Over the past few years, I've been very influenced by Voluntaryist / Anarchist philosophy, especially when it comes to anarcho-capitalist thinking which relies heavily on property rights (I own myself in the past, present, and future: more on that here). I recognize my own biases having been born in the United States which likes to tell itself stories about free markets and economic freedom (though we're not even in the top 10 nations for economic freedom).
This concept of "property" comes up again and again, and it is important for us to define, especially as our world becomes more and more digital.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago titled Why You Should Care About Plagiarism and Fair Use.
The very next day I saw this fantastic post by @jaredhowe Intellectual Property: A Government Protected Monopoly. You can see from my back and forth comments with Jared that it changed my thinking in terms of digital information not really being a scarce, rivalrous resource.
I also really enjoyed this post by @modprobe On the Origins and Purpose of Intellectual Property.
18 days ago, I sent a link to Jared's post to a lawyer I know in Nashville, and he replied with a series of Tweets today. You can follow the thread here.
Since I don't like Twitter for these long conversations, I was going to reply with a gist file on Github or something, but figured I'd just go ahead and make a Steemit post instead. If this stuff doesn't interest you, please feel free to save your votes for other great content out there.
I've quoted his tweets and included my replies below.
Hopefully Rick will be interested enough to create an account here and join the discussion.
Sorry it’s taken me this long to respond! Got swamped, but I put it on my to-do & now I’m doing! I’ll respond as best I can
Thanks for replying!
Intellectual property certainly isn’t "property" in any normal sense. IP is a bundle of rights & gov’t-granted power to stop others from doing certain things, the idea being to encourage innovation & creativity (leaving trademark out for now)
What do you think of Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property or Boldrin & Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly? What if IP doesn't encourage innovation and creativity at all, and we can argue this using empirical evidence? As to government granted power, how do we delegate rights to others we as individuals don't have (i.e. the initation of force against non-violent people because of the transfer of information)?
But it’s property-like in that you can buy & sell it—even slices of it. IMHO, it’s most like real property, if you think of real property less as something you have title to & more as something gov’t permits you guard borders of w/ a big gavel. You can let people on for $$, or sell, but some will sneak on b/c you can’t be everywhere at once. And sometimes it’s OK for people to be on w/o your permission for reasons that are (supposedly) socially useful—fair use, e.g.
So government controls everything and "property" is only something permitted to us by government? From my perspective, that seems ridiculous. Land is always a sticky subject regarding ownership, but we can at least say it's a scarce, rivalrous resource (as the author of that post describes property). Can we say the same about digital information?
IP doesn’t protect "information" per se, unless it’s a secret.
Once something can be physically copied, is it still technically "a secret" regardless of the intentions of the originator of the information? The media of a "secret" can be physically protected, but not the information itself.
It protects novelty (patents) & creative expression (copyright).
Or it is intended to, but what if it doesn't actually do these things but instead creates monopolies which suppress innovation and creativity? I wrote a post about the negative consequences of these actions from an evolutionary/game theory perspective.
No one owns a color, or 0’s & 1’s. But one may "own" a creative combination of colors or of 0’s & 1’s. That’s not double dipping
But does that creative combination of colors or 0's and 1's create a scarce, rivalrous resource? Or is it only the physical media itself which could be considered a scarce, rivalrous resource?
I don’t understand this guy’s resistance to abstraction. Is he really OK with, say, pirating someone’s creative content?
He talks briefly about plagiarism as fraud (which is what I consider the downside of "pirating"). But copying information and distributing it... is that really fraud? Has anyone actually been violated physically or otherwise?
He touches on real problem w/ IP: it was meant to create a kind of market by creating scarcity, but digital undermines all that
So much so that the entire idea, as it relates to digital information, may be completely incompatible. Again, digital information is not a scarce, rivalrous resource, only the physical medium it is stored on can be.
Now policing the borders of your "land" is harder & must be much more heavy-handed. How should creatives be compensated for the hard work of creation? If not compensated, they won’t have as much time to create
There are multiple approaches, one of them being the blockchain based system Steemit uses where value is created essentially out of nothing and given directly to the content creators and curators. Bitcoin adds around a million dollars of value every day to the economy. Steemit is a similar system, but it has a much easier mining algorithm so at a 9 to 1 ratio the rewards are given to more than just the miners. Creatives can be compensated via voluntary exchange without the need for government use of force and many artists are already exploring this reality with "pay what you want" and open source approaches. The gatekeepers of information no longer exist as the world goes digital and anything put into digital form can be copied.
Rick: Thanks again for spending your valuable time replying via Twitter. I really appreciate it and hope my anarchist ideas aren't too far out in left (or would that be right?) field for them to sound reasonable. I've read a bit of Rothbard, Mises, and Hayek along with @larkenrose and others who have significantly impacted my thinking regarding whether or not we actually need rulers in modern society. I do believe in the value of keeping secrets which is why I'm such a big fan of encryption mechanisms for doing just that. I don't believe good ideas require force and, from my perspective, the State is just a monopoly on the initiation of force, leading to all kinds of negative unintended consequences. I believe in a voluntary future using physics, math, and encryption to enforce the things we care about, not the guns of government.
Thanks again for your time.
P.S. I've selected the "Pay me 100% in Steem Power" for this post.