My family can own a piece of land in perpetuity. My car might fall apart, but it will not revert to public property no matter how long I wait. And a personal stake in the ownership of Microsoft, or any other company, is something I can expect to hold as long as the company exists unless I sell my share.
Real property rights don’t expire. Intellectual property, like it or not, is a very different thing and we’d do well to remember as such. The purpose of IP laws are to incentivize creation; securing limited property rights over information is simply a method for achieving that.
People are putting the cart before the horse when they treat IP like real property. This is why the word “theft” is used – to equate information in the reader’s mind with tangible property like a car or purse. And this is why people like me object to the use of that word. Unauthorized usage of information is a very different thing from actually taking someone’s property.
If you want to discuss fair ways to craft incentives for artists and musicians to create and make our culture richer, I’m all for it. If you want to pretend your creation sprung fully formed out of your head and wasn’t influenced and built upon the huge amount of free information our culture is awash in; if you want appeal to our emotions by defending that intangible creation the way you would defend a house, and in perpetuity, too; if you want to pretend the world would be better off if we had to pay for each idea, no matter how old, well I’m not participating in that conversation.
It is simply ignoring reality to compare information to a house, as if I could copy and transport houses at zero cost to anyone. And then contend that if we could copy and transport houses at zero cost, that would be a bad thing.
As long as you pay the artist for it, it’s just unauthorized copying. If money should be involved and the artist does not receive money, something was stolen. It doesn’t have to be a material object. If I intercept a computer bank transfer and reroute it to my account in the Cayman Islands, I’ve committed theft, even though no physical Benjamins changed hands.
If you’re availing yourself of something someone legitimately expected to be paid for, you’re stealing.
I push you off the land and claim it. HA! Now it’s mine, baby – your only recourses are to fight for it or to ask the state to endorse your idea of property: exactly the same recourses an IP claimant has. Physical property is only “owned” because a superorganism like a nation-state says so, and backs it up with action. Nation-states have also endorsed intellectual property rights.
Only because that’s how the law is written. You’re arguing in a circle. You’re using the present law to justify the present law: Intellectual property is different because intellectual property rights expire. Therefore intellectual property rights should expire. QED!
We’re already so awash in new movies, art, music, literature, and games that its hardly possible to keep up with even the best new works. So it doesn’t look to me like the current copyright system is having a massive chilling effect on the incentive of artists to create. Amazing new cartoons are still being made even though Mickey Mouse is under copyright.
I’m sure there are ways to improve the current system, but pretending that there’s a crisis with creativity or there’s something bizarre and unnatural about intellectual property (as opposed to real estate, or stock options, or mineral rights, or pork belly futures) is not a good place to start. ALL property is a government fiction created to allow distributed control of various resources. The rules for each form of property should be structured to serve a particular end, not out of abstract principles.
This is a straw man. No one is arguing that IDEAS should have copyright protection, and indeed they don’t and never have. All that copyright protection covers is a particular EXPRESSION of an idea.
Well, while I’d likely agree with at least most of the second bit, that first sentence doesn’t seem quite right. I’d argue that physical property is in no way a “government fiction” – rather, the notion of property stems from simple possession. The government is useful, in that case, to provide a framework to protect/uphold possession and resolve disputes.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, is indeed a government fiction. A very useful one, but a fiction nonetheless.
Just to be clear, IMO, that last post o’ mine has ramifications on a variety of things in this thread (e.g., “theft [is|isn’t] the proper term for infringment”, the genesis of property rights, what qualifies as property, etc.). After re-reading it, I thought it might be interpreted as a one-off objection, when it was meant to be more substantive than that.
How does one “possess” a piece of land? Do I own my house only if I’m inside it? Do I still own my car if it’s parked at the airport while I’m vacationing in Hawaii?
Ownership is a societal consensus that control over some resource has been assigned to an individual. The degree and limits of the control are sometimes absolute, sometimes not, depending on the situation. This consensus may sometimes be backed up by the rule of law, but it doesn’t have to be. And, I’d argue, the notion of ownership is particularly important in situations where I DON’T have physical control over the entity in question. The fact that I left my tools sitting unattended in my blacksmith’s shop while I eat my lunch does not make it okay for you to walk up and start using them. I OWN them, even though I’m not currently in POSSESSION of them.
I think you are interpreting my use of the term “possession” a tad bit too narrowly. Maybe not…I’m not sure; certainly different. But, I should point out that I’m talking about the origin of property rights (perhaps my use of “stems” didn’t make that clear). With that more clear, I hope you see it would be silly to answer the quoted questions.
I agree with all of that. And none of it changes my point, made merely to address your assertion that “ALL property is a government fiction”. I’d argue that, no, it isn’t. In fact, the notion of property originates in the reality of physical possession.
Let me try this: assume total anarchy, might makes right, red in tooth and claw, and all that. What is it possible to own?
The issue with most people have with copyright today is not that it shouldn’t exist, but that as more immortal entities own copyrights, they length is getting pushed back. This is a bad thing because it limits access to ideas and people’s ability to be creative.
Disney is the poster child for this issue. They made millions off of adapting stories in the free domain (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood, etc.) but they have lobbied time and again to extend the copyrights on the properties they own. The original Mickey Mouse shorts are still under copyright and will probably stay that way for ever if Disney can get their way. At some point copyright needs to expire.
Artists need a way to recoup the time spent. Some novelists take years writing a novel. But do they need 70 years past their death to recoup their investment?
Nothing. There is no ownership in that situation. There may be temporary possession of an object, but it lasts only for so long as you can hang onto it and fend off the mob.
It certainly limits access to ideas in the case of works where the demand for them has dropped so low that their owners no longer have a financial incentive to keep them in circulation. Which is why I support some sort of fee to keep your copyright active after some deadline has passed. (Much as property taxes encourage property owners to sell properties instead of letting them sit abandoned and unused.)
However, in the case of works that are still profitable to keep in distribution, how is copyright “limiting access to ideas”?
And how is it limiting creativity? How does my inability to make a cartoon starring Mickey Mouse place a significant bar on my artistic efforts? Unless you’re deliberately trying to copy an existing work, the chances of *accidentally *infringing someone else’s copyright are vanishingly small.
Dude, you just clipped the first part of my quote where I said it WASN’T ownership.
The whole point of ownership is that it persists IN SPITE of changes of possession. If my neighbor loans me his hammer, it doesn’t become my hammer simply because I happen to currently possess it. If I buy land in Florida I don’t cease to own it because I’m not there living on it. Ownership is the communal acknowledgment of control over the use of an entity regardless of possession. I can own things without ever possessing them and possess things without ever owning them. The two concepts are orthogonal to each other.
Yes, I clipped out an irrelevancy. As did you in the post I was quoting.
Not at all. Or, if it does, you’ve negated entire swaths of international history. Remember, I’m talking about origins, while you’re assuming a (social) framework, taking its existence for granted. Like so:
“Communal acknowledgment” is your posited framework here, i.e., a “social contract”). However, it does not do the work you wish it to when discussing origins of property rights. Frameworks can change, affecting ownership (e.g., joining the social contract by submitting to international law or, alternatively, having a superior force successfully invade and take possession). Lacking a framework, one is left with simple possession equating with ownership.
The Hamster King, would you accept that the concept of Intellectual Property is only one way of rewarding content creators? As a society we manage to reward most work using other mechanisms, it would be very odd if certain types of content creation were the exception that could only be rewarded using one mechanism.
If that is the case, why do you believe that it is the best mechanism?
As a specific example, I am a scientist, and almost all of my creative output is in the public domain. This doesn’t stop me getting paid, I just get paid up front rather than in royalties. Moral rights are very important to me, though, because my personal brand is what keeps me employed and gets me future appointments at higher salaries.
Many artists live in similar fashion, where the production is paid for by grants from funding organisations, and they get no continuing revenue from their products.
What is special about music and movies that makes IP so essential?
There are no “origins” absent a social framework. Human beings are tribal animals and we’ve been living in social groups for as long as we’ve been human. So the idea that “ownership” has some fundamental existence beyond how it functions within a human community is nonsense.
In any case, this is pointless. Whatever the distant roots of the concept, ownership, as it functions now in modern society, is entirely decoupled from possession. And if you want to assert that ownership *should *be tied to possession, then you’re talking about a sweeping reorganization of our economy and social norms that would make the upheavals that accompanied the adoption of communism look trivial by comparison.
I don’t. I believe that it’s a *workable *mechanism. And I believe that its incumbent upon anyone who wants to replace it with something else to demonstrate why their way is superior.
Patronage systems have worked before in the arts. However, they have a couple of drawbacks. First they tend to encourage the production of works that serve the needs of the ruling elites, rather than the needs of the average man on the street. Furthermore, given the current state of public funding of the arts in the United States, I find it hard to believe that you could switch the wholescale production of culture over to a grant system. How can we expect to make blockbuster movies with public funding if we can’t even keep NPR on the air?
Now that is something on which we really do agree. Interestingly, it’s been quite a long time since I was involved in an argument in which the conclusions depended so much and so explicitly on the axioms. So, agree to disagree, and we know exactly why.
But, I still feel the need to address this:
Surely you recognize that no, ownership is not “entirely decoupled from possession”. Or was that hyperbole? Granted, the phrase “possession is 9/10 of the law” is hackneyed and doesn’t really serve as an argument, but just as clearly, it holds both a recognizable meaning and some level of validity. Feel free to deny it, that’s OK. As I said, we don’t need to agree.
Of course, know also that I think you’re misguided and very much wrong.
Ok, I’m not left with anything to disagree with particularly then. I personally get more annoyed by infringement of moral rights because it is the basis of the system I get rewarded by, but I can’t claim any particular virtue for this position.
Perhaps in the education system (staffed by people who are in the same position as me) we do such a good job of demonising infringements that *we[/w] care about for both personal and educational reasons, that this spills over into general social attitudes. Movie makers haven’t learnt the trick of demonising IP infringement as part of the entertainment, instead of the silly adverts beforehand.
Score one for the underpaid academics!
I will maintain that IP infringement isn’t theft, in the same way that moral rights infringement isn’t theft, but I think we really just disagree about how broad the definition of theft should be rather than anything substantial.
You are right, we can’t do it wholesale, but we have plenty of room to experiment. IP infringement and IP enforcement are definitely making the IP system appear less desirable, but you’re right that it is the most workable model available at the moment.
To keep to my Disney example, take the movies Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone. Both movies were reinterpretations of existing stories. Those stories are in the free domain. The characters are part of our social heritage, just as Biblical stories and Homer are. If the original stories were under copyright, Disney would need the holders permission to use the story and character just as I would need Disney’s to make a new version of Steamboat Willie.
