Awesome free state project open to bitcoin donations

[meatsim]

Check this out: http://freestateinitiative.org

[1715122488]

1715122488

[1715122488]

1715122488

[1715122488]

1715122488

[1715122488]

1715122488

[meatsim]

I just realized that today is April fool's, but this one is actually no joke.

[error]

I wish them well, but this idea has so many holes that explaining them all at 3:30 in the morning is going to be difficult.

So here's a brief summary of what's wrong with this proposal:

The "Initiative" is to find a government somewhere which will create a semi-autonomous zone within its borders called a "Free State" which will itself be a government, and will have its own constitution, legislature, courts, and laws. Or perhaps the existing government will just close its doors and go home, but that's probably too much to ask for.

The "Initiative" is targeting primarily desert areas (albeit with ocean coastline) with little or no population, but expects access to large amounts of cheap labor.

The "Initiative" is being planned as a top-down entity which will dictate various terms, ground rules, laws, or whatever it wants to call them, to its participants.

The "Initiative" is actually contacting existing governments to ask them to sign up!

The "Initiative" says it is for open borders, but then explains that it wants exactly the opposite, for reasons of "state security." I cannot make this up: "... anyone who wants entry to the Free State must make themselves known to the authorities, typically with a passport at an airport. . . . anyone who is found entering the Free State illegally will therefore automatically be assumed to have foul intentions and be immediately expelled."

I cannot in good conscience give these guys a single satoshi.

[Anonymous]

The real free state project http://freestateproject.org/

/end

[onarchy]

I wish them well, but this idea has so many holes that explaining them all at 3:30 in the morning is going to be difficult.

So here's a brief summary of what's wrong with this proposal:

The "Initiative" is to find a government somewhere which will create a semi-autonomous zone within its borders called a "Free State" which will itself be a government, and will have its own constitution, legislature, courts, and laws. Or perhaps the existing government will just close its doors and go home, but that's probably too much to ask for.

The "Initiative" is targeting primarily desert areas (albeit with ocean coastline) with little or no population, but expects access to large amounts of cheap labor.

The "Initiative" is being planned as a top-down entity which will dictate various terms, ground rules, laws, or whatever it wants to call them, to its participants.

The "Initiative" is actually contacting existing governments to ask them to sign up!

The "Initiative" says it is for open borders, but then explains that it wants exactly the opposite, for reasons of "state security." I cannot make this up: "... anyone who wants entry to the Free State must make themselves known to the authorities, typically with a passport at an airport. . . . anyone who is found entering the Free State illegally will therefore automatically be assumed to have foul intentions and be immediately expelled."

I cannot in good conscience give these guys a single satoshi.

Hello,

I can answer all your questions and objections. There are bound to many of them.

1) the reason we are targeting unpopulated wastelands with no natural resources is because these have little/no value to a country. They don't lose any power by giving autonomy to such an area. At the same time we are targeting poor countries in desperate need of economic growth and international legitimacy. They would be willing to give up control of a very small portion of their country in exchange for the spectacular economic growth that this can generate. We have already had certain confirmations that this strategy is sound. One country in Africa has expressed great interest in the project.

2) today people from poor countries are willing to move around the globe and live in relatively poor living conditions for what in Western terms is a lousy salary. Filipinos for instance work 60 days on a ship for down to 2 dollars per hour. If you're willing to live on a ship and work 12 hour days for 2 dollars an hour, you are most certainly willing to move to a desert and work there. We do not believe that finding cheap labor will be a problem.

3) the rules will in did be "dictated" and once the constitution is written and the Free State Charter is signed these basic rules can't change. BUT then again, no-one is living in that area at the moment. No-one are affected by those rules. The only ones who will be affected by them are the ones who VOLUNTARILY move to the Free State to live under those rules. If those rules are as bad as you portray them to be, then no-one will come. If they, on the other hand, are as liberating and attractive as we believe them to be then people will come in droves and they will fight to maintain those rules.

4) Yes, we are contacting existing governments. That is the whole point. The Free State will be a sub-national autonomous governmental entity, and our response so far has been positive. In fact, all the negativity we have run into has come from rich spoiled people from the West. The response from people in poor countries, including government officials, has been phenomenal so far. It's too early to tell if this is a coincidence, but it seems not to be. Westerners are so rich that they can be picky. Poor countries and poor people cannot.

5) We are for open borders for PEACEFUL people, but obviously not all people in the world are peaceful. Some are criminals and some are terrorists. We need to protect the peaceful people who DO enter from criminals. That is the job of the state. This means that some provisions will be required to stay in the Free State, but these measures are not strict. Most people will be able to enter without a sweat. That people have to announce themselves to the authorities with an identity does not mean that they will be STOPPED by the authorities. It only means that the authorities need to have control over who is currently in residing in the state. You can very easily enter the Free State, and it will by far have the freest immigration practices in the world. Obviously if it is very easy to get into the state legally and you STILL try to sneak in, then why should we assume anything other than that you have ominous intentions when it is so easy to avoid it?

You say you cannot support us in good conscience. That is the same as saying that you support the status quo. You support the way things are done in the rest of the world, but that makes no sense since the rest of the world isn't anywhere near fulfilling your "good conscience."

[sirius]

Sounds very interesting! Considering relations with foreign states, it could be a good strategic choice to have a nominal "government" even if the country was practically a free-market "anarchy".

I might be interested in donating euros when I know more about the project and the people behind it

[Anonymous]

Are you affiliated with wirtland by any chance ?

http://www.wirtland.com/

Sirius is correct in that there is no info on the people behind the initiative.


As long as theres no oil the Us wont invade lol.

[onarchy]

Hello,

the people behind the Free State Initiative is mostly me, Onar Åm, but with a network of associated people who support me financially and with webdesign, critique, ideas and other resources.


http://freestateinitiative.org/about-us


If you google my name you will find that I am a known figure in the Norwegian blogosphere. I'm an author and a classical liberal.


FSI has nothing to do with wirtland og which we know nothing about. We are familiar with both Free State Project and Seasteading Institute. We applaud both efforts and hope they succeed, but believe that we have the best strategy for a Free State a reality.

The Free State will not be an anarchy, but a minarchy. Minimal government that only maintains the peace, i.e. secures property, contract and person. And the government will be composed of an international team of experts and law enforcers, recruited from cultures with a proven track record of low corruption. This will not just be a "nominal" government, but a real autonomous entity at the sub-national level. In fact, the state will in many way resemble a state in the United States. A state in the US has its own constitution and is autonomous in many respects. The federal government has grown far beyond its original purpose, and the states themselves have left their minarchy past behind, but the political structure is not completely unlike the proposed Free State.

[sirius]

Governments tend to get corrupted over decades (just like the US did), but yeah, I'd still give it a shot. At least it would be great as long as it lasts.

I hope you can get more people to work with the effort. That is of course easier when you get donations and there is progress in the negotiations.

[onarchy]

Governments tend to get corrupted over decades (just like the US did), but yeah, I'd still give it a shot. At least it would be great as long as it lasts.

We are fully aware of the corruption of government and the Free State Initiative and the effort to redesign government from scratch was to a large extent motivated by that corruption. We have a concrete new design to prevent corruption. Most of the elements of the proper design was in place in the design of the original United States, but a crucial feedback mechanism was missing for self-correcting and preventing the accumulation of errors and corruption. This crucial design element is the generalized burden of evidence for the use of physical force. "Innocent until proven guilty" today is the slogan of rule of law, and it applies in a court room. However, more generally speaking "innocent until proven guilty" rests on the more fundamental principle that everyone should be allowed to live in peace until proven otherwise. ALL use of physical force must therefore be motivated and proven to be legitimate and necessary.

As I mentioned this principle is applied in court rooms, but is missing today in a crucial part of government: law creation. There is no burden of evidence for new laws. All that is required is a simple majority. The law makers do not have to prove the law in Supreme Court. However, a new law is a standing order of how to use physical force. It instructs the government who to prosecute and throw in jail. Therefore the laws themselves require evidence beyond reasonable doubt, and the burden of that evidence rests on the one who wishes to wield government power, i.e. the law maker.

This is a complete redesign and expansion of democracy from the outdated majority rule of today to true democracy. In this system A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL can challenge a law in Supreme Court and have it overturned. He does not need to prove his case. He only needs to make a *plausible* case that the law is a violation or unnecessary.

Thus, with this new design, vigilance is built into the system. It's the equivalent of an open source version of government.

And this vigilance does not only apply to laws, it applies to ANY governmental procedure, institution, design features, and even features. Do you think there is a better way to reduce bureaucracy and structural hurdles in the system? Well, you can present them in the Open Government-community and those in favor of the current way of doing things need to make a very strong case against you. The burden of evidence rests on them.

This may not eliminate corruption of government over time, but it sure reduces the problem. It is a self-corrective method which with some luck is able to prevent another degeneration cycle of government as we have seen in the last 100 years or so.

I hope you can get more people to work with the effort. That is of course easier when you get donations and there is progress in the negotiations.

The Free State Initiative also accepts bitcoin donations at this time:


http://freestateinitiative.org/about-us/donate

[Timo Y]

If this is going to be a special administrative division of some poor country, it means that the country's laws will still apply to some extent, and unfortunately, most poor countries are extremely unfree and oppressive when compared to the West.

I see the danger that this is going to become another UAE, where amongst other nasty things, you go to prison for being a rape victim, but hey, living under arbitrary state violence isn't so bad when you're not paying taxes, right?

[sirius]

If this is going to be a special administrative division of some poor country, it means that the country's laws will still apply to some extent, and unfortunately, most poor countries are extremely unfree and oppressive when compared to the West.

I see the danger that this is going to become another UAE, where amongst other nasty things, you go to prison for being a rape victim, but hey, living under arbitrary state violence isn't so bad when you're not paying taxes, right?

Extinction of arbitrary state violence is a stated goal of the project. Of course it requires a major exemption from the enclosing country's laws.

[RodeoX]

It's a wonderful notion, but what government would ever entertain the idea? Would they allow this new country to have an army? Without an army what would keep someone from just looting your village?

[Timo Y]

Extinction of arbitrary state violence is a stated goal of the project. Of course it requires a major exemption from the enclosing country's laws.

Will a (by Western standards) unenlightened, superstitious, ultraconservative country such as Yemen or Western Sahara tolerate production of gay pornography within its borders? Even if it's a special administrative zone? What about setting up an ecstasy factory? Drawing a cartoon of a fictional prophet? Running a voluntary euthanasia clinic? etc...

Because if those things (and others) aren't tolerated, it ain't a "free state".  

It is one thing welcoming a no-tax, free trade zone.  (Those places already exist, but still they are highly oppressive in other respects).

It is another embracing the concept of sovereign individuals who owe nothing to society and are free to ignore cultural and religious rules. That concept is alien to people in most poor parts of the world.  They will perceive a high degree of social freedoms as a threat to their very existence.  We are talking about incompatible value systems.  It's a much deeper issue than mere economics.

A free state, hosted by one some the most unfree states in the world (according to the map on their website), coexisting peacefully?  I'll believe it when I see it.

[onarchy]

If this is going to be a special administrative division of some poor country, it means that the country's laws will still apply to some extent, and unfortunately, most poor countries are extremely unfree and oppressive when compared to the West.

I see the danger that this is going to become another UAE, where amongst other nasty things, you go to prison for being a rape victim, but hey, living under arbitrary state violence isn't so bad when you're not paying taxes, right?

No, the laws of that country will NOT apply. That's the whole point. The laws of mainland China do NOT apply to Hong Kong, because it is a "special administrative region." It will be the same thing here. The host country will make a Free State Charter Law which declares it to be a special administrative region, with autonomy according to the Free State Charter.

[onarchy]

It's a wonderful notion, but what government would ever entertain the idea?

Probably a very poor country with great incentives to get economic development in their country. We are already have one concrete lead in an African country who has expressed great interest in the project.

Would they allow this new country to have an army? Without an army what would keep someone from just looting your village?

The entire premise of the Free State is that it MUST have security forces sufficiently powerful to be able to protect the borders of the free state. I.e. not a full-fledged military, but a sufficiently powerful security force to make invasion much less attractive. The Free State should in addition of course have a regular police force to fight ordinary crime.

[onarchy]

Extinction of arbitrary state violence is a stated goal of the project. Of course it requires a major exemption from the enclosing country's laws.

Will a (by Western standards) unenlightened, superstitious, ultraconservative country such as Yemen or Western Sahara tolerate production of gay pornography within its borders? Even if it's a special administrative zone? What about setting up an ecstasy factory? Drawing a cartoon of a fictional prophet? Running a voluntary euthanasia clinic? etc...

There's a very real chance that the Free State Charter will contain specific Decrees on certain social issues like the ones you mention. We will negotiate and argue for as few decrees as possible, but there is a real possibility that there will be limitations. Even with these limitations this Free State will still be the freest political entity the world has ever seen.

Because if those things (and others) aren't tolerated, it ain't a "free state".

Well, no need to support the project then. No sir. Who needs free banking and money, low taxes, no regulations, private health care, roads, ports, airports, water and sewage anyways, right? It aint' free at all and of interest to NO-ONE on the planet without gay porn. Frankly I find that to be a typical objection from someone who is materially wealthy and therefore has the surplus to be able to focus on "high values" such as Ecstasy or Muhammed drawings. The response I see from people who are actually poor on the other hand is quite different.


It is one thing welcoming a no-tax, free trade zone.  (Those places already exist, but still they are highly oppressive in other respects).

It is another embracing the concept of sovereign individuals who owe nothing to society and are free to ignore cultural and religious rules. That concept is alien to people in most poor parts of the world.  They will perceive a high degree of social freedoms as a threat to their very existence.  We are talking about incompatible value systems.  It's a much deeper issue than mere economics.

This is true for many, and as a result the Free State may be hampered in some respect. But I don't see why this should be an issue. These freedoms are already hampered in these areas, and the kind of economic freedom we are talking about in the Free State exists nowhere on the planet, not even close.

[PLATO]

What do you need to do to make this happen?

[onarchy]

What do you need to do to make this happen?

To begin with a budget to be able to travel to various countries and talk to officials. That means that in order to get through the first phase we need donations. In the second phase we need, when we have a preliminary letter of intent from a host country we need to gather a team of experts and resource people from all over the world to design the general framework, constitution, laws and institutions of the Free State. Finally, when we enter into the last phase -- implementation -- we will be needing annual donations of 5-10 million dollars to operate the Free State until it can stand on its own, probably after 10 years or so.

[MoonShadow]

Looks interesting as a thought experiment; however, there is always a reason that unproductive regions are largely uninhabited.

[onarchy]

Looks interesting as a thought experiment; however, there is always a reason that unproductive regions are largely uninhabited.

Singapore and Hong Kong were unproductive regions 70 years ago, and that's still true. There are no natural resources in these states. Until recently Singapore did not even have fresh water. (Now they have through technological investments built rain water catchment and treatment systems to provide a significant portion of their own drinking water.) It wasn't natural resources that brought them prosperity, it was the fact that they transformed themselves into something very close to Free States. They had the most important resource of all: peace and liberty.

[Anonymous]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

[MoonShadow]

Looks interesting as a thought experiment; however, there is always a reason that unproductive regions are largely uninhabited.

Singapore and Hong Kong were unproductive regions 70 years ago, and that's still true. There are no natural resources in these states. Until recently Singapore did not even have fresh water. (Now they have through technological investments built rain water catchment and treatment systems to provide a significant portion of their own drinking water.) It wasn't natural resources that brought them prosperity, it was the fact that they transformed themselves into something very close to Free States. They had the most important resource of all: peace and liberty.

I don't disagree, but those niches have been filled.  I'm not sure that the world needs another international trade hub.  Liberty is great, but the people still need an income, more so if the city-state they live in cannot support itself sans trade.  If it were not for the trade of the harbor, Hong Kong would starve.  Seasteading, as many challenges that if faces, seems like a more viable possibility because at least such a city-state can technically move.  The human soul strives for liberty, but the human body toils to eat.

[MoonShadow]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

A data haven might yet prove to be the killer Bitcoin app.  The idea has been tried on several occasions, all have been crushed by outside forces.  The Principality of Sealand being both the most successful and most rediculous recent example that comes to mind.

[error]

So here are some tough questions.

Who's going to invade? Who was invading Hong Kong and Singapore?

What does someone do who is seeking political asylum and, because the government who claims him is a government, refuses to allow him to exit the country or even obtain a passport, so he must "sneak" out? It seems that such a person would be tossed back into the ocean.

[onarchy]

I don't disagree, but those niches have been filled.  I'm not sure that the world needs another international trade hub.  Liberty is great, but the people still need an income, more so if the city-state they live in cannot support itself sans trade.  If it were not for the trade of the harbor, Hong Kong would starve.  Seasteading, as many challenges that if faces, seems like a more viable possibility because at least such a city-state can technically move.  The human soul strives for liberty, but the human body toils to eat.

It seems that you are under the impression that 1) Hong Kong and Singapore are ONLY trade hubs, 2) there is no more room for any more hubs and 3) economic freedom can somehow only be used for creating trade hubs. I strongly disagree on all three points.

Today both Hong Kong and Singapore are trade hubs, but they are ALSO more. Hong Kong is an important financial center, while Singapore has a lot of industry. Hong Kong used to be a production center. In the 1970s the term "Made in Hong Kong" become famous in the west for cheap low-quality products, which later become a quality trademark. Singapore and Hong Kong are also two of the countries with the highest amount of tourists visiting, and for Singapore health tourism has become a significant industry. The airports of Hong Kong and Singapore are also consistently voted as the best in the world, and they attract a lot of travelers for this very reason. It is fair to say that Singapore and Hong Kong have many more legs to stand on than being a trade hub. This dynamism and continuous reinvention is very much due to the high degree of economic freedom.

Second, while they really are very important as trade hubs they first of all are in Asia. A lot of very exciting things are going on in Asia, but there are other regions in the world, especially Africa and South-America that lack bastions of peace and liberty. Don't you think it's possible that the African equivalent of a Hong Kong could become a trade hub for African goods or even South-American goods? Furthermore, there are 7 billion people on this planet today. Only 1 billion of them have a Western standard of living, with an additional 1 billion well on their way. 3 billion have access to electricity, and 2 billion live in utmost poverty. Hundreds of millions of people are today eager -- yes, desperate -- to move to a rich/industrialized country to look for jobs, and are unable to do so due to immigration barriers. Don't you think it's possible that there could be a market for a place that can offer jobs to low-wage immigrants eager to move to an industrialized country?  Also, every single day at least a million new people all over the world escape poverty and acquire the ability to buy industrial goods. Even if Singapore and Hong Kong are really, really good trade hubs, do you think they are able to keep up with the demand increase of one million new industrial consumers every single day?

Finally, where did you get the idea that economic freedom somehow was only good for becoming a trade hub? The evidence shows that economic freedom is good for ALL kinds of economic activity: trade, industry, banking, services, tourism, agriculture, energy. The idea that somehow there is room for only a finite amount of economic freedom is strange. The economy is not a zero sum game. All the evidence shows that if a new country increases its economic freedom then EVERYONE benefits. The cake increases in size so that the country that increased its economic freedom does not take away from the cake of others.

Thus, there is no reason to believe that somehow we now have "enough" economic freedom in the world and that the "niche" of economic freedom has been filled. Dictatorship and authoritarianism is not an economic "niche" that produces anything of value. If the whole world was rid of all dictatorships and authoritarian regimes then the world would be a better place for everyone. There is no end to how much economic freedom is needed. The more, the better.

Let me give you a clue to some of the business models that are viable in a Free State:

today there are literally hundreds of millions of able but poor people all over the world who want a better life and want to move to an industrialized state. The Free State provides something completely unique to investors:

- really, really good governance (i.e. low corruption, proper rule of law, enforcement of contracts, security of person and property and very high efficiency in the state machinery, i.e. very few hurdles + of course no regulations and low taxes)
- an abundance of cheap labor (due to free immigration)

Normally an investor can one of these things in a country, but not both, because most Western countries have a combination of fairly good governance + high wages, whereas poor countries have a combination of bad governance + low wages. The Free State provides both and therefore is in a unique position to compete with anyone on price.

Thus, ANY business who has a business model which requires or benefits from cheap labor will have a reason to invest in the Free State.

[onarchy]

So here are some tough questions.

Who's going to invade? Who was invading Hong Kong and Singapore?

The main threat is unstable neighbor regimes and of course the host country itself, which may want to violate the treaty and nationalize the Free State. Precisely to avoid this the Free State MUST have a security force sufficiently large to deter an invasion.

What does someone do who is seeking political asylum and, because the government who claims him is a government, refuses to allow him to exit the country or even obtain a passport, so he must "sneak" out? It seems that such a person would be tossed back into the ocean.

No, he would not. The normal mode of operation is that you present a passport on arrival in the Free State. If you for some reason do not have a passport you may still present yourself to the authorities of the Free State and seek asylum. However, generally speaking you need to have a voucher in order to come into the Free State. Someone has to vouch for you, meaning that they can prove their ability to pay for leaving the country or taking care of that person if no country acknowledges him. That person may be himself (he must pay a deposit that will be kept in a locked bank account) or some other party. Some countries such as Somalia practices a full denial of entry for anyone who leaves their country without a passport, even it can be proved that they came from Somalia. In this case, the only way to get into the Free State is for the person to hand over their passport to protective care to a trusted party, e.g. a registered airline. This passport will then only be given to the person on arrival back in Somalia at some point in the future.

In other words, the most important thing with immigration security is to present yourself to the authorities of the Free State. If you don't do this it will be interpreted as ill intentions, which will not be tolerated.

[onarchy]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

A data haven might yet prove to be the killer Bitcoin app.  The idea has been tried on several occasions, all have been crushed by outside forces.  The Principality of Sealand being both the most successful and most rediculous recent example that comes to mind.

Generally speaking the Free State will not be a complete data haven. Piracy and e.g. child pornography will not be tolerated.

[Anonymous]

Piracy will not be tolerated.

What's the "consequences" for this ?

Please spell it out exactly....

[Anonymous]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

A data haven might yet prove to be the killer Bitcoin app.  The idea has been tried on several occasions, all have been crushed by outside forces.  The Principality of Sealand being both the most successful and most rediculous recent example that comes to mind.

We need that more than yet another government .

[­­­Atlas_]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

A data haven might yet prove to be the killer Bitcoin app.  The idea has been tried on several occasions, all have been crushed by outside forces.  The Principality of Sealand being both the most successful and most rediculous recent example that comes to mind.

Generally speaking the Free State will not be a complete data haven. Piracy and e.g. child pornography will not be tolerated.

Boo. You don't believe in property rights. You are limiting what I can do with my energy and matter with your IP garbage.

[onarchy]

Piracy will not be tolerated.

What's the "consequences" for this ?

Please spell it out exactly....

Criminal prosecution.

[error]

Piracy will not be tolerated.

What's the "consequences" for this ?

Please spell it out exactly....

Criminal prosecution.

I do believe they're talking about "copyright infringement," not hijacking ships at sea.

[MoonShadow]

Might be a good business in hosting servers that the mafiaa cant have confiscated.

 

A data haven might yet prove to be the killer Bitcoin app.  The idea has been tried on several occasions, all have been crushed by outside forces.  The Principality of Sealand being both the most successful and most rediculous recent example that comes to mind.

Generally speaking the Free State will not be a complete data haven. Piracy and e.g. child pornography will not be tolerated.

I can pretty much promise that copyrights would have no force in a true free market.

[onarchy]

Boo. You don't believe in property rights. You are limiting what I can do with my energy and matter with your IP garbage.

For some reason, many libertarians are Marxist materialists when it comes to information. I don't understand this, but I will try to briefly explain some consequences of not accepting IP.

Intellectual Property is a species of information rights. So let us first start with defining a right objectively:

- a right is something you can legitimately use physical force to enforce.

Example: you have rights to your own body, i.e. if someone attacks you, you can legitimately use physical force to protect your body. Another example: you have property rights over X, i.e. if someone infringes that property you can legitimately use physical force to protect X.

So what then is an information right? It is a right that spawns from some information. An anti-IP materialist denies such a right, because it is non-material. In other words, someone who is against IP must also logically be against the forceful protection of ANY information.

This has severe consequences. Let's look at some of them.

- if no information rights exist, there is no basis for enforcing contracts, because a contract is entirely made out of that non-material stuff we call information. Thus, someone who denies information rights can agree to something, and even sign a contract that he is supposed to give a person 100 dollars for object X, and then simply refuse to give the money. He will say "agreement? What are you talking about? That's just this information non-sense. It is MY physical money, and I can do with it as I please. You were just stupid that gave me X voluntarily believing that I would give you 100 dollars. That's YOUR problem. You have NO right based on scribbles on a piece of paper to violate MY physical property (i.e. enforcing the contract).

- if no information rights exist, then THREATS of physical violence are perfectly ok. So if you deny information rights, then logically it is ok for me to point a gun at you and say "give me all your money or I will kill you!" Physically speaking I have not harmed you in any way. I have simply used my own property in a peaceful manner that in no way has harmed you, and I have used my freedom of speech. If you in any way felt compelled to voluntarily give me your money then that is YOUR problem. You have NO right based on mere utterances from my mouth to violate MY physical property (i.e. criminally prosecute you for wielding threats of violence)

Notice that the structure of these arguments are identical to the argument that is used against IP. If you're stupid enough to give me a book with a novel written inside it, then, even if I agree implicitly not to distribute the content of that book when I purchase that book, it's still ok to do so, because the physical book is MY property and I can do with it whatever I want.  If you in any way feel cheated that I went ahead and distributed the information in your book on the internet then that is YOUR problem. You have NO right based on mere scribblings on a piece of paper to violate MY physical property. (i.e. criminally prosecute me for breaching the implicit agreement you made when I bought the book.)

So if you don't accept information rights, you have to accept that contracts cannot be enforced and you cannot criminally prosecute threats or fraud. You also have to accept that espionage or secret surveilance is ok, child pornography is ok and it's ok to sample a piece of your DNA that you leave behind anywhere in public and then analyze and publish it on the internet, including a list of of all your genetic diseases. The same is of course the case with your fingerprints. Without information rights it is also perfectly ok to make a fully 3D-image of your face (using 3D imaging techniques) and then use YOU in any kind of realistic depiction. E.g. it's ok to depict you in a porn movie. It's ok to depict you as a violent killer or to take the face of a famous actor and then make a movie with that actor starring in that movie without that actor's consent, leeching on the fame of that person. Furthermore you have no obligation to tell anyone it's a fake. Without information rights you can falsify any data or image you like and then LIE that it is a real picture or movie of YOU, e.g. a perfectly life-like movie showing YOU raping a baby to death while laughing sadistically. Without information rights you can say whatever outrageous lie you want about a person and that person cannot in any way have you prosecuted.

Are you prepared to live in an insane world like the one I just described? If not you MUST accept the validity of information rights. In other words, you must accept the legitimacy of using physical force to enforce things based on information. Thus, for any sane person an argument against IP must be something other than "I can do whatever I want with MY physical property, so long as I don't infringe YOUR physical property" because that argument leads down the road I just described.

Typically there are two other arguments that are used against IP. 1) "I didn't sign an explicit contract, therefore I can do whatever I want with my property" and 2) "information is an infinite resource, and only finite resources can be property."

Let's start with the infinite resource argument. Suppose that there existed an immortal being. It lives forever. Thus, it's time is an infinite resource. Therefore it does not own its own time, because only a finite resource can be property. Therefore enslaving this immortal being for a finite amount of time is perfectly ok.

I think most normal people would agree that just because you live forever it's not ok to enslave you, even for a second. This implies that infinite abundance of some resource is NOT a sufficient argument against property rights for that resource. The infinite argument can be used in all sorts of creative ways. There are virtually infinite amounts of functionally identical atoms in the universe. So atoms are not a finite resource. Therefore property rights to an atom cannot be legitimate since you can always get another one. Everyone will now immediately recognize that this is a false argument. True, there are infinitely many atoms in the world, but your LIFE is a finite resource and the work required to arrange those atoms in a particular place and pattern required some of your highly finite time and energy. So that there are infinitely many atoms is completely irrelevant. By the same token it is completely irrelevant that information is an infinitely abundant resource because your LIFE is a finite resource and the work required to create that unique pattern (e.g. a book) required some of your highly finite time and energy. In both cases it is your WORK that gives rise to property rights, not because work is a finite resource (although it certainly is) but because work is the actions by which you as an individual acquire identity. You are you because of your actions, and by patterning reality that part of reality becomes part of you.


Let's move on to the no-explicit-agreement-argument. Basically some argue that when you buy a book you nowhere explicitly agreed to not spread the content of that book, even though inside the book it says "copyright (c) All rights reserved" which is legalize for an implicit contract stating ("when you get this book into your possession you accept that there are restrictions on what you can do with it.") Implicit contracts are default contracts that are valid by law unless explicitly stated otherwise. This is a very important and useful tool because it allows you to go outside without a sign over your head saying "I don't want to be killed."

If implicit contracts are not valid then this means that if you DON'T wear that sign one day, for some reason, then it is perfectly ok for anyone to kill you. They can simply say "I didn't agree not to kill him, and he didn't say it wasn't ok." Sane people understand that life would be unbearable without such implicit contracts, and copyright law is simply one of these implicit contracts. Copyright COULD be implemented with a sign on the book stating "by opening this book you agree not to spread the content of this book to anyone" or if that is not acceptable then even sign an explicit contract with the seller that you will not spread the content of that book.

In short, none of the standard arguments against IP leads to a sane world because of the logical implications it has for other laws and rights.

[kelp]

If implicit contracts are not valid then this means that if you DON'T wear that sign one day, for some reason, then it is perfectly ok for anyone to kill you. They can simply say "I didn't agree not to kill him, and he didn't say it wasn't ok." Sane people understand that life would be unbearable without such implicit contracts, and copyright law is simply one of these implicit contracts. Copyright COULD be implemented with a sign on the book stating "by opening this book you agree not to spread the content of this book to anyone" or if that is not acceptable then even sign an explicit contract with the seller that you will not spread the content of that book.

In short, none of the standard arguments against IP leads to a sane world because of the logical implications it has for other laws and rights.

Did you really just argue that not having IP laws is a slippery slope to allowing murder?

[onarchy]

If implicit contracts are not valid then this means that if you DON'T wear that sign one day, for some reason, then it is perfectly ok for anyone to kill you. They can simply say "I didn't agree not to kill him, and he didn't say it wasn't ok." Sane people understand that life would be unbearable without such implicit contracts, and copyright law is simply one of these implicit contracts. Copyright COULD be implemented with a sign on the book stating "by opening this book you agree not to spread the content of this book to anyone" or if that is not acceptable then even sign an explicit contract with the seller that you will not spread the content of that book.

In short, none of the standard arguments against IP leads to a sane world because of the logical implications it has for other laws and rights.

Did you really just argue that not having IP laws is a slippery slope to allowing murder?

Not a slippery slope, no. I made a principled argument. I.e. if IP laws (implicit information contracts) are not legitimate, then obviously NO implicit contract laws are legitimate. I.e. if you claim that IP laws are illegitimate because they are implicit contracts you MUST also argue that it is illegitimate to make a law with the implicit contract that bans killing someone. It's not a slippery slope argument, but a reductio ad absurdum argument. Any argument that makes it morally ok to kill someone unless you have an explicit contract is obviously insane.

[onarchy]

- a right is something you can legitimately use physical force to enforce.

[/quote]

Sorry, but I can't let that stand without a challenge. Your statement attempts to simply presume legitimacy without explaining what that means, as such it is nothing but tautology once reduced -> "A right is legitimate".[/quote]

I think you misunderstood me. "Legitimate" in this case was just short for "generally accepted in society." It says nothing about the MORAL legitimacy of a right. You can for instance have a right to public health care in Sweden, but not in some other countries. That right doesn't mean that it is morally acceptable, only that you can use physical force to enforce it. In other words, Swedes consider it ok to use the threat of jail to secure health care for everyone. Hence, health care is a right in Sweden. While we certainly can discuss moral rights, it is not necessary for this discussion, and really is side-tracking the issue. I am simply applying LOGIC and looking at what happens when an argument and principle is applied CONSISTENTLY to ALL its areas of impact.

This is what is meant by IP rights, it is an attempt to channelize nothing less fundamental than the air we breathe... That is consciousness itself.

This is patently false. You are perfectly in your right to read a book that you have purchased and to think the thoughts that it inspires in you. You can even use that inspiration to make new thoughts that you can spread freely and/or earn money from. The only thing you are not allowed to do is to destroy another person's ability to economically profit from his own intellectual work, by spreading pirate copies of his work around.

For someone to say they own what has been perceived by the operation of my eyes, ears, and mind; to control what I may in turn create form those perceptions is no different.

You are now making the same argument as those who claim that contracts cannot be legally binding, I covered this at length in my previous post. Read that post once more.

[error]

Your comparison between IP and contract enforcement is a complete non-sequitur.

Unfortunately, intellectual property is wholly incompatible with a free society. If you're actually interested in learning, you can start here.

[onarchy]

Perhaps I should have stated my point more explicitly. You are simply applying the utilitarian ethic as a moral absolute.

I have no idea where you're getting this from because I am not a utilitarian.

My point is that there is in fact no asymmetry between individual and group interests.

I agree, and I have no idea why you claim this or why you think this is relevant to any of the arguments I presented. You don't actually answer any of my arguments. What I have shown in my long post is this:

- the denial of information rights leads to absurd results such as the legalization of fraud, breach of contract and threats. Any argument with the structure "I can do whatever I do with my PHYSICAL property so long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" attacks information rights.

- if only finite resources can be protected by property rights, then immortal beings can be enslaved
- also, by the infinity argument there are virtually infinite atoms, so no atoms can be protected by property rights. Hence the infinity argument as used against IP also undercuts physical property rights
- finally, if you don't accept the validity of implicit default contracts then you must also accept that it is perfectly ok to kill someone unless they explicitly say otherwise.

You have not answered a single of these arguments, and each and every one of them is crushing against the anti-IP stance.

[onarchy]

Your comparison between IP and contract enforcement is a complete non-sequitur.

Unfortunately, intellectual property is wholly incompatible with a free society. If you're actually interested in learning, you can start here.

I am very familiar with Kinsella and other anti-IP libertarians. My impression, though, is that these have not answered a single of the arguments that I have presented in this thread.

[wb3]

- a right is something you can legitimately use physical force to enforce

This is a Natural Law, stated in another way is "The only rights you have are the ones you can defend".

So if you are the strongest person, you can have any right you want, until another comes and takes it away from you. This principle still works within groups.

Peaceful enforcement (financially or otherwise) won't work as soon as more people disagree with that right. This will come to ahead pretty soon. Every American citizen (babies included) owes $54,000 on the debt. The average income is $30,000 dollars. The government might have "the right" to tax you, but that right will be stripped from them when they come to collect.

And suppose there is no physical violence, but everybody succumbs to the law and gets imprisoned. Who is going to pay for the prison's?

[NghtRppr]

3) the rules will in did be "dictated" and once the constitution is written and the Free State Charter is signed these basic rules can't change. BUT then again, no-one is living in that area at the moment. No-one are affected by those rules. The only ones who will be affected by them are the ones who VOLUNTARILY move to the Free State to live under those rules.

I find it hard to believe that you've actually thought about this deeply because that will only last for a generation. After that, the children born into that system will be there but it won't be because they voluntarily moved there. You're doing nothing but creating yet another state. I'm sure in true statist form you'll respond with "love it or leave it". Which of course was already refuted by Hume with his ship analogy. Saying that I'm free to move even though I have no way to do so or survive after having done so is akin to saying that a man kidnapped and taken on aboard a ship is later free to leave that ship when it's at sea by jumping in the ocean to drown, and by not drowning he is thereby consenting to the laws on board that ship. Hogwash!

Your idea, in its current form, is doomed.

Generally speaking the Free State will not be a complete data haven. Piracy ... will not be tolerated.

Right, I think I called it. This is just yet another state. To call it a "free state" is disingenuous at best and a fraud at worse since you're taking in money for it.

If I own a stack of paper then I can do whatever I want with it, including writing a Harry Potter novel on it and then selling the paper. To limit what I can do with my paper amounts to partial theft since you are taking from me the use of my paper.

What exactly makes you think you are justified in claiming partial ownership of my paper and dictating what I can and cannot do with it?

[jimbobway]

Looks interesting as a thought experiment; however, there is always a reason that unproductive regions are largely uninhabited.

Singapore and Hong Kong were unproductive regions 70 years ago, and that's still true. There are no natural resources in these states. Until recently Singapore did not even have fresh water. (Now they have through technological investments built rain water catchment and treatment systems to provide a significant portion of their own drinking water.) It wasn't natural resources that brought them prosperity, it was the fact that they transformed themselves into something very close to Free States. They had the most important resource of all: peace and liberty.

The website "http://freestateinitiative.org" and onarchy is just totally vague and confusing.  On so many points they contradict their own points it just doesn't make sense.

You think Singapore and Hong Kong are close to "Free States"?  WTH?  They have progressed very quickly but they are not free.  If you spit gum on the sidewalk there is a fine.  In fact, they have banned chewing gum.  There are cameras in every public restroom.  If you don't flush the toilet or urinal you will be fined.  Singapore is becoming like a big brother state.

freestateinitiative right now is a joke to me.

[LMGTFY]

Singapore is becoming like a big brother state.

I believe William Gibson is banned from returning...

[onarchy]

The website "http://freestateinitiative.org" and onarchy is just totally vague and confusing.  On so many points they contradict their own points it just doesn't make sense.

Can you be more concrete? I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you have. Also, most of the response we get from people is that the project is very clear, and not at all confusing.

You think Singapore and Hong Kong are close to "Free States"?  WTH?  They have progressed very quickly but they are not free.  If you spit gum on the sidewalk there is a fine.  In fact, they have banned chewing gum.  There are cameras in every public restroom.  If you don't flush the toilet or urinal you will be fined.  Singapore is becoming like a big brother state.

Sure, both Singapore and Hong Kong have strong authoritarian elements in SOME areas, but that does not change the fact that economically speaking they are the freest states in the world, see:

http://heritage.org/index

The Free State will be freer than both Hong Kong and Singapore in the economic realm and in the personal realm.

freestateinitiative right now is a joke to me.

Well, you have given no information what you think is a joke. You've mentioned Singapore and Hong Kong, which are provably the economically most free states in the world, by far.

[error]

Your comparison between IP and contract enforcement is a complete non-sequitur.

Unfortunately, intellectual property is wholly incompatible with a free society. If you're actually interested in learning, you can start here.

I am very familiar with Kinsella and other anti-IP libertarians. My impression, though, is that these have not answered a single of the arguments that I have presented in this thread.

The problem is that your arguments are incoherent. How can the ability to copy the text of a contract (without IP) possibly have any bearing on whether the contract is enforceable? This is utterly senseless.

[onarchy]

I find it hard to believe that you've actually thought about this deeply because that will only last for a generation.

So what? The constitution will not change because there is a new bratty generation, because the basic principles of the constitution cannot legally be changed. The people will have to actually make a revolt and overthrow the government in order to achieve this.

After that, the children born into that system will be there but it won't be because they voluntarily moved there. You're doing nothing but creating yet another state. I'm sure in true statist form you'll respond with "love it or leave it". Which of course was already refuted by Hume with his ship analogy. Saying that I'm free to move even though I have no way to do so or survive after having done so is akin to saying that a man kidnapped and taken on aboard a ship is later free to leave that ship when it's at sea by jumping in the ocean to drown, and by not drowning he is thereby consenting to the laws on board that ship. Hogwash!

I completely agree with this. Our solution to this is that those in the next generation will have to go through the same process as their parents to become CITIZENS. They will have permanent residence in the state, but in order to bear arms, vote etc. they will have to become a citizen, which involves passing elementary tests and pledging their allegiance to the principles of the state.

Your idea, in its current form, is doomed.

Can you be more specific? I think you're being a bit presumptuous to believe that we have not thought about these things and don't have an answer. How about taking a slightly more humble strategy and... ASK when there is some questions you have. I will answer anything you are wondering about.

Generally speaking the Free State will not be a complete data haven. Piracy ... will not be tolerated.

Right, I think I called it. This is just yet another state. To call it a "free state" is disingenuous at best and a fraud at worse since you're taking in money for it.

Freedom from violence (peace) does not mean the freedom to murder, rape, assault, rob, steal, bully, swindle, threaten or pirate. I have presented forceful arguments against most of the anti-IP arguments in this thread. I notice that you seem to have no intention to answer any of them, and just decide that I am wrong without any counterargument. In my book that is not a very rational behavior.

If I own a stack of paper then I can do whatever I want with it, including writing a Harry Potter novel on it and then selling the paper. To limit what I can do with my paper amounts to partial theft since you are taking from me the use of my paper.

By the very same token banning threats is to take away your freedom of speech. If you're not allowed to wave your gun around peacefully without harming anyone while saying "give me all your money or I will kill you!" then according to your logic YOU have been violated.

What exactly makes you think you are justified in claiming partial ownership of my paper and dictating what I can and cannot do with it?

What exactly makes you think you are justified in claiming partial ownership of my gun and my mouth and dictating what I can and cannot do with it so long as I don't PHYSICALLY hurt you?

[onarchy]

Your comparison between IP and contract enforcement is a complete non-sequitur.

Unfortunately, intellectual property is wholly incompatible with a free society. If you're actually interested in learning, you can start here.

I am very familiar with Kinsella and other anti-IP libertarians. My impression, though, is that these have not answered a single of the arguments that I have presented in this thread.

The problem is that your arguments are incoherent. How can the ability to copy the text of a contract (without IP) possibly have any bearing on whether the contract is enforceable? This is utterly senseless.

I agree that what you just wrote is utterly senseless and incoherent. But that is not what I said. A contract is an INFORMATION right. A contract is not the scribblings on a piece of paper, but the information content of that contract is enforcible by the use of physical force. Similarly IP is an information right. So they have something in common. The argument "I can do whatever I want with my PHYSICAL property as long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" is what most libertarians use against IP laws, but the same argument can be used against contracts. In both cases you are refusing to acknowledge that information may be the legitimate source of physical force.

[error]

I agree that what you just wrote is utterly senseless and incoherent. But that is not what I said. A contract is an INFORMATION right. A contract is not the scribblings on a piece of paper, but the information content of that contract is enforcible by the use of physical force. Similarly IP is an information right. So they have something in common. The argument "I can do whatever I want with my PHYSICAL property as long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" is what most libertarians use against IP laws, but the same argument can be used against contracts. In both cases you are refusing to acknowledge that information may be the legitimate source of physical force.

Again, this is a non-sequitur. A contract is an agreement between individuals, a meeting of the minds, as it were. The piece of paper, if any, only serves as evidence of the agreement. I fail to see, and you have yet to show, any relevance to intellectual property.

[onarchy]

I agree that what you just wrote is utterly senseless and incoherent. But that is not what I said. A contract is an INFORMATION right. A contract is not the scribblings on a piece of paper, but the information content of that contract is enforcible by the use of physical force. Similarly IP is an information right. So they have something in common. The argument "I can do whatever I want with my PHYSICAL property as long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" is what most libertarians use against IP laws, but the same argument can be used against contracts. In both cases you are refusing to acknowledge that information may be the legitimate source of physical force.

Again, this is a non-sequitur. A contract is an agreement between individuals, a meeting of the minds, as it were.

Who cares? It's just information and I can do whatever I want with MY body so long as I physically don't harm you. Why isn't that a valid argument?

[NghtRppr]

I completely agree with this. Our solution to this is that those in the next generation will have to go through the same process as their parents to become CITIZENS. They will have permanent residence in the state, but in order to bear arms, vote etc. they will have to become a citizen, which involves passing elementary tests and pledging their allegiance to the principles of the state.

So even though they aren't citizens you're going to govern them by denying the right to own guns? Again, how is this any different from the USA where I'm born into a system and then forced to bend to the will of others?

Freedom from violence (peace) does not mean the freedom to murder, rape, assault, rob, steal, bully, swindle, threaten or pirate.

Murder, rape, assault and theft are violence. Threats are coercion. It's nonsense to group them together with piracy which is neither.

By the very same token banning threats is to take away your freedom of speech. If you're not allowed to wave your gun around peacefully without harming anyone while saying "give me all your money or I will kill you!" then according to your logic YOU have been violated.

Again, threats are coercion, a form of aggression, which is what I'm against. Your argument fails.

What exactly makes you think you are justified in claiming partial ownership of my gun and my mouth and dictating what I can and cannot do with it so long as I don't PHYSICALLY hurt you?

See above.

[jimbobway]

The website "http://freestateinitiative.org" and onarchy is just totally vague and confusing.  On so many points they contradict their own points it just doesn't make sense.

Can you be more concrete? I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you have. Also, most of the response we get from people is that the project is very clear, and not at all confusing.

You think Singapore and Hong Kong are close to "Free States"?  WTH?  They have progressed very quickly but they are not free.  If you spit gum on the sidewalk there is a fine.  In fact, they have banned chewing gum.  There are cameras in every public restroom.  If you don't flush the toilet or urinal you will be fined.  Singapore is becoming like a big brother state.

Sure, both Singapore and Hong Kong have strong authoritarian elements in SOME areas, but that does not change the fact that economically speaking they are the freest states in the world, see:

http://heritage.org/index

The Free State will be freer than both Hong Kong and Singapore in the economic realm and in the personal realm.

freestateinitiative right now is a joke to me.

Well, you have given no information what you think is a joke. You've mentioned Singapore and Hong Kong, which are provably the economically most free states in the world, by far.

I don't have time to debate the fancy website.  Stop saying Singapore an HK are the most free, economically free, whatever free.  Can I open a strip club in Singapore?  I cannot even sell chewing gum.  Give me a break.  If I sell medical marijuana there I'll be executed.  

[onarchy]

So even though they aren't citizens you're going to govern them by denying the right to own guns?

If you don't pass the very simple tests you are not fit to carry a gun, and if you refuse to pledge your allegiance to the principles of peace you are practically admitting that it is not safe to let you vote or to own and use a gun.

Again, how is this any different from the USA where I'm born into a system and then forced to bend to the will of others?

Are you saying that it is irrelevant whether you are born in North-Korea or in a Free State because both systems "force you to bend to the will of others"? Seriously? The Free State only enforces one thing on its citizens and residents: peace. Thus the only people who will "be forced to bend to the will of others" are criminals: murderers, thieves, rapists, swindlers etc.

Murder, rape, assault and theft are violence. Threats are coercion. It's nonsense to group them together with piracy which is neither.

You are not making an argument, but a claim.

By the very same token banning threats is to take away your freedom of speech. If you're not allowed to wave your gun around peacefully without harming anyone while saying "give me all your money or I will kill you!" then according to your logic YOU have been violated.

Again, threats are coercion, a form of aggression, which is what I'm against. Your argument fails.

I claim that piracy is a form of coercion, a form of aggression, which I am against too. It's not sufficient to make a claim, you have to substantiate it.

Also, I can deny that I am making threats. When I am saying "give me all your money or I will kill you" I am not physically harming you in any way. I am just making noises with my mouth. It's your problem if you take that as a threat. The same goes with a contract. That was just me scribbling on a piece of paper. I didn't agree to anything. I just nodded, made funny noises with my mouth and scribbled some doodles. By forcing me to abide to this so-called "contract" you are in fact assaulting ME!

[NghtRppr]

I claim that piracy is a form of coercion, a form of aggression, which I am against too. It's not sufficient to make a claim, you have to substantiate it.

It's funny that you make a claim and then say it's not enough to do that but one must also provide an argument while simultaneously failing to do exactly that. Piracy is coercion how? It's not because I'm not initiating violence or making threats on your property. That's the argument.

Also, I can deny that I am making threats. When I am saying "give me all your money or I will kill you" I am not physically harming you in any way.

You're not making any sense. Making a threat doesn't require that you are currently causing me physical harm, it's the promise of FUTURE physical harm. That's what a threat is. Please take your time and try to make more coherent responses. This is bordering on absurd.

[kelp]

I agree that what you just wrote is utterly senseless and incoherent. But that is not what I said. A contract is an INFORMATION right. A contract is not the scribblings on a piece of paper, but the information content of that contract is enforcible by the use of physical force. Similarly IP is an information right. So they have something in common. The argument "I can do whatever I want with my PHYSICAL property as long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" is what most libertarians use against IP laws, but the same argument can be used against contracts. In both cases you are refusing to acknowledge that information may be the legitimate source of physical force.

Again, this is a non-sequitur. A contract is an agreement between individuals, a meeting of the minds, as it were.

Who cares? It's just information and I can do whatever I want with MY body so long as I physically don't harm you. Why isn't that a valid argument?

Because you're making a false equivalence. It wasn't until 1989 that copyright was even implicit in the United States. That came with the ratification of the Berne Convention.

IP laws are not inalienable rights, and they have been very significantly tightened, due to heavy industry lobbying, in the United States over the last 30 years, especially with several acts passed in the 90s. We had perfectly functioning contract law before significant copyright and other IP protections. The two are not inextricably linked.

[jimbobway]

I claim that piracy is a form of coercion, a form of aggression, which I am against too. It's not sufficient to make a claim, you have to substantiate it.

It's funny that you make a claim and then say it's not enough to do that but one must also provide an argument while simultaneously failing to do exactly that. Piracy is coercion how? It's not because I'm not initiating violence or making threats on your property. That's the argument.

Also, I can deny that I am making threats. When I am saying "give me all your money or I will kill you" I am not physically harming you in any way.

You're not making any sense. Making a threat doesn't require that you are currently causing me physical harm, it's the promise of FUTURE physical harm. That's what a threat is. Please take your time and try to make more coherent responses. This is bordering on absurd.

I agree it is absurd and gibberish.

[asdf]

I agree that what you just wrote is utterly senseless and incoherent. But that is not what I said. A contract is an INFORMATION right. A contract is not the scribblings on a piece of paper, but the information content of that contract is enforcible by the use of physical force. Similarly IP is an information right. So they have something in common. The argument "I can do whatever I want with my PHYSICAL property as long as I don't infringe your PHYSICAL property" is what most libertarians use against IP laws, but the same argument can be used against contracts. In both cases you are refusing to acknowledge that information may be the legitimate source of physical force.

Again, this is a non-sequitur. A contract is an agreement between individuals, a meeting of the minds, as it were.

Who cares? It's just information and I can do whatever I want with MY body so long as I physically don't harm you. Why isn't that a valid argument?

You: "a contract is information. IP is information. therefore any argument used against IP can be used against contracts."
What kind of logical fallacy is this?

Contracts and IP, though having a common property of being "informational" or abstract, are none the less different things. A contract is agreed upon by consenting parties. IP is not.

The sun is yellow. A banana is also yellow. Therefore I can eat the sun. non-sequitur.

[onarchy]

I claim that piracy is a form of coercion, a form of aggression, which I am against too. It's not sufficient to make a claim, you have to substantiate it.

It's funny that you make a claim and then say it's not enough to do that but one must also provide an argument while simultaneously failing to do exactly that. Piracy is coercion how? It's not because I'm not initiating violence or making threats on your property. That's the argument.

The same argument can be made against a contract. One who breaches a contract is not initiating violence or making threats on your property. Clearly then, since you think that contracts are valid, this argument of yours is not SUFFICIENT, because in the cases of threats and contracts another more important argument trumps it. I am saying exactly the same thing when it comes to intellectual property. There is a more important argument that trumps your "I'm not initating violence or making threats on your PHYSICAL property" and that is that the author has mixed his labor with nature to create something REAL that is of value: a book. Just like a contract or a threat, that thing does not exist in physical space. It exists ONLY in information space of consciousness. Mental work should be protected by property right, just as much as physical work, and this is so important that it trumps the argument that you can do whatever you want with your physical property so long as you don't initiatie violence against your PHYSICAL being or property.

Also, I can deny that I am making threats. When I am saying "give me all your money or I will kill you" I am not physically harming you in any way.

You're not making any sense. Making a threat doesn't require that you are currently causing me physical harm, it's the promise of FUTURE physical harm.

I completely agree that it doesn't make any sense, just like piracy doesn't require that you are causing me physical harm, but rather take away FUTURE revenue from my mental work.

That's what a threat is. Please take your time and try to make more coherent responses. This is bordering on absurd.

Notice that whenever you say that I am making an absurd argument I am simply taking all the arguments that anti-IP people are using and adapting them to other similar situations. Of course they absurd, just like the anti-IP arguments are absurd, it's just that in other areas YOU TOO see that these arguments are absurd. I am glad to see that you are arguing against these absurd arguments in just the way IP-proponents argue against anti-IP-arguments. Hopefully this will spur in you some reflection on why that is, and maybe consider if your position on IP is absurd too. (I think it is)

[onarchy]

You: "a contract is information. IP is information. therefore any argument used against IP can be used against contracts."
What kind of logical fallacy is this?

Contracts and IP, though having a common property of being "informational" or abstract, are none the less different things. A contract is agreed upon by consenting parties. IP is not.

I've already responded to this: have you made an agreement with every person in the world that they should not kill you? Of course not. Then according to your logic that a contract is needed why shouldn't anyone be who hasn't signed a contract not to kill you not be allowed to do so? Why is there a default value that you never consented to which says: "unless anything else is stated I don't want to die, and killing me is a gross violation" ? And why does that default value not apply to IP: "unless anything else is stated I don't want my intellectual creation to be distributed without my consent, and doing so is piracy" ?

[onarchy]

Because you're making a false equivalence. It wasn't until 1989 that copyright was even implicit in the United States. That came with the ratification of the Berne Convention.

That's because the need for copyright in law is very recent. Prior to Gutenberg the act of copying books was a very laborious task. With the printing press copies could be made very easily. And with industrialization copying inventions became quite easy too. Then and only then copyright, patents and intellectual properties were conceived because for the first time in the history they became NECESSARY. However, culturally speaking many are still conceptually living in the pre-industrial world: "it's my book! I can do with it whatever I want!"

IP laws are not inalienable rights, and they have been very significantly tightened, due to heavy industry lobbying, in the United States over the last 30 years, especially with several acts passed in the 90s. We had perfectly functioning contract law before significant copyright and other IP protections. The two are not inextricably linked.

Yes, intellectual property rights ARE inalienable rights. Just because the precondition for intellectual property was not fulfilled until a few centuries ago doesn't mean that it isn't inalienable. Inalienable doesn't mean "has existed and will exist forever." When that is said let me add that I think that the IP laws of the US (like many of their other laws) are not good. I can explain what kind of IP laws I think should be practiced, if you like, but that is really irrelevant to this discussion. Before we get into the nitty gritty details of formulating good IP laws we should be able to get past the most significant bit: should or shouldn't ANY IP be protected by law at all? The reason I mention US laws here is to make sure you understand that I am not saying that just because I think that IP is an inalienable right, then all US IP laws are just.

[onarchy]

I don't have time to debate the fancy website.  Stop saying Singapore an HK are the most free, economically free, whatever free.

I can prove it. See heritage.org/index.

Can I open a strip club in Singapore?  I cannot even sell chewing gum.  Give me a break.  If I sell medical marijuana there I'll be executed.  

No you cannot do these things, and I think gay porn is off the table too. So according to your standards until strip clubs, medical marijuana, gay porn and chewing gum is legal, we should not in any way distinguish Singapore from North-Korea. Don't you think that is a little bit unproductive? Sure, Singapore has authoritarian elements, but that's true of ALL states in the world today. This does not change the fact that Singapore and Hong Kong are the CLOSEST things we have Free States today. They have low taxes, very few (and well-functioning) regulations, well-protected property rights, very efficient bureaucracy and little corruption. But to you all this is unimportant as long as strip clubs and medical marijuana is illegal.

I would say that this is the reaction of typical spoiled Westerners who know nothing about what it means to not be able to feed one's family or to live without electricity and toil long hours for even the simplest of amenities. But to the billions of people who live in or very near poverty, whether gay porn and strip clubs are available are simply not an issue, because they can afford neither. To these people it would be a dream come true to be able to live in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Now, we certainly acknowledge that neither Singapore nor Hong Kong are full Free States, but that they are very close and by far closest in the world should be acknowledged and celebrated. The Free State Initiative will strive towards greater social liberty than in Singapore, although there is a very real chance that such liberties will not be fully allowed by the host country. But even if that turns out to be the case the Free State is still worth pursuing for all the reasons we write about in the website. If you don't think those very reasons that enable you to be spoiled and sit in front of your computer (that would not exist without economic freedom) and whine about chewing gum and medical marijuana are important, then frankly you do not deserve to live in a free country.

[kiba]

Yes, intellectual property rights ARE inalienable rights. Just because the precondition for intellectual property was not fulfilled until a few centuries ago doesn't mean that it isn't inalienable. Inalienable doesn't mean "has existed and will exist forever." When that is said let me add that I think that the IP laws of the US (like many of their other laws) are not good. I can explain what kind of IP laws I think should be practiced, if you like, but that is really irrelevant to this discussion. Before we get into the nitty gritty details of formulating good IP laws we should be able to get past the most significant bit: should or shouldn't ANY IP be protected by law at all? The reason I mention US laws here is to make sure you understand that I am not saying that just because I think that IP is an inalienable right, then all US IP laws are just.

Those rights are meaningless to anti-IP entrepreneurs. We will culls business that use these "rights".

They are not "rights" in so much as they are disadvantage on the free market.

[LMGTFY]

I don't have time to debate the fancy website.  Stop saying Singapore an HK are the most free, economically free, whatever free.

I can prove it. See heritage.org/index.

OK, economically free. Because Singapore is effectively a one-party state: the Peoples Action Party has won every election since 1959. In the 1970s visitors with long hair had compulsory hair cuts at the airport. When I was last there, in the 1980s, opposition politicians were "confessing their sins" on TV. Freedom House rates Singapore as "partly free", The Economist rates it as a "hybrid regime", the third rank out of four, in its "Democracy Index". (via Wikipedia).

Socially and politically Singapore is hugely authoritarian. Australia and New Zealand are 3rd and 4th on the Heritage list, and I'd regard both of those as suspect in terms of freedom - but Singapore? Hong Kong? Really?

[NghtRppr]

The same argument can be made against a contract. One who breaches a contract is not initiating violence or making threats on your property.

A person binds themselves to the terms of a contract voluntarily. That isn't the case with intellectual property. Even if you make everyone you sell a CD to sign a contract that says "I will not redistribute the contents of this CD", you still haven't recreated intellectual property because there is nothing stopping a third party that didn't sign that contract from doing so. A contract is binding because it's voluntarily agreed to. You can't automatically bind third parties which is why intellectual property isn't legitimate.

I completely agree that it doesn't make any sense, just like piracy doesn't require that you are causing me physical harm, but rather take away FUTURE revenue from my mental work.

That's because you've been deluded into thinking that you own the products of your work. That's false though. If you steal from me a slab of marble and then chisel a statue out of it, do you own the statue now? No, the statue is mine and I also claim that you've destroyed my slab of marble and owe me for damages. Once you empty your head of that delusion, you will stop feeling entitled to own an idea just because you thought it up.

[jimbobway]

"Free State Initiative" is sounding more and more like some kind of Orwellian doublespeak.

Let's see... Isolate a population geographically and make them entirely dependent on resources provided by the State. Subject them to bizarre rules to control their behavior and confine them to regulated economic channels. And repeat this process all over the world, perpetuating a paradigm of neo-colonialism...

YES.  This sums up to exactly what I am thinking.  It is masking itself behind the word free when it is not really free.

[NghtRppr]

"Free State Initiative" is sounding more and more like some kind of Orwellian doublespeak.

Let's see... Isolate a population geographically and make them entirely dependent on resources provided by the State. Subject them to bizarre rules to control their behavior and confine them to regulated economic channels. And repeat this process all over the world, perpetuating a paradigm of neo-colonialism...

YES.  This sums up to exactly what I am thinking.  It is masking itself behind the word free when it is not really free.

It's a shame that the name is going to lead people into thinking it's somehow related to or modeled after the free state project. I hope nobody has any regrets after donating and then seeing what kind of ideology this guy is pushing.

[wb3]

A contract is entered into voluntarily. Intellectual property isn't. Even if you make everyone you sell a CD to sign a contract that says "I will not redistribute the contents of this CD", you still haven't recreated intellectual property because there is nothing stopping a third party that didn't sign that contract from doing so. A contract is binding because it's voluntarily agreed to. You can't automatically bind third parties which is why intellectual property isn't legitimate.

This makes perfect sense to me, however, judges seem to disagree. IP, at least in music, is due to laziness. A band creates a hit and rather than use the song to draw people to concerts, they want to sit home and collect money (for the rest of their life).

On the other hand, the law is starting to paint themselves into a corner. Soon people will be able to take advantage of these ridiculous rulings and bring down the whole house of cards. The big thing here is "work for hire", that the RIAA is now fighting. But with a few more rulings, People especially freelance employees, will claim IP, Publicity Rights (completely stupid), etc...  Workers will want control over their contributions to the work product in order to get paid for something forever.

If I am contracted to write a ISM Manual, I will keep the writes to that manual even after my death. There are even cases of people purposely letting crapy movies and songs out to collect the $150,000 dollar fine.

As an example:

All rights to this post are reserved, and only to be posted on bitcoin.org forum. No rights are granted in the reproduction of this post. Especially search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc... If this post is reproduced in and presented in a search engine, you may be sued and may have to pay fines up to $150,000 per reproduction. Thanks for understanding, as it took a significant amount of thought and time to produce this message.  Including the "ascii art" at the bottom.

  []
(.)(.)
\    /
 (  )
 |  |

[jimbobway]

I don't have time to debate the fancy website.  Stop saying Singapore an HK are the most free, economically free, whatever free.

I can prove it. See heritage.org/index.

Can I open a strip club in Singapore?  I cannot even sell chewing gum.  Give me a break.  If I sell medical marijuana there I'll be executed.  

No you cannot do these things, and I think gay porn is off the table too. So according to your standards until strip clubs, medical marijuana, gay porn and chewing gum is legal, we should not in any way distinguish Singapore from North-Korea. Don't you think that is a little bit unproductive? Sure, Singapore has authoritarian elements, but that's true of ALL states in the world today. This does not change the fact that Singapore and Hong Kong are the CLOSEST things we have Free States today. They have low taxes, very few (and well-functioning) regulations, well-protected property rights, very efficient bureaucracy and little corruption. But to you all this is unimportant as long as strip clubs and medical marijuana is illegal.

I would say that this is the reaction of typical spoiled Westerners who know nothing about what it means to not be able to feed one's family or to live without electricity and toil long hours for even the simplest of amenities. But to the billions of people who live in or very near poverty, whether gay porn and strip clubs are available are simply not an issue, because they can afford neither. To these people it would be a dream come true to be able to live in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Now, we certainly acknowledge that neither Singapore nor Hong Kong are full Free States, but that they are very close and by far closest in the world should be acknowledged and celebrated. The Free State Initiative will strive towards greater social liberty than in Singapore, although there is a very real chance that such liberties will not be fully allowed by the host country. But even if that turns out to be the case the Free State is still worth pursuing for all the reasons we write about in the website. If you don't think those very reasons that enable you to be spoiled and sit in front of your computer (that would not exist without economic freedom) and whine about chewing gum and medical marijuana are important, then frankly you do not deserve to live in a free country.

Ok, this is starting to get personal.  Attacking Westerners now, huh?   Claiming Westerners don't know how to feed their family or work long hours?  Claiming that I don't deserve to live in a free country?

I think you don't even know what a free country is.  From what I read, you think being free is being able to get as rich as possible without government interference.  There are other freedoms like freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, etc.  In places like Singapore these freedoms are restricted.  In places like the United States, it is now possible for gay people to become legally married.  People in the U.S. can organize and protest in front of the White House.  In Wisconsin there were protesters by the thousands in the state capitol and their rights were protected.

So I don't think you truly appreciate or know what freedom is.  All you care about is money.

[onarchy]

The same argument can be made against a contract. One who breaches a contract is not initiating violence or making threats on your property.

A person binds themselves to the terms of a contract voluntarily. That isn't the case with intellectual property.

This exact argument can be made against laws banning murder. The murderer can argue that he never signed a contract not to kill anyone. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient.

Even if you make everyone you sell a CD to sign a contract that says "I will not redistribute the contents of this CD", you still haven't recreated intellectual property because there is nothing stopping a third party that didn't sign that contract from doing so.

This exact argument can be made against third party resellers of items acquired by theft. He never signed a contract with the original party and should therefore be allowed to keep the stolen goods. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient. Illegal organ sales for instance, should by this logic be completely legal.

A contract is binding because it's voluntarily agreed to. You can't automatically bind third parties which is why intellectual property isn't legitimate.

The same can be said about a slave trader. The third party who buys a slave didn't originally enslave the person. Now that slave is property and so third party slavery is ok. He never agreed not to enslave that party. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient.

I completely agree that it doesn't make any sense, just like piracy doesn't require that you are causing me physical harm, but rather take away FUTURE revenue from my mental work.

That's because you've been deluded into thinking that you own the products of your work. That's false though. If you steal from me a slab of marble and then chisel a statue out of it, do you own the statue now? No, the statue is mine and I also claim that you've destroyed my slab of marble and owe me for damages. Once you empty your head of that delusion, you will stop feeling entitled to own an idea just because you thought it up.

The only thing you prove here is that the labor argument ALONE is not sufficient. I need to specify that it only applies to peaceful work, i.e. work that does not violate the property rights of others. But whose property do I violate when I write a book? In what way is sitting in my own home writing a book on my own computer which I bought with my own money that I earned fair and square not peaceful?

[onarchy]

I would say that this is the reaction of typical spoiled Westerners who know nothing about what it means to not be able to feed one's family or to live without electricity and toil long hours for even the simplest of amenities. But to the billions of people who live in or very near poverty, whether gay porn and strip clubs are available are simply not an issue, because they can afford neither. To these people it would be a dream come true to be able to live in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Now, we certainly acknowledge that neither Singapore nor Hong Kong are full Free States, but that they are very close and by far closest in the world should be acknowledged and celebrated. The Free State Initiative will strive towards greater social liberty than in Singapore, although there is a very real chance that such liberties will not be fully allowed by the host country. But even if that turns out to be the case the Free State is still worth pursuing for all the reasons we write about in the website. If you don't think those very reasons that enable you to be spoiled and sit in front of your computer (that would not exist without economic freedom) and whine about chewing gum and medical marijuana are important, then frankly you do not deserve to live in a free country.

Ok, this is starting to get personal.  Attacking Westerners now, huh?   Claiming Westerners don't know how to feed their family or work long hours?  Claiming that I don't deserve to live in a free country?

In addition to being spoiled you also seem not to be able to read. I didn't attack anyone. It is not an attack to tell the TRUTH. I didn't claim that you don't know HOW TO feed your family or work long hours. I said that you didn't know what it was like NOT to be able to feed your family despite long hours, and you don't know what it is like to toil long hours EVEN FOR THE SIMPLEST OF AMENITIES. And yes, I don't think you deserve to live in a free country when your only reaction to the Free State Initiative is whining about chewing gum in Singapore. In other words, you are actively working against the an organization that wants to create the freest state on earth, because Singapore bans chewing gum. Such a person obviously is spoiled rotten and does not deserve to live in freedom.

I think you don't even know what a free country is. From what I read, you think being free is being able to get as rich as possible without government interference.  There are other freedoms like freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, etc.  In places like Singapore these freedoms are restricted.  In places like the United States, it is now possible for gay people to become legally married.  People in the U.S. can organize and protest in front of the White House.  In Wisconsin there were protesters by the thousands in the state capitol and their rights were protected.

Did I say that the FSI was against any of these things? The Free State Initiative will work for peace on ALL levels, including for individuals to live in peace to do their own peaceful activities that others find offensive. No, you decided to react like a spoiled brat that I described Singapore "close to a Free State" because it bans chewing gum.

So I don't think you truly appreciate or know what freedom is.  All you care about is money.

When you don't have any money and are living in poverty I can assure you that all you care about is money too. Chewing gum comes far down on the list of priorities to these people.

[NghtRppr]

This exact argument can be made against laws banning murder. The murderer can argue that he never signed a contract not to kill anyone. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient.

Murder is covered under the non-aggression principle. There are no contracts needed for that.

This exact argument can be made against third party resellers of items acquired by theft. He never signed a contract with the original party and should therefore be allowed to keep the stolen goods. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient. Illegal organ sales for instance, should by this logic be completely legal.

There are only two legitimate ways to obtain property, by claiming unowned property or by buying it from the current owner. A person that receives stolen property from a third party has done neither so they don't legitimately own it.

The same can be said about a slave trader. The third party who buys a slave didn't originally enslave the person. Now that slave is property and so third party slavery is ok. He never agreed not to enslave that party. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient.

The argument against stolen property applies to slavery. I own myself and therefore only I can legitimately sell myself into slavery, which I see no problem with. If someone wants to sell theirself into slavery, have at it.

The only thing you prove here is that the labor argument ALONE is not sufficient. I need to specify that it only applies to peaceful work, i.e. work that does not violate the property rights of others. But whose property do I violate when I write a book? In what way is sitting in my own home writing a book on my own computer which I bought with my own money that I earned fair and square not peaceful?

Let's recap, shall we. You think that you own something because you mix your labor with it. I said that's false and I provided an example illustrating why. Then you said (I think) that you can mix your labor with a book and thereby own the book. No, either you already owned the book and writing in it is just doing whatever you want with your property or someone else owns the book and you just defaced their property. Writing in a book has nothing to do with owning the book. Of course, what exactly that has to do with owning what's written in the book is beyond me but it sounds like question-begging thus far.

[onarchy]

"Free State Initiative" is sounding more and more like some kind of Orwellian doublespeak.

Let's see... Isolate a population geographically and make them entirely dependent on resources provided by the State. Subject them to bizarre rules to control their behavior and confine them to regulated economic channels. And repeat this process all over the world, perpetuating a paradigm of neo-colonialism...

YES.  This sums up to exactly what I am thinking.  It is masking itself behind the word free when it is not really free.

Ok, I am now going to make a list of things that you will be able to do in the Free State that today is impossible in the United States or pretty much any country in the world:

- 100% privately owned roads
- 100% private health care
- 100% private education
- 100% private social security
- 100% private water and sewage
- 100% private airports and ports
- 100% private money (including Bitcoins) and free banking
- very close to 100% free immigration
- extremely low taxes, possibly zero (the goal is to have the Free State entirely financed by voluntary donations)
- zero regulations, other than that provided by private property


And yes, chewing gum will also be legal, although the private owners of the roads may have high fines for spitting it on their property. AND, if the host country does not have any objections, the Free State will also make drugs, alcohol, gay marriage, porn and full peaceful freedom of expression legal. There is a good chance that the host country as part of its charter will limit freedoms in one or more of these areas, but that will not be our fault.

Can you tell me exactly (be very specific now) in which way we are "masking behind the word free when it is not really free"?  What on this list I just mentioned is so horrible that you think we are virtually North Korea? Do you disagree that the list I just mentioned above makes the Free State *dramatically* freer than any state in the world today?

[kiba]

Can you tell me exactly (be very specific now) in which way we are "masking behind the word free when it is not really free"?  What on this list I just mentioned is so horrible that you think we are virtually North Korea? Do you disagree that the list I just mentioned above makes the Free State *dramatically* freer than any state in the world today?

Other than the fact that libertarians today oppose copyright and patents?

[onarchy]

This exact argument can be made against laws banning murder. The murderer can argue that he never signed a contract not to kill anyone. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient.

Murder is covered under the non-aggression principle. There are no contracts needed for that.

WHY does the non-aggression principle apply? And why is intellectual work supposedly not protected by this principle?

This exact argument can be made against third party resellers of items acquired by theft. He never signed a contract with the original party and should therefore be allowed to keep the stolen goods. Thus, this argument ALONE is not sufficient. Illegal organ sales for instance, should by this logic be completely legal.

There are only two legitimate ways to obtain property, by claiming unowned property or by buying it from the current owner. A person that receives stolen property from a third party has done neither so they don't legitimately own it.

Why does a person own his own body? He neither bought owned property nor claimed unowned property. I would claim that it is because he as an individual continuously mixes his WORK with the natural state and thereby acquire property rights. Simply "claiming" unowned property is not enough. I "claim" to own the entire universe that is as of yet unclaimed (i.e. the vast majority of it). Why is this not sufficient?

I own myself and therefore only I can legitimately sell myself into slavery, which I see no problem with.

WHY do you own yourself?

Let's recap, shall we. You think that you own something because you mix your labor with it.

Peacefully, yes. I.e. mixing labor with stolen goods or with slaves does not give rise to property.

I said that's false and I provided an example illustrating why.

You gave an example that I agreed with. You gave an example of work that involves violating others and hence is illegitimate. We don't disagree on that, so you can't use it as an argument against the labor theory.

Then you said (I think) that you can mix your labor with a book and thereby own the book. No, either you already owned the book and writing in it is just doing whatever you want with your property or someone else owns the book and you just defaced their property. Writing in a book has nothing to do with owning the book. Of course, what exactly that has to do with owning what's written in the book is beyond me but it sounds like question-begging thus far.

Here you are explicitly denying the existence of information, and then we are back to why information should be respected in other rights such as in contracts or when threats are made. As could use your argument above and say that I was not really making a threat. I was just peacefully waving my gun around while making a noise with my mouth: "give me all your money or I'll kill you!" If you perceived that as a threat then that's your problem. The same argument applies to contracts. If you deny the existence of information and only focus on physical actions, then I didn't sign a contract, I only write doodles on a piece of paper. Why is it ok to ignore the information content of a book, but not the information content of a contract or a threat?

[jimbobway]

I would say that this is the reaction of typical spoiled Westerners who know nothing about what it means to not be able to feed one's family or to live without electricity and toil long hours for even the simplest of amenities. But to the billions of people who live in or very near poverty, whether gay porn and strip clubs are available are simply not an issue, because they can afford neither. To these people it would be a dream come true to be able to live in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Now, we certainly acknowledge that neither Singapore nor Hong Kong are full Free States, but that they are very close and by far closest in the world should be acknowledged and celebrated. The Free State Initiative will strive towards greater social liberty than in Singapore, although there is a very real chance that such liberties will not be fully allowed by the host country. But even if that turns out to be the case the Free State is still worth pursuing for all the reasons we write about in the website. If you don't think those very reasons that enable you to be spoiled and sit in front of your computer (that would not exist without economic freedom) and whine about chewing gum and medical marijuana are important, then frankly you do not deserve to live in a free country.

Ok, this is starting to get personal.  Attacking Westerners now, huh?   Claiming Westerners don't know how to feed their family or work long hours?  Claiming that I don't deserve to live in a free country?

In addition to being spoiled you also seem not to be able to read. I didn't attack anyone. It is not an attack to tell the TRUTH. I didn't claim that you don't know HOW TO feed your family or work long hours. I said that you didn't know what it was like NOT to be able to feed your family despite long hours, and you don't know what it is like to toil long hours EVEN FOR THE SIMPLEST OF AMENITIES. And yes, I don't think you deserve to live in a free country when your only reaction to the Free State Initiative is whining about chewing gum in Singapore. In other words, you are actively working against the an organization that wants to create the freest state on earth, because Singapore bans chewing gum. Such a person obviously is spoiled rotten and does not deserve to live in freedom.

I think you don't even know what a free country is. From what I read, you think being free is being able to get as rich as possible without government interference.  There are other freedoms like freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, etc.  In places like Singapore these freedoms are restricted.  In places like the United States, it is now possible for gay people to become legally married.  People in the U.S. can organize and protest in front of the White House.  In Wisconsin there were protesters by the thousands in the state capitol and their rights were protected.

Did I say that the FSI was against any of these things? The Free State Initiative will work for peace on ALL levels, including for individuals to live in peace to do their own peaceful activities that others find offensive. No, you decided to react like a spoiled brat that I described Singapore "close to a Free State" because it bans chewing gum.

So I don't think you truly appreciate or know what freedom is.  All you care about is money.

When you don't have any money and are living in poverty I can assure you that all you care about is money too. Chewing gum comes far down on the list of priorities to these people.

You nothing about me and you obviously can't read either.  Again, you are generalizing and stereotyping Westerners.  You don't even know if I am a Westerner or if I am or have lived in poverty.  You don't know if I have toil for long hours trying to get basic amenities.  You come to all of these conclusions because you have a huge chip on your shoulder.  Clearly you are a bigoted person who has a distaste for Westerners.  

The reason why I brought up chewing gum is because that is where it starts.  Next you there will be rules on how to flush the toilet, how to marry, what to wear or not wear, how to walk, etc.  Each freedom is being taking away until there is little or no more freedom.

Here is some bigoted bullshit from your website that need specific examples:

 "In the West diversity is hailed in all areas except in material matters. Economic diversity is generally considered a huge evil and as a consequence Western countries set up huge immigration barriers that keep all the poor people on the outside, without access to the opportunities to improve their lives. In this way self-righteous Westerners are able to maintain the illusion of social equality. Out of sight, out of mind. As long as there are no visibly poor people in the West, people can pretend that there is material equality, even though there are still just as many poor people that just happen to live somewhere else. And worse: these poor are working in factories with bad conditions in their own countries to produce goods that are consumed in the West. In this way Westerners get to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor while preaching social equality."

More bigoted bullshit that needs specific examples:

"Western nations were redesigned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago, with the intention of taming government once and for all. They failed and the Western countries have largely returned to the feudal and corporatist welfare states that dominated earlier times."

[onarchy]

You nothing about me and you obviously can't read either.  Again, you are generalizing and stereotyping Westerners.  You don't even know if I am a Westerner or if I am or have lived in poverty.  You don't know if I have toil for long hours trying to get basic amenities.  You come to all of these conclusions because you have a huge chip on your shoulder.  Clearly you are a bigoted person who has a distaste for Westerners.

It's true that I don't know that you are from the West for sure, or not, and if you're a poor farmer from Bangladesh I apologize. HOWEVER, you DO have access to electricity, computers and the internet. Based on that fact, in combination with your spoiled attitude, I concluded that you are probably NOT a poor farmer from a poor country ravaged by bad governance, corruption, taxes, regulations, war and civil unrest. Please correct me if I am wrong.

The reason why I brought up chewing gum is because that is where it starts.  Next you there will be rules on how to flush the toilet, how to marry, what to wear or not wear, how to walk, etc.  Each freedom is being taking away until there is little or no more freedom.

So rather than being slightly more humble and actually asking "how will you prevent freedom from slipping away?" you just chose with zero calories of effort to dismiss the whole thing as trash. Maybe I have a very good answer to your concern, but you never gave me the chance to answer before you drew false conclusions. And you have the audacity to call ME bigoted.

Here is some bigoted bullshit from your website that need specific examples:

 "In the West diversity is hailed in all areas except in material matters. Economic diversity is generally considered a huge evil and as a consequence Western countries set up huge immigration barriers that keep all the poor people on the outside, without access to the opportunities to improve their lives. In this way self-righteous Westerners are able to maintain the illusion of social equality. Out of sight, out of mind. As long as there are no visibly poor people in the West, people can pretend that there is material equality, even though there are still just as many poor people that just happen to live somewhere else. And worse: these poor are working in factories with bad conditions in their own countries to produce goods that are consumed in the West. In this way Westerners get to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor while preaching social equality."

Can you tell me exactly what is UNTRUE about the above statement? Isn't it true that diversity is hailed in the West, except when it comes to "social inequality"? Isn't "social inequality" considered a huge evil in the West? Isn't it true that there is virtually no free immigration to the West from poor countries? Isn't it true that Westerners enjoy the fruits of low wages by workers who get wages and have working conditions which if they lived in their own countries would be appalled by? Exactly what in the above statement is untrue?

More bigoted bullshit that needs specific examples:

"Western nations were redesigned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago, with the intention of taming government once and for all. They failed and the Western countries have largely returned to the feudal and corporatist welfare states that dominated earlier times."

Do you think it is untrue that Western nations were redesigned during the Enlightenment 200+ years ago? What about the US constitution from 1787? That's some 224 years ago. Do you think that there is much left of the original enlightenment ideal of minimal government in the United States?

[onarchy]

This does nothing to make me feel any better about the project... "Private" means the somebody else owns and controls what would otherwise be public infrastructure. There is no commons in this scenario. Everyone shops at the company store...

Ah, but if you look at the slogan of the Free State Initiative it says "prosperity through PEACEFUL cooperation." And in the website it is emphasized that the goal is 100% PEACE (i.e. freedom from coercion/violence). You may not like a peaceful society, and that's ok, but to say that the website is dishonest? It is very specific about what kind of freedom it will foster, namely freedom from violence and coercion, i.e. peace. That's it, it's not freedom from having to earn a living, or freedom from having to live as a finite being in a finite world.

[PLATO]

I'm glad to see this thread getting interest.

What happens when I put a roadblock on my "Private Roads" for the lulz?

Onarchy - Have you ever read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"? Interactions between states, quasinational entities, individuals etc. are all governed by a 'Common Economic Protocol' - based on the libertarian ideal of "you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt me." It sounds like you are trying to set something in this vein up - am I correct in summing up your objection to information freedom as, "IP holds value, so allowing 'piracy' is tantamount to allowing economic theft from the rightsholder."

[wb3]

If everything was private, there would be very little for free. Toll Roads, Pay Bathrooms, etc...  I kind of like the Pay Bathroom idea.

[sirius]

I don't think IP laws are economically viable and thus they wouldn't exist if the law was formed in a free market process. Ie. justice insurance companies wouldn't be willing to sell insurances that compensate for copying of your work without permission. But that's impossible to tell before we see a society based on free market common law.

Ok, I am now going to make a list of things that you will be able to do in the Free State that today is impossible in the United States or pretty much any country in the world:

- 100% privately owned roads
- 100% private health care
- 100% private education
- 100% private social security
- 100% private water and sewage
- 100% private airports and ports
- 100% private money (including Bitcoins) and free banking
- very close to 100% free immigration
- extremely low taxes, possibly zero (the goal is to have the Free State entirely financed by voluntary donations)
- zero regulations, other than that provided by private property

Anyway, I think this is a good enough reason to give it a try. It would still be way better than any other state in the world. IP laws can (hopefully) be changed later if they are found unjust.

[kiba]

If everything was private, there would be very little for free. Toll Roads, Pay Bathrooms, etc...  I kind of like the Pay Bathroom idea.

Clean bathrooms are nice.

[NghtRppr]

WHY does the non-aggression principle apply? And why is intellectual work supposedly not protected by this principle?

Because murder is a form of aggression and copying information isn't.

WHY do you own yourself?

I have the best claim to my body. Everyone else is a latecomer with respect to me and my body.

Here you are explicitly denying the existence of information

No, I'm not. I'm denying that it's a form of property. If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

[onarchy]

WHY does the non-aggression principle apply? And why is intellectual work supposedly not protected by this principle?

Because murder is a form of aggression and copying information isn't.

Why isn't copying the work of someone else against their will not a form of aggression, whereas a threat (which is also just information) while pointing a gun peacefully at you IS a form of aggression?

WHY do you own yourself?

I have the best claim to my body. Everyone else is a latecomer with respect to me and my body.

That's not true. The atoms in your body has probably been claimed hundreds of times by other people, not to mention your parents. They produced you and fed you. Why don't they own you and can sell you as a slave if they like?

Here you are explicitly denying the existence of information

No, I'm not. I'm denying that it's a form of property.

Why?

If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

Why not?

[wb3]

Quote
If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

Why not?


Because you put it in the public domain. If you disagree, you must not have ever told somebody about what you heard on the news or in a newspaper. If you did, you violated your own principles.

[onarchy]

I don't think IP laws are economically viable and thus they wouldn't exist if the law was formed in a free market process.

Laws are not formed in a free market process. E.g. laws against murder don't arise in a free market, a free market ASSUMES laws against murder. If you mean that laws are just like any other commodity then I am sure that you will be able to find societies where it is "economically viable" to enslave, say, 10% of the population and to murder another 10% who are not fit to contribute to society. 80% say so. That does however not make it right.


When that is said I will grant you that BOTH the IP laws of today AND the practices of the various companies in the industry are bad. A major problem is in fact lack of micropayment, which in turn is largely caused by the insane regulations and taxations on money and banking. Thus, indirectly much of the cause of the current debacle on copyright are the banking laws and regulations and the taxes.

With micropayment systems much of the problems associated with piracy would be almost non-existent.

Another major problem is with industry who haven't understood that most people are actually NOT pirates. Most people respect intellectual property and want to pay for it just like they would any product. The problem is that the industry is punishing people who are legal. Where do you see a gigantic warning against piracy? On every DVD that is sold, i.e. those who actually PAY for the product and DON'T pirate are harassed by the industry. Furthermore, legal copies often have copy protection and time zone restrictions, which means that the legal product is LESS convenient and LESS available than the pirated copy. And often you simply CAN'T get the product via internet, you MUST buy a physical copy of a DVD that you care nothing about and that needs to be shipped halfway around the globe. Furthermore without proper payment systems there are no per usage payment for software. In some cases you have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a product you want to use 4 times. And why do you have to pay full price for a Blue Ray version of the movie when you bought the DVD? Here you're paying for the same information (the IP) twice, and for no good reason. And if you lose the DVD too bad for you, you have to buy a completely new one.

All this is experienced as deeply unfair by consumers and rightfully so. Part of the problem is with the laws (e.g. banking laws) and part of the problem is with the dinosaur industry that is being unreasonable. We see that as somewhat ok consumer solutions arise people do prove that they don't want to be parasitic criminals who pirate other people's hard work. spotify.com is a brilliant example which has more than 1 million paying customers now, mostly from Scandinavia. In Sweden the music industry is now making more money through Spotify than through regular channels. And remember, Sweden was the home of Pirate Bay. Once fairly reasonable solutions are available, people choose them.

The key here from a customer service point of view is not to treat your regular customer as a criminal. Look at ordinary shops. There is maybe 2% shop lifting there, and you can quite easily get away with stealing, but most people don't AND most importantly: the shop owners will rather have 3% theft than to treat their customers as criminals with draconian anti-theft measures. In other words, the ordinary customer should NOT notice any anti-theft measures (i.e. guards who searches everyone on their way out) and this is where the music and film industry has simply misunderstood everything. You cannot avoid a certain amount of piracy, but treat your paying customers with respect and provide them a good service and most people will buy, not steal.

Of course the anti-IP libertarians are not exactly doing people any favors. They are spreading an idea that goes much further than to criticize the bad service attitude of the IP industry. They are in fact spreading the idea that piracy is NOT MORALLY WRONG. In essence they are trying to normalize pillaging and violation, and by so doing they not only contribute to a more sinister form of IP theft, but actually pushes many of the pro-IP people towards draconian measures.

Ok, I am now going to make a list of things that you will be able to do in the Free State that today is impossible in the United States or pretty much any country in the world:

- 100% privately owned roads
- 100% private health care
- 100% private education
- 100% private social security
- 100% private water and sewage
- 100% private airports and ports
- 100% private money (including Bitcoins) and free banking
- very close to 100% free immigration
- extremely low taxes, possibly zero (the goal is to have the Free State entirely financed by voluntary donations)
- zero regulations, other than that provided by private property

Anyway, I think this is a good enough reason to give it a try. It would still be way better than any other state in the world. IP laws can (hopefully) be changed later if they are found unjust.

This is true, and as of today The Free State Initiative is the only project where Bitcoins will be accepted as a fully free and legal payment without any legal hindrances. The Free State Initiative currently accepts and a future Free State will accept donations in Bitcoins to show this. Yet, despite this not a single person in the Bitcoin-community has donated a single Bitcoin to the initiative. I find that very, very strange.

[onarchy]

Quote
If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

Why not?

Because you put it in the public domain.

This is more or less identical to the argument used by conservative islamists on rape. If a woman puts herself in the public domain (i.e. doesn't wear clothes that hides her body) then she is inviting and legitimizing rape. In fact, this is regularly used as an argument in muslim gang rape cases. They argue that by wearing sexy clothes she is a whore who have already volunteered to sex by putting the image of her body in the public domain.

If you disagree, you must not have ever told somebody about what you heard on the news or in a newspaper. If you did, you violated your own principles.

This comes under "fair use." Precisely because information does not exist independently of consciousness and that conscious work is required to (re-)animate information there has to be strong limitations on IP and a lot of leeway in its usage. That's why IP could and should never be expanded beyond a) economic exploitation and b) protection of personal privacy.

[MoonShadow]

Quote
If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

Why not?

Because you put it in the public domain.

This is more or less identical to the argument used by conservative islamists on rape.

That makes even less sense than calling copyright infringement "piracy" in order to compare it to the violent mugging of a trade ship at sea.

The events are not comparable.  Copyright infringement is the violation of a state granted monopoly on data.  No physical harm, or threat of harm, comes to those who claim the copyright.  Nor are they denied the use of their data themselves for it.  Copyright has moved far from it's original intent of the framers, and of it's use in the Constitution; and even they were wary about copyright, and were very clear that they did not consider it property, nor the control of it as a natural right. 

Lacking the support of the state, private data is only protected so long as the owner can do so.  By publishing it, they are making it public by definition.  A person can protect their personal or trade secrets with strong encryption, but protecting data that has been released to the public is much harder to do, and cannot be reasonably enforced without an unnatural state supported monopoly.  I said before that IP would be the first to pass away because in anything close to an anarchist state, the public would be unconcerned about the violation of laws that only exist because of the monopolies granted by a prior state.

[onarchy]

No physical harm, or threat of harm, comes to those who claim the copyright.

Unless of course you count all the money they DON'T make when people pirate their books and works. But in any case, why should it matter that they don't come to PHYSICAL harm? Why is it that only atoms matter to human existence, and hence only atoms that gives rise to property rights?

Nor are they denied the use of their data themselves for it.

A woman under Sharia is also allowed to be fully naked under her Burqa.

By publishing it, they are making it public by definition.

Again, that's exactly what the muslim gang rapists say too. Why is it made public (in the sense not owned by anyone) just because it becomes publicly *available*?

A person can protect their personal or trade secrets with strong encryption, but protecting data that has been released to the public is much harder to do, and cannot be reasonably enforced without an unnatural state supported monopoly.

This is identical to what Islamists say about women who go outside without a male family member. A woman who goes outside alone is begging for rape and deserves all she gets. She has become public property because she's made herself publicly available, and protecting her is practically impossible. Therefore rape is ok.

I said before that IP would be the first to pass away because in anything close to an anarchist state, the public would be unconcerned about the violation of laws that only exist because of the monopolies granted by a prior state.

Actually the case of Spotify proves otherwise. The same is true for ring tones for mobiles. The very same kids who don't hesitate to download a movie without paying for it is willing to pay up to 3-4 dollars for a jingle that lasts only a few seconds. Why is that? It is due to the inherent decency of most people that they recognize that stealing is wrong, and that they don't want to make themselves into thieves for a few dollars.

[NghtRppr]

Why isn't copying the work of someone else against their will not a form of aggression, whereas a threat (which is also just information) while pointing a gun peacefully at you IS a form of aggression?

It's coercion.

That's not true. The atoms in your body has probably been claimed hundreds of times by other people, not to mention your parents. They produced you and fed you. Why don't they own you and can sell you as a slave if they like?

When people die their are atoms abandoned and become unowned. As soon as my body goes from a lump of matter to "me", I am in possession of my body. My parents are still latecomers, even if late means only a split second later.

Here you are explicitly denying the existence of information

No, I'm not. I'm denying that it's a form of property.

Why?

Information isn't property because it isn't scare or rivalrous. If you have a car and I take that car from you then I've deprived you that car. If I make an exact copy of that car then you can still drive the car. The only reason why we have property rights is because when disputes arise and we need some objective way of deciding who owns what. If anyone could have as much of anything they wanted, a mansion, a yacht, a space ship, a house on mars, whatever, it wouldn't make any sense to have property rights. I could never deprive you of those things because they are unlimited.

If you write in a book you own, you still own the book and the writings, the physical copy itself, not the information contained therein.

Why not?

See above. Anyways, I've successfully shown that mixing your labor with something doesn't make it yours. If you steal my marble and make a statue, you don't own the statue. You owe me for damages to my marble. If you disagree then you can give me a counterexample where mixing your labor with something thereby makes it yours but simply claiming it as yours won't do. Of course, trying to offer a novel you wrote as an example would only beg the question since that's the issue we're arguing over.

[MoonShadow]

No physical harm, or threat of harm, comes to those who claim the copyright.

Unless of course you count all the money they DON'T make when people pirate their books and works. But in any case, why should it matter that they don't come to PHYSICAL harm? Why is it that only atoms matter to human existence, and hence only atoms that gives rise to property rights?

Because property rights have a direct relation to 'primary use'.  Said another way, it's theft to steal my bike, because I can't use it.  You have harmed me by denying me the use of my own things.  Data doesn't have the same issues, as I can copy your bike design for my own use and never deny you your own bike.  The state monopoly that is copyright originally existed to incentivise the producers to produce more, by offering the possibility of making money for a short time off of the works, but even that ended after 15 years originally.  Now it's the life of the author plus 70 years, and doesn't benefit the author except by proxy, as the copyright holders are invariablely a publishing company.  Companies don't have rights, only people do; and even the children of the author don't have a right to unearned benefits.

Actually the case of Spotify proves otherwise. The same is true for ring tones for mobiles. The very same kids who don't hesitate to download a movie without paying for it is willing to pay up to 3-4 dollars for a jingle that lasts only a few seconds. Why is that? It is due to the inherent decency of most people that they recognize that stealing is wrong, and that they don't want to make themselves into thieves for a few dollars.

Nonesense.  Spotify works because it's actually more convenient than doing the work of searching for the desired ringtone.  Spotify's business model is dependent upon access, not copyrights.  They could charge for public domain ringtones as well, so long as it's easier to get the desired MIDI version of Bach than it would be to either find an artist who has already done it or do it themselves.

[NghtRppr]

Unless of course you count all the money they DON'T make when people pirate their books and works. But in any case, why should it matter that they don't come to PHYSICAL harm? Why is it that only atoms matter to human existence, and hence only atoms that gives rise to property rights?

The real question is, why do I owe you anything other than to not physically harm you and your property unless in self-defense, or coerce you? Do I also owe it to you to not hurt your feelings?

[PLATO]

bitcoin2cash: In your dream world where we can conjure up houses, cars, arts, etc. the only argument that would exist for 'you can't copy my art' is 'it hurts my feelings.'
Onarchy: Note that you can't really count the money people DON'T make due to piracy, as many pirates will never purchase the work regardless.

[jimbobway]

"Free State Initiative" is sounding more and more like some kind of Orwellian doublespeak.

Let's see... Isolate a population geographically and make them entirely dependent on resources provided by the State. Subject them to bizarre rules to control their behavior and confine them to regulated economic channels. And repeat this process all over the world, perpetuating a paradigm of neo-colonialism...

YES.  This sums up to exactly what I am thinking.  It is masking itself behind the word free when it is not really free.

Ok, I am now going to make a list of things that you will be able to do in the Free State that today is impossible in the United States or pretty much any country in the world:

- 100% privately owned roads
- 100% private health care
- 100% private education
- 100% private social security
- 100% private water and sewage
- 100% private airports and ports
- 100% private money (including Bitcoins) and free banking
- very close to 100% free immigration
- extremely low taxes, possibly zero (the goal is to have the Free State entirely financed by voluntary donations)
- zero regulations, other than that provided by private property


And yes, chewing gum will also be legal, although the private owners of the roads may have high fines for spitting it on their property. AND, if the host country does not have any objections, the Free State will also make drugs, alcohol, gay marriage, porn and full peaceful freedom of expression legal. There is a good chance that the host country as part of its charter will limit freedoms in one or more of these areas, but that will not be our fault.

Can you tell me exactly (be very specific now) in which way we are "masking behind the word free when it is not really free"?  What on this list I just mentioned is so horrible that you think we are virtually North Korea? Do you disagree that the list I just mentioned above makes the Free State *dramatically* freer than any state in the world today?

I think what turned me off about the freestateinitiative was because of how the site utilized Singapore and Hong Kong as examples to strive for.  Also, the freestateinitiative seemed to look down on western governments as failures when for some people it is a beacon of light.

In addition, there are a lot of concepts on your website that needs to be clarified.  For example, making things private is not the way to be free.  I think a free state should instead revolve its core principles on basic human rights, which should be guaranteed somehow to people living in the free state.

Some loop holes that really bother me is that what if there was someone how owned 100% of the water resources, 100% or the roads, etc?  That would be a monopoly and he could charge fees, deny travel, or limit water resources.

Anyways...

[onarchy]

I'm glad to see this thread getting interest.

What happens when I put a roadblock on my "Private Roads" for the lulz?

Why would you as a capitalist do something like that? Those who build roads do so to make money, not to harass people.

Onarchy - Have you ever read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"?

I have not.

Interactions between states, quasinational entities, individuals etc. are all governed by a 'Common Economic Protocol' - based on the libertarian ideal of "you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt me." It sounds like you are trying to set something in this vein up - am I correct in summing up your objection to information freedom as, "IP holds value, so allowing 'piracy' is tantamount to allowing economic theft from the rightsholder."

Well, yeah, sort of, except that I base it on the Lockean labor theory of property. Property arises from such action, and there are for humans TWO ways of acting: physically and consciously. Since we humans are *primarily* conscious beings and that most of what we call human nature pertain to the mind, it makes sense that the work of the mind is protected by rights just as much as our physical bodies and work. Thus I don't accept Marxist materialism. Karl Marx is in many respects the originator of modern libertarian anti-IP stance. Marx argued that ONLY physical work gives rise to value. Therefore he argued that capitalists and leaders were parasites because they were largely mind workers. Physically a leader sits in a chair all day picking up phones. Therefore a leader should not be paid more for his work than a secretary which also sits in her chair all day picking up phones. Since a leader gets paid more than a secretary he is deemed an exploiter that uses government monopoly to coerce profit out of the poor workers who do all the physical work (and thereby create all the value).

Modern anti-IP libertarians accept the basic materialist philosophy of Marxism, but have traded his labor theory of value with a free market theory of value. The result is that the libertarians use exactly the same arguments against authors and musicians as Marx earlier used against capitalists and managers. Indeed, we've even heard people in this debate stating their motivation for their anti-IP stance: information is a common. Hence they are information Marxists.

I think it is very important for libertarians to learn about their Marxist roots and whether that's really the kind of ideas they want to propagate in the world. ALL anti-IP libertarians I have run into are Marxist materialists, i.e. they deny the existence of the mind (at least in an ethical context) and only acknowledge matter as the source of property. But why is materialism true? It is a false philosophy in so many areas that leads to horribly evil conclusion: materialism denies the existence of mind altogether, and since consciousness is an illusion and has no real existence, then free will must be an illusion, and hence coercion is an illusion. Therefore materialism ultimately leads to a form of dictatorship through the denial of the existence of the mind.

[error]

This is getting pretty twisted.

I can't think of anywhere else on the planet that will throw you in prison or shoot you for having an unlicensed copy of Windows. I'm disturbed that anybody would create such a place.

[kiba]

Modern anti-IP libertarians accept the basic materialist philosophy of Marxism, but have traded his labor theory of value with a free market theory of value. The result is that the libertarians use exactly the same arguments against authors and musicians as Marx earlier used against capitalists and managers. Indeed, we've even heard people in this debate stating their motivation for their anti-IP stance: information is a common. Hence they are information Marxists.

What utter nonsense. My writers get paid for their work. I still earn revenue from my site.

Information is not a common. Information is always privately owned.

[kiba]

I think it is very important for libertarians to learn about their Marxist roots and whether that's really the kind of ideas they want to propagate in the world. ALL anti-IP libertarians I have run into are Marxist materialists, i.e. they deny the existence of the mind (at least in an ethical context) and only acknowledge matter as the source of property. But why is materialism true? It is a false philosophy in so many areas that leads to horribly evil conclusion: materialism denies the existence of mind altogether, and since consciousness is an illusion and has no real existence, then free will must be an illusion, and hence coercion is an illusion. Therefore materialism ultimately leads to a form of dictatorship through the denial of the existence of the mind.

Free will is an illusion because we live in a deterministic universe. We have minds. I see no contradiction.

[onarchy]

I think it is very important for libertarians to learn about their Marxist roots and whether that's really the kind of ideas they want to propagate in the world. ALL anti-IP libertarians I have run into are Marxist materialists, i.e. they deny the existence of the mind (at least in an ethical context) and only acknowledge matter as the source of property. But why is materialism true? It is a false philosophy in so many areas that leads to horribly evil conclusion: materialism denies the existence of mind altogether, and since consciousness is an illusion and has no real existence, then free will must be an illusion, and hence coercion is an illusion. Therefore materialism ultimately leads to a form of dictatorship through the denial of the existence of the mind.

Free will is an illusion because we live in a deterministic universe. We have minds. I see no contradiction.

Your entire paragraph is one giant contraction. You are talking AS IF you have free will. You are debating AS IF this makes a difference. But if you are truly determined, just like a rock, then why should I trust whatever comes out of your mouth or keyboard any more than I trust a rock? If you're determined to mean what you mean then obviously I can place just as much credibility in your thought as I can in the credibility of the ideas of the wind or a rock or a cheese.

Free will is the precondition of any rational argument, because why argue if you are determined in advance on what the outcome of that argument will be? And why should a deterministic process have the ability to gain knowledge?

[onarchy]

Modern anti-IP libertarians accept the basic materialist philosophy of Marxism, but have traded his labor theory of value with a free market theory of value. The result is that the libertarians use exactly the same arguments against authors and musicians as Marx earlier used against capitalists and managers. Indeed, we've even heard people in this debate stating their motivation for their anti-IP stance: information is a common. Hence they are information Marxists.

What utter nonsense. My writers get paid for their work. I still earn revenue from my site.

Information is not a common. Information is always privately owned.

If information is always owned (i.e. someone's property), how come there should be no property rights for information?

[kiba]

I information is always owned (i.e. someone's property), how come there should be no property rights for information?

There is. You just don't own the musics I brought.

[onarchy]

I information is always owned (i.e. someone's property), how come there should be no property rights for information?

There is. You just don't own the musics I brought.

But suppose that my music gets stolen (someone steals my hard disk with all my music on) and the thief uploads all my music. Do I still own that music, or is it now ok for everyone to copy and distribute that music?

[kiba]

But suppose that my music gets stolen (someone steals my hard disk with all my music on) and the thief uploads all my music. Do I still own that music, or is it now ok for everyone to copy and distribute that music?

You can just download the music and viola! You have your musics.

You lost out on potential profit though.(Not to mention that he stolen your harddrive)

[Anonymous]

I information is always owned (i.e. someone's property), how come there should be no property rights for information?

There is. You just don't own the musics I brought.

But suppose that my music gets stolen (someone steals my hard disk with all my music on) and the thief uploads all my music. Do I still own that music, or is it now ok for everyone to copy and distribute that music?

The music is only a template for the medium which it is written. The ownership of the medium supersedes its form and its supposed ownership.

[Anonymous]

In addition, let's say Jane writes a book. Bob borrows the book from Jane in a formal agreement that nobody else must see it. Bob loses the book and John reads it and spreads it everywhere. Bob broke the contract; however, whatever John does is free game. He has no knowledge of said agreement and as far as he is concerned and the mediums which the book is written should remain in the hands of the medium holders.

I believe in copyright but only in a contract-basis. Hence, the contracts can be broken.

[onarchy]

This is getting pretty twisted.

I can't think of anywhere else on the planet that will throw you in prison or shoot you for having an unlicensed copy of Windows. I'm disturbed that anybody would create such a place.

The whole question boils down to this: should it be a right to have your WORK protected by property rights? Because what you find so twisted is that all the people who work at Microsoft actually should get PAID for the work they do by the people who USE their work. Basically it is just a rationalization of theft. All people have a strong desire to be a GOOD person. Therefore a criminal has a very strong incentive to justify his violations of other people, so that he can hide behind a veil of good conscience that he is the good guy and his victims the bad guys. We see it with rapists ("she wanted it, she got what she deserved"), we see it with thieves ("all people are thieves, I'm just taking back my rightful share of the loot"), murderers do it ("he was lowly animal, he deserved to die") and the same is true with all violators. Even Hitler viewed himself as one of the most moral people to ever have walked the Earth. Anti-IP arguments are basically designed to justify parasiting on creators, and are very often heartfully embraced by people who like to download stuff without paying for them. The morality of information Marxism allows them to do it, not only with a clear conscience, but to view anyone who defends the victims as "pretty twisted."

Or are you denying that someone at Microsoft made something that was of value to the unlicensed user? If it was not of value, why did he acquire a copy? What do you normally do with things that are of value to you that someone else has labored hard to create? You BUY it. Obviously the people at Microsoft do all this hard work in order to get PAID for their work, and by deliberately NOT paying for a copy of Windows despite their explicit intention that you should pay for their work, you are exploiting the fruits of their labor against their will without paying. Any remotely decent human being understands that this is parasitism, and it is NOT "pretty twisted" to defend a creator's right to make money from his own creation by restriction distribution rights.

[PLATO]

Creighto - If I download your movie, it doesn't economically hurt you directly. However, if I code a new CPU miner that automagically gets 1GH/s on my Pentium, and someone steals and releases the source code, many people would use it, and I would get fewer bitcoins from my invention. Shouldn't the robber be punished, if possible?

[Anonymous]

John creates a wheel out of wood. I like John's wheel. After viewing it, I decide to make my own.With MY wood, MY labor and MY tools I create an identical wheel. Have I really stolen anything from John?

[error]

Don't put words in my mouth. I paid for my copy of Windows. (I regret it now, but that's another story.)

[kiba]

The whole question boils down to this: should it be a right to have your WORK protected by property rights? Because what you find so twisted is that all the people who work at Microsoft actually should get PAID for the work they do by the people who USE their work. Basically it is just a rationalization of theft. All people have a strong desire to be a GOOD person. Therefore a criminal has a very strong incentive to justify his violations of other people, so that he can hide behind a veil of good conscience that he is the good guy and his victims the bad guys. We see it with rapists ("she wanted it, she got what she deserved"), we see it with thieves ("all people are thieves, I'm just taking back my rightful share of the loot"), murderers do it ("he was lowly animal, he deserved to die") and the same is true with all violators. Even Hitler viewed himself as one of the most moral people to ever have walked the Earth. Anti-IP arguments are basically designed to justify parasiting on creators, and are very often heartfully embraced by people who like to download stuff without paying for them. The morality of information Marxism allows them to do it, not only with a clear conscience, but to view anyone who defends the victims as "pretty twisted."

I have ads revenues and I earned bitcoin for my work. That's good enough justification for me. I don't need somebody to tell me that I can't make a living without copyright.

Go die in the marketplace.

[Anonymous]

This is getting pretty twisted.

I can't think of anywhere else on the planet that will throw you in prison or shoot you for having an unlicensed copy of Windows. I'm disturbed that anybody would create such a place.

Obviously the people at Microsoft do all this hard work in order to get PAID for their work, and by deliberately NOT paying for a copy of Windows despite their explicit intention that you should pay for their work, you are exploiting the fruits of their labor against their will without paying.

John Doe can run all day on a treadmill all in the intention of making a few hundred bucks. Frankly, I couldn't care less if he thinks his sweat-infused breathes are worth all the money in the world. I am not paying.

Welcome to the free-market, bud.

[onarchy]

But suppose that my music gets stolen (someone steals my hard disk with all my music on) and the thief uploads all my music. Do I still own that music, or is it now ok for everyone to copy and distribute that music?

You can just download the music and viola! You have your musics.

You lost out on potential profit though.(Not to mention that he stolen your harddrive)

So in other words, you use the term "own" in a completely empty manner. To own information means to be able to control it. If you cannot legally use force to control your ownership of information then you don't own it. What you are describing is ownership of your hard drive, not the information on that hard drive. When you say that you "own" the music you're really saying that you are allowed to freely reconfigure the content of your hard drive, but that's it. But that's not INFORMATION rights. Information rights cannot be reduced to local physical rights. Information rights imply GLOBAL rights. Example: in a sane world YOU own the information content of your face. This means that people cannot make forgeries of your face and place you in realistic gay porn or depict you as a baby raper or mass murderer without your consent. THAT'S what information ownership means, not that you are allowed to download a copy of your false baby raping and put it on your hard drive.

[onarchy]

John creates a wheel out of wood. I like John's wheel. After viewing it, I decide to make my own.With MY wood, MY labor and MY tools I create an identical wheel. Have I really stolen anything from John?

If no-one had ever invented a wheel before and it therefore was a unique invention that is of immense economic value and John spent 10 years of his very finite life thinking about a way to improve transportation efficiency, then yes, you have really stolen something from John, something you would have been unable to make on your own without the input from John.

[Anonymous]

But suppose that my music gets stolen (someone steals my hard disk with all my music on) and the thief uploads all my music. Do I still own that music, or is it now ok for everyone to copy and distribute that music?

You can just download the music and viola! You have your musics.

You lost out on potential profit though.(Not to mention that he stolen your harddrive)

So in other words, you use the term "own" in a completely empty manner. To own information means to be able to control it. If you cannot legally use force to control your ownership of information then you don't own it. What you are describing is ownership of your hard drive, not the information on that hard drive. When you say that you "own" the music you're really saying that you are allowed to freely reconfigure the content of your hard drive, but that's it. But that's not INFORMATION rights. Information rights cannot be reduced to local physical rights. Information rights imply GLOBAL rights. Example: in a sane world YOU own the information content of your face. This means that people cannot make forgeries of your face and place you in realistic gay porn or depict you as a baby raper or mass murderer without your consent. THAT'S what information ownership means, not that you are allowed to download a copy of your false baby raping and put it on your hard drive.

There's no such thing as your "sane world" except in your own perception. It simply doesn't exist objectively. Good luck getting that by me. Frankly, if someone pastes my face in a rape scene, it's their energy. There's nothing I can do about it. If people take it as a defamation of my character, it's their loss. They are only denying themselves a perfectly fine individual.

Learn your idea of reality is completely subjective and not everybody is going to agree that the shape of their feces is worth something.

[error]

John creates a wheel out of wood. I like John's wheel. After viewing it, I decide to make my own.With MY wood, MY labor and MY tools I create an identical wheel. Have I really stolen anything from John?

If no-one had ever invented a wheel before and it therefore was a unique invention that is of immense economic value and John spent 10 years of his very finite life thinking about a way to improve transportation efficiency, then yes, you have really stolen something from John, something you would have been unable to make on your own without the input from John.

Ah, so you're going to have patent prisons, too. Sounds nice!

[kiba]

If no-one had ever invented a wheel before and it therefore was a unique invention that is of immense economic value and John spent 10 years of his very finite life thinking about a way to improve transportation efficiency, then yes, you have really stolen something from John, something you would have been unable to make on your own without the input from John.

Nobody cares about the physical or mental work he put in. The only question is: will he make money or will he not?

[Anonymous]

John creates a wheel out of wood. I like John's wheel. After viewing it, I decide to make my own.With MY wood, MY labor and MY tools I create an identical wheel. Have I really stolen anything from John?

If no-one had ever invented a wheel before and it therefore was a unique invention that is of immense economic value and John spent 10 years of his very finite life thinking about a way to improve transportation efficiency, then yes, you have really stolen something from John, something you would have been unable to make on your own without the input from John.

What if John spends nearly an eternity learning to take the most efficient shit and I do it in a second? I'm a parasite?

Also, without the input from John? Let's say I've never seen John in my life and I make the wheel. Am I still a thief in your view?

[NghtRppr]

The whole question boils down to this: should it be a right to have your WORK protected by property rights? Because what you find so twisted is that all the people who work at Microsoft actually should get PAID for the work they do by the people who USE their work. Basically it is just a rationalization of theft.

I'm a software developer. I've made over a million dollars in the last three years by selling my software online. When I originally started to question the legitimacy of intellectual property, I was biased in favor of it. I was wishful in thinking that a case could be made for it. Unfortunately, I couldn't accomplish that. I had to follow reason wherever it took me and the conclusion was, intellectual property is partial theft of tangible property. If I own a piece of paper, I get to control it, that's what ownership is. To make a claim against what I can or cannot do with my piece of paper is to assert partial ownership over it, which is theft. I do have an incentive to maximize my profits, i.e. I wish intellectual property was legitimate, but not at the cost of sacrificing my ethics. Maybe now you can drop the ad hominems against intellectual property opponents by insinuating that we are all thieves trying to justify our actions, as if that somehow affected to truth of our arguments.

[Anonymous]

You have yet to convince me that IP law is just another way for the state to limit how I can manipulate MY matter and MY energy due to some supposed subjective sacredity placed around the ideas of others. There is no strong basis for this.

[kiba]

You have yet to convince me that IP law is just another way for the state to limit how I can manipulate MY matter and MY energy due to some supposed subjective sacredity placed around the ideas of others. There is no strong basis for this.

Sometime, you're just right.

[wb3]

This is more or less identical to the argument used by conservative islamists on rape. If a woman puts herself in the public domain (i.e. doesn't wear clothes that hides her body) then she is inviting and legitimizing rape. In fact, this is regularly used as an argument in muslim gang rape cases. They argue that by wearing sexy clothes she is a whore who have already volunteered to sex by putting the image of her body in the public domain.

No it isn't but that statement lets us see into your thought processes which are a little off.

However, using your off base statement, my argument would stand under these conditions from your statement. If a women walks around with no clothes, she puts her figure and measures in the public domain. So when someone copies her tits and ass for a blow up doll, she has no standing to complain.

[onarchy]

The question we keep getting back to and which I never get an answer to is this: why should ONLY physical things be regarded as property and not patterns? That's a completely arbitrary assertion which no-one is able to answer. There comes a whole host of secondary arguments to support this, but as I have shown all of this require some kind of qualifier, some deeper argument without which the argument fails. The arguments presented don't stand on their own feet.


Example of such a skin deep argument: "IP limits what people can do with their physical property, therefore it is a violation of their rights." To this I can reply "laws against murder limit what people do with their physical property (e.g. their guns), therefore it is a violation of their rights." Then of course comes the qualifier, the hidden underlying argument of physical property rights: "it's ok to limit people's physical property rights because they cannot violate other legitimate rights." In other words, you are not free to do whatever you want with your gun. You are only allowed to use your gun in a PEACEFUL manner. Therefore it is not sufficient to say "IP limits what people can do with their physical property, therefore it is a violation of their rights" because as we have just seen, it is perfectly ok to limit property rights of guns so that you cannot use them to violate other peaceful individuals' rights. So in order to make that argument, another argument is needed, a qualifier. What is it? Why is it ok to limit physical property rights with other physical property rights, but not with IP rights?

This is where this discussion with anti-IP libertarians always stops up, because to this I simply get a tautological answer: "because it violates my physical property rights." But the property rights are what is in question. What the murder example shows is that any right can be limited in any way so long as there is another right of equal importance. So why is it ok to own physical property (and thereby to limit what others can do) but not to own intellectual property? What's the qualifying argument that I am missing?


Some people say it's because information is an infinite resource, but as I showed earlier, so is the life of an immortal being. If such a being existed surely he would still have the right to his own body. The infinite argument is just arbitrary. WHY should the infinite argument carry any weight? And if it does carry any weight, why is it not ok to argue that there are virtually infinitely many atoms in the universe. Therefore there should be no property rights on atoms. If you need one, just go get one. The answer to this is usually "because it required energy and time to pattern the atoms, and your life is finite." That's right, so it's really your WORK that is a finite resource, not the atoms themselves. But that's equally true of information patterning. Even though information is an infinite resource, it is the energy and time of your life that is a finite resource and that which you acquire property rights to.

This is what I started as a reply, and still these arguments stand completely unanswered. We're walking in circles and the anti-IP people always ends up reiterating one of the above arguments tautologically. So again: WHY should atoms (matter stuff) be allowed to become property, but not information (mind stuff). And don't give me the "you own your own information on your own hard disk"-crap, because that is clearly not an information right since it can wholly be reduced to physical property rights. So come on guys: why does matter take precedence over information when it comes to property rights?

[kiba]

Some people say it's because information is an infinite resource, but as I showed earlier, so is the life of an immortal being. If such a being existed surely he would still have the right to his own body. The infinite argument is just arbitrary. WHY should the infinite argument carry any weight? And if it does carry any weight, why is it not ok to argue that there are virtually infinitely many atoms in the universe. Therefore there should be no property rights on atoms. If you need one, just go get one. The answer to this is usually "because it required energy and time to pattern the atoms, and your life is finite." That's right, so it's really your WORK that is a finite resource, not the atoms themselves. But that's equally true of information patterning. Even though information is an infinite resource, it is the energy and time of your life that is a finite resource and that which you acquire property rights to.

Because nobody can control the same atoms.

This is what I started as a reply, and still these arguments stand completely unanswered. We're walking in circles and the anti-IP people always ends up reiterating one of the above arguments tautologically. So again: WHY should atoms (matter stuff) be allowed to become property, but not information (mind stuff). And don't give me the "you own your own information on your own hard disk"-crap, because that is clearly not an information right since it can wholly be reduced to physical property rights. So come on guys: why does matter take precedence over information when it comes to property rights?

Because copying information doesn't deprive people of information.

[NghtRppr]

The question we keep getting back to and which I never get an answer to is this: why should ONLY physical things be regarded as property and not patterns?

No, the question is, why should patterns by regarded as property? The burden of proof is on you as well. You can't keep demanding that we prove you wrong while refusing to prove yourself right.

I did also answer your question here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256.msg78334#msg78334 but you failed to respond.

Some people say it's because information is an infinite resource, but as I showed earlier, so is the life of an immortal being. If such a being existed surely he would still have the right to his own body.

You're conflating the life of a person with their body. Even if I live forever I still only have one body so it's a scarce resource. Therefore, your argument fails.

[onarchy]

Because nobody can control the same atoms.

So what? Get another one. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe to choose from.

Because copying information doesn't deprive people of information.

a) that's just another way of restating the infinite argument. If I enslave an immortal being for 70 years I am not depriving him of his life since he lives forever. So slavery of immortal beings is ok then, had they existed? Also taking an atom from you does not deprive you of atoms. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe. If you need another atom, go get one. There is an abundance of atoms out there waiting for you to collect them.

[wb3]

Unless of course you count all the money they DON'T make when people pirate their books and works. But in any case, why should it matter that they don't come to PHYSICAL harm? Why is it that only atoms matter to human existence, and hence only atoms that gives rise to property rights?

Yea, I heard about the group that claimed a loss of 76 Trillion dollars in Australia. More than the Earth's GDP.

But what if it can be shown that more money is made by the piracy rather than less. I can show cases of when piracy increased sales. Should they get to also sue for the loss when they made a greater profit.

It is proving a negative. And courts seem to go along with it for lack of math skills. Sort of like "Jobs Saved".

I really think it won't be long before they realize that it is not the content but the servicing of the content. Kind of like NetFlix, and why they are starting to fight NetFlix, they are scared of losing the control instead of braving the new ground.

[kiba]

a) that's just another way of restating the infinite argument. If I enslave an immortal being for 70 years I am not depriving him of his life since he lives forever. So slavery of immortal beings is ok then, had they existed? Also taking an atom from you does not deprive you of atoms. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe. If you need another atom, go get one. There is an abundance of atoms out there waiting for you to collect them.

Dude, they are just copying information. If somebody copy the configuration of atoms, I don't care.

You know what? I don't give a damn. You will die in the marketplace anyway.

[NghtRppr]

So what? Get another one. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe to choose from.

That's probably not true but even if there were an infinite number of atoms in the universe, an atom of gold on Earth is worth more than two atoms of gold in another galaxy. Practical availability is key. Plus there's the whole problem with needing these atoms to be in a certain configuration, namely a hand, arm or whatever to replace my body, rather than just a lump of matter on a table. If you chop my arm off and give me the equivalent amount of atoms by mass, I'm afraid that's not good enough.

[wb3]

So what? Get another one. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe to choose from.

I like the Philosophical premise. In order for your statement to be true, you must prove matter is infinite in the universe. Empirical evidence does not support this. While infinity can be surmised, an infinite amount of atoms can not be.

Just saying....

[sirius]

I don't think IP laws are economically viable and thus they wouldn't exist if the law was formed in a free market process.

Laws are not formed in a free market process. E.g. laws against murder don't arise in a free market, a free market ASSUMES laws against murder. If you mean that laws are just like any other commodity then I am sure that you will be able to find societies where it is "economically viable" to enslave, say, 10% of the population and to murder another 10% who are not fit to contribute to society. 80% say so. That does however not make it right.

I'm not talking about the current system of centrally planned law, but polycentric free market law. Nobody would provide you an insurance that shields you from prosecution when you murdered somebody. That's just unsustainably expensive, like selling insurances that pay you for intentionally burning down your own house.

As you pointed out, making a law means to point guns at people. In a free market, laws would be rules that people are generally ready to enforce by pointing guns at others. I highly doubt that downloading a song from the internet would count. In a statist law monopoly people don't have to personally pay the costs of the laws they support and that's why we have stupid and invasive laws. I find the deduction of "rights" by complex philosophical argumentation quite uninteresting and useless.

Medieval Iceland, American settler communities and Somalia's Xeer are historical examples of polycentric common law, and they weren't violent dystopies but really efficient and peaceful systems compared to what we have now.

This is true, and as of today The Free State Initiative is the only project where Bitcoins will be accepted as a fully free and legal payment without any legal hindrances. The Free State Initiative currently accepts and a future Free State will accept donations in Bitcoins to show this. Yet, despite this not a single person in the Bitcoin-community has donated a single Bitcoin to the initiative. I find that very, very strange.

Thanks for using Bitcoin. I think people are waiting to see more discussion and generally get to know the project better before they donate.

[onarchy]

The question we keep getting back to and which I never get an answer to is this: why should ONLY physical things be regarded as property and not patterns?

No, the question is, why should patterns by regarded as property? The burden of proof is on you as well. You can't keep demanding that we prove you wrong while refusing to prove yourself right.

I don't accept that. Why not the other way around? Why doesn't physical property rights have the burden of proof?

I did also answer your question here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256.msg78334#msg78334 but you failed to respond.

Your answer was that atoms are scarce, information is not. That's just the infinite argument, which I have presented an answer to. You just ignored that and went back to stating that atoms are scarce. To reiterate: a) the life of an immortal being is not scarce, and by your logic it's ok to enslave him for a finite amount of time. Do you concur? Is slavery of immortal beings ok? b) even if we accept your scarce-argument, atoms are not scarce. There are infinitely many atoms in the world. If I take your car, there is nothing stopping you from going out in the universe to collect new atoms to create a new car. Of course, it requires TIME and ENERGY and WORK, all of which ARE limited resources. So it's not really your atoms you own but the time and energy and work required to pattern them. So why does this same argument not apply to unique information patterns such as a novel?

You're conflating the life of a person with their body. Even if I live forever I still only have one body so it's a scarce resource. Therefore, your argument fails.

Why is that relevant? Also you did not answer the second part of my argument (there are infinitely many atoms. Go out and get some if you need them.)

[onarchy]

Yea, I heard about the group that claimed a loss of 76 Trillion dollars in Australia. More than the Earth's GDP.

This of course is a bogus claim, but it is irrelevant to a principled discussion on IP.

But what if it can be shown that more money is made by the piracy rather than less.

What if I can show that you have a better and more secure life if I impose a welfare state on you? Does that make it ok?

[onarchy]

So what? Get another one. There are infinitely many atoms in the universe to choose from.

I like the Philosophical premise. In order for your statement to be true, you must prove matter is infinite in the universe. Empirical evidence does not support this. While infinity can be surmised, an infinite amount of atoms can not be.

Just saying....

Well, by the same token information IS a scarce resource because it takes a tiny amount of energy and time on your computer to copy it.

[NghtRppr]

I don't accept that. Why not the other way around? Why doesn't physical property rights have the burden of proof?

Whoever makes a claim has the burden of proof. You're claiming that intellectual property should be considered as legitimate property. Are you not? If so, where's your argument for that? All I see you doing is loudly declaring that you should be able to make money by owning information. Why?

You're conflating the life of a person with their body. Even if I live forever I still only have one body so it's a scarce resource. Therefore, your argument fails.

Why is that relevant?

Why is it relevant that you are conflating two things? Because it's fallacious reasoning, that's why. What about that is confusing to you?

Also, you keep skipping over my previous posts and claiming I haven't answered you. Please make sure you read everything before making such claims. The forum software notifies you if new replies have been posted while you were typing so you really have no excuse.

[NghtRppr]

Well, by the same token information IS a scarce resource because it takes a tiny amount of energy and time on your computer to copy it.

No, that just means that energy and time are scarce. If energy and time weren't scarce we could copy the same information infinitely.

[Anonymous]

Here's my evidence for physical property: our own bodies and the ability to sustain them. Man must own himself and property in order to sustain. The intangible is a different story. Patterns don't feed people or sustainably create wealth.

[wb3]

Let me ask this, if I hire an "Artist" for a job (work for hire), I own the work product. Correct?

If correct, if public money is given to an "Artist", the public should own the work product. Correct?

So this will take care of anyone that received taxpayer dollars for support of their work.

Now, lets go private. If I invest in the work of an "Artist", I am doing so with the expectation of a return on my investment with no guarantee that I will get a return. Correct?

I fund a movie, release it, get returns, but it is then pirated. How can I calculate what I would have made if not pirated? Do I assume everyone on Earth would have watched it?

But more to the point, can you point me out a major release movie that was pirated, and didn't make more than what it cost to produce it. So basically the investors got their money back, plus more, but they are greedy and want it all.

X-Men was a 0 day release, and made money. Hurt Locker made tons of money 2.5 Billion in ticket sales world wide, $32,492,653 for dvd, but investors want more. How much did it cost to make? 15 Million.  

If I was the Judge, I would laugh them out of the court room, and charge them for wasting my time.

[kiba]

Here's my evidence for physical property: our own bodies and the ability to sustain them. Man must own himself and property in order to sustain. The intangible is a different story. Patterns don't feed people or sustainably create wealth.

My evidence for why we don't need intellectual property:

I make money from my work. The end.

[Anonymous]

Also, another question is if IP can be reasonably forced. The truth is it can't. It's hard to see when it's stolen because just a simple glance can almost guarantee "theft", as with the physical, it's pretty stable in form and theft can be easily detected.

This pretty much guarantees IP as bunk without an overlord government peaking into our lives to enforce it.

IP is bunk and in the end IP holders are the parasites!

[wb3]

How about a thought experiment.

Assume we now have telepathic abilities. I go and watch a movie but with my photographic memory and telepathy, I go to a coffee shop and share the movie with others. Am I wrong. Or is the argument that as long as we can prevent it we will, but once we can't well all will have to change.

Well, All will have to change.  I just wish they would hurry up and get there.

[Anonymous]

Addendum:

I am not anti-IP. Sure, I believe in idea protection through contracts and concealment. However, you shouldn't get butthurt when your idea gets out and decide to hate man because he uses his property in his best interest.

[Anonymous]

How about a thought experiment.

Assume we now have telepathic abilities. I go and watch a movie but with my photographic memory and telepathy, I go to a coffee shop and share the movie with others. Am I wrong. Or is the argument that as long as we can prevent it we will, but once we can't well all will have to change.

Well, All will have to change.  I just wish they would hurry up and get there.

The only way to make sure the labor of those hard-working movie creators is respected is to put government telepathic tracking on everybody's thoughts. IP-infringement through thought will be punished to the highest extent of law. Continued thought crime will lead to brain suspension.

Thinking is a government-granted privilege. Abuse it and lose it.

[wb3]

I will make an admission, although I think I am OK.

I "acquired" the Hurt Locker, but liked it so much I bought the DVD.

What conundrum would this be, I would not have bought the DVD, if I didn't see the movie?

Since I now own the Hurt Locker, and didn't share it, I am fine.

I thought of taking the DVD back when I heard of the law suit.

[wb3]

Matter takes precedence over published information because you can control it. Information can really only be considered property if it is controlled. If someone breaks into my computer and lifts my wallet.dat file, a case can be made that it was stolen, but I still no longer own it. If I publish my wallet.dat file I no longer own it, but I can not really make a case that it was stolen because I abdicated my control of it.

Good Points, and long winded but I understand. Hitting the brick wall and all.

If a bank robber steals all the money out of the bank, and buys a whole bunch of junk food and eats it. The money is gone. Yea, it was yours, but you lost control or someone lost control for you.

You can't go to the convenient stores and demand your money. You "might" be able to get the robber to give it back, but odds are he is broke, hence he is robbing banks.

Ironically if he was able to steal $5 Billion Dollars and spend it. It is gone. He will do his 20 years, out in 5 for good behavior. But he will never repay you, unless he goes and steals someone else's money and gives it to you.

Loss of Control is a good standard. Movie theaters could do strip searches and only release to the theater, but once it hits the DVD rack, all bets off.


Just to add; I believe if I buy something it is mine. To do with as I wish. If I buy a DVD and want to show it to all my friends, I have the right to do it.  I routinely give my DVD's to the Library so as many people can watch them as wanted. I have given over 400 DVD's to the Library. I am sharing my property.

[error]

This is true, and as of today The Free State Initiative is the only project where Bitcoins will be accepted as a fully free and legal payment without any legal hindrances. The Free State Initiative currently accepts and a future Free State will accept donations in Bitcoins to show this. Yet, despite this not a single person in the Bitcoin-community has donated a single Bitcoin to the initiative. I find that very, very strange.

Thanks for using Bitcoin. I think people are waiting to see more discussion and generally get to know the project better before they donate.

I think all of us were willing to take a look, and the eight pages of tough questions gave answers that most of us disliked. This initiative may succeed, but it seems that here, it's been largely rejected. Few of us are willing to donate to a project where people will be thrown into prison for pirating Windows or reinventing the wheel.

[NghtRppr]

Matter takes precedence over published information because you can control it. Information can really only be considered property if it is controlled. If someone breaks into my computer and lifts my wallet.dat file, a case can be made that it was stolen, but I still no longer own it. If I publish my wallet.dat file I no longer own it, but I can not really make a case that it was stolen because I abdicated my control of it.

Loss of Control is a good standard.

I think a better one is excludability because it gets at the heart of the matter and is covered quite a bit in Libertarian literature.

[sirius]

I think all of us were willing to take a look, and the eight pages of tough questions gave answers that most of us disliked. This initiative may succeed, but it seems that here, it's been largely rejected. Few of us are willing to donate to a project where people will be thrown into prison for pirating Windows or reinventing the wheel.

The laissez-faire policies described on the site are classical minarchism and many people here are surely fine with that. This IP thing divides opinions, but I think many libertarians would still prefer the relatively free state over less free states.

Onarchy, 100K is a lot of money to ask as donations. You'll need to convince people that the funds can actually be raised and things are really going to happen. A donation counter would be cool. Have you looked into Kickstarter or some other fundraising site that would allow donations on the condition that the required total amount will be reached?

Getting donations will surely be easier if the initial negotiations are successful. Having a bigger team of representatives for the project would help build confidence. This is a huge project for one person, and random internet guys don't know you well enough to trust that you can do it.

[onarchy]

Whoever makes a claim has the burden of proof. You're claiming that intellectual property should be considered as legitimate property.

No, YOU are claiming that physical property should be considered as legitimate property. (If you don't believe me, ask a socialist what HE thinks about your property theory) I have no more burden of proof than you do.

Are you not? If so, where's your argument for that? All I see you doing is loudly declaring that you should be able to make money by owning information. Why?

The rational basis for ALL property rights is this: living beings are not regular objects, we are in fact processes, i.e. a temporary pattern of matter which needs to ACT and spend energy (i.e. do WORK) to exist. Thus work is the means by which living things exist. In us humans work comes in three different forms, 1) the purely physiological work of self-production that we share with all other life, 2) physical things we build using our mind and body, and 3) pure mental work, which results in information -- mind stuff. Self-ownership comes from 1. The human self expands beyond the metabolic self with our mind which requires property rights of non-metabolic things, 2 and 3. In this view there is no difference between these various forms of property rights.

You're conflating the life of a person with their body. Even if I live forever I still only have one body so it's a scarce resource. Therefore, your argument fails.

Why is that relevant?

Why is it relevant that you are conflating two things? Because it's fallacious reasoning, that's why. What about that is confusing to you?

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. You're using a very reasonable argument here: even though his TIME is a non-scarce resource, there are other factors in his life that ARE scarce that override the non-scarce factor. The same is true with atoms. ATOMS are not scarce, but the "practicality" of getting them (i.e. YOUR life, time and energy) is scarce. Thus, whenever we move away from information (which is a non-scarce resource) you argue very reasonably, in fact almost identical to how I would argue against the non-scarcity of information. It's irrelevant that information itself is not scarce, because that's not what you are protecting by law, it is the life and intellectual work of another person that IP protects.

[onarchy]

I think all of us were willing to take a look, and the eight pages of tough questions gave answers that most of us disliked. This initiative may succeed, but it seems that here, it's been largely rejected. Few of us are willing to donate to a project where people will be thrown into prison for pirating Windows or reinventing the wheel.

The laissez-faire policies described on the site are classical minarchism and many people here are surely fine with that. This IP thing divides opinions, but I think many libertarians would still prefer the relatively free state over less free states.

Onarchy, 100K is a lot of money to ask as donations. You'll need to convince people that the funds can actually be raised and things are really going to happen. A donation counter would be cool. Have you looked into Kickstarter or some other fundraising site that would allow donations on the condition that the required total amount will be reached?

I'm looking into Kickstarter, sure, but as of now the funding requirements are so small that it is not really necessary. I am also donating my time and energy into this. In other words, if there are no funds available to pay me for my time while I am travelling to meetings, conventions and presentations then I will work without pay. The most important thing is to pay for air tickets, hotel stays etc. and that is not particularly expensive. One roundtrip costs $2-4,000 for one person. Thus, the funding requirement for ONE trip is fairly small, and I am already starting to approach the funding needed for such a trip. Paying for one such trip requires about 10 people subscribing to the project for $25/month for a year. That's not much. So in the beginning there is very little pledging needed. It is only late in phase 1 or in phase 2 that I think that it will become necessary with a pledge system like Kickstarter. Phase 2 is the assembly phase, where a host country has signed a letter of intent stating that it has the intention of setting up a free state charter. Then starts the work of assembling an international team of legal experts and resources to design the free state in detail. This will take 1-2 years, and will cost something like 1 million dollars per year. At this time a pledge system makes a whole lot of sense. Then there is the final phase, which is the implementation of free state in which the funding requirements will be $10 million per year, and at this time a pledge and donation system will be a permanent part of the free state.

Getting donations will surely be easier if the initial negotiations are successful. Having a bigger team of representatives for the project would help build confidence. This is a huge project for one person, and random internet guys don't know you well enough to trust that you can do it.

Sure, I understand this concern completely. The reason I started FSI to begin with was because I had a concrete lead, an invitation to talk to a real government in Africa, and a government who has read the presentation of the project that I made for one of the ambassador of the country in Europe. Precisely because I have gotten such great feedback, not just from one person, but from many that this could be very important to their country I started the FSI to fund the first rounds of talks. (Flying to Africa is expensive) Without this as a basis I would never have started this now. I have a great team that is helping me with graphics, the website, critique etc. so that it becomes a professional and presentable project.

[onarchy]

I think a better one is excludability because it gets at the heart of the matter and is covered quite a bit in Libertarian literature.

First you must explain WHY excludability is a requirement for property rights. Second, as I have shown numerous times in this debate, it is the easiest thing in the world to take some arbitrary variable which is non-excludable, rip it out of context and ignore all the other factors which ARE excludable. The atom example is perhaps the easiest to understand. I can argue that atoms are non-scarce. There are for all practical purposes endlessly many atoms in the universe. Therefore if I take an atom from you, this does not in any way exclude you from utilizing an identical atom. It's just to go out there in the universe to go get one.

Of course, as someone rightfully already pointed out the non-excludability or non-scarcity of atoms is irrelevant, because it requires TIME and ENERGY from your precious, finite life to structure reality. In practice these limitations on YOUR LIFE makes the atoms exclusive. YOUR LIFE is the exclusive property here, not the atoms.

We who argue for IP say that the non-excludability of information is just as irrelevant to IP as the non-excludability of atoms is to physical property, because there are other factors that ARE excludable. Once a discovery has been made and is available in the public, no-one can do that discovery again. Once a novel or a song has been written no-one can write it freshly again. In other words novelty is exclusive. In fact, novels are even named after their novelty! A Novel must be novel to have value!

To a materialist who deny the existence of mind in one or more ways this is completely irrelevant: "novelty? What the hell are you talking about? If you can't touch it, it ain't real." In other words, materialist deny the existence of mind objects. Classical Marxists do this all the time: they deny that leadership or planning exists. All that gives rise to value is physical labor. Therefore managers and capitalists are exploiters of the poor.

Libertarian anti-IPers also deny the existence of mind objects, in some areas. They deny that novelty exists. (If they recognized that novelty is exclusive then obviously they would see the point of IP) They may say that they recognize the existence of novelty, but they always, always, always trump novelty with physical property, and arbitrarily so.

[no to the gold cult]

onarky, your idea sounds to me like just another Free Trade Zone or Special Economic Zone with free immigration thrown in.

You'll produce some sort of dystopian nightmare super-sprawl in the desert populated by the poor and the desperate, fleeing war, oppression and poverty only to be tricked into indenturing themselves to the employ of sweat-shops and brothels and slumlords by the elusive dream of gold-dripped success while the pale edifices of casino's and pleasure-palaces glint through the heat-haze over-head and swaggering mercenaries and their sneering war-criminal captains patrol the barb-wired perimeter.

Why are you and your libertardian like-mindlings so intent on making the world more amenable to the tastes of men like this?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPaGflu4JM

"man/woman/child for sale, only 3BTC the set, do what you want with, it's all permitted here."

[­­­Atlas_]

onarky, your idea sounds to me like just another Free Trade Zone or Special Economic Zone with free immigration thrown in.

You'll produce some sort of dystopian nightmare super-sprawl in the desert populated by the poor and the desperate, fleeing war, oppression and poverty only to be tricked into indenturing themselves to the employ of sweat-shops and brothels and slumlords by the elusive dream of gold-dripped success while the pale edifices of casino's and pleasure-palaces glint through the heat-haze over-head and swaggering mercenaries and their sneering war-criminal captains patrol the barb-wired perimeter.

Why are you and your libertardian like-mindlings so intent on making the world more amenable to the tastes of men like this?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPaGflu4JM

"man/woman/child for sale, only 3BTC the set, do what you want with, it's all permitted here."

A free trade zone is not without government restrictions.

Everything else you said is with no basis.

[PLATO]

You'll produce some sort of dystopian nightmare super-sprawl in the desert populated by the poor and the desperate, fleeing war, oppression and poverty only to be tricked into indenturing themselves to the employ of sweat-shops and brothels and slumlords by the elusive dream of gold-dripped success while the pale edifices of casino's and pleasure-palaces glint through the heat-haze over-head and swaggering mercenaries and their sneering war-criminal captains patrol the barb-wired perimeter.

+1 for style

[kiba]

To a materialist who deny the existence of mind in one or more ways this is completely irrelevant: "novelty? What the hell are you talking about? If you can't touch it, it ain't real." In other words, materialist deny the existence of mind objects. Classical Marxists do this all the time: they deny that leadership or planning exists. All that gives rise to value is physical labor. Therefore managers and capitalists are exploiters of the poor.

Pfft.

The free market doesn't care about your crackpot theory about intellectual property.

[onarchy]

To a materialist who deny the existence of mind in one or more ways this is completely irrelevant: "novelty? What the hell are you talking about? If you can't touch it, it ain't real." In other words, materialist deny the existence of mind objects. Classical Marxists do this all the time: they deny that leadership or planning exists. All that gives rise to value is physical labor. Therefore managers and capitalists are exploiters of the poor.

Pfft.

The free market doesn't care about your crackpot theory about intellectual property.

You are proving my point exactly. You are saying that because novelty is non-material it is "a crackpot theory." So you're a materialist to the bone, and as a consequence an information Marxist.

[­­­Atlas_]

Information property rights can't be enforced without tyranny. It's really that simple, onarchy.

[onarchy]

onarky, your idea sounds to me like just another Free Trade Zone or Special Economic Zone with free immigration thrown in.

You'll produce some sort of dystopian nightmare super-sprawl in the desert populated by the poor and the desperate, fleeing war, oppression and poverty only to be tricked into indenturing themselves to the employ of sweat-shops and brothels and slumlords by the elusive dream of gold-dripped success while the pale edifices of casino's and pleasure-palaces glint through the heat-haze over-head and swaggering mercenaries and their sneering war-criminal captains patrol the barb-wired perimeter.

Why are you and your libertardian like-mindlings so intent on making the world more amenable to the tastes of men like this?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPaGflu4JM

"man/woman/child for sale, only 3BTC the set, do what you want with, it's all permitted here."

What you are describing here is a very understandable concern, because if you go to any third world country and look at their cities this is what you will find. But are these cities really "Free Trade Zones"? If that's true, why do something like 80% of all South-Americans not have formal property rights to their houses, businesses and contracts? In large part of Africa the number is way above 90% and in Asia it is somewhat lower but still 50-70% e.g. in the Philippines. How can they be "Free Trade Zones" if it is so hard to start a business that only rich people can do it?

And what about crime? Is it really "Free Trade" when you are living in constant fear of gangs and bandits? And what about corruption? Is it really Free Trade if you can be prosecuted by the government at any moment and that the only way for you to get out of trouble is to pay bribes to speed up the process and remove barriers?

I would say no to all these questions. Peace requires good governance, i.e. authorities that are good at protecting the peace, i.e. protecting contracts, person and property.

So let's have a look at the premise of sweat shops and brothels. The only way this will happen is if there are far more people who want jobs than there are jobs available. In a system where making a job (business creation) is very difficult due to nasty regulations, high taxes, corruption and badly protected contracts and property rights then there will be fewer jobs than is needed. Then you get a high unemployment and bad working conditions.

But what if it was really, really easy to make a job that pays? Suppose that the Free State was equally attractive to investors and entrepreneurs as it is to workers? What then? Obviously the two would tend to balance each other out. Each new prospecting worker finds that entrepreneurs create jobs for him. With balance between job creation and job seekers there would be none of the problems you cited. And if in fact the Free State was MORE attractive to capitalists than to workers then this would push the wages UP.

So what could create a situation where the Free State actually is MORE attractive to capitalists than it is to workers? How is that even possible? Well, to a capitalist it is the profit margin and the risk associated with it that counts, i.e. what prospects of risk adjusted return on investment he can expect. Low taxes, low regulations, low corruption and a highly efficient government bureaucracy brings down the COST of doing business and makes it more profitable. Low crime, low corruption and well-protected contracts and property rights bring down the RISK of doing business. Thus a Free State optimizes the risk adjusted return on investment and therefore is highly attractive to investors. In fact, if the Free State has the lowest taxes, least regulation, best governance, lowest crime, lowest corruption and best property protection then this place will from an investor's point of view look like the best place on earth to put his money. For an immigrant worker, however, this may in the short run not be the best place on earth. The wages may be low and the working conditions may be poor to begin with, not unlike their home countries. Thus, there is a mismatch between investor interest and worker interest. This pushes up the wages and worker conditions until there is balance.


Because of this I predict that the kinds of slums you see in third world countries with bad governance will be much less pronounced in the Free State, and maybe even non-existent.

[onarchy]

Information property rights can't be enforced without tyranny. It's really that simple, onarchy.

That's just an arbitrary assertion. If information property rights are LEGITIMATE, then of course it is not tyranny to enforce them. You should pause to consider very carefully that you are making an IDENTICAL argument that socialists all over the world are making about ALL private property, and in the area of information property rights you agree with them 100%. You are information Marxists. So the question we keep getting back to (and which I now have pointed out several times) is WHY physical property rights trumps information property rights? The burden of evidence is exactly the same for both. (Just ask a socialist and he will say that YOU carry the burden of evidence for physical property rights)

[­­­Atlas_]

If man has the right to himself, he must also have the right to sustain through physical resources. Easy.

However, when it comes to the intangible that creates no real wealth and doesn't allow people to truly sustain, it's hard to prove it can be considered property.

Also, I pirate books and all sorts of "intellectual property" undetected. How are you going to be able to do any different against me in your supposedly free state?

[­­­Atlas_]

Is a man not entitled to a monopoly on his ideas?

"No!" says the counterfeit purse maker in China. "These ideas, they belong to the poor!"

"No!" says the pirate on the internet, "They belong to everyone!"

I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose The Free State, a city where every computer will be monitored, where every patent-infringing object will be destroyed and where the patent holders will not be prettied by the small wanna-be innovators! And with enough idea claims of your own, The Free State can be yours as well! Even the idea of it itself!

[kiba]

You are proving my point exactly. You are saying that because novelty is non-material it is "a crackpot theory." So you're a materialist to the bone, and as a consequence an information Marxist.

I don't quite understand what you mean by that. All I am saying that competition in the marketplace will eliminate people who believes in IP right.

[EvanR]

For anyone interested in more of onarchy's moral convictions, here is the log from #bitcoin-politics.

http://codepad.org/3gJSjoux
last bit truncated on codepad http://codepad.org/Xfqo8e7k

Summary is that copying data is equal to rape and murder. We report, you decide.

I will spare the forum of my opinion on him.

[EvanR]

An interesting revelation (to me at least) is that the IP debate comes down to this... content authors or owners ideally would like to use state force to stop who can read and listen to what. This is an independent issue from digital copying and other technological details. Physics allows you to do this with secrecy, but current authors and owners feel that the costs and risks of secrecy are too high, so they want coercive force to help them. Market distortion?

[deadlizard]

Patents are state enforced disclosure of trade secrets in exchange for a limited monopoly before becoming public domain.
Originally intended to expand human knowledge because before patents trade secrets where closely guarded and no-one could build on those ideas. Of course now the term of the monopolies is ridiculous but the original idea was sound.

in short the patent system is a great idea let down by poor execution.

[EvanR]

There are ways to profit from ideas without protection from police. It's expected that your profit margin could be less if you used the same strategy, but you're a business man, change your strategy. If you invented something useful, and you think selling it is dangerous because of competition copy cats, then use the invention to earn money yourself. This is where the risk comes in because agents could always infiltrate or employees could give the secrets away, though it wouldn't be in their best interest. This is where contracts come in, if you buy this or you work here or you are allowed into the facility you agree not to reverse engineer anything.

Another argument for patents is public good is served somehow, and no one is going to 'donate' to the public good by researching and publishing without a profit. This could be solved in the same way as copyrightless book sales. Do your work offer the results at a high price. The millions of people who made you rich before will now have to pay into a pool to get you to release the secrets. Let the market work?

[onarchy]

If man has the right to himself, he must also have the right to sustain through physical resources. Easy.

However, when it comes to the intangible that creates no real wealth and doesn't allow people to truly sustain, it's hard to prove it can be considered property.

You claim that intellectual work is of no real value to human existence, yet you still choose to pirate what you consider worthless. Why do you do that? If something is worthless to you, why download it and spend your valuable time reading/listening/watching it?

Also, let's now consider the difference between species who use the mind as integral to their survival (humans) and species that don't, e.g. antelopes. Today there are 7 billion people on the planet. Without industrialization 6 of them would not have existed. It is only the radical improvements in agricultural productivity that enables so many people not merely to physically survive, but many of them to prosper. So then let's look at antelopes. How are they doing when it comes to agriculture and industrialization? Hmmmmm, they have none. Why is that? Because productivity increase is first and foremost an INTELLECTUAL feat, not a physical one. We have Gallilei, Newton and a whole host of intelligent people who used their minds to create the INFORMATION needed to improve agricultural productivity. Thus, not only is information of crucial value to our PHYSICAL survival, it is of so paramount importance that we can say for certain that 6 billion people owe their life to that information. In fact, without information produces by the human intellect there would be no wealth. The mind is the source of wealth. For thousands of years Africans have been living in dirt poverty with all sorts of natural physical resources all around them. Yet, to no avail because they didn't have the KNOWLEDGE to transform their physical surroundings into wealth. And then look at Singapore, which is an island with no natural resources, not even fresh water, and it has risen from nothing to become one of the most prosperous nations in the world in only 60 years. Before the economic liberalization of Singapore, the nation could at most support 1 million people. Now there are 5 million people who sustain themselves and not only survive but prosper. That would be impossible without the intellectual work of mind workers.

So since you think that intangibles create no real wealth I think you should take your own words seriously and give up everything in your life that would not exist without intangibles. In other words, you must give up your computer, electricity, sewage system, water pipes, anything made of steel, cars, boats, air travel, cheap industrial food etc. These are all dependent on intangibles. So let's see you put your money where your mouth is and give up all these things that allegedly are of no value to you, and creates "no real wealth and doesn't allow people to truly sustain." When you've done that, we can talk.

Furthermore, is human existence only about getting calories into your bread hole? Does art and entertainment have NO place in humanity? It is of NO value to humans since you can't eat it? And therefore it's ok to pirate it?

Also, I pirate books and all sorts of "intellectual property" undetected. How are you going to be able to do any different against me in your supposedly free state?

Against an individual pirate? Very little. Just like all other laws have to be constructed in such a way that they do not have negative effects for ordinary, innocent people the same is the case with IP laws. It's better that 10 pirates go free than that 1 innocent person's liberties are infringed. Therefore it is mostly organized and blatant piracy that will be targeted. Since most people are decent human beings piracy will in general be a minimal problem with proper laws and proper micro-payment solutions.

[kiba]

Patents are state enforced disclosure of trade secrets in exchange for a limited monopoly before becoming public domain.
Originally intended to expand human knowledge because before patents trade secrets where closely guarded and no-one could build on those ideas. Of course now the term of the monopolies is ridiculous but the original idea was sound.

in short the patent system is a great idea let down by poor execution.

A bunch of bollocks. See the case of James Watt, the monopolist.

In any case, what you have is a bunch of idiotic government bureaucrats, lawyers, lawsuit, and other costs involved with patents. Inventors are not focusing on innovating and responding to their competitors' innovation. Instead they waste their fucking time on the system.

Innovation and competition are a dynamic continuous real-time process of action and reaction. You stick a system in there which purposely slow down inventors and you'll reduce the rate of innovation.

[EvanR]

You claim that intellectual work is of no real value to human existence

You are latching onto trivial and easily dismissed positions. Please dismiss non-points quickly and get to the meat of the matter. Actually you would have a hard time filling pages doing that, because you dont have any meat beyond the circular argument beginning at rape = copying.

[­­­Atlas_]

If man has the right to himself, he must also have the right to sustain through physical resources. Easy.

However, when it comes to the intangible that creates no real wealth and doesn't allow people to truly sustain, it's hard to prove it can be considered property.

You claim that intellectual work is of no real value to human existence, yet you still choose to pirate what you consider worthless. Why do you do that? If something is worthless to you, why download it and spend your valuable time reading/listening/watching it?

Also, let's now consider the difference between species who use the mind as integral to their survival (humans) and species that don't, e.g. antelopes. Today there are 7 billion people on the planet. Without industrialization 6 of them would not have existed. It is only the radical improvements in agricultural productivity that enables so many people not merely to physically survive, but many of them to prosper. So then let's look at antelopes. How are they doing when it comes to agriculture and industrialization? Hmmmmm, they have none. Why is that? Because productivity increase is first and foremost an INTELLECTUAL feat, not a physical one. We have Gallilei, Newton and a whole host of intelligent people who used their minds to create the INFORMATION needed to improve agricultural productivity. Thus, not only is information of crucial value to our PHYSICAL survival, it is of so paramount importance that we can say for certain that 6 billion people owe their life to that information. In fact, without information produces by the human intellect there would be no wealth. The mind is the source of wealth. For thousands of years Africans have been living in dirt poverty with all sorts of natural physical resources all around them. Yet, to no avail because they didn't have the KNOWLEDGE to transform their physical surroundings into wealth. And then look at Singapore, which is an island with no natural resources, not even fresh water, and it has risen from nothing to become one of the most prosperous nations in the world in only 60 years. Before the economic liberalization of Singapore, the nation could at most support 1 million people. Now there are 5 million people who sustain themselves and not only survive but prosper. That would be impossible without the intellectual work of mind workers.

So since you think that intangibles create no real wealth I think you should take your own words seriously and give up everything in your life that would not exist without intangibles. In other words, you must give up your computer, electricity, sewage system, water pipes, anything made of steel, cars, boats, air travel, cheap industrial food etc. These are all dependent on intangibles. So let's see you put your money where your mouth is and give up all these things that allegedly are of no value to you, and creates "no real wealth and doesn't allow people to truly sustain." When you've done that, we can talk.

Furthermore, is human existence only about getting calories into your bread hole? Does art and entertainment have NO place in humanity? It is of NO value to humans since you can't eat it? And therefore it's ok to pirate it?

Also, I pirate books and all sorts of "intellectual property" undetected. How are you going to be able to do any different against me in your supposedly free state?

Against an individual pirate? Very little. Just like all other laws have to be constructed in such a way that they do not have negative effects for ordinary, innocent people the same is the case with IP laws. It's better that 10 pirates go free than that 1 innocent person's liberties are infringed. Therefore it is mostly organized and blatant piracy that will be targeted. Since most people are decent human beings piracy will in general be a minimal problem with proper laws and proper micro-payment solutions.

It wasn't the ideas themselves that created wealth. It was the actions of the individuals. They may have needed the input of information but in the end, the sweat of their own brow made it happen.

[kiba]

It wasn't the ideas themselves that created wealth. It was the actions of the individuals. They may have needed the input of information but in the end, the sweat of their own brow made it happen.

Or the key pressing.

[EvanR]

The main issue is a dispute over the social land rights to the word 'property.' Property, regardless of how you define it, will currently evoke fears and a scramble to protect it. You advocate a change to the concept of property for your own purposes not just because you want that concept to be protected, but because the word property will make it easier to rally support. This is disingenuous. To be fair, you should leave the normal definition of property alone as it is, and advocate state protection for your idea independently, and call it something else. If it sounds ludicrous to people, well, at least you lost fair and square. As a tip you should come up with a name for it that is definitely marketable, but property is already taken.

[wb3]

If I invent the "Cancer Cure Pill" should I expect to make Billions upon Billions of Dollars, or should I give it freely to the public at cost +1 and just make millions and be regarded as the greatest humanitarian that ever lived in the history books. Or the the evil Health Barron?

I should make money, but when you are Greedy and want it all, you curry favor of thugs. The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work. Sometimes; Nothing.  Other times; Something   But Never: Everything.

[­­­Atlas_]

Also, just because my mother gave birth to me doesn't mean I am indentured to her for life. That isn't a legitimate contract.

[­­­Atlas_]

If I invent the "Cancer Cure Pill" should I expect to make Billions upon Billions of Dollars, or should I give it freely to the public at cost +1 and just make millions and be regarded as the greatest humanitarian that ever lived in the history books. Or the the evil Health Barron?

I should make money, but when you are Greedy and want it all, you curry favor of thugs. The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work. Sometimes; Nothing.  Other times; Something   But Never: Everything.

Let's say I find the cure for cancer: a glass of water mixed with a handful of dirt. I patent it. Every time somebody mixes some water with dirt, I am being raped?

[EvanR]

The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work.

Seems like a good default is 'however much people will pay for it.'
But not 'however much I can get them to cough up at gunpoint'.

[wb3]

Also, just because my mother gave birth to me doesn't mean I am indentured to her for life. That isn't a legitimate contract.

Hey don't forget about Dad. His work product contributed to the work of Art.

[­­­Atlas_]

The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work.

Seems like a good default is 'however much people will pay for it.'

...Mr. Onarchy wants that to be left to the creator and if anybody else creates it and sells it for less... they should be charged with violent molestation?

[­­­Atlas_]

Also, just because my mother gave birth to me doesn't mean I am indentured to her for life. That isn't a legitimate contract.

Hey don't forget about Dad. His work product contributed to the work of Art.

I guess I have to pay him royalties too. Also, my thick hair got me a job modeling. That's another IP check in the mail.

[wb3]

The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work.

Seems like a good default is 'however much people will pay for it.'
But not 'however much I can get them to cough up at gunpoint'.

I agree, my point on IP is that just because someone Pirated your work doesn't mean they were going to buy it anyway. They accepted a lesser quality with less caveats, to look at your work.

[deadlizard]

Patents are state enforced disclosure of trade secrets in exchange for a limited monopoly before becoming public domain.
Originally intended to expand human knowledge because before patents trade secrets where closely guarded and no-one could build on those ideas. Of course now the term of the monopolies is ridiculous but the original idea was sound.

in short the patent system is a great idea let down by poor execution.

A bunch of bollocks. See the case of James Watt, the monopolist.

In any case, what you have is a bunch of idiotic government bureaucrats, lawyers, lawsuit, and other costs involved with patents. Inventors are not focusing on innovating and responding to their competitors' innovation. Instead they waste their fucking time on the system.

Innovation and competition are a dynamic continuous real-time process of action and reaction. You stick a system in there which purposely slow down inventors and you'll reduce the rate of innovation.

I should add that much like communism is a great idea in principal I don't think patents could work in the real world either

[EvanR]

At the risk of opening up a giant can of worms, Atlas, it IS curious exactly what onarchy's 'default contract' for IP would entail. Continuous payments by all parties with the IP, payment per copy operation, payment per reading, etc. Doesn't seem like a good application for a constitution. No, I do not want to know the details. It's bureaucracy.

[EvanR]

I agree, my point on IP is that just because someone Pirated your work doesn't mean they were going to buy it anyway. They accepted a lesser quality with less caveats, to look at your work.

These 'problems' are just bad business practices, not crime. Pool plus free samples plus donations should be a good experiment.

[EvanR]

Oh, and sell your product even after the initial release. This works great right now considering the defacto lack of property rights on music files. You can get them all for free but people still pay for them, a lot.

[wb3]

I think the on the music side, the ratio for the profit margin wasn't stable. Studios could replicate the digital for next to nothing and charge the same as if they were still creating CD's.  That model was never going to work.

However, if they want to be fair, I will pay a 300% mark up, over the cost of them hitting copy on their computer.

[onarchy]

Patents are state enforced disclosure of trade secrets in exchange for a limited monopoly before becoming public domain.
Originally intended to expand human knowledge because before patents trade secrets where closely guarded and no-one could build on those ideas. Of course now the term of the monopolies is ridiculous but the original idea was sound.

in short the patent system is a great idea let down by poor execution.

It is good to see that there are at least some reasonable people on this forum. Patents are a sham in execution for several reasons. One of the primary reasons for this is that there is missing a crucial kind of intellectual property. I will write more about this in a future book, but let me quickly summarize it. Today patents make the information freely available to anyone, but the economic utilization of the information is restricted. A copyright restricts distribution but anyone can utilize the information economically. What is needed is a new kind of information property right that is something in between a copyright and a patent. I call it a scientific property right. Here there are no restrictions on who can distribute the information, but there is a fee associated with publication. The information itself can be economically utilized in any way.

This is particularly well suited for scientific publication (which already has an extremely well-developed reference system), including university books. Scientific property rights come in three variations:


1) scientific data property rights
2) scientific method property rights
3) scientific discovery property rights


Let's go through with examples. Suppose there is a team of people who have decoded human DNA, (like the human genome project). These people could then publish it and acquire scientific data property rights to this data. What this means is that anyone who wants to download this data, look at it, study it and utilize it economically are free to do so at no cost and no restrictions. However, anyone who PUBLISHES a paper that UTILIZES and/or REFERENCES the data in their work must pay a fee for the data. The data is exclusive, but not the source. Anyone can go back to the source (the human genome in this case) and make a new data set that can be made public domain or given a similar data property right, even when the two data sets are identical (they usually aren't).

These data property rights would in this case be an excellent alternative to the horrible gene patents that sometimes are given for "isolating" DNA.

Scientific method property rights works similar to the data property rights except that they resemble patents. There is no data source. It's the method itself that is exclusive. Once a scientific method has been protected by property rights no-one else can do the same with an identical method. Those who e.g. publish statistical or other mathematical methods would here find a revenue model for their work. Again, it's free to READ and USE the methods in economic activity, but if you publish a scientific paper based on them in which you use this method and reference it, you pay a fee.

This is an extremely good alternative to patents, especially for small inventors, because you don't have to actually implement the idea or invest millions of dollars in it in order to get revenues from it. So long as people write about it and reference it they pay a fee, and the economic usage and availability of the invention is in the public domain.

Finally, sometimes a scientific discovery is made, and it has extreme news value in the first year or so and then it ceases to be of such great value. A discovery right ONLY protects the revenue from PUBLICATION of the discovery. In other words, there are no restrictions on who can publish (so long as they pay the fee) and anyone can read the information and utilize it freely without restrictions. Discovery rights expire much faster than other scientific rights, maybe e.g. in a year or so.

This generates an entirely new business model for scientific explorers. It actually becomes profitable to generate new news-worthy scientific discoveries. Many of the companies who today try to protect their inventions by patents will instead live from making headlines.

In general this finally brings market forces into science. Science has been rotting away, especially in the last century resulting in such junk science as the current climate change scare. But not only that, many of the people who today are forced to either choose copyright or patents to protect their intellectual work will now find an array of possible property rights that are more suitable for their kind of model.

To a libertarian anti-IP person this sounds like complete tyranny. Since science is of zero value to humans (it's non-material) it is a major violation to protect scientific property rights.

[­­­Atlas_]

Alright, that's it. I'm going to tear this apart in a podcast.

[onarchy]

It wasn't the ideas themselves that created wealth. It was the actions of the individuals. They may have needed the input of information but in the end, the sweat of their own brow made it happen.

I have discussed extensively for many hours with self-proclaimed stalinist marxists and this argument of yours is IDENTICAL to theirs. This is the Marxist theory of value. They claim that intellectual work is "a precondition" or "a needed input" as you say, but that the actual value comes from physical labor and ONLY the physical labor. In other words you are indeed an information Marxist, as I have stated all along.

[EvanR]

However, if they want to be fair, I will pay a 300% mark up, over the cost of them hitting copy on their computer.

The price isn't going to be determined by cost of transfer, obviously. Ignoring the giant unsustainable recording industry, the company or band will need to make enough money to cover their time and the cost of promotion. So they need to find a way to charge enough people enough money. Stage 1 get fans with gigs or free samples, stage 2 advertise your new album and sell with a pool, stage 3 sell copies and accept donations.

Stage 4, the so called pirates make you even more famous by freely distributing your work , which covers stage 1 when you need to repeat the process.

Onarchy has nothing better to do than try to prove the obvious fact that ideas have value.

[onarchy]

The main issue is a dispute over the social land rights to the word 'property.' Property, regardless of how you define it, will currently evoke fears and a scramble to protect it. You advocate a change to the concept of property for your own purposes not just because you want that concept to be protected, but because the word property will make it easier to rally support. This is disingenuous. To be fair, you should leave the normal definition of property alone as it is, and advocate state protection for your idea independently, and call it something else. If it sounds ludicrous to people, well, at least you lost fair and square. As a tip you should come up with a name for it that is definitely marketable, but property is already taken.

Property can be defined as things that are OWNED, i.e. wielded SOVEREIGNTY over by an owner. It says nothing about whether that property is physical or what not. In fact, over the centuries various things have been proclaimed as property that we today consider alien. Take slavery. People were indeed property. A slave proponent could argue that you should leave his property alone and that the term property is already taken. In a rational world that's not how things work.

[onarchy]

The whole IP argument is over how much do you deserve for your work.

Seems like a good default is 'however much people will pay for it.'
But not 'however much I can get them to cough up at gunpoint'.

That's EXACTLY what happens when you go into a store and want to have any physical good. If you say "I don't think this is worth any money so I'll just take it for free" you will soon find yourself having to cough up at gunpoint. How horrible!

In short, this argument of yours is empty since it can equally well be applied to physical property. You have to explain WHY intellectual work should not be property whereas physical work is allowed to be protected by property rights.

[NghtRppr]

You're claiming that intellectual property should be considered as legitimate property.

No, YOU are claiming that physical property should be considered as legitimate property.[/quote]

Even you will admit that physical property should be considered legitimate. If you disagree then please tell me where you live so I can collect your things. However, since you aren't claiming IP as legitimate then this discussion is over since there's nothing for me to argue against. 

The rational basis for ALL property rights is this: living beings are not regular objects, we are in fact processes, i.e. a temporary pattern of matter which needs to ACT and spend energy (i.e. do WORK) to exist. Thus work is the means by which living things exist. In us humans work comes in three different forms, 1) the purely physiological work of self-production that we share with all other life, 2) physical things we build using our mind and body, and 3) pure mental work, which results in information -- mind stuff. Self-ownership comes from 1. The human self expands beyond the metabolic self with our mind which requires property rights of non-metabolic things, 2 and 3. In this view there is no difference between these various forms of property rights.

That's just one long assertion. Why should you own the ideas that you think up?

It's irrelevant that information itself is not scarce, because that's not what you are protecting by law, it is the life and intellectual work of another person that IP protects.

Why does anyone owe your intellectual work protection?

[EvanR]

I understand this is one of your alternative forms of property. But it isn't a very good definition for various reasons. I own the earth's atmosphere. Sorry but I do. I can't enforce my property rights on it, but that's not important to you. As an onarchist I would strive to invent diabolical technology to assert these rights on the atmosphere.

No onarchy, you are circular again. Trading property is one of the aspects of actual property, you can't just take it from the store because you have to buy it because its property. By saying that copy catting methods or copying data is the same is just, again, you calling it property. That's fine. But you can say it all with fewer bytes by stating 'ideas are property.'

[­­­Atlas_]

Mind workers create something of value but to regulate life and its many aspects in the name of paying their supposed dues isn't the way to go about it. That's all that I am arguing.

[onarchy]

Even you will admit that physical property should be considered legitimate. If you disagree then please tell me where you live so I can collect your things. However, since you aren't claiming IP as legitimate then this discussion is over since there's nothing for me to argue against. 

Has to be the weirdest argument today. Of course I claim that IP is legitimate. Just because we happen to agree that physical property is legitimate doesn't mean that we have the same reasons or that the burden of evidence for IP is any less. I base myself on the Lockean labor theory of property, and I am not a materialist. Hence both intellectual and physical work give rise to property. You have to explain why materialism is true, and why do you not adopt a completely consistent materialistic viewpoint, only in those areas which suits you?

That's just one long assertion. Why should you own the ideas that you think up?

Actually that was a very nice argument, not an assertion. I don't own the ideas I think up. I own my own intellectual labor, because labor is the means by which I exist. I.e. human existence = labor. Self-ownership means ownership of your labor. Since I don't own the ideas, but my labor, I have very limited rights of ideas. I cannot prevent you from thinking with my ideas, because you own your own mind, and I cannot have full sovereignty over HOW an idea is used. Since labor is all I own I can basically only own the rights to economic exploitation of the ideas.

It's irrelevant that information itself is not scarce, because that's not what you are protecting by law, it is the life and intellectual work of another person that IP protects.

Why does anyone owe your intellectual work protection?

Because they owe ME protection, and my intellectual work is a part of ME. (I don't like the word "owe" in this case since it sounds like rights are debt/duty-based, which they are not)

[onarchy]

Mind workers create something of value but to regulate life and its many aspects in the name of paying their supposed dues isn't the way to go about it. That's all that I am arguing.

That's what Marxists say about physical property too.

[EvanR]

Why should you own the ideas that you think up?

To make a stronger (but not as interesting to many people) assertion, you DO effectively own the ideas you think up. As long as you keep them secret within your organization. Whether you should point guns at the entirety of untrusted earth when they distribute the idea is a policy decision on your part.

[­­­Atlas_]

Here's the real question:

Does enforcing the existence of intellectual property help individual happiness and prosperity?

[onarchy]

I understand this is one of your alternative forms of property. But it isn't a very good definition for various reasons. I own the earth's atmosphere. Sorry but I do. I can't enforce my property rights on it, but that's not important to you. As an onarchist I would strive to invent diabolical technology to assert these rights on the atmosphere.

WHY do you own it? You did not create the atmosphere and according to the labor theory of property you therefore don't own it.

No onarchy, you are circular again. Trading property is one of the aspects of actual property, you can't just take it from the store because you have to buy it because its property.

Yes, so the very moment we are not discussing what property IS, then your argument is perfectly ok, but the definition of property is precisely what is under question.

By saying that copy catting methods or copying data is the same is just, again, you calling it property. That's fine. But you can say it all with fewer bytes by stating 'ideas are property.'

Nope. Ideas are not property. Intellectual labor is property. No-one can own an idea without creating a totalitarian society.

[­­­Atlas_]

By saying that copy catting methods or copying data is the same is just, again, you calling it property. That's fine. But you can say it all with fewer bytes by stating 'ideas are property.'

Nope. Ideas are not property. Intellectual labor is property. No-one can own an idea without creating a totalitarian society.

This where it all falls apart. The definition of intellectual labor is only held up by subjective whims and desires.

[onarchy]

Here's the real question:

Does enforcing the existence of intellectual property help individual happiness and prosperity?

It certainly makes the CREATOR of the intellectual work happy, and most people actually feel more happy when they are behaving like decent human beings too. Therefore their conscience is clear when they actually don't steal the hard labor of a mind worker. I know that this obviously don't apply to a lot of the people in here, but I'm talking about normal, decent human beings who have not been seduced by Marxism.

[deadlizard]

Nope. Ideas are not property. Intellectual labor is property. No-one can own an idea without creating a totalitarian society.

good point

[onarchy]

This where it all falls apart. The definition of intellectual labor is only held up by subjective whims and desires.

This is an assertion. Can you provide an argument to back up your assertion? Are you saying that thinking or creativity is not work?

[kiba]

I should add that much like communism is a great idea in principal I don't think patents could work in the real world either

If it sucks in real life, it must sucks on paper.

[EvanR]

WHY do you own it? You did not create the atmosphere and according to the labor theory of property you therefore don't own it.

You also don't 'labor' over copies of your work or labor to help people read your book. They do the labor. So they should own the book after reading.

[deadlizard]

I should add that much like communism is a great idea in principal I don't think patents could work in the real world either

If it sucks in real life, it must sucks on paper.

if x then y

[­­­Atlas_]

This where it all falls apart. The definition of intellectual labor is only held up by subjective whims and desires.

This is an assertion. Can you provide an argument to back up your assertion? Are you saying that thinking or creativity is not work?

I am saying the idea of effort is completely subjective. It cannot be universally defined. There is no evidence for a true definition. It's like asking me to disprove the existence of God.

[NghtRppr]

Of course I claim that IP is legitimate. Just because we happen to agree that physical property is legitimate doesn't mean that we have the same reasons or that the burden of evidence for IP is any less. I base myself on the Lockean labor theory of property, and I am not a materialist. Hence both intellectual and physical work give rise to property.

Property rights aren't based on materialism. Property rights are based on the fact that certain things are rivalrous. As I've explained several times already, property rights arise because certain things can only be controlled by one or a few people at a time thereby causing the need to exclude others. If I have a cooking spoon and I want to use it at the same time that you do, we have a problem. How do we settle it? Well, that's why we have property rights. The only question left to decide is how are property rights assigned, flip a coin, whoever is stronger, etc. What sets Libertarianism apart is the rules on the assignment of property rights. We believe in homesteading which means that the first user has a better claim than any latecomers. If you are a latecomer with respect to me and you argue that you have a better claim then there's nothing stopping yet another latecomer from making the same argument against you. Therefore, the prior-later distinction is presupposed by anyone claiming they own property otherwise you would let anyone come along and take it.

Self-ownership means ownership of your labor. Since I don't own the ideas, but my labor, I have very limited rights of ideas.

This is demonstrably false. If you steal my marble and make a statue of it, you don't own the statue. You owe me for damages to my marble. You own your body which means you control what labor it does but you don't necessarily control the products of that labor. You have to own the raw materials to also own the product.

Because they owe ME protection, and my intellectual work is a part of ME.

Why is your intellectual work a part of you?

[EvanR]

You own your creative labor, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.

[EvanR]

Guy walks into a public area and starts a conversation with someone. As it progresses, someone begins to reveal slowly the design of a valuable technology. Guy screams, 'No! Stop! I don't want the patent holder to own me.' Onarchy would claim that this situation is equivalent to doing something dangerous where you might end up in the hospital with astronomical debt. Better not to talk to people.

[­­­Atlas_]

Let's say somebody patented the idea of a car. Only one company can make cars. People go along with it and purchase these cruddy cars because it's the best option available at the time. However, a black market opens up due to the government restriction on car manufacturing. Wars occur on the streets due to "illegal car" smuggling. Lives are lost and "car thieves" are jailed at the taxpayer's expense but the car creator's "property right" is maintained.

Is this what you really want, onarchy?

[onarchy]

You own your creative labor, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.

A store owner owns the candy in his store, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.


I'm sure you'll agree that you don't HAVE to buy candy from a store if you think it's too expensive, so you can help decide the price of that candy by NOT CONSUMING it. I am also sure that you would say that it is still a free market even if the store owner uses guns to prevent you from taking candy without paying the price he demands. In other words, this entire line of argument is completely empty, because it ASSUMES THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. In other words, the real discussion here is what property IS, and once we agree on that then such arguments as you presented become valid. But by insisting on presenting such arguments even if the definition of property is in question, then your argument amounts to "I will ignore all your arguments about why intellectual work should be property and just insist without argument that it isn't, ok?"

[onarchy]

Let's say somebody patented the idea of a car.

Ideas can't be patented, only intellectual labor.

Only one company can make cars. People go along with it and purchase these cruddy cars because it's the best option available at the time. However, a black market opens up due to the government restriction on car manufacturing. Wars occur on the streets due to "illegal car" smuggling. Lives are lost and "car thieves" are jailed at the taxpayer's expense but the car creator's "property right" is maintained.

Is this what you really want, onarchy?

Nope, that's not what I really want. Normally when things like this happens it is a sign that SOMETHING in society is wrong. In the case of IP, there is a combination of a cultural/philosophical problems (the extensive appeal of Marxism) and legal problems (bad laws, particularly bad money/banking laws which prevent micropayment technology from taking off)

[­­­Atlas_]

You own your creative labor, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.

A store owner owns the candy in his store, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.


I'm sure you'll agree that you don't HAVE to buy candy from a store if you think it's too expensive, so you can help decide the price of that candy by NOT CONSUMING it. I am also sure that you would say that it is still a free market even if the store owner uses guns to prevent you from taking candy without paying the price he demands. In other words, this entire line of argument is completely empty, because it ASSUMES THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. In other words, the real discussion here is what property IS, and once we agree on that then such arguments as you presented become valid. But by insisting on presenting such arguments even if the definition of property is in question, then your argument amounts to "I will ignore all your arguments about why intellectual work should be property and just insist without argument that it isn't, ok?"

Fine, the candy is too expensive so I make my own and sell it cheaper. This is what you seem to be against because I supposedly infringed on the store owner's "intellectual labor" he used to make the candy.

[wb3]

Here's the real question:

Does enforcing the existence of intellectual property help individual happiness and prosperity?

It certainly makes the CREATOR of the intellectual work happy, and most people actually feel more happy when they are behaving like decent human beings too. Therefore their conscience is clear when they actually don't steal the hard labor of a mind worker. I know that this obviously don't apply to a lot of the people in here, but I'm talking about normal, decent human beings who have not been seduced by Marxism.

A "Mind Worker"?  What does Nature say about this? I can think of better ways of growing corn, but can't grow corn. So you want to charge the corn growers for increased efficiency from using your method. If you never told them, they would still grow corn.

A "Mind Worker"? is working in a fictitious world. He gets what he gets, and should be happy he gets it. However, if he grows corn and increases his own corn yields, he wins. But is he getting the reward from the Mind Work or the Corn Yield and his Physical Work.

Wonder what a world of "Mind Workers" would look like? How much would things cost?

[onarchy]

Guy walks into a public area and starts a conversation with someone. As it progresses, someone begins to reveal slowly the design of a valuable technology. Guy screams, 'No! Stop! I don't want the patent holder to own me.' Onarchy would claim that this situation is equivalent to doing something dangerous where you might end up in the hospital with astronomical debt. Better not to talk to people.

Well, let's take the more tangible case of books. Authors use a year of their life to write a novel which provides entertainment and afterthought to his readers. BUT instead of selling 1 million copies of the book with copyright protection, the book only sells 100 copies because there is no copyright protection. The market is flooded with cheap or free pirate copies of the book. Millions of people read his books and since various materialist libertarians have been very successful at spreading their morality that intellectual work has ZERO value. Hoards of people not only do not pay for his book, but actually scoffs at people who pay for it for being "irrational" and "wasting money on something that has no value." So these people who read his one year work not only do not pay, but have a really, really good conscience about not paying, thinking "he got paid exactly what he deserved: ZERO. That's free market capitalism for you" before he continues reading the exciting book which allegedly was of zero value.

So what you anti-IP libertarians are doing is something much, much, much, much worse than actually just reading a book without paying for it. You're spreading ideas to people that they should do it with a clear conscience! Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good books being written, and why all the Hollywood films that come out are crap and regurgitations. But at least it's free!

[­­­Atlas_]

Here's the real question:

Does enforcing the existence of intellectual property help individual happiness and prosperity?

It certainly makes the CREATOR of the intellectual work happy, and most people actually feel more happy when they are behaving like decent human beings too. Therefore their conscience is clear when they actually don't steal the hard labor of a mind worker. I know that this obviously don't apply to a lot of the people in here, but I'm talking about normal, decent human beings who have not been seduced by Marxism.

A "Mind Worker"?  What does Nature say about this? I can think of better ways of growing corn, but can't grow corn. So you want to charge the corn growers for increased efficiency from using your method. If you never told them, they would still grow corn.

A "Mind Worker"? is working in a fictitious world. He gets what he gets, and should be happy he gets it. However, if he grows corn and increases his own corn yields, he wins. But is he getting the reward from the Mind Work or the Corn Yield and his Physical Work.

Wonder what a world of "Mind Workers" would look like? How much would things cost?

https://i.imgur.com/Gpeoq.png

[onarchy]

You own your creative labor, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.

A store owner owns the candy in his store, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.


I'm sure you'll agree that you don't HAVE to buy candy from a store if you think it's too expensive, so you can help decide the price of that candy by NOT CONSUMING it. I am also sure that you would say that it is still a free market even if the store owner uses guns to prevent you from taking candy without paying the price he demands. In other words, this entire line of argument is completely empty, because it ASSUMES THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. In other words, the real discussion here is what property IS, and once we agree on that then such arguments as you presented become valid. But by insisting on presenting such arguments even if the definition of property is in question, then your argument amounts to "I will ignore all your arguments about why intellectual work should be property and just insist without argument that it isn't, ok?"

Fine, the candy is too expensive so I make my own and sell it cheaper. This is what you seem to be against because I supposedly infringed on the store owner's "intellectual labor" he used to make the candy.

As long as you start from your OWN material and make your OWN candy it's perfectly ok to do that. That's capitalism. But when you COPY a book, is that then YOUR work of ART? Did you WRITE it? Did you spend thousands of hours working with your mind to create it?

[­­­Atlas_]

You own your creative labor, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.

A store owner owns the candy in his store, fine. Now who gets to decide how much it is worth. You and guns or a free market.


I'm sure you'll agree that you don't HAVE to buy candy from a store if you think it's too expensive, so you can help decide the price of that candy by NOT CONSUMING it. I am also sure that you would say that it is still a free market even if the store owner uses guns to prevent you from taking candy without paying the price he demands. In other words, this entire line of argument is completely empty, because it ASSUMES THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. In other words, the real discussion here is what property IS, and once we agree on that then such arguments as you presented become valid. But by insisting on presenting such arguments even if the definition of property is in question, then your argument amounts to "I will ignore all your arguments about why intellectual work should be property and just insist without argument that it isn't, ok?"

Fine, the candy is too expensive so I make my own and sell it cheaper. This is what you seem to be against because I supposedly infringed on the store owner's "intellectual labor" he used to make the candy.

As long as you start from your OWN material and make your OWN candy it's perfectly ok to do that. That's capitalism. But when you COPY a book, is that then YOUR work of ART? Did you WRITE it? Did you spend thousands of hours working with your mind to create it?

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

[NghtRppr]

Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good books being written, and why all the Hollywood films that come out are crap and regurgitations.

Yes, it's a good thing we had strong copyright laws back in the day to protect Bach, Beethoven, Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, etc, or we'd be in such trouble.

If you're making art just for the money, you probably suck anyways.

[kiba]

As long as you start from your OWN material and make your OWN candy it's perfectly ok to do that. That's capitalism. But when you COPY a book, is that then YOUR work of ART? Did you WRITE it? Did you spend thousands of hours working with your mind to create it?

The Bitcoin Weekly is full of original essays, but it's under the public domain.

The only issue is finding enough money to pay writers. The fact is, revenues does flow to my coffer. It just needs to be more popular.

[onarchy]

A "Mind Worker"?  What does Nature say about this? I can think of better ways of growing corn, but can't grow corn. So you want to charge the corn growers for increased efficiency from using your method. If you never told them, they would still grow corn.

Before the contribution of the mind worker: a 10 ton crop of corn. After the contribution of the mind worker: a 100 ton crop of corn. Those 90 extra tons of corn would not exist without the contribution of the mind worker. Are you seriously saying then that just because he can still grow 10 tons of corn, being able to grow 100 tons of corn is of NO value to the farmer?

A "Mind Worker"? is working in a fictitious world. He gets what he gets, and should be happy he gets it. However, if he grows corn and increases his own corn yields, he wins. But is he getting the reward from the Mind Work or the Corn Yield and his Physical Work.

You are simply proving my point that libertarian anti-IP people are materialists who think that information is "fictional," i.e. doesn't exist. All that exists is physical work. That's identical to the ideas of stalinist Marxists.

Wonder what a world of "Mind Workers" would look like? How much would things cost?

ALL people are to some extent a mind worker, because even the simplest of human tasks require the usage of the mind. So the right question is to ask: what would a world WITHOUT mind workers look like? How much would things cost? Basically you would be an animal, less than a savage. The concept of "cost" would be meaningless to you since you don't have a mind to understand it with.

[onarchy]

Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good books being written, and why all the Hollywood films that come out are crap and regurgitations.

Yes, it's a good thing we had strong copyright laws back in the day to protect Bach, Beethoven, Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, etc, or we'd be in such trouble.

If you're making art just for the money, you probably suck anyways.

And if you bake bread just for the money then those breads probably suck anyways. And if you write software just to make a living then that software probably is trash. And if you build cars, or waiter at diners, or drive taxis, then you probably just deliver bad, bad goods and service. Again, this is exactly what the Marxists say when they argue against capitalism. So long as people do things out of self-interest it sucks. (BTW, all the great classical composers such as Bach or Beethoven earned a wage from kings.)

[­­­Atlas_]

A "Mind Worker"?  What does Nature say about this? I can think of better ways of growing corn, but can't grow corn. So you want to charge the corn growers for increased efficiency from using your method. If you never told them, they would still grow corn.

Before the contribution of the mind worker: a 10 ton crop of corn. After the contribution of the mind worker: a 100 ton crop of corn. Those 90 extra tons of corn would not exist without the contribution of the mind worker. Are you seriously saying then that just because he can still grow 10 tons of corn, being able to grow 100 tons of corn is of NO value to the farmer?

A "Mind Worker"? is working in a fictitious world. He gets what he gets, and should be happy he gets it. However, if he grows corn and increases his own corn yields, he wins. But is he getting the reward from the Mind Work or the Corn Yield and his Physical Work.

You are simply proving my point that libertarian anti-IP people are materialists who think that information is "fictional," i.e. doesn't exist. All that exists is physical work. That's identical to the ideas of stalinist Marxists.

Wonder what a world of "Mind Workers" would look like? How much would things cost?

ALL people are to some extent a mind worker, because even the simplest of human tasks require the usage of the mind. So the right question is to ask: what would a world WITHOUT mind workers look like? How much would things cost? Basically you would be an animal, less than a savage. The concept of "cost" would be meaningless to you since you don't have a mind to understand it with.

Billy invents a way to increase crop production ten-fold. Billy licenses use of said technique with John. John agrees not to tell anybody. John walks down the street with said technique in-hand. Technique blows away and John breaks the contract. Mary finds the lost technique and applies it to her crop. She shares it with everybody. Hundreds of thousands of people are using the technique. Should they be forced to stop and/or pay royalties to Billy?

[onarchy]

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

It's my mouth and I will use it to say whatever I want, including "give me all your money or I'll kill you." It's just sound, right? Doesn't mean anything, right? And when I sign a contract with you, it's not really an agreement, right? It's just ink on a piece of paper, right?

[­­­Atlas_]

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

It's my mouth and I will use it to say whatever I want, including "give me all your money or I'll kill you." It's just sound, right? Doesn't mean anything, right? And when I sign a contract with you, it's not really an agreement, right? It's just ink on a piece of paper, right?

The first sentence is out of context. Irrelevant. If you break contracts, nobody is not going to want to do business with you in the future. It's only to your detriment.

[onarchy]

Billy invents a way to increase crop production ten-fold. Billy licenses use of said technique with John. John agrees not to tell anybody. John walks down the street with said technique in-hand. Technique blows away and John breaks the contract. Mary finds the lost technique and applies it to her crop. She shares it with everybody. Hundreds of thousands of people are using the technique. Should they be forced to stop and/or pay royalties to Billy?

Yes, they should, for the very same reason as if my car is stolen and resold to a third party then that third party does not own that car. He has to deliver it back to ME, the owner. You should be allowed to enforce such third party infringements both in the physical realm AND in the non-material realm.

[NghtRppr]

And if you bake bread just for the money then those breads probably suck anyways. And if you write software just to make a living then that software probably is trash. And if you build cars, or waiter at diners, or drive taxis, then you probably just deliver bad, bad goods and service.

Bread isn't art. Neither is any of that other crap you've mention. Your analogies fail. Many classical and romantic artists didn't live under nobility. Mozart was an independent musician yet he's arguably still one of the greatest composers of all time, without the need for copyrights. Of course, you tellingly ignored the examples of Plato, Aristotle and others so you can cherry-pick your argument.

[onarchy]

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

It's my mouth and I will use it to say whatever I want, including "give me all your money or I'll kill you." It's just sound, right? Doesn't mean anything, right? And when I sign a contract with you, it's not really an agreement, right? It's just ink on a piece of paper, right?

The first sentence is out of context. Irrelevant.

It's free speech, right? I just used my body peacefully to make sounds, right? Sounds don't hurt anyone, right?

If you break contracts, nobody is not going to want to do business with you in the future. It's only to your detriment.

Interesting argument. Are you saying that it should NOT be legal to enforce contracts?

[­­­Atlas_]

Guy walks into a public area and starts a conversation with someone. As it progresses, someone begins to reveal slowly the design of a valuable technology. Guy screams, 'No! Stop! I don't want the patent holder to own me.' Onarchy would claim that this situation is equivalent to doing something dangerous where you might end up in the hospital with astronomical debt. Better not to talk to people.

Well, let's take the more tangible case of books. Authors use a year of their life to write a novel which provides entertainment and afterthought to his readers. BUT instead of selling 1 million copies of the book with copyright protection, the book only sells 100 copies because there is no copyright protection. The market is flooded with cheap or free pirate copies of the book. Millions of people read his books and since various materialist libertarians have been very successful at spreading their morality that intellectual work has ZERO value. Hoards of people not only do not pay for his book, but actually scoffs at people who pay for it for being "irrational" and "wasting money on something that has no value." So these people who read his one year work not only do not pay, but have a really, really good conscience about not paying, thinking "he got paid exactly what he deserved: ZERO. That's free market capitalism for you" before he continues reading the exciting book which allegedly was of zero value.

So what you anti-IP libertarians are doing is something much, much, much, much worse than actually just reading a book without paying for it. You're spreading ideas to people that they should do it with a clear conscience! Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good books being written, and why all the Hollywood films that come out are crap and regurgitations. But at least it's free!

Well, let's take the more tangible case of sex. A prostitute uses a year of her life to learn how to make pleasurable sex which provides entertainment and afterthought to her partners. BUT instead of selling 100 acts of sex with copyright protection, she only sells 10 acts because there is no copyright protection. The market is flooded with cheap or free prostitutes whom she is undersold. Millions of people experience her trademark sex positions and since various materialist libertarians have been very successful at spreading their morality that intellectual work has ZERO value. Hoards of people not only do not pay for her positions and services, but actually scoffs at people who pay for it for being "irrational" and "wasting money on something that has no value." So these people who experience her one year work not only do not pay, but have a really, really good conscience about not paying, thinking "she got paid exactly what he deserved: ZERO. That's free market capitalism for you" before he continues enjoying the sex which allegedly was of zero value.

So what you anti-IP libertarians are doing is something much, much, much, much worse than actually just reading a book without paying for it. You're spreading ideas to people that they should do it with a clear conscience! Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good girls selling sex, and why all the pornographic films that come out are crap and regurgitations. But at least it's free!

[NghtRppr]

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

It's my mouth and I will use it to say whatever I want, including "give me all your money or I'll kill you." It's just sound, right? Doesn't mean anything, right? And when I sign a contract with you, it's not really an agreement, right? It's just ink on a piece of paper, right?

It's coercion. Why do you keep bringing up arguments that have already been refuted?

[­­­Atlas_]

It's my ink and my paper. I will sell it any form I damn well please.

It's my mouth and I will use it to say whatever I want, including "give me all your money or I'll kill you." It's just sound, right? Doesn't mean anything, right? And when I sign a contract with you, it's not really an agreement, right? It's just ink on a piece of paper, right?

The first sentence is out of context. Irrelevant.

It's free speech, right? I just used my body peacefully to make sounds, right? Sounds don't hurt anyone, right?

If you break contracts, nobody is not going to want to do business with you in the future. It's only to your detriment.

Interesting argument. Are you saying that it should NOT be legal to enforce contracts?

In many cases contracts can't be enforced like on the internet. I am just saying they don't have to be. A monopoly on force or a gun in hand isn't always necessary.

[­­­Atlas_]

Billy invents a way to increase crop production ten-fold. Billy licenses use of said technique with John. John agrees not to tell anybody. John walks down the street with said technique in-hand. Technique blows away and John breaks the contract. Mary finds the lost technique and applies it to her crop. She shares it with everybody. Hundreds of thousands of people are using the technique. Should they be forced to stop and/or pay royalties to Billy?

Yes, they should, for the very same reason as if my car is stolen and resold to a third party then that third party does not own that car. He has to deliver it back to ME, the owner. You should be allowed to enforce such third party infringements both in the physical realm AND in the non-material realm.

...but they didn't sign any contract. Why should they be obligated to pay?

...and a car can't be duplicated and be used by multiple people. It isn't the same.

[wb3]

Before the contribution of the mind worker: a 10 ton crop of corn. After the contribution of the mind worker: a 100 ton crop of corn. Those 90 extra tons of corn would not exist without the contribution of the mind worker. Are you seriously saying then that just because he can still grow 10 tons of corn, being able to grow 100 tons of corn is of NO value to the farmer?

Actually under our financial system and commodities market, he makes money by having the ability to grow corn but not grow it. The ability to grow is Acreage, not the mind workers improved methods. The profit is maintained by not growing, just like software, the profit is maintained by not hitting the "Copy key."

Thomas Jefferson created a plow that was more efficient, but he did not believe in the patent system. He though knowledge and use of knowledge belonged to the public. So his field was plowed more efficiently but he didn't care if others copied his design or not. It was their choice to use it or reject it.

My problem is people want to get paid for "No Work" or "Very Little Work" well beyond the original work. If a bank wants software for its banking computers, it should contract the work (work for hire), all the work is paid for before delivery to the bank. The bank could even contract for the software to be specific and not generalize so others would not be using it at least very easily. Everyone is happy.

In my world of software, there would be no libraries, unless those libraries are GPLv3.

[wb3]

I am in favor of the Aspirin process. Aspirin is in the public domain, but yet companies still make money off of making Aspirin. Anyone who doesn't think its price is worth it, can go to the Willow Tree and eat the appropriate amount of Bark.

People will pay for the convenience of not going to the willow tree, but will do so, if costs get out of hand.  <--- Piracy defined.

[onarchy]

...but they didn't sign any contract. Why should they be obligated to pay?

Interesting you are arguing that if you don't sign a contract then violation is ok. That of course has to apply to killing as well. If you don't sign a contract with another person explicitly stating not to, it's ok to kill him.

...and a car can't be duplicated and be used by multiple people. It isn't the same.

Sure a car can be duplicated. You just get the atoms and put them together into a car.

[­­­Atlas_]

...but they didn't sign any contract. Why should they be obligated to pay?

Interesting you are arguing that if you don't sign a contract then violation is ok. That of course has to apply to killing as well. If you don't sign a contract with another person explicitly stating not to, it's ok to kill him.

...and a car can't be duplicated and be used by multiple people. It isn't the same.

Sure a car can be duplicated. You just get the atoms and put them together into a car.

So, you wouldn't download a car?

[EvanR]

Onarchy is autistic and this community likes trollbait.

Everything onarchy says is
  a) correct assuming certain data and ideas are property
  b) sounding really stupid to people
  c) therefore a great argument against premise of a)

[onarchy]

I am in favor of the Aspirin process. Aspirin is in the public domain, but yet companies still make money off of making Aspirin. Anyone who doesn't think its price is worth it, can go to the Willow Tree and eat the appropriate amount of Bark.

People will pay for the convenience of not going to the willow tree, but will do so, if costs get out of hand.  <--- Piracy defined.

Sure, once Aspirin is out there in the public domain (i.e. its novelty has worn off) then there is no problem with this. But what if someone actually spent 1 billion dollars researching and inventing Aspirin and after 10 years of hard work and lots of investment they finally start selling Aspirin only to find out that the company across the street has used one week to analyze the contents of their Aspirin and are now making their own version of Aspirin. And since they didn't spend 1 billion dollars and 10 years they can now sell the product at a fraction of the cost! Wow, free market competition! So the inventor -- the company who spent one billion dollars and 10 years on cutting edge research taking a huge risk and building up huge debt -- end up going broke, whereas the business across the street makes a fortune because they were able to make a "competing" product at "more competitive price." Please tell me that you understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with this, that it is grossly unfair that the hero who used all those  resources to make the world a better place goes bankrupt while the parasite across the street who has done NO research and invested NOTHING gets all the profit.

[­­­Atlas_]

I am in favor of the Aspirin process. Aspirin is in the public domain, but yet companies still make money off of making Aspirin. Anyone who doesn't think its price is worth it, can go to the Willow Tree and eat the appropriate amount of Bark.

People will pay for the convenience of not going to the willow tree, but will do so, if costs get out of hand.  <--- Piracy defined.

Sure, once Aspirin is out there in the public domain (i.e. its novelty has worn off) then there is no problem with this. But what if someone actually spent 1 billion dollars researching and inventing Aspirin and after 10 years of hard work and lots of investment they finally start selling Aspirin only to find out that the company across the street has used one week to analyze the contents of their Aspirin and are now making their own version of Aspirin. And since they didn't spend 1 billion dollars and 10 years they can now sell the product at a fraction of the cost! Wow, free market competition! So the inventor -- the company who spent one billion dollars and 10 years on cutting edge research taking a huge risk and building up huge debt -- end up going broke, whereas the business across the street makes a fortune because they were able to make a "competing" product at "more competitive price." Please tell me that you understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with this, that it is grossly unfair that the hero who used all those  resources to make the world a better place goes bankrupt while the parasite across the street who has done NO research and invested NOTHING gets all the profit.

When they released Aspirin, invested in research and etc. they should of been aware of such risks.

[EvanR]

News flash: in a free market you can lose your investment and get nothing for it. Try making THAT illegal.

[­­­Atlas_]

News flash: in a free market you can lose your investment and get nothing for it. Try making THAT illegal.

Let's make failure illegal. Let's see how that works out.

[wb3]

Shouldn't Einstein's Estate be getting lots of checks for his "Mind Work"?  

Or did he just find a Natural Process, that holds no value. But yet he worked to figure it out, I am getting confused. Should he have a claim for his IP. Or is IP once revealed part of the public domain?

Formulating information in ways the turns out to be productive, should be rewarded with protective IP laws. It will keep others from conducting their "mind work".

I can copy a car, dirt cheap, in a junk yard by taking piece of this car and a piece of that car. Actually, I have done this. The average cost of a 5 year old car is about $2500 plus your time in putting the pieces together, about 3 months on the weekends.  How come it is so inexpensive? Because someone else already paid for the original work. I even still get to still call it by the trademark name of the vehicle.

[onarchy]

Sure a car can be duplicated. You just get the atoms and put them together into a car.

So, you wouldn't download a car?
[/quote]

If the design/invention of the car was in the public domain I would certainly download it without paying. But if it was NOT and the designer demanded, say, 1000 dollars for his design, I would most definitely be willing to pay this for downloading a car. Remember how much a car costs TODAY in comparison. In fact this scenario is not all that unlikely. 3D printers are getting better all the time, and atom precision rearrangement of matter is not necessarily completely utopian. Some time in the future ANYONE can with the right atoms print a car, and at that point I am sure that the printing costs of such a car will start to approach the cost of the atoms, so lets say 1000 dollars in material costs. So you can print an open source car at the cost of 1000 dollars, or you can buy the sleak and really powerful design of some car designer for an additional 1000 dollars and end up with a really, really cool car for only 2000 dollars.

BUT I am absolutely positive that a whole host of libertarians are going to whine that it's coercion to not be able to use that design for free, even though the total cost of a car has fallen dramatically since the time when you couldn't easily duplicate it. In other words, when the car costs 30,000 dollars libertarians think its ok, but once it becomes so efficient to make cars that you can make them at home for 1000 dollars, paying 1000 dollars for someone else's design work becomes too much to ask. Go figure.

[wb3]

I am in favor of the Aspirin process. Aspirin is in the public domain, but yet companies still make money off of making Aspirin. Anyone who doesn't think its price is worth it, can go to the Willow Tree and eat the appropriate amount of Bark.

People will pay for the convenience of not going to the willow tree, but will do so, if costs get out of hand.  <--- Piracy defined.

Sure, once Aspirin is out there in the public domain (i.e. its novelty has worn off) then there is no problem with this. But what if someone actually spent 1 billion dollars researching and inventing Aspirin and after 10 years of hard work and lots of investment they finally start selling Aspirin only to find out that the company across the street has used one week to analyze the contents of their Aspirin and are now making their own version of Aspirin. And since they didn't spend 1 billion dollars and 10 years they can now sell the product at a fraction of the cost! Wow, free market competition! So the inventor -- the company who spent one billion dollars and 10 years on cutting edge research taking a huge risk and building up huge debt -- end up going broke, whereas the business across the street makes a fortune because they were able to make a "competing" product at "more competitive price." Please tell me that you understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with this, that it is grossly unfair that the hero who used all those  resources to make the world a better place goes bankrupt while the parasite across the street who has done NO research and invested NOTHING gets all the profit.

Ahh... but they didn't. They made the mistake of marketing a natural product and tried to make a fortune. This is why drug companies go and find natural medicines, take it back to the lab and synthesize the natural medicine into a patented medicine. Which is fine if they want to do that, but they should also show what the Natural Medicine is.

The new Holistic Medicine process is coming on strong (fish oil, etc...) because it is Natural Medicine without the synthesis of it. It is cheaper to boot. The FDA are removing Fish Oil from Nutrient stores for claiming it is the same chemicals of an Official Medicine. The FDA is protecting who? The public or the company?  They should be removing the snake oils, not protecting profits.

[wb3]

As far as the company that invests billions to bring a drug to market and someone analyzes the product for a million and copies it.  Don't they know that will happen? You will never be able to protect from it. China will copy it in a heart beat no matter what laws you put in place. If not China, someone else.

Most of the money by the way is in the Synthesizing and Medical Studies. What it comes down to is not the chemicals in the medicine but the trust the public has in the company. The TradeMark. People are willing to pay for the Trademark, and if the company acts in a decent and responsible fashion it will maintain market share in the product. But if its actions loose the public trust, it will lose.

So we are not talking about it making back its billion dollars, we are talking about the time frame in making back its billion dollars.

You know, I think Bayer has figured this out. (At least in its division of the company).

[chickenado]

Onarchy, your distinction between social and economic freedom is subjective.

You say that your "free state" will have zero regulation but various decrees on gay relationships, drugs, or whatever enforced by the host country.

But those decrees are regulations.  

Objectively, regulations against an individual's sex life, or social life, or spiritual life, or whatever life are not different than regulations against an individual's money making life.

All restrictions on how an individual can achieve maximum subjective utility without violating the non-aggression principle, are equally immoral. Some people may derive utility from making lots of money, others from becoming a monk and meditating all day (and yes even poor people pursue that goal sometimes - look at India for example).  

Your "free state" will only give people maximum freedom in the money making aspect of their life while still infringing on other freedoms, as dictated by the host country's arbitrary morality.  You say that it doesn’t matter so much because (according to your subjective opinion) freedom in the money making area is somehow superior to freedom in other areas, and poor people mainly care about economic freedom anyhow.

I say, fundamentally there is only one kind of freedom, and let the individual decide which "flavours" of that freedom are important to her/him.  Who is being the arrogant rich Westerner here, making that decision for them?

Perhaps gay porn is a bad example, but it's simply not true that people from poor parts of the world are not concerned about the so called social freedoms.  A better example is religion, and lack of freedom of thereof is bound to lead to the brutal oppression of some immigrant minorities in a theocratic host country.  Either that or people from other cultures simply won't immigrate and the free state will never become your multicultural utopia.

Also, I'm curious about this: Imagine the host county mandates some really silly, religiously motivated decree, I dunno, like "driving a car on a Saturday is punishable by prison".  When I move to the free state and challenge the decree in the supreme court, and the supreme court can find no evidence whatsoever, empirical or first principle, that the decree is beneficial, who’s side will the court take? And if it does take my side, how will it deal with the host country's hostility?

[onarchy]

When they released Aspirin, invested in research and etc. they should of been aware of such risks.

This is exactly the kind of argument that muslim gang rapists use when they see a woman on the street alone. She should have been aware of such risks, so it's her own fault she got gang raped and beaten half to death. She got what she deserved.

What I find disturbing is that the ONLY reason you have ANY sympathy with this woman is that you by extraordinary coincidence have chosen to adhere to an arbitrary principle which just happens to make the above an act of aggression. But if for some reason that principle didn't include rape when you walk alone in an alley, then I absolutely positive that you wouldn't have felt an inch of sympathy for the poor woman, just like the gang rapists don't feel bad for raping her and beating her half to death, and I find that pretty scary.

Now, you can say that I am way over the top. The aspirin example is not a violation and has nothing to do with rape, but that's the point. It does. They are fundamentally similar acts of violation. One is more severe than the other, but they are still acts of violation, and any normal, human being with even a fragment of decency understands that it's a gross injustice that the inventor of a product earns NOTHING while all the parasites who have done no work to create the product get to become rich. Frankly it is shocking that anyone can say something like that with a straight face. One thing is certain: a person like that deserves no freedom.

[error]

Well, let's take the more tangible case of books. Authors use a year of their life to write a novel which provides entertainment and afterthought to his readers. BUT instead of selling 1 million copies of the book with copyright protection, the book only sells 100 copies because there is no copyright protection. The market is flooded with cheap or free pirate copies of the book. Millions of people read his books and since various materialist libertarians have been very successful at spreading their morality that intellectual work has ZERO value. Hoards of people not only do not pay for his book, but actually scoffs at people who pay for it for being "irrational" and "wasting money on something that has no value." So these people who read his one year work not only do not pay, but have a really, really good conscience about not paying, thinking "he got paid exactly what he deserved: ZERO. That's free market capitalism for you" before he continues reading the exciting book which allegedly was of zero value.

So what you anti-IP libertarians are doing is something much, much, much, much worse than actually just reading a book without paying for it. You're spreading ideas to people that they should do it with a clear conscience! Then when all of society is like that you start wondering why there are no more new really good books being written, and why all the Hollywood films that come out are crap and regurgitations. But at least it's free!

So the "mind worker" deserves to get paid for his labor, precisely because he did the mind work? Now who's the intellectual Marxist?

[wb3]

This is exactly the kind of argument that muslim gang rapists use when they see a woman on the street alone. She should have been aware of such risks, so it's her own fault she got gang raped and beaten half to death. She got what she deserved.

Dude,

You got issues. Comparing IP, infringement to "muslim gang rapists".  Something obviously happened to you, I am sorry for whatever it was. I had nothing to do with it.

[onarchy]

Ahh... but they didn't. They made the mistake of marketing a natural product and tried to make a fortune. This is why drug companies go and find natural medicines, take it back to the lab and synthesize the natural medicine into a patented medicine. Which is fine if they want to do that, but they should also show what the Natural Medicine is.

The new Holistic Medicine process is coming on strong (fish oil, etc...) because it is Natural Medicine without the synthesis of it. It is cheaper to boot. The FDA are removing Fish Oil from Nutrient stores for claiming it is the same chemicals of an Official Medicine. The FDA is protecting who? The public or the company?  They should be removing the snake oils, not protecting profits.

It's important that we keep our examples general and not dependent on actions by the FDA, because in the Free State the FDA wouldn't exist, and the entire example you gave would be non-existent with proper laws. Remember, most of the cost of medicine today is NOT research or production cost, but FDA approval. Life Extension Foundation has calculated that if the FDA was dissolved the cost of drugs would on average fall by 90-95%. That's how much of the cost is only due to government regulation.

However, that is beside the point in this discussion. The question is whether it should be possible for someone to protect their research WORK without allowing people to parasite on that work. You have to pretty void of any fragment of humanity if you with a straight face claim that someone who has done research for 10 years and sees his profit taken away by others because they DIDN'T do the research is not being done gross injustice. To me that's just so unspeakably evil on such a massive scale that I lack words. Such a person does not deserve to be called human.

[onarchy]

This is exactly the kind of argument that muslim gang rapists use when they see a woman on the street alone. She should have been aware of such risks, so it's her own fault she got gang raped and beaten half to death. She got what she deserved.

Dude,

You got issues. Comparing IP, infringement to "muslim gang rapists".  Something obviously happened to you, I am sorry for whatever it was. I had nothing to do with it.

You're right that something happened to me: I became an adult. I learned to think. I developed basic human competencies such as reason, empathy, decency and integrity.

[error]

You're right that something happened to me: I became an adult. I learned to think. I developed basic human competencies such as reason, empathy, decency and integrity.

Which reminds me: All of the ad hominem attacks aren't helping your case at all.

[onarchy]

So the "mind worker" deserves to get paid for his labor, precisely because he did the mind work? Now who's the intellectual Marxist?

He ONLY deserves to get paid for his labor if someone actually USES the fruits of his labor. If the one who wants to use the fruits of his labor doesn't like the price, then he can simply refrain from consuming the labor of the mind worker. It's very simple. Basic capitalism, actually.

[LMGTFY]

This is exactly the kind of argument that muslim gang rapists use when they see a woman on the street alone. She should have been aware of such risks, so it's her own fault she got gang raped and beaten half to death. She got what she deserved.

Dude,

You got issues. Comparing IP, infringement to "muslim gang rapists".  Something obviously happened to you, I am sorry for whatever it was. I had nothing to do with it.

I suspect it's just a typo. There's a serious issue facing us all today: Muslamic ray guns.

Seriously, this is a logical fallacy, like the "Marxists are materialist. Libertarians are materialists. Therefore libertarians are Marxists" fallacy above.

[wb3]

However, that is beside the point in this discussion. The question is whether it should be possible for someone to protect their research WORK without allowing people to parasite on that work. You have to pretty void of any fragment of humanity if you with a straight face claim that someone who has done research for 10 years and sees his profit taken away by others because they DIDN'T do the research is not being done gross injustice. To me that's just so unspeakably evil on such a massive scale that I lack words. Such a person does not deserve to be called human.

I apologize for the long answer in response to your post, but here is an article that is apropos to your post.

What about Sand Castles?
 
What is the purpose of a Sand Castle? Lots of time, energy, and skill that others don’t posses go into their creations.  Some people build ugly monstrosities trying to improve their skill to match the beautifully designed and intricate structures that others build. They are not built for any physical gain and serve no profitable purpose. Sand Castle’s will be washed away with the incoming tide to be forever vanquished but yet others will be built the following day with the same result. Competitions are undertaken to judge who is the most skillful at building Sand Castles. A few people become respected for their skill and crowds of people will show up to see the finished product. As certain people are granted a level of respect for their ability. A local nearby shop owner will pay the respected artist to build his Sand Castle’s in front of his shop.  This is a natural and perfect solution for everyone involved to have a win/win solution.  The shop owner gains business from the crowds that show up to see the Sand Castle, the artist receives money from for doing what he would do even if he wasn’t paid, the crowds get to be wondered about the creation of art. Young inspired youths will try to emulate the respected artist’s work. The original artist isn’t offended. He realizes that he can’t be the only artist in the world, and imitation is flattery.  

More Sand Castles need to be made. People have forgotten the pleasure of making them and viewing others creations.

No matter what is done, All Sand Castles return to the Sea .... Eventually


There is something wrong with our system of entertainment. It had a perfectly sound system that was corrupted. Sponsors and Advertisers will pay to associate themselves with quality entertainment.  Programs and almost all entertainment was base around this premise. It inspired quality and creativity. It destroyed the lazy and non-creative. It promoted new and different ideas that became popular. Bad stations with bad programing went out of business. Executives had to work for their money. Artist that wanted to be recognized had to constantly work for their money. Cost control was built into the system. Giving raises and rate reductions was built into the system. It just worked and it worked well. All most all of our entertainment system was free. Television, Radio, Family games were all free.  People paid to go to a movie when it was first released and that was an exception because no sponsors or ads were paying for the movie. The current form of Cinema will be taking its last breadths unless it changes. It will go the way of the buggy whip. Take note of artist like Kevin Smith produced “Clerks” for just under $28,000 dollars. He made millions from that venture. Modern studios will spend $30-$100 million and hope to make a little money. The world is going back to a free or near free system. The big guys aren’t going willingly, but there are some innovators like NetFlix, Revision3, Twit, Hulu, etc.... That are making great strides at delivering content.  People are willing to pay for content, up to a point. But if it is offered for free or near free, it is a clear choice.  When a Black Market springs up around products, it means that the original products are being priced to high. Stop building walls around the Sand Castles.

All Sand Castles return to the Sea... Eventually

Common Sense suggests the following:

Patents:
Patents aren’t to protect cash flow or rights, they are for the public to know that the product they are buying does what it says it does and to give credit to the creator. This keeps items like Snake Oil from being sold.

Copyright:
Copyright is not to protect cash flow, it is to give credit were credit is due so others don’t take credit for another’s work.

Trademarks:
Trademarks will fall under Copyright. That’s it.

Knowledge isn’t to be stored and hoarded for the few. It should be free and exchanged and improved. In the Common Sense future Open Source, GPL Licensing, Open Patent, is the way to a better society. There is hope, because Open Source does exist, Lawyers came up with GPL Licensing and it is flourishing. But how can that be? Nothing is done for free.  It can be, because it is natural and it closely emulates Natural Laws that every other creature on earth follows.  Apes work together as a group to provide a better environment for their group. Each Ape performs different and similar functions. There are rewards, punishment, injured that are helped out.  And all this takes place without one penny exchanging hands. It is Capitalism but without the money.

But where ever the future takes us, remember...

All Sand Castles return to the Sea... Eventualy

[onarchy]

Onarchy, your distinction between social and economic freedom is subjective.

You say that your "free state" will have zero regulation but various decrees on gay relationships, drugs, or whatever enforced by the host country.

We're not advocating those decrees, but it's definitely a possibility that we won't be able to prevent it.

But those decrees are regulations.

 

Sure, and in the constitution it will explicitly state that certain decrees by the host state are not in accordance with the principles of peace and the Free State, but are put their because there is no alternative, and the very second the host country should choose to lift any of these decrees, then they will be removed as fast as you can say "swoosh" from the Free State.

Objectively, regulations against an individual's sex life, or social life, or spiritual life, or whatever life are not different than regulations against an individual's money making life.

How true.

All restrictions on how an individual can achieve maximum subjective utility without violating the non-aggression principle, are equally immoral.

Again, true.

Your "free state" will only give people maximum freedom in the money making aspect of their life while still infringing on other freedoms, as dictated by the host country's arbitrary morality.

That's completely true.

You say that it doesn’t matter so much because (according to your subjective opinion) freedom in the money making area is somehow superior to freedom in other areas, and poor people mainly care about economic freedom anyhow.

That's also true. Of all the liberties, economic freedom is by far the most basic because without it no other liberty can exist. Also to a non-gay, non-druggie Bangladeshi farmer the Free State DOES provide a humongous increase in liberty and no violations FOR HIM. If that Bangladeshi had the choice between 1) no social liberties + no economic liberties OR 2) no social liberties + full economic freedom, then to HIM that would be a giant step up, don't you think, even if was a gay drug addict. Later the host country may become more liberal and may lift its social decrees, OR later, when people have earned a lot of money in the Free State, they can afford to go to a country in the West that has all these social liberties. The Free State has been a stepping stone and without it they would have NO liberty.

I say, fundamentally there is only one kind of freedom, and let the individual decide which "flavours" of that freedom are important to her/him.  Who is being the arrogant rich Westerner here, making that decision for them?

Today no Free State exists. No emigration opportunity exists for billions of people. With the Free State the opportunity and choices has INCREASED, and anyone who goes there goes there voluntarily. And you are saying that I somehow are "making that decision for them"?!?!? The choice people have is: 1) no Free State, 2) Free state with great economic freedom, but with some hampered social freedoms. I don't understand why this isn't a no-brainer.

Perhaps gay porn is a bad example, but it's simply not true that people from poor parts of the world are not concerned about the so called social freedoms.  A better example is religion, and lack of freedom of thereof is bound to lead to the brutal oppression of some immigrant minorities in a theocratic host country.  Either that or people from other cultures simply won't immigrate and the free state will never become your multicultural utopia.

This is true, and therefore freedom of religion will be an obvious premise.

Also, I'm curious about this: Imagine the host county mandates some really silly, religiously motivated decree, I dunno, like "driving a car on a Saturday is punishable by prison".  When I move to the free state and challenge the decree in the supreme court, and the supreme court can find no evidence whatsoever, empirical or first principle, that the decree is beneficial, who’s side will the court take? And if it does take my side, how will it deal with the host country's hostility?

As I said, the constitution will explicitly state that the decrees are in violation of the principles upon which the Free State is built and that they are nevertheless respected because the very existence of the Free State rests upon that respect.

[­­­Atlas_]

So the "mind worker" deserves to get paid for his labor, precisely because he did the mind work? Now who's the intellectual Marxist?

He ONLY deserves to get paid for his labor if someone actually USES the fruits of his labor. If the one who wants to use the fruits of his labor doesn't like the price, then he can simply refrain from consuming the labor of the mind worker. It's very simple. Basic capitalism, actually.

...but not everybody is going to follow this. So you send out the men with guns to do your bidding.

[chickenado]

and any normal, human being

Appeal to majority... oh and you've just scored own goal with this one, because by definition you youself are abnormal as someone who even vaguely falls into the libertarian camp.

with even a fragment of decency

I love it when people use the word "decency" to try win an argument.  WTH is "decency" supposed to mean anyhow other than an hand wavy expression for "this is right/wrong because it feels right/wrong to me".




Anyhow, your position seems to be that if person A puts a lot of work into something and person B benefits from the fruits of that work in some way,  B has somehow become indebted to A because B has entered an implicit contract, from the mere act of benefiting.

The problem with this principle is that it is impossible for a central authority to objectively quantify this kind of positive externality for individuals, much less enforce compensation.  

Example: Mike spends 10 years working on a brilliant poem and when it's finally finished he shows it to his best friend John. Without Mike's permission, John graffities the poem onto a bridge where Mary reads it from the train on her daily commute.  She is so inspired by the poem that she decides to give up her job and start her own business, making her, and by extension, her husband Fred a millionaire.  According to your principle, Fred is now indebted to Mike. But how much does he owe? $100 ? $100,000 $10M?.  There is simply no    
objective way of determining this, even if this whole chain of events was public, and even a Big Brother state would not be capable of illuminating all the complexities of social webs.


Life isn't fair according to your definition of fairness. If it was, a heart surgeon who works 24 hour shifts and saves countless lives would make more money than a rich heiress who lives off rent and never lifts a finger.   That kind of "fairness" can only function in totalitarian state.  The heiress is lucky to be sitting on capital she didn't need to work for the same way the inventor of aspirin is unlucky he had to work for capital he cannot sit on.  

As someone else put it well, the purpose of property rights is not utilitarian, the purpose of property rights is to settle disputes over who controls a finite resource.

[thisone]

Self-ownership means ownership of your labor. Since I don't own the ideas, but my labor, I have very limited rights of ideas. I cannot prevent you from thinking with my ideas, because you own your own mind, and I cannot have full sovereignty over HOW an idea is used. Since labor is all I own I can basically only own the rights to economic exploitation of the ideas.

Own the legal rights to economic exploitation of the ideas? If I sell an idea that you've created, that would be illegitimate in your book. Getting gold coins in return for "selling" your idea would be wrong. How about using your idea to physically create gold coins? How about using your idea to physically create chocolate coins, which I would could eat? How about using your idea to prevent falling in a ditch? How about using your idea to create stone figures which I later trade for a big log so I can safely cross the ditch? Please define "economic exploitation".

In fact, over the centuries various things have been proclaimed as property that we today consider alien. Take slavery. People were indeed property. A slave proponent could argue that you should leave his property alone and that the term property is already taken. In a rational world that's not how things work.

In a rational world that's not how things work because you would own your body.

Nope. Ideas are not property. Intellectual labor is property. No-one can own an idea without creating a totalitarian society.

If ideas are not property you cannot own your idea. Labor != property, but you can use labor to create property. You own your labor, you own the object you created, but you don't own the idea.

If you used 10 years of your life to figure out how to walk backwards, I won't pay you for it.

If you don't sign a contract with another person explicitly stating not to, it's ok to kill him.

Why would you even suggest something like this? I know you agree that you own your own body and therefore do not need a sign.

But what if someone actually spent 1 billion dollars researching and inventing Aspirin and after 10 years of hard work and lots of investment ...

Why is "10 years" and "hard work" relevant? Do you believe in the labor theory of value?

But if for some reason that principle didn't include rape when you walk alone in an alley, then I absolutely positive that you wouldn't have felt an inch of sympathy for the poor woman, just like the gang rapists don't feel bad for raping her and beating her half to death, and I find that pretty scary.

Again, all the posters here agree that you own your own body.

It seems like most of your analogies don't work.

Other than that, I applaud Onarchy's initiative, although I suspect there will be a lot of debate on certain issues like IP and FRB.

[wb3]

If I "own" dogs, and breed them in a fashion to create a new breed of dog. Do I own the new breed, if other people do the same thing to come up with the same breed?  I have mixed chemicals (genes, DNA) to come up with a unique breed that no one else did. But if someone else mixes the chemicals in the same way, should I get paid for it?

What if by chance the dogs do themselves, but under my care and resources? Do I own the breed?

Should I even be able to own the dog?  Or should the dog be considered nobody's property?  The state needs to give back the fines imposed by dog bites then.

Did I even create anything? Or did I just rearrange what was there?

Summed up:

If I build a pile of dirt on my property into a uniquely shaped hill that prevents erosion of the hill, it is my hill. If others do the same, it is not my hill, it is theirs.

If they don't want to do it themselves, they can pay me to do it for them. It is still their hill.


BTW: Don't you find it ironic that IP, Copyright laws are imposed on citizens and not governments. Because Governments will reverse engineer anything they want, copy what they want, etc... without hesitation.  They will call it research, archiving, or even national security.

It won't matter how many laws or rules there are, because once it becomes accept as a practice, common law overrides any previous laws.  It might be illegal to jaywalk, but enforcement drops as soon as the masses do it, because it is not practical to punish everybody.

[chickenado]

After skimming over this long thread, I'd like to make one more point which I haven't seen mentioned yet:

A world without implicit contracts does not necessarily lead to chaos and endless civil war.

In his book Practical Anarchy Stefan Molyneux describes how such a hypothetical society could function and thrive.

The idea is that there are several dispute resolution organisations (DRO) competing (and cooperating) with eath other.  There are no implicit contracts. There are only explicit contracts with DROs.  In practice, almost everybody would end up being a member of some mainstream DRO.   

So let's take some examples that Onarchy has used, and see how DROs would resolve this.

1) Someone who produces kiddie porn. 

This one is easy. Since kiddie porn is almost universally condemned, this person would amass a terrible reputation, and soon he would have trouble finding a reputable DRO prepared to take him as a member.  Without a DRO to protect him, someone might just "accidentally" murder him as soon as he is forced to leave his property to find food, because he has no explicit contract with 99.99% of society protecting him against murder. 


2) Defamation  and Threats

In a world where anybody can commit the "crime" of defamation against anybody without fearing physical retaliation, baseless defamation and relaliatory defamation would soon spiral into a "flame war", and nobody would take this kind of information seriously anymore unless it's backed up by evidence.  Also, people would no longer believe information outside their web of trust.  If someone defames a person inside their web of trust, and the published information turns out to be baseless, or a cruel breach of privacy,  they would lose hard earned trust from a lot of people.  That would act as a strong deterrent.   

In short, society would acquire more healthy skepticism, and paradoxically, there would be less defamation even though it's not explicitly illegal. Implicit libel+slander laws are similar to "consumer protection" regulation leading to passive, gullible consumers, who dishonest companies find easier to rip off. 

3) Being murdered because I'm not wearing a sign "don't murder me".

Again, since murder is almost universally condemned, almost every DRO would have a clause against this, and reputable DROs would have reciprocal agreements allowing to "extradite" murderers to each other.  The putative murderer would be wise to assume that a person on the street has a 99.99% chance of being protected from murder by their DRO, who would hunt down the murderer.   Ok, this model still doesn't protect against "crime of passion" murders but neither does the statist, implicit contract model.

[wb3]

I wonder if any of the 'experts' consulted by the Free State Initiative will be from the Social Science Research Council or Harvard Business School.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/big_content_is_strangling_amer.html

One of the greatest threats to the US's ability to innovate lies within: specifically, with the music and movie business. These Big Content businesses are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America's position as a world leader in innovation.

At least in the Music and Movie business. To support your post; I use NetFlix, there was a Taiwanese film about an Autistic Girl that learned Karate from just watching it on TV. It was one of the best Asian films I had seen and was better than much of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood. It had Drama, Action, Romance, etc... and done very well.

I would have never seen this film if not for Content Service like NetFlix. I would rather watch NetFlix at $7 a month, than pay Hollywood $7 a movie.

The first shock that Hollywood will get, is when a famous Director markets a movie to investors for say a budget of $30 Million and releases it on Itunes for 0.99¢ a download.  Now I am willing to bet that rather than Pirate the movie more than 100 Million People will download it. Will they make Billions? No, but 200% return on a investment isn't bad, especially in this market.

I am kind of surprised that Apple doesn't finance a major movie to give it a go. It would increase their relevance and power if successful. Itunes could be the next best "Movie Theater".

[onarchy]

Anyhow, your position seems to be that if person A puts a lot of work into something and person B benefits from the fruits of that work in some way,  B has somehow become indebted to A because B has entered an implicit contract, from the mere act of benefiting.

No, benefiting is not sufficient. I benefit every single day from technology and capital I don't own and from products I have never bought. I've never used an oil tanker directly and neither have I paid for it directly. Yet, I benefit from oil tankers every single day, and it's perfectly ok. What would NOT be ok is if I benefit DIRECTLY from a product without paying for it.

The problem with this principle is that it is impossible for a central authority to objectively quantify this kind of positive externality for individuals, much less enforce compensation.  

But as you can see, I have never claimed you should be paid for positive externalities. Copying someone's unique mental work and using it to the detriment of their ability to profit from their own work is not a positive externality, it is piracy. Most people have no problem understanding the difference between externalities and piracy.

Example: Mike spends 10 years working on a brilliant poem and when it's finally finished he shows it to his best friend John. Without Mike's permission, John graffities the poem onto a bridge where Mary reads it from the train on her daily commute.  She is so inspired by the poem that she decides to give up her job and start her own business, making her, and by extension, her husband Fred a millionaire.  According to your principle, Fred is now indebted to Mike. But how much does he owe? $100 ? $100,000 $10M?.  There is simply no    
objective way of determining this, even if this whole chain of events was public, and even a Big Brother state would not be capable of illuminating all the complexities of social webs.

As I just pointed out, indirect benefits do not count. That's not what we're talking about.

Life isn't fair according to your definition of fairness. If it was, a heart surgeon who works 24 hour shifts and saves countless lives would make more money than a rich heiress who lives off rent and never lifts a finger.   That kind of "fairness" can only function in totalitarian state.  The heiress is lucky to be sitting on capital she didn't need to work for the same way the inventor of aspirin is unlucky he had to work for capital he cannot sit on.

We're not talking about mere unfairness (it's unfair that some are lucky to be born with good genes etc.), but about injustice. 

As someone else put it well, the purpose of property rights is not utilitarian, the purpose of property rights is to settle disputes over who controls a finite resource.

I agree that it's not utilitarian, and as an approximation it is an ok definition of property to say that it settles disputes over who controls a finite resource (that's a utilitarian argument), but the more fundamental argument is that YOU OWN YOUR OWN LIFE. Your life is a WORK PROCESS. Every single moment of your life you have to work (through your metabolism at the cellular level, through physical labor and through mental labor). You are a work machine, and you are defined by that work. You are YOU because you create yourself and when you structure your surroundings and reality that becomes part of you. Since we humans are a social species (i.e. peacefully coexist) then it means that living as a human means to respect each other and live peacefully together. Peace is defined as to be able to have full sovereignty over your SELF (and hence also your WORK PRODUCTS). That's the fundamentals, not some arbitrary principles about settling disputes.

[onarchy]

Please define "economic exploitation".

Direct commercial utilization of the IP. Someone who buys the book doesn't have the right to distribute and sell copies of the book. This should be fairly easy to understand since current IP law examplifies this very well.

If ideas are not property you cannot own your idea.

That's right.

Labor != property, but you can use labor to create property.

ALL property was originally created through labor. (Property can be sold or given away, but that doesn't change the fact that the origins of the property was labor)

You own your labor, you own the object you created, but you don't own the idea.

That's right. You own your own thoughts of course, but owning an idea would infringe people's right to think freely with their own minds and that would be a gross violation of the freedom of thought. In your head you can do whatever you want.

If you used 10 years of your life to figure out how to walk backwards, I won't pay you for it.

Well walking backwards is not UNIQUE is it? It's not a novelty, and hence it doesn't matter that I've spent 10 years reinventing something mundane. I cannot exploit that concept economically with IP rights because it is not novel.

If you don't sign a contract with another person explicitly stating not to, it's ok to kill him.

Why would you even suggest something like this? I know you agree that you own your own body and therefore do not need a sign.

Because the right to not be killed IS an implicit contract. You CAN agree to have someone kill you (euthanasia) so it's not completely unrealistic that someone wants to be killed. However, by DEFAULT you assume that people DON'T want to be killed, and you therefore have to make an EXPLICIT contract with someone in order for it to be legal for someone to kill you.

Why is "10 years" and "hard work" relevant? Do you believe in the labor theory of value?

I'm only using a large number to create an extreme example. Most people's moral compasses often require more than fine nuances. They need to see the most significant bit before they can sea the lesser bits. So its only purpose is to make a very clear point. No, I don't believe in the labor theory of value, but I DO believe in the labor theory of PROPERTY, which is not the same thing. That something has a MARKET VALUE is not the same as it being your PROPERTY. These are completely separate topics. Property means "that which is under your sovereignty, i.e. full control." Market value means what people are willing to pay for someone's property.

Other than that, I applaud Onarchy's initiative, although I suspect there will be a lot of debate on certain issues like IP and FRB.

I don't mind debate, that's why I am participating. I just wonder how materialism (upon which Marxism is based) could acquire such a prominent position in libertarianism. It's flabbergasting and disturbing because the position of anti-IP libertarians and Marxists on intellectual property is identical and for identical reasons.

The same goes with "FRB is fraud." I can understand that people are skeptical towards FRB (just like I understand that they think IP law is broken) but from here to conclude that FRB is fraud is a complete mystery. I have btw, written an essay on Fractional Reserve Banking for those interested:

http://onarki.no/blogg/2011/04/fractional-reserve-banking-vs-pure-gold-standard/

[wb3]

No, benefiting is not sufficient. I benefit every single day from technology and capital I don't own and from products I have never bought. I've never used an oil tanker directly and neither have I paid for it directly. Yet, I benefit from oil tankers every single day, and it's perfectly ok. What would NOT be ok is if I benefit DIRECTLY from a product without paying for it.

If you borrow a Pen or Pencil from your friend to write a note, are you are committing a crime? You are benefiting from something directly that you did not pay for. If you write a novel with the borrowed pencil, does the novel belong to you, or do you have to share the profits with the owner of the Pencil. What if he lent you the pencil conditionally? He let you use it to erase something but not write something.

What if the pencil he lent you wasn't his pencil to lend? You had no right to write with it.


You get the idea.

[onarchy]

No, benefiting is not sufficient. I benefit every single day from technology and capital I don't own and from products I have never bought. I've never used an oil tanker directly and neither have I paid for it directly. Yet, I benefit from oil tankers every single day, and it's perfectly ok. What would NOT be ok is if I benefit DIRECTLY from a product without paying for it.

If you borrow a Pen or Pencil from your friend to write a note, are you are committing a crime? You are benefiting from something directly that you did not pay for.

It depends on what kind of relationship you have with your friend. Is it very likely that your friend would say yes to lending you his pen or pencil? If so, then borrowing is not a crime. However, suppose you borrow 1 million dollars from him (his entire life saving) to go gambling in Las Vegas. Then you WOULD be a criminal, because this is something that he would very likely object to very loudly.

If you write a novel with the borrowed pencil, does the novel belong to you,

Yes. At most I have to pay a few cents for borrowing the pen.

or do you have to share the profits with the owner of the Pencil.

No sharing.

What if he lent you the pencil conditionally? He let you use it to erase something but not write something.

Still no.

What if the pencil he lent you wasn't his pencil to lend? You had no right to write with it.

Still no. He could go to a civil law suit against me and I would have to fully compensate him for using the pen, but the novel I write will in no way affect the compensation. It will ONLY be for using his pen, whether I use to write doodles or a novel.

You get the idea.

Yeah I do. All these examples has nothing do with IP.

[wb3]

Yes. At most I have to pay a few cents for borrowing the pen.

Ok, so the most any "Pirate" must pay is the cost of the item. So instead of the $150,000 dollars, he would only pay $19.99


Or as many do, they purchase the item and use Pirated copies because they are easier to deal without the DRM.

 Just ask Ubisoft, who are selling a pirate-sourced soundtrack of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to their customers. Or Belarus’ National State Television, who aired a pirated copy of The Hurt Locker on Oscar night.

At first everything seems normal, but those who look closely will notice something interesting. On the film’s cover we can read the following text – “Killers 2010 BDRiP AC3 XViD-ILOVE” – which is a direct reference to a pirated copy of the film that can be found on numerous torrent sites.

It is unclear whether any of the other films on board were also being provided from pirated sources.

Although there is little doubt that we’re dealing with a pirated copy of Killers, this doesn’t mean that Saudi Airlines doesn’t have a license to show the film. Sometimes it’s just more convenient to deal with non-DRMed files than the copies that are provided through official channels.

If I buy a new release DVD, and bring 50,000 friends to the Super-dome to watch it, I have done nothing wrong. Streaming DVD's is the same principle.

If I purchased a DVD, I can download it and watch if from a pirated source because I own the DVD. It is just easier to move the file between systems because of the lack of DRM. If big companies can do it, why not me or others?

I might even want to add my own subtitles, to the film. What is wrong with that? I own the DVD. I own the content on that DVD. If they don't want me to have the content, don't sell it to me.

If I go over a friends house and he gives me a DVD, it is now mine. All right to the property have been transferred.

[onarchy]

After skimming over this long thread, I'd like to make one more point which I haven't seen mentioned yet:

A world without implicit contracts does not necessarily lead to chaos and endless civil war.

(snip)

These are certainly the best arguments presented so far, and any state has to mount very serious arguments against anarchy. I really don't want to go into that debate now, although I will sketch the argument:

Back in what I call The Original Tribe (i.e. the natural environment humans have lived in and adapted to most of their evolutionary history) there was no state. There were only a few dozen tribe members and the organization of that tribe could just as easily be called anarchism as socialism, laissez-faire, tribalism or nationalism. With such a small group all these organizational systems become virtually identical. Indeed, that is why all these are so popular. The reason you don't need a state in The Original Tribe is because you have something that completely balances power and prevents violation: love and friendship. If you KNOW someone personally it is extremely unlikely that you will enslave them. And if you are part of a family you tend to share with each other in an egalitarian socialist like manner.

The problem with love and friendship is that they don't scale up. You can love and be friends with so and so many people, but beyond that you have no relation with them. They are alien to you, strangers. Now, THIS event (which probably took place around 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture after the dramatic rise of CO2 after the ice age) of scaling up the tribe to such a size that the STRANGER was introduced in society was also the birth of slavery and structural violation. With a sufficiently large tribe there will always be groups who have no moral restrictions on what they could do to other groups in the tribe, and hence you get the rise of mafia and despotism. Thus, what is needed is a system that allows for the STRANGER to live safely. That's what a classically liberal society is all about: privacy, i.e. the right to be a stranger. Socialists don't want you to be a stranger. They insist on you being part of the family, treating you as part child and part brother whom they can demand egalitarian sharing from.

But in this world filled with strangers it is inescapable that there will arise mafias who will take over the whole of society and impose despotic rule -- fascism -- on everyone. This happens rarely, but when it happens the condition is extremely hard to get rid of and lasts for centuries. Therefore, what is needed is a minimal state with a single purpose: to prevent the births and takeover of mafias, which is inevitable in a world of anarchy.

However, notice that the minarchy can be very, very small, allowing for something very close to private security firms and even private courts, and if you read our section on Rule of Law, I briefly outline MY strategy for preventing a minarchy from devolving into fascism, as it has in the United States and Europe.

http://freestateinitiative.org/free-state/rule-of-law

[thisone]

I don't mind debate, that's why I am participating. I just wonder how materialism (upon which Marxism is based) could acquire such a prominent position in libertarianism. It's flabbergasting and disturbing because the position of anti-IP libertarians and Marxists on intellectual property is identical and for identical reasons.

The same goes with "FRB is fraud." I can understand that people are skeptical towards FRB (just like I understand that they think IP law is broken) but from here to conclude that FRB is fraud is a complete mystery. I have btw, written an essay on Fractional Reserve Banking for those interested:

http://onarki.no/blogg/2011/04/fractional-reserve-banking-vs-pure-gold-standard/

I know a ton of libertarians that are pro-IP and don't consider FRB to be inherently fraudulent. Most of them adhere to the Austrian school (which is the only school that seems rational to me), and most of them love the works of Ayn Rand. But they don't necessarily agree with everything that comes out of either camp.

I often quote Rand and Rothbard even though they aren't always compatible. But both of them did a great deal of good. What worries me is the rivalry that I sometimes witness between Objectivists and Austrians. I won't dismiss Rothbard because Rand "shunned him". (And I won't dismiss Mises, Reisman etc for that reason either). I don't mind that people disagree, but I think it's sad when Objectivists try to discredit Austrians, frantically avoid quoting them (even though they often have to in order to support their arguments), embrace supply siders etc, only because some of their supporters would disagree on certain issues.

I suspect that you refrain from calling yourself a libertarian in order to distance yourself from anarchists, Rothbardians, anti-IP and anti-FRB people, and maybe even Rothbard himself. I don't see it that way. I don't think you have to be anti-FRB or an anarchist to be a "libertarian". (Yes, I've read some Objectivist literature on "libertarianism", but I don't endorse their definition.) I align myself with people like you because we agree on 99% when it comes to politics (considering the socialist, welfare state, corporatist plague that is so prevalent today). I applaud every attack on the collectivist mentality, and I won't stop promoting Atlas Shrugged even though my Objectivist neighbor calls Rothbard a liar. Like Rand said: "Mises in economics". And like Mises said: "... but Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also (or may I say: first of all) a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled "intellectuals" and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties.".

And, to quote someone else: "Baby, this shit we got together, it's so good we gotta get the government in on this shit. We can't just share this commitment between us. We need judges and lawyers involved in this shit, baby. It's hot!"

[wb3]

That is exactly how publishing startups like Spotify and even individual artists and authors are succeeding. A girl can sell copies of her self-published book on Amazon and make $180,000 in a year, without a team of lawyers to chase down people that are sharing her book, no DRM or any other deterrent, simply because it is convenient for the consumer. It would have taken her years to get her work published had she gone through a traditional publisher, that is if she could find a literary agent that would even answer her correspondence. The point being there are market based approaches to IP that are far more successful than any kind of centralized enforcement effort.

Agreed, it is the Free "Free Market".  And I like it.  She made more than she thought and is happy with what she received. She is not expecting to forever make thousands off of her work. Her work, earned what it earned. Onto the next book.

It is the way it is supposed to be. Amazon did a great service to authors. Sure they take a cut, but not excessively so. And they sure aren't suing on her behalf. It is what it is.

It is hard to move the "Artists" out of their penthouses in New York. They created something once, and expect to get paid for it forever. They are delusional. It worked for them for awhile but not anymore.  Even journalist are getting scared, crowd sourcing news is way more accurate than one journalist with "sources."

[onarchy]

Yes. At most I have to pay a few cents for borrowing the pen.

Ok, so the most any "Pirate" must pay is the cost of the item. So instead of the $150,000 dollars, he would only pay $19.99

Well, the pen is different in that it wasn't a product that your friend explicitly sold for profit. If he was a pen dealer and you used a pen that he sells at 150,000 dollars, then you may not have to pay the whole price, but at least the price of the market value reduction from becoming a used item.

Or as many do, they purchase the item and use Pirated copies because they are easier to deal without the DRM.

That's in my view perfectly ok, so long as you don't spread the copy. I do that myself. Remember IP rights do not give a blank check to limit information usage in any way the creator wants. It must serve the purpose of economic exploitation (or privacy issues when that applies.) A DRM has no function for a legitimate user who does not pirate. The creator's intention is not to hamper the user experience, but to prevent piracy.

Although there is little doubt that we’re dealing with a pirated copy of Killers, this doesn’t mean that Saudi Airlines doesn’t have a license to show the film. Sometimes it’s just more convenient to deal with non-DRMed files than the copies that are provided through official channels.[/i]

Agreed, and it's just fair use. There's something screwy about the laws of society (particularly the banking/money laws which prevents micropayment systems), and to compensate for that screwiness in the way you described is not a violation of IP rights.

If I buy a new release DVD, and bring 50,000 friends to the Super-dome to watch it, I have done nothing wrong. Streaming DVD's is the same principle.

No, here you HAVE violated the conditions of the DVD. Fair use means watching it with your family (up to 5 people). 50,000 people is obviously distribution and is a violation of IP rights.

If I purchased a DVD, I can download it and watch if from a pirated source because I own the DVD.

Agreed.

It is just easier to move the file between systems because of the lack of DRM. If big companies can do it, why not me or others?

Agreed.

I might even want to add my own subtitles, to the film. What is wrong with that?

Nothing wrong with that.

I own the DVD. I own the content on that DVD. If they don't want me to have the content, don't sell it to me.

Well, you own the instantiation of the content on the DVD, but you don't own the distribution rights.

If I go over a friends house and he gives me a DVD, it is now mine. All right to the property have been transferred.

That's true, so long as he has actually not made a copy of it and that you now are watching a duplicate.

[onarchy]

I am kind of surprised that Apple doesn't finance a major movie to give it a go. It would increase their relevance and power if successful. Itunes could be the next best "Movie Theater".

That is exactly how publishing startups like Spotify and even individual artists and authors are succeeding. A girl can sell copies of her self-published book on Amazon and make $180,000 in a year, without a team of lawyers to chase down people that are sharing her book, no DRM or any other deterrent, simply because it is convenient for the consumer. It would have taken her years to get her work published had she gone through a traditional publisher, that is if she could find a literary agent that would even answer her correspondence. The point being there are market based approaches to IP that are far more successful than any kind of centralized enforcement effort.

I applaud and welcome any such improvements as described here. As I have stated numerous times during this debate. IP is so seriously flawed today due to bad laws, mainly due to extremely cumbersome money and banking laws which makes it virtually impossible to start a bank or payment service. As a consequence of this only NOW we are starting to something like Flattr, iTunes, Spotify and other similar solutions that imitate micropayment. With free banking I am positive that we would have seen micropayment systems as soon as before 2000. It is not impossible that when the WWW was built payment systems had been built right into the protocol without the prevalent banking laws. Today micropayment would have been just as mundane and common as email, and as a consequence ALL software, music and movies would have been on a digital payment platform at super-low prices. There would have been virtually zero piracy and no DRM.

To my knowledge no libertarians have ever pointed out the relationship between the bad state of IP and the bad money laws, because most people don't understand the relationship.

I look at the attitudes of Onar Åm and wonder if such a Free State Initiative might be better served by people with a more progressive vision.

Theft is not progressive by any standard.

How would companies like Microsoft fare doing business through channels made available through such a Free State? Software piracy is an integral to Microsoft's market entry strategy for emerging markets. What would they do? Arrest Microsoft's agents, or people that Microsoft is encouraging to pirate their wares? The level of regulation and enforcement would eventually make administrative efforts very top-heavy in such an environment.

It's hard to say exactly what would happen in a Free State, but generally speaking organized piracy would be struck down.

I am wonder what the law enforcement strategy for such a Free State would look like. Would there be one system for workers and another for the operators of multinational corporations?

There would be equality before the law.

[wb3]

No, here you HAVE violated the conditions of the DVD. Fair use means watching it with your family (up to 5 people). 50,000 people is obviously distribution and is a violation of IP rights.

I am in trouble, my family has 7 in it. With extended family (sister, etc...) I have 20.  Often more than 5 watch DVD's at my house.  So IP has limited my right to how many friends that can watch a movie.

But Yet you state:

If I go over a friends house and he gives me a DVD, it is now mine. All right to the property have been transferred.


That's true, so long as he has actually not made a copy of it and that you now are watching a duplicate.

So instead of having everyone at the same time watch my DVD, I can give it to a friend, and them give it to another, and with just degrees of separation, almost everybody can watch the DVD.

So its not really that I can't have 50,000 people watch the DVD, I just can't have them watch it at the same time.

Hence, a DVD club where each buys 1 DVD then sends it on to another predetermined group member say after 2 days, would be OK.
In effect, rather than 50,000 people buying each and every DVD, they each buy 50,000 different DVD's and give it to their friends at predetermined intervals.  Apparently there is nothing wrong with that.  Why does something tell me if this occurred new laws would be written to prevent it.

Irrespective of any laws, when a "Black Market" exists, it is just the Free Market at work. Someone has overpriced or suppressed the availability of something many want. Is it wrong, who is to say.  The Kennedy's got rich by bootlegging liquor, no one complains now about it.

Others are getting rich selling cigarettes in New York City because of the Price they put on Cigarettes there. When you can buy a carton duty free for $14 and sell them in NYC for $80, there will be a market, no matter what laws are written.

It is funny watching the clowns in the circus go round and round wondering why the system isn't working. They are not seeing the forest through the trees. It is working, just not they way they want it to work.

[onarchy]

No, here you HAVE violated the conditions of the DVD. Fair use means watching it with your family (up to 5 people). 50,000 people is obviously distribution and is a violation of IP rights.

I am in trouble, my family has 7 in it.

Well, I was using a typical order of magnitude numbers. 5 is ok, 50,000 is NOT fair use. 500 is not fair use either, and neither is probably 50.

So instead of having everyone at the same time watch my DVD, I can give it to a friend, and them give it to another, and with just degrees of separation, almost everybody can watch the DVD.

So its not really that I can't have 50,000 people watch the DVD, I just can't have them watch it at the same time.

If you would like to put it like that, yes. But the point is that with transferred ownership (and hence serial viewing) it will take 11 years for 50,000 owners to watch a 2 hour movie, if they watch in a continuous marathon. If we assume that there are 4 people in the family of each owner on average and it is actually only watched during the afternoon hours (i.e. when people are home from school and work and not sleeping) Then you can if you're lucky get two ownership transfers per day and it will then take 17 years for 50,000 people to watch the movie. By that time the movie is outdated and everyone who wanted to see it has seen it anyways. I.e. this serial transfer of ownership, even when done very efficiently (i.e. twice a day), does not significantly undermine the IP (i.e. the ability of the owner to profit from his creation).

Irrespective of any laws, when a "Black Market" exists, it is just the Free Market at work.

That is true. A large black market shows that something is wrong, but not necessarily WHAT is wrong. It may be overpricing, it may be hampering of the product (DRM or annoying FBI-warnings), inavailability due to bad payment systems due to bad banking laws etc. But you cannot from a black market alone tell WHAT is wrong.

It is funny watching the clowns in the circus go round and round wondering why the system isn't working. They are not seeing the forest through the trees. It is working, just not they way they want it to work.

If there is a black market then obviously the system is not working.

[wb3]

If you would like to put it like that, yes. But the point is that with transferred ownership (and hence serial viewing) it will take 11 years for 50,000 owners to watch a 2 hour movie, if they watch in a continuous marathon. If we assume that there are 4 people in the family of each owner on average and it is actually only watched during the afternoon hours (i.e. when people are home from school and work and not sleeping) Then you can if you're lucky get two ownership transfers per day and it will then take 17 years for 50,000 people to watch the movie. By that time the movie is outdated and everyone who wanted to see it has seen it anyways. I.e. this serial transfer of ownership, even when done very efficiently (i.e. twice a day), does not significantly undermine the IP (i.e. the ability of the owner to profit from his creation).

I wonder if George Lucas would agree with you.

But we might be coming to a consensus. If instead of Mailing these movies, we have a club house, that sells say beer and pretzels, where you can come and mingle, pick a movie to take home, bring any new purchases for others to the shelves of the club house, this would be OK.

As the Club Owner, I make money off of the sales of beer and pretzels, the club members get low cost almost free movies (because they must be averaged down from each others purchases). Would this be an acceptable business in your new system? Even though it does hurt DVD sales (maybe, cause they might not buy the DVD otherwise).

[onarchy]

If you would like to put it like that, yes. But the point is that with transferred ownership (and hence serial viewing) it will take 11 years for 50,000 owners to watch a 2 hour movie, if they watch in a continuous marathon. If we assume that there are 4 people in the family of each owner on average and it is actually only watched during the afternoon hours (i.e. when people are home from school and work and not sleeping) Then you can if you're lucky get two ownership transfers per day and it will then take 17 years for 50,000 people to watch the movie. By that time the movie is outdated and everyone who wanted to see it has seen it anyways. I.e. this serial transfer of ownership, even when done very efficiently (i.e. twice a day), does not significantly undermine the IP (i.e. the ability of the owner to profit from his creation).

I wonder if George Lucas would agree with you.

But we might be coming to a consensus. If instead of Mailing these movies, we have a club house, that sells say beer and pretzels, where you can come and mingle, pick a movie to take home, bring any new purchases for others to the shelves of the club house, this would be OK.

Once it becomes organized it is no longer in line with fair use, so this would not be ok or at the very least borderline. Though, the creators factor in fair use into the price, so that the one who actually pays for the DVD ends up paying for the average number of freeloaders fair use involves. Needless to say if such a scheme cought on and become very common the publishers would simply compensate by increasing the price.

On the other hand the exact opposite would happen with pay-per-view and micropayment. If there were no freeloaders and every single one who ever saw the movie or listened to the song actually paid then the price per listen or pay per view would become VERY small. Let me give one of my favorite examples. Consider the success series Prison Break. It was cancelled after its fourth season (I think). Why when it was so popular? Piracy. Too many people just downloaded the series instead of watching the horrific ad-version on TV. How could this EASILY have been fixed with micropayment? The average number of official viewers in the LAST season was about 6 million. On average each episode in the third season cost 3 million to produce. So with micropayment installed in every TV, if every single official viewer paid 1 dollar per episode (45 minutes) then that would have given the series producers a profit margin of a stunning 50%. That's really, really good. Now, if you factor in all the millions of people who watched the series abroad and all the people who downloaded it then I'm quite certain we are talking about at the very minimum 20 million people. If we now say that a reasonable profit margin for such a series is 40% (to cover the high risk etc.) then each episode would have to bring in 5 million dollars. 5/20 = 0,25 dollars or 25 cents per episode per viewer. In other words, with proper micropayment Prison Break could be extremely profitable at 25-50 cents per episode. I would not hesitate one second to pay that amount, and neither would 99% of viewers.

Now, Prison Break was cancelled. But not only Prison Break. Remember Battlestar Galactica? This fantastic series was cancelled in after its fourth season due to too few PAYING viewers. Remember the prequel Caprica? Cancelled after its FIRST season for the same reason. Think back to all your favorite TV shows that have been cancelled way too early due to too few viewers. Every single one of them could have continued for a much longer time had it not been for piracy and the lack of proper payment systems. These are the casualties of piracy and bad banking laws. So all you anti-IP guys out there that love a series that has been cancelled: You got *exactly* what you asked for.

Think about the horrendous state of Hollywood today, how few truly good, creative and novel movies come out these days. That drought of creativity is entirely due to piracy and bad payment systems. In a sense all these movies and series that are NOT made is Atlas Shrugging, the men of the mind are on strike due to the widespread looting of the able.

[wb3]

I accept your points, as plausible and logical. I disagree with the cost of production and estimation of losses.

Remember "Clerks" by Kevin Smith. Production $28,000 dollars, and made some actors famous from being neighborhood kids on the block. It is the costs of production that many have the argument with.  What really scares the Big Guys is the indie movement. They fear it and are trying to prevent it.

The simple economic price points are not hard to define. When the price of the product is cheaper and more convenient to you acquiring it from another method, the correct price is set.

What gets people going, is not that artists make profits, but how much they want and for as long as they want it. Unfortunately for digital media, the laws of supply and demand do not disappear because you want them to. If I could mine all the gold I want, the price will fall because I can supply as much as you want. Once digitized, the supply side becomes really easy to meet the demand side for next to nothing. Sorry, it won't go away as long as what you make can be digitized. Right or Wrong doesn't matter. Supply/Demand is a natural system.

I have traveled the world. In almost any country you can buy DVD's on the corner for $5-$10 that have about 20 movies on it. It is part of local economies in some places. You can't put Schrodinger's Cat back into the Box. ( <-- Talk about paradoxes)

The FBI just arrested a guy, glass worker, in New York for uploading a Pirated Movie (Wolverine pre release) he bought from a Korean in New York for $5. They arrested the John but forgot about the Korean that sold it to him. Yea, he did a wrong. But why didn't they go after the Korean. I can surmise, this is now big business for people that can "fight" back. People you don't turn in. People lawyers won't sue. At least Lawyers that like living.

So even if you successfully turn the internet into a "clean" model. People will just buy it at its real price point from the guy on the corner. Will people stop making movies? No, of course not. They will just reduce the cost to make the movies or lower prices.

[wb3]

Pay per view, is one of my club ideas.

No one pays for Pay per View events, businesses and bars pay for them, and let their customers watch. The Bars, Casinos, etc... make money by the business it generates at the locale.

Don't tell me that is illegal. Cause every Casino and Bar does it.   Boxing, UFC, etc...

[onarchy]

I accept your points, as plausible and logical. I disagree with the cost of production and estimation of losses.

The cost of production of Prison Break is just taken from Wikipedia. It is not infallible, but that's the numbers I've seen. Prison Break was especially covered in the news for being the most popular TV Series that "no-one" saw on TV.

Remember "Clerks" by Kevin Smith. Production $28,000 dollars, and made some actors famous from being neighborhood kids on the block. It is the costs of production that many have the argument with.  What really scares the Big Guys is the indie movement. They fear it and are trying to prevent it.

I have nothing against the indie movement. I was just quoting real costs of a real production, and even with a 3 million dollar budget per episode the series could EASILY have prospered on less than 50 cents per episode with a proper payment system.

What gets people going, is not that artists make profits, but how much they want and for as long as they want it.

I don't care, so long as a) I get a good product, b) I pay what I consider a fair price for it. I have no problems paying up to 1 dollar per episode for a series I like. Hell, if it's a really good series that only a few people watch but I just happen to love, I wouldn't mind paying 10 dollars per episode. The point is that with micropayment all movies and series are going to cost typically 1 dollar per view or less.

I have traveled the world. In almost any country you can buy DVD's on the corner for $5-$10 that have about 20 movies on it. It is part of local economies in some places. You can't put Schrodinger's Cat back into the Box. ( <-- Talk about paradoxes)

With a proper payment system it would be zero problem to actually segment a market based on location. In the Philippines it makes sense that a legal copy of a series costs somewhere around 5 cents. With such prices there could easily be 15 million viewers for a series. Given that a series today makes ZERO from such a series in Philippines, 15 million * 5 cents = 750,000 dollars per episode extra is not shabby.

The FBI just arrested a guy, glass worker, in New York for uploading a Pirated Movie (Wolverine pre release) he bought from a Korean in New York for $5. They arrested the John but forgot about the Korean that sold it to him. Yea, he did a wrong. But why didn't they go after the Korean. I can surmise, this is now big business for people that can "fight" back. People you don't turn in. People lawyers won't sue. At least Lawyers that like living.

Obviously it was the seller, not the buyer that should have been targeted here.

So even if you successfully turn the internet into a "clean" model. People will just buy it at its real price point from the guy on the corner. Will people stop making movies? No, of course not. They will just reduce the cost to make the movies or lower prices.

I think you're wrong. In Norway kids buy mobile ring tones upwards of 3 dollars or more per jingle. I don't understand it but they pay it without hesitation due to convenience. The moment it is MORE convenient to pay legally than to become a criminal the piracy rate drops to pretty much zero.

[wb3]

I think you're wrong. In Norway kids buy mobile ring tones upwards of 3 dollars or more per jingle. I don't understand it but they pay it without hesitation due to convenience. The moment it is MORE convenient to pay legally than to become a criminal the piracy rate drops to pretty much zero.

I didn't know that, and I must say; It shocks me. $3 bucks for a ring tone. Why don't they just make their own from music they have? Huh? Well, if that is how they want to spend their money, its theirs to do with as they wish.


I know this is Apple and Oranges, but if two people are selling bottled water of same quality but one is authorized and approved, and the other is a bootlegger. From who do you buy?

Now, the Authorized Guy's price is $20 per liter. And the Bootlegger's is $1 per liter. From who do you buy?

You know you are committing a crime, but something just doesn't feel right about the Authorized Guy's price. Something mischievous is going on and you have no control over the price point. It is forced down your throat. But you can, protest the system by purchasing the unauthorized water.

Of course the powers that be try to put the Bootlegger out of business, but more just pop up every-time you arrest a bootlegger. Not to mention the bootleggers are good in avoiding you, so instead you go to the customer of the bootleggers. You try to scare them into compliance, but it is really hard because their is such a big difference in the price points ($20 to $1). You must cross your fingers and hope everyone gets scared. Some might, but you still can't overcome the price point problem.

All I am saying is that the industry could have put all this to bed a long time ago, if they had the right price point. But it is hard to let go of all the Greed and Money. If they don't accept less soon, they will get nothing. And others will emerge.

[MoonShadow]

I accept your points, as plausible and logical. I disagree with the cost of production and estimation of losses.

The cost of production of Prison Break is just taken from Wikipedia. It is not infallible, but that's the numbers I've seen. Prison Break was especially covered in the news for being the most popular TV Series that "no-one" saw on TV.

I saw the first season of Prison Break on TV, but after that they quickly lost their muse.  The plot of the first season, the idea that an intelligent person would first engineer a new prison, arrange to get his brother transfered there, and then get convicted to be sent there, and have his break-out plan encoded onto his skin as a tatoo is pretty cool.  But once they were out, it was just like so many other drama shows I've seen before.

[EvanR]

Probably not because of arbitrary thresholds of 'common knowledge' and 'common heritage' and 'copyright expiration' which will be codified into the constitution. Wouldn't it be interesting if normal property had such limits? This bike is mine for ten years, then it is owned by no one and usable by anyone!

[deadlizard]

Probably not because of arbitrary thresholds of 'common knowledge' and 'common heritage' and 'copyright expiration' which will be codified into the constitution. Wouldn't it be interesting if normal property had such limits? This bike is mine for ten years, then it is owned by no one and usable by anyone!

Show me the receipt or I'm taking my new bike out for a spin, lol

[deadlizard]

Is there a digital equivalent to archaeology? Probably not, because Indiana Jones would fear being sued by Microhotep...

*groooooaaaan*

As for digital archaeology just look at the Mame project.

[EvanR]

Probably. Arcade machines are ideas, simulating someone's machine on your computer for your own purposes is immoral.

[onarchy]

Or this... Would this be considered 'theft' in a Free State?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/opinion/24darnton.html?_r=1

A number of countries are also determined to out-Google Google by scanning the entire contents of their national libraries. France is spending 750 million euros to digitize its cultural treasures; the National Library of the Netherlands is trying to digitize every Dutch book and periodical published since 1470; Australia, Finland and Norway are undertaking their own efforts.

Generally speaking libraries and digitalization of works that are in the public domain are completely unproblematic, and I applaud such private efforts (e.g. the Gutenberg Project), although government has no business doing running libraries. In general, with copyrighted material libraries become problematic, unless the IP owner explicitly chooses to allow libraries to use his work, and with digital books this becomes even more problematic. There are several solutions to this and one model is that philanthropists who want to share books with the world can make a deal with the author to e.g. buy the rights to place them in the public domain, or to buy a certain amount of licenses at bulk prices.

Libraries made a whole lot of sense back in the days when the act of copying books was the expensive part, but nowadays libraries are really out of date.

[wb3]

But for how long, What if it took a 1000 years for a work to become Public Domain? The length of these protections are getting ridiculous. Death +86 years, what is that?  

Lets compromise, anything after 20 years becomes public domain. Free for anyone to use however they see fit.

I am also for an OpenPatent system (voluntary), which guarantees that a product does what it says it does and gives credit to the inventor, but the money goes to whomever makes the best use of the patent. The Key is that another company can't use the traditional patent system with a product from the OpenPatent system. If I invent the anti-gravity machine, it and any products based off of it shall remain in the OpenPatent system an can not be put into the traditional.

Libraries need to change, but the most efficient means of archiving is still paper. CD = 100 years, Microfiche = 500 years, Paper = thousands, Stone would be the best but not very efficient.

Magnetic is a stupid medium to archive as its life is almost Random, and easily destroyed.  Remember those magnetic tape erasers they used to sell at Radio Shack that you plugged into the wall pulled a trigger and erased several cassettes at once, Somebody with one of those could bypass all security programs, passwords, etc... put it next to a computer and fry it. Actually I think they could fry just about anything with electronics and/or a hard drive.

[­­­Atlas_]

In a free state economy, the mess of a road system we have today would be radically changed over time. You most likely would not find a no parking zone but something a bit more profitable for both parties.

[MoonShadow]

Magnetic is a stupid medium to archive as its life is almost Random, and easily destroyed.  Remember those magnetic tape erasers they used to sell at Radio Shack that you plugged into the wall pulled a trigger and erased several cassettes at once, Somebody with one of those could bypass all security programs, passwords, etc... put it next to a computer and fry it. Actually I think they could fry just about anything with electronics and/or a hard drive.

This used to be true, but try it now and you aren't even likely to harm a modern hard drive, and might not even disrupt a running (GNU/Linux) server enough to get a kernel panic.  Modern magnetic drives have pretty effective shielding.

[wb3]

Magnetic is a stupid medium to archive as its life is almost Random, and easily destroyed.  Remember those magnetic tape erasers they used to sell at Radio Shack that you plugged into the wall pulled a trigger and erased several cassettes at once, Somebody with one of those could bypass all security programs, passwords, etc... put it next to a computer and fry it. Actually I think they could fry just about anything with electronics and/or a hard drive.

This used to be true, but try it now and you aren't even likely to harm a modern hard drive, and might not even disrupt a running (GNU/Linux) server enough to get a kernel panic.  Modern magnetic drives have pretty effective shielding.

They make Degaussers for Hard Drives http://www.garner-products.com/CDS-4400ED.htm

Just a portable version and voila; Destroy all data in anyones Hard Drive, All Data, and because inductive fields cause electrical currents, I bet it would fry some of the electronics too.

It is actually the safest and easiest way to destroy a hard drive. People use software because the drive is still usable afterwards, with a degausser, its toast.

I use to use a portable one on the old Tube TV's for the funny effects it would cause. But Tubes were very resilient, but if you timed it right, you could release the trigger at the right moment and magnetize the Horizontal and Vertical deflection plates for the electron gun to get weird pictures.

[deadlizard]

Magnetic is a stupid medium to archive as its life is almost Random, and easily destroyed.  Remember those magnetic tape erasers they used to sell at Radio Shack that you plugged into the wall pulled a trigger and erased several cassettes at once, Somebody with one of those could bypass all security programs, passwords, etc... put it next to a computer and fry it. Actually I think they could fry just about anything with electronics and/or a hard drive.

This used to be true, but try it now and you aren't even likely to harm a modern hard drive, and might not even disrupt a running (GNU/Linux) server enough to get a kernel panic.  Modern magnetic drives have pretty effective shielding.

They make Degaussers for Hard Drives http://www.garner-products.com/CDS-4400ED.htm

Just a portable version and voila; Destroy all data in anyones Hard Drive, All Data, and because inductive fields cause electrical currents, I bet it would fry some of the electronics too.

It is actually the safest and easiest way to destroy a hard drive. People use software because the drive is still usable afterwards, with a degausser, its toast.

I use to use a portable one on the old Tube TV's for the funny effects it would cause. But Tubes were very resilient, but if you timed it right, you could release the trigger at the right moment and magnetize the Horizontal and Vertical deflection plates for the electron gun to get weird pictures.

That would have been awesome. I used to use hard drive magnets to mess with monitors at school 

Had a few cassette tapes that I left on top of a speaker and the sound would fade in and out.
Left my wallet on top of a speaker once and corrupted my bank card. the replacement fee ensured I never did that again.
Magnetic media is the suck.

[wb3]

Not that I am destructive, but it would be funny watching the IT department running around trying to find out who breached their security software and deleted their data. It would drive them nuts. They would probably blame anonymous.

Beware though if you try to do it. Once they discovered that the magnetic servo data was erased off of the hard drive, they would then know it was a physical attack.  The magnetic medium for the servo data, can not be written to once it is out of the factory.

here is a good article:

Irreversible damage to some media types

Many forms of generic magnetic storage media can be reused after degaussing, including audio reel-to-reel tape and VHS videocassettes. These older media types are simply a raw medium which are overwritten with fresh new patterns, created by fixed-alignment read/write heads.
For certain forms of computer data storage, however, such as modern hard drives and some tape backup drives, degaussing renders the magnetic media completely unusable and damages the storage system. This is due to the devices having an infinitely variable read/write head positioning mechanism which relies on special servo control data that is meant to be permanently embedded into the magnetic media. This servo data is written onto the media a single time at the factory using special-purpose servo writing hardware.
The servo patterns are normally never overwritten by the device for any reason and are used to precisely position the read/write heads over data tracks on the media, to compensate for sudden jarring device movements, thermal expansion, or changes in orientation. Degaussing indiscriminately removes not only the stored data but also removes the servo control data, and without the servo data the device is no longer able to determine where data is to be read or written on the magnetic medium.

[onarchy]

Imagine you are a consumer of something that may or may not be someone's IP, a designer, programmer, etc...

You see something like this:



What do?

If you have the resources, you lawyer up.
If you don't, you pretty much disregard it.
For all practical purposes...

How would this work in a Free State?

I didn't understand the contract, and I guess that was your point. Generally speaking it is a huge problem with massive EULAs that no-one reads, yet everyone accepts and trusts are not draconian. It is so much more practical to have implicit contracts that are approved by the law makers on behalf of a significant majority of the population. Implicit contracts are practical since most people find them reasonable (otherwise they would not have been voted to be law by a significant majority). Those who want to deviate from the implicit contract must either write an entire EULA or write the *deviations* from the implicit contract.

This aligns the self-interest of all parties. If a software company wants to sell software to MANY people it is very smart to use the implicit contract voted for by the MANY. If a software company wants to sell to a minority then that minority will not mind the EULA since they belong to the minority who may not like the implicit contract. If however a software company wants to sell to the MANY but also don't want to abide by their wishes and follow the implicit contract, they will be at a severe disadvantage because they will have to harass people with a cumbersome EULA.

However, there is a very high treshold for something to become an implicit contract by law, and private contract firms could easily get a "nice to have" implicit contract law overturned by showing that there exists a private, peaceful alternative. This could be similar to a "people who liked X also liked Y"-service. I.e. "people who found contract X reasonable also found contract Y reasonable." With such technology available you could easily migrate from implicit contract laws to explicit contracts mediated by a private firm of your choice.

Implicit contracts of the "nice to have"-kind should in general be avoided, and only reserved for implicit contracts where there is serious risk of violations involved. E.g. implicit contract laws against killing without consent will never be lifted. It will always be assumed that people don't want to die unless explicitly stated in very certain terms.

[em3rgentOrdr]

As long as theres no oil the Us wont invade lol.

lol.  good point.  It would be wise to first test for oil, and only start building this free state if they don't find any...

[em3rgentOrdr]

It is sounding like Free State will pretty much resemble an industrial park populated with warehouses and lawyers.

hehe!!!  Oh crap...that already exists!  It's called "New Jersey".

[onarchy]

It is sounding like Free State will pretty much resemble an industrial park populated with warehouses and lawyers.

And to me it sounds like you are really wanting the Free State to resemble and industrial park populated with warehouses and lawyers so that you can justify your views on IP.

[deadlizard]

Then please, what is your aesthetic vision for Free State?

"Free State" is an oxymoron

[onarchy]

Then please, what is your aesthetic vision for Free State?

I think I capture it to a significant degree in our website, i.e. a greener and less crowded version of Singapore and Hong Kong.