Monday, May 17, 2021

Elizabeth Warren Signals She is Part of the Anti-IP Crowd

Elizabeth Warren

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who hates anything that hints of free markets and private property, has signaled she is a member in good standing of the anti-IP crowd.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Progressives are promoting President Biden’s waiver of U.S. Covid vaccine patents as necessary to save lives. So full marks for candor to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who last week explained the real goal: set a precedent that erodes all pharmaceutical intellectual property protections in the U.S. and around the world.

“Special [IP] protections for drug companies are an even bigger issue than COVID-19 alone,” the Massachusetts Senator said at a Senate Finance hearing with U.S. Trade Rep Katherine Tai on Wednesday. 

This should come as no surprise. As Warren has demonstrated, time after time, she is first and always a  central planner. Denying individuals and corporations the ability to protect their inventions in their own fashion is simply a central planning scheme to take control of intellectual creations away from the creators and hand them over to the state to make the rules.

There is no surprise that Warren would be in favor of this.

The libertarian position on intellectual property was best presented by Murray Rothbard, who argued that the structure of copyright law was the best legal structure for intellectual property and should also be used for creations that are now protected by patents:

Violation of (common law) copyright is an equivalent violation of 
contract and theft of property. … our theory of property rights 
includes the inviolability of contractual copyright.
 Ethics of Liberty, p. 123
… violation of copyright should indeed be illegal.
 Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 112
On the free market, there would therefore be no such thing 
as patents. There would, however, be copyright for any inventor or 
creator who made use of it, and this copyright would be perpetual, 
not limited to a certain number of years.
 Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 74

 -RW

7 comments:

  1. "So full marks for candor to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who last week explained the real goal: set a precedent that erodes all pharmaceutical intellectual property protections in the U.S. and around the world."

    Elizabeth Warren is anti-profit-motive, and she sees IP as "special protections" for so-called unearned profit. Big Pharma is seen by Socialists as the profit motive corrupting an otherwise benevolent government, rather than what it really is, the socialist-motivated attempt to provide the "right" to health care to everyone by trying to incentivize the production of medicines by giving companies protections for their profits.

    To be sure, IP has its roots in the socialist beliefs that either 1) "society" is benefitted by centrally planning the incentive to come up with new innovations, or 2) the source of value is labor and if someone else can sell it for cheaper then the original inventor is somehow robbed.

    The word "property" refers to something you can mix your labor with - something tangible. The word "information" refers to subjective interpretations of observations.

    That is, the consumer of information is pouring his own meanings - right or wrong - into the observations. Information is entirely a product of the mind; And no matter how someone else comes up with the same information as someone else, the information in someone's head can only ever "belong" (wrong word, really) to the individuals who have that information.

    So, there can logically never be such a thing as intellectual property "theft". The WAY in which one comes by information can be a crime, but information isn't a thing, and if I have a right to paint an entire page with ink, then I have a right to put any possible configuration of ink on that paper, including information that was inscribed on YOUR piece of paper.

    There's a saying that the sculptor merely removes the parts of the stone that is not part of the sculpture - the sculpture is already there within the block of stone to begin with.

    The same is true of ink on a paper and configurations of digital recording media (the 1's and 0's are already there).

    So no, IP is socialist in origin and Elizabeth Warren is merely inconsistently applying her socialist beliefs.

    In the same way otherwise free-market religious people might have wrongly objected to the legalization of marijuana under the Obana socialist coup due to a legitimate concern that Obama was merely using cultural Marxism to erode religous convictions so as to make it easier to impose socialism on America.

    Yes, the legalization of marijuana has a benefit to Marxists in "greasing" the masses for conformity to socialist ideology, but no, the legalization of marijuana is not, strictly speaking, consistent with the socialist worldview.

    The freedom to trade in drugs is consistent with libertarianism, but Marxists just use the legalization of drugs as a means to an end.

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  2. IP is just labor theory of value for engineers.

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  3. Rothbard was wrong on copyright if he was claiming that one could have a property right in intangibles, such as information or ideas.

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  4. Mechanistic theories of properties, such as from Anonymous, Donxon, and NAPster, arose in an era when there was little in the way of IP to think about protecting. Property rights were created to deal with physical objects. The question is how do we extend this theory to a world where a great deal of value is contained in information and the income of large numbers of people comes solely from creating this information?

    The answer is not to dogmatically insist on "mixing one's labor" or avoiding "intangibles", or declaring that "If I use your ideas, you still have them, so you haven't been deprived of them" arguments. Is copyright a good answer? Maybe, maybe not, but staying stuck in 17th century thinking will not advance ideas of justice in a world where ideas have come to play an outsize role.

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    1. "... but staying stuck in 17th century thinking will not advance ideas of justice in a world where ideas have come to play an outsize role."

      Unless you think that reality, itself, changes over time - as opposed to our understanding of it just improving - then you have to concede that there are ideas that were held in the 17th century, as a subset of ideas that have, and always will, be true, that are as true now as they were back then.

      Just because some ideas we hold today were held in the 17th century does not, itself, invalidate them.

      "Mechanistic theories of properties, such as from Anonymous, Donxon, and NAPster, arose in an era when there was little in the way of IP to think about protecting."

      The Lockean theory of property rights can be derived from the negative right to be left alone:

      No one can justly claim an inherent right over someone else's person or labor that would not apply to everyone else - a contradiction, since two people cannot simultaneously be the owner of the other.

      The inverse of this negative right is the positive right of self-ownership and the self-ownership of one's own labor.

      Since no one can claim inherent ownership of another's labor, when someone does do labor, it would be a violation of the right to one's own labor to comandeer the fruits of one's labor without the owner's consent.

      There's no difference, as far as violating another's right to self-ownership goes, between forcing someone at gunpoint to make you something and waiting for someone to finish making what someone else wants, and then that someone else steals it.

      In both cases, the laborer has worked to produce something that will not be used according to his own preferences.

      So, because someone has "mixed their labor" with an unowned thing, that thing becomes his property.

      "The question is how do we extend this theory to a world where a great deal of value is contained in information and the income of large numbers of people comes solely from creating this information?"

      If the large numbers of people acquired income by theft, then that income is coming *at the expense of* others. And to believe that such theft results in sustainable wealth creation is to commit the Broken Window Fallacy.

      "Information", as I said, is not a thing. Information is meaning that *you* pour into your observations.

      If I hand you a coded message, it is not information until you can read the unencrypted message.

      When we share information over computers, it is not information that is being "transfered" (really just copied by another computer), rather, we are using programs that process the data that it's being given in a certain way that we expect to be meaningful to us.

      That's why you can, technically "open" certain files with programs that are not intended to open them - and the result is gibberish. Computers are just really complicated Rube Goldberg Machines. Just because you use an information-processing program to open a file does not mean that doing so results in information.

      Information is meaning that *you* pour into things, and is therefore entirely subjective to the individual, even when everyone agrees about what is being communicated.

      So, when we use computers to "produce" information, what the computer is really doing is not producing, but rather providing *services* (not goods) of processing data in a certain way.

      The same is true of paper and ink. The information communicated is not a good, since information is only information when it is understood. The paper, itself, is a good, and the ink, itself, is a good, but not the information.

      The reason written works are worth more than what people would pay for just scribbles of ink on paper is because they value the *service* of communication.

      IP is the attempt to treat what is really a service as if it were a good.

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    2. I found that infomation-theoretical argumentation flies so over the head of any IP proponent that it is completely useless to even try to advance it.

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