"You will own nothing, and be happy." -WEF
Big capital has been fighting to strengthen private property and eroding personal property.
- ¿Drawing a schematic of a thing you own for repair?
- ¿Creating a spare part to repair a thing you own?
Those infringe on companies private property so you must have no rights over your personal property.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Personal_property#/Personal_vers...
There's also no easy distinction made between private and personal property, and any attempt to define one is nonsensical. There are endless examples where something is both personal and private property, or rapidly switched between the two.
Yet another aspect of Marxist theory that fails to hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.
I have a wheelbarrow in my yard that I'm not using. Why can't anyone else use it? There's no natural reason why they couldn't. It's just there, they can take it and wheel dirt around in it. I might no even know it's happening, but my property rights say they're not allowed to.
I think the main feature of property is to disallow others from using it in a way that restricts your own use. For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you.
I wonder how you feel about medical information being free to copy? That's not property either, is it? Are you happy with no moral rights for subjects of photographs and no rights to privacy of medical information? Should patients "own" their medical records or should hospitals be free to use them however they like?
The main difference between the wheelbarrow and IP lies in the copies. If someone else uses my wheelbarrow I can't use it while they're using it, or they may damage it. If someone copies an mp3 of a song I performed, I still have my mp3.
We had a working economic model based on physical property and we've been crippling the wonderful ability to infinitely create zero-cost copies of digital artifacts in order to fit our existing model. It's not horrendous that we've done this, and I'd optimistically view it as a step on the road to something yet unrealized.
> medical data
That deals with privacy, which is a different can of worms.
It is already a topic discussed in the agricultural space.
Just imagine a future where we will have cures for some incurable diseases, but as a consequence of IP laws, the pharma company now controls your reproductive rights because you are making copies of their IP.
Intellectual property doesn’t exist, it’s all just privileges handed out at the whims of the the state the same way only Dentists can practice dentistry.
Secrets aren’t the idea. Far more than 1 million people use 6 digit pins therefore most if not all of them are shared by many people and that’s completely ok. The value is in the secret not the exclusivity. RSA private keys are compromised if someone knows the number and knows it’s part of someone else’s key, two peoples private key’s can happen to share a prime number without issue.
A sandwich on the other hand can’t happen to be eaten by 20 people without the others noticing.
Finally, what protects the company producing cokes is the trade marks on their packaging not the formula. I can know Coke’s formula or something close enough to be indistinguishable and nothing changes for them because I can’t undercut them and sell an identical product.
> Animals have been guarding the kills for millions of years before humans even evolved.
And in the state of nature, if a stronger animal comes by and defeats you, it gets that kill and you get nothing. In the world of property rights, the state protects your right to your stuff. The fact that you can own more stuff than you can defend with personal violence is not natural.
Also, the state can take away your things with taxes or eminent domain, and it can say you can't own certain things, like nuclear weapons, heroin, or other people. But the latter two used to be allowed, in the United States, at least.
Property rights are a function of law, not a function of nature.
And scarcity is not a function of the digital realm.
The way you use harm here implies that you believe that the world owes J.R.R. Tolkien something for having written LotR. In the case of commerce, the buyer owes the seller the agreed price. But noone owes anyone for simply writing something.
If a creator creates a creation, nobody, by default, owes the creator anything for having created it. If the creator wants to make the creation the object of a contract, they can do so. In that case, the parties of the contract owe the creator whatever was agreed in the contract. This is how Patreon works. And how financing art worked before IP was invented.
IP is not a contract!
IP is a legal monopoly right on the duplication of an infinitely and freely duplicable item. And the only way to enforce IP is to infringe on everyone's physical rights.
As to the law ‘respecting’ personal property, we have this thing called taxes that says the state just gets to take some of your stuff based on the same principles that a larger bear gets to take stuff from a smaller one. As to how much stuff you can protect, squirrels aren’t limited to what they can defend they can just hide it.
So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?
No, I'm saying all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state and they're all figments of our collective imagination. There's no fundamental ontological difference and the lines we draw are arbitrary. I'd support rolling back some of the IP protections we currently have in place, and I'm also in support of higher taxes in some cases, and other restrictions on physical property rights, but there's not a magical difference between IP and physical property that means we should regard those things differently.
Maybe we even treated some of them the same but certainly not today.
I would argue that, at least from some points of view, in the past, marriage was treated similarly to physical property. Thankfully we no longer do so.
The existence or absence of IP laws does not affect your capability to have secret information in any way.
Patents, one of the types of IP, was actually designed to encourage holders of secrets to release them. But the ability to hold secrets is completely unaffected.
Also, just because you hold a secret does not mean anyone owes you anything. You may sell a secret and you always could regardless of IP.
What IP allows you to do is, after you've made a secret public, demand compensation every time other people share it among themselves.
Scarcity and the lack thereof is fundamental difference between the physical and the digital.
A secret can be scarce but the more copies are made the less scarce it is.
Encoded information (either written text -language is an encoding- or digital information) can be copied losslessly infinitely for a vanishing marginal cost.
Sure, enshrining property rights as law is a human social construction. The goal is to limit the use of force, otherwise everyone has to guard thair own property, gun in hand. But property itself arises naturally.
It exists to deal with the dynamics of scarce goods. If person a is using your wheelbarrow, then person b cannot use it as well. You can't raise cows on a piece of land, but also plant a crop of wheat there. This definition goes back thousands of years and is respected across cultures.
There is another practice that was respected across cultures for thousands of years: the free sharing and open remixing of songs, stories and ideas.
IP is a weaselly project to carry the advantages of property rights to non-scarce goods, and to things which were previously fiercely regarded as public domain. It creates a set of rights which did not previously exist and which created new benefits for people who were already elites.
"For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you." This does not follow from the argument you are making. Selling something is not a use of it. Carting things around in a wheelbarrow or playing a compact disk - these are examples of use.
Perhaps you bring some cultural bias to this conversation. Having grown up in a setting with IP, and having a career in a field where some people gain great advantage from IP, you have come to believe that it is reasonable to regard ideas as property.
But IP is an aberration, even in our time. It is not law in all places, it is not enforced well in the places where it is, and in those places people who are morally conscious and otherwise law-abiding routinely violate it.
IP is impractical to enforce equally, is inconsistent with the principle of live-and-let-live, it raises the barrier-of-entry to a range of industries, it grants extra privileges to existing elites, it is easily gamed by bad-faith actors, it is disrespected by the general population, it has at best a hand-wavey economic justification that is backed by no real evidence. IP is complicated when good laws are simple, and IP muddies the water for a concept that is a genuine foundation of our civilisation - property. IP fails all tests for what is reasonable law.
If the government were to say that black were white, this would not make it so. So it is with property.
Just because you own something does not mean you automatically have a right to receive the revenue you want.
Being undercut by free when selling copies of x is absolutely natural for a medium where producing any additional copy of item x is free and can be done by anyone.
Want to be paid for the original new content, then sell that. Plenty of new content is already being funded that way. And before IP existed, all creative content was funded that way.
What IP allows you is to instead of demanding a bounded ammount of compensation for a bounded ammount of creative output (demand payment per creative work), you instead can demand an unlimited ammount of compensation.
IP is monopoly rights and undermines physical property.
This is a common argument, but one that is ungrounded in reality. Ancient tribes were small and certainly had fewer (or no) written rules, but there is plenty of evidence that they had personal property. Grave goods are just one of the most obvious. Neolithic huts with fences built around them to keep the livestock safe are another. We have stories dating all the way back into prehistory of shepherds counting their sheep. Etc, etc.
"Intellectual property", as a term, also serves to further layman confusion on the topic. I can't count on all my appendages the number of times I've spoken to an average person (whether in person or via the internet) where they've said something about "copyrighting" a business name or other trademark. Let's call "intellectual property" what it really is - copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Each of those has a completely different framework of regulation and philosophy, and it doesn't really serve us to lump them all together into one term for most productive discourse on the topic.
What's happening is more like a lot of bugs trying to get into a box of food. The marketers and their lawyers have always used whatever tricks are at their disposal to sell one product and ship another, and if the latter is just a use license, so much the better. They don't need to be actively coordinated; their actions naturally support one another by damaging the box.
>The FTC also alleged that Harley-Davidson failed to fully disclose all of the terms of its warranty in a single document, requiring consumers to contact an authorized dealership for full details.
>By telling consumers their warranties will be voided if they choose third-party parts or repair services, the companies force consumers to use potentially more expensive options provided by the manufacturer. This violates the Warranty Act , which prohibits these clauses unless a manufacturer provides the required parts or services for free under the warranty or is granted an exception from the FTC.
The Warranty Act was enacted in 1975. This is not a new fight. It is an ongoing conflict that requires each generation to be engaged in defending the box and repairing it.
The authors were not saying it’s the society that the World Economic Forum should be working to create, just that it seems remotely possible, certainly not a plan for a conspiracy. Rather, it’s more similar to a fiction like The Brave New World... On second thought, regardless of whether you treat it as a fiction or as an actual conspiracy, you get the same message, so I’d say the thought experiment is successful in that aspect.
"We asked experts from our Global Future Councils for their take on the world in 2030" is not much of a preface, if this was as purposefully exaggerated as you're saying.
Yes, it is in the interest of many owners of corporations that own IP to push for XaaS model, a rent everything model. And some of those may attend the WEF.
But the WEF is not a conspiratorial group. And that often quoted and misunderstood fragment is not some declaration of their values.
People like to hate the WEF, or Soros, or the illuminati, or whatever because it gives the enemy a face and it directs the anger.
The reality is that most of the things damaging humanity are not masterminded by someone or some group. They happen organically due to the various self-interests of individuals.
Edit: Just to make it extra clear.
The difference is not in the interestes of the members of a group. You will find wide agreement that wealthy and powerfull people are interested in getting even wealthier and even more powerfull. Or at the very least retain all of their priviledges.
The difference is that conspiracy theories presupppose that the group has a structure, that the group can coordinate. And by extension, that the group has a leader, which if only you could KO, all of the worlds problems would be solved.
The structure is not there. And even if you eliminate all the individuals designated as enemies by a conspiracy theory, the greed and the pride is still there and they will be replaced by others.
I think it was a neutral thought experiment, and you're free to make your own interpretation, it's neither an utopia nor a dystopia.
> It is as much a thought experiment as it is an invitation to advance the state of "Everything as a Service" rent-seeking among those in power
I don't disagree here.
In this new vision, the billionaires own everything and others owning nothing - at which point they become serfs. It is a regression to feudalism.
If anything, it's the logical continuation of the trends Marx saw.
And studies show the more stuff you own, the happier you are, so this is a direct attack on happiness. Experiences don't matter, stuff does.
I think the conspiracy theory is imagining a bunch of wealthy elites sitting around in a dark room Illuminati style discussing how they can turn everyone into serfs renting everything from them.
The reality is that our capitalist economy is very short sighted and wants quarterly profits and returns. Subscriptions provide predictable and constant income, you can tweak the later both by raising prices or increasing subscribers.
well, according to Marxism that is a way to socialism :) And USSR was exactly it - a country of wage-slaves not owning anything and ruled by the elite.