[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/3/10, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>     It fits patents because patents restrict one's right to configure
>     material elements in a particular pattern.
>
>  That description of patents will mislead, because the patent is not
>  defined in terms of any physical pattern.  It is defined in terms of
>  an idea.  Whatever implements the idea(s) stated in the patent claims
>  is forbidden.

So it's a restriction on the implementation of an idea in physical
reality, using the implementer's own tangible property, based on the
idea "owner's" monopoly.  The ownership of an idea to the extent of
controlling replication and interfering with tangible property rights
is the patent's area of commonality with other forms of IP.

>       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).

>  Enabling buyers to tell what they are buying is the nominal purpose of
>  trademark law.  It covers how things are marketed, not what they are.

Key word "nominal."  It also prohibits marketing identical products
minus the trademark or with an anti-trademark.  Ownership of trademark
prevents job-shop owners in Asia from marketing goods identical to
those they produce for Western TNCs, minus the 400% brand name markup,
and with the original logo in a circle-and-slashbar (which would
obviously create no genuine misapprehension as to the producer's
identity).

>  You are grasping at the meager shreds of commonality among these laws,
>  but why try?  Whatever commonality you might find is irrelevant to
>  understanding what any of these laws does or judging whether it is
>  good or bad.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this.  See below.

>     I like to use IP in the converse way:  turning the enemy's
>     self-description into a pejorative ("decuperation"?).
>
>  These unrelated laws do totally different things.  To oppose them all
>  is a snap judgment.

They all create artificial scarcity by restricting people's freedom to
replicate/implement an idea/information/pattern in the material realm.
 If opposing them is a snap judgment, it's one I've formed over many
years.

>  The term "intellectual property" encourages people to focus on the
>  abstract little they have in common.  Further, it encourages people to
>  consider this abstract little, rather than on what really matters: the
>  effects of each law.  This is how that term skews one's thinking.

The term "intellectual property" points to a common fallacy used to
justify all its different forms:  ownership of ideas, patterns, and
information.  My goal is to encourage people to consider the wrongness
of the ownership of ideas and to reject "intellectual property" in all
its forms.  "Intellectual property" points to the common fallacy that
the intellect can be property, and thereby lays out a framework for
attacking it on the ground that intellect cannot be property.

>  I think we should to judge each of these laws based on its effects.
>  And each has different effects.

Each has the effect of creating artificial scarcity, and IMO
artificial scarcity resulting from artificial property rights is the
central evil of corporate capitalism.

-- 
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