So-Called Free Trade Agreements are to Free Trade, as the Ministry of Love is to Love
Posted by Kevin Carson on Feb 17, 2010 in Commentary • 24 commentsThere’s an unfortunate tendency among many libertarians to accept at face value neoliberalism’s self-identification with “free markets” and “free trade.” For example Jim Bovard, who usually comes down on the right side of things involving government power, in “Feeling Your Pain” dismissed Seattle anti-WTO protesters as “opponents of trade, capitalism, and modern civilization,” and accepted the Uruguay Round as a straightforward agreement to “lower trade barriers”—despite arguably creating a system of trade barriers more statist and more protectionist than the wildest imaginings of Smoot and Hawley.
At The Washington Times (!), Cato’s Daniel Griswold comments: “Despite complaints from critics on the left, such as Ralph Nader, and even a few libertarians, such as Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, membership in the World Trade Organization serves Americas national interest.”
WTO membership, he argues, helps both to keep U.S. markets open, “for the benefit of U.S. consumers and import-using industries,” but “also promotes trade liberalization abroad, which opens markets and keeps them open for U.S. exporters….”
Further, he says, WTO membership “does not limit our freedom as individual Americans”; rather, trade agreements “limit the power of governments to interfere in the peaceful commerce of their citizens,” which in turn “enhances the liberty and prosperity of all Americans.”
It’s interesting that Griswold specifically mentions “genetically modified crops,” “high-technology products,” and “copyrighted sound recordings” among the American exports promoted by the WTO. That suggests, however obliquely, what fake “free trade” agreements like the Uruguay Round of GATT are really all about.
It’s no coincidence, comrades—as Lenin might say—that the main beneficiary industries of the Uruguay Round and the rest of the phony “free trade” regime are those most dependent on “intellectual property.” Strong—nay, draconian—IP law is at the heart of the neoliberal “free trade” agenda. Again, it’s no coincidence that the leading industries in the global economy are software, entertainment, biotech, electronics, and the kind manufacturing in which corporations outsource all production to independent contractors and rely entirely on ownership of “intellectual property” to maintain control of their supplier networks.
In short, “intellectual property” plays the same protectionist role for the global corporate economy that tariffs did for the old national industrial economies. From the perspective of transnational corporations, it has the virtue of decoupling protectionism from geography. As a result, all the inconvenient barriers to a single corporation transferring production inputs and unfinished goods across national lines are removed. The barriers enforced by IP protectionism coincide, not with national borders, but corporate walls. But just as much as did tariffs, “intellectual property” regulates who is allowed to sell a given product in a given market and protects the privileged “owner” of that “right” against competition from unauthorized sellers.
To get some perspective on just how protectionist, how statist, how authoritarian “intellectual property” is, let’s go back to Griswold’s Bearded-Spock universe claim that the WTO and the accords it enforces don’t limit our freedom as individual American citizens. Mr. Griswold should try getting a DMCA takedown letter, or getting his Internet service cut off by the “three strikes” laws likely to be passed pursuant to ACTA. He should try wearing a T-shirt with DeCSS printed on it, or try playing a DRM’ed CD on an unauthorized platform or using a computer sabotaged with Genuine Advantage. He should try manufacturing generic spare parts and accessories for proprietary industrial platforms, or selling an identical knockoff of a proprietary industrial design for a price actually approaching the marginal cost of production.
If Mr. Griswold equates the WTO to “free trade” and believes the neoliberal trade agenda doesn’t limit our freedom as citizens, all I can say is his ideas of “free trade” and “individual freedom” are worthless to any genuine libertarian.
If it’s true that the Uruguay Round and WTO don’t limit our individual freedoms, it’s true only to the extent that they’re unenforceable. And thank God, they are.
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.
I must admit I'm not terribly familiar with the agreements you mention. Anything else that sticks out as anathema to free markets, aside from intellectual property?
Mr. Carson, your anti-IP rants are getting quite shrill! My own views are here:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/node/26134
Though strike-the-root seems to be offline today, for some reason.
JdL
Louis B.: Well, any form of subsidy, and any form of intervention that restrains competition, would be a fundamental violation of free market principles. The neoliberal agenda promotes such things in a number of other ways, including phony "privatization" of assets funded by taxpayer debt through sales to politically connected insiders, the defense of feudal land titles against land reform, etc. But I believe IP is the lynchpin of the system at present.
JdL: You might want to skip the next few columns.
*Sigh*, another anarcho-capitalist who doesn't view intellectual property as legitimate products of labor. And here I thought I was going to read a more serious and crippling claim against "free trade" agreements.
According to you, J.K. Rowling would not have the right to impede the sales of duplicates of her work, correct? Are you familiar with her story of rags-to-riches? How on earth would she have secured the capital to distribute her work? At least Marxism concedes human impulsiveness towards theft (but by your logic Harry Potter cannot even be stolen since it is not taken from anyone); viewing the world through a rosy-Randian lens, where capitally-endowed publishers behave morally and won't distribute Rowling's work absent of her just compensation upon reading her manuscripts, is simply quixotic.
Now imagine IP of real significance.
I never thought I'd live to see my views on IP called "Randian," whether rosy or of any other hue.
I've got a forthcoming column on the subject, but suffice it for now to say one of the beauties of digital/network culture is the drastic reduction in capital outlays required to publish and distribute a book. I've got a "printing press" (my ibook) that cost all of $300, and I paid a flat fee of $300 or so to set up the pdfs of my last book for on-demand printing. I promote my books virally, though the readership of my free online writing. And although the pdfs of my books are available for free online I think they function as free advertising, resulting in a net increase in hard copy sales. This brings me maybe $5k a year in income, in addition to my day job.
I suspect that for everyone like J.K. Rowling who became a millionaire off a blockbuster series, and would be far less rich absent a proprietary content model, there are hundreds like me whose small readership and butter-and-egg money are that many readers and that much money more than we'd have ever had in the "good old days."
Since you approached this from a utilitarian angle, rather than attempting to deduce Ms. Rowling's right to "intellectual property" from some fundamental principle, I'll do the same.
Here it is, in utilitarian terms: Copyright is unenforceable. DRM doesn't work. Files of blockbuster books, albums and movies will be available for torrent download the same day the official version comes out–and all the Internet surveillance regimes in the world won't stop it. As Cory Doctorow says, the computer is a machine for copying bits; anybody whose business model depends on preventing bits from being copied is going to fail. Period.
So people can either adapt their business models to the new reality, and use free content to promote the sale of auxiliary goods and services (the Freemium model of Linux distros, Phish, etc.), or they can impotently wave their fists and command the waves to stop advancing.
@laissez_dog: Could J.K. Rowling have published Harry Potter if all the concepts she borrowed from mythology and other fantasy authors were under copyright lockdown? Could you imagine if she was expected to pay the same royalties on "basilisks," "hippogriffs," etc that filmmakers have to pay to use proprietary music in their movies?
Sorry for the late response.
@Kevin: While my citation of the big bad publishing house does infer the necessity to protect poor old J.K Rowling, it wasn't my intent to draw the conclusion that this – capital leverage in the marketplace – is the sufficient purpose of IP protection, and consequently, if the barriers of entry into the marketplace were circumvented, said protection becomes superfluous. Rather, especially with your own personal anecdote, as it becomes easier to distribute works, it becomes easier to duplicate them, which does not perturb my original contention of the need to protect IP at all.
Your usage of this new technology clouds the discussion a tad. The fact you use your IP how you want is precisely what I advocate, and may be necessary for a (no offense) lesser-known author to generate readership in the marketplace. In other words, at the present time, the marketplace may value your work at $0. Certainly well-known authors (e.g. Stephen King) are valued above this price point. Now let's say, through your distribution efforts, you can begin to sell your e-books for substantial prices.
In this scenario, what I believe to be theft is the following: say I create a website, which aggregates all of your work and the works of other authors. This website is supported by both advertisements and subscriptions, so I may offer your work – which the market established to be valuable – for free. According to you, I am entitled to all the revenue I generate from this website. It is also feasible that other similar websites are created by competitors, who imitate the exact same business model of duplicating your efforts. So what we have now is an entire system in existence based on the use – and extraction – of your time.
Now here is the essential point that is often neglected in the discussion of labor and its products, and this negligence lends credence to the notion that a story, a song, or an invention, is merely an "idea" someone stumbles into and that is not actually produced: labor is a function of time. As is famously referred to as the paradox of value (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value), diamonds are worth more than water because of the difference in labor output over time required to make a diamond marketable compared to water. Since products (and value) are ultimately dependent on time, "thinking" is actually productive.
Since I believe an individual is in possession of their body, any labor from that body belongs in his possession. Now the contrast of our viewpoints can be seen when referring back to the previous scenario. My opinion is that my website has stolen from your labor. Why is it that withholding a wage after services have been rendered is considered theft, yet profiting from your e-books is not? Are both not compensating for profits derived from another person's labor?
@laissez_dog
The business model of compiling others work and selling it on the internet is a poor one. No one will pay for access to reading material via this venue for the same reason they won't pay for access via an author's website; it's free everywhere to anyone with an internet connection.
Even given today's state subsidized enforcement of IP, torrent sites flourish. Without subsidization they, or something like them, will probably define the way we consume music, movies and books. Under such a scenario, right and wrong will be defined by whether or not you can non-coercively convince people that freely downloading files is theft, since it will be next to impossible to enforce IP laws. Of course, there is an entire industry devoted to protecting IP privately. Text book publishers, for instance, are doing a decent job of developing software that makes it difficult to reproduce ebooks. Also, the purchase of eBooks is often times built into tuition with the school paying the publisher for each licensed electronic copy. I could envision such distribution models surviving the collapse of state enforced IP laws in one form or another.
Your argument about value ignores the demand side of the equation.
Regarding the article, I'm still looking for easy to consume, distilled arguments against "free" trade agreements that my friends with main stream political and economic views will understand and find interesting. No one but anarchists and hackers think much about IP. I have my own arguments, but I tend to make the arguments that are easiest for my friends to understand, and the geopolitical climate of labor, capital, "free" trade, and borders is not one of them.
laissez-dog and an onion: I think you're both assuming the same point–a point I would dispute. Removing proprietary content rents does not eliminate the possibility of making money off value added. My goal is not to make money off ebooks; rather, I see the ebooks as free advertising that increases sales of the hard copy above what they otherwise would be.
Even if the transaction costs involved in quickly finding a certified complete and authentic pdf on a torrent site totally disappeared (and they're far from doing so–just look at the different pdf versions of my "Homebrew" manscript being circulated, with absolutely no indication of which version it is and what date obtained), there are significant transaction costs involved in setting up a book for on-demand print and collecting secure payments, creating a market profile, etc. And those transaction costs are a source of rent for the first mover.
Of course the total pile of money resulting from rents on the time and trouble of setting up hard copy publication, from authenticity and completeness, from guaranteed "true fan" access to the latest version with authorial commentary etc. without the hassle of searching for it in the Internet haystack, etc., etc., is less than the total moneyh pile that would have resulted from proprietary rents. But with the implosion of setup and distribution costs compared to 20 years ago, the author who follows the Radiohead marketing model will be able to get a larger slice of that smaller pie.
The main thing is not to get greedy and charge enough premium over production cost to make it worth someone else's trouble to undercut you. The larger a book's sales, the more it becomes worth the trouble of setting up publication of knockoff hard copies. For a book that sells a few thousand copies, offering a competing version for a buck less is more hassle than it's worth. For a book by Stephen King, OTOH….
Re an onion's remarks on the low profile IP issues have for most people, I can understand. I recall first reading Tucker's arguments against copyright a little over a decade ago and finding them convincing–but thinking "so what?" I'd paid so little attention to digital copyright issues in the news, and had so little knowledge of the role of patents in industrial cartelization, that I dismissed it as just some marginal issue that had a limited effect on the cost of printed works. But the more I read about it since then, the more I became convinced that IP is the linchpin of the entire global corporate order. IP is the reason a pill that costs $1 to make costs you $10. IP is the reason your iPhone is designed to be replaced when a key gets stuck, and the reason the average electronic device you buy probably costs ten times what labor and material costs would warrant. IP is the central legal basis for transnational corporations' control of sweatshop contractors around the world.
In short, any critique of global corporate power and of the neoliberal "free trade" regime that does not address the central importance of IP will not be based on reality. And if the public doesn't know or care much about it, or realize how important it is, or think of it as just something to do with guaranteeing that artists get paid, that means the Matrix has been pretty damned effective. I'd say that rather than being something to be accepted with a shrug, it's an indication that the low public profile of IP issues in the debate over corporate power is something to be remedied. A fight against corporate power that ignores the central basis of corporate power in today's world will be pretty ineffective.
Interestingly, JK Rowling is being sued, again, for plagiarism and copyright infringement.
When wagon wheels and wooden barrels were passed by, both as a product and as a business model, we didn't exactly stop the advancement of the automobile and plastic storage container markets.
We refer to people who resist technological change as Luddites.
Yet, for people dependent upon copyright, we want to stop the obvious progression of technology and the needs of a developing marketplace.
JK Rowling would do just fine – if her books actually made it to the fame they did without the backing of a big corporate publishing company – by her fee for speaking engagements alone.
Part of the problem is we continue, as a society, to hold on to the "romantic" belief in the artist/creator being rewarded "handsomely" for his/her talent, as opposed to fairly. Why is it so bad if creative people "merely" make a good living like so many other people do without any protection for their ideas? Do we really think corporations aren't sink holes of unrewarded ideas by employee after employee over the years who are "rewarded" more modestly?
The transitional period, if we were to move from IP to non-IP, is the glitch and the turmoil, as transitional periods always are – so maybe copyright for written words will need to be addressed last in the change away from IP, but by then maybe the bigger picture will be clearer and an alternative model would present itself.
@anonion: I included the the method of subscriptions as an additional revenue source – perhaps this hypothetical website takes Kevin's works and publishes them freely on one portion of the website yet is also supported by advertisements, but this website also commissions works by authors and requires the readers to pay (a la Wall St. Journal?); regardless, critiquing the viability of the model does not counter my main points about the nature of IP in my response.
"Without subsidization… right and wrong will be defined by whether or not you can non-coercively convince people that freely downloading files is theft, since it will be next to impossible to enforce IP laws."
-So because of the hypothetical difficulty in enforcing SOME IP (a song is a different animal than software code or a trade secret), this obviates our discussion?
"Of course, there is an entire industry devoted to protecting IP privately. Text book publishers, for instance, are doing a decent job of developing software that makes it difficult to reproduce ebooks."
-And if someone breaches these protections, a mechanism (i.e. court system) might be in place to rectify the transgression, correct? And bringing up this point has only confused me as to what your position is regarding IP – to me it seems you're OK with it as long as it is not statist.
"Your argument about value ignores the demand side of the equation." – part of the paradox of value is that water is necessary to survive, so it should have greater demand than a diamond, and thus by economic logic, be valued more, but it's not, so we have to ignore demand in our solution to the problem.
@Kevin: "My goal is not to make money off ebooks; rather, I see the ebooks as free advertising that increases sales of the hard copy above what they otherwise would be."
-And my point was at the present time, this is currently your only choice. If a celebrated author began selling their book at Borders for $29.99, there is strong motivation in the marketplace to replicate and publish that work and sell it for $19.99, $15.99, etc. until a price equilibrium is reached. The "monopoly" enforced grants the author exclusivity to the products of his labor, much like the "monopoly" that grants you the exclusive rights to the wages you earn at your day-career, making it illegal for me to garnish them. By removing IP protection, all literature, music, and film work is rendered as merely a hobby and not a viable career, stunting the diversification of labor and productivity in the society. Look no further than Industrial Light & Magic, or the movie Avatar, as illustration.
Paradoxical to your argument, the distribution methods you venerate actually enable more members of society to profit off their creative output! And of course, this creates more demand for the associated productive chambers of society (e.g. recording studios; film editing; publishing), and further unforeseen ones.
Again, just like Anonion, this is a straw man, circumventing the central issue of why you don't believe in IP.
@SPBS:
"Part of the problem is we continue, as a society, to hold on to the 'romantic' belief in the artist/creator being rewarded 'handsomely' for his/her talent, as opposed to fairly. Why is it so bad if creative people 'merely' make a good living like so many other people do without any protection for their ideas? Do we really think corporations aren’t sink holes of unrewarded ideas by employee after employee over the years who are 'rewarded' more modestly?"'
-Greetings comrade! I believe your sentiment was expressed more succinctly before:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Workers of the world, unite!
Precisely. I have no problem with IP as long as its enforcement is not statist. Regarding non-statist legal mechanisms, I imagine that will very from community to community. I predict (admittedly, with little proof) that non-statist legal action and enforcement would be prohibitively high. The mechanisms I spoke of have more to do with protecting the delivery of content and paying for content rather than reacting to its theft with legal action. Such mechanisms can be in the form of a bundled product, like a university course that charges a text book fee that is passed on to the professor/author along with software that makes copying difficult or maybe some kind of donation system; like George Lucas saying he's not going to release the next Star Wars episode until he gets pay pal'd a certain amount of money.
As far as IP goes, technology is a game changer. The world is leaving copy right behind.
Regarding value, I think if the supply of water were as scarce as that of diamonds we would quickly find out which has greater demand. You can't arrive at value without both supply and demand.
@laissez_dog: The fact that people have to exert labor to create/invent does not mean that people can own ideas. The purpose of the institution of property isn't too reward people for work, but to accommodate the fact that tangible things are scare. Because tangible things are scarce, there is conflict over them and property is the tool by which we resolve such conflict.
Ideas, on the other hand, are not scarce. An unlimited number of people can make use of any idea at any given time, so the concept of property in ideas doesn't make sense.
If I take a physical copy of the first Harry Potter that belongs to J.K. Rowling without her permission, then surely I have stolen something from her. But if I simply upload a torrent for an ebook version of it to a file-sharing site and share it with hundreds of people, Rowling hasn't been deprived of anything.
@anonion: OK then, referring back to the article, it seemed to me Kevin rejected the concept of IP at all, which was the basis of his critique of free trade, which is what I was trying to counter.
@Andrew: I was awaiting the introduction of this specific dogmatic view of property. Fortunately you grant that labor is incurred when creating/inventing.
According to your doctrine, property emerges from scarce resources. By deduction, we principally own our own bodies, correct? Hence the concept of self-ownership. Now if I own my own body, and therefore own the labor my body produces, I own its productive output, which is to say, I can lease my labor (i.e. earn a salary or wage).
The main contradiction in your viewpoint is that creative output is dissimilar to any other form of labor by the human body (even though you already granted that supposition). In your example of J.K. Rowling, her creative output is equated with the presumed abundance of "ideas", which allows you to believe "Rowling hasn't been deprived of anything," if Harry Potter is shared freely with hundreds of people. When in fact, it is much more logical to the doctrine you subscribe to to view the story of Harry Potter as a product of her body's – a scarce resource – creativity. As much as I have a claim to earn the salary provided by my employer and can restrict others from making the same claim, she has a claim to earn income from her story and restrict others from doing the same.
The fallacy of IP opponents is the conflation of "ideas" with creative labor; if we begin to make exemptions from certain forms of labor, logical incoherency in their mode of thinking will surely arise, e.g. creativity is a mental sedentary task, but aren't most forms of jobs presently? Thus, they contradict one of their primary premises, that being self-ownership.
“During the nineteenth century anyone was free in the United States to reprint a foreign publication, and yet American publishers found it profitable to make arrangements with English authors. Evidence before the 1876-8 Commission shows that English authors sometimes received more from the sale of their books by American publishers, where they had no copyright, than from their royalties in this country [the UK]. From the economic standpoint it is highly significant that, although there was no legislative restraint on the copying of books published abroad, competition remained sufficiently removed from that abstract condition of “perfection,” in which there could exist no margin between receipts and costs for the remuneration of authors, for “handsome sums” in fact to be paid. In the first place, there was the advantage, well worth paying for, which a publisher secured by being first in the field with a new book. To secure priority American publishers regularly paid lump sums to English authors for “advance sheets.” Secondly, there was a “tacit understanding among the larger publishers in America that the books published by one should not be pirated by another.”Each notified the other of arrangements he had made. What of other publishers who might be tempted? It was explained, thirdly, to the Royal Commission of 1876-8 “that the practice of all the great houses in America (there are some three or four large publishing houses with very great capital), if anybody publishes one of their books, is to publish a largely cheaper edition at any cost, and they would make any pecuniary sacrifice rather than not cut out a rival.” “Fighting editions” in the book-publishing trade served the same purpose as “fighting brands” in the cigarette business, “fighting ships” on the shipping conference routes, and “fighting buses” in post-war London passenger transport. Yet, fourthly, perhaps the most important check on the rival publisher, whose competing edition would in any case be late in the field, was the low-price policy which the American publishers adopted. American editions might cost one-half as much as the English issue; one quarter or even one-eighth of the English price was very frequent. In such circumstances, the American public enjoyed cheap books, the American publishers found their business profitable, and the English authors received lump sums for their advance sheets and royalties on American sales.”
http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Plant%20Copyright.htm
There is a tacit understanding in this discussion that copyrights are there to protect authors/creative types, and that therefore the question revolves around whether sacrificing such protections is worth any other benefits that might accrue. However, the laws here were designed primarily to protect publishers, on the understanding that publishers have the best interests of authors at heart. This is evidently not the case.
Copyright is a relatively small player in the realm of so-called “intellectual property,” however. Compare the number of people employed by the entire creative industry to a single large technology company, such as IBM. It is patents that are the more significant, and in my opinion, the more harmful. It was patents that allowed AT&T to rebuild its monopoly following the anti-trust actions in the earlier part of the 20th Century. It is patents that prevent the adoption of a halfway decent video format for the WWW.
One could describe the intellectual property regimes as a new form of mercantilism. The actual production process is outsourced to wherever labour is easiest to exploit, and then a premium is added for “designed in California, produced in China.” It’s “buy low, sell high, and get the state to ensure it” all over again.
In reality, the prime source of wealth is the marketplace. The state can encourage innovation by intervening, but subsidies (to, for instance, universities and other research institutions) are far more effective at this than allocation of monopolies, and are also far less intrusive on said marketplace. We’re in a strange situation now, where the state subsidises innovation in this way, and then also attaches monopolies after the fact. This is probably the worst of both worlds. It displays a strange lack of confidence in the ability of markets to deliver, especially considering that everything needs a “free market” gloss in order to be considered serious, given the enormous benefits for society that markets have thus far provided.
Believing this does not make one an “anarcho-capitalist” (a contradiction in terms, in my view), it instead demonstrates a commitment to enlightenment values and sensible political economy. It also gels most closely with empirical observation. Take an example within living memory, the computing industry. It was not the introduction of patents to this arena that caused the spate of innovation that this industry has demonstrated in its relatively short lifespan, quite the reverse. Graphical user interfaces and human-computer interaction, networked computers, operating systems, compilers and the main paradigms of computer languages (currently object-oriented, functional and logical) were all developed before the expansion of the patent regime to cover this arena. Following the expansion, what have we seen? Amazon’s one-click? Give me a break. The narrative that we can take from this example is that, in its infancy, the industry saw great strides as various entities jockied with one another for a place in the market. The low-hanging fruit were plucked. As some entities gained a lead over their competitors, and then ran out of ideas, they lobbied the government for the protection of their position. The biggest single innovation in the field of computing of the past 20 years, the World Wide Web, was created entirely outside the patent regime and is actively hostile to it to this day.
I would suggest that this is no coincidence. Competition drives innovation and monopoly sabotages it.
@bobaapleyard: your anecdote is hardly convincing for the simple fact you are extrapolating 19th century practice into the 21st century. Among the presumptions is the method of patronage, something Kevin clearly demonstrated to be no longer necessary with digital distribution methods; this is a good thing because it reduces friction in the marketplace, i.e. with the publisher middleman no longer needed, costs will deflate, and with greater degrees of freedom, authors will pave new roads for productivity for other members of soceity.
Further, and perhaps most damaging, is the fact this citation attempts to demonstrate the viability of a copyright free world, yet merely demonstrates the exact opposite as to what was intended: "American editions might cost one-half as much as the English issue; one quarter or even one-eighth of the English price was very frequent." There is no argument about the cost-effectiveness of an IP free world, just as there is no argument that a gang of impoverished thugs become wealthier after ransacking a wealthy estate. The fact the English authors consented to such fabricated business practices stems from the fact they had no other choice in the American marketplace; some profit is better than none at all; and in effect, these authors were at the demands of the American publishers. Yet all of this was done with the security of copyright protection, and thus royalty guarantees, in Europe.
"There is a tacit understanding in this discussion that copyrights are there to protect authors/creative types, and that therefore the question revolves around whether sacrificing such protections is worth any other benefits that might accrue."
-certainly you would disagree with such a proposition if it was in regards to your neighborhood looting your home, or worse, a neighbor taking your life due to the "benefits that might accrue" correct? As noted in your further arguments, the fundamental misdiagnosis by the IP critics is that it IP is utilitarian in nature in respect to society, when in fact property rights are not. It's as clear as the difference between a collectivist and an individualist.
Copyright etc isn't a property right, though. It's almost the opposite. With a copyright, you use the power of the state to tell other people what they can and cannot do with the things that they own.
You're right, though, it isn't the 19th Century. Copying is even easier now. The problems that were evident enough with the regime in the 1930s are completely obvious today.
@bobappleyard:
"Copyright etc isn’t a property right, though. It’s almost the opposite. With a copyright, you use the power of the state to tell other people what they can and cannot do with the things that they own."
-May I ask what your underlying premises are for your assertion? As I expressed in my counter-argument to Andrew, if it is taken that self-ownership is existent – we own our bodies – than a copyright or patent is protection of the product of one's labor by one's body; in this case, its creativity.
It may appear that copyrights restrict what people can do with their property, but so too do ordinary property rights laws. For instance, it is illegal for me to use my body to steal my neighbor's car. It is also illegal for me to run over a pedestrian with my own car. More analogous to the topic at hand, it is illegal for me to garner your wages from labor you have exercised. In this sense, this is the exact logic behind IP protection; labor has been done, its product is evident, and thus any profit derived from said product is (i.e. can legally only be) reaped exclusively by the person/persons who carried out the labor to produce it. Those who reap from the products of others labor are considered thieves – and rightly so – in the traditional definition of labor, so why is there an exception here?
"You’re right, though, it isn’t the 19th Century. Copying is even easier now. The problems that were evident enough with the regime in the 1930s are completely obvious today."
-I'm confused with what your point is here, though I agree "copying is even easier now." This has the added benefit of unknown artists becoming recognized faster and cheaper for themselves, which is obviously a good thing. How they profit off this attention, however, in the wake of P2P sharing, will have to be seen.
Ah, there's your problem. You take an incoherent notion, "self-ownership," and this leads you to make nonsensical claims. You don't *own* your body, you *are* your body; ownership is a relationship between the individual, an object, and society. So you state things like running someone over is bad because of conflicting property claims, which is just absurd. If you own yourself, then ownership loses its distinctive character from holding something in trust or lease, for instance. It is like division by zero.
I would agree that labour justifies ownership. In the case of creative works, the works themselves are the evident product of said labour. That is, if I am an author, the manuscript is the product of my labour. The copies thereof are not; they are the product of the copying process. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are, in reality, limited monopolies.
There are actually two kinds of justification for copyright and the rest. You did a fair job of representing the "moral rights" argument. As I stated above, it fails to reflect reality, as well as being ultimately impractical. Pythagoras, no doubt, expended a good deal of effort in the creation of the theorem that bears his name. If he was entitled to a property right, so his estate should be allowed to demand a royalty from uses of said theorem. Or perhaps the estate of Shakespeare could demand royalties on public performances of his works, or be allowed to stop them outright. This would be in alignment with our sense of actual property; the landed estates of aristocrats from Shakespeare's day, in some cases, still reside within those families. This would be quite impractical if applied to creative works; it would utterly hobble further creativity. To agree with this would necessitate the abandonment of copyrights as property, and so it is abandoned.
The other justification assumes that ideas are the common heritage of all mankind, and that the allocation of temporary monopolies serves to induce further creative works. This is the vision of creativity in the US Constitution, for instance. I suppose you might call this "utilitarian," in that it is pragmatic. That ideas are not scarce, or rather non-excludable and non-rivalrous, is a fundamental idea here: you reading this screed does not mean that others are prevented from doing so. Allocating a monopoly attempts to restore a notion of scarcity to their treatment. Of course, this way of thinking has a weakness, if you could call it that: it is subject to empirical falsification. I would argue that such falsification has been provided. Boldrin & Levine's "Against Intellectual Monopoly" provides a good survey of this.
bobappleyard has it absolutely right.
Again, I'm sorry for the late response.
@bobappleyard:
"You take an incoherent notion, “self-ownership,” and this leads you to make nonsensical claims."
- I was taking a presumption that you agreed with the libertarian conception of property rights and attempted to expose the logical contradiction that arises when refuting IP claims; I never formally agreed or disagreed with this belief. This presumption has been put forth by Stephan Kinsella, whose persuasion has notably convinced Lew Rockwell:
"The key thinker here is Stephan Kinsella. He and Jeffrey Tucker have done the heavy lifting and convinced most all of us that intellectual property is an artifice that has no place in a market economy." (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/daily-bell-interview141.html)
As such, I believed you to be convinced of the same argumentation. And what does Kinsella base the foundation of his arguments on?:
"Human bodies are of course scarce resources. As Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe observes, even in a paradise with a superabundance of goods,
every person's physical body would still be a scarce resource and thus the need for the establishment of property rules, i.e., rules regarding people's bodies, would exist. One is not used to thinking of one's own body in terms of a scarce good, but in imagining the most ideal situation one could ever hope for, the Garden of Eden, it becomes possible to realize that one's body is indeed the prototype of a scarce good for the use of which property rights, i.e., rights of exclusive ownership, somehow have to be established, in order to avoid clashes.
Now the distinct libertarian view is that each person completely owns his own body — at least initially, until something changes this (e.g., if a person commits some crime by which he forfeits or loses some of his rights). Implicit in the idea of self ownership is the belief that each person has a better claim to the body that he or she directly controls and inhabits than do others." (http://mises.org/story/3682)
Now obviously you disagree with Kinsella, and Hoppe, which was why I asked where your own premises lie.
Yet you have not explicitly provided any. While recognizing this, it appears to me in your defense of criticizing IP you are implying that intellectual property protection hinders innovation which is a justification for abolishing it; thus it is a "pragmatic" justification, as you have defined. For corroboration:
"in alignment with our sense of actual property…would be quite impractical if applied to creative works; it would utterly hobble further creativity."
"Ideas are the common heritage of all mankind, and that the allocation of temporary monopolies serves to induce further creative works…Of course, this way of thinking has a weakness, if you could call it that: it is subject to empirical falsification. I would argue that such falsification has been provided."
Firstly, the position you present, which if extended would be to infer that property rights in general are only instilled to promote productivity in society, is begging the question. You are assuming this is function of property rights without providing an explanation. Secondly, such an indictment makes one appear contradictory when you claim that "labor justifies ownership". Obviously some labor is more productive than others, so in your purview, wouldn't redistributing property amongst the productive laborers be justified?
Lastly, "Against Intellectual Monopoly" is a very large straw man argument built on countering the belief that IP is necessary to induce innovation, and therefore productivity – which again begs the exact same question posed by you.
Yet for the sake of argument, if we were to take the explanation for property rights solely based on its pragmatism, I read nowhere in the text about what these "artificially imposed" monopolies can lead to – the creation (and growth) of businesses, specifically those whose sole competition advantage is this "monopoly", and consequently, employees and demand for goods and services. In fact, I would be even so ambitious as to claim – amongst such argumentation – that this provides even more productivity at the expense of innovation. At any rate, I refer you to an article written by The Economist about the nuisance of patent protection in Europe that has many people believe this is the cause of stunted growth of low to medium-sized companies (subscription required however): http://www.economist.com/business-finance/display…
But this is a digression based upon ignoring my original question: what do you genuinely base your assumptions of property rights on?
Ironically, James Bovard wrote, in his book "The Bush Betrayal", my all-time favorite passage about the differences between free trade agreements and genuine free trade; I've been meaning to post the quote for a while and the mention here gave me impetus to do so:
http://joelschlosberg.blogspot.com/2010/02/quote-…
Also, Jesse Walker has written an excellent defense of anti-globalization protests from a libertarian perspective:
http://jessewalker.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_archiv…
And a good article about how free trade agreements' strengthening IP laws undermine genuine free trade appeared a while back in The New Yorker of all places:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/05/1…
Dean Baker has also been on this, challenging the press's parroting of the term "free trade agreement" and arguing that intellectual protectionism is the main thing they're about.
@laissez_dog
I’ve already explained that copyrights, patents etc are not a kind of property, so anything regarding their validity is unrelated, and mostly a distraction. This caused a lot of bulk in your reply. For instance, when you tell me that my views are that “property rights in general are only instilled to promote productivity in society,” that’s a load of bullshit.
Yadda yadda more of the same.
I can’t read the article you linked, and your last paragraph was unintelligible. Can you restate what the hell you were on about there? Thanks.