[773] in libertarians
Rambling musings on Intellectual property
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Travis Corcoran)
Mon Feb 27 13:25:06 1995
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 95 13:16:58 EST
From: tjic@ICD.Teradyne.COM (Travis Corcoran)
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <49F683B0377@COLUMBIA.MMU.AC.UK> (message from Nick Davis on Mon, 27 Feb 1995 16:35:45 GMT)
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> From: Nick Davis <94728860@mmu.ac.uk>
> Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 16:35:45 GMT
>
> I have found the question of intellectual property one of the hardest
> to consider, and I have still to be pursuaded one way or the other.
>
> 1. I buy some land and build a house.
>
> 2. I buy some stone and carve a statue.
>
> 3. I paint a picture.
>
> 4. I paint a picture, and produce copies which I sell.
>
> 5. I write a book about *how* to paint a particular kind of
> picture.
>
> All the above surely create property rights. But whereas I would not
> sanction, for example, removing a part of the house, or taking the
> statue or any of the paintings, I could understand someone who
> borrows and copies one of the copy pictures, and would have few moral
> problems with someone who photocopied part (or all?) of the book.
I also have some problems with intellectual property rights, although
over all I am in favor of them for pragmatic reasons (I've been
carrying on a email debate with Richard M. Stallman for a couple of
weeks now, and he can be persausive...). I see the difference between
theft of property and copyright infringement to be one of actively
depriving the original creator of his property. If I steal your car,
you no longer have a car. If I copy a book you wrote, you personally
have no more and no less property than you did before my action. In
fact, unless you saw me perform the act, you have no knowledge that
anything has been done.
Some forms of information are not copyrightable: phone books, and
other compendiums of publically known facts. I recall reading about
some drug manual which is sold to doctors. The manual is nothing more
than a compendium of information released by the various manufacturers
of thousands of different drugs. Because this information is not
copyrightable, the editors of the manual require each purchaser of the
multi-hundred dollar manual to sign a "I will not copy or allow to be
copied this manual" statement before the manual is delivered.
It seems to me that intellectual property may not be a natural right,
but an example of a right that is indeed created by the government - a
rare working example of the "social contract" that leftists talk about
so much when they try to take freedoms from some people in order to
provide security to others.
I am not in favor of the "social contract" theory in general - I
believe that (1) all true rights are natural, (2) that there never was
such a thing as the right of agression, (3) that government does not
give natural rights to people, and (4) that government does not take
away the "right" of would-be agressors to impose on others - however,
I can see that the social contract of (a) creating the right to
intellectual property, and (b) restraining the right to copy an
intellectual work can be pragmatic. On the other hand, it must be
acknowledged that individuals do not sign such a social contract,
at best their elected [ supposedly ] representatives do, and therefore
such a contract should not be automatically considered binding.
Perhaps a method of resolving the conflict between the pragmatic
desire for intellectual property, and the illegitimacy of restraining
individuals from a victimless action ( who gets hurt when I hit the
COPY button of a Xerox machine ?) is to emulate the example set by the
software industry: wrap every new book in an envelope with a sticker
saying: "By opening this envelope you are agreeing to abide by the
following agreement:....you will not copy or distribute this work...".
Of course, this method could be simplified to merely printing such
words on the same page that has the ISBN, LoC filing information, etc.
End Result: as long as every publisher includes this information in
their books, the situation is indistinguishable from what we have
today, except that the underlying rationale is no longer one of a
vague social contract that everyone must abide by whether they want
to or not, but a specific real-world contract that is indeed agreed to
by all parties involved in the process of information transmission.
- --
TJIC (Travis J.I. Corcoran) TJIC@icd.teradyne.com
Member NRA, GOAL
opinions(TJIC) != opinions(employer(TJIC))
"Buy a rifle, encrypt your data, and wait for the Revolution!"
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