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Neither Intellectual Nor Property
Techdirt's Mike Masnick is writing a series of short articles on topics around intellectual property. His latest focuses on the term itself, exploring the nomenclature people have proposed to describe matter that is neither intellectual nor property. The whole series (starting here) is well worth a read.
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain? That everything that comes out of my brain is MINE MINE MINE and has nothing to do with the world I live in? You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right? and that even he decided it was wrong.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't understand why this is so difficult for you idiots to comprehend. The "property" around that MP3 you're warezing isn't the file itself; it's the *copyright*, which can not be duplicated and which is scarce. Now, you may not think such a thing *should* exist in order to be property and Richard Stallman may have told you that it's thoughtcrime to think such a thing, but the fact is that in our legal system it *is* property. All this sophistry about scarcity is completely missing the point.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You're right, the answer is simple. No it does not exist. There is nothing physical, thus while you have the right to share or commercialize it, you cannot prevent anyone else from doing so as well, once they either learn of the idea or come up with it on their own. No matter what the facist corporatists say.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That said,Sounds nice, but I don't think it holds merit at all. The very purpose of property and property rights is self-interest and the philosophical right to pursue self-interest. It has nothing to do with managing allocation of resources. It's human nature to declare ownership (ever been around a two-year-old?) because ownership of things translates to better survival and reporductive rates.
At any rate, I'm sure I'm gonna get modded into oblivion here, since my post runs counter to the opinions of some of the more rabid libertarian/anarchist moderators. I'm not going to get into some of the other things in his blog specifically in relation to IP... since rebuttal of same is apparent in the comments to so many articles have come before.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That's (one reason) why people get so upset over IP law - there's nothing stopping them copying ideas EXCEPT the law (it's so rare that something is produced by one person that it may as well be discounted), and there's no harm done by copying IP (RIAA/MPAA might argue that, but you could just as easily argue that their business system is based solely on the law, which means that it would be different/redundant without that law).
That's as succinctly as I could manage to summarise the article, and none of it seemed like intellectual wankery - this argument has serious ramifications IRL, and looking at the fundamentals of it seems as good a place to start as any. So, what you generate with your brain IS your property, but just like your money, it's completely useless if you don't SPEND it.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Code/music/data are no more than a sequence (pretty large sometimes) of numbers, that is, bytes. If I came up with sequence, say, 5, 10, 11, 35, 255 - can I claim it to be my property and sue you for copying it? If not, how long should such sequence be in order to allow this?
Coding etudes
This is similar to the suggestion that charging a fee for each email sent would stop spam.
And about as practical.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain?
I thought he was saying that he owes the estate of Aristotle for his use of that idea, and he owes some money to various Germanic tribes for their contributions to the English language. I'd imagine that is keyboard is illegal, as it didn't include any payment to the estate of Christopher Sholes, inventor of the QWERTY keyboard layout. Does his power company pay rights to Tesla's decedents for their use of alternating current to power that computer? Is there anything that we as humans can make or do that doesn't utilize the ideas of other people?
We are all just people.
Disliking a musical genre cannot be racist unless you equate musical genres to race, which is a racist concept.
Put identity in the browser.
Let's look at the difference between the two in the physical world, rather than the abstraction of the physical world which is the law. The right to exclude Real property - exclusion can be accomplished without involving 3rd parties.
Intellectual property - exclusion can only occur with the aid of 3rd parties (i.e. law enforcement). The right to convey Real property - Once conveyed, its gone.
Intellectual property - Once conveyed, you still have it. The right to subdivide Real property - Subdivision is finite, there is only so much to go around.
Intellectual property - Subdivision is infinite, you can give away pieces of arbitrary size to as many people as want them. The right to control how something is used Real property - control does not require 3rd parties.
Intellectual property - control requires 3rd parties (i.e. law enforcement) That is a non-rivalrous property right: my ability to get my golf ball is not impeded by the number of other people who have that right. Whether or not a right is rivalrous says nothing about whether or not the actual resource is rivalrous. The entire world could have the right to retrieve golfballs from someone's yard, but the entire world could not actually DO it because the yard is rivalrous. IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else. But physical resources do not resemble ideas anywhere but within the realm of some legal systems.
I'm sort of disturbed by the idea that just because you can make 10000 copies of something at no _cost_ to the original creator of the content, you should just be able to make as many copies as you want and never compensate them. Yes, it doesn't cost them anything, but what about compensating people for the work they do, or encouraging them to do more work in the future? There are lots of things I would like to write or produce that I think would be valuable, but rather than simply wondering how many people would like my product and what they would think it's worth, I have to wonder how many would just copy it and steal the product of my labor. Sure, open sourcers would still produce things, and there would be people willing to work for free for the fame or future job prospects or whatever, but not everybody wants to work for free! I like the idea of working hard and getting a higher income than the guy who doesn't, and having a nice house and a new car parked in front of it. I don't understand why people want to reduce the opportunity to do that.
what I generate with my brain is MY intellectuall property and
No man is an island.
The ideas etc that you generate with your brain are not emanating only from you but are generated by your experiences; your education, the society in which you grew up, your life experience.
They do not arise out of some kind of vacuum, unless you really *are* empty-headed.
Hence, if there really is *property* here it must be said to be the property of all of society; you *didn't* come up with it *all* by yourself. Never. Ever.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I hate eminem just as much as I hate 2pac. don't worry, no racism, just *hate* rap.
I'm afraid you've got it wrong, but at least you're on the right track. Incidentally, here's a major downside to the term 'intellectual property': it's vague and confusing, and you've fallen into that trap.
A copyright, for example, is not the same thing as the creative work to which the copyright pertains, nor is either of those the same as a copy in which the creative work might be fixed. A copy is certainly property. A copyright is arguably property. A creative work is certainly not property.
Ultimately, property is that which is capable of being used and enjoyed by the owner, lent to others and recoverable, and which the owner can dispose of (either by selling, or by destroying). While a creative work meets the first requirement, it cannot meet the other two (outside of extreme and unrealistic situations), largely because it's nonrivalrous. A copyright, at least, can.
However, there are non-rivalrous goods out there in which we attach property rights.
Offhand, I can't think of any. Your easement example doesn't work. The easement is very large, but it is finite. If the entire population of the world was playing golf that day, and everyone hit their ball onto that lot, you'd have a hell of a time if they all decided to retrieve it simultaneously. If the easement were truly non-rivalrous, it would be no problem at all.
IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else.
Again, it depends on what 'IP' means. As a lawyer who practices in copyright and trademark, I assure you, the term is so vague, so meaningless, so deliberately confusing, that I have no idea of what people mean when they say it. I don't even use the term at all myself, save to point out why it shouldn't be used.
If you want to talk about copyright, say so. Ditto, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, publicity rights, etc. They're all different, they're all unrelated, and they're not going to be less so just because of a made-up umbrella term.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
With physical property I (or me and both my friends) can (attempt to) physically secure property from you and your roving band of 6^2^2 friends. Regardless of whether or not I'm successful, only one of us ends up with it. Either I'm successful in defending it, or you manage to take it from me. This idea led mankind to villages and countries: To defend my property from the invaders.
Contrast this with an idea: Once I publish my idea (or even tell one person) it is impossible for me to ever be sure that no one else uses my idea. I suppose I could kill the first person I told, but this is an unusually harsh 'defence' for 'property' and still doesn't guarantee that either they already told someone else, or (as often happens) someone else had the same idea as me.
The reality is that physical property can be protected, but ideas can not.
The 'net is a perfect example of this: the more some organization tries to stifle the dissemination of something (perhaps internal e-mails) the more it gets copied throughout the net until it becomes literally impossible for anyone (including the government) to halt this spread.
That we may or may not make use of the government to help protect our physical property isn't really important. What is important is that physical property can be protected, while ideas can not. And this is true due to the rivalrous nature of property, and the non-rivalrous nature of ideas. This "problem" has been exacerbated by the internet, which is of course a giant idea copying machine: your idea goes in once, but comes out everywhere...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
With all due respect, Batt brought that on himself. He said he shared writing credits with another musician. I'm pretty certain I can record silence and attempt to sell it and perform it without gaining the ire of Cage so long as my performance is not like his (sit at a piano silently for a length of time) and doesn't reference him.
.. rests in music are as important as the notes. Cage made an interesting point; what if the rest is the whole song? It doesn't bother me nearly as much that he can copyright such a 'composition' than somebody owns the rights to Happy Birthday. Ultimately, Cage had a neat idea which is obvious in retrospect, and it's not like he goes around seeking infringement from any piece of media with dead air. He copyrighted silence as a musical performance, and its unclear to me why people are more concerned about that copyright expiring than cultural works that are ingrained in the public vernacular. Doesn't it seem clear that Batt was just hoping to ride on the coattails of Cage? No Cage, no one minute of silence from Batt.
The thing is, to me
"Old man yells at systemd"
In the past the artist had a patron: The church. The state. The merchant prince. The patron's one rule is that the art he commissions remains unique. You do not embarrass Nero by building a knock-off of his golden house.
You should ask yourself why you want to be paid forever for something you do once.
Because it is something no one else has ever done - perhaps no one else could ever do. Harper Lee has written one novel. But that novel is To Kill A Mockingbird.
Half the reason patent lawyers have no interest in filing quality patents is because that would cut down on patent litigation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No, he's wrong. IP is "property" because you can sell it or otherwise transfer it, leave it to your children, license it (which is like a lease or easement), etc. A patent or copyright is a grant by the government of the right to sue others from making or using your creations. The "property" side of this grant distinguishes this grant from other grants by the government, such as the right to free speech, etc., which are "inalienable" -- meaning, you can't sell or transfer these rights.