4 ms·

Actually, "protecting" ideas as if they were property is in direct opposition to personal rights, so this should be expected. It's weird how "intellectual prop

• uriel 15y ago
  Yes, intellectual property is completely contrary to free markets and personal liberty, in its essence is a system of government-granted and government-enforced monopolies, and how anyone can think that is compatible with liberty economic or personal boggles the mind.
• sp332 15y ago
  Well, I've heard that in Britain, IP is considered an inherent right just like personal property. If I own the result of my own physical labor, why wouldn't I own the result of intellectual labor as well?
  • Sharlin 15y ago
    You do. No-one can take it away from you, except by destroying all copies and mindwiping you. Owning something doesn't mean you get to control copies of that something.
  • Vivtek 15y ago
    Because if you physically make something and it's taken from you, you no longer have it. Information can't be taken from you - granted, a medium on which it's stored could be, but again, that would be a physical, not an intellectual loss. You can't be deprived of the knowledge that allowed you to create the item in the first place. Unless, of course, somebody else is granted the intellectual property rights to it.
    • michael_dorfman 15y ago
      But that's not quite the argument. If I compose a poem or a play, and contract with a publisher to publish said poem and pay me a portion of the proceeds (or contract with a theater company to perform the play, and similarly pay me a portion of the proceeds), and some third party takes the poem/play and publishes/performs it without paying me, I have, in fact, been deprived of something, i.e., income. And, if my reading of history is not mistaken, it is precisely from this use case that the notion of intellectual property (in the initial form of copyright) takes its foundation.
      • hxa7241 15y ago
        First: a third party is not bound by the contract. And if the contract cannot validly or practically secure you income, you cannot very well be said to be losing anything. Second: the big question is: why should we make the form of such a contract a general rule/law? Just assuming it is a matter of contract is just assuming away the interesting question.
      • slowpoke 15y ago
        >And, if my reading of history is not mistaken It is. Copyright is and always was designed for distributors, not authors. It's nothing more than a myth - or rather, industry propaganda - that copyright was invented by authors. Here's a nice round-up of the entire history of copyright: http://questioncopyright.org/promise http://questioncopyright.org/promise
        • antiterra 15y ago
          Even the forced slant in that "round-up" doesn't really serve to justify the conclusion in its last sentence. There is also no coherent argument that a dubious origin necessarily implies the lack of useful premise. The Internet and personal computing technology indeed add "roll-your-own" options to publishing and completing a work that did not exist beforehand. But, at this point, they certainly have not replaced the need for the (sometimes creative) work done to support the work of authors. Things like: editing, typesetting, music production, video post-processing etc. What happens when the publishing model is dead? Look at poetry. Poets still write, and some of it is decent. However, big publishers won't touch a poetry book that isn't a classic or a guaranteed sale anthology. Smaller imprints will usually only bother if the book has won a prize. In a number of cases authors pay a reading fee to enter contests, and the fee pays for the publishing of the book in a near break even scenario. In the case where poems are published on the internet, there's a small but arguable respectable audience, however there's no money changing hands whatsoever. Poets have second jobs, I know some who just gave up, who went into finance and law. I'll grant that lack of market is more of an issue as copying in this case, but publishers can help make markets. It should be easy to see how the effects are related. That is to say: What's the difference between a bitcoin and a poem? You can buy food with a bitcoin. Not everyone wants to be a sustenance farmer for a living.
    • danieldk 15y ago
      The artifacts produced from intellectual labor can often not be taken from an individual, but through copying potential income can. 'Intellectual property' is a concept invented by people to protect themselves against such loss of income. Currently, most people who care cling to two extremes: one group sees intellectual property as physical property, and think 'theft' should be punished as physical property theft. The other group thinks that 'intellectual property' is imaginary, because the cost of copying is near-zero and copying does not take away information from the original owner. Obviously, the first extreme is completely unacceptable. Suppose (for the sake of the argument) that someone invented a copier tomorrow that could copy any physical object. That would be a tremendous win for humanity. However, the 'intellectual property'-crowd would come in and insist that people pay nearly the same price for the copy as the original (as happens today with books, movies, and music). On the other hand, there should be some financial incentive to produce intellectual artifacts.
• Symmetry 15y ago
  I think "intellectual property" is an excellent example to use when distinguishing between free markets and capitalism. Free markets and IP are opposed for the same reasons that free markets are opposed to any other government granted monopoly. But IP laws extend the reach of capitalism into places that might be outside it without legal assistance.