You claim that the rights of the collective ought to trump the rights of the individual because humans allegedly "work like that", ie. because that's the way it is.

What did I get backward? Or did I misunderstand you?


What "harm to society" means is also just opinion. Every member of that society of yours has a different opinion on that.  Some people think that drawing a cartoon of their imaginary friend causes such "harm to society" that it must be punished by death.
Whose opinion is valid? Everybody's? Then surely I am "harming society" whatever I do because some people will have contradictory opinions. Not Everybody's? Well then I'm not entitled to my opinion, am I?

My belief in the NAP might "just" be opinion, but at least it's consistent with everyone being entitled to an opinion, and encouraged to act on it as long as they don't aggress against any individuals. See, no internal contradictions in my opinion.

Your pro-IP stance is also "just" an opinion. But if that is your opinion, you cannot simultaneously hold the opinion that theft of physical property is a crime. Or at least not without contradicting yourself. 

Wrong. The first thing people try to do in an emergency is to save their own and their immediate family's ass.

Yes, people often form groups in emergencies, but they do so voluntarily.  Those who have more to gain than lose from joining the group, will choose the group. Those who don't will indeed rush off and try to fend for themselves.

In practice, joining the group is the decision most will make because of the huge benefits that the division of labor and voluntary exchange have to offer.  But the reason they are making that decision is ultimately selfish, not to sacrifice themselves for the survival of the group.

The decision to survive as an individual, the decision for autonomy, thus comes first.


How exactly is this established? Must it be an unanimous decision? Or will a majority vote suffice? Or perhaps it's decided by an elite of self-appointed expert philosophers? A roll of dice? Or perhaps it's the biggest bully who gets the final word? What about those who disagree? Will they be allowed to leave this society? Will they be allowed to live unmolested by whatever arbitrary societal good comes above their right to use their body and property?  


Is/ought problem. Humans also actually and habitually steal, murder, rape, torture, and  commit genocide on scale too big to be ignored as unrepresentative of human nature.  Sometimes endorsed by a majority who has decided that initiation of force is "for the good of society".   That still doesn't make those things right.

The purpose of individual rights is not to eliminate those evils from the word.  The purpose is to do justice, where they are committed.


"Bad people will always do bad things, good people will always do good things, but for good people to do bad things it takes the myth of virtuous collectivism*"

* take your pick: government, religion, culture, "society", nation, tribe, personality cult.  Fundamentally, they are all the same misfiring of our hunter gatherer instincts, the same tyrannical myth used by the strong to manipulate the weak.

A friend once told me, "Nature is murky and complex, therefore ethics has to be murky and complex. Everything in ethics is a grey area".

I don's see how the latter necessarily follows from the former.  The whole point of ethics is that is not natural. It's a purely artificial, abstract set of rules created by humans. A bit like mathematics.

Besides, even the most "mature", "moderate", and "sober" individuals are idealistic teenage extremists on some issues.  Usually the ones that have been resolved by said extremists in the distant past.

I have never met a "moderate" who isn't absolutist on the topics of slavery, women's suffrage, or racial segregation for instance. No stance other than Total Abolition is considered reasonable by them.

Dwolla is more of a transaction mediator than a bank.

Margaret Thatcher's quote comes to mind, "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals".

I don't agree with that quote.

That would be like saying "there is no such thing as biology, there is only physics".

But there clearly is such a thing as biology. Biology explains emergent properties that physics alone cannot explain.  Biology is an abstraction layer built on top of biochemistry, which is an abstraction layer built on top of chemistry, which is an abstraction layer built on top of physics. 

What biology cannot be however, is in violation of the abstraction layers it was built upon.  All biological laws must also obey the laws of physics.  All macrobiological theories must also obey the theory of DNA, and so on.  Any putative theory that doesn't obey the lower level theories can be discarded a priori.  Conversely, it would be fallacious to take lower level theories and homomorphically apply them to the emergent phenomena occuring at higher levels.  Organisms don't behave like cells. Cells don't behave like atoms. Atoms don't behave like subatomic particles.


Analogously,

There clearly is such a thing as society. Just like there is a swarm of birds.  Society has emergent properties that can't be understood by looking at nature of the individual alone.  These "swarm effects" affect all of us deeply because we are a social species. It is important to understand those effects and plan our lives accordingly. But while we are doing that, we must always keep the following principles in mind:

1. Societies are not individuals. Societies do not behave like individuals.

2. Before we can establish "rights" for society as a whole, we must establish rights for the individual

3. Any societal "rights" that violate the individual rights established in principle 2 can be discarded a priori


When people talk about society, I constantly come across the the fallacy of personification. "Society wants".  "Society needs".  "Society feels".  "Society has decided...".   These phrases are nonsensical.  Society doesn't want, need, feel, or decide anything.  Society is an abstract concept and not a person.
Some persons can perhaps claim to represent groups of other persons, but they are still persons, and not societies.
 
Even if society can be considered a superorganism, it's a "dumb" superorganism, in the sense that it displays behaviors and reacts to stimuli.    But society does not have dreams, desires, feelings, free will, or a consciousness.

Individual rights can never be overridden by a tyrant, a minority, a majority, or a plurality.  Individual rights can only be overridden by unanimity.



Conclusion/ tl;dr

It may well be that IP is beneficial to society, but none of us can pretend to know this for certain.

If that is your belief, join a group of people that have mutually agreed to honor each other's IP, and if it really is that beneficial your group with thrive and others will attempt to copy you.  But in the mean time, do not initiate force against those who disagree with you.

I see this as THE killer app for bitcoin:

http://www.mondonet.org/

It doesn't have to be mondonet specifically though.  It could be any network that must fulfill all of the following 10 properties (quoted from the mondonet website):

    DECENTRALIZED
    UNIVERSALLY ACCESSIBLE
    CENSOR-PROOF
    SURVEILLANCE-PROOF
    SECURE
    SCALABLE
    PERMANENT
    FAST
    INDEPENDENT
    EVOLVABLE

I would go as far as saying that any network that has all the properties stated above, cannot be and could not be built before the invention of a p2p cryptocurrency.

Most of the people who call themselves the 99% are still in the top 1% globally.

By their own logic, they should withdraw most of their savings and donate them to slum dwellers in Africa.

I like SR, though I have never used it. What is there not to like about Pareto efficiency?

We may have empirical evidence for correlation, but we don't have empirical evidence for causation.

The societies that excel at innovation, already excelled at innovation before the introduction of IP laws.  This suggests a cultural component, and it suggests that IP laws were a reaction to the big role that innovation already played in those economies, not the other way around.   A law that regulates civil aviation, for instance, would be nonsensical in a society where manned flight hasn't been invented yet, and just as likely to be passed as a law that regulates time travel.  It would be a fallacy to conclude that just because a country has laws regulating civil aviation, those laws were the cause for the invention and bringing to market of manned flight.    Copyright law, in particular, was a reaction to the invention of the printing press. It initially aimed to restrict its effects on society, not enhance them.

This is all conjecture of course, but the point is that there is no conclusive proof for either position.  Economists don't seem to have reached consensus on whether IP law does more harm than good, macroeconomically. There are plenty of excellent, peer-reviewed empirical as well as ab initio studies to support both sides.

To quote from an earlier poster, a law that can't be proven (beyond reasonable doubt) to be beneficial, has no business existing. 

By definition.

Which is silly, because building a bitcoin business is a wiser investment than just buying a bunch of bitcoins and saving them.

If bitcoin succeeds, you are going to be rich in both cases. But if bitcoin fails, in the first case you will at least come out with some useful skills and experience, while in the second case you will come out with nothing.

economic growth in rich countries is mainly driven by productivity gains, not by growth in resource consumption.

Reversibility comes at a cost. A reversible transaction is essentially an insured irreversible transaction.

Insurance isn't free, you know?  Some people would rather not pay insurance because they trust the merchant.  With your Visa card, you are forced to purchase this insurance and you are forced to bail out people who use their visa card irresponsibly.

Real life example: The shop where I buy electronics is a "bare-bones" merchant. Very limited customer service, very low margins, and so on. That's why they can afford to charge 10-20% less than the high street merchants.  The also charge 3% extra for credit card transactions as compared to cash-in-hand because that is how much it costs them, and it's the type of shop that likes to pass the savings to the customer. 

Some low-cost airlines do the same thing.

Just because most merchants effectively subsidize credit card customers, don't assume that all of them do and don't assume that some customers don't want that choice.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What if the substitute is inferior to the product offered by the monopolist?

I'm not saying this is always the case, but if if was it the utility-maximizing justification for state intervention would still be valid.

The purpose of property rights is not fairness, it's justice.

The purpose of property rights isn't to "fairly reward people for their work", "create incentives" or any utilitarian nonsense like that.  These modern perversions of the concept of property come from ignorance of what property means in the first place, and where it came from originally. 

Property rights have nothing to do with morality. Property rights are nothing but a way for humans to settle disputes over who controls scarce resources.

Property rights serve one purpose and one purpose only: To answer the question, "when is violence justified"? 

Property rights are strictly negative rights, ie. the right not to be interfered with while using one's body, whether applied to physical property or information.   

The modern concept of intellectual "property" is a positive right, ie. the right to arbitrarily violate other people's self-ownership because their behavior is deemed immoral by some central authority.  Thus it isn't a property right at all.


The pro-IP brigade fails to make this distinction between morality/fairness and justice.

When a kind stranger helps me with directions on the street and I return the favor by being rude to him, most would consider that behavior immoral or unfair.   But that alone doesn't give the kind stranger the right to force me to say "thank you" or to return another favor.  Though he certainly has the right to ostracize or denounce me.

When I make money off an idea that I "stole" from a friend without giving him credit I might be an asshole,  but that alone doesn't give my friend the right to point a gun at me, or steal my physical property as "compensation".

The concept of physical property is everything but "fair". A poor peasant might work 20 hours a day for a few dollars, while a rich land owner might earn millions from rent and live a life of leisure, simply because he owns capital and the peasant doesn't.   

So why, then, intellectual property should be "fair" is beyond me.

This thread illustrates the problem with the Bitcoin community.

You are all a bunch of arrogant, naive, utopian amateurs who automatically dismiss any good advice from people with experience.  That's why Bitcoin businesses are bound to fail.

To make it in the Real World of entrepreneurship, you must resort to deception, blackmail, and nepotism.  Only in the fantasy world of immature idealists does honesty, customer loyalty, and creating real value get you anywhere.

That was all the Venture Capitalist was trying to say to you, and your knee-jerk reaction was to gang up on him. How predictable.  

What about the train crash victims in China? Don't they deserve a thread too?

Life isn't about the amount of time you spend on earth. It's about what you do with the time you've got. She lived her short life more intensely than any of us corporate zombies ever will in our 80+ years.

27 is a good age to go out in style.

Thanks for being with us, Amy.

Mininum wage only "protects" people who already have a stable job.

But it hurts those who need the most "protection" - the unemployed. It lessens their chance to get their foot in the door and pushes more of them into a vicious cycle of long term unemployment.

Minimum wage is regressive and anti-social.