that you stop misleading people in this way and engaging in such hyperbole. Even the United States government does not assert that copyright infringement is “theft” or “stealing,” because there are fundamental differences, which I have already pointed out to you numerous times.

I don’t care what the US government asserts or doesn’t assert. I do not support them or their laws, I support those who work hard to create enjoyable art and entertainment from having their work usurped, the ability to compete in the marketplace stripped from them and their labored efforts made null and void. These things add up to theft.

I understand how pirates would prefer not to think of themselves as thieves, but that’s just denial, not truth. Of course they want to find a way to justify their actions and shed their responsibility, to minimize the notion they’re causing harm. That way, they can continue doing it and not feel bad about it. They don’t want to be the bad guy but they want what is not theirs sooooo much more. It’s so easy to copy, click click click, see? No harm done. So eassssy… yessss, we can make millionsssses of preciousssses for ever and ever…

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 2:55 pm

Please keep telling me how I feel, Zeus. You would know better than I would.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 3:08 pm

Interesting that you think my references to “pirates”, “they”, “their” and “themselves” and the motivations of such persons somehow addresses you with specificity.

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 3:26 pm

Well, I have downloaded things without asking permission from the creator beforehand, so presumably you consider me a “thief” and a “pirate” and I would be included within your statements. If you do not consider me as such, then I would be glad about that, because I do not feel that I have harmed anybody or done anything wrong.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 3:34 pm

OK militant whoever guy, you’ve got it down.

Ad hominem

Socialist word obsessed insult

My advice:

Either have a take or go back to yer bridge.

Zeus, we fundamentally disagree about IP. I will certainly reread your assertions and consider my opinions carefully. Thanks for a civil discussion!

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 3:35 pm

As an interesting aside, I wonder if there is anybody left in the Western world above the age of 10 who is NOT a “thief” and a criminal under your draconian intellectual property scheme. I highly doubt it. The chance that you yourself have not violated at least hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of copyrights, patents, and trademarks under your system of intellectual property laws is close to zero, and I would happy to provide you with examples of such. Here are a few:

Have you ever sung the Happy Birthday song at a party?
Have you ever played music at work?
Have you ever copied music onto a CD for someone?
Have you ever shown a VHS or DVD to anyone outside of your immediate family and closest friends?

Well then, how does it feel to be a criminal?
Will you be paying the RIAA/MPAA by cash, check, or credit card?

This is a common tactic of oppressive governments: make everybody a criminal for doing the things they naturally do every day and then extort them for money or incarcerate them the moment it is advantageous to do so. See also: traffic tickets

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 4:03 pm

Well, I have downloaded things without asking permission from the creator beforehand, so presumably you consider me a “thief” and a “pirate” and I would be included within your statements. If you do not consider me as such, then I would be glad about that, because I do not feel that I have harmed anybody or done anything wrong.

I understand that you feel you’ve done nothing wrong and I’m telling you that you have. Admittedly, its not on the level of homicide or taking someone’s TV but it is still immoral and unjust even though you don’t want it to be.

You now have something (you have benefited) that is theoretically permanent and can be copied infinitely and you have given nothing in exchange to the person who created it. Worse, you didn’t even give them the chance to decide how their work should be distributed. Maybe it was already free, maybe it was free but licensed under the GPL, maybe it was a penny, maybe it was five bucks. Doesn’t matter because you didn’t care. You saw it, it was there somehow on the internets, you wanted it, you downloaded it. I understand that people do it every day.

If it ended there, the harm would be minuscule, like stealing a stick of gum. Now have ten million people do the same thing and it grows exponentially. Now you’re talking entire truckloads of gum.

Worse is when someone does this vindictively to you or if they copy your work without permission and then profit from it. That is the ultimate level of theft when it comes to works of the mind.

You toil and labor to create something awesome and some dillweed comes along who contributed nothing to it, he makes a billion copies and sells them through his shady fly-by-night operation. Maybe he tries to pass himself off as you or your company. If his copies are shoddy or he rips someone off, your reputation takes a hit.

To sum up, pirating is not the same as murder, assault or rape. But it is a form of minor theft that can escalate from just plain immoral to seriously damaging. The best practice is to try and control one’s self, not be tempted by the ease of doing it and not engage in it.

That all said, I’m not stuck on cloud 9 here. I know that very few (if any) people are going to take that advice and make the moral choice. I just want you to remember that when you do it, don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s wrong and don’t try and justify beyond “Me Want, Me Take”.

Eventually, the market will triumph and creators who want to sell their works will have to do so through online applications like STEAM and iTUNES or closed devices like the Kindle and customers will be technologically prevented from spreading around the work without permission. Then authors who want to charge something for their work will be able to do so worry-free.

Comment by Zeus

August 26, 2009 @ 4:14 pm

As an interesting aside, I wonder if there is anybody left in the Western world above the age of 10 who is NOT a “thief” and a criminal under your draconian intellectual property scheme. I highly doubt it. The chance that you yourself have not violated at least hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of copyrights, patents, and trademarks under your system of intellectual property laws is close to zero, and I would happy to provide you with examples of such. Here are a few:

Have you ever sung the Happy Birthday song at a party?
Have you ever played music at work?
Have you ever copied music onto a CD for someone?
Have you ever shown a VHS or DVD to anyone outside of your immediate family and closest friends?

Well then, how does it feel to be a criminal?

A) they’re not my intellectual property laws, B) I don’t support government-enforcement of intellectual property protection and C) yes, nearly anyone with a computer in the last 20 years has likely done it.

Will you be paying the RIAA/MPAA by cash, check, or credit card?

I do not recognize the RIAA/MPAA as anything more than government-backed monopoly that enslaves creators who were fooled into signing away their creations.

That said, I pay for all my stuff and support creators like NIN who seek to break free of the current market paradigm.

This is a common tactic of oppressive governments: make everybody a criminal for doing the things they naturally do every day and then extort them for money or incarcerate them the moment it is advantageous to do so. See also: traffic tickets</blockquote<

Nice try but you can't use the tactics of the government to disguise your own wrongdoing. Ya did it and you'll do it again and that's just how it is. Doesn't make it any less immoral.

Again, the market will eventually prevail.

Comment by Lpviper

August 26, 2009 @ 4:16 pm

The hell of it is I totally get where you are coming from, Zeus, but I am just not on board. I think that this is not expressly theft, could conceivably be considered poor etiquette or bad manners and earn one ostracism from the artisan and his supporters, and maybe even people in general. But it’s not going to be easy to convince average people to feel bad for people whose works earn them money, because their job is not a hard labor type of work, and then you have the whole messy thing with a published work being owned by the purchaser, not the artist, and things like that. It will be interesting to see how this issue is viewed by the mainstream in a freer society. So far I still don’t feel like a thief, Zeus. Am I evil for that?

Comment by Dan

August 26, 2009 @ 5:05 pm

It’s just plain hypocrisy, because Zeus him(her)self has undoubtedly violated copyright law many, many times and probably does not even realize it, or perhaps does realize it and simply doesn’t care. See my previous post on the subject for examples of such violations that Zeus has undoubtedly engaged in at one point or another. Will Zeus pay for them and make the artist “whole”? No, because deep down Zeus knows that it’s all nonsense, (s)he hasn’t harmed anyone, and the artist has undoubtedly managed to make money anyway in a multitude of different ways by using the fame the work has generated for them.

It’s the same thing as police reaching into your wallet for victimless parking/speeding/rolling stop “violations” when they themselves break such laws probably dozens of times each day, or a 60 year old boomer railing against pot and underaged drinking when they were the poster child during the 1960’s and besides the recent authoritarian streak turned out fine for it.

I refuse to be told that I am immoral and a criminal for acts which have no demonstrable (key word) damages, especially when the accuser is almost definitely guilty of many of the same acts. It’s self-righteousness and hypocrisy to the extreme, all based upon a flawed and ethereal “control rights” theory no less. It’s the technologically backwards buggy-seller suing the automobile-seller for cutting into the profits he personally feels he deserves when the market itself is sending clear signals that each individual copy of his work has no such value.

Comment by Zeus

August 27, 2009 @ 4:09 am

I wrote a long response several hours ago but it never posted for some reason and I had to go.

Anyway, I’ll try and respond the latest posts.

@ Viper: People who do that kind of work struggle and fight for it. Most of them would be better off doing manual labor for a living. As for the “published work being owned by the purchaser”, I explained earlier how works of the mind function differently that physical works. i.e. they require a container or medium of transference. It is the container that is being sold unless otherwise explicitly stated. This why people use copyright, creative commons and so on. So that they buyer knows what they’re actually getting for their money. For each every person who purchases a Matrix DVD to suddenly claim they all own the whole franchise and can make new films would be absurd.

As for feeling like a thief, Dan is right in that most of us alive in the digital age are guilty of making copies we shouldn’t have without an exchange of value for value.

Obviously, it isn’t an act comparable with taking a car, or a television and, if the copying ends with you, the harm is minimized. But whether you feel guilty about it or not doesn’t change the immorality of it.

@ Dan

It’s just plain hypocrisy, because Zeus him(her)self has undoubtedly violated copyright law many, many times and probably does not even realize it, or perhaps does realize it and simply doesn’t care. See my previous post on the subject for examples of such violations that Zeus has undoubtedly engaged in at one point or another. Will Zeus pay for them and make the artist “whole”? No, because deep down Zeus knows that it’s all nonsense, (s)he hasn’t harmed anyone, and the artist has undoubtedly managed to make money anyway in a multitude of different ways by using the fame the work has generated for them.

You don’t know how wrong you are. Have I violated copyright in the past? Absolutely. Many times. But I have indeed made or attempted to make restitution in every instance I can recall since realizing it was wrong. These days I purchase all my music, mostly using iTunes, unless the artist has explicitly made it available for free download. I read quite a few books and listen to audiobooks constantly. I either get them explicitly free or I pay for them. Much of the software I use is open source or freeware but when I need something I can’t get anywhere else, I pay for it. I’ve made a conscious decision to respect the property of talented creators whose work I value.

As for the artists making “money anyway in a multitude of different ways”, that’s irrelevant to your actions. Whether they make money or not is a smokescreen used to justify copying their work and pretend that it’s moral.

It’s the same thing as police reaching into your wallet for victimless parking/speeding/rolling stop “violations” when they themselves break such laws probably dozens of times each day, or a 60 year old boomer railing against pot and underaged drinking when they were the poster child during the 1960’s and besides the recent authoritarian streak turned out fine for it.

Now you’re taking your hatred for government thugs and cranky old hippies and using their immoral actions to justify your own.

I refuse to be told that I am immoral and a criminal for acts which have no demonstrable (key word) damages, especially when the accuser is almost definitely guilty of many of the same acts. It’s self-righteousness and hypocrisy to the extreme, all based upon a flawed and ethereal “control rights” theory no less. It’s the technologically backwards buggy-seller suing the automobile-seller for cutting into the profits he personally feels he deserves when the market itself is sending clear signals that each individual copy of his work has no such value.

I’m pretty sure it would be considered a civil matter in both the existing government system of arbitration as well as voluntaryist one. Not criminal.

It sounds like you’ve got some major cognitive dissonance going on, maybe some other guilt-related issues as well. I can’t imagine why it’s so hard to say “It is immoral and I should try not to do it anymore”. I mean, not wanting to think of one’s self as a bad person is understandable. But we all do immoral things from time to time even when we know better. No one is perfect. The best we can do is to try to be better, more honest and moral people. This is why so many of us are drawn to the Philosophy of Liberty in the first place.

It helps us to recognize when we are doing something wrong so we can confront it rather than putting our hands over our ears and shouting “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”. I’m not asking you to support thugocratic government copyright law nor the unjust entertainment industry mafias (RIAA/MPAA) nor do I think anyone should be imprisoned or pay egregious and unfair restitution. I’m just asking you to respect the creator and what they put into the work you enjoyed enough to copy without bothering to see if it was ok or exchanging anything of value.

Comment by Dan

August 27, 2009 @ 9:21 am

Zeus, there is so much that is authoritarian and even religious about your continued assertion that somebody who comes up with a design first has an absolute monopoly on “control” of that design over billions of other people they have never contracted with, and has the sole right to use force to obtain arbitrary monetary damages from those people. I find it ironic that you bring up “cognitive dissonance”! I say religious because why do they have such a control right even absent deprivation of use? Oh, because you said so.

Let me give you another example (there are so many ways to attack this argument it is difficult to pick one at a time).

Situation 1: People from the “state” decide to build a road system for the “public good.” They then insist that only they have the right to build and maintain such systems, and you are forbidden from competing with them or using it without their permission, in other words they institute a monopoly. Any violation of this monopoly is backed up by coerced extraction of wealth from other individuals of arbitrary set damages.

Situation 2: People from a “studio” decide to create a design for the “public good.” They then insist that only they have the right to use such a design, and you are forbidden from competing with them or using it without their permission, in other words they institute a monopoly. Any violation of this monopoly is backed up by coerced extraction of wealth from other individuals of arbitrary set damages.

You don’t see the authoritarian parallels of such a system? Far from cognitive dissonance, to me the fact that they are two versions of the same flawed system is obvious.

Comment by Zeus

August 27, 2009 @ 6:31 pm

Apparently part of that missing post showed up as 82224. Dunno what happened with that.

Zeus, there is so much that is authoritarian and even religious about your continued assertion that somebody who comes up with a design first has an absolute monopoly on “control” of that design over billions of other people they have never contracted with, and has the sole right to use force to obtain arbitrary monetary damages from those people.

As far authoritarianism goes, I suppose I’m authoritarian or even totalitarian about my life, my body, my liberty, my labor and my property. As a sovereign individual, I have the right to be sole controller of those things. That you confuse the usurpation of a creator’s work (their property) with an imaginary assault or deprivation against you is nonsensical reverse-thinking based on greed and utilitarianism.

You initiate the aggression when you start tinkering with something that isn’t yours and for which you have absolutely no right to tinker with since you did not make an exchange of value or gain permission from the property-holder.

You further confuse the sale of a book, DVD, CD or other container of content as being a complete transference of all rights to the content, not just the container and certain permissions granted by the author regarding the content. Again, if it isn’t explicit in the terms of the sale, there is no transference of rights (i.e. a quit claim) to the content. You cannot own what you did not buy, create or homestead yourself unless it is explicitly granted to you by someone who does or did.

I posed a situation previously in which the likely solution from an arbitration jury would be to make adjustments to the design by one or both parties until potential confusion was deemed null by those parties or the jury. If the designs are found to be not enough alike to pose a problem in the market, the bringer of the suit would owe court costs and a “wasting my time” fee to the defendant, perhaps even a ding to their reputation if vindictiveness (or just plain jackassed nuttiness) can be proved.

“Let the punishment fit the crime.” – The Mikado

Monetary damages, let alone arbitrary ones, are not the solution to all problems.

You claim I’m being a zealot, that my defense of creators and their works borders on religious fervor. But you consistently try to flip the situation and paint the creator as the bad guy (because he won’t quit claim all rights of the content to you) rather than the person claiming the right to do whatever they want with someone else’s work even though they contributed nothing to the creation of the work i.e. labor, didn’t exchange anything of value for it and usurped the creator’s ability to choose their method of distribution or rules governing their property. Not once have you satisfactorily addressed these issues which are at the very core of the Philosophy of Liberty.

Piracy is pure socialist thinking fueled by greed and utilitarianism. It devalues works of art, disrespects creators and interferes in the market of goods and services. “We the people deserve entertainment for free and we will do whatever we want with it, author be damned!”

You might as well be advocating that all creative works become the property of the state. Goodbye free market capitalism, goodbye creator’s rights. The time of Producers is over and the Parasites have won. I suppose at least then the state would probably pay minimum wage to a bunch of hacks to churn out their government-approved dreck. Of course, it would be with stolen blood money. With any luck, a black market will spring up around it and people will once again value good entertainment and respect the people whose minds labored to create it.

I find it ironic that you bring up “cognitive dissonance”! I say religious because why do they have such a control right even absent deprivation of use? Oh, because you said so.

Works of the mind require a container, be it a book, an optical disk or a computer hard drive. Once you make an exchange of value for that container (or the author willingly gives it to you for free), the container is yours to do with as you wish. Set it on fire, throw it way, shoot it to the moon.

What you are NOT entitled to is all rights to the CONTENT unless explicitly stated otherwise in the terms of the sale.

You may read the content of the book any time you like, but only because you own the book. Buying a Star Wars book does not entitle you ownership to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

You may watch a DVD any time you like, but only because you own the DVD. Buying the Lord of the Rings Trilogy set does not entitle you ownership of Gandalf and Frodo.

You can listen to the content on a CD any time you like, but only because you own the CD. You don’t own Master of Puppets or The Shortest Straw.

Copying those works to new containers and redistributing them is not something you’ve been given permission to do by the person who expended the labor to create them.

Admittedly, making a single copy for one’s own use is far, far less an act of thievery than cranking out thousands of copies and flooding the market with them (for profit or otherwise). But it is still immoral. Low on the list of immoralities, granted, but it is still wrong and one should never fool themselves into thinking otherwise.

Again, you have the option to walk away from the work and find an alternative. I wouldn’t recommend Open Source because the majority of it is released with licensing terms. Same for the Creative Commons. Plus you hate copyright already. Perhaps you can find alternatives from the public domain or other creators who don’t care what you do with their work or who encourage copying.

Let me give you another example (there are so many ways to attack this argument it is difficult to pick one at a time).

Situation 1: People from the “state” decide to build a road system for the “public good.” They then insist that only they have the right to build and maintain such systems, and you are forbidden from competing with them or using it without their permission, in other words they institute a monopoly. Any violation of this monopoly is backed up by coerced extraction of wealth from other individuals of arbitrary set damages.

An argument filled with flaws. Here you’re equating usurpation of a creator’s rights to their property with a mob declaring a monopoly and shaking people down for trying to compete “illegally”.

It is far more likely that agents (wittingly or unwittingly) of a socialist state would go around copying the works of every potential competitor and release them into the “public domain”, claiming that “The People” deserve entertainment and knowledge and that it is the duty of creative people to willingly contribute their work to the “common good”, else be labeled as a greedy capitalist who hates the “lower classes” and wants them to suffer from a lack of amusement or knowledge.

Situation 2: People from a “studio” decide to create a design for the “public good.” They then insist that only they have the right to use such a design, and you are forbidden from competing with them or using it without their permission, in other words they institute a monopoly. Any violation of this monopoly is backed up by coerced extraction of wealth from other individuals of arbitrary set damages.

Another flawed example. If the people from the studio create a design they honestly mean to serve the public good, they would release it to everyone equally for such use (socialism) rather than claiming a monopoly on the use of the design, forbidding competitors to compete and then shaking them down if they attempt to do so.

If they do not do this, they are lying about their motives.

You continue to try and flip things around so that the creator is guilty of wrongdoing rather than those trying to usurp their labor.

People who create works of the mind compete all the time and do so fairly. There are millions of books, tens of thousands of films and millions of songs. Only when their works are usurped by others (be it the government, the RIAA/MPAA mafia or a bunch of pirates) is there a problem.

There are tons of similar properties out there that are exceptionally similar and yet have enough of a difference between them to make them unique unto themselves. If I say “frightening masked crusader of the night dealing vigilante justice on scum of the city” I could be referring to Batman, The Shadow, or any of a dozen other masked vigilante characters.

Apollo and the Midnighter from DC’s THE AUTHORITY are obvious analogues for Superman and Batman. The Incredibles are analogues to the Fantastic Four and yet significantly different enough to compete on their own without entirely plagiarizing Marvel’s characters. Supergirl and Batgirl are female analogues to Superman and Batman and yet they have their own books because there’s more to them than just being copies with breasts. Similar creations CAN compete. Plagiarism, however, is theft.

You don’t see the authoritarian parallels of such a system? Far from cognitive dissonance, to me the fact that they are two versions of the same flawed system is obvious.

I don’t see it because both your examples and your conclusions are flawed, likely because you consciously or unconsciously want the facts to match your answer rather than the other way around and it just ain’t so.

If you don’t like the author’s terms and refuse to respect their rights, walk away and find something else to entertain you. If you cannot or do not want to control yourself from usurping their work, at least admit to what you’re doing rather than trying to fool yourself with false justifications for it or shifting the blame elsewhere.

There are millions of people being immoral every second. I’m sure there’s a few of them who at least admit to it even if they don’t stop doing it.

Comment by Lpviper

August 27, 2009 @ 8:19 pm

Your judgement of morality is evidently not to be questioned, eh, Zeus?

This is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth…

Comment by Zeus

August 27, 2009 @ 9:03 pm

I would point out, Viper, that my foundation for morality is the Philosophy of Liberty and the Non-Aggression Principle. The beauty of the PoL and NAP is that they are incredibly simple and flawlessly logical.

Since I believe them to be correct and true based on reason and critical thinking and they haven’t been proven otherwise, the only remaining option is that I have misinterpreted them.

If so, you are free to show me where I’ve gone astray. I will then take your claims and your evidence, test them to see if they are compatible with the PoL/NAP and, if so, admit you are correct and adjust my worldview accordingly.

This process may seem familiar to you from reading every post I’ve ever made here because I make an effort to do this with everything. It’s my scientific method for truth and understanding.

I do not find Dan’s claims or your previous claims as morally defensible nor compatible with the PoL/NAP. Both of you have attempted to provide evidence and examples that pirating is A-OK. I have explained why I do not feel that it is.

Being a creator of such works, perhaps I have a better perspective at what goes into making a work of the mind and thus respect and value creators and their creations more than the average person, but I have made a concentrated effort not to let emotion overrule logic in this discussion.

I think your desire for works of the mind combined with the ease of being able to make perfect copies clouds your judgment (and that of millions of others who do the same thing every day) on this issue. First, you want to deny that its wrong because you don’t want to think of yourself as committing an immoral act. Failing that, you want to imagine that if it is wrong, it’s someone else’s fault, the greedy capitalist creator, the government, the evil entertainment mafia or even me. Certainly, the government and the RIAA/MPAA are guilty of far, far greater immoralities than pirating, but their acts (nor anyone else’s) do not negate responsibility for your own.

It doesn’t appear that I have convinced either of you at all and neither of you have convinced me. Perhaps we have reached an impasse and exhausted all possible usefulness from this particular discussion.

Comment by Lpviper

August 27, 2009 @ 9:52 pm

That certainly is possible. I am still studying the matter and will refer back to the Philosophy of Liberty and apply it to this situation.

The concept and its applications (of IP I mean) seem so subjective as to be non definable. This is what is really giving me pause.

What is definitely true is that it has my brain crankin’.

We will discuss this again anon, Thanks again to you and Dan and everyone at FK for the great discussion. I’ll definitely be coming back to this one with either more (intellectual) bullets or with a handful of crow in my mouth

lol be well

Comment by Lpviper

August 27, 2009 @ 10:10 pm

OK Zeus, here is an article that I found quite interesting regarding this topic:

http://mises.org/story/3631

Read that when you get a chance, I’d enjoy reading what you make of it.

Comment by Zeus

August 28, 2009 @ 1:03 am

INTRO

Mr. Krawisz, the author of the article, immediately makes a glaring blunder right out of the gate when he says “This presumed right of the creator of an idea is often believed to be similar to the right that a homesteader has to land he has settled”. Do you see the blunder? He’s already confusing an “idea” with an intellectual property. That’s like the Cartoon Network asking you to produce a new show and you hand them a piece of paper that says “Let’s do a parody of Johnny Quest wherein every episode is about never being able to achieve greatness.” They’ll look at it, say “That’s a great idea but we asked you for 13 episodes of a show, not a piece of paper with a single sentence on it. We can’t pimp a sentence to advertisers. Nobody is going to watch a sentence. It has no value to us, to our viewers or to our advertisers.”

Needless to say, I’m already leery of Mr. Krawisz’s assumptions and terminology here.

THE NATURE OF PROPERTY

P3: Mostly logical until he introduces exclusivity. Exclusivity applies only to physical one-of-a-kind objects. It does not apply in the same way to works of the mind. It applies to physical containers but not imaginative content. Perhaps the flaw in libertarian pro-piracy thinking begins with the assumption that you can apply the exact same logic with both mental and physical works when we know they don’t operate the same way. It’s like trying to apply Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (which works fine on massive, corporeal objects like stars and planets and people) to a realm bound by Quantum Physics (which works, albeit weirdly, for incorporeal, low-mass objectsl like quarks, atoms and neutrinos). Let’s face it, you can’t hold an “idea” in your hand let alone an intellectual property like a “story”, a “movie” or “music”. You require a medium to contain and/or produce it. You can hold a book. You can hold a DVD. You can hold a CD or a trombone. And this why you cannot apply exclusivity to mental works in the same way you apply it to physical works. I find this tragically amusing because a) Mr. Krawisz is a physics student at the University of Texas at Austin and b) the page this appears on is governed by its creators with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

P4: He says here “All such rights must resolve into rights over physical things.” Technically, this is true only if you acknowledge that works of the mind come from the creator’s labor. Time and effort are valuable. Physicists focus their brainpower on solving complex mathematical equations. Writers focus their imagination on crafting stories with complex and interesting characters. Artists use their knowledge of light, shadow and color to create a drawing or painting that is pleasing or evokes a desired emotional response from viewers. Without people skilled at these things, much of our entertainment would be crude. People slapping pies in each others faces, bonking each other on the head and so on. Hell, much of that is already overtaking media now. Look at shows like Jackass, American Idol, various reality shows, massively multiplayer games with no end and no goal other than to level up, repetitious first person shooters with no story and no goal other than to kill everything on screen, etc. It’s pablum for the masses so they can zone out while the state intrudes ever deeper into their lives and wallets.

P10: “Ideas cannot themselves be controlled with physical force”. Ideas are only the atoms of intellectual property, not the property itself.

“To own a patent in a given invention is to have rights over everything in the universe that might be used to replicate that invention.”

A ludicrous statement but I will agree that patents are unnecessary and should be abolished. They do not work as advertised and cause more problems then they solve. Licensing would be a more appropriate solution.

P11: “to have a copyright in a song or a book is to have a property right over all paper, printing presses, computers — even over all people — everywhere.” Horsepuckey, hogwash and poppycock. I’m pretty sure most of us have tons of copyrighted materials in our possession. I’ve got craploads of books, CD’s, DVD’s and movies. Not once have they prevented me from using paper, printing presses and I’m using a computer right NOW. It’s ONLY when you attempt to aggress by using those devices (or others) to copy a work that you have no right to copy. Mr. Krawisz’s theories have officially entered Twilight Zone insanity.

“The owner may prevent the copying or public performance of his work by them all.”

Copyright and licensing doesn’t prevent unauthorized copying anymore than writing a law prevents people from committing crimes. What copyright and/or licensing do is list a specific set of permissions (granted by the author) regarding how the content (not the container) may be used.

Since nothing else in the universe grants you a just, moral claim to do anything with that content (since you did not invest your labor to create it and there was no quitclaim), violating these permissions deprives the creator of the time and effort they invested into creating it. Now you’ve got a non-criminal dispute on your hands which can be arbitrated in a non-government voluntaryist arbitration court.

Perhaps a replacement for government-run copyright protection would be a sort of “Super Creative Commons” that combines copyright and creative commons licensing rather than the latter relying on the former.

“Intellectual property is, like socialism, a kind of slavery, albeit a limited kind. Unlike socialism, however, intellectual property does not limit itself to the people and property in a given town or nation, or even the entire world. Since most matter in the universe could be used to encode an idea, intellectual property is a claim over the entire universe.”

Yeah, he’s gone off the deep end here. He’s now claiming that a creator authorizing (the root word here being “author”) a specific set of permissions as to how the content they invested their time, effort and brainpower (labor) to create is somehow the direct equivalent of seeking UNIVERSAL DOMINATION. A falsely absurd argument of the highest degree.

And I’m going to end my review there, about a third of the way through the article. With insane arguments like that already having been reached by the author of the article, I expect to find nothing but more of the same flawed logic and ludicrously absurd conclusions.

Comment by Zeus

August 28, 2009 @ 2:27 am

I’d like to take a moment to paint a picture for you on how a creator’s work typically gets to the market in today’s world.

Let’s go with a writer since I know them best.

Typically, a dedicated and skilled writer can churn out a 90,000 word novel (about 400 pages) in less than a year. Others may take several years.

Once they’re finished with it, they need to go through it several times, editing and proofing it.

Then they send out their manuscript to dozens of agents looking for representation. Why? Because most first-time authors don’t have the money to risk printing up thousands of copies of a finished book nor the sales acumen and distribution reach in selling them. So they get an agent to pimp them to the publishers who will foot the bill for all that.

If you get an agent (and most will turn you down) and then you get a publisher to bite (most will turn you down), you go through the book again several times making whatever changes they request. You wrote a 90,000 word novel but they might tell you they need a 100,000 words or maybe 80,000. Now you’ve either got to chop off your baby’s arm or have her grow a tumor on her forehead. Get used to it.

For your work, the publisher gives you an advance, maybe a few thousand dollars. It’s probably the last bit of money you’ll ever see from the book so hopefully it makes up for all that time you spent cramming your writing around your day job and your personal life. Now say goodbye to 15% for your agent’s pimpage.

Once the book hits the stores, statistical odds are that it will be crushed by an onslaught of better known competitors backed by larger publishers and will never recoup the money it took to print and distribute it. It will, in fact, lose money. The publisher knows this. They expect it. They survive through quantity, not quality.

Congratulations! You’re a writer. And after you buy that new hot tub or used car or pay some bills off, you’ll be broke again.

Then you do it all over again (except now you have an agent) hoping to get better reviews and more fame and another book deal so you can increase that next advance or beat the astronomical odds against you of becoming a genuine best-selling author.

It works mostly the same in the music business except your agent is usually called a “manager” and much of your money comes from performing your music live. And most of that will be spent on cocaine, weed and booze. You gotta keep up the lifestyle, right?

In film and television, just forget it. Hollywood is an abyss that will consume your soul and vomit it back up in your mouth.

Computer games? Become a programmer or an artist. They rarely hire for anything else and, when the studio goes out of business or gets sold, you can get a job elsewhere.

The majority of films and games, like books, lose money.

The internet is changing these things but very, very slowly. Major obstacles include the RIAA/MPAA refusing to die, millions of pirates getting a copy of your work for free and waiting for the successor to STEAM and iTunes to finally be born. Of course, they’ll probably end up being a monopoly and feed off your hard work just like everyone else and they’ll find your old and decrepit booze-filled body in filthy apartment down in nowheresville. Not having a clue who you are, they’ll bury you in a pauper’s grave, with only well-fed worms to mark your passing in this world.

Pep talk over, kids. Go get ‘em!

Comment by charley hardman

August 28, 2009 @ 9:53 pm

Being a creator of such works, perhaps I have a better perspective at what goes into making a work of the mind and thus respect and value creators and their creations more than the average person,

for fuck’s sake, blow it out your joke ass. throughout this thread you’ve been positing “pirating” as an argument killer (i.e., you’ve thrown yourself under a bus with a ludicrous fallacious ad hominem argument), and now you launch yourself into the heavens of “creators” and consider this cockamamie inversion pose a virtue.

get stuffed, moron. OMG, she’s a “creator”! zOMG! idiot.

but I have made a concentrated effort not to let emotion overrule logic in this discussion.

failed from the beginning.

Mr. Krawisz, the author of the article, immediately makes a glaring blunder right out of the gate when he says “This presumed right of the creator of an idea is often believed to be similar to the right that a homesteader has to land he has settled”. Do you see the blunder? He’s already confusing an “idea” with an intellectual property.

that’s an arbitrary and wrong dictum you pulled from vapor, and you apparently consider yourself a genius for playing the sophist’s diversion game. the size of an intellectual creation knows no binary delineation lunacy such as what you propose. that some situations may be found to belittle an “idea” does nothing for your meaningless disguise point.

all your yapping, and you’ve not written a single word justifying the use of force to prevent one man from copying the published work of another, leaving the creator his creation intact. you’ve done well, however, in selling yourself as a rank collectivist utilitarian idiot, and repuking the same weighted inapplicable terms. nowhere have you refuted the true economics.

as i explained from the beginning, the primary screw here is not the right of copiers, but the right of creators to prevent copying. they’ve none, for their creations are left them exactly as created. all you’re whining about is the perceptions of others; that’s what you assert must be rightfully controlled by creators. your position was debunked on all these details days ago, control freak.

do you watch your precious turds go down the toilet, psycho girl? seems a shame they can’t be marketed somehow and shoved back up someone else’s ass. come up with a utilitarian theory on that and roll with it.

Comment by Dan

August 28, 2009 @ 10:37 pm

Careful Charlie, by insulting her you are potentially lowering her artistic marketability and you may owe her arbitrary and substantial damages in an arbitration court for the resulting depreciation of her artistic works in the marketplace, which, according to her, only she has the right to determine the value of and sell without interference.

Comment by Zeus

August 28, 2009 @ 11:16 pm

@ Charles

all your yapping, and you’ve not written a single word justifying the use of force to prevent one man from copying the published work of another, leaving the creator his creation intact.

A) What force are you referring to?
B) Every man has a right to defend his life, his liberty, his labor and his property.

all you’re whining about is the perceptions of others; that’s what you assert must be rightfully controlled by creators. your position was debunked on all these details days ago, control freak.

Charles, I’ve layed it out as simply as it can be. If you didn’t exchange value for value in order to gain something and you didn’t homestead it, you’ve got no right to it. Period. All else is an excuse to render the labor of the person who did homestead it
null and void. You simply want to justify copying what isn’t yours and deny it to be so. Why do you care so much what I think if you disagree so vehemently?

@ Dan

Careful Charlie, by insulting her you are potentially lowering her artistic marketability and you may owe her arbitrary and substantial damages in an arbitration court for the resulting depreciation of her artistic works in the marketplace, which, according to her, only she has the right to determine the value of and sell without interference.

For the record, Dan, I’m male. Charley is just being a douchebag as usual.

As for you, it’s unfortunate that a mostly civil discussion has degenerated so badly that you’re now out to kill the messenger rather than refuting the message.

Thanks for the decent conversation while it lasted.

Comment by Dan Newman

August 29, 2009 @ 10:22 am

“If you didn’t exchange value for value in order to gain something and you didn’t homestead it, you’ve got no right to it. Period. All else is an excuse to render the labor of the person who did homestead it
null and void.”

But you DID homestead it, all you borrowed was the freely floating information which cannot legitimately be forcibly restricted in the way that you are proposing. The fact that somebody built a chair to sit on before I did should have no bearing on whether I can legitimately cut wood, sand it, and built it into my own chair later on. To say that somebody can “own” the chair design and prevent other people from building their own chairs is no different from government saying that they alone can research and control marijuana and everyone else is banned from using it unless they obtain permission first. It’s backwards and anti-liberty.

“As for you, it’s unfortunate that a mostly civil discussion has degenerated so badly that you’re now out to kill the messenger rather than refuting the message.”

None of my statements were ad hominem attacks. My latest, to which I assume you are referring, is simply another illustrative example of the absurdist-type thinking that necessarily results when one subscribes to the notion of exclusive intellectual property.

Comment by charley hardman

August 29, 2009 @ 11:45 am

A) What force are you referring to?

the force you advocate applying against those who copy published intellectual works.

B) Every man has a right to defend his life, his liberty, his labor and his property.

repeatedly in this thread your inappropriate use of language has been noted, yet you continue to thwack away in a disingenuous haze. material copies of published intellectual works are the property of the copier, not the creator (except when the creator is the copier). you continually snivel that a creator’s property has been fucked with, yet when specifying the method of copying i’ve been careful to highlight that the work in cases i’m referring to has been published voluntarily by the creator. in most cases what’s being discussed is a copy of a copy. far as i’ve seen, no one in this thread advocates a right to violate property when copying intellectual works. until you get that straight, you’ll continue to be the silly “IP” twat.

If you didn’t exchange value for value in order to gain something and you didn’t homestead it, you’ve got no right to it. Period.

obvious baloney. first, you’ve eliminated gifts and your “public domain” horse shit with your typical imprecision, then you neglect again that nobody here’s advocating taking property from a creator. funny how confused your measly brain gets regarding property and intellectual works. the medium of the creator, i’ve no right to; once he publishes and allows physically the copying of his work, no worries about messing with his property (medium).

All else is an excuse to render the labor of the person who did homestead it
null and void.

more of your coercionist utilitarian horse shit. i refer you to my pizza hut example above — assuming, apparently wrongly, that you can read worth a damn.

You simply want to justify copying what isn’t yours and deny it to be so.

and again with the fallacious ad hominem tripe. i’m laughing at you.

Why do you care so much what I think if you disagree so vehemently?

i don’t care what you think. untruth, however, is good to swat down. if you happen to be the one swilling it, and i see it and swat it, whatever. your question is pointless and, of course, easily reversed back to you. the point? none.

For the record, Dan, I’m male.

“the record”? you’re fucking anonymous.

Comment by Lpviper

August 29, 2009 @ 12:20 pm

Jeezus, Charley, ever consider mixing in a carrot?

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 1:41 pm

But you DID homestead it, all you borrowed was the freely floating information which cannot legitimately be forcibly restricted in the way that you are proposing.

To borrow would imply that you “received with the implied or expressed intention of returning the same or an equivalent”. To borrow requires knowledge and permission from the lender, otherwise it’s not borrowing.

“Hey! That’s my wallet! What the hell!”

“Don’t worry, pal. I’m just borrowing it so I can counterfeit some money. I’ll give it back in an hour.”

You say you’re “forcibly restricted”. Please explain how the owner putting rules on the result of their labor (content, not the container), is initiating harm on you.

I don’t believe it does. Quite the reverse, actually. Only until you choose to wave the magic wand and create a billion identical duplicates to give to the masses does there become a problem.

Imagine what it would be like in the real world for businesses if every potential customer suddenly got their hands on a magic duplication wand.

Why buy McDonald’s when anyone can wave a wand, say “Presto Multiplicare!” and get a free sandwich anytime you want? If everyone’s got a wand, sales will eventually become so low (if not nil) that Ronald decides there’s no point in continuing the business and retires.

The construction of a house takes months and numerous man-hours of strenuous labor. Someone comes along with their magic wand and shouts “Abracaduplicatorum!”, robbing them of their labor. Now nobody needs to purchase anything from them ever again since they can just copy your duplicate with a wave. Poof!

Every unauthorized duplication is duplicated theft of the creator’s labor.

Using the recent results of an author I know, I estimate he made approximately $1.38 per copy from every $25 hardcover novel of his that sold. Ten duplicates would be a mere $13.80 in damages. Not even worth the trouble of a dispute but that doesn’t change the immorality and unethicalness of the piracy. Even a thousand unauthorized copies might have a market value for him of only $1380. A decent chunk of change but probably still not worth pursuing. But piracy distributes to hundreds of thousands of people if not millions. 300,000 unauthorized copies would, in his situation, have a market value of $414,000.

Keep in mind, I’m not pulling the market value out of thin air. I’ve taken the amount of his advance and divided it by the number of copies sold.

Now how can he get restitution from 300,000 casual pirates? He can’t. He’d have to sue each and every one of them for $1.38. How then can he get restitution? I suppose he could sue the intermediary that made the unauthorized work available for redistribution.

But there’s more to this than just money.

Under your theory, I can create a work that introduces a character like Superman and anyone else can build on it without my permission. They can produce their own Superman comics, movies, lunchboxes, porn, whatever. One person or group can publish a derivative work where Superman is a degenerate child molester, another can publish a derivative work where he goes on a killing spree and urinates on the bones of his victims, and so on.

And, in your world, there’s absolutely nothing the creator can do about it other than compete with everyone else who decides they want to compete with him using his own creation.

If this was the world we lived in, what would be the point of creating anything? No creator would bother pouring their heart and soul into their work and soon all you’d have is a bunch of dreck cranked out for a quick buck.

The fact that somebody built a chair to sit on before I did should have no bearing on whether I can legitimately cut wood, sand it, and built it into my own chair later on.

Apples and oranges. The real equivalent to this would be for you to write your own book, record your own song or paint your own painting, not use a magic wand to duplicate the work of someone else without expending the same labor or compensating the person who did.

To say that somebody can “own” the chair design and prevent other people from building their own chairs is no different from government saying that they alone can research and control marijuana and everyone else is banned from using it unless they obtain permission first. It’s backwards and anti-liberty.

I implore you to build your own chairs rather than cloning the chairs of others and robbing them of their labor and control over their property.

Tell me this, Dan: Let’s say you think that cloning humans is fine. Now let’s say someone gets ahold of your blood and begins cloning you by the thousands without your permission. Would this be just and moral?

None of my statements were ad hominem attacks. My latest, to which I assume you are referring, is simply another illustrative example of the absurdist-type thinking that necessarily results when one subscribes to the notion of exclusive intellectual property.

It was a sarcastic response painting me with motivations I don’t have in order to make me look like an unreasonable ogre. It attacks me and fails to address my argument.

Comment by Lpviper

August 29, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

I still have to say Zeus, IP is not enforcable without a violent monopoly. It’s the thing that’s killing your argument for me.

What will you have done with the so-called ‘pirates’, and who will do it?

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 2:19 pm

the force you advocate applying against those who copy published intellectual works.

Which force would that be? I’m looking for clarification here, Charles. Am I advocating smashing someone in the skull with a table lamp if they perform an unauthorized duplication or what? You seem adamant about whatever this alleged use of force you claim I’m advocating, so please, enlighten me as to what sinister violence I have in store for pirates.

repeatedly in this thread your inappropriate use of language has been noted, yet you continue to thwack away in a disingenuous haze.

I call it as I see it, Charles. “Piracy” is indeed the modern day vernacular for unauthorized duplication and redistribution of creative works. If you thought I actually meant “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” pirating, then please forgive faux pas in not being more clear.

material copies of published intellectual works are the property of the copier, not the creator (except when the creator is the copier).

Those “material copies” are only the property of the copier if they had permission to do so from the creator or exchanged value for value in a transaction. Even then, those material copies are just containers for the content. Unless a transfer of ownership over the content was specified, you only have the rights to the content the author has granted. Do what you will with your justly acquired container so long as it doesn’t infringe on the author’s ownership of the content.

you continually snivel that a creator’s property has been fucked with, yet when specifying the method of copying i’ve been careful to highlight that the work in cases i’m referring to has been published voluntarily by the creator.

Charles, you may not realize this but most of your posts are barely lucid ranting demonstrating your enviable skill of combining profanity and high-falutin’ words to give the appearance that you’re trying to communicate something important but what that might be is often unintelligible.

If indeed the work has been published online voluntarily, what then do you make of it being licensed? Do you ignore it because you can and because you think to yourself “tough shit now, moron! It’s online!”?

in most cases what’s being discussed is a copy of a copy. far as i’ve seen, no one in this thread advocates a right to violate property when copying intellectual works. until you get that straight, you’ll continue to be the silly “IP” twat.

That’s certainly not the impression I’ve been getting. Perhaps the others would like to address whether or not Charles’ belief that “a right to violate property when copying intellectual works” is not being advocated here. How can one justify copying the work and not also justify doing whatever they want with it like making Superman porn?

obvious baloney. first, you’ve eliminated gifts

A gift would be a container (what you called “material copies”) with certain granted permissions to the content. And the giftgiver must have made an exchange of value in order to obtain it, all they’ve done is transfer their ownership of the container and the content permissions to you.

and your “public domain” horse shit with your typical imprecision, then you neglect again that nobody here’s advocating taking property from a creator.

Again, Charles, this is not the impression I got from all the discussion thus far. If true, this stipulation was unclear.

“the record”? you’re fucking anonymous.

To you, perhaps. Most others know that I’m the guy who does the promos for the Liberty Radio Network (owned by Free Keene’s Ian Freeman).

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 2:32 pm

I still have to say Zeus, IP is not enforcable without a violent monopoly. It’s the thing that’s killing your argument for me.

What will you have done with the so-called ‘pirates’, and who will do it?

As I said before, it’s often unfeasible to go after even a thousand pirates. And even then, it’s a civil dispute, not a criminal matter.

What I propose is that they be notified of their license violation and receive a bill for whatever the market values the work at.

If they ignore that, I expect that in a voluntaryist society, the dispute will have to be resolved using arbitration. If they refuse to participate, then the author wins a judgment by default and the reputation of the violator takes a ding so that other people who interact with them will know what kind of person they’re dealing with and be able to respond accordingly if they have a problem with it.

A real voluntaryist society might come up with a better way of doing things but at the moment, that’s how I think it would be likely to operate.

Comment by Lpviper

August 29, 2009 @ 3:26 pm

Which value? The retail ‘price’? I’ve never bought a pirated disc, but what could they really be worth, intrinsically? Does the author control the media, like the paper or the disc, or does he only control the stuff on it?

Erg

Do you think arbitrators are going to make damage awards on IP claims all day? Or will some of these guys interpret the natural law in the way described in the Mises article?

Time, and freedom, will tell

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 4:22 pm

Which value? The retail ‘price’?

Whatever people are actually paying for it in the free market. Most songs, for example, sell for $1 each. Paperback books tend to sell for about $8 these days. Since the point of the arbitration is to resolve the dispute, the settlement would be negotiable.

Arbitration works for both parties involved in the dispute. I highly doubt anyone is going to go around suing people for $8 but if they do, people are going to know that and decide for themselves if they’d like to do business with someone who does that.

In reality, I expect most people will either control their impulses, pay a reasonable price for their copy of the work, and most people who still infringe will probably only receive a minor ding to their reputation IF an author even bothers to waste their time pursuing it.

What creators really want to do is prevent the market from being flooded with “counterfeited” clones of their work or people using the content in an unauthorized manner (Superman Porn), not sue a bunch of people for a couple of bucks in damages they may not even get anyway.

I’ve never bought a pirated disc, but what could they really be worth, intrinsically? Does the author control the media, like the paper or the disc, or does he only control the stuff on it?

The author only controls the content, not the media. When you purchase a CD, DVD or a book, you are receiving certain grants of permission (license) regarding the content in addition to the printed paper or the plastic disc holding it.

The medium is yours to do with as you please so long as what you do with the content on it doesn’t violate the terms in the license.

I highly recommend reading up on Creative Commons, the GNU General Public License and the origins of copyright.

Erg

Do you think arbitrators are going to make damage awards on IP claims all day? Or will some of these guys interpret the natural law in the way described in the Mises article?

Time, and freedom, will tell

I expect the market will eventually solve the issue entirely with STEAM-like services springing up to deliver encrypted application-reliant editions of books, pictures, movies and games.

Comment by Lpviper

August 29, 2009 @ 6:00 pm

And render this whole discussion moot, except the part where you want to fine people for copying intellectual works. I’m still not sold on that, and this STEAM thing seems like the right answer by virtue of being non coercive

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 6:43 pm

The fine is nothing more than the going price for the work in the free market and serves as restitution for:

- the author’s loss of labor caused by unauthorized copies flooding the market (right to labor)
- violating the terms of the license the author has chosen to govern their content (right to property)

Remember, no one twisted their arm into copying the work. They chose to do it of their own free will and the PoL/NAP tells us that people should accept responsibility for their own actions.

The ding to their reputation for refusing to resolve the dispute amicably serves as a warning to others and as persuasion to conduct one’s self in an ethical manner. It’s very much like the concept of Karma.

I expect, like now, most authors won’t pursue such minor infractions. More likely, they will go after mass redistributors like the various Torrent websites.

Hopefully, the market will respond sooner than later and render the whole thing moot.

Comment by charley hardman

August 29, 2009 @ 7:38 pm

the force you advocate applying against those who copy published intellectual works.

Which force would that be?

since you’re a nitwit, i must begin your education at a point long before someone merely confused about rights regarding intellectual works. tedious, but WTF:

start by recognizing that neither force nor violence is prohibited by the voluntarist philosophy. the terms are not the bogeyman vocabulary routinely attempted by feel-good irrational idjits posting here. for example, if i’m leaving a store and someone attempts to take what i just bought, i may rightfully use force/violence as practically required in defense of me and other property i own. this gets into proportionality, a subject which, beyond this mention, i hope to leave out of this already convoluted discussion.

if instead the same person steals my property while i’m not around, i have the right to compensation. i may use force/violence as necessary to retrieve at least equal wealth from the thief. i hope to leave out of this discussion the irrelevant topic of going beyond equal wealth.

you asserted in this thread, “Every man has a right to defend his life, his liberty, his labor and his property.” you have stated that without consent of the creators copying intellectual works is “theft”, “stealing”, and “depriving” creators “the fruits of their labor”. you assert that redistributing works without “permission” makes one an “aggressor”.

it appears that you intend your embrace of violence for the prevention of intellectual copying to go unnoticed.

Am I advocating smashing someone in the skull with a table lamp if they perform an unauthorized duplication or what?

you are advocating whatever force is necessary to extract from a copier the arbitrary price demanded by the work’s creator. it’s unlikely but entirely plausible that this would include “smashing someone in the skull with a table lamp if they perform an unauthorized duplication”. yes, i know your addled POS brain is even now formulating a simulated-aghast sarcasm response to this assertion. hold that “thought”.

back to rightful force. you contend that copying a “licensed” copy without consent of the work creator is stealing. according to voluntarist tenet, and yourself, stealing may rightfully be defended against. assuming a thief doesn’t agree to compensate his victim, there may come a time when it’s appropriate to go into his house and take him by force, to work off his debt. if in his home he attacks one of those attempting to take him, it may turn out, exactly as you have stated, that he is smashed in the skull with a table lamp. such action, given the correct context, may be entirely justified under voluntarist philosophy.

what you must eventually understand, if you are not to remain a sodden mollusk whining about the “rights” of creators, is that you are not advocating umpteenth-granulated specific action, but a principle through which the very situation you raise ironically is possible and, given enough transactions, likely.

your principle is fucked, and you attempt to cover this reality with bullshit conscription of inapplicable terms, both for scare value and minimization. the “stealing” and “theft” routine is a cheap bitch way to launch petitio principii fallacy and push programmed buttons in people advocating a philosophy centered on the sanctity of property. your “logical” reply to the assertion that intellectual works are not property:

p1: stealing is aggression.
p2: the copying of intellectual works is stealing.
c: therefore, intellectual works are property.

the conclusion is presumed in p2, a core logic fuckup identified thousands of years ago. assholes similar to you enjoy thwapping the same technique with the word “terrorism”. get that shit to stick to a subject, and your argument is “won”. the conclusion is presumed in a premise.

however, even someone as stupid and internally dishonest as you must at least admit that an object that may be copied, leaving the object unaltered and in the possession of its owner, does not fall within the traditional definition of “property”, with all the associated indignity and defense triggers set up to restore to a man something he no longer holds. if you insist on, wrongfully, calling intellectual works property, or employing terms dependent upon them being property, at least concede that there’s a vast difference between traditionally scarce physical property and works that may easily be copied without changing the original in the least or “depriving” the owner of precisely what he created.

on the other side of the language distortion, you invoke “arbitration” and “chosen protection agency” to lend market taint to your scheme of force. this has already been explained to your stupid ass. you are advocating “rightful” force against “copyright” “violators”. step up and embrace openly the sickness you lust for.

Those “material copies” are only the property of the copier if they had permission to do so from the creator or exchanged value for value in a transaction.

your obvious adoration of the term “value for value” indicates your control-freak nature. even in your fucked fantasy world, permission is all that’s required. seemingly irrelevant, but damned telling in context, “creator” god.

Even then, those material copies are just containers for the content. Unless a transfer of ownership over the content was specified, you only have the rights to the content the author has granted.

this highlights your ludicrous premise: the creator of a work has prohibition rights to all media in the universe. they’re the owner’s media so long as they don’t get organized in a pattern too similar to any of the creator’s patterns.

control freak. i figured that it would be decades before i encountered someone so similar to gargantu-psycho/dullard mark helprin, but here you are.

Do what you will with your justly acquired container so long as it doesn’t infringe on the author’s ownership of the content.

again, i’m laughing at you. pure preposterous bleh, the assertion that a creator has prohibition ownership of the arrangement of bits on your media.

you continually snivel that a creator’s property has been fucked with, yet when specifying the method of copying i’ve been careful to highlight that the work in cases i’m referring to has been published voluntarily by the creator.

Charles, you may not realize this but most of your posts are barely lucid ranting demonstrating your enviable skill of combining profanity and high-falutin’ words to give the appearance that you’re trying to communicate something important but what that might be is often unintelligible.

of course, you’re too pussified to assert that what you quoted is “unintelligible” or “barely lucid”, so you throw out convenient non sequitur as evasion smoke. if you’re intending to assert that the quoted portion is flawed mechanically, do so. then it’ll be shoved up your ass.

If indeed the work has been published online voluntarily, what then do you make of it being licensed? Do you ignore it because you can and because you think to yourself “tough shit now, moron! It’s online!”?

and, shocker, it’s back to the old ad hominem fallacy — another convenient dodge when what’s being discussed is rights, not my behavior. how i respond to a work published online voluntarily is wholly irrelevant to this thread. last time you tried this shit, i wrote, “when you’ve evidence i copy intellectual works without the permission of the creator, pull your fallacious ad hominem joke for what it’s worth (nothing).”

of course, you ran from that until the coast was clear. stupid pussy.

That’s certainly not the impression I’ve been getting. Perhaps the others would like to address whether or not Charles’ belief that “a right to violate property when copying intellectual works” is not being advocated here. How can one justify copying the work and not also justify doing whatever they want with it like making Superman porn?

check your premise, sherlock. jesus christ. try some language precision, barely lucid hack.

obvious baloney. first, you’ve eliminated gifts

A gift would be a container [...]

i was referring to gifts from the creator.

“the record”? you’re fucking anonymous.

To you, perhaps. Most others know that I’m the guy who does the promos for the Liberty Radio Network (owned by Free Keene’s Ian Freeman).

irrelevant, of course, like most of what you write.

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 10:35 pm

it appears that you intend your embrace of violence for the prevention of intellectual copying to go unnoticed.

you are advocating whatever force is necessary to extract from a copier the arbitrary price demanded by the work’s creator.

False. Force isn’t always necessary, desirable or appropriate.

you contend that copying a “licensed” copy without consent of the work creator is stealing.

True. I never said, however, that it’s akin to grand theft auto.

When it comes to defending one’s life, liberty, labor and property, the key is that any defense raised or restitution sought should be proportionate. If some kid trespasses on your land, you don’t blow their head off with a shotgun. It’s unjustifiable overkill.

p1: stealing is aggression.
p2: the copying of intellectual works is stealing.
c: therefore, intellectual works are property.

the conclusion is presumed in p2, a core logic fuckup identified thousands of years ago. assholes similar to you enjoy thwapping the same technique with the word “terrorism”. get that shit to stick to a subject, and your argument is “won”. the conclusion is presumed in a premise.

Incorrect as usual, Charles. It goes a bit more like this:

p1: property comes about by the exertion of labor (John Locke, Labor Theory of Property)
p2: works of the mind come about by the exertion of labor
c1: therefore, works of the mind are property

The PoL tells us that we have a right to property and to defend it.

Lysander Spooner agrees:

The right of property has its foundation, first, in the natural right of each man to provide for his own subsistence; and, secondly, in his right to provide for his general happiness and well being, in addition to a mere subsistence.

The right to live, includes the right to accumulate the means of living; and the right to obtain happiness in general, includes the might to accumulate such commodities as minister to one’s happiness. These rights, then, to live, and to obtain happiness, are the foundations of the right of property. Such being the case, it is evident that no other human right has a deeper foundation in the nature and necessities of man, than the might of property. If, when one man has dipped a cup of water from the stream, to slake his own thirst, or gathered food, to satisfy his own hunger, or made a garment, to protect his own body, other men can right fully tell him that these commodities are not his, but theirs, and can right fully take them from him, without his consent, his right to provide for the preservation of his own life, and for the enjoyment of happiness, are extinct.

The right of property in intellectual wealth, has manifestly the same foundation, as the right of property in material wealth. Without intellectual wealth- that is, without ideas – material wealth could neither be accumulated, nor fitted to contribute, nor made to contribute, to the sustenance or happiness of man. Intellectual wealth, therefore, is indispensable to the acquisition and use of other wealth. It is also, of itself, a direct source of happiness, in a great variety of ways. Furthermore, it is not only a timing of value, for the owner’s uses, but, as has before been said, like material wealth, it is a merchantable commodity; has a value in the market; and will purchase, for its proprietor, other wealth in exchange. On every ground, therefore, the right of property in ideas, has as deep a foundation in the nature and necessities of man, as has the right of property in material things.

however, even someone as stupid and internally dishonest as you must at least admit that an object that may be copied, leaving the object unaltered and in the possession of its owner, does not fall within the traditional definition of “property”, with all the associated indignity and defense triggers set up to restore to a man something he no longer holds. if you insist on, wrongfully, calling intellectual works property, or employing terms dependent upon them being property, at least concede that there’s a vast difference between traditionally scarce physical property and works that may easily be copied without changing the original in the least or “depriving” the owner of precisely what he created.

If your reading comprehension skills were better than a toddler hopped up on sugar-coated meth, you’d notice I already stated in previous posts that trying to think of intellectual property in physical property terms is like using Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity on a Quantum objects. It doesn’t quite translate because there are fundamental differences (which I have also pointed out over and over and over again).

on the other side of the language distortion, you invoke “arbitration” and “chosen protection agency” to lend market taint to your scheme of force. this has already been explained to your stupid ass. you are advocating “rightful” force against “copyright” “violators”. step up and embrace openly the sickness you lust for.

Do you think everyone is Lex Luthor or just me? I’m only advocating that people cease their unauthorized cloning of work they didn’t labor to create and pay whatever restitution the market determines as proper. If not, their reputation should take a hit. Any other false attribution you attach to it is sheer delusion emanating from the paranoid lump floating around inside your skull.

your obvious adoration of the term “value for value” indicates your control-freak nature. even in your fucked fantasy world, permission is all that’s required. seemingly irrelevant, but damned telling in context, “creator” god.

Right, because using a phrase such as “exchange of value for value” as a synonym for “mutually beneficial trade” indicates an unhealthy need to control everything around me but your obvious adoration for intense profanity and inability to refrain from it in civil discussion isn’t an indication of your Cro-Magnon heritage.

this highlights your ludicrous premise: the creator of a work has prohibition rights to all media in the universe. they’re the owner’s media so long as they don’t get organized in a pattern too similar to any of the creator’s patterns.

Yet another falsification of my position. Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but you’re abusing the privilege. I have repeatedly stated that the creator owns the fucking content, shithead. Not the media.

control freak. i figured that it would be decades before i encountered someone so similar to gargantu-psycho/dullard mark helprin, but here you are.

Irrelevant blather.

again, i’m laughing at you. pure preposterous bleh, the assertion that a creator has prohibition ownership of the arrangement of bits on your media.

You can have all the media you want, as long as you like it empty. If not, buy a license to use the content or find content released by an author without restriction. Copying someone’s work on to your media without authorization is akin to putting stolen goods in your car. If you don’t like the creator’s terms, go write your own goddamn book, song, movie, game or whatever and put THAT on your fucking media. Nothing else entitles you to do jack shit with property that isn’t yours.

and, shocker, it’s back to the old ad hominem fallacy — another convenient dodge when what’s being discussed is rights, not my behavior. how i respond to a work published online voluntarily is wholly irrelevant to this thread. last time you tried this shit, i wrote, “when you’ve evidence i copy intellectual works without the permission of the creator, pull your fallacious ad hominem joke for what it’s worth (nothing).”

of course, you ran from that until the coast was clear. stupid pussy.

Clever, for a cretinous troglodyte. Here you ironically blather on about how I’m conveniently running from something so you can deftly evade the question yourself. Just more smoke and mirrors from a dishonest prick.

check your premise, sherlock. jesus christ. try some language precision, barely lucid hack.

More evasion disguised as drivel. How unexpected.

Comment by charley hardman

August 29, 2009 @ 11:11 pm

On every ground, therefore, the right of property in ideas, has as deep a foundation in the nature and necessities of man, as has the right of property in material things.

guess he didn’t hear your big speech. ROFL.

oh, and laughing even louder at your “corrected” syllogism, which is as fallacy-ridden as what you presume to correct. i’ll let you figure it out over the course of… um, seven years?

p1: property comes about by the exertion of labor (John Locke, Labor Theory of Property)
p2: works of the mind come about by the exertion of labor
c1: therefore, works of the mind are property

Comment by Zeus

August 29, 2009 @ 11:22 pm

That’s all you could come up with? A nonsensical retort and an abbreviation signifying inappropriate laughter when Spooner just handed you your ass on a plate with garnish and dip?

Have another bite:

From the very nature of the right of property, that right can be transferred, from the proprietor, only by his own consent. What is the right of property? It is, as has before been explained, a right of control, of dominion. If, then, a man’s property be taken from him without his consent, his right of control, or dominion over it, is necessarily infringed; in other words, his right of property is necessarily violated.

Even to use another’s property, without his consent, is to violate his right of property; because it is for the time being, assuming a dominion over wealth, the rightful dominion over which belongs solely to the owner.

These are the principles of the law of nature, relative to all property. They are as applicable to intellectual, as to material, property. The consent, or will, of the owner alone, can transfer the right of property in either, or give to another the right to use either.

That’sa spicy meataballa!

Comment by charley hardman

August 29, 2009 @ 11:44 pm

A nonsensical retort

among your many intellectual weaknesses is a penchant for ascribing your failures to understand to an incorrectly alleged failure of another to be sensible.

you reply too hastily, fallacy after fallacy. look again. read the quoted bits too. carefully.

Comment by Lpviper

August 30, 2009 @ 12:01 am

Mmm hm. When the author of the work relinquishes control of it to another, he is relinquishing control of the physical medium and of the content itself. Spooner’s argument makes no distinction in that regard.

How do you explain this, Zeus? Do you claim that he can relinquish the property without relinquishing it? Unless the author uses an encrypted data feed or something, he sells the content to the retailer or the end user when he sells him the medium.

The only way to combat this would be to demand that the purchaser sign a lease/disclosure agreement with the artisan. I don’t think that would be very popular with purchasers. Look at the people who very recently had their copies of ‘1984′ stolen from their Kindles. Didn’t hear about any happy ones.

And even if you sign these silly contracts with every purchaser of hard media, how would you ever expect to enforce them in a way that will benefit you? How will you do it without an institutionalized violent monopoly to enforce them for you?

I don’t think it would ever be cost effective in a free market.

So, I think we are left with:

1) Guard your IP

2) If it gets away from you, dream up some new IP and guard it better

3) I’m sure you can ostracize everyone who ’steals’ your intellectual ‘property’, but how far will that go for you before you are considered a crank and start to be ostracized yourself?

It comes down to self responsibility, just like all human action. Don’t give a copy of your book to someone if you dont want him to copy it. Hold public readings of your book and charge for them or something.

Comment by Zeus

August 30, 2009 @ 12:48 am

@ Chucklehead

Your big beef that had you “Rolling On Floor Laughing” is with his wording? Because he didn’t recognize that ideas are only the atoms of intellectual property rather than the property itself?

Considering he’s not the only one to miss that distinction, wrote it in 1855 when there was no internet or digital media, has been dead for 122 years, never finished that tract and *still* schooled your ass, I’m going to cut him some slack.

@ LPV

Mmm hm. When the author of the work relinquishes control of it to another, he is relinquishing control of the physical medium and of the content itself. Spooner’s argument makes no distinction in that regard.

How do you explain this, Zeus? Do you claim that he can relinquish the property without relinquishing it? Unless the author uses an encrypted data feed or something, he sells the content to the retailer or the end user when he sells him the medium.

When an author publishes a work he puts a notice or symbol on it stating his intentions, be it copyright or a license. Unless there is an explicit statement of a quitclaim (like a Public Domain notice), there is no “relinquishment”. Many authors willingly relinquish all ownership to a publisher in return for financial compensation. Likewise, many musicians willingly relinquish all ownership to a label in return for the same. This is generally done via a contract between the parties. That is the “instrument of transfer”.

When writers get their book published, customers purchase the novel (the paper, ink and glue that composes the medium) and are granted certain rights regarding the content (the story and characters).

When musicians put out a song or album, customers purchase the CD (a plastic disc) or MP3 (digital recording) and are also granted certain rights to the content.

With the current copyright scheme run, unfortunately, by government, the author retains the exclusive right:

* to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (mechanical rights; including, sometimes, electronic copies: distribution rights)
* to import or export the work
* to create derivative works (works that adapt the original work)
* to perform or display the work publicly (performance rights)
* to sell or assign these rights to others
* to transmit or display by radio or video (broadcasting rights)

A License — such as the Creative Commons (often called “copyleft”) — may extend additional rights to the licensee that may void one or more of the exclusive rights above.

Many CC licenses allow licensees to copy and distribute to their heart’s content so long as they a) don’t do it for commercial purposes, b) include attribution designating the author as the creator, c) release derivative works so long as it’s released under the exact same license as the original. There are multiple variations on the CC license. See their site for more info.

The only way to combat this would be to demand that the purchaser sign a lease/disclosure agreement with the artisan. I don’t think that would be very popular with purchasers. Look at the people who very recently had their copies of ‘1984′ stolen from their Kindles. Didn’t hear about any happy ones.

And even if you sign these silly contracts with every purchaser of hard media, how would you ever expect to enforce them in a way that will benefit you? How will you do it without an institutionalized violent monopoly to enforce them for you? I don’t think it would ever be cost effective in a free market.

There’s no need for a lease/disclosure agreement when you have a license. Since the author has sole dominion over the content, they and only they can determine the terms on how the content (Not The Medium) may be used by the user. The user doesn’t need to agree to it because they can simply refrain from bothering with it if they don’t like the terms. But if they do bother with it, they are explicitly accepting the license because the only thing authorizing one to do so is acceptance of the license.

Think of it this way: I point to a door and tell you that beyond that door lies thrilling adventure, suspense, mystery and wonder. I tell you that you may enter only as long as you pay a nickel and take your shoes off. You can either accept my terms by giving me the nickel and taking off your shoes or you can decide you’d rather keep those things and walk away.

Comment by Lpviper

August 30, 2009 @ 12:59 am

What validates such a license as you describe?

Comment by charley hardman

August 30, 2009 @ 12:59 am

Because he didn’t recognize that ideas are only the atoms of intellectual property rather than the property itself?

because your big fallacious unveiling (argument by authority, obviously) includes your authority directly contradicting a point of which you stated in this thread, “I cannot stress this enough.”

that’s goddamned funny. most people stupid enough to waste their time playing proof text poker at least leave out the bits from their idols which had they been asserted by an opponent would’ve been treated as dung. in your case it’s you who’s wrong on that point and spooner correct. however, this does not make spooner the voice from heaven you appear to wish him.

but here’s the best part:

Considering he’s not the only one to miss that distinction, wrote it in 1855 when there was no internet or digital media, has been dead for 122 years,

all points irrelevant to what you “cannot stress [...] enough”.

spooner’s schooled my ass before. not tonight. you’re going to have to get straight with that.

and it appears you still have not caught your embarrassing syllogism fuckup. get on it, bitch. next stop, quoting krugman. yeehawwww!

Comment by Zeus

August 30, 2009 @ 1:16 am

@ LPV

What validates such a license as you describe?

If you mean “How can I verify its for reals?”, it’s usually printed right on the container.

If you mean “What gives the license authority?”, that’d be the whole “Author has sole dominion over the content” argument both I and Spooner make.

@ Charlemagne

because your big fallacious unveiling (argument by authority, obviously) includes your authority directly contradicting a point of which you stated in this thread, “I cannot stress this enough.”

that’s goddamned funny. most people stupid enough to waste their time playing proof text poker at least leave out the bits from their idols which had they been asserted by an opponent would’ve been treated as dung. in your case it’s you who’s wrong on that point and spooner correct. however, this does not make spooner the voice from heaven you appear to wish him.

Sorry, but you appear to be suffering from hallucinations. All he’s saying is that intellectual property “has as deep a foundation in the nature and necessities of man” as traditional, physical property. Nothing here erases the rest of what he’s saying or the many, many other statements and arguments you’ve evaded.

You’re argument is now reduced to picking at scabs.

Comment by Lpviper

August 30, 2009 @ 8:50 am

No Zeus, I don’t think that’s what Spooner said in what you quoted above. Those definitely were not the words he used. He said, “These are the principles of the law of nature, relative to all property. They are as applicable to intellectual, as to material, property. The consent, or will, of the owner alone, can transfer the right of property in either, or give to another the right to use either.”

It seems like you are interpreting a century old quote to make it say what you want it to say. What this says to me is once you have sold or given away a book, CD, or other media form, if it is not blank, then you have sold or given away the content as well. Nowhere in Spooner’s quotes do I see this directly refuted. It feels like you’re going in circles here

Comment by AnAmazedReader

August 30, 2009 @ 11:43 am

@Zeus wrote:

“As I said before, it’s often unfeasible to go after even a thousand pirates. And even then, it’s a civil dispute, not a criminal matter. What I propose is that they be notified of their license violation and receive a bill for whatever the market values the work at. If they ignore that, I expect that in a voluntaryist society, the dispute will have to be resolved using arbitration. If they refuse to participate, then the author wins a judgment by default and the reputation of the violator takes a ding so that other people who interact with them will know what kind of person they’re dealing with and be able to respond accordingly if they have a problem with it.”

Zeus, while I agree with your assessment of Intellectual Property, I find your prescription for addressing violations of said property is extremely weak. Submit to arbitration? If I’m the violator, I say “buzz off, I don’t choose to participate”. Or say I choose to participate, and the ruling goes against me? I say “Sorry, the arbitrator’s decision was BS, and I don’t acknowledge its validity”.

Now we are on to the second component you suggest: shame/loss of good reputation. In a world filled with scoundrels that not only survive and thrive, but indeed have all sorts of supporters and customers, I’m amazed that you think this would be effective in any sort of significant way. There are all sorts of businesses out there that provide truly crappy products and services who still seem to do just fine. Can you say M.I.C.R.O.S.O.F.T.?

Comment by Lpviper

August 30, 2009 @ 12:04 pm

Of course you would send armed tax feeders after the ‘pirates’, wouldn’t you, Ann?

Comment by Zeus

August 30, 2009 @ 2:24 pm

It seems like you are interpreting a century old quote to make it say what you want it to say.

The quote you’re talking about isn’t the one Chuckleberry and I are arguing about, LPV.

What this says to me is once you have sold or given away a book, CD, or other media form, if it is not blank, then you have sold or given away the content as well. Nowhere in Spooner’s quotes do I see this directly refuted. It feels like you’re going in circles here

In the quote you picked, Spooner’s first sentence says “These are the principles of the law of nature, relative to all property.”

Here, he’s referring to the prior paragraphs where he lays that out for us.

“They are as applicable to intellectual, as to material, property.” Here he’s saying the principles he’s been talking about cover both types of property.

“The consent, or will, of the owner alone, can transfer the right of property in either, or give to another the right to use either.”

Here he’s just saying that regardless whether its physical property or intellectual, it requires a conscious and explicit decision on the part of the owner to transfer ownership. This is usually done with a contract. No contract, no “sale”.

Let’s have Spooner expound a bit further:

The conclusions, that follow from the principles now established, obviously are, that a man has a natural and *absolute* right- and if a natural and absolute, then necessarily a *perpetual*, right- of property, in the ideas, of which he is the discoverer or creator; that his right of property, in ideas, is intrinsically the same as, and stands on identically the same grounds with his right of property in material things; that no distinction, of principle, exists between the two cases.

Again, he’s all about ownership in intellectual property, he just doesn’t realize that “ideas” are only the atoms of said IP rather than the IP itself.

I think that directly refutes any such claim that you sell the IP when you sell the container. No contract, no sale.

Comment by Zeus

August 30, 2009 @ 2:47 pm

@ Ann

Zeus, while I agree with your assessment of Intellectual Property, I find your prescription for addressing violations of said property is extremely weak.

It’s important to pursue persuasion before using force and if force is the last resort, it must be reasonable, appropriate and proportionate to the injustice inflicted. As I said before, pursuing $1.38 is a waste of time. Even in a voluntaryist society, it’s going to cost more than that just to pay the fee for the arbitration court.

The intent behind using such a court is to provide dispute resolution and get the harmed party some proportionate restitution. Time is money. I can waste 5 minutes of someone’s time to recoup the $1.38, no headbusting needed.

Comment by Zeus

August 30, 2009 @ 7:05 pm

Instead of drifting off further and further into speculation on how an arbitration court may work in a voluntaryist society and how creators might pursue just restitution, we should concentrate on the here and now and the core elements of the argument:

John Locke proposed the Labor Theory of Property in his Second Treatise on Government, a natural law theory that holds that property originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources.

Just as wood, water, clay and metal are natural resources pulled from the Earth to construct all manner of contraptions and edifices, so too are ideas pulled from the mindscape, that realm of conscious thought (viz. Alan Moore’s Theory of Ideaspace and, perhaps, Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere) that all self-aware beings are connected to.

Spreading virally from person to person (like their cousin memes), each of us can take the simple incorporeal matter called “ideas” that are floating around in our consciousness, string them together, add our personal zeitgeist to them, and forge them into unique, one-of-a-kind works of art that could only come from us at the time we crafted them and who we were at that time: Stories to capture the imagination, paintings to please the eye, music to soothe the savage beast within us all.

As Lysander Spooner proposed, this intellectual property, like physical property, can be owned by its creator and can only be transferred in its entirety to another by explicit consent, often through an instrument of transfer such as a contract and an exchange of value for value (mutually beneficial trade).

The creator can also choose to share the work by placing a copy of it (as is their right alone) into a medium such as a paper, a digital storage device, or canvas. The creator of the intellectual property can then sell the medium containing a copy of the content and either give it away for all to use as they wish or by granting only certain permissions to the content within.

Any usurpation of the creator’s right to sole dominion over the property forged by their time and labor, just as with any owner of physical property, would thus be unjust and immoral.

Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote as his Third Law of Prediction that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So it is with the introduction of the digital age, where unlike our physical universe, anything and everything in the realm of one’s and zeroes can be perfectly cloned with the click of a button. This ability to “wave a magic wand” and create an infinite number of indistinguishable copies without any recompense for the labor expended by the original creator causes a serious and dire problem. The ease with which it can be done and the ubiquitousness of it in the modern age, places all creative works in peril. For without the right to control the duplication of one’s creative efforts, there is little incentive to create works of the mind ever again.

Spooner wrote that it is “the natural right of each man to provide for his own subsistence”, that “the right to live includes the right to accumulate the means of living”, “the right to obtain happiness in general includes the right to accumulate such commodities as minister to one’s happiness” and that that “without intellectual wealth… material wealth could neither be accumulated, nor fitted to contribute, nor made to contribute, to the sustenance or happiness of man.”

Without the ability to control his or her intellectual inventions, a creator is deprived not just of his labor or some unknowable potential profit that could very well be naught but of an entire means of accumulating material wealth to provide for his own subsistence.

One might imagine (depending on your level of cynicism) that the remedy for such theft might be to begin with persuasion, for a creator to appeal to his fellow man’s sense of morality, justice and ethics. Science-fiction author Larry Niven’s Ninth Law, however, states that “Ethics change with technology”, so there’s certainly no guarantee that a creator’s fellow man will even recognize that unauthorized copying is immoral. And, in fact, this is already the accepted meme among those who “pirate” the works of others, that it causes no harm or, if it does, its someone else’s fault.

He or she might then resort to a proportionate amount of force in order to obtain restitution but this is financially feasible only with the most egregious violators. It does not and cannot prevent the continued use of this disruptive new technology. As the ferriers, blacksmiths, gas station attendants and elevator operators of yore learned first-hand, the tide of change is inevitable.

Attempting to change what cannot be changed is fruitless. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, would have referred to this as “grasping” or “clinging” (kamupadana) and that it would cause suffering without end because the desire (for pirating to end in this case) can never be fulfilled.

Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. We have seen this with the RIAA’s endless attempts to sue people for sharing unauthorized copies of music. It has had unintended consequences and resolved nothing.

What can be done then, in the face of this realization? Must the creator suffer endlessly while their work is usurped and the means to livelihood stripped from them forever?

The answer, thankfully, is a resounding “No.” The solution, of course, is for the market to adapt to this disruptive technology and provide a new means of protection against the massive casual theft it not only allows but encourages. Eventually companies will provide services not unlike Valve Software’s STEAM which will reduce, if not eliminate, the negative consequences that now jeopardize creative works and their authors. While this process moves glacially slow, it’s only a matter of time.

The question that remains, is how many will suffer — both creators and “pirates” — until then.

Comment by Lpviper

August 30, 2009 @ 9:37 pm

Well, they better get on it then, because nothing else will stop your ‘pirates’.

The next interesting point to ponder is, will consumers buy more from artists who restrict their works, or from those who offer their ideas freely and ask those who appreciate them to contribute?

The CABAL and the FTL AMP program are shining examples of ways that creators of content can benefit from their ideas, and yet not forcibly restrict them.

I know what my choice as a consumer will be, and I think that with a less restrictive society, ie much smaller or no government, there would be more expendable wealth in the hands of the people, and many would choose to contribute to those who are sharing their work generously with all