[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/8/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you believe people may simply take what they want when they can take it
> and no one loses a physical item, you ought to say that.  That means any
> item is simply free for all that can be copied.  All trademarks, copyrights,
> patents, etc. are entirely meaningless.  To me it seems clear that such a
> world is not feasible and would quickly lead to collapse...and not social
> justice.  That, to my mind, is pure capitalism...not socialism.  It is the
> idea that people can act completely without regulation to do whatever they
> want.

Semantics again, but to me "capitalism" is just the opposite:  the
extraction of rents from artificial scarcity created by the state.
Paying rackrents to landlords because the state restricts access to
vacant land, working for less than your full product because the state
criminalizes free competition in the supply of credit or imposes
artificial capital outlays for small-scale production, etc.

> If some lady with a sowing machine in Chiang Mai thinks she can make a Dior
> scarf, I care little...frankly Dior cares little.  Everyone knows the
> differences except the lady with the sowing machine.  It is the guy in Hong
> Kong who runs a factory making Dior scarves with the same boxes, etc. that
> is a criminal and plainly so because it is against Hong Kong law, against
> French law and against numerous international treaties.  To defend that
> person is very odd to me...even bizarre.  To say he is "removing artificial
> scarcity" is simply counter-factual.  If that were the case, he would never
> produce the item in the first place...he is clearly free riding on someone
> else's brand and quality and design investment--which is entirely scarce.
> That's the whole point of his copy.  If it weren't scarce, he wouldn't do
> it.  No one mixes salt with water to make sea water.  It isn't scarce.  It
> is the "artificial" term which is clearly meant to distort facts and
> circumstances.

But IP is the main reason companies like Nike can charge a 400% markup
for its sneakers, over and above wages and materials, without even
having its own factories.  Anything that enables the factories to
produce identical shoes without the swoosh, for sale to the local
market minus the markup, is a good thing in my view.   When the
supplier networks and networked job shops ignore the western
corporations' IP and bypass them as redundant nodes, it will be a good
thing.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html