J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
Guest Editorial by L. Neil Smith: Little Criminals — The Context of Consent
L. Neil Smith is the First Initial Middle-Name-“Neil” Last-Name-Begins-With-“S” Prometheus-Award-Winning Libertarian-Science-Fiction-Author Gun-Writer Singer/Songwriter” who is not me. Now here’s something else we agree about.
Little Criminals — The Context of Consent
Have you ever noticed — in movies, books, or real life — that when a mugger attacks someone, he never says “Give me your money!” but usually says “Give me the money!” or even “Give me my money!” instead?
There seems to be a basic human drive to justify one’s actions, no matter how heinous they might actually be. Sometimes it’s a matter of self-deception — “I’m doing this for your own good!” — sometimes it’s a matter of propaganda: “We had to destroy the village to save it.” It’s the basis on which millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others were stripped of their perceived humanity in the 1940s and
massacred.
I was probably only eight years old when I realized that socialism is nothing more than a fancied-up excuse for stealing other people’s property and killing them if they resist, that collectivism is just a shabby attempt to make theft and murder appear respectable. Later on, I came to understand that this is true of all “philosophies” of government.
We all live in a kleptocracy.
Lately, we have witnessed the rise of a movement — a thuggish crusade wrapped in the tattered robes of academic “respectability” against “Intellectual Property Rights” — dedicated to stripping creative individuals of whatever they create, to expropriate it for some imagined “greater good,” and to attack the creators viciously and defame them if they should be so gauche as to object to being stolen from.
Their principal “argument” seems to be, now that almost everything is digitized and can be duplicated, manipulated, and transported by means of electronics, that this somehow removes the moral obligation of civilized beings to respect the rights of others and honor their propriety. It’s fundamentally the same argument that victim disarmament advocates make when they claim — ignoring the principle involved — that the authors of the Second Amendment couldn’t possibly anticipate machine guns.
Even more, it’s like a rapist saying afterward, “Hey, if you were a virgin, at least that’s taken care of now. And if you weren’t, then you haven’t really lost anything, have you? True, I have benefited from your sexuality, but you still have it, don’t you? And if you didn’t want to get raped, you had no business going out in public and spraying pheromones all over. In fact, I think I’m the real victim, here.”
I am currently thinking these thoughts, and many more besides, because, when they thought I wasn’t looking, a small handful of literary muggers and rapists have taken something that I am fairly famous for having written — my “Covenant of Unanimous Consent” — inflicted alterations on it which they falsely claim makes it a different document, and then fraudulently passed it off as their own work.
Which means any signatures it gathered were obtained fraudulently, too. They would want me to mention who they are and give you their URL.
I’ve seen plagiarism before. In ninth grade, I won a short story contest because the guy who “beat” me had typed up something by Robert Sheckley or Richard Matheson and passed it off as his own. I’m not the one who turned him in, although I had immediately recognized the story. The idiot had to get on the PA system and confess to his crime. Whether it ruined his life forever or was the making of him, I have no way of knowing. I had no sympathy for him because what he did is a crime, in the legal sense but more importantly, in the moral sense, as well.
Back to the present.
In time, several individuals warned me about what had happened, and I contacted the plagiarists directly, myself. Imagine my surprise when, instead of apologizing humbly and abjectly, as they ought to have done, and sought to make restitution, they became obnoxious and aggressive, so that, in the end, I was considered the villain of the piece, and called names, simply for having defended my own work from theft.
You will be interested to learn — and falling-down amused, if you know me or my work at all well — that I am, officially, a “statist asshole.” In part, this is because I politely informed them I was sharing our correspondence with my attorney, to whom I had started blind-copying everything. My attorney is also among my very closest friends, and I had decided to blind-copy him to keep his Inbox clear of the heady liquid excrement (ever see the uncut final sequence of The Magic Christian?) I was having to wade through to protect my rights.
Never forget that I am a statist asshole.
Please note: I had never said that I was planning to sue this gang of little criminals, only that I was blind-copying my correspondence with them to my attorney. It was they who jumped to the conclusion that I wanted to sue them. Even when I told them that I wasn’t planning to sue them, and instead mentioned private adjudication — a process, I assume, that can legitimately involve attorneys — they childishly went on calling me a statist, not because it was true, but because it was such a swell smelly ball of excrement to smear on the wall.
This is not unlike the way, whenever they sensed dimly that they were losing the argument at hand, my grandmother Mabel and my wife’s grandmother Bertha (no, I am not kidding), both of whom were Roosevelt Democrats with minds so narrow they could look through a keyhole with both eyes, would resort to calling anyone who disagreed with them a communist.
Thus I am a statist asshole.
I have a small bet with myself that if I had informed these opponents of common, civilized behavior that I consider that what they have done amounts to an act of initiated force against me — with all of the consequences that entails — intervention on their behalf by the State, most likely in the form of badged and uniformed policemen who could prevent me from dealing with them directly, myself, would suddenly, miraculously appear a whole lot more attractive and morally acceptable.
But, statist asshole that I am, I have digressed.
At some point, I realized that the topic of intellectual property rights (about which I have never before been particularly interested) would have to be dealt with in Where We Stand, the volume I’m currently writing on libertarian policy, and that if I were to write an article about this little flapette for my editorial journal The Libertarian Enterprise, it might be suitable for the book. I conveyed that idea to the plagiarists as politely as I could, and put off any further argument with them until the article could be written and published.
The very next thing I knew, I was being defamed, by the leader of these scavengers and parasites, to all sixteen of the listeners to his Internet radio show, and all over the Internet. But, of course, had I decided to sue the guy for libel, slander, and defamation, in addition to his plagiarism, that would have made me a statist asshole all over again.
A double statist asshole.
Ever hear a mugger or rapist complain bitterly when it turns out his victim is armed and can defend him- or herself? I have. He sounds exactly like a left wing anti-gun politician. He also sounds exactly like the second-handers whole stole my work and offered it as their own.
Like many another pack of thieves, the Hole-In-The-Head Gang (to borrow a phrase) had an ideology with which to alibi themselves. The first tenet is that there is a distinction between physical property and what some — especially its creators — claim to be “intellectual property.”
They informed me, loftily, that just because I think of an idea, that doesn’t mean it belongs to me. That if I don’t want something I created stolen, then I shouldn’t communicate it to the world. Fine — and if everybody followed this “advice,” these creeps wouldn’t have any opposition to their thievery, and no stories or books would ever be published, no songs would ever be written, no music would ever be composed.
What a swell world that would be.
Believe it or not, one of these scavengers defended his crime by asserting that the Covenant of Unanimous Consent did not appear on one of the more prominent pages of my website. That’s exactly like ordering me to turn in my Yves Saint Laurent suit (believe it or not, I own one, and a nice Calvin Klein, too) because I don’t wear it very often. True, I had backed off pressing the Covenant as it became more and more obvious to me the movement had deteriorated so badly that the Zero Aggression Principle was now considered controversial, and even oppressive.
“You are a dinosaur and your assertion [presumably of my personal property rights] is invalid,” another of them informed me grandly. He, too, would want me to mention his name. “Innovation is impossible under your worldview.”
As an individualist, I’m not generally interested in Utilitarian arguments. However, it is worth noting that the past 300 years have seen the greatest progress in human history, and it’s exactly the same era in which copyright has been respected and stringently enforced. In this connection it’s worth asking, since there is no actual difference between intellectual property and physical property, when some self-appointed committee of sticky-fingered little rodents will “discover” that fact, and decide that you don’t really need your wallet, your car, your house, or especially your guns. It’s been done everywhere else, during the last couple of centuries, all over the world. Why not here?
Only we’ll call it libertarianism.
As I say, I had pretty much ignored the issue of intellectual property rights, even though arguments about it had been raging all over my blog at BigHeadPress.com, and in the virtual pages of my opinion journal, The Libertarian Enterprise. For the most part, I had been too busy creating more intellectual property, notably my vampire novel, Sweeter Than Wine and the policy guide, Where We Stand. Now I was going to have to think about it and say something coherent.
Damn.
My first observation is that, in a moral context, there is no discernible difference between physical property and intellectual property. As I first learned at the age of thirteen from the pages of Jack Finney’s 1959 novel Assault on a Queen, virtually everything we have, we have purchased at the price of little bits of our lives which we dedicate to fulfilling some employer’s interests rather than our own. We trade the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and eventually the years of our lives for our homes, cars, and everything else.
Traditionally in civilized property theory, “mingling your labor with the land,” the concepts of “sweat equity,” and of “selling little bits of your life” in order to acquire whatever you need or want, abolishes any meaningful difference between physical and intellectual property. The farmer begins with a tree-covered lot that he must clear and plow and plant, and the writer with a damnedly blank page or screen.
Property is property and theft is theft. Or as my wife Cathy, who can be refreshingly straightforward, puts it, unless you can go out in a field somewhere and pee me a bicycle without reflecting on it, all property is intellectual property. Somebody had to think of it. Somebody had to build it. And somebody had to use his mind to earn the money “or other valuable consideration” that was exchanged for the bicycle.
When I first went to college as a freshly-fledged “admirer of Ayn Rand,” I was informed — by leftists deeply involved in what was billed as the “Civil Rights Movement” — that there are human rights and then there are property rights; only the former existed in reality and are legitimate. Some of them asserted mockingly that property couldn’t have rights, others that defending property rights is somehow reprehensible and evil. Doomed never to be popular at school, I disagreed. It had been my experience that those who disparage property rights most vociferously usually do it because they want your property themselves.
Almost to a man (if that’s not giving these poor creatures too much credit; I have noticed that none of these would-be looters seem to be female, perhaps because women are the ultimate creators and the fiercest guardians of that which evolution has put in their charge) these illiterati seem to be very poorly educated where history in general — and the history of the libertarian movement in particular — are concerned. One of them actually quotes one of the original ideological expropriationists for the common good, collectivist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his messages: “Property is theft.”
That’s like a Jew leaning on Adolf Eichmann for support.
They seem a little unendowed in the imagination department, too. I have spent my entire adult life writing novels about how the mechanics of civilization can be re-engineered to exclude the very concept of government.
I hereby sentence them to read The Probability Broach, Pallas, and especially Forge of the Elders. Just because the state has protected intellectual property rights in the past, that doesn’t mean intellectual property rights don’t have to be protected. Just because it’s difficult to imagine how, that doesn’t relieve us of the moral burden.
Copyright © 2010 L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. Used by permission. For reprint rights email L. Neil Smith.
My own writings on “IP” are in previous columns here on J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review:
Informational Property — Logorights
Copying Is Not Theft? How About Identity Theft?
Copying Is Not Theft? How About Forgery? Counterfeiting? Plagiarism?
–J. Neil Schulman
J. Neil Schulman (Photo Left)
with L. Neil Smith (Photo Right),
July, 1998
July 19, 2010 - 6:42 am
Most of my favorite libertarian thinkers have long advocated a system of private justice, that is to say a voluntary system used by consent of the parties to a dispute. I guess this is what I just don’t understand about the anti-IP movement. It almost seems that they would suggest, that in a free society, they would somehow restrict authors and sculptors and mousetrap makers from having access to
private non coercive dispute resolution.
Of course that’s a non starter. Law would be an issue of custom and property rights and it would fall on the mutually agreed on judge and jury to rule on the merits of each case, both parties having signed a contract before hand agreeing to abide by the decision.
Even absent IP, if tomorrow I released a book called Man, Economy and The State by Brian Singer, I’m quite sure I would be widely thrashed by even the most ardent opponents of IP as being an imposter and a plagiarizer.
July 19, 2010 - 11:49 am
El Neil, you should realize there is a very good reason anyone would want to, as that hippie what’s-his-name said, “Steal This Book”: You write so darn well.
No one else I know or know of uses his vocabulary so well, or has one as large (and make of that what you will). Maybe to save your blood pressure you need to remember that imitation – even, I guess, outright plagiarism — is the sincerest form of flattery.
OK, seriously, you are right, and genuine libertarians really ought to acknowledge it.
July 19, 2010 - 5:49 pm
Brian Singer wrote:
“Even absent IP, if tomorrow I released a book called Man, Economy and The State by Brian Singer, I’m quite sure I would be widely thrashed by even the most ardent opponents of IP as being an imposter and a plagiarizer.”
Analogy fail. There’s a difference between using a work by another author for some purpose without the author’s consent and trying to pass off another author’s work as one’s own.
Furthermore, even if plagiarism is immoral (and I believe it is), it does not automatically follow that acts of plagiarism are criminal “copyright infringement.”
July 19, 2010 - 9:59 pm
The fact that obvious theft of an idea is exactly that, obvious, is what makes copyright so pointless.
Yes, Brian, you could release _Man, Economy and State_ under your name, but no one would believe you. If anything, you would generate interest in the original.
Reading many of the posts (how can I know if I’ve read them all?) about this incident, one of the people labeled “socialist” and “thief” has repeatedly asked for adjudication. He has clearly voiced his position that if Smith will prove damages, he will provide restitution.
The problem from my standpoint is that Smith’s Covenant has not been changed, it is still right where it always was, intact.
Nothing was stolen. Attribution was given.
Your assertion that “they would suggest, that in a free society, they would somehow restrict authors and sculptors and mousetrap makers from having access to private non coercive dispute resolution” is not rational. No one can be denied access to dispute resolution.
What those who have come to oppose I.P. have said is that, given rational argument, I.P. will not stand up.
One thing that has been requested is support for I.P., to counter “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, “Against Intellectual Property” and the other rigorous refutations of I.P.
Other than the emotional, “You stole from me!”, are you going to provide that support for I.P.?
Is there any argument in favor of I.P. better than “You stole from me!”?
July 20, 2010 - 2:19 am
The concept of exclusive ownership of an idea is ridiculous. Copyright and Patent laws are a dead weight cost on the productivity and culture in our society. Your article is simply a long-winded example of begging the question. Enjoy the privilege of rent seeking at the expense of the rest of the economy while it lasts. It will, unfortunately, likely persist for at least another generation.
July 20, 2010 - 2:45 am
Therefore, the fact that obvious theft of a car is exactly that, obvious — that is, you come out of a restaurant and the car is obviously missing — is what makes chop shops pointless?
July 20, 2010 - 2:50 am
I love the opaque imbecility of reducing ownership of things which can be identified, observed, and traded to the straw man of “an idea” — an argument which to the best of my knowledge zero advocates of IP ownership have made.
July 20, 2010 - 3:17 am
Funny thing about Steal This Book — once you understand how the book business works.
Abbie Hoffman writes a book titled Steal This Book! He licenses the rights to a publisher, which promises him a royalty on each copy sold minus copies returned to the publisher’s warehouse by the bookstore.
So if 100,000 copies of Steal This Book are shipped by the publisher to bookstores, and the books are stolen from the bookstore — guess what? Because the books are stolen the bookstore can’t return them to the publisher for credit and has to pay for them and Abbie Hoffman got his royalty.
So Abbie Hoffman and his publisher laugh all the way to the bank and the poor bookstore owners have to take the loss all by themselves.
What a lovely criminal conspiracy aimed at booksellers by an author, his publisher, and book thieves!
July 20, 2010 - 9:35 am
“It almost seems that they would suggest, that in a free society, they would somehow restrict authors and sculptors and mousetrap makers from having access to private non coercive dispute resolution. ”
This is completely false. I have invited Mr Smith to engage in a private non coercive dispute resolving process and pledged to make him whole if he can show that I have damaged him to an impartial third party arbiter. He has rejected this invitation because he doesn’t want to “give me a taller soapbox.”
What else can I do? I don’t believe I have injured him and I want to be shown that I have. He won’t even tell me the amount of the damages.
July 20, 2010 - 9:51 am
“I love the opaque imbecility of reducing ownership of things which can be identified, observed, and traded to the straw man of “an idea” — an argument which to the best of my knowledge zero advocates of IP ownership have made.”
First, thank you for responding. As you no doubt noticed, I think that our economy and culture would be improved with the repeal of copyright and patent laws. My argument is clearly not likely to be accepted by someone who’s livelihood has benefited so much from the existence of such laws. However, your response seems to follow a fallacious line of reasoning. What precludes something “which can be identified, observed, and traded” from being an idea. Copyright and Patent law regulate the right to reproduce and implement, respectively, ideas. To call this fact a straw man argument, is to miss the entire definition of both Copyright and Patent. Thus, any advocate of these laws make arguments, if only privately, to justify their existence, which implies enforcement in some form. Ownership of ideas is the premise which they are advocating. A premise that creates a net loss for the societies that codify it in law and enforce.
July 20, 2010 - 11:18 am
My own arguments are not based on the definitions in copyright, trademark, and patent law, so for me that’s a “straw man” in any case. I argue natural law and natural rights — an ontological and moral, not legal, case for ownership in commonly observable and identifiable things.
But even copyright law explicitly denies copyright protection to “ideas.” Look it up.
July 20, 2010 - 6:21 pm
A couple of ill-mannered clowns thought they could come onto my page, insult my friend, denigrate our writings, and expect that I would publish their comments. They were wrong.
I own this page and decide who publishes here. Meet my standards of good manners or meet my bouncer.
July 20, 2010 - 11:48 pm
It almost seems that they would suggest, that in a free society, they would somehow restrict authors and sculptors and mousetrap makers from having access to private non coercive dispute resolution.
Why do you think that? But there would be no “dispute resolution” over IP issues because there is nothing to resolve. The idea that “law would be an issue of custom and property rights and it would fall on the mutually agreed on judge and jury to rule on the merits of each case” is nonsense — there is just law and unjust “law”, and the latter doesn’t become the former just because it’s long-held custom or something. E.g., if you live in a society that hates red-heads and customarily kills them on sight, to use Rothbard’s analogy, that doesn’t make it OK to kill them. But you actually make the point yourself by bringing up the “mutually agreed judge”: what red-head in that situation would agree to a judge that thinks killing red-heads is OK? And what red-head-killer would agree to one who didn’t? It’s only possible to have mutually-agreed dispute resolution over just law (if A and B dispute the justness of particular law per se, rather than just its application to a particular instance (which is what third-party adjudication is about), the party disputing the law simply doesn’t have the protection of that law. E.g., if A claims it’s OK to murder people, then A has no recourse when someone murders him. In the “IP” case, if A disclaims IP, then B can “steal A’s IP” to his heart’s content. But nobody in the anti-IP camp has a problem with that!)
Even absent IP, if tomorrow I released a book called Man, Economy and The State by Brian Singer, I’m quite sure I would be widely thrashed by even the most ardent opponents of IP as being an imposter and a plagiarizer.
Why? Does MEP by Brian Singer contain the same words as MES by Murray Rothbard? If not, you’re neither an imposter (unless you’re only pretending to be “Brian Singer”…but authors use noms-de-plume all the time) nor a plagiarizer. If so, you’d be a subject of ridicule, perhaps, but not violence.
July 22, 2010 - 9:15 am
Something has been bothering me about this editorial. I’m not part of the “shire” or whatever this group is, though I am a FSP signer and I heard of the issue on Free Talk Live. The thing that bothers me, I’ve yet to see addressed. So I’ll do so, and hope for some clarification or discussion. The passage that caught my attention from Smith’s article:
“I have a small bet with myself that if I had informed these opponents of common, civilized behavior that I consider that what they have done amounts to an act of initiated force against me — with all of the consequences that entails — intervention on their behalf by the State, most likely in the form of badged and uniformed policemen who could prevent me from dealing with them directly, myself, would suddenly, miraculously appear a whole lot more attractive and morally acceptable.”
It strikes me that there might be two possibilities here, either it was a ploy to get the other side to display utter hypocrisy or it was a sincere suggestion as to how the matter might be resolved in a society minus a “legitimate monopoly on force”.
It’s the second suggestion that interests me, and then only on a practical level. My bother, and question is this: how on Earth would someone actually go about this in such a society?
In this situation, the parties are separated by, I believe, several thousand miles, and if I’m not mistaken both are known to be armed to the brim(a condition that I would assume would only increase in our stateless model).
Certainly Smith, no matter his firearms prowess, would not ride six-guns ablaze alone into an armed camp of some several dozen. That would be suicide, at least outside of an Eastwood film or a Hawthorne novel.
Likewise, it seem to me that there would be few who would be willing to take such a risk along side him, at least not gratis.
I suppose one could raise a mercenary army to go seek justice-but would one really go to that expense over an “initiation of force” that one only knew about from third parties? It would seem illogical to me to be willing to take the tactical offensive even for stolen TANGIBLE property, since one certainly cannot take it along for the very likely ride that comes after taking the tactical offensive.
Seems to me that in such a society any thought to actually physically attempting to recover IP would be laughable. Indeed, even an attempt to recover tangible property would have to be carefully contemplated-as would revenge for physical harm.
So, my question is, how would one actually go about enforcing such a thing on a practical level without engaging the overwhelming force of government(that I’m forced to pay for on your behalf)?
It is this practical conundrum more than anything has convinced me of the positive nature of intellectual “property”, and why I’ll never seek to enforce it should anyone be foolish enough to use any of scant few coherent things I’ve written over the years.
July 22, 2010 - 11:47 am
I can’t speak for either L. Neil Smith or the Shire, but I’d love to see this resolved on The People’s Court.
July 22, 2010 - 11:01 pm
I can’t see how it could be adjudicated the The People’s Court; that would be based on non-libertarian statute law. (But FWIW one of the Shire people offered L. Neil Smith the opportunity to take it to mutually-agreed private arbitration. He merely scoffed at it, saying he didn’t want to give them “a soapbox”)
July 23, 2010 - 11:51 pm
Most libertarian discussion on IP ignores an essential reality — copyright is defined by the state. I’d even say that IP is a statist invention — which does not by itself condemn IP. I’m no anarchist.
Here’s a key issue that libertarian discussion on IP often ignores: What is the proper SCOPE of copyright, and what is the proper length of its TERM?
Consider SCOPE. Broadly defined, the first writer to type “I love you.” in a novel might claim an exclusive copyright to that phrase.
And from an IP absolutist perspective — why not? Why should not simple phrases or ideas be protected by copyright?
Because the state’s definition says so. The Copyright Act says that protecting phrases is too broad a SCOPE of protection. An arbitrary, statist limit on copyright, but a good one.
Fair Use and the First Amendment limit the SCOPE of copyright. Unfortunately, Big Media is taking ever greater SCOPE. Fair Use should allow quoting a few lines of poetry or song lyrics, but Big Music has bullied novelists from quoting a single line from a song, lest they be sued.
Likewise, there’s nothing inherently libertarian about a copyright TERM that lasts for eternity, or even the life of the author plus 75 or 99 years. I think “life of the author plus 20 years” would be generous. I prefer that. But “50 years from creation” would also be fair and reasonable.
The state defined and created copyright, and has expanded its SCOPE and TERM over the years, to the point that it’s stifling free expression.
While I support some copyright, I hope Fair Use will reassert itself to restrict copyright’s SCOPE, and I hope that its TERM will be shortened.
To see how IP is stifling free expression: http://www.eff.org/ and http://www.chillingeffects.org/index.cgi
July 24, 2010 - 6:02 am
Amiable post and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you on your information.
July 27, 2010 - 1:30 pm
Whether you admit it or not there are serious problems for Libertarians advocating “Intellectual Property.” “Where does it end? ” becomes not a slippery slope fallacy, but is made real by ordinary copycat human nature.
Corporations are trying to patent genes. Would you respect that in a Libertarian society? And how would that work exactly? If you discovered the genes for “mad hops” could you then turn around and sue Michael Jordan the next time he dunks? “Sorry Mike, but you infringed on my Intellectual Property rights when you took off from the free throw line. ”
How far do we go with “Intellectual Property” in a just society? As far as Robert Klassen’s Innovation Clearing-House? He wants Good Year to pay the inventor of the wheel a royalty! And possibly you when you buy a tire from them! Or drive your car!
What happens when the line blurs even more between man and his machines? At some point we’re going to be able to think a thought and have it recorded in your very own database. When that happens we’ll have the electronic equivalent of telepathy plus didactic memory to boot. According IP logic actually using this technology would brand you a criminal, even just attending a concert.
And what about simultaneous invention? Two inventors, engineers, or scientists following parallel lines of progress arrive at the same conclusion roughly at the same time, but innovator A’s car breaks down on the way to the patent office, letting innovator B’s patent squeak by the finnish line 53 seconds ahead of his competitor. Do you support “Whoops. Tough $#!% innovator A. From now on change your motor oil more often and better luck next lifetime.” or upon proof of independent investigation “#@&% you very much innovator B; this is all my own work so go tell it to Satan. He might give a damn what you’ve been up to cause I sure as hell don’t. And neither do my customers.”
Wouldn’t the first option make for interesting times if L. Neil Smith’s Elder’s showed up and demanded their royalties for everything from the wheel to the Industrial Revolution all the way to the Dot Com bubble? I’m sorry, but your entire civilization is infringing on our Intellectual Property. If you do not cease and desist and return to your local jungles and caves immediately you’ll have forced us into the uncomfortable position of dealing with you directly-“with all of the consequences that entails.”
IMO Intellectual Property sounds like a case of the cure that would have the disease for dinner and the patient for desert. Good luck with that.
July 28, 2010 - 5:55 am
J.Neil,
“Therefore, the fact that obvious theft of a car is exactly that, obvious — that is, you come out of a restaurant and the car is obviously missing — is what makes chop shops pointless?”
Very interesting rewording.
I said “idea”, you replaced it with “car”. However, by utilizing your idea I have not deprived you of it. If I utilize your car, you cannot also utilize it.
You make this point your self, “the car is obviously missing”, as in gone, vanished.
No matter how literally an idea, phrase, whatever, is re-used, it doesn’t vanish. The Covenant of Unanimous Consent has not vanished, its signers have not had what they signed changed in the slightest, any more than the signers of the Declaration of Independence were deprived by L. Neil’s writing of the Covenant.
I would like also address something touched upon in these comments: The completely arbitrary nature of copyright. The reason we could spend all day bickering back and forth about scope and duration is because the basis of copyright has nothing to do with reality. It is entirely arbitrary, a creation of statute.
Remove the statute. Libertarians, right? No statute law, only what can be proven. To “take” your own example, take my car and I can PROVE that I was deprived of my car.
You clearly state that you “argue natural law and natural rights”. Ok, please do so.
Is there ANY logical, rational, reasoned support of Intellectual Property to counter the arguments in “Against Intellectual Property” or “Against Intellectual Monopoly”?
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html
I’ll be candid: The only non-emotional support for I.P. I’ve ever seen is bald assertion and argument from utility. The same arguments that disarm everyone because guns and knives can be used to kill.
July 30, 2010 - 11:41 pm
Why does L. Neil Smith have the foreword of The Probability Broach (one of my all time favorite novels) which was basically “shoplifted” right out of Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone prelude?
How can he defend this?
August 1, 2010 - 3:14 am
Regarding comment #20 by “Bob Robertson”:
Hey Bob, what’s wrong with “argument from utility”? That’s what 90% of law is about, after all. The notion that you have some silly “right” to your car is based on utility — who are you to presume that your possession of the car is more valuable to society than my possession of that car? Do you think you take better care of it than I would? Do you think you’re somehow more important than I am? Do you think your toil in the salt mines somehow makes you more deserving of driving it around than my sitting around and reading all day? What, you think that because some arbitrary piece of paper registered with the state DMV says that you “own” the car, you have some sort of moral right to it?
But “utility” says that because you have proven yourself by earning money with which to buy that car (or so I assume; for all I know, you could be a welfare leech who stuffed his mother’s dead body in the crawlspace so that you could keep collecting her Social Security payments), that you’ve got a right to control that chunk of metal and plastic.
“Utility” also says that if I take the time, effort, and money to design, test, and patent a useful invention, that I get to make a return on the disclosure of that invention by being allowed to stop others from making, selling, or using the invention for a fixed period.
And the “free market” gets to decide whether I get any return on my investment of time, effort, and money — because if I price my product too high, nobody’s going to buy it, and I’ll have wasted all of that time, effort, and money. When the patent expires, anyone gets to make it — and if I’m not making a cent off it, the patent will expire in a mere eight years, since I won’t bother paying the renewal fees.
You want to talk moral rights? Ok, here’s one. If patents don’t exist, then I choose not to share the results of my creative efforts with you. In fact, I choose not to bother with the “efforts” part of “creative efforts”, because those efforts cost me time and money that could better be wasted fishing, which at least puts fish on the dinner table.
You don’t have a moral claim on my creative efforts, nor on my time and my money. Therefore you don’t get the results. And you, and society as a whole, are poorer for it.
You really are — because (in real life) I’ve got multiple patent applications in the works. They’re all gun-oriented, so the only decent market is the U.S. And because of that, they’re all filed with nonpublication requests, so if no patent ever results, you won’t ever see them, or know about the concepts behind them, or be able to use them. I think they’re pretty good ideas, but of course the market will have the final say — if the market ever gets to see them.
August 1, 2010 - 3:27 am
Regarding comment #19 by “Mr. Quincy”:
Quincy dude, it’s obvious that you know absolutely nothing about gene patents. If you had even the slightest understanding of them, you’d realize why your argument is complete garbage. But all that you know about them is what you’ve picked up from the fruitcakes who demonize the notion, so you’re going around parroting them — “oh, the horrors, some of my genes could be patented! Waaaah!”
So, just for starters, genes are patented “in isolation”. The patent rights don’t extend to your body, or to Michael Jordan’s. The patent rights extend to whatever uses for those genes are disclosed in the patent document — typically, tests for finding defective genes, proteins and other chemicals made by them, and sometimes therapies for treating them.
That alone pretty much kills all your whining.
But if you still don’t like gene patents even knowing that, well, you (and the rest of the world) can just do without private investment paying for the research to find those genes, their uses, and treatments for genetic diseases they cause. Private investors have to get a return on their money or else that money evaporates into thin air. They make that return by charing on the back end. So, you’ll have to wait for the government-funded researchers to find the causes, uses, and treatments, because that’s the only other source of funding — it’s either private or government, there ain’t nobody else.
Seen the national debt lately? Good luck with that!
Anyway, I seem to recall a comment by a noted science fiction author that “everyone has the right to an INFORMED opinion”. Yours isn’t informed, and so your whining is entirely worthless, and merely goes to show what a complete tool you are.
Likewise your dribblings about “simultaneous invention” — there are three possibilities, and each one has been implemented in various countries’ patent systems. First-to-file is done everywhere outside the U.S. First-to-invent is the U.S. system, and considering that ours is the most successful patent system on the planet, a lot of us happen to think it’s a pretty good one. True ties can be resolved with the Euro model of “you’re all special! everyone gets a patent!” (The Japanese resolve true ties by “only one of you gets a patent; you two go work out who that’s gonna be, and then come back and tell us — kapisch?”)
But, otherwise, yes indeed, there will be one winner and one loser. Richard Jordan Gatling lost the race to the patent office with the screw propeller for boats — look where that got him. Alexander Graham Bell won the race with the telephone — and hardly anyone, other than patent geeks and maybe some of his descendants, remembers the name of the other guy.
That’s the way the system works. Sucks to be second. But that system also works to incentivize the inventor to work quickly, to keep good records, and to keep his car in good shape so he doesn’t have a breakdown on the way to the filing window.
The rest of your ravings are filled with ridiculous levels of fail. If our society really did protect IP to the extent of tracking down the inventor of the wheel, then there might be cause for concern about it — but we don’t, patents are limited to 20 years (from filing), copyrights are however long Mickey Mouse has been around, and even trademarks don’t go any further back than the founding of the nation (assuming you’re in the U.S. — if not, the oldest company I’m aware of is Beretta, and even they only go back to the 1600s).
Next, I assume you’ll argue how unfair it is that Paul Allen has a better view out his window than you do, and how the government should reward you equally for your existence. Poor baby. Have a lollipop and some Benadryl.
August 1, 2010 - 3:52 am
Shrdlu, you idiot, in #22, assuming it gets published, you forgot to inform Bob that “utility” furthermore predicates that right-to-exclude on having given a full disclosure of the invention, and giving up the right-to-exclude upon the patent’s expiration. That’s the trade-off.
And the alternative to the trade-off is the “trade secret”, which is why companies like Google don’t patent their search algorithms — because they can keep them secret forever, and society as a whole never learns what those algorithms are, and can be kept in thrall forever.
Thanks to web-based delivery of software services, such trade-secret protection strategies will only increase. Eventually, the anti-software-patent people will get their wish — and nobody outside of the corporations will be able to learn, or benefit, from those corporations’ research efforts. Students will labor in darkness. Open-source software communists will waste man-years of programming effort to create inferior algorithms. Richard “Stalin” Stallman will continue to live off academia-funded largesse while berating the private sector.
This also ties back to Mr. Quincy’s sadly uninformed comment on gene patents — Myriad Genetics could just as easily keep its genetic research secret, and until some government-funded researcher got around to duplicating their efforts, they’d have a true monopoly. Instead, Myriad patented their work, and all the whiny government-funded pricks threw a tantrum about how terrible it was that Myriad wasn’t letting them make an immediate cash profit from Myriad’s hard work.
Oh well. It’s late. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.
August 2, 2010 - 4:11 pm
Obviously, I was joking with the Michael Jordan and some of the other comments.
Obviously, you’re happy with the status quo. That says a lot about you.
I’m talking about encroachment. Relentless, incessant, merciless, all pervasive encroachment into every aspect of our lives of which IP is the latest and most successful maneuver .
Just because now single isolated genes are what’s being patented doesn’t mean that somewhere down the road some fool isn’t going to try to patent whole organisms that they did not actually create. In fact, it’s almost certain. Not because of a slippery slope, but because people are naturally copycats and naturally greedy. Nothing wrong with greed as long as it’s confined to the stuff you create or buy that was created. If they create new genes or brand new organisms from scratch or buy them from someone who does, wonderful. I’ve got no problem with them owning them as long as they aren’t sapient organisms or some $#!% like that. These genes were discovered. They didn’t create them. They didn’t alter them. They just found out what was already there. Their patent is standing in the way of better technologies that can sequence whole genomes and make their patent obsolete.
The real power of genes is how they work together. You’re a fool if you think that’s not the next big thing coming down the pike. Someone is going to research and develop how whole series of genes lead to some desirable or undesirable outcome. And then we’re off to the races.
IP doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is implemented in some form or fashion in bed with Big Government. Right now they’re cooking up ACTA so they can liberally violate your rights any time you enter an airport and any time you step online all in the name of Intellectual Property. Under ACTA you may be criminally liable without even the imaginary benefit of due process. You go inform your damned self about ACTA and then come and tell me that IP is not the Judas goat ushering in an age where stepping out of your front door is patented or copyrighted by somebody and therefore illegal without a paid subscription.
Keep on giving them an inch and they eventually WILL TRY and take a mile. I see no reason to give them those inches they’re demanding. And by “them” I mean Big Business in bed with Uncle Sam screwing everyone else over.
ASCAP was arguing not too long ago that AT&T owed them royalties whenever your phone rings out “performances” of whatever mp3s you have on it, even though you payed for them already. This is not an aberration. This is the normal course of doing business. The $#!% is insidious and progressive. They’ll never stop trying to squeeze out more than YOU bargained for.
I would be perfectly happy with Google or Myriad and others keeping their technology to themselves. Last I checked there was competition to Google.
I doubt anyone will miss your super hair trigger happy inventions. You’d be better off making an ebook and selling it on Clickbank, “How to trick out your pistol grip pump!” I’m sure some sucker will buy it.
August 4, 2010 - 12:01 am
Dear Mr. Quincy:
First, allow me to point out again that your arguments against genomic patents remain uninformed and irrational, not to mention shrill. Your arguments are full of fail. Alas, you appear to be ineducable, much like any other socialist.
As far as our freedoms are concerned, encroachment in IP is nearly the least of our worries. Compared to healthcare, bank bailouts, government control over education, inequality in divorce settlements, farm subsidies, peanut-planting quotas, and hundreds of other liberty-impaired areas of our lives, the terrifying dangers of patents and copyrights rank somewhere within the bottom five threats to what little freedom we have left.
That said, no, I am not satisfied with the status quo in IP. Not at all. Copyrights have been extended to ridiculous durations to protect Mickey Mouse; in the wake of EBay v. MercExchange, injunctions are nearly impossible to get to block patent infringers; the CAFC has expanded inequitable conduct risks to an insane breadth and scope, far beyond their ruling in Kingsdown. There are plenty of opportunities for improvement. Abandoning IP so that dullard looters like yourself can take the fruits of others’ efforts without fee or fear is not one of them.
Moreover, for the most part, the SCOPE of IP is determined by elected officials. See, for example, the Supreme Court’s recent Bilski case, where even Kennedy had to suck it up and point out that Congress made “business methods” patentable subject matter. And note the multiple Mickey Mouse copyright term extensions. Don’t like it? Get elected and change the laws. If some hepatitis-deranged twit who thinks Guam might tip over can become a Member of Congress, so can you. Hell, as unlikely as it appears from your silly arguments, you could even be an improvement.
Meanwhile, go pirate some MP3s while cackling madly about “sticking it to the bands”. Those rich, creative bastards, how DARE they refuse to let you play bass with them and f*@$ their groupies?!?! Just because you have all the tunefulness of an elderly and incontinent cocker spaniel, the creativity of a gnat, and a body odor reminiscent of a baboon’s cage means nothing! NOTHING!!!!1! You DESERVE those MP3s. Really.
Kind regards,
E. Shrdlu
August 4, 2010 - 11:54 pm
I find it hilarious that you would call me a socialist. You are seriously bass ackwards with that assessment.
Do you know anything about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) or are you the one who isn’t educable? If you think ACTA is in the bottom five threats to liberty you don’t even deserve to be counted as a sapient organism.
All of those issues you mentioned are gigantic threats to liberty. However, they are obvious to a shit load of people. That’s why they had such big opposition. ACTA is coming from a pro business angle at a time of weakened economy. It doesn’t have nearly as much opposition. Unless people learn of this and rise up like they’re doing for those other issues they’ll never have a chance to stop it. They won’t even know how or why their rights are being violated.
That’s why they’re doing it in complete secret so obtuse, fatuous, moronic, imbeciles like you won’t know until it’s biting you on the ass. It’ll sneak in under the radar and one day you’ll look up to see them cutting off your internet because your daughter was using so much bandwidth that their traffic analysis told them your household was downloading DVD rips.
Without your internet connection you won’t be able to spew your vitriolic, venomous concoctions all over websites like these. Now if this were confined to you then the internet itself would simply breathe a sigh of relief and the world would move on happily. However, it won’t be you alone as this will be happening globally to untold numbers of people. It’ll be used politically to deny internet access to undesirables all on anonymous tips from busybody snitches like yourself. They’re laying the ground work right now for taking back control of the internet.
I wonder if they had clueless Jews resembling you in Nazi Germany, who couldn’t see the gas chambers coming until they were standing in them holding their rank stank week old morning breath trying to squeeze out that last molecule of oxygen?
By the way, I haven’t pirated any mp3s. I use Itunes. Last I checked their royalties were paid up.
What I deserve is not to have my private files searched every time I enter an airport or cross customs.
What I deserve is not to have government agencies raiding the “cloud,” rummaging through my backed up files on some half-baked anonymous tip from you about mp3s.
What I deserve is not to have my internet interrupted on the mere accusation of so-called pirating without any proof.
What I deserve is what every American born in this country deserves, what we were promised in the constitution.
I hate the trial lawyers, but I’m going to love the lawsuits that come about on the day this garbage takes effect.
“incontinent cocker spaniel?” If that’s what you call creativity I see why you haven’t gotten your patent yet. You’ll probably be waiting a VERY long time.
I can’t wait to see your silly ass on youtube hooting and hollering in some airport after your laptop containing the master copy of your latest tricked out trigger design has been confiscated because the OEM drafting software you purchased turns out to be a pirated counterfeit copy.
Like I said, good luck with that.
August 5, 2010 - 3:04 pm
In respone to #22 by Etaoin Shrdlu
I find it interesting that all he does is argue from utility and emotion.
What Etaoin didn’t seem to get is that I’ve heard all that before. Especially his, “I’ll take my marbles and leave unless you give me my way, and you’ll all be sorry! Waaa!”
To bemoan other people as whining is hypocrisy on his part.
August 5, 2010 - 9:39 pm
Bob,
What’s so terribly wrong with utility? Frankly, if you want to go with a pure natural-rights law for everything, then “might makes right”, and the strongest and most ruthless can always enslave you. The only “natural right” you have is whatever you can grab. Go ask the Mexican border-crossers about how their “natural rights” fare when the cartel gunmen decide they want someone to be a drug mule for them.
The reality is, you guys just want to use other people’s creative talents for nothing, just like any other socialists. You just try to couch it in fancier terms than “redistribution” and “theft”.
August 19, 2010 - 1:33 pm
The issue of IP is complex. Obviously the creator of some work has first rights to say how that work is offered and under what terms. But what is covered under IP? Is a mathematical method covered? If so then it what way and how long and under what terms? A novel is obviously a work of great effort. Why would this form of work offer no protection and no benefit to the creator at all, not even of attribution? The idea of Universal Consent is not a novel, it is an idea. It seems obvious that attribution of origin should be made but that there should be no restrictions or use of the idea. I don’t see L Neil Smith advocating restrictions on use. Just point out that it is slimey to take the idea and present it as one’s own. How the heck does that produce some tempest that he is a statist? If he is a statist then I am an alien from Alpha Centauri.
The notion floating out their that only a physical something is property is simply an arbitrary assertion. It can have no rational proof. By this logic Hank Rearden’s fabulous metal in Atlas Shrugged, produced after 10 years of excruciating effort, is automatically property of the people as soon as he markets it at all. After all the essence of it is not any particular slab of it but the metallurgical formulas that make it up. Yes he could keep the formula a trade secret, sort of. But one disgruntled employee could end that. And keeping it a trade secret would in fact make it less likely that other inventions could be built off the knowledge entail in that one. It seem hypocritical to say that Rearden would have the IP right to keep the formula secret but have no right any benefit from his work if he published the formula under a contractual arrangement requiring licensing to use it. If you believe in IP in the trade secret sense then you believe in IP.
September 21, 2010 - 10:48 am
Mr Shrdlu,
“What’s so wrong with utility?”
An argument from utility is what justifies “might makes right”. It’s what justifies 51% of the population enslaving the 49%, since the greater number will obviously be better off doing so.
“you guys just want to use other people’s creative talents for nothing”
I do keep hearing this over and over. Is this, honestly, the only thing you can hear anyone say? Has all the discussion, all the effort to try to show how granting “rights” to other people’s property merely because it’s similar to someone else’s, is destructive and impares innovation, been wasted because the pro-I.P. side has decided “they’re just thieves” and stuck their fingers in their ears to everything else?
It seems so.
I read recently in a pro-I.P. article, “did he have the right to make a copy? No.”
Yes.
Of course he had a right to make a copy, that’s how he did so without initiating force or fraud on anyone else.
Remember force and fraud?
To _sell_ that copy as if it were the original, that’s fraud.
September 21, 2010 - 11:47 am
The argument is not a utility argument; it is a rights argument.
If a creator makes a work of art, a property right is created in that work of art, belonging to its creator.
What makes the creation art is its unique arrangement of elements into something that has never before existed. This can be a novel, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, architectural plans, or any other thing in which what is new and valued is its uniqueness.
It is scarce at the moment of creation because it is new and there is only one.
The right to make copies belongs to its creator.
Any copy is the same thing as the original. Both the original and the copy being the same thing belong to the creator.
If you make copies without the creator’s consent, you violate the property right.
A right is not a physical thing. It is an abstract concept. All property rights are abstract.
A right to make a copy is no more nor less abstract than a right to live in a timeshare condo, or to buy the right to take passage on a bus or train, or to cross a bridge, or to sit in a theater for a performance.
What is bought and sold are abstract rights to take specified actions with respect to material things.
To make a copy of something which is owned by someone else without the owner’s consent is just as much a violation of rights as having sex with someone without their consent, or sleeping in their bed without their consent, or taking a ride in their bus without their consent, or using their time share without their consent. All these things are nothing more than taking action with respect to someone else’s property without their consent.
Criminals are people who do things to or with other people’s things without their consent.
November 10, 2010 - 8:30 pm
If a creator makes a work of art, a property right is created in that work of art, belonging to its creator.
And this assertion is where all the pro-IP people go off the rails. Where’s the evidence? What do you make of Kinsella’s example with the marble block? (An artist carves a statue out your block of marble. Who owns the statue?)
December 31, 2010 - 2:43 pm
“A right to make a copy is no more nor less abstract than a right to live in a timeshare condo”
which denies others the use of that space at the same time,
“to buy the right to take passage on a bus or train”
which denies others the use of that seat/berth at the same time,
“to cross a bridge”
which occupies actual space, denying someone else the ability to walk through that same space at the same time,
“to sit in a theater for a performance”
which denies to others the ability to sit in that same seat for that same performance.
Everything you mention is the exclusive use of a scarce resource.
Making a copy of something does not deny anyone else equal (or greater) use of that same information at the same time, any more than taking a photograph denies someone else seeing the same view.
In fact a photograph is an excellent example of non-rivalrous copying, the copying of the photon-reflected image that would otherwise have been transitory upon my retina.
Lots of people try to assert copyright in photographs, yet they did not invent the photons which they copied. They merely made the first copy. So from that shall we conclude that making a copy implies ownership? Wow, that would be a fine kettle of fish.
December 31, 2010 - 3:13 pm
Rivalrousness is beside the point, and is an argument invented by communists to negate an owner’s exclusive ownership of his property. I own the first copy of a novel I write, which is a scarce resource since initially there is only one. I own the right to specify the terms under which others may use it, and that includes copying.
You didn’t invent the atoms or molecules of the clothes you wear. Does that give someone else the right to strip you naked?
May 2, 2011 - 6:38 pm
“Rivalrousness is beside the point, and is an argument invented by communists to negate an owner’s exclusive ownership of his property.”
I’ve heard that you’re going to be coming to PorcFest this year. Is this the presentation you’re going to be making?
“I own the right to specify the terms under which others may use it, and that includes copying.”
Indeed! And if every person who gets a copy must first agree to and sign a contract that says they may not make any further copy of it, then that’s the terms. But if anyone gets it without entering into that contract before hand, to what are they to be held?
“You didn’t invent the atoms or molecules of the clothes you wear. Does that give someone else the right to strip you naked?”
Under what seems your interpretation of intellectual property, yes. That’s why I do not agree with that interpretation: The logical conclusion of intellectual property is a complete loss of anything like individual liberty.
June 18, 2012 - 11:22 pm
A contract can limit a grant for use of a property right to the signatory of the contract; but the lack of a signature on a contract isn’t an unlimited grant of the use of a property to any non-signatory.
If this were not the case then I could sign a contract with you granting you a limited right to borrow my car for a few days, and if any third party is free to do what they will with my property because they are not a party to our contract then if you left my car unlocked with the engine running while you grabbed a Starbucks coffee they would be committing no property violation by driving off in my car.
A lack of contract does not grant any property rights. A limited grant of property usage reserves all those rights not specifically granted.