From: Randall Randall (wolfkin@freedomspace.net)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 09:26:36 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
> Randall Randall wrote:
>
>>Mike Lorrey wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I think, though, that Lee's definition of property is the problem. What
>>>gives an item value is entirely a matter of its marginal utility to its
>>>user, while an item's status as property is matter of the fact that
>>>labor produced it (or improved it from raw resources).
>>
>>But the status of something as property is not intrinsic to the
>>thing itself, but a social convention. This social convention has
>>proven to be incredibly useful for things, because the convention
>>makes it easy to tell who should make decisions regarding that thing.
>
> ownership of an individual's labor is not a 'social convention', ergo
> ownership of any product of an individual's labor is not to be decided
> as a 'social convention'.
If ownership is not a social convention, then there has to be a way to
determine ownership without other people telling you who owns what.
This isn't the case, however; since you must be told that someone owns
an object, and since you must also be told *who* owns it, ownership
cannot be a property of the object itself.
> You are either a slave or you are a free
> person. If you are a free person, then anything originally produced by
> your muscles or your mind is your property. While the statists,
> socialists, and communitarians are fond of the concept of fractional
> slavery (taxation), they are not fond of calling it what it is, slavery.
> Ten men who are one tenth slaves equals one fully enslaved individual.
> The same sorts are also not fond of IP as an extension of the
> individuals natural right of self ownership and prefer to describe it
> merely as a priveledge granted to the individual by the state (as they
> are wont to do with everything). This bias tends to creep into the left
> end of the libertarian spectrum, though the looter mentality can crop up
> anywhere where utilitarianism or opportunism gains a foothold.
This bit above has nothing to do with my argument, and seems only calculated
to attempt to group me with statists and tax collectors. In case it was
unclear, I am not saying that the State determines who owns things, but that
people themselves determine this, by agreement.
>>>To use another's labor without recompense is slavery, therefore any
>>>product of our labor is property.
>>
>>Nor is anyone here, so far as I can tell, advocating that the thing
>>of that type or with that arrangement should be taken away from you,
>>only that others should be free to create that sort of arrangement
>>of things in there own things.
>
> IP law in general entirely allows individuals who create something that
> has been previously invented to use their creation for their own
> purposes. Copyright law also allows shared ownership of identical art
> concieved entirely separately from each other.
IP law is much like taxation, I'm sure you'll agree, in that it seeks to
remove from my possession matter I've worked for if I arrange the matter
in forbidden patterns.
> Others here are, in fact, advocating that others should be free to use
> the product of your labor without compensation to you, on the theory
> that if it doesn't cost you much, or anything at all, to produce
> identical copies of your ingenuity, that you shouldn't be paid anything
> at all for the additional copies.
I believe that others here (including myself), are actually arguing that
they should be allowed to make copies themselves of things that *they*
have purchased with the fruits of their labor. This literally has nothing
to do with the person who first arranged things in that way, and no one
is claiming that that first person should somehow be obligated to make
copies at her own expense for others. Indeed, I would expect the first
person to charge very highly for the first copy.
> A proper accounting of IP would reflect what the utility your ingenuity
> is worth to each user of each copy, and pay you a royalty as a fraction
> of that utility value. Additional copies only dilute what each copy is
> worth as a function of how broadly the ingenuity is used. Ubiquitously
> utilized ingenuity confers very little real additional utility to each
> user in a perfectly competitive market.
Prices are not just a function of demand (which is related to user
self-estimates of utility), but supply, which in this case can very
cheaply be increased. So low additional utility in the case of a
physical good would be an indicator that supply would decrease, but
in the case of arrangements or patterns, means only that prices
would tend toward zero as the number of copies increase. This is
prevented from happening by artificial monopolies on copying, however.
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> Crypto key: randall.freedomspace.net/crypto.text ...what a strange, strange freedom: only free to choose my chains... -- Johnny Clegg
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