As noted on my media page, I’ll be delivering a speech entitled “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism” at the Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010, Oct. 8-9 2010, Auburn Alabama. The conference’s theme is “The Economic Recovery: Washington’s Big Lie.” There’s a dynamite list of speakers. The heroic Jim Rogers will be awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize, “For lifetime defense of liberty, given every year, awards $10,000 to a public intellectual or distinguished scholar.” I am looking forward to the entire event, especially the black-tie-optional reception and dinner honoring Mr. Rogers, at which I’ll wear my newly tailored tux (taken in to fit my newer, more svelte figure which resulted from losing 25 lbs on the HCG diet).
In my younger days, when I was full of libertarian bluster, I used to formulate arguments in terms of “Natural Rights.” Murder was Wrong (with a capital ‘W’) because it violated your “right to life.” I used to go on like this all day, until finally my friend Cesar (I think) kindly pointed out that I was full of shit.
I’m still full of libertarian bluster, I suppose, although you’d never in a million years catch me arguing based on “natural rights,” which (after my youthful indiscretions) I came to realize represent either religious (“they’re the rights god gave us”) or pseudo-religious (“they’re self-evident!”) attempts to create an “objective” basis for one’s policy preferences. (As a general rule, if most people refuse to agree with a proposition even after you’ve made your best case for it, it’s not “self-evident.”)
There’s no shortage of people who want an “objective” basis for their policy preferences. It turns them from opinions (e.g. “it’s my opinion that we should pay teachers more”) or hypothetical imperatives (e.g. “if we want to make teaching a more attractive profession, we should pay teachers more”) or self-interest (e.g. “speaking as a teacher, we should pay teachers more”) into “facts” (e.g. “it’s a fact that we should pay teachers more”) and “morals” (e.g. “if you don’t think we should pay teachers more, you’re a moral reprobate”). You can argue against opinions, but you can’t argue against facts! You can rail against self-interest, but not against morals!
It’s a nice sleight of hand when you can pull it off. Unfortunately, you usually can’t. Neither can Sam Harris, who has a new book out claiming that “science has a universal moral code.”
This, to me, shows one problem with the natural law type thinking about libertarianism, just as it shows, by analogy, what is wrong with self-delusional rah rah cheerleading of the typical political activist. [continue reading…]
This course is taught by Stephan Kinsella, a practicing patent attorney and author of Against Intellectual Property. This is a 6-week course and will run from November 1 until December 17 (with Thanksgiving week off), and will provide an overview of current intellectual property law and the history and origins of IP. The course will explore and offer critical analysis of various utilitarian and deontological justifications offered for IP. The course will analyze the proper relationship between property, scarcity, and ideas, and integrate the proper perspective on IP and the nature of ideas and information with Austrian economics and libertarian theory. Various legal and political reforms consistent with this perspective will be offered along with discussions of market and social institutions in a post-IP world. Optional testing will include a multiple-choice mid-term exam and a combined multiple-choice and essay final exam. Kinsella is Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute, editor of Libertarian Papers, General Counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, and was formerly an adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. He has frequently lectured and published on IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, including Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (co-editor, with Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises Institute, 2009).
I’m looking for a few good examples of how the US has pushed various emerging economies to adopt Western/American style statist measures in the guise of teaching the benighted states how to set up a modern “capitalist” economy. The examples that come to mind (but I don’t have clear examples/refernces for all of them) include:
antitrust law
income tax withholding
anti-bribery laws
narcotics regulations
IP law/ACTA/WTO
I have in mind the way the US has “helped” Iraq “rebuild,” as well as various measures such as the Marshall Plan and strings attached thereto; strings attached to international loans; various programs to “help” the former Soviet/communist countries after 1991 or so such as the ABA CEELI program, BISNIS, etc. where they are encouraged to adopt the Western “rule of law” (sic).
I’m looking for American-style state practices pushed on other countries, where because of the conflation of the US as a modern capitalist society, the statist measures foisted on other countries could be erroneously attributed to or blamed on capitalism instead of American statism itself.
A friend passed this story on to me–Man Builds Computer Inside Computer Game. It reminded me of John Conway’s Game of Life, which I was fascinated with in grad school. This is a “cellular automaton” simulation invented by Cambridge mathematician John Conway. “This game became widely known when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970. It consists of a collection of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Depending on the initial conditions, the cells form various patterns throughout the course of the game.” In grad school I wrote a program (in Turbo Pascal) to simulate the Game of Life; this was part of a study I did for a grad-level EE course on neural networks, where I showed that the Life cellular automata could be constructed using properly connected and weighted neurons in a neutral net. Now, you can find simulators online — see, e.g., John Conway’s Game of Life. More information at Lifesuite. What reminded (includes a simulator). As explained on the Wikipedia article on Conway’s Game of Life “It is possible to construct logic gates such as AND, OR and NOT using gliders. It is possible to build a pattern that acts like a finite state machine connected to two counters. This has the same computational power as a universal Turing machine, so the Game of Life is theoretically as powerful as any computer with unlimited memory and no time constraints: it is Turing complete.”
In 1988, when I wrote that paper, I was in grad school pursuing my MSEE and about to start my first year of law school. One reason I went to law school was that while pursuing my BSEE and MSEE I got more and more interested in philosophy, political philosophy, etc., as some offhand comments in the paper indicate:
In the summer of 1986, a conference on cellular automata was held at MIT. The use of automata as models for exploration and prediction in such diverse fields as economics, neurophysiology, art, pattern recognition, parallel computing, circuit design, evolution and physics was discussed.
The complexity of LIFE and cellular automata in general–and therefore the neural networks which can represent them–has convinced some scientists that automata might even be able to create life. After all, von Neumann has already shown that automata can reproduce and this can be shown specifically with LIFE as well).
Given a large enough LIFE plane, with a random scattering of the basic shapes–glider guns, blocks, blinkers, ships, eaters–it is conceivable that a type of evolution would occur. That is, shapes that are unsuccessful at surviving would of course die out. Others better at living–due to their structure, reproductive abilities, and defense mechanisms–would of course tend to dominate regions of the LIFE plane. And when any unexpected event happened–such as a stray glider entering a previously successful pattern–this would be like a mutation occurring.
Of course, as in evolution in our world, most mutations would be harmful. But, due to chance, some would be beneficial. In this way, more efficient and complex “animals” could come to exist–possibly to the point where they are actually intelligent and conscious.
As Conway said, “It is no doubt true that on a large enough scale LIFE would generate living configurations. Genuinely living. Evolving, reproducing, squabbling over territory. Writing Ph.D. theses. On a large enough board there’s no doubt in my mind this sort of thing would happen.”
A situation could arise in which a simulation of a LIFE plane had progressed so far that conscious life has actually arisen. Then one might wonder whether the engineer running the simulation has the moral right to turn it off–fearing that to do so might possibly be akin to murder. Unfortunately–due to the lamentable dearth of any explicit philosophy whatsoever in the field of engineering, except for a cursory glance at the scientific method–it is not considered to be the role of engineering to answer such questions. Or even, I fear, to ask them.
(Okay, that last was a bit melodramatic and purple, due in part to my youth, and to the stronger sway Rand’s thinking had on me at the time.)
This is one of the stupidest propaganda pieces I’ve ever seen. Pathetic. But it does a good job of mimicking the typical glassy-eyed brainwashed arguments given for intellectual property.
… creation is an important means of increasing wealth. As Hoppe has observed,
One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, production and contractual exchange, or by expropriating and exploiting homesteaders, producers, or contractual exchangers. There are no other ways.[26]
While production or creation may be a means of gaining “wealth,” it is not an independent source of ownership or rights. Production is not the creation of new matter; it is the transformation of things from one form to another — the transformation of things someone already owns, either the producer or someone else.
Using your labor and creativity to transform your property into more valuable finished products gives you greater wealth, but not additional property rights. (If you transform someone else’s property, he owns the resulting transformed thing, even if it is now more valuable.) So the idea that you own anything you create is a confused one that does not justify IP.
There are two ways to acquire rights to property: homesteading unowned property; or contractually acquiring title to property held by a previous owner. It is wealth and value that is created or produced, by rearranging already-owned scarce resources. But no new property emerges from an act of production, from labor, from creation: new wealth is created, by making existing property more valuable. By being careful here about the distinction between “creating value” and acquiring property rights, by avoiding overuse of the creation and labor metaphors, we can avoid the mistake of thinking that we have rights in whatever we find, whatever we buy, and whatever we create, as if this latter is an independent, third category. We have rights to the value we create only as a by-product of owning the resource that we have made more valuable by rearranging it. And once we see that this third category does not exist, we see that the creationist case for IP evaporates. Creation never was a source of ownership at all. [continue reading…]
Starts at 8:20 in video 6 of 7, and continues to about 2:49 of video 7 of 7. He says that IP is one of the issues, along with abortion, he gives as sharply dividing libertarians. I haven’t yet watched the rest of the videos (linked below), but a friend assures me it’s a riveting, great lecture.
My contention in “There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property” has been shored up with the latest weak attempt, by “AssassinatorGirl,” who “doesn’t own a table,” in her video Kinsella Fails On Intellectual Property Arguments. She (a) agrees with my critique on utilitarianism and (b) agrees with my critique of the state, leaving her with only (c) an inept contract-based argument, which she fumbles around after admitting she doesn’t know all those legal terms. Ummmmmm…
I’ve moved to libertarian scholarship full-time. Quit job, well mostly–working 1 day a week, mostly remotely. Rest of the time: full time libertarian and legal speaking, lecturing, publishing. Very pumped up. No more patents. Starting a new anti-IP center. More details forthcoming…
Seth King of The Daily Anarchist, in ?Intellectual Property And Libertarianism, does a nice job of summarizing why the legitimacy of IP has been taken for granted in libertarian circles (it’s in the Constitution), why the issue is becoming ever more important (in recent years “software and file sharing really kicked into high gear” and there’s been an at least apparent increase in obviously absurd and unjust patent and copyright infringement lawsuits), his own enlightenment on IP (influenced by some of my writing), and why a compelling case against IP needs to be informed by Austrian economics and not by leftist anti-property assumptions.
Collecting previous posts and other links about IP imperialism (efforts by the US and other western countries to strongarm developing or other nations into adopting US-style IP laws:
As noted on my media page, I’ll be delivering a speech entitled “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism” at the Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010, Oct. 8-9 2010, Auburn Alabama. The conference’s theme is “The Economic Recovery: Washington’s Big Lie.” There’s a dynamite list of speakers. The heroic Jim Rogers will be awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize, “For lifetime defense of liberty, given every year, awards $10,000 to a public intellectual or distinguished scholar.” I am looking forward to the entire event, especially the black-tie-optional reception and dinner honoring Mr. Rogers, at which I’ll wear my newly tailored tux (taken in to fit my newer, more svelte figure which resulted from losing 25 lbs on the HCG diet).
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