This sounds very Wittgensteinian. In terms of his philosophy of language, what we have here is a "metaphor gone wild". You take "intellectual" and "property", you put them together as a metaphorical phrase that on the face of it seems meaningful and semantically sound, and people start believe that there's actually such a thing; that it's not made up word-lego.
It takes careful awareness to language to be able to point this out, as Stallman does. Just because there's a word for it, doesn't make it meaningful.
Sorry, in Wittgenstein words are meaningful if they correspond to predictable results in communication. If we can reasonably predict how the world will react to the words "intellectual property", then the phrase is "real". Meaning, for Wittgenstein, is usage.
The world, if you were wondering, will look dimly upon second-hand interpretations of a dead, legally irrelevant philosopher if you're caught in the courtroom violating someone else's intellectual property.
If you want to fight intellectual property you first have to acknowledge that, yes, it is a real thing. Our legal system has made it so. Just like physical property is a thing, corporate free speech is a thing, equal protection of the law is a thing, &c.
I'm sorry but "predictable results in communication" is not the criterion for being meaningful. If you fart in a courtroom, you get very predictable results, too. The phrase isn't 'real' just because some people use it. People use "God" quite a lot, and that doesn't make it a meaningful concept.
(why do I feel I just unleashed an unholy flame war from hell with that last analogy?)
I suppose that strictly speaking, the use of a phrase by many people does not imply that it has a "meaning" (for certain definitions of meaning) (if many people inserted "whum" as an adjective into some of their sentences, but had no real idea behind it, I suppose it might not be meaningful)
However, if many people say "invisible cherry" when they are talking about a door or opening, or means of accessing something, then it would be reasonable to say both that "invisible cherries exist", and to say "the phrase 'invisible cherry' is meaningful."
Also, while there is no set of all sets, I would argue that (again, for some definition of meaningful), the phrase "the universal set(the set of all sets)" is both meaningful and useful.
Also, if you wanted to avoid a flame war with that last bit, it may have been useful to instead claim that "magic" is meaningless due to being inherently self contradictory (by definition). I would disagree with that claim, but I think it would make a similar argument without being as likely to cause a flame war (though I doubt it would happen in either case)
However, I acknowledge that you did not say magic, and I am not attempting to use a straw man as if you had.
First you say, "In Wittgenstein, intellectual property is a meaningless phrase." But this is the opposite of the truth, because in Wittgenstein phrases have meaning if they can reliably be used to communicate. So in this example 'intellectual property' is a perfectly cromulent concept.
Now you say, "Intellectual property is still a meaningless phrase, because flamebait about God and courtroom farts." To me, it just looks like you're saying intellectual property is meaningless because it's an intangible concept you happen to dislike. This is good to impress people on the Internet, but not a good way to analyze or change the system we live in.
The organic food movement I find semantically irritating, I wish they would use the word sustainable or something. You have stuff claiming to be Organic Salt on sale in the supermarket and it isn't MSG.
I've always been fascinated by the FSF's interplay with IP law. Mostly because of the 'copyleft' hack, which is the core underpinning of the GPL and, by extension, GNU.
If you didn't have IP law at all, what you'd have is effectively public domain, without even the 'moral right' of attribution of authorship.
The kinds of systems you'd be able to build with that would resemble BSD codes, not GPL codes. This would suffice for open-source software, to be sure, but not for Free software with all the political trappings that it brings [1].
In much the same way as DRM aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of media and code in favor of the 'IP holders', copyleft aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of source and even binary codes in favor of the 'IP users'.
While the class of set of people benefiting from IP is different, it all still relies on IP.
I believe that copyright law should be abolished. (Eventually, slowly, responsibly.) While I release some works as CC0 [1], I still use the GPLv3+ on much source code because it's the best way to protect freedom given the existing system. This isn't a dichotomy nor hypocritical.
I would prefer for the GPL and other copyright licenses to be unenforcable; unfortunately that isn't the case. So I prefer not to BSD-license my works because then copyright could be used against me to take my rights from me.
BSD-ish licenses are "permissive", in that you can release modifications/derivatives of the work (in binary or source) that restrict how those modified versions are distributed.
e.g. I write a BSD-licensed song, and someone remixes that song and says that I cannot copy the remixed version.
Thats one of the most common argument against the concept of copyright. They say: How does a copy take away any of the authors rights? The original work is still there regardless how many copies are made by p2p file sharing.
Which has been stated before in this comment thread. If we abolish copyright, GPL is not needed. If we keep copyright (and thus accept the concept of derivative copies effecting the author), then GPL request freedom.
Please pick one. We should not cherry pick the arguments depending if one is talking about copyright or GPL. The same argument can't be false and true at the same time in the same mind.
The original exists, but the modified versions that are now prevalent are works that do not grant me my rights. I have contributed to the arsenal of my adversaries; my works have become part of the works that deny me rights that I consider important, the right to share and remix.
Whereas when copyright is abolished, if I have the song I can copy the song. They cannot put terms on it that would withhold my freedom to do so. I don't really need the GPL anymore; I don't demand anyone's source code, just my freedoms with the knowledge and information that is available to me.
> I prefer not to BSD-license my works because then copyright could be used against me to take my rights from me
I agree with you about GPL now vs. ideally no copyright, but one thing that would definitely be lost is the ability to coerce releasing source code. Companies in a hypothetical no-copyright future could still keep source code secret, and still release compiled/obfuscated software. They could still take code others had released, make modifications, and then only release obfuscated binaries. They wouldn't be able to sue if someone leaked the source code, but is that enough of a protection?
Personally, I'm willing to live with it, because I think in the long run people would rather share. But from, say, RMS's point of view, people are losing some measurable level of protection.
I really do value individual freedom. If I have access to some data, I want the freedom to share it. If I have some data, I want the freedom to not share it as well. "You must share the software" is not the world I want.
Legal requirements to share, would actually make it a burden to provide anything: If I give my friend this disk, am I legally required to give them something else along with the disk? If my computer is accessible on a network, do I have a legal obligation to make any source code that is accessible also available? What are the rules about that?
I think it's too messy. And honestly, if a kid writes a game, maybe they're embarassed about the source code... the law shouldn't require them to share that with their friends/teachers/etc.
Although there might be merit to regulations on industry / corporate actions, especially in so far as their works affect the public (voting machines, safety equipment: software that we might want to require keeps its source-code alongside binary distributions).
I'm much more comfortable with people keeping data to themselves in a world where they have less legal ability to prevent others from sharing it.
These are non-issues. The idea is not "share all data". If we copy the GPL model, all you need to share is the source code to any program you distribute in an uneditable form, and then only when someone asks for it (at which point you may charge a reasonable processing fee for the trouble). It's really not that onerous. No one is making you share your private software.
For "software" replace "food" and for "source code" replace "ingredients". You can cook whatever you want at home, but when you start selling food to people certain responsibilities kick in. If a kid is selling lemonade but is too embarrassed to tell you what's in it, would you drink it?
> ideally no copyright, but one thing that would definitely be lost is the ability to coerce releasing source code
Would not "definitely" be lost. It's easy to imagine other regulation which coerces releasing source code (indeed more powerfully, as not relying on copyright holder to both choose the right license and enforce it), if indeed that is a socially valuable thing to do.
But presumably you'd also be able to reverse-engineer the binaries much more freely (currently the DMCA prohibits most of those activities), so the market for source code would have a lot more players than just the original owner. Consider the interplay between Wine and Microsoft; in the absence of IP, Wine would probably be a lot more feature-ful and popular, perhaps even driving Microsoft out of business.
I have a hard time parsing your argument in the context of the original post. FSF is not against all forms of copyright. FSF is against all forms of software patents, and believes copyright should be more limited and sharing in particular should be completely legalized.
What FSF is particularly against, in this post, is combining, arguably completely separate, trademark laws, copyright laws, patent laws, and trade secret laws, under a useless umbrella term "Intellectual Property" which can be leveraged for propaganda purposes and is of little real use.
Forced transparency does not need to rely on copyright. If it is a good idea, it should be advocated as consumer, competition or procurement regulation, applied to all software.
Calling a turd "transparency regulation" instead of "intellectual property" is just changing the name of the same thing.
Under any copyleft type of regime, even if you remove copyright and replace with some other enabling law, you're still using legal controls to enforce rights management of bits and bytes.
Not the same thing. The copyleft hack on copyright is enforced by copyright holders, thus property (or whatever word wishes to use if not "property") based. Other easily imagined mechanisms for forcing transparency/source revelation would have no relation to copyright nor any other kind of property; I wouldn't call them copyleft any more than I'd call forced transparency in other domains (e.g., finance) copyleft.
Such would still be "using legal controls" (or more broadly "using policy controls", as in the case of procurement, which could be private) but not necessarily to "enforce rights management of bits and bytes". The legal controls could be for example around certification of a product: no source, no certification, no legally selling product. In that case the bits and bytes independent of a product on the market would be unregulated, not subject to forced transparency.
> The legal controls could be for example around certification of a product: no source, no certification, no legally selling product.
GPL forbids giving away infringing code as well.
Does your proposed regulatory regime also encompass forcing all open-source and hobby coders to get one of your licenses before they can enable the "download as ZIP" feature on their GitHub?
Could, probably wouldn't. Just as consumer, competition, procurement and other regulation typically doesn't cover hobbyists. I'd call that a feature -- more effective enforcement for commercial entities, hobbyists can ignore. Contrast with copyright hack, applies to all, commercial entities can ignore without consequence.
My statement doesn't preclude the reverse relationship. Each relationship is almost certainly bi-directional.
Altering the language is a powerful technique to shift views and change the debate. Totalitarian regimes have used it extensively (and Orwell parodied/warned about in 1984) but it is used in democracies too, see the battle over the language for abortion (life/choice), the US redefinition of liberal and I'm sure many other things too.
I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way.
GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes.
I've come around to the view that the basement/garage hacker who changes the world is largely a myth. It's a very popular one and a very American individualist one, but I see few if any real world examples.
This wasn't the product of basement hackers. It was the product of enormous amounts of DARPA money used to pay a good number of very smart people to focus on the problems of human-computer interaction full time for many years.
I want to believe. Please show me the basement/indy hacker equivalent of that demo.
Sure, basement hackers can make innovations... a little here, a little there. They can also do an excellent job making copies of commercial/military stuff, and in some cases the copies are a bit better than the original. I'm not saying this work has no value. But it doesn't innovate much and it certainly doesn't invent. Invention is a hundred times harder than innovation.
IP sucks. It's a bad system. But consider what it is attempting to accomplish. It's trying to create a mechanism whereby really innovative work can really pay. It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward. In its present form it does a poor job of that, but that's the intent.
Edit: I think the same logic also applies to startups, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Startups do sometimes have money, and can therefore focus on problems and employ people. But they must get revenue fast, which hugely limits their ability to play and experiment. As a result startups can innovate -- improve existing things -- but they generally cannot invent. Most startups that attempt to invent run out of runway and crash in the weeds. Invention seems to require a financier who is willing to throw money away, such as DARPA, NSF, etc... traditionally either nation-states or really freaking huge companies with money to burn. Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it. That's the problem that IP attempts but largely fails to solve.
GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes.
Really, the first thing you point out is the widget toolkits? Those really aren't the work of any of the projects you listed (with the exception of GNU and GTK+, though it's presently GNOME, which is still a subproject of GNU, but largely dominated by Red Hat).
There are tons of different toolkits available, which is truly the beauty of it. The bazaar choice. I'm not sure what you're expecting. It's not like the GUI model has changed much since its inception.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of proprietary operating systems owe significant debt to "basement hackers," particularly to BSDs due to their permissive licensing model. The TCP/IP stack on OS X, for one thing.
As for kernels, I can't help but be reminded of the Torvalds-Tanenbaum debate. Also, the Hurd is not monolithic modular like the BSD and Linux kernels, it's a multiserver microkernel approach.
It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward ...
No, I don't think so. IP was never meant to help innovative people. IP -- at least as it was created in the last decades (before, nobody talked about IP, but patents and trademarks and ideas -- no IP) -- is a fighting term that was coined to create a new form of property -- thus, after having things and than land, now also have ideas "own-able". Ideas are no property. How can they? That is just a bad, bad word.
And when you say, that the intent would be to help people with ideas, I can not consent! It is something to make investors and owners happy! To make rich people happy and steal from those with the ideas.
It's an attempt to make ideas, inventions, etc. into something like physical goods that can be put on balance sheets like physical goods. Accountants like that, investors like that. But it doesn't seem to work very well.
Exactly. Ideas don't fit into their system of wealth and money -- so they try to put it into the system. But it does not fit and only brings much trouble, since ideas can not be measured. The patent system is awfully broken because of this and it will go downhills more and more if nobody stops it (it does not seem so, because the neo-capitalism is still going strong and has more might than all governments together).
IP is creating more assets. Its designed for the benefit of the asset class. You'll notice how with IP becoming less powerful with open source software etc, there came the rise of SaaS or Software as a Service.
The truth is that strong IP, and strong property rights in general, are part of a system where one profits via the ownership of things as opposed to goods and services provided. That's why the asset class needed to push so hard for it. Otherwise, they all might have to go back to working as their assets will no longer be able to do the work for them, so to speak.
So I wouldn't say that what IP is "attempting to accomplish" is to create invention. Its likely a lot closer to incentivising and further increasing the control the asset class has on our society. We can decide how to support and fund invention in many, many ways. IP is just there because we have decided its the asset class's decision. And the asset class would never invest in anything that did not return more assets. So if we want to keep the system of asset class control over our society, we needed to come up with something that gave the asset class more assets for technological innovation, otherwise they'd probably just run up the price of real estate and natural resources to an unsustainable point.
I find your assertion that basement hackers never "invent" silly. Heck, Google/Pagerank started in a garage, as the saying goes. The demo you link is amazing and I'm not sure anyone has topped that in or out of a company since, but using that as proof that only companies and governments can invent is fallacious.
Many other statements you make are downright false or silly. For example, you say "the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac" and yet I've never seen a powerful tiling window manager on those two OSs ... certainly not before I used them on Linux. There might be similarity between some WMs and others, but there are dozens that are fairly novel.
The "Basement / Garage hacker that changes the world" you say is a myth; and yet Google and Apple both have undeniably changed the world despite originating with basement hackers.
Furthermore, the industry has moved to open source where it's easier for a basement hacker to do something big. At the time that video was made, you would have to create practically everything from the ground up. There was no free code to build on. Anyone might have had an idea expressed in that video, but he or she would have had great difficulty implementing it in a basement due to lack of resources to make the whole stack.
Nowadays, if I have an idea, there's a good chance many components of it are already done in the open source sphere, and I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and implement my idea with minimal work. The ability to create slow and steady progress and have such diverse bases on which to build, I think, makes the basement hacker far more possible. The jump from idea to working product is now much shorter in the software world than ever before.
Next, you say "basement hackers can innovate ... but it certainly doesn't invent". I honestly don't see the difference you're drawing between innovation and invention. innovate is the verb that creates inventions, the noun. I'm just not seeing what you're trying to do by creating that false dichotomy.
I also think you have the intent of "IP" a bit wrong. Patents are supposed to grant limited monopolies to people who have innovated. IP also covers trademarks and copyright which each have nothing to do with "innovative work" paying. By using IP there, you just fell into the trap of the article you're commenting on (I recommend reading it).
Furthermore, you say patents are meant to reward innovative work. That's simply false. Innovative work rewards itself. If you invent something truly innovative, you'll make money selling it. If patents were only meant to reward, they would have no requirement of disclosing sufficient details to reproduce the invention. What patents are meant to do is help the economy and industry as much as possible. A patent requires an inventor to disclose his invention and gives him a limited monopoly. The disclosure is meant to allow others to use his idea to create further inventions. The monopoly is to encourage people to disclose ideas at all, not merely hoard them as trade secrets.
"Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it." ... The whole point of a useful invention is that it solves a problem in a novel way. Surely people with that problem will want to pay for the solution that didn't exist before?
All "property" is imaginary. Having physical things without the backing of the law is just possession. We create a legal notion of property for the benefit of society. Property law adds the force to the state to my possessions, to stop someone beating me on the head and taking them. Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow, to encourage the creation of more, and to enable me to make a living from it.
We can argue to what extent this force is necessary, but to claim that intellectual endeavours are just "imaginary" is to do a huge disservice to millions of people who pour their lives into the creation of new and exciting things.
It points out that imaginary property is wholly unlike physical property. One is naturally exclusive, as multiple people cannot all use the same property at the same time. The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared.
Importing concepts of physical property is sloppy thinking and detrimental to society because it advocates for an unreasonable and unworkable basis. It's interesting in that vein that you have a "sweat of the brow" concept of copyright interest, when this theory has been directly rejected under US law (Feist v. Rural).
The term imaginary property recognizes such contributions to society as the product of the imagination and is more productive as a starting place for discussion thereof, even if it also lumps the disparate legal concepts together to some degree, though this may be unavoidable at this point.
"The term imaginary property recognizes such contributions to society as the product of the imagination and is more productive as a starting place for discussion thereof"
No, it's derogatory. Very few phrases of the form "Oh, it's just your imaginary X" are designed to be complimentary. In common parlance, "imaginary" is just synonymous with "not real". The phrase "imaginary property" is designed purely to advance an agenda where people write books, create films, make software, etc all for some "manna" which, when pushed, advocates can't actually specify beyond saying "they'll find new business models". Yes, they will. Involving not writing books, films, etc.
> The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared.
If this were true, there would be no need for insider trading laws, we'd play poker with all the cards face up, and targets of blackmail would just laugh it off.
You're pointing out the asymmetry of the value, rather than disputing it.
The information the insiders are trading on is relevant to the stock price (i.e. valuable to stockholders), the poker card info is valuable to the other players (or cheats wouldn't be after it), and the target of the blackmail has something important to hide or they wouldn't pay up.
I still don't see how that is the case with your examples.
Insider trading laws, for example, exist exactly because only a few people having the info reduces its value, there would be no point in having them if that wasn't the case. Obviously, the value to the few having the information is increased because they can use the information to their advantage - but the overall value of something has to consider externalities as well, which in this case would mean considering at least the losses that unsuspecting trading partners incur, which already would make it a zero-sum game, so there at least is no positive value in keeping the information secret. Now, another externality of keeping insider information secret is that it leads to the market making less rational decisions about asset allocation, for example allocating capital to a company that is actually less efficient at doing its job in society than its competitor that publishes such information immediately and honestly, thus likely wasting resources in comparison to the allocation that would happen in an honest market. I mean, after all, we put quite a lot of effort into making sure that price discovery in the stock market is not being manipulated, and into creating public exchanges with public price information in the first place, so presumably there is some value to society in making this information widely available?
You're only looking at half of the value, though. It's because it has value to others that it's worth keeping the secret. I'm asserting that the normal case is for the value to others to outweigh the individual's value. You are correct that it's asymmetric, of course. And yes, zero sum games would tend to be something of a limiting case. I'm not sure you can find a negative sum game for society as a whole, though you can for some particular group.
EDIT: I'm sorry three of us replied at the same time. I didn't mean to gang up on you.
> All "property" is imaginary.
When it comes to the current legal notion of property, then yes, assigning something as someone's "property" is imaginary.
The problem is "real" property cannot be duplicated without expending resources, whereas IP can be duplicated for free. For example:
If I make a car, you can't just "copy" it. Taking the car is stealing, and I think that is immoral because you have deprived the original owner of their work.
If I make a short story, then "copying" the story means using your own pen and paper (or your own hard drive to place a sequence of bits) to copy. I don't think this should be illegal. That is, I don't think that having a particular sequence of bits on your hard drive should legally allow men with guns to enter your home, label you a criminal, fine you, and/or send you to jail.
In that sense, not all property is "imaginary." We can make a distinction between tangible property, that exists as mass, and intellectual property, which is a set of ideas/words/code/etc. Tangible property is rivalrous; we can't both use it at the same time. Intellectual property can be used by many individuals at once, so calling it someone's "property" and enforcing that claim with force creates artificial scarcity.
I do feel bad that people who expect and rely on IP laws could feel cheated if IP laws were to disappear tomorrow. But to pretend IP law is some sort of natural thing is a bit naive. People have been creating ideas since we evolved a brain. People will continue to create without IP law. To make money off of your creations just requires a different business model.
There are no natural laws. Just because you (or your forefathers) were first on a piece of land, what natural right grants you it? Surely it's far more natural that, if I can overpower you and take it, it's mine? That's actually how nature typically works. The notion that it's "immoral" is a purely human construction. Why is that immoral, but my spending 5 years writing a book, only to see nothing in return because everyone hands it around for free is moral?
I'm not saying people will stop having ideas, or creating music, etc. What I am saying is that people without private means or patrons will have to stop performing creative acts that require a significant time investment. If I've got a wonderful idea for a book/film/game/whatever, but know it will take 5 years to make, how do I make it when I need to work 8-6 to pay for food/shelter etc?
Eliminating IP is to construct a return to patronage; the very wealthy deciding what creative output it worthwhile. IP is actually a hugely egalitarian concept; the world can decide what has value, and reward the creator post-hoc, because the creator is ensured a return.
No it is not. There can be ideas and "copyright" without having IP. But IP does also mean that the "property" can be owned by people that did not create it. This notion is fundamentally wrong and de-valuates any creative work. In patents you can already see it (most inventors are getting just a little fixed money -- the most of the value goes to the companies) -- but also in copyrighted work. The most of the value goes not to the performers of the art (eg music) but to the distributors.
Why is it "fundamentally wrong"? I created the work, I'm free to do with it as I please. I can give it away for free. I can charge $10 a copy. I can come to an arrangement that someone else has the right to set the price, in return for something else I want. That many musicians choose to sell their creations to distributors is entirely their choice. It obviously didn't "devalue" it to them at the point of sale, else they wouldn't have sold it. That many patents are owned by companies is because they were created by employees whose creative output was owned by the company in exchange for a salary.
If creative output has a value, then people should be free to exchange their creations for anything they like. To create restrictions that prevent people from writing a book then making an arrangement with a publisher, is just to prevent people from actually being able to do anything with their creations.
>I created the work, I'm free to do with it as I please.
Under the current law: NO!
That is just a dream from the people that are pro-IP -- they know, that is a dream, but they want you to dream it.
If you are working for a company and have an idea, the company gets the patent and you get (if you are lucky) a fixed amount (~$500 is a typical amount in my country) and the patent belongs to the company -- you don't even have the right to use the stuff for yourself.
IP means, in its conclusion, that the creators are disowned and the "owners" own your ideas. You created it, you are busted!
I'm guessing you're being deliberately obtuse here. You were completely free to do with your work as you please, and you "pleased" to sell your work to a company in exchange for some consideration. If you don't want IP transfer, or first-refusal fixed price patent transfer, then don't sign that employment contract. I had them negotiated out of my last agreement, and I'm free to spend my personal time creating whatever I want, knowing the rights to it will be owned entirely by me.
When you still find an employer, that makes a contract like that, call yourself lucky. In my country, it is a law -- and you can't cancel out laws in my country in contracts.
Not everybody is so lucky, that he has enough money or finds fitting freelancer work.
Ask the music people. They (oftentimes) can't sell their music without having contracts with big companies -- and they have to sell out all their rights.
But it seems that you just view the world from your standpoint -- fading out any negatives -- and everybody that has different experiences as you do, is just stupid or "obtuse" in your view. With such an attitude on your side, a discussion makes little to no sense.
>But IP does also mean that the "property" can be owned by people that did not create it. This notion is fundamentally wrong
How is that that "fundamentally wrong"?? It's just a natural extension of giving exclusivity to the creator of the work. Are you saying it's "fundamentally wrong" to, say, commission a creative work from an artist for your exclusive use, the way it was done for thousands of years?!? Treating creative works as a kind-of property, greatly simplifies things.
>and de-valuates any creative work.
HOW?!?! How is _paying_ for a creative work, devaluing it? I'm sure there are multitudes of examples when the artist was screwed out of profiting from their work, then again there are multitudes of examples when artists greatly profited from their work (Hey there, George Lucas).
>The most of the value goes not to the performers of the art (eg music) but to the distributors.
Sometimes that's true, and sometimes that isn't true. But even in the former case, there are good reasons why that may happen. Furthermore, it's not like this is limited to music or creative works. A condo developer may sell a piece of (physical) property, for moderate profit, to a savvy real estate agent who then flips it for twice the amount. Did the developer get screwed? Maybe, maybe not. That's just the way things are.
Personally, I think there are other ways to fund intellectual creation like this than to return to patronage, but I want to lay out a hypothetical since your comment intrigues me.
In a world where we had a basic income guarantee, you could think of that as basically universal patronage. Sure, artists and other "thought workers" might not make as much money as others, but it would be a viable way to spend your time. And, actually, you could probably even make more money since the stuff you do in your free time would act as effective advertising for hiring you for your services (e.g. a commissioned work, or consultation etc).
Would you have any objection in principle to such an arrangement? I ask because it actually sounds pretty nice to me.
Personally, I think Jefferson's take on patents illuminates this subject pretty well:
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
The thing is, there are good arguments for many aspects of patents, copyright and trademarks, however to try and establish them under the banner of Intellectual Property is both inaccurate and damaging.
In the long run, the pushing of IP is to the level that a Google search for "Mickey Mouse Law" lists the first result as the Copyright Extension Act https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mickey+mouse+law is the factor that might lead to laws being dialled back so far that patronage will be the only option.
The reformists are the IP industries only real hope at this point, because if they are not paid attention to, then the abolitionists will win the argument.
The fundamental problem is that, as you noted, IP is free to copy. It is not free to create, and some arrangement must be made to pay for creation.
The approach of current IP law is to artificially imbue IP with attributes that make copies rivalrous and excludable, so that the creator can sell them on the free market. The free market will decide which IP should be produced and which should not, and the creation costs are paid by the people that use the IP.
Advantages of this approach: costs paid by users--if I don't read your novel, I don't pay for your novel; free market controls production decisions.
Disadvantage of this approach: price to users is higher than the "economically correct" price.
There are ways to deal with IP that do not involve artificial scarcity. One alternative approach, which was popular a long time ago, is the private patronage approach. Artists find a rich person to pay them to create. I'm not sure there are enough rich patrons to make this work at the scale consumers like to consume art today, and I don't think we'd have the artistic diversity we now have under a private patronage system.
Another approach is the begging approach.
Probably the best alternative to the current approach is the public goods approach. Treat artistic works like we treat public parks. Anyone could freely copy and share, and the creation would be funded by the government out of tax revenue.
The main problems with this approach are (1) determining the budget for art funding, and (2) deciding which artists get funded and by how much. The budget can be dealt with by tying it to a tax on something that correlates well with public consumption of art. Probably the best way to deal with deciding which artists get funded is to track consumer use, similar to the way we now do in order to determine royalties, and base funding on that.
Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow
Actually, in many countries, including the US, "seat of the brow" is explicitly excluded as a doctrine w.r.t. copyright and patents.
See Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., where the SCOTUS specifically refers the clarification given by Congress that the fundamental criteria for protection are originality and fixation in tangible form, and sweat of the brow is excluded.
Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow, to encourage the creation of more, and to enable me to make a living from it.
Except that little pesky thing called the constitution doesn't call it intellectual property (rightly so), and the purpose is not to enable making a living from ideas (which doesn't follow; just because someone has a copyright or patent, doesn't mean they'll make a living from those ideas, and not having a copyright or patent doesn't preclude them from making a living off their ideas). The wording is pretty explicit: "to advance science and the useful arts."
I don't think this is right. The ownership may be imaginary, but most of my property is real and tangible. If my computer here were imaginary, you would never see this. So if you do read this, rest assured that at least some of my property is real.
This is different from intellectual property. In that arena, not only the ownership, but the property itself is purely a construct of the mind.
That's a horrible term to use, since people will naturally assume it is equivalent to "property that is not real property". However, "real property" means in common law land and fixed improvements to land (e.g., my house and my well are real property, as is the land they are on).
My car, my phone, my clothes, and my chess set are examples of property that is not real property, and so in a real/imaginary dichotomy would be imaginary property.
Most property falls into a trichotomy: (1) land and fixed improvements to land, (2) physical things other than land and fixed improvements to land, and (3) non-physical things that have been legally given some aspects of property so as to use society's machinery for dealing with property to deal with these non-physical things.
There is nothing wrong with the current term, "intellectual property" for things in the third part of the trichotomy. It is property by legal definition, and its origin is the intellect.
I'd say that IP's origin is in the imagination, and only a subset is also from the intellect, the intellect being only a part of creative thought.
This is plainly obvious by viewing the general mass of the output of some of the major IP industries, such as Hollywood.
Intellect is not required to generate IP, but imagination generally is.
Personally I don't care that much if this makes the term seem less weighty, perhaps the term is currently overweighted and made to seem more lofty than it really is.
I mean, sure IP is used in areas like like biotech research into cancer treatments, but it also applies to stuff like copies of a kids drawing of a peanut man with the last minute addition of a monocle and spats, and I feel that to refer to the latter as intellectual is to do abuse to the word, however both examples could be accurately said to be products of the imagination.
Similar sophistry can be used to empty your bank account, because the value of money is also intangible; the money itself is just a number. What natural law prevents the value of that number being altered by application of other numerics? The value of virtually all of the world's currency is imaginary; it's a shared fiction.
That's true in some respects, but I think most will agree that pretending it's a little like real property has it's benefits. For example, think about ARM Holdings.
From Wiki:
>Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as: Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric),[40] ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing and sellIng its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers. This model is similar to fellow British design houses: ARC International, and Imagination Technologies who have similarly been designing and licensing GPUs, CPUs, and SoCs, along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees.
All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property. But can you deny the importance of their role? How many ARM devices are in use around the world?
The argument isn't that it isn't a valuable process, the argument is that it's a process that produces something that is wholly unlike physical property. Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work.
[0] Some information, like intelligence information, is more valuable the less people have it, which is a major distinguishing feature here.
I don't understand your comment. How else would you compensate them when their business model is designing the processors to be licensed to others and not building it?
Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company? If so, then yes, you've defined the solution into a corner here and copyright monopoly is the only way to go.
If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property.
>Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company
Doesn't ARM keep coming up with new and innovative designs? Don't they have companies like Intel nipping at their heels waiting for a misstep? Isn't ARM on server an uphill battle for them they are working on?
Why do we need to shake up their business model? To what end exactly? To make smartphones a few cents cheaper than they already are?
>If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property.
Go on... what are some of the "lots of ways" ? I am genuinely curious.
>Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work.
Doing that without properly compensating ARM is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. ARM is already trying to make a $20 smartphone. There is already a $25 FF OS smartphone.
Genuinely curious: what do you think would be some other practical, achievable ways of ensuring that the people at a company like ARM get compensated for their work without "putting the force of the state behind their 'thought-property'"?
We actually have a bunch of examples since there are many industries which don't have the ability to obtain copyright monopolies or patents (or either).
People are making money today doing creating intellectual products without the benefit of copyrights and patents, and they're some of the highest margin industries out there.
ARM would not need to exist if IP didn't exist to restrict the usage of both ASMs and designs of every other semiconductor manufacturer. People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. What you would see is a transition away from everyone reinventing the wheel (how many add instructions do we need?) more towards an open common base set of instructions with extensions per use. And if that standard ever grew obsolete, the technical benefits of any other implementation could be immediately utilized industry wide without the tyrannical abuse of power that is copyrights on the vocabulary and patents on the chip designs.
>People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do.
Is this real life? I honestly can't believe people actually believe this.
If you couldn't profit from the IP of a faster computer, you could still profit from having a faster computer. Of course, this might mean that people are less likely to disclose information, which is the main economic benefit of the patent system.
I'm not completely against patents, I just think they have grown into something that is now more than slightly ludicrous and needs a serious trim before it becomes un-rescuable.
All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property.
No, what they produce are useful designs of chips; whether they are - or should be considered - property is a different matter. After all, inventions don't become useless or unimportant the moment their patent expires.
They're considered property in the eyes of the law via patents because this isn't some philosophical question and that's how their product and business is protected in practice.
They're considered property in the eyes of your particular jurisdiction. They might not be in another - even if probably not for long, since chances are the US will bully them into compliance, as we've been seeing with TPP.
> The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
Not really - just like the clearest way to separate criminal and civil liability isn't to just stop using the word "illegal".
The easiest way is to just learn the distinction. It doesn't take long.
It takes about 30 seconds to explain intellectual property (copyright = exact original content, patent = protects a general mechanism, nobody can solve the same problem the same way, trademark = about consumer confusion, only one company can use a word or other thing to sell a specific type of product).
Actually that was more like 15 seconds, wasn't it?
I have absolutely no problem with calling all of the above intellectual property, because all of it keeps me from doing certain things, just like I'm not allowed to walk on some tiles just because they happen to be in the middle of my neighbor's house, and his property is protected by law. I'm not just referring to taking them - I can't even walk on them without his permission. Property rights are a fine expression. If it causes confusion, this can be cleared up directly.
Intellectual property is a wording that shows, what the intention is:
Making ideas and thinking property, thus de-valuating it
What is the property of "property": Property is owned by somebody independently from the creator of the property. Thus, the person that has the ideas becomes less important -- important is only the owner and the money, that was paid for the property.
Without "IP", rich people can live from their money, and their money pays them a living, just from the interest they "earn". But with IP they can also own your ideas and we all become slaves to the rich.
I think most people have an intuitive notion of "intellectual property". That intuition is probably not inline with actual laws on books, but I'm reasonably sure if you ask most people, they'd agree that a film studio, a writer, a painter, a musician, a software developer should be able to have exclusive rights of distribution of their work under some constraints. Obviously the devil is in the details, but at a high-level, I think that's a pretty mainstream, reasonable view.
You missed the entire point. Software uses patents, so people literally can't imitate others' works like some artists do. And that's the problem with over-generalization: it's a useless abstraction that doesn't generalize well.
>You missed the entire point. Software uses patents,
I haven't, I just didn't focus on software patents because software patents are just one niche within the larger "Intellectual Property" framework. Even if you get rid of software patents, and I can be convinced either way, you're still left with patents in general, and copyright.
>And that's the problem with over-generalization
IP? I think it's a useful abstraction. Patents, software or otherwise, trademarks and copyright all are rooted in the same ideology. Giving a content creator a conditional exclusive right of distribution of a creative work.
You did miss the point. Read the article. It's about how all IP is not the same because they originated from different places and they do different things. For example, software uses patents. That's not just a niche, that's an entire category of IP. Copyright is also an entire category that artists use to "protect" their work. But what kind of protection? It's different between patent and copyright, so just saying I have IP rights, is as vague as you can possible be because you don't have them all - just some.
> so just saying I have IP rights, is as vague as you can possible be
No, its not, because you could say "I have intangible personal property rights" or "I have personal property rights", or "I have property rights", each of which is vaguer than "I have IP rights", as IP is a strict subset of intangible personal property, which is itself a strict subset of personal property, etc.
"most people" are people that have grown up in a civilization that has some legal understanding of "intellectual property" and the economic effects thereof, so their intuition is already pretty skewed towards the status quo. Even if, after having experienced an alternative, they would prefer the alternative.
>"most people" are people that have grown up in a civilization that has some legal understanding of "intellectual property" and the economic effects thereof, so their intuition is already pretty skewed towards the status quo.
That may be so, but I still claim that there is something intuitive in supporting the idea that content creators be allowed to "own" their creative work. Doubly so if you live in a society that allows ownership (of things, or land), because it's a very short conceptual jump from one to the other.
It takes careful awareness to language to be able to point this out, as Stallman does. Just because there's a word for it, doesn't make it meaningful.