The Copyright Lobotomy: How Intellectual Property Makes Us Pretend to Be Stupid
23rd April 2013
I’ll keep repeating it until it sinks in: There Is No Such Thing As Intellectual Property. Property is stuff that, when you have it, nobody else does. This ain’t that. The term ‘intellectual property’ is like ‘gay marriage’, a category mistake. I tell you three times.
April 26th, 2013 at 07:25
“There Is No Such Thing As Intellectual Property.”
OK. But that statement has consequences. Are you saying that as soon as somebody writes a book, or a song, or a program, that anybody who can get a copy of it may use it freely, or do you propose another term to use to name the rights an author has?
What phrase do you prefer to use to refer to the poems, programs, and other things I’ve written and to which I still have certain ownership rights?
April 27th, 2013 at 16:11
1. “The rights an author has.” Under current law, or under common sense? Ask Aristotle what rights he has to the Nicomachean Ethics. Those are the ‘rights’ an author has.
2. You have those ‘ownership rights’ because governments, in an historical process that starts with the movement to abolish arbitrary monopolies beloved by the Tudors and Stewarts, have said you have certain ‘ownership rights’. These rights are similar to the ‘ownership rights’ certain white people had to certain black people prior to 1865. ‘Ownership rights’ granted by a government can be a good thing or a bad thing; which side of that argument do you want to take?
April 27th, 2013 at 19:57
Yes, those rights are constructs of the government, like freedom of speech or the right to keep and bear arms.
You wrote “Property is stuff that, when you have it, nobody else does.” If you actually believed that that was the issue here, and were consistent in your beliefs, you could never have written the horsestuff that “These rights are similar to the ‘ownership rights’ certain white people had to certain black people prior to 1865.” One of those is stuff that, when you have it, nobody else does, and the other is not.
You aren’t keeping to a consistent line of argument. You are simply throwing any nonsense you can come up with to defend the current liberal academic myth that this aspect of capitalism shouldn’t exist.
Yotta Networks paid me good money to develop patentable inventions for them – only because they could own them after paying me to do so.
This particular “invented right” is why people invent smartphones and make movies and write books – so they can make money doing so.
April 28th, 2013 at 06:22
Which, of course, explains all of the free software out there. I have a smartphone with 86 applications on it, not one of which I paid for. I have a Kindle account at Amazon with over three hundred titles, only about half of which were purchased.
Certainly, if you invent a ‘right’, people will make money off of it — our welfare system is proof of that. But the nature of property doesn’t depend on invented rights, it depends on the natural categories into which ordinary objects encountered in life fit. It is illegitimate to arbitrarily change the definition of a term to fit some tendentious predilection of one’s own, and expect everyone else to admit it and use that new and eccentric definition from now on. This is how we get such intellectual retro-viruses as ‘gay marriage’, ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, and all the other excrescences that blight our daily discourse.
If you build a widget, is it your property? Of course it is. If you sell it to me, is it still your property? No, because I have it now, and you no longer do. That’s what property means — it was ‘proper’ to you, and now it is ‘proper’ to me.
If you create a story, is it your ‘property’? Of course it is — until you tell it to someone else. Then that person has the story, too; but you still have the story. It isn’t ‘proper’ to you, because it’s information, and information is not exclusive once it’s been shared. There’s the difference right there in a nutshell, and all the ‘invented rights’ in the universe won’t alter that essential nature of the information.
I fail to see where the inconsistency is in that line of argument.