If you have the time please read the book. These are some of the things discussed. One of the major roles for governments in libertarian thought is to enforce contracts. There are some solutions that don't lead back to an IP rights situation. An employer and employee can have a legal contract that can help prevent this. But if the employee leaves it is the employee that is breech of contract not the company that paid for the information. If the first company finds out about the offer in time it could get a restraining order against the employee to enforce the contract.But if the information gets out then it is public and cannot be protected.
I am a believer in natural law theory. This basically means there are laws that govern how humans interact with each other just like those that we describe with physics. The goal of human law should be to work with those laws.
There is a natural intellectual monopoly that goes with any discovery. When a new product is first created it isn't obvious if it will be successful. It is only after it is successful do others want to copy it. This gives the creator a natural monopoly in which they can be the only seller. Also what is interesting is that unlike our legal monopoly the natural one adjusts based on how advanced the discovery is. Something that is obvious like the one click buy button can be instantly copied. But a new piece of hardware that is a generation more advanced might take competitors years to reverse engineer and gear up for fabrication
Patents don't protect the physical device they protect the idea of the device. How is the idea of a physical device different then the idea behind software, music, food, or other thoughts? Now the actual physical device is protected by regular property rights.
And that is the problem with the theory of IP rights. The reason property rights exist is because property is scarce. If I take your car you no longer have the car. If you come up with an idea and I learn about it doesn't force you to forget it. By giving rights to an idea you have to violate other people's rights to do what they want with their own physical property.
What about rewarding innovation. There is a natural system of temporary monopoly. When a new product is released on the market nobody knows to copy it until it is successful. Then people will copy it. This takes some time. What is interesting is that the bigger the leap forward the more difficult it will be to copy and the longer the monopoly. So there is no need for a government creation of IP rights because they exist naturally. So the real stupid patents that are easy to copy like one click shopping would enjoy a monopoly of about a day while if someone invented a tabletop fusion power plant it may take years after the product is released on the market for someone to reverse engineer.
And even with copies the market seems to reward the originators in markets where There are no IP rights like cooking and fashion.
Great post. Just to add to it. I am a mechanical engineer. There are types of stainless steel that are not magnetic even though they are over 70% iron. Also when you are heat treating steel you can tell when it transitions to Austenite because it is no longer magnetic. So that is a case where something that is almost all iron 97%+ becomes nonmagnetic due to a change in the crystal structure.
What is the purpose of sexual reproduction as opposed to asexual? To create diverse genetics that help a species survive. A farmer doesn't want their plants to be too diverse. The want certain traits that make their crop valuable. You want tasty, sweet, large fruit.
Genetic Modification whether through natural methods, artificial breeding or engineering can create plants with very desirable crops but also have the problem that their offspring don't share those traits. I know some people like that. Heirloom seeds come from plants that have shown the ability to keep desirable traits from one generation to the next. This is most typically with plants that are self fertile where they pollinate their own flower before it opens. This prevents cross pollination.
For trees it's even more interesting. I have citrus trees with root stocks that are disease resistant that have had desirable fruiting stems grafted to it. I have to make sure that whenever a new branch forms below the graft that I cut it off. You can have more than one type of citrus on the same tree but some are more aggressive than others.
The Fukujima plant saved lives. Did you see the area around it? Not too many people survived that tsunami. But those working in the plant at that time did.
It was interesting that during this crisis and all of the coverage I didn't see any news stories try to explain radioactivity and radiation. I was watching a news program and they showed the workers,cleaning up wearing particle masks and my father inlay said why are they wearing masks because it won't stop the radiation. I spent about five inutes explaining that the difference between radioactive elements and radiation. I explained the radiation wasn't dangerous because it was begin monitored and skin and clothes would stop most of what they were being exposed to. The threat was radioactive dust that if they got it in their lungs it could radiate inside which is more dangerous so wearing the mask was doing a lot of good. If the news would spend a few minutes explaining it would go a lot further than having talking heads stating matter of factly that all those workers will end up dead.
It is a lie that the private companies won't put the cable in. They just won't do it for free. If you live a few miles from the nearest junction you could hire this guy to run the fiber and the providers will be happy to hook it up for you. Most people would prefer others pay for it. There are tradeoffs wherever you live and you have to take it into consideration before moving.
Now in this situation a real role for local government would be to establish easements so you could run the fibers.
I suggest you read at least some of the book. It is very interesting. Your comment " As soon as a big publisher realizes that he can just make as much money by grabbing any author's books and selling them without paying royalties, they will start doing that." Yes but look at works that are out of copyright. They are available on the internet but also publishers still sell them. But since the IP is free the cost for the books are quite low.
Also you always have a short term natural copyright. If an author signed a contract to produce a book for a publisher the publisher would need to do an analysis to figure out how long they will have to sell the book at full price until competitors can copy it. There will be a time where they are the only ones selling the book before copies can be sold. Plus take a look at your brand clothing example. There are obviously people that will pay a premium for the same item if it is made by a particular brand. The book industry could do the same thing.
I used to think similar things. But I kept seeing how the system was being abused. I read the following book Against intellectual Property. As one would expect this book is public domain. It gives examples from history and ideas for the future about how creative people can still make money without intellectual property rights. Thing food and clothing. Recipes and designs cannot be copyrighted. Yet these industries thrive and the creative people make money inspire of copies. The one part of intellectual property the author finds the sleast offensive is trademarks. Copying a trade mark is akin to fraud since you are claiming the product you made is made by another company.
Did you ever wonder why the movie industry is located in Hollywood? It was because Edison who owned the patent to motion pictures was very strict as to the types of movies that could be made. So all of the famous studios you know today were started out west where they could easily avoid the patent enforcement that was happening back east.
You are falling for the lies. The goal of Bin Laden is simple. It's the same as he had for the Soviets. Get the foreigners out of their country. If you bankrupt them they are forced to leave. Simple.
I have one goal. High Growth. This is because even the poorest people in the US live better than 99% of the people in human history. A homeless person today can buy a prepaid cellphone from panhandling that a head of state couldn't buy with all of their countries resources 50 years ago. The biggest obstacle to this is envy. People can't stand that other people have better toys. I have no problem with this. I buy cars that are 3 years old and electronics that are 1 year old. I let the rich pay full price and I get their hand me downs for 1/2 that price. It's still much better than what I had.
For individuals: Replace SS tax, Medicare tax, and Income tax with flat rate of 10% with no deductions taken out of your paycheck like SS is today. The $24,000 you have isn't needed because people are already billed about 15% for SS and Medicare from dollar one. This is a wash for them.
Eliminate all of the rest of the double taxation like Estate, Capital Gains, Savings Income, ect.
For businesses: Replace the entire tax code with a flat rate of 10% on Gross US Revenue.
Balanced Budgeting: First thing is to default on the debt. This will piss off alot of people but will free us from the debt and prevent us from being able to accumulate any more since nobody likes to lend to a dead beat. Budgeting will be done as a percentage of revenue. Every quarter when the revenue comes in the budget is set.
The compliance costs become close to zero. Everyone can plan long term because there is no uncertainty and growth will be astronomical. The few years of turmoil will pass quickly and we will be generating more revenue than before due to growth.
I'm not sure how much he was asking for them but you always pay a premium to buy coins. You have to pay for the actual minting process. Because they were close to pure silver you should be able to sell them for the price of silver to anyone just like you can sell a necklace or silverware.
Notice how you had to say US Dollar not Dollar. There is a very interesting etymology to the word Dollar and $ and both predate the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar
Thank you for getting my point. For this crowd I should have been more specific. When you get the bill for this treatment the sugar will be billed to you at the equivalent $1000/lbm kind of like the $10 aspirin.
Thanks for the links. That is pretty cool stuff. It seems people are worries about increased salinity in the man made sea. But the Mediterranean Sea managed to balance this due to the difference density of ocean water and the sea water. If you made another tunnel that led from the bottom of the lake to an equivalent depth in the ocean you could let saltier water out into the ocean.
You are exactly right. Car accidents kill about 40,000 people a year in the US. If we went to all automated cars and reduced that to 400 deaths the car makers would still go out of business even though many lives were saved. This country is doomed because of the insane legal system and juries that give insane rewards.
Automation will bring prices down so much that you hardly have to work to buy what you need. I can find computers in the trash that would be considered Super Computers 20 years ago.
Good post. In Civil and Mechanical Engineering you typically have two choices when building important structures. You can use established building codes. These cover almost everything you need to build a structure and have made the ability to build safe structures using standard components and techniques very economical. Such standards are ASCE 7 which gives you standard loads, AISC Steel Construction Manual which gives you standard materials and shapes and techniques to analysis the structure. And there are the AWS Welding codes that give standard ways of welding steel joints that all certified welders are able to do. The downside of this is that you are stuck with standard looking buildings for the most part.
If you want something extremely cool or complex you have another option. You can do all of the engineering yourself. You can come up with your innovative design and then do a full analysis that everything will work out. You may have to build wind tunnel models since standard load data won't apply. You will have to do your own welded joint calculations and test them to failure. Then certify that the welders can make those welds reliably and most likely do x-ray inspection on those welds to verify they are sound.
Both of these options are available to a customer for the structure. A cheap off the shelf cookie cutter version or a very expensive original idea and all of the engineering that goes along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have the time please read the book. These are some of the things discussed. One of the major roles for governments in libertarian thought is to enforce contracts. There are some solutions that don't lead back to an IP rights situation. An employer and employee can have a legal contract that can help prevent this. But if the employee leaves it is the employee that is breech of contract not the company that paid for the information. If the first company finds out about the offer in time it could get a restraining order against the employee to enforce the contract.But if the information gets out then it is public and cannot be protected.
Here is a great book http://mises.org/books/against.pdf against intellectual property laws.
I am a believer in natural law theory. This basically means there are laws that govern how humans interact with each other just like those that we describe with physics. The goal of human law should be to work with those laws.
There is a natural intellectual monopoly that goes with any discovery. When a new product is first created it isn't obvious if it will be successful. It is only after it is successful do others want to copy it. This gives the creator a natural monopoly in which they can be the only seller. Also what is interesting is that unlike our legal monopoly the natural one adjusts based on how advanced the discovery is. Something that is obvious like the one click buy button can be instantly copied. But a new piece of hardware that is a generation more advanced might take competitors years to reverse engineer and gear up for fabrication
Patents don't protect the physical device they protect the idea of the device. How is the idea of a physical device different then the idea behind software, music, food, or other thoughts? Now the actual physical device is protected by regular property rights.
And that is the problem with the theory of IP rights. The reason property rights exist is because property is scarce. If I take your car you no longer have the car. If you come up with an idea and I learn about it doesn't force you to forget it. By giving rights to an idea you have to violate other people's rights to do what they want with their own physical property.
What about rewarding innovation. There is a natural system of temporary monopoly. When a new product is released on the market nobody knows to copy it until it is successful. Then people will copy it. This takes some time. What is interesting is that the bigger the leap forward the more difficult it will be to copy and the longer the monopoly. So there is no need for a government creation of IP rights because they exist naturally. So the real stupid patents that are easy to copy like one click shopping would enjoy a monopoly of about a day while if someone invented a tabletop fusion power plant it may take years after the product is released on the market for someone to reverse engineer.
And even with copies the market seems to reward the originators in markets where There are no IP rights like cooking and fashion.
Great post. Just to add to it. I am a mechanical engineer. There are types of stainless steel that are not magnetic even though they are over 70% iron. Also when you are heat treating steel you can tell when it transitions to Austenite because it is no longer magnetic. So that is a case where something that is almost all iron 97%+ becomes nonmagnetic due to a change in the crystal structure.
What is the purpose of sexual reproduction as opposed to asexual? To create diverse genetics that help a species survive. A farmer doesn't want their plants to be too diverse. The want certain traits that make their crop valuable. You want tasty, sweet, large fruit.
Genetic Modification whether through natural methods, artificial breeding or engineering can create plants with very desirable crops but also have the problem that their offspring don't share those traits. I know some people like that. Heirloom seeds come from plants that have shown the ability to keep desirable traits from one generation to the next. This is most typically with plants that are self fertile where they pollinate their own flower before it opens. This prevents cross pollination.
http://www.burpee.com/heirloom-seeds-and-plants/
For trees it's even more interesting. I have citrus trees with root stocks that are disease resistant that have had desirable fruiting stems grafted to it. I have to make sure that whenever a new branch forms below the graft that I cut it off. You can have more than one type of citrus on the same tree but some are more aggressive than others.
I know this crazy person that bred a male donkey with a horse and the offspring are infertile.
The Fukujima plant saved lives. Did you see the area around it? Not too many people survived that tsunami. But those working in the plant at that time did.
It was interesting that during this crisis and all of the coverage I didn't see any news stories try to explain radioactivity and radiation. I was watching a news program and they showed the workers,cleaning up wearing particle masks and my father inlay said why are they wearing masks because it won't stop the radiation. I spent about five inutes explaining that the difference between radioactive elements and radiation. I explained the radiation wasn't dangerous because it was begin monitored and skin and clothes would stop most of what they were being exposed to. The threat was radioactive dust that if they got it in their lungs it could radiate inside which is more dangerous so wearing the mask was doing a lot of good. If the news would spend a few minutes explaining it would go a lot further than having talking heads stating matter of factly that all those workers will end up dead.
How far is it? Then call them and ask if you get all of the permits and hire someone to run the lines to the nearest box will they hook it up.
It is a lie that the private companies won't put the cable in. They just won't do it for free. If you live a few miles from the nearest junction you could hire this guy to run the fiber and the providers will be happy to hook it up for you. Most people would prefer others pay for it. There are tradeoffs wherever you live and you have to take it into consideration before moving.
Now in this situation a real role for local government would be to establish easements so you could run the fibers.
I suggest you read at least some of the book. It is very interesting. Your comment " As soon as a big publisher realizes that he can just make as much money by grabbing any author's books and selling them without paying royalties, they will start doing that." Yes but look at works that are out of copyright. They are available on the internet but also publishers still sell them. But since the IP is free the cost for the books are quite low.
Also you always have a short term natural copyright. If an author signed a contract to produce a book for a publisher the publisher would need to do an analysis to figure out how long they will have to sell the book at full price until competitors can copy it. There will be a time where they are the only ones selling the book before copies can be sold. Plus take a look at your brand clothing example. There are obviously people that will pay a premium for the same item if it is made by a particular brand. The book industry could do the same thing.
I used to think similar things. But I kept seeing how the system was being abused. I read the following book Against intellectual Property. As one would expect this book is public domain. It gives examples from history and ideas for the future about how creative people can still make money without intellectual property rights. Thing food and clothing. Recipes and designs cannot be copyrighted. Yet these industries thrive and the creative people make money inspire of copies. The one part of intellectual property the author finds the sleast offensive is trademarks. Copying a trade mark is akin to fraud since you are claiming the product you made is made by another company.
http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Did you ever wonder why the movie industry is located in Hollywood? It was because Edison who owned the patent to motion pictures was very strict as to the types of movies that could be made. So all of the famous studios you know today were started out west where they could easily avoid the patent enforcement that was happening back east.
You are falling for the lies. The goal of Bin Laden is simple. It's the same as he had for the Soviets. Get the foreigners out of their country. If you bankrupt them they are forced to leave. Simple.
I have one goal. High Growth. This is because even the poorest people in the US live better than 99% of the people in human history. A homeless person today can buy a prepaid cellphone from panhandling that a head of state couldn't buy with all of their countries resources 50 years ago. The biggest obstacle to this is envy. People can't stand that other people have better toys. I have no problem with this. I buy cars that are 3 years old and electronics that are 1 year old. I let the rich pay full price and I get their hand me downs for 1/2 that price. It's still much better than what I had.
How about this instead.
For individuals:
Replace SS tax, Medicare tax, and Income tax with flat rate of 10% with no deductions taken out of your paycheck like SS is today. The $24,000 you have isn't needed because people are already billed about 15% for SS and Medicare from dollar one. This is a wash for them.
Eliminate all of the rest of the double taxation like Estate, Capital Gains, Savings Income, ect.
For businesses:
Replace the entire tax code with a flat rate of 10% on Gross US Revenue.
Balanced Budgeting:
First thing is to default on the debt. This will piss off alot of people but will free us from the debt and prevent us from being able to accumulate any more since nobody likes to lend to a dead beat.
Budgeting will be done as a percentage of revenue. Every quarter when the revenue comes in the budget is set.
The compliance costs become close to zero. Everyone can plan long term because there is no uncertainty and growth will be astronomical. The few years of turmoil will pass quickly and we will be generating more revenue than before due to growth.
I'm not sure how much he was asking for them but you always pay a premium to buy coins. You have to pay for the actual minting process. Because they were close to pure silver you should be able to sell them for the price of silver to anyone just like you can sell a necklace or silverware.
Notice how you had to say US Dollar not Dollar. There is a very interesting etymology to the word Dollar and $ and both predate the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar
Thank you for getting my point. For this crowd I should have been more specific. When you get the bill for this treatment the sugar will be billed to you at the equivalent $1000/lbm kind of like the $10 aspirin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
when they get the patent.
Thanks for the links. That is pretty cool stuff. It seems people are worries about increased salinity in the man made sea. But the Mediterranean Sea managed to balance this due to the difference density of ocean water and the sea water. If you made another tunnel that led from the bottom of the lake to an equivalent depth in the ocean you could let saltier water out into the ocean.
You are exactly right. Car accidents kill about 40,000 people a year in the US. If we went to all automated cars and reduced that to 400 deaths the car makers would still go out of business even though many lives were saved. This country is doomed because of the insane legal system and juries that give insane rewards.
Automation will bring prices down so much that you hardly have to work to buy what you need. I can find computers in the trash that would be considered Super Computers 20 years ago.
Good post. In Civil and Mechanical Engineering you typically have two choices when building important structures. You can use established building codes. These cover almost everything you need to build a structure and have made the ability to build safe structures using standard components and techniques very economical. Such standards are ASCE 7 which gives you standard loads, AISC Steel Construction Manual which gives you standard materials and shapes and techniques to analysis the structure. And there are the AWS Welding codes that give standard ways of welding steel joints that all certified welders are able to do. The downside of this is that you are stuck with standard looking buildings for the most part.
If you want something extremely cool or complex you have another option. You can do all of the engineering yourself. You can come up with your innovative design and then do a full analysis that everything will work out. You may have to build wind tunnel models since standard load data won't apply. You will have to do your own welded joint calculations and test them to failure. Then certify that the welders can make those welds reliably and most likely do x-ray inspection on those welds to verify they are sound.
Both of these options are available to a customer for the structure. A cheap off the shelf cookie cutter version or a very expensive original idea and all of the engineering that goes along with it.