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> I love when people pretend that the full, purchase price of "pirated" material is what they "lost" due to piracy, as if every single person WOULD have paid, and paid full price, if they couldn't "pirate" it.

Agreed. If it was up to these assholes they would charge you for every eyeball / ear consuming content.

So when I buy and watch a BluRay does that mean the rest of my family are now magically "pirates" since they consumed the content and never paid for it???

Funny how piracy is never listed in the Year-End Financial reports under "losses" -- because it is some bullshit, made-up-number pulled out of someone's ass.

Piracy isn't soley about price -- its about convenience. Some people it convenient to (freely) share. /sarcasm Oh noes! Pirates are the cause of the downfall of society!

But keep believing in those Imaginary Property Rights! When even a Lawyer starts to present the case Against IP you know the days of artificial scarcity are about to change.

> Why, then, are most people so negative on other people selling and buying them?

You can start here with the shenanigans of Imaginary Property:

* Against Intellectual Property
* Against Intellectual Property 2

--
Only Cowards Censor

One of the most amusing aspects of denialism is that since they have no concept of the science, they go oafter what the can attack. Personality. That's why we were treated to years of "Michael Mann is an asshole", which was somehow supposed to invalidate his work. Mann is not an asshole, and the denialists largely stopped pursuing him after he proved to be adroit at their tools.

Now Nye, he isn't a person on the same caliber as Sagan. But the attacks are similar.

Carl Sagan, Socialist Jerk http://www.stephankinsella.com...

https://eternian.wordpress.com...

I coud find more of people playing the personality card on people of science. Nye is getting the same treatment as other popularizers like Sagan and N.D. Tyson.

And that's good enough proof that he's on to something, when Deniers single him out for their anti science derision.

Not that I'm a libertarian (far from it), but I've never really gotten the impression that they hate trademark laws. This is (arguably) a trademark case.

Ron Paul is a minarchist. He believes in government, and thinks he can keep a leash on it. I thought he'd gotten over the Constitutional fetish with his parting speech before Congress, but apparently he still likes IP.

Libertarians have legitimate debates over whether the use of trademarks are matters of Imaginary Property or measures of fraud/not-fraud.

The problem for Ron Paul in this situation, is that there is no fraud accusation here - RonPaul.com is not trying to pretend that it's Ron Paul.

So this is an intellectual property argument. Somebody needs to lock Ron Paul in a room with Stephan Kinsella for a few days until he's gotten over IP. IP infringes on real property rights, which is the foundation of modern libertarianism. The whole issue of the UN is a red herring (yeah, it's hypocritical, which is scandalous, but not the main issue for libertarian objection).

I think there's a reasonable medium.

I used to think this, but I believe I've learned better. To see why, let's see what imaginary property really is.

You have some paper. You have a pen. What can you do with these two things? The natural answer is that you can do anything you want, because it's your property (short of damaging somebody else's property with it).

But here's what imaginary property says: "We as a State are going to take away the real property rights of three hundred million people to arrange that ink on that paper how they see fit, for the sake of one individual, to whom we will grant a monopoly for certain arrangements. If anybody disobeys this rule we will hurt (or ultimately kill) that person for such an infraction".

People used to think we could make society better by acting this way. The original ideas were to do things like protecting writers from publishers. It was a low-information, high-scarcity, low-technology society four hundred years ago, and perhaps the idea was a decent hypothesis at that point. But it still offered immoral means, so it shouldn't be surprising that the power was ultimately corrupted. All attempts to reform that power will still fail because it's based on immoral means.

There are better options available today, and the imaginary property system is now damaging to society. Time to discard the obsolete systems. Check out Stephan Kinsella in print, online or video. He's spent a ton of time identifying the problems and developing alternate mechanisms to reward creators, but based on non-zero-sum means.

Any poor country can create such things, or not, as it chooses.

But just think - if a small third-world company started manufacturing, say drugs that the local people who live on a dollar a day need, earning perhaps a trivial profit, it would be the end of the 1st world countries!

As if the idea weren't already impeding the progress of the arts and useful sciences. Because a company like Apple would never use such a system to try to band the competition from the marketplace or anything...

I certainly believe copyright is immoral. Or rather, I believe it's only moral to do it in order to fight copyright law, much as my ancestors picked up enemy rifles to shoot the enemy (GPL et al.)

> What morality would disallow the creator of an original creation from controlling how that creation is distributed

Their creation is their copy. Only the physical exists. They have absolute control over before they release copies of it. If they don't want it copied further they shouldn't release it. My freedom of speech is more important than their "freedom" to rentseek.

Copyright law gives them the power to control other copies which are not their physical property. This is why libertarians opppose copyright law - only a simpleton can support property law and imaginary "property" law at once. The two are incompatible, not complementary, as shown by Stephan Kinsella, Boldrin and Levine and others.

http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications/

No, copyright and patent monopolies destroy the free market in physical goods, because they actively conflict with physical property rights, as shown by e.g. Stephan Kinsella. You can't have both real and imaginary property coherently in one system. You're kind of right - if it was a thing there were no physical property laws, a free market in imaginary properties might be possible. But that's not the situation. The physical free market, the market normal people care about, is destroyed by imaginary property.

Care to elaborate?

Yes:

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-Boldrin/dp/0521879280
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Hugo G.

each copy of a book is a different object. Only the physical exists. The product of a guys mind is his copy, not all copies. And if you don't want something copied, you don't have to release it. Fine by me.

Property rights to physical objects and imaginary property rights are incompatible. We can't consistently have both in the one legal system (that doesn't stop them trying).

http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Ok, so why not the 2nd and 4th? If the SCOTUS believe that the Fourteenth Amendment allows for full Incorporation, why haven't they fully incorporated it?

Just because some recent rulings seem to fall towards the belief that we now live with the BoR fully Incorporated does not mean that they are fully Incorporated. It's a sham to make that belief.

For the simple-minded who refuse to accept that there is no Incorporation, nor will there ever be, here are some resources by Constitutional scholars:

The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (PDF!!) Berger, Raoul
Fourteenth Amendment and Selective Incorporation Links, Jim Allison
The Truth about the Fourteenth Amendment, Thomas DiLorenzo
States Rights Traditions that Nobody Knows, Thomas Woods

Google Raoul Berger, he has numerous articles and books on the matter as well.

patents, copyrights, and trademarks are founded upon a hypothesis (usually confused for fact) of the free rider problem; this "problem" is a myth, however.

http://jorge.cortell.net/
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763

There's No Such Thing As a Free Patent
By Stephan Kinsella
Posted on 3/7/2005

The conventional defense of the patent system is that it is essential in order to stimulate creativity.[1] For example, in "Don't Believe the Hype" (Feb. 2005, IP Law & Business), patent attorneys John Benassi & Noel Gillespie conclude that our patent laws continue to "foster innovation." This is so even though many observers believe our patent system is "out of control and that overworked patent examiners are issuing overly broad patents."

Costs Must Be Considered

But the benefits that flow from the patent system are only half the story, since the system also comes with costs. Even if we are going to adopt a wealth-maximization criterion (which is, admittedly, problematic),[2] we must compare the costs to the benefits to know whether the system is worth having at all.
If costs are not taken into account, there are no limits to what could be done to encourage innovation. Some, for example, suggest replacing the patent system with a federal commission that gives taxpayer-funded rewards to inventors deemed worthy. "Under a reward system, innovators are paid for innovations directly by the government (possibly on the basis of sales), and innovations pass immediately into the public domain. Thus, reward systems engender incentives to innovate without creating the monopoly power of intellectual property rights."[3] ...

If the patent system is to be a net benefit to society, the gains it provides (the extra wealth and innovations the system stimulates) should be greater than its costs, according to standard law and economics "wealth-maximization" reasoning. As Landes and Posner--deans of the law and economics approach--point out, innovators themselves engage in a similar calculus: "For a new work to be created the expected return . . . must exceed the expected costs."[6]
In other words, the theory is that the innovator will engage in innovating activity only when he believes he can reap a profit. And the very point of a patent system is to make it easier for inventors to earn a profit, so that more of them will invest time and resources trying to innovate.
Likewise, the entire patent system's "gains"--the extra wealth or innovation it stimulates--needs to be clearly greater than the costs of the system if the patent system is to be a net benefit to society. How we are to go about measuring such costs against the benefits, and include the opportunity costs of time, is a crucially important issue. But if one is going to advocate a system on the grounds that it is beneficial, one must attempt to account for costs as well.

What Costs Are There?

And there are clearly costs to the system. Indeed, some of the purported "benefits" cited by Benassi and Gillespie may really be costs. They note, for example, that venture capitalists insist on a strong patent portfolio when evaluating whether to invest in a company. But this is because, in part, patent portfolios are necessary to defend against other companies' portfolios. If there were no patent system, one would not need to defensively spend money building up a mountain of patents to use in counterclaims or cross-licensing negotiations.
The authors also acknowledge that, "Unfortunately, there are companies that make no products and whose only business is to acquire patents in order to enforc

(a) In our Pork-o-centric times, real property *is* taken unfairly, all the time; it's called taxation.

(b) The problem with fantasy property[1] - other than the fact that it is a cynical and fraudulent manipulation of the law in the name of "social utility" in order to secure unjust profits from an arbitrary government monopoly grant, of course - is that, even if its existence were incontrovertible in the first place (which it is not; see the general response of most citizens of non-Anglo non-Euro countries to the tableau of some jackass pinstripe junior lawyer running up, out of breath, puffed up with the Power of the Peephole and wielding a C&D letter, demanding payment from the more-or-less honest merchant in the street market selling DVD copies of Western television dramas, i.e. "Fuck you, asshole" and rightly so), the assertion of that right directly contradicts long-established *real* property rights.[2] For example, it is indisputable that I may use, say, blank CDs that I have lawfully purchased. I may likewise use a lawfully-acquired CD burner in the same way. If I use these items together to copy a piece of fantasy property protected by the RIAA, I've suddenly become a felon, despite my indisputable rights to use what is indisputably all my own actual, physical property. We can't satisfy both rights. I prefer real rights, not fantasy rights, myself; they are far easier to adjudicate, and far more conducive to prosperity. Enough of fantasy property.

[1] A better contrast to "real property" than "intellectual property", to my mind.
[2] Good links here:
http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications.php#bl og-ip

OR...

Nobody should be able to appeal to government force to secure a monopoly.

i am basically for stronger enforcement of copyright laws.. does this make me 'anti-tech' or 'pro-tech' in this survey view?

anti-tech, you douche.

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=01 97

http://jorge.cortell.net/
http://www.benkler.org/
http://www.dklevine.com/
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

http://swpat.ffii.org/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.piratbyran.org/
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/
http://www.cambia.org/
http://www.plos.org/
http://www.fsf.org/

I'm a vocal anti-copyright advocate and I repeatedly try to get people to realize what most Federal legislation does, especially regulatory legislation: it removes rights from the individual and creates cartelization: legal monopoly. It has happened in every industry that has any form of federal regulation: oil refinery, content distribution, medical licensing, campaign finance rules, even the stock market is cartelized now moreso than every before. Regulation at the national level is unconstitutional regardless of what people think of the non-applicable "interstate commerce clause."

Cartels exist because they have the legal monopoly to do so. Copyright only helps create and empower the cartels -- it has never helped an individual unless that individual was protected by a cartel. If you created a movie and someone wanted to hack it so that more peopl could watch it -- and they paid you for each and every hack -- you'd love it because you are getting income, you're gaining a new audience, and even more profitable: you're learning what people want. DVD players already allow for multiple versions, and maybe companies would start taking advantage of it had it not been for the big cartel that controls the flow of movie productions and releases.

Consider you're that same small movie maker -- if someone copies your movie (with or without hacking it), how would you battle them in court? What money would you use to fight the hacker/pirate/modifier/copyright violator? Is the financial risk of losing in court worth the reward? Definitely not -- more proof that cartelization is always bad.

Stephan Kinsella made a great case as to why intellectual property restrictions are anti-consumer in his free PDF titled Against Intellectual Property. (PDF WARNING) Stephan is a IP lawyer, as well, and has offered dozens of great articles on the problems with IP and how more laws aren't going to support more consumer freedom, better quality products and more competition. When you create federal regulations, you create cartelization. He also has a great non-PDF article from last year titled No such thing as a free patent, which goes beyond copyright but makes very good arguments for why they're all bad. This guy makes his living with the law, amazing that he cries out against it.

While I'm anarcho-capitalistic, I do understand that the Constitution DOES allow regulation of some sort to be created at the state level. This is preferably where regulations "should" be, if at all. The states that over-regulate will see less choice (and higher prices due to decreased supply). The states that don't over-regulate would likely see better choice, safer products and better pricing.

As usual, the federal government oversteps its bounds predictably -- in the direction of cartels. I won't call them "big business" because no real business exists with the help of government. Thankfully the future of the free market is proving to the world that copyright is insignificant to most people: they'll continue to find new ways to distribute all media products "for free," and the producers of content will have to learn the reality of supply and demand: if it is digital, it has a virtually unlimited supply. Put infinity in the supply/demand/price equation and the price will always fall to zero. This means it is time to find new ways to promote value added products along with your content.

http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

However, it's a big win for Lindows. They get $20 million just for changing their domain name and company name. It's pretty clear that MS would have lost this case. You don't get trademarks to everything that even sounds like what you have a trademark to.

As a libertarian, I'm against trademarks, tradesecrets, patents, and copyrights to begin with. See the following articles:

Against Intellectual Property. Kinsella, Stephan.

Do patents and copyrights undermine private property?

Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs? Cole, Julio H.

Government and Microsoft: A Libertarian View on Monopolies. Rideau, François-René.

Against Intellectual Property. Martin, Brian.

The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Long, Roderick T.

...because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).

Sure there would, you just wouldn't have mother government working for you as your own personal enforcer.

This is a topic I have been seriously interested in, and have done a lot of reading about in the last year or so. Having studied economics under a very strict Libertarian, I have been influenced by that line of thought. Companies should be responsible for guarding their own secrets (wether through security or contracts between companies and consumers). It is not the job of government to subsidize corporations by providing "trade secret security".

I could go on and on...but I won't. Instead, I will defer to those who have thought a lot more about this, and who are much better at articulating relavent ideas than me...

Stephan Kinsella

Ilana Mercer