
Against Intellectual Property (1995) - matthewsinclair
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html
======
Zigurd
Intellectual property is an Americanism that metastasized. It's a global idea
not because of it's own merits, but because it was propelled by American
treaties and diplomacy during an era when America was dominant.

One irony in that is the fact that the Framers were skeptical of intellectual
property. In fact, they didn't call it intellectual property. Even less did
they call it "intellectual property rights." It was a temporarily granted
monopoly. It was not considered to be a right.

How is that? All your actual rights are assumed to exist. The Bill of Rights
explicitly says it isn't the List of Rights. That's because your rights
predate any laws and constitutions. You simply have them, and governments are
more or less just in observing that you have rights and in not trampling them.

This is key to making the US constitution future-proof. It carves out a set of
legitimate powers. It doesn't enumerate your rights: to travel by car or jet-
pack, or space-warp, to use unbreakable codes, to marry the person you love,
etc.

Patents and copyright monopolies, on the other hand, are explicitly granted,
and, unlike your rights, they expire. The congress could at a whim change
patent and copyright terms to a week, a day, a nanosecond, and there would be
no constitutional case against that law. Because these grants of monopoly are
NOT rights.

~~~
m1sta_
Can you see an argument for how both physical property rights and intellectual
property rights are both government granted rights?

~~~
harshreality
Yes, but... there's a difference in what happens when you try to do away with
them. Society without physical property rights requires everyone to abide by
fair evaluation of what they need and what others need; otherwise, anti-
communal individuals take things in order to enrich themselves. The people
they take from are either non-violent and end up not being able to feed or
clothe themselves—limited only by the conscience of the person taking
unfairly—or else there's extra-legal armed conflict. Even if everyone agrees
to the principle of equitable sharing, a communal ideal, there are still
mismatches in different people's evaluation functions of need and ability.

I think the drug market can be viewed as a microcosm of that. There are no
state-enforced property rights in drugs, at least none that anyone outside the
drug trade takes seriously. It doesn't turn out very well for anyone involved
in the market. Even those who get rich from it are at greatly increased risk
of turning up dead.

Abolishing IP would affect income streams, but so does outsourcing, automation
, and change in particular job markets or industries... the onward march of
progress. I don't see that as a reason why it shouldn't be done.

------
shittyanalogy
I find it interesting that we commonly regard "Intellectual Property" as non
oxymoronic. I find the concept of Intellectual Property an impossible
situation as:

    
    
        It's not possible to *own* a concept.
        You own a *monopoly* on the sale of the *application* of a concept.
    

A better name might be Intellectual Monopoly Rights.

I realize that I'm arguing semantics, but I think a further look at the
semantics help reveal the true nature of the system and enlighten the
discussion. Intellectual Monopoly Rights are only granted by societies for the
benefit of their citizens. Does our current set of Intellectual Monopoly
Rights benefit us? Can we make them better?

~~~
dnautics
But property property is also a monopoly right, enforced by the state, so your
semantic redefinition really gets us nowhere. It's worth considering what
things should be propertized... One solution is that things subject to the
tragedy of the commons should be properties, especially when to deny one
person the use of a good entails violence against their person. These goods
are _rivalrous_ \- if I take your bike by pushing you off of it, I deny you
the use of said bike. Note that this doesn't apply to intellectual property
without appealing to entitlement language ("An artist is entitled to
compensation " \- who decided what is art and how much to give for it)

~~~
shittyanalogy
That property can be taken from me. You can't physically take my ideas or
concepts from me. They cannot be property.

~~~
briantakita
The only thing that can be taken away is the government-granted monopoly on
applying the "IP".

~~~
shittyanalogy
Agreed.

~~~
shittyanalogy
Who downvoted me responding to a comment in my own thread?

~~~
shittyanalogy
?

------
nova
So, semantics and rhetoric aside, what is _really_ this thing called
"intellectual property"? In the real world, in actuality.

A big game of Who Has The Best Lawyers.

Nothing less, nothing more. An expensive game, normally better played by big
corporations, sometimes by small optimized "companies" (trolls), completely
uncorrelated with any notion of fairness or economic sense. Another thing that
exists not necessarily because is a good idea, but because of enormous
inertia, like many other things we do "because that's how things are", even if
they are completely stupid. A legal meme.

(As an aside, I'm personally totally OK with trade secrets; I'd accept a sane,
limited version of copyright as useful; and I think patents should be
abolished. All of them. Software patents are just the most aggressive and
vicious strain)

~~~
loceng
Well said.

------
belorn
Historically, intellectual property was the crown’s desire to raise
unconstitutional revenue by getting money out of those who would buy a
statutory monopoly at the net present value of the royalties that could be
extracted. The monarch issued a _writ patent_ , that is a royal decree, and
the monarch raised money at the expense of society.

In 1620 after an outburst of patenting to raise extra Parliamentary revenue by
James I, Parliament passed the Statute of Monopolies which stated that only
Parliament might grant monopolies in statutory form and that only for new
inventions. The principle written into the law was that the only valid or
legitimate use of the otherwise dangerous mechanism of the statutory monopoly
was for new discoveries and that for a limited time.

That was then. Where we current live at is that this 400 year old legal
concept of statutory monopolies is used not to secure new discoveries, but to
have government act in the market. Companies want to prevent cheaper or better
products by competing firms from entering the market, and "intellectual
property" is one of the better tools used to achieve this end. This is
obliviously wrong, so it is up to government to step up like they did in 1620
and stop the abuse, but so far the trend has been to add more abuse, more
government involvement in the market, and ever increasing number of royal
decrees.

------
matthewsinclair
I just posted a link to the above paper in a comment here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496154)

But it's such a good article, that I think it warrants reconsideration given
the "Abstract Ideas Don’t Deserve Patents" article in the New York Times
(linked in that above comment thread).

This paper really changed my mind on the notion of IP. And if you've got a
view on the subject, it's worth reading.

~~~
Jach
Please consider to upvote this as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498995)
It contains a more thorough overview of the history and effects; Chapter 9 is
particularly excellent for breaking down why the pharmaceutical industry
should hardly be considered a "crown jewel" for IP advocates.

~~~
aspensmonster
Seconding the suggestion to read through chapter 9.

------
Tloewald
The author quotes someone named Hettinger who lists five justifications for
allowing intellectual property and, fairly neatly, dismisses four of them,
allowing only that it might be that IP protections encourage the production of
innovation. A more important argument would be the discouraging of trade
secrets (if you invent something and patent it, your invention is protected;
if you rely on trade secrets then others can still reverse engineer and copy
your work).

I'm not sure I disagree with the author (or Hettinger) but they have missed an
important counter argument.

~~~
ds9
This was one of the original arguments for patents. It is actually the reason
they're called patents (opposed to "latent"). There had been, in UK, cases of
formulas for making certain things, which had been lost because they were kept
secret to preserve then-defacto monopolies.

