[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/2/10, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:

>     It would primarily involve copyrights, although such opacity would
>     also protect patent infringement where infringing industrial designs
>     were exchanged in the form of CAD files.

> I don't think it is pertinent to these patents.  Just distributing the
>  CAD files is perfectly legal as far as I know, so there is nothing to
>  protect; but if the device infringes a patent, they can see that by
>  looking at it, without needing to see the CAD files.

Sure.  The good thing is, enforcing patents based on seeing violations
depended, to a large extent, on the low transaction costs entailed
when a limited number of models were produced by the millions in giant
mass production factories owned by a handful of oligopoly firms, and
stocked on the shelves of a few giant retail chains.  When the
infringing products are designed in small peer networks and produced
by micromanufacturers serving neighborhood-sized markets, the
transaction costs of enforcing patents will skyrocket.

>     But in general, I think IP means IP.  I'm familiar with your objection
>     to the use of "intellectual property" as a catchall term, but IMO it's
>     very useful because of the commonalities between the different forms
>     of IP.

> But they have hardly anything in common.

See below.

>       They're all based on the same general principle:  enforcing
>     artificial scarcity through monopoly "ownership" in the right to
>     duplicate patterns or information,

> That description fits copyright, and fits trademarks badly,
>  but the other laws not at all.

It fits patents because patents restrict one's right to configure
material elements in a particular pattern.  And the main area of
trademark law it doesn't fit is the one area with some arguably
legitimate basis  (preventing outright identity theft or fraud).

Both patents and copyright require the infringement of genuine,
tangible property rights by restricting what I can do with my
legitimate property (whether it be using a hard drive I own to
duplicate a CD I own, or producing parts from materials I own with a
machine I own to copy a patented product).

I believe these areas of commonality are very important.

>  Using that term often leads people to surmise a picture fo these laws
>  which fits the term and its suppositions, but does not fit the reality
>  of these laws.  I think that has happened here.

There's a phrase--"recuperation," I think--for reclaiming pejorative
language used by one's enemies and proudly using it to label oneself.

I like to use IP in the converse way:  turning the enemy's
self-description into a pejorative ("decuperation"?).  For the reasons
I stated above, I think the enemy is correct in using IP as a catchall
term based on the areas of commonality between patent and copyright.
But that leaves them vulnerable if it can be shown that the common
principle underlying them is false.

Ditto for subsuming IP itself into an even broader category of
artificial scarcity or artificial property rights, along with the
other forms of artificial property attacked by Thomas Hodgskin,
Benjamin Tucker, etc., and then demonizing corporate capitalism in
terms of its own falsely professed "free market" values.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html