Libertarian Party of Colorado First to Officially Support Ending IP
lpedia.org
lpedia.org
But trademarks have some customer-friendly properties: if I buy a soda with Coke's trademark design on it, I can be reasonably sure I'm buying an actual Coke product. OTOH, we also have the IOC suing people for using "Olympic" in the name of non-related businesses (eg https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150221/14095930099/olymp...), which should be a "too bad so sad" ruling for the defendant against anyone who names their organization after a physical location.
As an aside, I strongly believe that entities should have to pay taxes on their intellectual properties. It's at least imaginable that you could defend your real estate without the government's assistance, even if that means hiring armed people to enforce the borders you're claiming. It's impossible to enforce IP without the government's assistance, and I think it's utterly unreasonable to expect that government to lift a finger to help protect it without paying taxes on it. I ran this by Cory Doctorow and he patiently explained why this isn't possible, but I still contend that even if it can't be, it ought to be.
What is?
> In addition, it's possible to have intellectual property without requiring government influence on someone's thoughts. Case in point, trade secrets.
Nobody is proposing that keeping stuff in your head is going to be illegal or taxed. What would be taxed is puting stuff out in the world and then telling people what they are allowed to do with it. That is only possible by using threats of force or the implied threats of force embodied bybour legal system.
Also, all other actual IP.
No, like any other property tax, its a user fee for the government service of excluding others from whatever exclusive rights are granted under law for the class of property at issue.
IP doesn't limit or license thought, and a tax on IP doesn't tax thought.
If you want the government to protect against other people making certain applications of similar thoughts to the ones you’ve had, then you want IP protection, and that protection is what a tax on IP applies to.
How else does such a person learn to discover or create without his thoughts? Taxing IP is taxing the discoveries and the works of a person. Ergo taxing IP is taxing one's thoughts.
“private contracts” aren't an enforcement mechanism, they are a basis for government enforcement.
That aside, no, IP (and property generally) isn't a user fee, its the privilege of excluding others from some conduct relating to the subject of the property right.
A tax on property is a user fee on the service of providing and enforcing that privilege.
False. "IP" is the right to exclude other people from using such work.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/08/legal-action-against-co...
Also this case was resolved in a pretty reasonable manner[1] which actually does seem to increase the visual distinctiveness between the two logos and, from what I can tell, that logo change was the sole result of the settlement. Apple's logo is, IMO, three main things, an apple, a bite, and a leaf - and each of those is quite distinctively placed within the logo. Prepear was pretty precisely copying the style of the leaf.
1. https://www.creativebloq.com/news/apple-prepear-logo-resolut...
If I get mad at my neighbor and falsely accuse him of stealing my car, that is not evidence that laws prohibiting theft are “about more than just stealing things”. The law means what it means regardless of others untested and wacky claims about it.
This always felt like something better enforced via fraud laws than intellectual property to me. Property is the wrong metaphor for trademarks.
Right now you can do bullshit like sell and license trademarks, so I can't actually be confident that a FooBarWidget is made by FooBar. I can have some confidence that FooBar licensed there trademark for it, but they might be doing that as a way of cashing out on their reputation. That shouldn't be legal, that should be fraud.
A better replacement would be special fraud laws against some set of phrases like "Made By <Company>" and "Certified By <Company>", and using those phrase when it's not the case should be very illegal. Maybe there should be a replacement version of trademarks where you can register a distinctive image or made up word as being synonyms with "Made By <Company>", but that shouldn't be sellable, licensable, or anything else, it should be a simple synonym. While <Company> should be able to sue for damages if they can show them, the real enforcement should come from law enforcement because the entities actually being lied to and defrauded are the customers, not <Company>.
Those rights being saleable and licensable honestly just strikes me as common sense because CocaCola might want to empower regional bottling plants to produce their product without putting those bottling plant subsidiaries in the awkward position where they refuse to operate because at any moment CocaCola could step in and essentially seize their entire business since, contractually, there is no method to allow CocaCola to lease out the rights to make such styled bottles removing the protection from bottling plants.
Lastly, CocaCola as a brand definitely has a large value to the company - so if that brand is not saleable how are you going to quantify that value and allow a transferrence of the value of it between different shareholders, holding companies, or company owners/executives.
I also think you're oversimplifying damages - CocaCola could suffer a reputation loss due to CocoCola including arsenic in their product and causing public confusion. I think these portions of the law are pretty complicated - yes - but they're that way because it's a complicated subject.
I'm not that opposed to software patents per-se, but I believe all patents (and copyright) should be much more time-limited. With software, a year or two would be a more reasonable (for me) time limit, and maybe 10 years for copyright.
- Copyright is "automatic" whenever you fix a work to a medium. Should it be made manual, like patents? Or should copyright be exempt from taxes? What about Open Source?
- Profitability for any given patent varies wildly depending on the company that owns it. So you'd end up with big corporations having patents because their scale (and profits) justifies owning patents, and small companies having no IP. Same thing for trademarks.
Say you make a movie and claim that it's worth $10,000,000 for tax purposes. Well, you don't get to sue for $100,000,000 if someone pirates it, because you've already declared that it's not worth that much.
I'm not persuaded by the "small companies have no IP" argument. Apple owns an enormous campus. My company doesn't. Is it fair that Apple gets to lay claim to a larger part of available real estate just because they can afford it? Well, yeah. I believe so, anyway.
The difference being that Apple cannot arbitrarily claim to own your real estate.
If you create a work that is worth a great deal, but cannot claim it to have that value because you cannot afford to pay the taxes (yet), a large organization can safely appropriate that work while only paying the smaller amount of damages.
Hm; one question: Could they then claim that it is their work, put a large value on it, and put you out of business?
You can make this even more elegant by making it a Harberger tax: https://ristret.com/s/ftmbkg/harberger_taxation_has_elegant
An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace, not by inferior products defended in the courts.
Even when it's a superior product, often covetous protectors of excessive demands and restrictions hamper and kill it. Media formats, software, vehicle technology, the graveyard of brilliant products by petty tyrants zealously destroying their dreams through their own stubbornness is vast and depressing.
I'm glad Apple knocked off Xerox, Tim Berners Lee knocked off Ted Nelson, and Linus knocked off a bunch of groups. I'm glad Encyclopedia Britannica didn't have IP rights to shut down wikipedia and W3Catalog, the first search engine wasn't going around knocking off Yahoo, Alta Vista and Google when they came around.
I don't expect wide agreement with this, that's why I'm saying it.
For example, I very recently heard that you should be careful about Philips TVs, and that they may be rebranded off-brand models. ;)
There's other reasons for that existing. For instance, liability.
Let's say the name Quaker Oates was allowed (with the e) and they used horrible inspection and poisoned dozens of people.
Quaker Oats, the company everyone thinks of, could show damage to their brand. This isn't IP
Honestly, I think that must because you're using "IP" in a kind of vague way. I think it's important to distinguish:
1) more traditional IP regimes, that were designed to incentivize the creation of new things by protecting the people who made the initial effort to bring them into being, and...
2) ...more modern IP regimes, that have been twisted and perverted by powerful entities to protect their ability to milk old work for more profit.
You can support #1 without supporting #2, and abolishing #1 to get rid of #2 would (in many, many cases) just lead to the return of old abuses (e.g. why should a publisher pay an author anything when they could just copy their book without paying).
It's not a bright line, but more of a gradient with some difficult corner cases and tradeoffs. However, the extremes are pretty clear.
> And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again?
It can't. The best anyone can do is be vigilant.
I don't think that's enough time to do either of those things, even in the most wildly optimistic circumstances. Honestly a patent term probably should be at least 10 years for an actual invention, but they need to tighten up rules about what an invention actually is.
The place where IP has really gone off the rails is copyright.
You are right that IP law is fundamentally about time. A more nuanced way to think about it is that IP law provides a reliable framework to amortize the cost of information creation.
Intellectual property is an unusual kind of good in that it:
1. Has extremely high fixed cost.
2. Has near-zero marginal cost.
3. Once the fixed cost is paid, anyone could become a seller for zero fixed cost and near-zero marginal cost.
For example, I've spent the past six years of my life writing a book. That's a pretty high fixed cost. Once I've finished polishing it off, it costs me virtually the same to sell 1,000,000 eBook copies as it does for me to sell one. But, also, it would also cost you nearly nothing to take a copy of that eBook, start selling it, and keep all of the profit. You could even undercut me since you didn't pay the fixed cost anyway so have no expenses to recoup.
Copyright law gives me a window of time where I can use the low marginal cost and protection from #3 to recoup the time investment I made in #1. Without that protection, the day my eBook goes on sale, someone can buy a copy and immediately start reselling their own copies of it as some dirt cheap price.
In a world where that happens all the time, many people would be simply unwilling or unable to invest that high fixed cost and those goods wouldn't exist at all.
There are interesting arguments to be had over how long/large this window of protection and exclusivity should be. But I think no window at all would be disastrous.
> An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace
That presumes a world where the marketplace has no influence over which products exist at all. Sure a marketplace that sells my book for $20 and $1 gives customers the choice and they can take the $1. That's clearly superior: same great book, much lower price. But a marketplace where I spend years writing only to have someone else profit from my book is a marketplace where the book doesn't exist as a product at all because I wouldn't write it.
(You might argue that people should be creating information products out of the goodness of their hearts and not for financial gain. That's a nice sentiment, but the consequence of it is that it means that only the rich participate in creative culture since only they have the luxury to create in their free time.)
Many media conglomerates had short-lived book publishing arms 50 years ago. The current owners of the successor companies may not even be aware they have those rights in any meaningful sense.
These subsequent transfers don't get registered. So the paper trail is hard.
Additionally researchers are hampered when trying to track down old newspapers or out of print material.
For instance, many daily newspapers shuttered their doors in the past 30 years. Currently you mostly have to go to the Library of Congress, find a local library or historical society with archival microfilm, drive over there and then scrub through the rolls on an analog machine like it's the 1970s.
Murky copyright prevents these defunct publications from being digitized.
I really wish the existence of Mickey Mouse wasn't the reason I have to wait until COVID is over because the archives room is closed at a specific library I'd like to go to and they don't have the rights to digitize what they have on file.
I'd gladly pay for it but nobody knows who to pay. I've tried tracking down the current right holders and the only person I heard back from claims (I believe incorrectly) they do not have those rights. I'm guessing the lawyers saw the long chain of transfers I documented and were just trying to play it safe. So here I am. Splendid.
I'm pretty sure in your example there's many other laws that protect you from that kind of brazen theft
No, it is literally only copyright law. If it wasn't for the ambient threat of copyright litigation that I could bring to anyone else who attempted to sell my book, the day I put it on Amazon, someone else would take it, put their own copy up, and undercut the price.
People like to complain loudly about IP law, and I agree there are definitely problems. But I think we massively take for granted all of the many cases where it does work well.
If IP disappeared tomorrow, I'd bet quite a bit of money that some skilled lawyers would quickly find a way to get the kind of protection you speak of to exist under other laws.
I'd go so much as to say that if something can't be argued under existing laws of things like damage, theft, impersonation, forgery, abuse and fraud, then it probably would be the kind of rights exercise that I'd consider objectionable.
It doesn't not require fraud or forgery to sell someone else's book. You don't claim to be the author, you claim to be a publisher. Publishers always publish authors' work, that is literally the business of a publisher. You are also not forging anything, unless you are claiming that your version of the book is a specific edition of the printed work.
If you sold an author's work and claimed that you have a contract with that author, so that they receive a share of the proceeds, and if that claim was untrue, then that would be fraud. But you could simply not make that claim.
> It's similar to selling a car you don't own or someone else's real estate property through title fraud.
The title represents the property right. If you didn't have the right to exclusive ownership of cars, then the title would be irrelevant, because you could just obtain the keys to the car and sell them to someone. Property rights are the reason this is illegal, not title fraud.
I would be very surprised if IP law was the only possible legal wall in such a bad faith action as the one you're referring to but I'm completely unqualified to argue any actual legal nuance. Sorry.
What I really want is easier access to historical primary source research material without having to drive an hour and spend all day combining through microfiche. It feels stupid having to still do that in the 2020s. These should have been fed through a digitizer 20 years ago, it'd take like a weekend. It's not hard. The IP boogeyman is the only thing holding this up.
Heck, sometimes, say with various local LA city paper, there's often only 2 existent copies, one in Downey or Lapl central and one in Sacramento. When I get that role I literally have half the world's copies in my hand. I mean really, what the hell is that? Disk space is effectively free. Let's get on this.
I wish you luck on your book
If someone took a rare out of print book and after a good faith search for the copyright holder, started printing it and set aside the proceeds in escrow to go to the owner if they were found or donated otherwise, that's materially very different from stealing works in print and price sniping them.
For example, "We hold that rights to property, including real property, are individual rights and, as such, are entitled to the same protections as all other individual rights. The owners of property have the full right to acquire, trade, control, use, dispose of, rent, collateralize, or enjoy their property in any manner, without interference, unless the exercise of their control infringes upon the valid rights of others."
"Infringing on the valid rights of others" is the very fine edge in this case that can slice just about anywhere you want to put it. I could, for example, build a feedlot next door to your house. Except, "Pollution of air, water, and land violates rights. Polluters, including government, should have strict liability for harms caused by pollution. Strict liability should regulate pollution, not government agencies nor arbitrary government standards." (On the other hand, what exactly is the strict liability for the harm of stench and effluvia? The loss of property value? How would you determine that?)
Ideally we'd somehow expel being a bastard.
Where many libertarians brains break is they understand this with institutions that they choose to label with the word government, but once you remove the superficial label they think there's no longer any problems.
That's where anarchism comes in. But like libertarianism it means contradictory things depending on who you talk to.
Whatever you want to call it as long as we admit we are only in the current chapter of history and many more are to be written then together we can continue to try to build a better society
Honestly the world would be better off. If anyone wants to go off on their own for six years and etch out their own symphony—that's great! All the freedom to them. But that's not something we should subsidize as society by restricting everyone else's intellectual freedoms. Most books are 10x - 100x too long and are mostly a regurgitation of existing ideas.
We need more people collaborating on items like Wikipedias and RISC-Vs and Linux Kernels and fewer people trying to generate some new "novel" thing which they have a monopoly over. We shouldn't ever disbar someone from creating whatever they want, but we need to stop pretending like these things are worth a fortune. They're not. The big winners are only making a fortune because of these monopoly laws, not because they are orders of magnitude better than the alternatives.
> those goods wouldn't exist at all.
The data is overwhelming that the critical, most important goods get created just fine without copyright and patent protection. TCP/IP, WWW, Wikipedia, the majority of all essential medicines, critical NIH databases, et cetera. The goods we get from copyrights and patents are the junk like Oxycontin, Microsoft Windows (how much have we paid for in security lapses), CNN and NYTimes and FoxNews.
This. Have you seen someone else elaborate on this more? I see it too and want more sources.
Unfortunately, this is impossible in the context where some companies will just spew toxic waste in other countries with no regulation to save costs, so that behavior wins with no IP.
How? Is putting IP disputes in the court system "without government intervention?"
As much as I would like to see an IP holders version of Robot Jox, I'd imagine this would turn into a "whoever has more money wins".
Assume they’re advocating for some sort of arbitration system.
Advocating that IP claims should be forced to fail in private arbitration before being eligible for a hearing in public court is a reasonable way to prioritize the private market fixing problems on the cheap before consuming public resources - but removing the courts as the ultimate arbiter is a really big shift in my mind.
If your work is important or valuable to you, keep it under lock and key.
They could talk at you until you cease resisting.
Without IP laws, how would one party force the other into arbitration? Or to be more specific, if I spend two years writing an excellent novel but Random House legally makes all the money off it it with a pirate edition, why would they enter arbitration with me? They'd just say "get lost," and laugh all the way to the bank.
P.S. Do note that the platform of the Libertarian Party of Colorado explicitly denies that the government has a monopoly on violent force, does not allow the government to initiate violence, and in fact, doesn't describe any way of paying for what force the government may legitimately apply. Enforcing any of your rights requires you to be a part of a more powerful gang than theirs.
Contractually. (Non-participants wouldn’t be subject.)
> Contractually. (Non-participants wouldn’t be subject.)
So the "arbitration" mechanism would be useless in almost all relevant circumstances and is not a serious suggestion.
Not really. Industry arbitration venues exist. So if you want to distribute through such and such channel, or want to buy certain components, part of the agreement is agreeing to certain rules including binding arbitration at certain venues.
It’s silly. But not unworkable for most kinds of IP.
I'm guessing they refer to signing contracts similar to NDAs when you don't want your invention to be public, but still want to "sell" it to some specific entity.
Those of us that don't want to be bound by any "IP" can just not sign any of those contracts.
That state has ... issues.
That's not too far from the libertarian ethos.
Before that, there was no distribution of e.g. music, and bands profited from live performances, much as they still do. The work to copy a manuscript set the value of books. It didn't stop writers from writing.
I believe we're done with that period, and should accept it and go back to the historical standard that ideas have limited value (sorry) and the prize is in the execution.
We are seeing this already I believe, with obvious things like Netflix and spotify, which are about accessibly and selection, and do not derive consumer value from the IP itself (evidence: it's easy to pirate music, why would I when I have access everywhere to a huge catalog for $10 a month from Spotify).
Same with "good" cloud business models. Simple example, password managers like 1password give you access to passwords etc. everywhere, and manage security. That is how they produce value, the source code of their apps is valueless and in any event could be substituted with open source. This is in contrast with some software vendors that literally want to charge a subscription just to execute their code. I don't see that as a sustainable business model, because it wrongly assumes that the code itself has any value as property. I believe this is borne out by the way the market is heading, and by what already is open source vs what types of things people will pay for.
So even if it's not mainstream, I'm happy to see anyone rethinking intellectual property.
> I do not derive consumer value from the IP itself (evidence: it's easy to pirate music, why would I when I have access everywhere to a huge catalog for $10 a month from Netflix)
It's imperfect and in need of reform, but IP exists to ensure that some of that $10 gets funneled back to the people who created that work. I'm a photographer, and people steal photographs and use them for profit constantly. IP enables me to force them to pay me for creating that work. Yes distributing a JPEG has essentially zero marginal cost, but producing it required me to wake up at 3 AM and hike off into the woods. Aside from my time, I had costs like acquiring equipment and gas to drive out there. I don't work with models, but if I did, they would deserve to be paid for their labor as well.
I dont presume to know your business, but the way I look at it, there's no inherent rule of natural justice that says you deserve to be compensated for creating (and having the government enforce) artificial barriers to accessing your work. I agree you have real costs, but you have options, for example photographing on a commission from a client that needs a new photo of something. Or if a stock photo service, that has paying clients because derive value from having quality photos aggregated, the service itself paying photographers because they find it convenient to get photos this way, then it all works out. But the concept of intellectual property is not necessary for it to do so. There may be other business models (like I say, I dont know that business) but I don't see how trying to create an artificial barrier around something is sustainable, and I dont see value in the IP itself, only in the convenience of getting it.
Again concrete example, I subscribe to the Noun Project for icons, because they are all in one place, and it makes it hassle free and low cost to get icons for my job. Like Netflix, its about the catalog and convenience, and I pay them even though it's technically voluntary because I see a tangible value in it. Again, IP doesn't need to come into it, it's about compensation for a service or convenience, not inherently about the right to perpetual royalties from a piece of work.
> I don't see how trying to create an artificial barrier around something is sustainable
A world where no one can be paid to create work is not sustainable. IP is the backbone that makes all of this possible, due to the free rider problem.
> photographing on a commission from a client that needs a new photo of something
This does happen, but then the client gets exclusive rights to the photos they paid for. But under your world, this is impossible. Their competitors can just take the material without paying for it. This applies not just to photography of course, but to everything they create.
Suppose I took the 1password code, made a modification to save unencrypted account information for me to later sell, and published it under the name "1password"?---trademarks are a form of IP.
Suppose I invent a new way of doing something very valuable. If I keep my invention secret, everybody is happy until I get run over by a bus, at which point that secret is lost. If I do not keep my invention secret, anyone is free to copy it, undercut my prices, and drive me out of business---patents are a form of IP.
The one form of IP you seem to be thinking about is copyright. It's somewhat true that it didn't stop writers from writing, but a surprising proportion of the famous ones (and a large chunk of the non-famous ones) died broke. Fortunately, the number of brilliant works that were not created simply because the theoretical creator had to spend all their time acquiring food is not knowable.
Further, "the prize is in the execution", but it may not pay to develop the skill for the execution. For example, any "big budget" movie requires what is effectively a tremendous capital investment which would be hard to recoup without copyright.
Also, and possibly unrelated, you seem to be making the mistake of assuming "content" is an undifferentiated mass: "why would I [pirate music] when I have access everywhere to a huge catalog for $10 a month from Spotify". Because Spotify doesn't carry the music you want?
When I read the constitution, "Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8" stands out to me as weird. They provide a justification for why they have these laws—"To promote the progress of science and useful arts". Why do they need to provide a reason, whereas most of the text is based on a set of "self-evident" truths?
What I found, thanks largely in part to the site linked above, is that Copyright and patent laws provided an amazingly cheap method of central intelligence for our early government. They got a copy of every book and every new invention for free, delivered straight to them! They didn't need a CIA or NSA. Everyone would just send them their most valuable stuff. Now the world has changed. That setup provides no real value to the government anymore. At this point, information and inventions are a deluge.
So I don't think it ever was much of a boon to the progress of arts and sciences, but I do think it was a dirt cheap way for a new federal government to keep it's pulse on the state of the world.
They just can't do the job everyone thinks they are doing, so we'd be better of without patents at all.
But honestly, I think this would work. As long as NDA's are enforceable, which they are, that is sufficient protection for encouraging innovation as trade secrets. The downside, compared to the aforementioned idea, is that less new engineering knowledge is published into the public domain, to then stimulate further idea genesis. But either way is better than the current system. The patent office is so flooded that no one reads the garbage boilerplate that makes up 90%+ of patents.
They infight, they have no power, and they aren't Republicans or Democrats.
The are probably more correct than they are incorrect about things, they are like what modern Republicans should have turned into.
But it's hopeless without charismatic and strong leadership, even the best candidate will get eaten by their own. See Justin Amash.
I guess that part of the constitution doesn't require the Congress to do that
Just needs a trial judge and then an appellate group of judges to agree, and for no further appeal to happen
> we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws
Why don't they support ending real property or chattel property?
Dejacque, the founder of libertarianism, first used the term in a scathing criticism of Proudhon where he nevertheless expressed his agreement with Proudhons "property is theft" while suggesting Proudhons was not radical enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_D%C3%A9jacque#Debate_wi...
"For Déjacque, on the other hand, the communal state of affairs — the phalanstery 'without any hierarchy, without any authority' except that of the 'statistics book' — corresponded to 'natural exchange,' i.e. to the 'unlimited freedom of all production and consumption; the abolition of any sign of agricultural, individual, artistic or scientific property; the destruction of any individual holding of the products of work; the demonarchisation and the demonetarisation of manual and intellectual capital as well as capital in instruments, commerce and buildings."[10]"
I guess Colorado LP's "2 out of 3 kinds of property are legitimate" is a middle ground? (or 3 out of 4? Not sure how to classify their position on clean air as property)
The distinction basically boils down to whether or not you see freedom as being about the possibility of doing something vs. about legal right in principle to do something. To left-libertarians, legal rights are meaningless if you are deprived of the ability to exercise them, be it by other laws or by lack of resources.
And property rights flow right in the face of that, by denying access to scarce resources that enforce both the immediate lack of access, and economic inequality that prevents the exercise of other rights.
To property specifically, I grew up in Norway. In Norway the freedom to roam is considered so intrinsic that until about a century ago it was the only major legal principle regularly treated as "common law" in a system otherwise strictly codified. Today it is codified, and you can hike across all privately owned uncultivated rural land as long as you leave it as you found it, and you can forage, and camp, because allowing public access to the land is seen as an essential trade-off between public liberty and private property rights.
That would be closer to what a middle ground looks like - hollowing out private property rights to alter the balance of which protections a private owner has vs. the public. In Norway the balance seeks to recognise the distinction between a private dwelling, where allowing public access would be a massive intrusion vs. land holdings where public access has very limited direct effect on the owner, in e.g. setting limits on how close to private dwellings you can go or camp without asking permission.
The point being similar to the libertarian socialist distinction between private and personal property - that there are substantial differences in to what extent maximising liberty requires protecting different kinds of property. If I own a forest and someone walks through it, the impact on my liberty is next to nil. But if someone wanders into my house at night, the impact is substantial. As such, denying someone access to a forest is government overreach that diminished the freedom of the public to a left-libertarian, but denying access to my house is justified because it affects me much more to be made to feel unsafe where I live than it affects others by being denied access to a given house.
It was an interesting means to align investment that goes against seemingly intuitive notions of fairness.
I don't want to have to fight expensive legal battles in whatever private arbitration hellscape that right-libertarians have in mind in order to stop, say, SEO spammers from using my personal photos in their content.
While I'm not a fan of the DMCA, I appreciate the recourse it gives me for things like that.
on another note, though I don't know if this is a right place for this: I feel we gonna have a strong push towards libertarianism due to the repressive media freedoms we've these days. I say this as a minority bpoc.
Yet the current implementation is an embarrassing mockery of a system for protecting property. The current IP office and laws literally cannot do the job they're made to do. Hard as they might try.
But as long as we continue to be a market economy, it seems there must still be some regulation of IP. Though I can't say with an specificity what that should look like. I personally don't like the idea of intellectual property, but I can still see the value of protections for it. I'd like to see much, much shorter time frames for exercising IP ownership and a perhaps some kind of licensing fee/tax to encourage productivity and innovation. You're not going to mess around with something you have to pay to upkeep and you're likely to actively develop your idea into a product or else sell it. This would favor incumbents in a way that's justifiable I think.
Also, 'intellectual property' is mostly just postmodern nonsense
Copyleft (probably?) can't exist without government enforcement. In principle it could be direct rather than by way of copyright.
Note that I'm not speaking to the advisability of such a system, just pointing out that there's not actually a theoretical dependency as I would use the terms.
If we're being loose enough with the term "copyright" that it applies to any possible limitation of copying, then of course copyleft depends on it because we've just defined it to include copyleft - that is not interesting.
A miracle cancer cure literally can't exist without cancer. Exactly! That's the point. Copyleft is a temporary treatment for the cancer of copyright. When we get rid of the tumors, we don't need (or want it) anymore.
The free market can solve the NDA problem. Our tax dollars should be used for more important problems than deciding whether adults are keeping secrets between each other.
Under what mechanism? The free market didn’t share code with the world pre-GPL and other copyleft licenses. What reason would they have to continue to comply?
Large companies are not contributing to copyleft projects for fun, altruism, or profit. They’re doing it because the software is good and they legally must contribute in order to extract profit from it. If you take away that obligation, they’re not going to instruct their employees to waste company time making a pull request that is no longer legally required. They’ll have their 9-to-5 engineers push fixes to their own proprietary forks which you’ll have to pay for, and hobbyist forks will be stuck with whatever hobbyists fix in their spare time.
NDAs are the legal/contractual resolution mechanism that resolves disputes when business partners backstab each other. If you remove that mechanism, the problem will still exist, it’ll simply get filled with another resolution mechanism. Maybe a return to mob rule?
And there's no reason for this other than to preserve power in the hands of the powerful. The sole purpose of the NDA is to limit the rights of the party with less capital and create unnatural advantages to the holders of capital. They eventually cause great social harm, and society ultimately pays the price cleaning up the mess. How many hundreds of billions of dollars in security costs does our society keep having to pay because of Microsoft and Intels reliance on NDAs and copyrights which led to building much of the digital world on shaky foundations. Like technical debt, there is "secrecy debt". Too much leads to catastrophe. People should have the right privacy and to keep secrets. But our collective government should not be in the business of subsidizing that.
> As we oppose all government intervention in the marketplace, we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws. Disputes between inventors, creators, authors, artists, businesses, and other such entities should be resolved without government intervention.
IP does not exist without government intervention. Government intervenes to create IP. This is true for real property as well, but at least with real property, you could form an army and defend your property that way without a government. Since IP is so easily transmissible, and often must be transmitted to be useful, this would be very challenging.
If you write some source code, intending it to be proprietary (for your operating system, for example), and I obtain it somehow, you'd be screwed under this system. I guess you could call this "resolving the dispute without government intervention" in the sense that the resolution is me telling you to pound sand, but I don't think any capitalist system would find that satisfactory.
I think the fact that you can pretty much download every Austrian economic book for free from the Mises Institute website makes this clear.
Note: I don't want to discuss politics. I don't care if you think its wrong or you don't like left or wing wing libertarians if that's a thing. I'm just stating what I know. Please keep your opinions about "the one true anarchist" to yourself.
Do you happen to know of a libertarian economist who has specifically come out against property rights, and who has a book available from the Mises Institute? I might feel the urge to create a book this weekend.
Securing that only you can use some arbitrary machine instructions under IP law is an abomination, so I'm ok with this.
It goes beyond computer stuff too, of course. Let's say you write a hit song and I hear it and manage to release my version first, so I reap all the profits. Under this libertarian utopia, I guess you're supposed to just rob me at gunpoint to get "your" money back?
Same thing was probably said when there was talk of banning cocaine from foodstuffs. Corporatism rarely pushes moral (or stable) principles.
Some of them recognize this, and then propose that private entities take on the responsibilities and bodies of the state, but envision another state with accountability to only shareholders or the market, and not the people.
Some follow the logical conclusion and advocate for a minimal state needed to enforce property rights and contracts, and so they envision a state similar the ones we have now, but without welfare. I find that to be an interesting take on what they mean by liberty.
> If you write some source code, intending it to be proprietary (for your operating system, for example), and I obtain it somehow, you'd be screwed under this system. I guess you could call this "resolving the dispute without government intervention" in the sense that the resolution is me telling you to pound sand, but I don't think any capitalist system would find that satisfactory.
Imagine computing in such a market. It would prioritize cryptographically secure application DRM, application distribution systems that complied with that app DRM, systems that only allowed approved software to run and systems with tight integration with HSMs/TPMs.
The biggest difference in such a world compared to ours would be that general purpose computing would hardly exist, and personal computing would consist of locked down thin clients and purpose-built devices.
It wouldn't be much different than what iPhone and iPad users are already accustomed to and what Microsoft, Apple and Google are all trying to bring to personal computing in the coming years.
It doesn't. According to them it comes from the right to bear arms, so in theory you'd go out and about and explore, then you'd find a nice , unclaimed piece of land and settle there.
Once progress sort of catches up and the human community reaches the perimeter of your land, then you have your guns to protect your land, your family and the house you built on that land from people who want to take it from you.
I'm in if it includes ramming the heads of a Commodore 1541 floppy drive against the limit switches to read ersatz tracks for the copy protection information so that it sounds like a small machine gun. (I'm nostalgic.) :-)
I have 55 US patents and I have written 20 books, so you would think that I would support IP laws, but in general I don't. I do like Creative Commons licenses and for software GPL/AGPL, favoring them slightly over MIT and Apache (which I also use).
Even with the obvious high level of corruption in the USA, I am hopeful that we can have a fair society with equal opportunity for all young people, peace, high productivity, and social justice. It is up to us as individuals on how we want to contribute to that effort.
> As we oppose all government intervention in the marketplace, we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws. Disputes between inventors, creators, authors, artists, businesses, and other such entities should be resolved without government intervention.
This is madness. Without a notion of "property", there is no marketplace. Even the more extreme libertarians will generally agree that it is necessary for government to have police powers, partly to ensure that property rights are respected.
Now, one can argue (without being completely incoherent) that intellectual property should not exist as a concept, but that amounts to abolishing a certain marketplace, not preventing "government intervention in the marketplace". Moreover, denying property rights outright for intangible goods is a strong position, and not one I usually associate with libertarians.
Sometimes local third party politics is the only thing less sane than national two-party politics.
I'd say that applies to all the local politics, regardless of party. Some of the wackiest crap I've ever seen in politics happens locally, even under the banner of one of the big parties. Stuff they'd never say at the national level.
No. Read Machinery of Freedom by Friedman for a primer on why this is not necessary.
It requires a utopia to work as described. Libertarians love it.
I'll... leave judging the soundness of that plan as an exercise for the reader.
[edit, also:]
> The plausible end result of violating the law is either that you have to accept the result of arbitration or you end up getting shot
You would contract with a particular for-profit legislative system the same way you contract with an insurance company and a police company and a war-defense company. The insurance company would have contracts with investigative companies and retributive force companies.
When you get into a dispute with your neighbor over whether they are allowed to build a wall that might cross on to your property, you contact your court company and your insurance company. The court company sends someone to talk to your neighbor and get details of their jurisprudence subscription. If they subscribe to the same courts, excellent! They have jurisdiction and can decide whether this is a minor violation of the contract (see rules on respecting property lines) or a major violation. Violations can be punished by corrective action or fines equivalent to the costs of such.
If the neighbor uses a different court system, perhaps they have a treaty-contract with your court system. In that case the treaty-contract will supply the rules.
Oh, but maybe there isn't a treaty-contract. The court companies might take this opportunity to negotiate one. Or, they might notify their insurance companies that they have a conflict. Maybe their insurance companies have a mutual non-aggression contract, in which case they might force the court companies to negotiate a treaty-contract or lose insurance coverage.
See? Utopia!
There's a long quote down a ways (starting: "How, without government, could we settle the disputes that are now settled in courts of law?") that does a pretty good job of giving you the gist. The very TL;DR, and I don't think an unfair one (read Friedman's own, quoted story of how his system might work, if you don't believe me) for anyone who's familiar with cyberpunk fiction is that it's basically just unironically advocating the corporate-security-is-the-only-security future that those settings often feature. Given the timing, it seems probable to me that Friedman and others' writings on this topic inspired those elements of that genre, in fact.
In Friedman's version of the story, this looks like a lot more freedom than we have now[0]. In the cyberpunk version, it looks a lot like feudalism.
[0] I don't really see that, personally, in his and similar writing, which looks like it replaces de jure restrictions with a pile of stress, anxiety, and risk, which don't really feel like more freedom in any practical sense, to me, but it's supposed to be there, so let's just grant for the sake of argument that he's successfully painting a picture of a more-free system, as that's what he intends.
These authors comment on the idea that war being expensive would be a barrier, and surely it would be some kind of barrier. On the other hand, during the late medieval and early modern eras there were numerous wars that easily cost the entire revenue of the "state" for the year or sometimes multiple years. These wars were privately financed and involved the use of mercenaries. To me, this doesn't sound so different from the world proposed by libertarians like this, and I much prefer our world.
"We hold that rights to property, including real property, are individual rights and, as such, are entitled to the same protections as all other individual rights. The owners of property have the full right to acquire, trade, control, use, dispose of, rent, collateralize, or enjoy their property in any manner, without interference, unless the exercise of their control infringes upon the valid rights of others."
Does the Libertarian Party of Colorado supply some sort of hierarchy to these platform elements since some of them conflict.
Perhaps their notion of property is more spartan than yours. :)
More seriously, property is a technology for resolving problems stemming from scarcity. If there is no applicable scarcity, then property rights are not necessary. Even more, if property rights in some arena effectively cause scarcity, as is the case for some forms of IP, then they ought to be abolished.
On this model, a particular copy of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is scarce, where the right to copy "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" isn't, since two people exercising that right at the same time need have no effect on each other. If they both want to sell copies, then the wider availability may lower the price of a copy, but this is only the same effect as two widely separated gold miners have on each other, and giving one miner the right to restrict mining of gold by the other would seem a weird application of property rights to many libertarians.
Ultimately it comes down to whether one believes that the smart and creative don't deserve to extract profit from their creations nearly as much as the wealthy deserve to extract rent out of physical stuff they didn't create...
"By the time the prospectus and agents were in the field [TATS was published in the US by the American Publishing Co., on a subscription (!) basis], a pirated edition of the novel had been on the market for four months. [I]t is [...] likely that [a Canadian publisher, the Belford Brothers] set [the pirated edition] from a hastily imported copy of the British one [published in Britain to secure a copyright there]. Their version of the novel was available in three prices: $.75, $1.00 or $2.25 -- considerably less than the authorized one would cost. And there was no way to keep pirated copies of the book from coming into America along steamboat and train lines. ... The copy in the Barrett Collection graphically indicates what [Clemens] was up against on its titlepage, where someone (the name has been effaced) recorded where and when the book was bought: on the steamer St. Lawrence, perhaps on its way into America, and in September, 1876 -- fully three months before [the American Publishing Co.] was ready to sell any copies on which [Clemens] could make money.
"The delay cost [Clemens] over $10,000, according to his own reckoning, and contributed to the book's weak first-year sales. ... [T]he fate of Tom Sawyer not only soured him on the American Publishing Co; it also seems to have discouraged him as a writer. During the next five years he published only one book." (https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/tomsawye/tomcomp.html)
Private contract is just the kind of agreement that government has decided provides a basis for government force, so the distinction you are drawing even as you have written it is largely fictitious.
In other words, what does it mean that God didn't give a title to the original owner of a property?
If you think such a thing as "intellectual property" exists, then you would also probably be fine with calling cigarettes "health pops!".
If your computer is your property, but there are loads of peaceful things you cannot do with it where no one else is directly affected, then it is not your property.
The term "Intellectual Property" is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Uhm, you might want to reconsider using a term which was literally invented by Adolf Hitler for his abysmally evil propaganda purposes.
Ending IP laws in this case is like ending laws against theft. Without government to define what property is in this case, I could just take without any need to engage in any dispute resolution.
The distinction between “a government” and “a private individual with an armed force to impose, by force or intimidation, their will” is...not large. Mostly a matter of time.