Intellectual Property Rights Debate

This rousing debate broke out during a discussion section at FEE's Freedom University i Seminar. June 4, 2009. For more FEE videos go to http://fee.org/videos/

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• copyright
• intellectual property
• file trading
• music industry

[arknihil]

the guy on the far left knows what he's talking about.

[samalet77]

Nice. Thanks for posting the video. Hope this is just the beginning. Thanks.

[aenkmnp]

Sheldon Richman FTW!

[TheRhinehart86]

I can sympathise with people wanting to protect their shit. My problem is the 'pro-active' means being taken to 'stamp out piracy' rather than prosecuting each case of fraud as an isolated incident. Seperately suing a million people for copyright fraud, just as you would seperately prosecute a million people who each commit a murder, is highly impractical, so instead they now go for the ISPs, affecting millions of people who had nothing to do with piracy, that may be law but it aint justice

[furyofbongos]

Check out Stepan Kinsella, a registered patent attorney on his very strong arguments against the violence of IP laws.

[Keeban3]

Its not about owning the economic value of your work, its about owning the right to its usage. Its not like stealing a good, instead its like counterfeiting money.

[briano8713]

Do libertarians who favor current form of IP realize that they support a massively inefficient government subsidy to arbitrary content creation? One that has the side-effect of massive rent-seeking and a hamstringing of horizontal information flow between market participants. The administered pricing that results from arbitrary monopoly is a de facto TAX, even economists who favor it understand this. These same folks prolly decry "big guvment" funding for R&D.

[briano8713]

@wildbobandronnie

Ever seen the stupid commercials where the RIAA tries to stop kids from d/l music w/ the "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" The accurate analogy would be, "you wouldn't copy a friend's car for free because it would deprive GM of their state-granted first mover advantage, would you?" But how would GM make money when people can just copy cars for free?! Once again - there are less destructive ways of subsidizing content creation w/ taxes than granting arbitrary monopolies.

[briano8713]

@wildbobandronnie

You're missing the point. If he is paid as a lecturer/professor, he is being paid for a scarce service he himself provides. If a student memorizes his lectures and repeats them to others, it is not theft, not in a meaningful sense. The reason property rights exist *at all* is to provide a mechanism to resolve disputes among scarce resources. Patterns are not scarce resources. You can subsidize content creation in numerous ways, granting monopolies is simply the most harmful.

[27istheNumber]

@arknihil what's his name?

[swu880]

/watch?v=8KSua3Nczjk&feature=r­elated

Jefferey tucker made a good solid argument for differentiating property rights as in physical property vs the intellectual property. one is finite & scarce the other is infinite and never really scarce(in the sense that its being used here)