[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/7/10, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:

>       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.

> It is still not vague enough to fit all these dozen or more laws.  For
>  instance, trademark law only concerns how products are marketed, not
>  what they do.  In order to fit them all, you have to make this "area
>  of commonality" extremely abstract.
>
>  Experts have succeeded in doing that, but why bother?  It is the
>  details of each law that make it good or bad.  Focusing on this
>  abstract "area of commonality" is just a distraction from everything
>  that matters.  Thus, the deep harm in the term "intellectual property"
>  is that it leads people to focus on an abstract generalization instead
>  of the concrete requirements and effects of patent law, the concrete
>  requirements and effects of copyright law, and the concrete requirements
>  and effects of a dozen other laws.

See below.

> Not all of them.  Trademarks don't create an artificial scarcity of
>  anything that matters.  (Is a scarcity of images of Mickey Mouse a
>  problem for society?  I don't think so.)

I think there's some harm to society, even if relatively minimal, in
restricting mashup use of imagery (all the trademark "dilution" crap).
 It still falls under the heading of ownership of an idea.  IMO
trademark law is only valid to the extent that it prohibits outright
fraud or identity theft, in cases where there really is an attempt to
pass one's product off as that of another company and there's a
genuine risk of confusion.   That would rule out the vast majority of
trademark litigation in which it's used for bullying, pure and simple.
 There's an important tradition of defacing trademarks as a form of
Alinsky's political  jiujitsu, turning the trademark's strength around
and using it against a symbolic corporate target.

> I retract saying its was a snap judgment.  Please forgive me.  I
>  should have said, "an overgeneralization, based on giving an abstract
>  point more importance than practical effects."

No problem.

>     Key word "nominal."  It also prohibits marketing identical products
>     minus the trademark or with an anti-trademark.

> I am not sure what you mean by "identical".  Do you mean, same logo on
>  the side of the glass?  Identical packaging?  Same shape or color of
>  the bottle?  That is not the product, that is how it is marketed.  So
>  I stand by what I said.

I may be wrong about the effect of trademark law in constraining
freedom of physical production.  If it's only patent law, and not
trademark law, that makes it illegal to sell sneakers identical to
Nike's (I mean identical in the sense that the shoes are physically
identical in design and materials, but minus the Swoosh), then I stand
corrected.

>     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.

> Historically, these laws were established for various specific
>  reasons.  It is the term "intellectual property" that encourages
>  people to believe in a single, abstract invalid justification for
>  them.  I agree we should reject this supposed justification.  If we
>  want our rejection to have influence, we should reject the term
>  "intellectual property" that spreads and encourages that supposed
>  justification.

IMO it's useful to strike at the root.  If the advocacy of IP is based
on the assertion of a general principle that ideas can be owned, it's
useful to attack the core ideological principle behind such advocacy.
It's useful to make a case that ideas cannot be owned, and that the
rationale behind such ownership claims, in all their forms, is
therefore invalid.  As you put it in the GNU Manifesto, "'Control over
the use of one's ideas' really constitutes control over other people's
lives..."

Advocates of property in ideas have created the term "intellectual
property" as a commonality to serve them as a weapon, but in so doing
they've also made it into a single, almighty big target.  IMO it would
be a mistake not to take advantage of it.

But IMO all this just reflects a difference in opinion over strategic
approach.  "Let a hundred flowers bloom," and all that.

>  Rejecting that general supposed justification does not mean that all
>  these laws are bad.  Rather, it means we judge each one specifically
>  based on other criteria.  Some of these laws are good, at least in
>  part, for the same specific reasons that motivated them in the first
>  place.

Which of them do you consider good, and why?

-- 
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