My debate with Stephan Kinsella over intellectual property is only 5 days away. The debate will be posted here at EPJ and by Kinsella, at 5:00 PM ET. The picture below was taken at the Mises Institute, I may use it as part of my demonstration of the weaknesses in Kinsella's anti-IP views.
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Appropriate music.
ReplyDeleteOh boy, if Mr. Wenzel isn't joking about using this picture, it confirms my opinion on how high an intellectual level this debate will be.
ReplyDeleteagree Josiah, is Wenzel refusing to even distinguish between the characteristics of "physical property"(such as a driveway that can only fit a limited number of cars at once) and "intellectual property" such as a song that can be whistled by a infinite number of people at once?
ReplyDeleteI can understand how some might think we should all have to pay money in order to a whistle a certain tune that someone wrote(perhaps it will be argued that song writers become owners of our bodies), but I cannot understand how someone couldn't comprehend that there is a categorical difference between physical and intellectual property.
Anti-IP persons are fond of saying "copy is not theft." Trespassing is not theft either, but we recognize a property owner's ability to control his property.
DeleteMany (not all) pro-IP people often make accusations of theft. Thus the rebuttal that copying isn't theft. I agree with your point that trespass is not directly theft. Correction: it's not the "ability" (per se) it's the "right " to control that defines ownership. If you steal my car, I am unable to control it, but I haven't lost the right to control it. Your rebuttal that trespass isn't theft works equally against any claim that IP violators have "stolen" ideas.
DeleteSo you've accurately distinguished theft from trespass. I'd say trespass is the underlying act of aggression.
If we're in agreement that standing on my driveway without my consent is trepass. But what if you see my driveway, and go and pave, landscape and paint your driveway to look identical to mine. Are you still trespassing on my driveway when you stand on yours (that has been *configured* to look identically to mine)?
Has anyone made the claim that trespassing is theft? I have never heard anyone make that claim. Trespassing is trespassing.
DeleteThe anti-state-granted-monopoly (aka anti-IP) people have written quite a bit on the trespassing comparison. I hope that's not Wenzel's go-to argument, otherwise this debate won't be nearly as interesting as I had hoped.
@Brian
DeleteThe "stolen ideas" is a non sequitur. You cannot patent or copyright ideas. Ideas are not considered IP today. IP is an expression of an idea. If your driveway had some particularly amazing design that took you a long time to create, then yes, I think you should control that design. Creating IP takes time. It takes creativity. The people creating IP are not just pluggable drones; they have talent. They utilize their time and brainpower to create the IP.
If IP is free for the taking, the "tragedy of the commons" will definitely apply. People aren't going to work just for the benefit of others. People aren't generally going to pay other people to create IP (like software) that then has no ownership once it's created. Socialism doesn't work with tangible property, and it's not suddenly going to start working with IP.
Labor does not imbue value.
DeleteTry again.
Try building a house without labor.
DeleteC'mon, 2:11AM. Are you really saying that houses are valuable because people built them?
DeleteUnknown @ 2:11 simply parrots the Marxist dogma apparently without even realizing that. Another victim of American public education, I guess.
Deleteghst6149. Are you saying houses spring into existence spontaneously? Some weird religious belief, I presume.
DeleteI know it's hard to grasp, but not all labor is equally productive. It normally takes some kind of labor (often enhanced by one or more inventions) to produce goods and services. If you can write Harry Potter novels, then why didn't you do it before J.K. Rowling? Why don't you go out and write a successful multi-platinum album if it's so easy?
The anti-IP crowd looks at everyone as a pluggable drone. Real life doesn't work that way.
It's funny how the anti-IP crowd consistently wants to take others' efforts without compensation using the same arguments Marxists use against so-called "real" property. Then, they turn around and call their victims Marxists. It's really quite ironic.
DeleteIt's not ironic, and the people who argue that because something took effort or a "long time" to create, other people must give them money. This basically sounds like Marx's labor theory of value. The rest of your comments reveal that you simply do not understand the argument being made.
DeleteSeriously, I am quite interested in hearing a coherent pro-IP argument. I just never have. Maybe Wenzel has one. I'm skeptical, but I'm willing to listen. It would be nice if a pro-IP person could make an actual case without resorting to equivocation, question-begging, and name-calling.
"Effort" is not value. The idea that value is effort is nothing more and nothing less than Marxist labor theory of value. (The consequence is that if labor/effort creates value, then capitalists are mere exploiters, expropriating the fruits of labor or workers. To stop this expropriation, the capitalists have to be dispossessed and forced to work. In labor camps, because they obviously are enemies or the working class.)
DeleteOf course, applying that idea in practice leads to supremely idiotic outcomes: as an example, digging up streets only to fill the trenches back in was a relatively common sight in Soviet Union. All that effort created value, you see.
It is impossible to take "efforts" from anybody. This has no meaning in English. This is pure newspeak.
You *are* Marxist, dear Unknown, but lack education to understand where "your" beliefs come from. They are straight out of Das Kapital, by the way of leftist indoctrination masqueraded as education. And if you have a modicum of intellectual integrity you will be able to understand how this particular belief (that effort is synonymous to value) inevitably leads to justifying labor camps and dictature of proletariat.
The alternative is Austrian subjective theory of value. In which effort has no relationship to value whatsoever, and thus is irrelevant. In fact, quite a few greatest discoveries and inventions came to their authors without any appreciable effort, by serendipity or in a flash of inspiration (or even in a dream, as it happened to Mendeleev when he came up with the periodic table of elements). Quite a few discoveries and inventions are made independently because they are "in the air", with half-baked concepts being tossed around and discussed, so there's no evident sole author.
I never said effort was value. That was your straw-man attempt to derail the argument. Obviously, different people will have different levels of effort required to create things of value. However, it does take effort to create things of value (except in your world of property being created by God out of thin air). To rob people of thing they built through their own effort is an initiation of force as well as a Marxist pretext of taking for the common good. Marxists argue that you have no right to property -- real or otherwise -- because your acquisition of property is an initiation of force against them and their right to share in all property. That's pretty much identical to your anti-IP arguments.
DeleteAnd discoveries very rarely come from nowhere. Expressions of ideas you get in your dreams (and I've had them) usually come from days, months, or years of mulling over an issue that your mind finally puts together in the middle of the night. Why should that give you equal ownership?
@Dave. I never said you deserved something from your effort. Lots of people write IP that is not worth paying money for. The products of their IP efforts can indeed have value, and that product does not come out of thin air. It comes through effort. And your attempt to remove that product after they have applied their effort is theft -- exactly the same thing if you took their home after they built it.
If the effort is not value, then why the heck did you mention it?
Delete"in does take effort to create things of value"
Value is subjective, and a lot of things in this live which do have huge value (sunlight, air, etc, etc) come to us without any effort.
Similarly, a lot of effort is spent on actually destroying value. Like wars.
So, the effort one puts into anything does not guarantee it has any value, and consequently does not convey any right to be compensated for the effort. The only way to deny that is to offer the Marxist argument that effort magically creates value. It does not. Value is purely subjective. There is no objective measure of value.
That leads us that to the fact that no matter how much effort an author of "intellectual property" he is not entitled to any property rights just because of that effort. To have property rights in something one needs to have exclusive control over that something. Which only works for words, music, and such as long as he does not tell or show them to anybody else.
The whole and sole reason for existence of property rights is to eliminate conflict over control of scarce resources. Material resources are scarce because they cannot be replicated (as a consequence of quantum non-copying theorem). Classical information is not scarce, and is not controllable, precisely because it can be indefinitely replicated. Copying information does not reduce its availability to the original possessor, and thus does not create conflict.
So what the "intellectual property" regime does is creating artificial scarcity where none existed before. It is just a system of monopoly privileges propped up by the violence of the governments. It is totally futile, too, as anybody who has any experience with P2P and search technologies knows.
And the system of "intellectual property" is seriously destructive. If the laws on the books regarding IP ownership were actually enforced, the whole high-tech economy would come crashing down. It is impossible to design or produce any high-tech device without violating thousands of patents and copyrights. Every engineer who actually designs things knows that, and willfully ignores it (making only token efforts to appear to be in the "clear"). The real inventors loathe the system but are forced to play this insane game (Phil Karn wrote an essay about that). Businesses are losing billions of dollars to patent trolls who neither invent anything nor produce anything useful. There is not a tiniest shred of evidence that this system actually increases creativity. None. Zilch. Nada.
And all of that insanity is supported by the specious arguments essentially boiling down to your contention that effort creates value and that this somehow makes people making efforts eligible for compensation for their efforts.
...
DeleteIf you talk to entertainment people you'd learn that making any movie, writing any book, composing any melody is a gamble, risking attention of copyright trolls with claims of substantial similarity, copyrighted objects or sounds in background, or even similarity of characters or plots. The real creativity is forced out; and the only genres which actually flourish are precisely those where authors consciously and conspicuously disregard the whole wretched IP system (for example, the only branch of music alive today is electronic music - fundamentally based on sampling, remixing, and freely incorporating other people's music and "found" sounds into the new works. Oh, and people in that scene share what they created freely, with authors uploading their creations to file-sharing services as soon as they finished mixing - and that invites feedback from fans and peers, which gets incorporated into newer generation remixes, etc. The resulting explosion of creativity is astonishing - literally hundreds of new musical genres and sub-genres, none of which existed twenty years ago; Iskur's Guide to Electronic Music gives some idea of what it is about (though it is already seriously outdated).
In the high-tech world, the most common tools and platforms are IP-free. Linux, GNU, Apache, Android, to name a few. The value of that is enormous, it is pretty much the foundation of the modern technology. The IP regime in this field is actively circumvented by the "copyleft" licenses, and pretty much disregarded by the individual engineers and entrepreneurs. Any inventor hoping to profit from his patents is considered a naive geek, at best, and a dangerous kook, at worst. Most actual inventors don't bother to "protect" their inventions (so the companies hoping to accumulate defensive patent portfolios have to offer cash prizes and "conferences" in nice locales to incentivize them to talk to lawyers - with the inevitable result of average patents being made-up junk and techno-gibberish mass-produced by the office drones, and then groomed by the lawyers to make outrageously wide claims).
And then there's the medical field, where the unholy alliance of the IP regime and the FDA-enforced cartel kills people by thousands and robs people by millions. One has to be completely oblivious to the reality to defend this monster.
Wenzel has been doing this for years. Go back and check the comments of his past IP articles. He isn't this dumb. He purposely confused the two things at EVERY CHANCE. Its really quite pathetic. He loves to call others out on logical fallacies, and for good reason, but in this particular subject he relies entirely on logical fallacies.
ReplyDeleteHis responses border on childish in many cases and in other cases it has almost turned me off of this site as he comes dangerously close to intellectual dishonesty in his approach to this issue.
Welp, I look forward to the debate myself.
ReplyDeleteI think it's an important debate, and I personally think that a lack of respect for property rights in the realm of unique/scarce ideas is holding back mankind in some ways.
That isn't a justification for gov't monopoly is said area btw....more of an observation.
IP is a very difficult subject, which is why I look forward to hearing both sides.
"I personally think that a lack of respect for property rights in the realm of unique/scarce ideas is holding back mankind in some ways."
DeleteWhat proof do you have to support this?
It is a personal opinion based on my experience professionally. Ideas are being held while attempts are made to protect them before exposure. Specifically, delaying their mass arrival and further development. I have seen NDAs ignored routinely by big corps that is driving some of this as well....they basically tell the little guys, "tough luck." Some of these guys know it.
DeleteI won't argue with your observations. But your view is not comprehensive. For all the cases where you've observed "lack of respect for property rights in the realm of unique/scarce ideas...holding back mankind", in how many other cases is mankind being "held back" by the concept that unique ideas are property? In other words, have you done a thorough, species-wide cost-benefit analysis to see if the concept of ideas as property has had a net gain or a net loss on innovation? Presumably not, so your "opinion" is based on some rather shaky inductive reasoning.
DeleteGood point. James Watt and the explosion of development and growth of usage of the steam engine following the expiration of his patent comes to mind.
DeleteThere is no doubt that the patent system is screwed up (less-so for copyright, IMHO). There should probably be less than a dozen patents granted each year when in fact, there are many thousands granted. For the most part the government rubber-stamps patents and lets "the courts figure it out." However, going to court costs 7 figures and is highly unpredictable given the biased nature of courts and the restrictions on picking a knowledgeable jury. Most patents today should be entities handled through copyright. I would definitely agree that the U.S. patent system holds people back with patents that absolutely shouldn't have been granted.
DeleteThe screwed up nature, however, doesn't invalidate the concept. Otherwise, screwed-up zoning laws would invalidate home ownership.
"In other words, have you done a thorough, species-wide cost-benefit analysis to see if the concept of ideas as property has had a net gain or a net loss on innovation? " Of course not, but it shouldn't stop anyone from discussing the concept or postulating. That's usually what motivates people to do such research.
DeleteThe utilitarian argumentation is always weak, because it always dependent on whose utility is being measured or optimized.
DeleteThat's why most of the so-called research concerned with costs / benefits to "the society" is pure unadulterated junk. It measures nothing other than researcher's biases.
Now, the fact that ANY "intellectual property" regime requires existence of organized crime syndicates (aka "states") to sustain it is sufficient to reject the whole concept without discussing costs/benefits. If you think any nebulous benefit to "society" justifies threatening peaceful people with violence (or actually committing violence towards them) you need to have your MORALITY adjusted, simply because you're qualitatively (if not quantitatively) is in the same camp as Hitler and Stalin (and other believers in the idea that benefits to society justify violence towards some of its members).
"Now, the fact that ANY "intellectual property" regime requires existence of organized crime syndicates (aka "states") to sustain it is sufficient to reject the whole concept without discussing costs/benefits. If you think any nebulous benefit to "society" justifies threatening peaceful people with violence (or actually committing violence towards them) you need to have your MORALITY adjusted"
DeleteWhat amazing self righteousness you have.
Let's first start off with the fact I have never advocated for "organized crime syndicates" as you have chosen to pretend I have, nor have I suggested any form of violence what so ever.
Let's turn a real mirror on you now.
You are saying that because man has not come up with a good way yet to protect "intellectual property", unique ideas, etc. et al that theft(violence) of said property is "ok".
So who's the one advocating violence?
Even further, the irony of you comparing me to Stalin is quite rich from the perspective that you want other people's unique ideas termed something other than "property" so that you can pretend you aren't stealing them and make them PUBLIC PROPERTY.
You are a joke.
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DeleteIf Wenzel actually believes that this photo is in any way a valid means by which to criticize anti-IP, then the demolition from Kinsella is going to be even more devestating that I had at first suspected.
ReplyDeleteSimply astonishing. Conflating scarce physical resources with non-scarce Platonic forms called ideas that are infinitely replicable, such that to protect the former using force means one is obligated to protect the latter using force.
Good lord, maybe I'll avoid this debate entirely because I'll feel so embarrassed for Wenzel that I'll get that uncomfortable feeling people get while watching a debacle unfold.
"Conflating scarce physical resources with non-scarce Platonic forms called ideas".
DeleteFantastic. Given that ideas aren't "scarce", would you mind directing me to the person(or maybe you, yourself know how) that can tell me how to construct a warp drive so I can build one myself and go visit other galaxies?
Exactly, Nick! Nice way of putting it!
DeleteNice way of putting what? Is there an argument there? Are you suggesting nobody else could be taught to build a warp drive? I mean, I don't get it. Do you just not understand the argument being made?
Delete"Are you suggesting nobody else could be taught to build a warp drive?"
DeleteCurrently, no. Which means ideas are scarce. Who doesn't understand what argument?
I look forward to the debate. As a musician, this is an issue that I struggle with.
ReplyDeleteIn one respect, it's hard for me to agree with the argument that someone can own an idea, a set of words in a certain order or a set of notes/chords in a certain order and rhythm. If I cover a Beatles song but change a few things up in the process, isn't that my own work or do I really need to pay royalties for that?
In the other respect, because government supports copyrights, one must copyright his or her idea before someone else does and forces the original creator of the idea to pay royalties on his or her own idea. If I write a song and someone else steals it and copyrights it, I now must pay royalties on my own song. That's two wrongs now instead of one! The thought of getting rid of copyrighting sounds good on paper - but until it is abolished, we would pay the price of government intervention if we ignored it on principle.
The current copyright law says that any work is copyrighted at the moment of its creation. Thus means that nobody can take what you wrote and copyright it.
DeleteWhat they can do is to lie about authorship in order to get the State thugs to extort from you, and because people who do that usually have better lawyers and money to bleed you for the legal costs indefinitely if you choose to fight their lies in court, the actual authors usually lose. So most are just paying their due to the copyright syndicates, and are permitted to get some share of the loot.
Copyrights are evil.