Copyright
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.To keep someone from copying your work you have to infringe on the private property of that person by claiming an exclusive right on prohibiting his use of his privately owned copying medium to instantiate a certain pattern.
‘To stop someone from murdering you you have to infringe on his private property by claiming an exclusive right on prohibiting his use of his privately owned gun to shoot you’ How is that different?
Murdering someone destroys their scarce property (their body in this case). Copying something using your own property leaves the original totally untouched.
One can steal value without stealing physical property (as happens when you transfer someone’s digital money without their consent).
The issue is scarcity. Digital money is also scarce since you cannot double spend it. If it wasn't scarce, it wouldn't be money and neither would it be private property.
But digital money isn’t physically scarce like someone’s body. Your argument rests on physical property being special in some way.
Do you agree that scarcity is at least a central consideration in determining whether copying information in disregard of consent should be considered a crime or not?
Edit: Dennis points out that copyright infringement is generally not treated as a crime. Perhaps I should have said: “[…] should be considered unlawful,” or “[…] should entitle the original author to seek a court order (e.g., a cease-and-desist) backed by state enforcement.”
Was there any other reason besides the claim that my argument rests on the “physical” nature of private property? If not, I believe I have already addressed that criticism. I don’t actually think property rests on physicality, but rather on whether something is zero-sum or non-zero-sum, physical or not. A useful concept in this context is “rivalry” in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
I don’t think the issue hinges on whether something is physically scarce, whatever that’s supposed to mean. After all, all information is physical, as David Deutsch likes to emphasize. The real distinction is this: stealing someone’s digital money deprives them of the ability to use it, while copying someone’s novel does not prevent the author from accessing or using their own work. The former is zero-sum; the latter is not.
The latter is still zero-sum because the author gets nothing in exchange for the work they put in upfront, but expected to get something, and made the distribution of their work contingent upon this expectation being fulfilled.
Imagine living on a flat planet that extends infinitely in all directions.
Land is not scarce on this planet.
You build a house, mixing your labor with an acre of land. Someone comes and takes your land, saying you have no cause for complaint since land isn’t scarce.
See how scarcity isn’t necessary for something to be property?
Take someone’s reputation. That isn’t a ‘scarce’ thing yet it’s a good thing there are laws against defamation.
Reputation is scarce in the sense that it’s limited.
So if someone publishes a blog post falsely but believably accusing you of being a pedophile and then all your business partners stop talking to you and you lose all your money and your friends and family ghost you, you wouldn’t want to have any legal recourse?
I'm not sure, seriously. I'm open to suggestions.
There's lots of things that I think people shouldn't do yet should still be legal.
I can also think of ways this could be misused.
Edit: This alone is not a sufficient argument to discredit laws against defamation.
Laws (against murder and other crimes) don’t reduce to physical property.
Libertarians often think that the purpose of the law is ONLY to define and enforce property rights. In reality, the purpose of the law is to prevent and address the arbitrary in social life.
It’s true that it would be arbitrary if anyone could just take your property against your will, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only kind of arbitrariness the law should prevent/address.
Ridiculous definition of murder. Classic libertarian thought bending over backwards to reduce everything to property rights. Please cite a legal text where the definition of murder invokes scarce property.
No. I don't expect to find it, but that doesn't make it less true. That's how I make sense of the difference between IP and real property.
If current law isn’t based on what you claim it’s based on then that does make it less true.
I don't care about current law, there are lots of dumb laws. I care about what's right and why.
Maybe? Kinda? Not sure.
You don't get to use your knife to aggress on others, that much is clear. So perhaps this can be understood as a right of others to do certain things with your property.
So… the law extending to others’ property is nothing new and not totalitarian in and of itself.
I should be clear though that it is only right for the law to interfere with property to protect others’ rights. It’s not right for the law to confiscate your money to collect taxes, say.
Just intuitively, I feel like there's a difference between forcing others not to force you, and forcing others not to copy you. I feel like defending against others using your scarce means towards their ends is just, while defending against others using non-scarce means towards their end is wicked. Since I impose no opportunity cost on someone by copying information, they have no claim on my scarce means as recompense. The copy-ability of information gives us this nice non-zero-sum situation where we can have our cake and eat it too because we don't have to economize on non-scarce things.
Correction: In some sense copying information does impose a cost, but I think of that cost more akin to the cost imposed on an incumbent producer by his competing alternatives in a free market.
When I distribute Harry Potter for free, I am simply offering better terms for access to the information than JK Rowling, so in a free market I should be the one that ends up distributing because I solve the same problem at a lower price.
This duplicate is symptomatic of a larger and common issue of just reverting back to one’s previous arguments when one hasn’t fully processed the counterarguments. Veritula helps you avoid doing that because you can just look up each idea’s ‘truth status’. If it has outstanding criticisms, you don’t invoke it again. You either save it first or work on something else.
‘When I distribute other people’s bicycles for free, I am simply offering better terms for access to bicycles than the stores that sell them, so in a free market I should be the one that ends up distributing because I solve the same problem at a lower price.’ 🤡