Being radical is not the same as being stupid - Use your brains for once!

An assembly of reasons why the scarce/non-scarce dichotomy is fallacious, as a justification for negating Intellectual Property rights
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Both this and the abortion question (though these are not consensual by any means) are the points where I deviate from agorism, and hence, the reason why I call myself an Anarcho-Capitalist, in the vein of Rothbard and Friedman.

If you think this is at least a video worth watching, please digg it, by going to this link - http://digg.com/lbv.php?id=7769592&ord=1

Thanks!

http://social.teelook.com

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• free
• market
• anarchy
• intellectual
• property
• rights
• education
• voluntary
• politics
• copyright
• philosophy
• libertarianism

[DQ15]

whats the name of the song?

[dakshinamurti]

Music is by Coldfinger, a portuguese band. Don't remember the name :)

[davidsmind]

It's not, as you state, that one couldn't own anything besides land if no intellectual property rights existed. Logically, it is only that you couldn't own the IDEA of anything without IP. Which is well and good.

If farmer A had the rights to limit farmer B from planting corn in wet dirt as opposed to dry because farmer A did that first and therefore owned the idea of wet-dirt-planting....well I think you get the point. No progress could ever be made on anything. The world would simply stagnate

[dakshinamurti]

IP is not about owning an idea, but a concrete implementation of an idea. I know this can get confusing. From my perspective, I design t-shirts. If I could not lay any claim of property over my designs, anyone, let's say, a chinese could just copy paste it to his webstore, and sell it at half the price. While this is awesome for the consumer, it is awful for producers. I would not be making any more tee designs. Apply same principle to any invention. That, my friend, is halting production.

[dakshinamurti]

this is all a game of incentives. When you know you will be able to profit/explore the fruits of your labor, free from parasites, you feel highly motivated to express your creativity, solve problems, to be an entrepreneur. if you are at the mercy of everyone else, if you know that what you do will be expropriated from you, that your market will be diluted or even obliterated by a parasite, then you will feel highly motivated to be a leech. If everyone is a leech, nobody is a producer.

[dakshinamurti]

And if noone is a producer, leeches have nothing to leech, and consumers have nothing to consume. So it is in my opinion not in the best interest of the consumer to reward leeches. This isn't even a moral matter. It's recognizing what works in practice, and until anyone can demonstrate (not assert, but demonstrate) how it is awesome for all of us to take incentives from producers and give them to leeches, I stick to the proposition that IP is desirable, especially if you are a creator.

[davidsmind]

"To destroy the pharmaceutical industry in poorer countries, for example--and, incidentally, to block technological innovations, such as improved production processes for patented products. Progress is no more a desideratum than markets, unless it yields benefits for those who count."

So, essentially, IP Laws could theoretically be used as a protection for the enterprising scientist, but not in their current form and/or implementation. Currently IP is used as an attack.

[davidsmind]

Many scientists (dare I say most) work not "to be an entrepreneur" but to solve problems. It is often useful for them if there is a benefactor, but certainly not always necessary.

Anyhow, Chomsky said it best in his book "On MisEducation":

[The current system imposes] "intellectual property rights" restrictions of an extreme sort that rich societies never accepted during their period of development but that they now intend to use to protect home-based corporations:"

[davidsmind]

We must make a distinction between IP for artistic works (designs for shirts, works of art, songs etc.) and scientific improvements and discoveries.

It is a very new concept that the later be protected for anything but novel mechanical configuration (for which you would get a patent) and often times throughout history you'll find the patent-holders are not the creators nor producers, but brokers or hucksters who got to the patent office before the well meaning scientists. (Penicillin, Tesla's)

[dakshinamurti]

from theft/expropriation. I am also against patents by the way. Murray Rothbard is favorable to copyrights but against patents. That's my view. If you want to know why one is cool and the other not, do a simple search for the chapter of ethics of liberty about intellectual property.