From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu Jul 18 2002 - 17:30:26 MDT
> (Rafal Smigrodzki <rms2g@virginia.edu>):
> ### But why is theft immoral? (this is going at a tangent to the IP debate
> but might help us come to an agreement)
> What's so bad about taking other people's property?
I may be anti-IP, but the arguments in favor of traditional property
(both physical things and contractual rights) are pretty solid, and
are covered better by other basic texts on Libertarian thought. But
the basics are these: property cannot simultaneously serve the goals
of more than one agent. Therefore, /some/ method is required to
arbitrate who gets to control a piece of property at any given time.
There are certianly other ways of doing that: voting on it by the
community, for exaple (socialism); or raw force. But the system that
has shown to generate the most efficient outcomes is property rights:
assign the right to control property to a single agent, and allow
agents to volutarily negotiate contracts by unanimous consent for
any changes of control, so that all transfers are likely to be Pareto
improvements. There are also multiple ways to do this--for example,
who controls and pays for enforcement? Most people today favor taxes
and a government enforcement system. But a private system might work
as well, as long as it is based on the same foundation: control by a
single agent, and freedom of contract.
These aruments don't apply to inventions and creative works (though
they do apply to other things commonly lumped in with IP, such as
trademarks, which I therefore fully support), because those can in
fact serve the purposes of multiple agents simultaneously (multiple
use may dilute the /market/ for idea-based products, but it does not
in any way change one's actual choice of available actions).
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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