Quote from: Atlas on April 02, 2011, 02:49:56 AM

Boo. You don't believe in property rights. You are limiting what I can do with my energy and matter with your IP garbage.

For some reason, many libertarians are Marxist materialists when it comes to information. I don't understand this, but I will try to briefly explain some consequences of not accepting IP.

Intellectual Property is a species of information rights. So let us first start with defining a right objectively:

- a right is something you can legitimately use physical force to enforce.

Example: you have rights to your own body, i.e. if someone attacks you, you can legitimately use physical force to protect your body. Another example: you have property rights over X, i.e. if someone infringes that property you can legitimately use physical force to protect X.

So what then is an information right? It is a right that spawns from some information. An anti-IP materialist denies such a right, because it is non-material. In other words, someone who is against IP must also logically be against the forceful protection of ANY information.

This has severe consequences. Let's look at some of them.

- if no information rights exist, there is no basis for enforcing contracts, because a contract is entirely made out of that non-material stuff we call information. Thus, someone who denies information rights can agree to something, and even sign a contract that he is supposed to give a person 100 dollars for object X, and then simply refuse to give the money. He will say "agreement? What are you talking about? That's just this information non-sense. It is MY physical money, and I can do with it as I please. You were just stupid that gave me X voluntarily believing that I would give you 100 dollars. That's YOUR problem. You have NO right based on scribbles on a piece of paper to violate MY physical property (i.e. enforcing the contract).

- if no information rights exist, then THREATS of physical violence are perfectly ok. So if you deny information rights, then logically it is ok for me to point a gun at you and say "give me all your money or I will kill you!" Physically speaking I have not harmed you in any way. I have simply used my own property in a peaceful manner that in no way has harmed you, and I have used my freedom of speech. If you in any way felt compelled to voluntarily give me your money then that is YOUR problem. You have NO right based on mere utterances from my mouth to violate MY physical property (i.e. criminally prosecute you for wielding threats of violence)

Notice that the structure of these arguments are identical to the argument that is used against IP. If you're stupid enough to give me a book with a novel written inside it, then, even if I agree implicitly not to distribute the content of that book when I purchase that book, it's still ok to do so, because the physical book is MY property and I can do with it whatever I want. If you in any way feel cheated that I went ahead and distributed the information in your book on the internet then that is YOUR problem. You have NO right based on mere scribblings on a piece of paper to violate MY physical property. (i.e. criminally prosecute me for breaching the implicit agreement you made when I bought the book.)

So if you don't accept information rights, you have to accept that contracts cannot be enforced and you cannot criminally prosecute threats or fraud. You also have to accept that espionage or secret surveilance is ok, child pornography is ok and it's ok to sample a piece of your DNA that you leave behind anywhere in public and then analyze and publish it on the internet, including a list of of all your genetic diseases. The same is of course the case with your fingerprints. Without information rights it is also perfectly ok to make a fully 3D-image of your face (using 3D imaging techniques) and then use YOU in any kind of realistic depiction. E.g. it's ok to depict you in a porn movie. It's ok to depict you as a violent killer or to take the face of a famous actor and then make a movie with that actor starring in that movie without that actor's consent, leeching on the fame of that person. Furthermore you have no obligation to tell anyone it's a fake. Without information rights you can falsify any data or image you like and then LIE that it is a real picture or movie of YOU, e.g. a perfectly life-like movie showing YOU raping a baby to death while laughing sadistically. Without information rights you can say whatever outrageous lie you want about a person and that person cannot in any way have you prosecuted.

Are you prepared to live in an insane world like the one I just described? If not you MUST accept the validity of information rights. In other words, you must accept the legitimacy of using physical force to enforce things based on information. Thus, for any sane person an argument against IP must be something other than "I can do whatever I want with MY physical property, so long as I don't infringe YOUR physical property" because that argument leads down the road I just described.

Typically there are two other arguments that are used against IP. 1) "I didn't sign an explicit contract, therefore I can do whatever I want with my property" and 2) "information is an infinite resource, and only finite resources can be property."

Let's start with the infinite resource argument. Suppose that there existed an immortal being. It lives forever. Thus, it's time is an infinite resource. Therefore it does not own its own time, because only a finite resource can be property. Therefore enslaving this immortal being for a finite amount of time is perfectly ok.

I think most normal people would agree that just because you live forever it's not ok to enslave you, even for a second. This implies that infinite abundance of some resource is NOT a sufficient argument against property rights for that resource. The infinite argument can be used in all sorts of creative ways. There are virtually infinite amounts of functionally identical atoms in the universe. So atoms are not a finite resource. Therefore property rights to an atom cannot be legitimate since you can always get another one. Everyone will now immediately recognize that this is a false argument. True, there are infinitely many atoms in the world, but your LIFE is a finite resource and the work required to arrange those atoms in a particular place and pattern required some of your highly finite time and energy. So that there are infinitely many atoms is completely irrelevant. By the same token it is completely irrelevant that information is an infinitely abundant resource because your LIFE is a finite resource and the work required to create that unique pattern (e.g. a book) required some of your highly finite time and energy. In both cases it is your WORK that gives rise to property rights, not because work is a finite resource (although it certainly is) but because work is the actions by which you as an individual acquire identity. You are you because of your actions, and by patterning reality that part of reality becomes part of you.

Let's move on to the no-explicit-agreement-argument. Basically some argue that when you buy a book you nowhere explicitly agreed to not spread the content of that book, even though inside the book it says "copyright (c) All rights reserved" which is legalize for an implicit contract stating ("when you get this book into your possession you accept that there are restrictions on what you can do with it.") Implicit contracts are default contracts that are valid by law unless explicitly stated otherwise. This is a very important and useful tool because it allows you to go outside without a sign over your head saying "I don't want to be killed."

If implicit contracts are not valid then this means that if you DON'T wear that sign one day, for some reason, then it is perfectly ok for anyone to kill you. They can simply say "I didn't agree not to kill him, and he didn't say it wasn't ok." Sane people understand that life would be unbearable without such implicit contracts, and copyright law is simply one of these implicit contracts. Copyright COULD be implemented with a sign on the book stating "by opening this book you agree not to spread the content of this book to anyone" or if that is not acceptable then even sign an explicit contract with the seller that you will not spread the content of that book.

In short, none of the standard arguments against IP leads to a sane world because of the logical implications it has for other laws and rights.