Bitcoin Forum

As per the subject, do the hard-core libertarians here support intellectual property? Are copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, personality rights and other notions of information as property justified, given that they are essentially state-sponsored monopolies, regulations that infringe on people's freedoms of expression, trade and action, often by use of force.

However, without copyright we wouldn't have free software or huge investments in proprietary software, without patents all inventions would be secret, without trademarks there would be no high quality brands due to market saturation by counterfeiting, and so on and so on.

So which information should be protected by regulation and/or treated as property, and why?

This is very debatable. Free software licenses, as a general rule, try to emulate a world without copyright. Given the amount of free software in existence, it seems unlikely that lack of copyright would greatly diminish the amount of it written.

As for proprietary software, a significant amount of it is written for in-house purposes, and therefore would not likely disappear in a world without copyright -- at best it would just be replace by other software.

I doubt anybody wishes to purchase counterfeit products. Nobody likes being lied to. This whole trademark debate can be thrown under a true law called fraud.

In addition, to say trade secrets would be forever hidden is to say that somebody that has a Bitcoin will forever hold it.

Information is not property.

Why not? What necessary characteristics does information lack?

Scarcity and enforceability (without holding people's REAL property hostage).

What he said. ;)

Reasonable enough.

Yeah controversial statement I agree, but Stallman's GNU project did build a lot of the free software we use. I tend to write open source software which can be locked up as proprietary myself, my favourite licenses being MIT or WTFPL. However, I do think we'd see a hell of a lot of copyleft code being locked up as proprietary if there were no copyrights on software, and copyleft does help protect user-freedoms.

Having said that, even as a developer I don't have any strong feelings either way myself. If copyright was abolished I'd still be paid for doing an honest day of work, though the people who employ me might have less to spend.

The vanilla GPL allows for the code to be locked as long as it is not distributed, so I don't think it would be that different in a world without copyright.

What makes fraud a true law? If I choose to make a product that is identical to someone else's but make no claims that it is an original, only people who sold it under false pretences would be committing fraud. Without trademarks or design protection I would be free to make identical copies from inferior materials and sell them, people could then claim that they don't know whether they're original or not.

Not hidden away forever, just protected by the courts from industrial espionage. Consider that someone pays your staff to leak designs that you have invested heavily in, you can't prove who did it, there is no contract in place between me and you, and there's no protection or ownership of information. When your product is being brought to market by my company before you've even announced it, what can you do?

Well, that's when the original company starts to sell certificates of authenticity. I see nothing wrong with making an identical as long as you claim its not from another company than your own. It's their property.

Adapt.

...and you can hold the people who leak secrets accountable by putting everbodys employment in that department on the line or being innovative with tracking. (Hidden numbers in the documents, etc.)

The vanilla GPL wasn't made for a world of software-as-a-service, which is why the AGPL was written to fix this modern loophole. In the era of the vanilla GPL, software was actually distributed to end users. If copyright was abolished we'd still see locked down versions of free software desktop apps, and sites hosting AGPL software without the source code.

Best GPL: http://bittalk.tv/WYWPL

Now only if we had some way to hash physical objects, then we could use encryption to make unforgable certificates of authenticity...

EDIT:
Though, in a world without copyright, one leak of the source would be sufficient.

And forgery is a type of fraud. The people who bought the fake ones would have a case against the company who sold them.

Libertarians are heavily divided over this issue. There are basically three schools of thought:

1) Information wants to be free. Intellectual property is an oxymoron, a fiction that can only be sustained by government fiat. Contracts that purport to restrict information are invalid and unenforceable, akin to slavery.

2) Intellectual property is just as real as physical property. Your idea is yours. Governments should enforce intellectual property rights laws substantially similar to the copyright and patent laws we have today. (With some people having exceptions for particular things, like some agree with patent but not copyright, some would exempt software from patents, and so on.)

3) Intellectual property rights are contractually-acquired rights. For example, when you buy a book, you could agree not to make copies of it. To, say, buy or rent a DVD, you might have to agree not to distribute it. Libertarian societies could have intellectual property, but always formed by contracts and not anything like our intellectual property laws today.

My own view is complicated to explain, but it's somewhere between 2 and 3. At root, intellectual property should arise out of contracts, but the government has no choice but to pass a number of laws to control how this will work because otherwise it will be impossible to fairly enforce those contracts.

Allow me to add a fourth:

If Intellectual property is to be treated as property, let it be treated as property. When I buy the book, I buy the data in it, too. I can do whatever I want with my property, digital or physical.

I think that is 1, just phrased differently. Well, let's see:

Suppose I break into your house and take pictures of a manuscript you were working on. Then I email the digital pictures to Fred, saying "Here is a valuable manuscript I 'stole' from myrkul. If Fred publishes your manuscript knowing I stole it (but not conspiring with me), and you lose a publishing contract because of it, can you sue Fred? (Because of his use of stolen information, even though no physical object was stolen.)

If you say "yes", then you have a fourth, because you really do treat information as property (though it's actually then more like 2). If you say "no", then this is 1, just phrased differently, since you refuse to treat stolen information as stolen property.

Well, what if in order to buy the book you have to sign a contract that says you won't copy or distribute it? Is that okay? If no, then this is 1. If yes, then this is 3.

If information is revealed out of breach of contract, one should not punish the ones who have received the information by memory erasure or the ceasing of their current property. Only the breacher of the contract should be held liable.

That's pretty much the WTFPL without the swearing and with a disclaimer. I prefer the obscenities and love the preamble :D
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/


Not being able to trust anyone sounds rather costly to society as a whole. You'd have to put up artificial barriers to communication and wouldn't be able to outsource anything to anyone.


Sounds nice in theory, but not very practical at all. Can you give some ideas of how this would actually work in practice? I know my arguments could be taken as an appeal to consequences, but in the real world we need to strike a balance between idealism and practicality.

There's nothing impractical about protecting the innocent.

If you assume no laws specifically about intellectual property, you cannot bind completely innocent third parties. For example, if Jack acquires a copy of your DVD movie through a contract with you, negligently loses the copy, and Jeff finds it on the street and makes 1,000 copies, you can only go after Jack, not Jeff. But you can bind third parties who acquire the information through some kind of wrongful act.

In practice, it won't matter. Intellectual property protection agencies will probably not permit you to agree piecemeal. You'll either have to sign their contract agreeing to respect all works registered with them or never see a movie at the movie theater. Heck, you may not even be able to browse the Internet because web sites will require you to agree to such things. For all practical purposes, the vast majority of people will have no choice but to agree to respect reasonable IP rights.

I don't think people who object to our patent, copyright, and trademark laws realize how much they are getting for what they are giving.

Or... such a system would collapse under its own weight.

It might. It's very hard to predict what will actually happen. People might come up with a better way than I can imagine just sitting on a chair in my office. There will be billions of dollars for the guy who gets it right. That's one of the beauties of the Libertarian solution -- you don't have to figure it out. You just have to make sure someone has an incentive to figure it out. And doing this right would be worth huge amounts.

Scarcity isn't the only necessary qualifier for property, nor should something no longer be property if it's difficult to enforce it as such. Property is not property because it is rare, it is property because it is the product of your mind/creation.

Why should I be denied to do what I please with my property because you claim you it's a friggin product of your mind?

If you must classify Information as property, treat it as property, not some special class of thing.

Once you have transferred ownership of property, you can not then specify what someone does with it.

Because if you don't, I won't share the products of my mind with you and we will both lose. To flip it around, why shouldn't I be allowed to share the products of my mind on whatever terms I please, with others free to agree with terms or not as they please?

Right, but people don't have to transfer ownership of information if they don't wish to, they can simply grant people a restricted license to use it. In a Libertarian society as most people envision it, thinks like DVDs and CDs wouldn't simply be sold, they'd have their physical possession transferred pursuant to a contract. The creator/distributor would retain some rights, so it wouldn't be a transfer of ownership but merely a transfer of physical possession and a grant of some rights to use another's property.

Some people would do it that way.

Others would sell it once, for the full value it was worth, and let someone else copy it.

Still others would give the music away (probably digitally) and make money on the merchandise.

And, of course, the donation model is a fine option.

These "Others" struggle with the concept of forward thinking. These "Others" propose two ways of exchanging information; Give it away or perform a miraculous calculation to price their knowledge based upon the effect that this knowledge will have in the future. Sure, that would work if we were all oracles.

But lets say that they are oracles and are able to price their knowledge. This price for a lot of knowledge would be prohibitively high for most but a few. Providing no incentive to share valuable items of information.


These "Others" do not allow someone who has an idea to go and find another party who can put their idea into practice and share the outcome of this collaboration. Instead they expect the "ideas" person to also be a pricing oracle and find another to pay the price. Otherwise give away the idea and get nothing in return. Ridiculous.

I'm sorry, did you have something productive to add to the discussion?

In this case we'd most likely have no concept of "fair use", each of the media giants would have people sign up to lifelong, incredibly restrictive contracts if they wished to see a movie, use a website or software. With no restrictions on the content of such contracts, forums like this would be sued out of existence for breach of contract if someone's avatar was an unauthorized copy, violated a contractual trademark and so on. I'd imagine it would be the end of free speech and the Internet as we know it.

I would certainly prefer our current state-sponsored monopolies over this sort of situation where legal might is right and the little guy has no protection other than isolating himself from the rest of society.

As would pretty much everyone else. Again, in a Libertarian society, the person who solves this problem in a way that makes as many people happy will make billions. I have a few ideas for how to do it, but there are probably better ones out there.

One model is competing "rights protection" agencies. Some might demand very restrictive terms. Others might have much looser terms. Those who create content could sign up with as many rights protection agencies as they wished, unless they had restrictive policies prohibiting that. When a movie, say, was shown, signs could indicate which agencies are accepted. When you enter the theater (or buy a book, or whatever), you might have to show a biometric ID that indicated you had agreed to the terms of a rights protection agency acceptable to the content owner.

Rights protections agencies that had very restrictive terms would provide people who registered works with them with a very high level of protection. But many people might refuse to sign up with such agencies, so distribution might be very limited. The ratchet may work towards freer terms. With freer terms, more people sign up, which means content owners make more money because they have more customers.

If you steal some wood from me and make a chair, you don't own the chair. It's my chair and you owe me for damages to my wood.

Information is non-scarce. When one gives it to another person, the originator still has it.

Information is non-rival. When you take it from someone, you do not deprive him of the ability to use that information.

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/

If you honestly believe this, please give me all the private keys corresponding to your Bitcoin accounts.

The private keys would still exist and they could still be used. That's like saying that if I give you the password to my encrypted hard drive and you delete the contents that some how the password vanishes and can't be used. It can still be used but the information you deleted can't.

I would only give it out if a huge government bureaucracy is created to insure that if I give it out, they would prevent people like you from abusing it. Only a megalithic government institution can prevent the bad stuff you will do after I give you my bitcoin private key.



Oh wait, it won't. It's my responsibility what information I give to what people.

You said, "Information is non-rival. When you take it from someone, you do not deprive him of the ability to use that information." But that's not true. If you give me your keys, I can deprive you of the ability to use them.

You said, "Information is non-scarce. When one gives it to another person, the originator still has it." But that misunderstands the nature of scarcity. Bitcoins are information, yet Bitcoins are scarce. No matter how many copies of a bitcoin are made, it is still only one bitcoin.

Perhaps you can make some argument that your statements are correct in some absurd technical sense, but they obviously are nonsense from a practical standpoint. You might as well argue that speed limit signs are ambiguous because they don't state what the speed is relative to.

No, you can deprive him of the ability to spend the coins those keys unlock. He's free to add more coins to the compromised wallet, if he so chooses.
Bitcoins are not, strictly speaking, information. They are an abstraction of the transaction record.

I agree with JoelKatz, bitcoins are a clear example of information as property of which copying can lead to transactions that deprive someone of something. The stolen manuscript and loss of publishing contract are similar, but more abstract.

I still don't think that it's a good justification for copyright though, I think that both of these involve non-public, secret information which could fall under legislation that deals with privacy, but they're pretty solid counter-points to the hard-core "information wants to be free" or "all regulation is bad" ideas.

I have nothing against paying a fair price for the quality and getting a nice looking product as a bonus. Trying to trick people into thinking it's somthing it isn't, is not somthing i welcome though.

That is because what I failed to mention is that once information is published, it becomes non-excludible. It remains excludible only as long as it remains secret, ie, you are the only one that knows it.

Because you appropriated the wood from somebody who mixed his labour with a tree, and/or mixed your own labour with the tree, and/or at very least homesteaded it.

...and fairly so. The people who have made the original modifications have been paid. They are owed nothing further.

I completely agree with you, however this does make his point moot because his point involved me stealing his wood.

The equivalent in intellectual property would be you stealing my research, completing it and then marketing my product as your own.

So long as everyone who knows it is bound by some contract that limits what they can do with it, the information is still excludible even though any number of people know it. For example, say I want you to have my 50 bitcoins in the case of my death. I can make you post a $5,000 bond that I can claim if you ever abuse my private key before my death and give you the private key. I am still screwed if someone other than you gets their hands on my private key, say by stealing it from me.

And as soon as someone who is not bound by that contract knows it, bam! Non-excludable.

You can sue for breach of contract, but your data is out.

Exactly. So as long as everyone who knows it is bound by some contract, you're good.

Right. If the data gets out due to the fault of someone bound by contract, you can sue for breach of contract. If the data doesn't get out, it's excludible. You're good either way. So even though a large number of people know the information, it is still valuable to ensure it isn't stolen from you.

A Libertarian intellectual property system would likely work on this principle. Essentially, you would reach the point where someone had figured out a win-win intellectual property agreement that the vast majority of people were willing to agree to.

What happens when the location of the leak is unknown but there is someone not bound by your contracts that claims to have managed to copy the info (and that seems to really have it) ?

This is called the "innocent third party" problem. Some Libertarians believe it is possible to bind innocent third parties, some believe that it is not. However, it should be possible to solve this problem by drafting an appropriate win-win intellectual property agreement. You should be able to reach a point where 95% of people have entered into this agreement, so the innocent third party can only use the information himself or with those other 5% who haven't met the agreement. Drafting agreements that solve this problem will be a major market challenge. Someone will figure it out.

Or we could stop trying to control bits and bytes, and seek more profitable revenue streams.

Sure, can I have your Bitcoin wallet.dat then? After all, it's not your property and you shouldn't try to control it.

Ahh, but it's on my property, and as long as it stays that way, I have full control of it.

It's not the same concept. It's scarce and most of all, controllable. Much unlike telling people they can't make your patented paper swa with their own damn paper.

Scarcity alone doesn't justify property. OK then, duplicate your bitcoin wallet and send it to me. The bytes aren't scarce, only its contents are.

It's OK, I won't use it. I'll just duplicate it and put it on Pirate Bay.

Yes it does. If you can deny somebody it, it's something worth owning.

That's not what I meant. Scarcity isn't the controlling factor for whether something can be property or not. It may be a factor as to whether you want to own it or not.

Let's say I can download a Ferrari using my own machinery and material I rightfully acquired. Have I denied Ferrari anything? A Ferrari isn't scarce any longer. Anybody can make one on a whim. Is that really theft?

You've denied Ferrari their right to control the product of their labour (design is labour), which is fundamentally where property rights outside of a statist context come from.

Design is labor, but labor is not property. So... Nice try.

If property does not stem from the mixing of labour, where does it stem from?

What decides who has a claim over an object, other than mixing of labour or legitimate voluntary transaction with somebody who has mixed their labour?

Never said it didn't. I said that labor is not property. Let me explain:

You made a drawing by mixing your labor with a piece of paper (your property)

The resultant document is your property.

If I take a picture of that drawing, or look at it and make an exact copy, the exact copy is not your property.

If you draw a picture on a piece of paper you stole from me, that picture is not your property.

Labor doesn't make property all by itself.

We wouldn't have free software licenses.  But we would still have open, collaborative software development.

Most software doesn't need copyright in order to be profitable.  That's why so many software companies are moving from the software-as-a-product to the software-as-a-service model.

Humans aren't good at keeping secrets. All secrets leak sooner or later as soon as >100 people know about them. 
Almost all big inventions require the collective effort of >100 people.

My smartphone is an HTC.  Most of my non-techie friends don't recognize that brand. The HTC's quality is awesome, and superior to the iphone IMO.  It needs to be, because the only reason people buy HTCs is because of their superior quality for the same price, not because of brand recognition. 

Also, brands will lose their meaning a decade from now when the semantic web really takes off.  People will no longer purchase stuff based on packaging, but content. 


Information cannot be protected by regulation from third parties.  It can only be protected by personal measures.

It's not a question what information "should" do. It's a question of what information will do, and how we can adapt to that inevitability.

Outside a statist context, property rights only serve one purpose: To settle disputes over scarce resources.

They have nothing to do with the notion of "labour", whatsovever.