The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next blockbuster or producing a cure for cancer, they’ll content themselves with flipping burgers or digging ditches for a living, and we’ll all be worse off.
I’m not big on consequential arguments. Absent moral foundations, they’re equivalent to noting that I can’t make money as a bank robber unless the banks are required to leave their vaults unlocked. That may be true, but it’s not a good reason to give me what I want, is it?
As it happens, though, even this “trump card” argument for “intellectual property” monopolies falls flat on its face when we stand it up against both history and current events. A great many works still considered classics — all of Shakespeare’s plays being the preeminent example — pre-date 1710’s “Statute of Anne,” the first modern copyright law. Even at the height of the copyright age, right up to this very day, many authors have guaranteed their own incomes by selling subscriptions to the work before its release (and often before its creation) or finding other ways to monetize it that don’t rely on copyright protection.
Take, for example, libertarian author L. Neil Smith who, I should emphasize up front, is a staunch defender of “intellectual property” and shouldn’t be taken as a supporter of my own claims here. Back in the early part of the decade, I played a small role in a “subscription” drive for a novel (Ceres) which he wanted to write, but which he wasn’t getting the deal he wanted on from the traditional publishing industry. In fairly short order, his fans filled out the subscription campaign, paying him in advance to write the novel, with various rewards available based on their level of payment. Granted, those rewards did include some “intellectual property” incentives (if I recall correctly, the higher subscriber levels would have received a portion of film rights sales and such), but the point here is that based on his reputation — for the quality of his work, and for his track record of completing more than 20 previous books — people who wanted to read his stuff paid for that stuff in advance, when copyright protection had no role in compelling them to do so.
Even without prior payment, artists can manage to get rewarded for their work. Comedian Louis CK, known for his standup comedy specials and other entertainment forays, decided to skip the middleman for Live at the Beacon Theater. He financed production himself, then offered the performance as a $5 download, politely ASKING people NICELY to pay for it. Per Wikipedia, the download grossed more than $1 million in its first two weeks of release, allowing Louis CK to reimburse himself the $250k in production costs, pay out $250,000 in bonuses to the people he worked with, donate $280k to charities, and pocket a $220k profit.
Trent Reznor’s popular band Nine Inch Nails did something even crazier in 2008: They released the album Ghosts I-IV as a free download (including freedom for non-commercial reproduction), with various “upgrades” available … and grossed $1.6 million in sales. The “physical” release of the album hit #14 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
I could go on (Cory Doctorow, who releases his novels as free downloads and still sells hard copies like hotcakes, deserves a shout-out), but I’d run out of space before I ran out of examples. All of the works in question enjoyed copyright protection. None of them relied on that protection for their creators’ ability to get paid.
These days, via Kickstarter, Indiegogo and hundreds of other web sites, “crowd-funding” is quickly becoming the way that artists and creators get their projects funded. The day is not far off when the standard way to get a book published or an album or movie released will be to go straight to the people who want to read, hear or watch it instead of to middlemen who bundle non-existent “rights” into packages that reward said middlemen far more than artists or audiences. When that model reaches full bloom,the “piracy” that dying class of middlemen complain about so much will be recognized as a feature, not a bug: Every “pirated” download potentially creating a new fan for the next round of crowd-funding and the creation of the next work.
“Intellectual property” has always been a morally bankrupt anti-concept. Now it’s becoming a financially bankrupt revenue model. Good riddance.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Beating the “intellectual property” racket, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 10/30/13
- Thomas L. Knapp, Market vs. Monopoly: Beating the “Intellectual Property” Racket, Baltic Review, 10/29/13
- Thomas L. Knapp, Market vs. Monopoly: Beating the “Intellectual Property” Racket, Before It’s News, 10/27/13
"Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if
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"[T]hey’re equivalent to noting that I can’t make money as a bank robber unless the banks are required to leave their vaults unlocked."
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So NOT CONTINUING to write books (that people still download several hundred times a month, years after first release) and stopping to do something else that pays the bills is morally equivalent to bank robbery. Thank you for that clarification. And here I foolishly thought I was just bowing to free-market forces by not bothering to produce a product people don't want.*
That certainly explains the people who told me that I was obligated to produce free books for their reading pleasure, the ones who told me that "you don't own the words" even as they insisted on my particular arrangement of the words (never mind the words that I had to _invent_, a common issue in SF).
Just curious though: If I'm obligated to write the next books in the series for people who won't voluntarily compensate me, does that make me a slave forced to work without pay? Or do you propose some coercive system akin to Obamacare to guarantee that the taxpayers fund my writing (and does that make slave of the people working to support books they don't want for other people)?
Of course, I only had two more novels and a handful of short stories planned for my series. What happens when those are done and I'm still required to prove I'm no bank robber by pumping out more? I guess that explains the Star Drek franchise.
Now that you've discovered that _not_ producing is theft, how will you compensate me (and other creators that weren't good enough to get paid)? was always a fan of voluntary exchanges, but now that you've taken that off the table, I can't wait to see what you have in mind.
A few web searches on the topic will show that I'm not a fan of the current conventional view of IP and gov-enforced copyrights. But I do wonder what option you offer to compensate creators like me — with books that people want, but not enough to pay for (I still get letters asking for the next in the series… from people who didn't kick in for the existing books).
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* Background for those unfamiliar with the series: I wrote a couple of novels and anthologies, the first — Net Assets — was originally published over ten years ago. They aren't good enough to interest conventional publishing houses; no sale. I offered them as self-published works; someone immediately copied them onto P2P networks for download without compensating me. I tried "pre-sales" through Indiegogo; embarrassingly. I bowed to the obvious and offered them as free downloads on my own site, and asked for voluntary contributions; a couple or three times a year I even see some. That's despite — taking this month to date as an example — 800 plus free downloads per month. For a decade. Assume the average is half that, and I've had over 50,000 downloads… and _in total_ almost made enough to pay my rent once. Damned right I quit writing in favor of something that people are willing to pay for. Now that I know they're morally equivalent, perhaps I should try _actual_ bank robbery next. I always thought that was a bad thing, but now that Knapp has explained that I _am_ a bad person…
One of the loud arguments in favor of copyright is that without it, "people will use my idea". The implicit assumption is that people will use the idea _to_make_a_profit_.
What happens instead is that those who do copy the materials and ideas make the original artist more popular. The author is read by those who would not have otherwise known of the works. The popularity of "fan fiction" builds on the themes, demonstrating that the original was not merely satisfying, but inspiring.
The lack of copyright does not mean no legal protections. There is the very real crime of fraud, of claiming to have invented something that one did not invent. No one claims to have written a Shakespeare play even when they create a variation such as "Shakespeare In Love".
At the same time, Disney uses copyright to take what were "public domain" stories such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and lock them down so that it becomes prohibitive to make one's own variation on the original story.
The greatest enemy of a creator is obscurity. Not free advertising.
"So NOT CONTINUING to write books (that people still download several hundred times a month, years after first release) and stopping to do something else that pays the bills is morally equivalent to bank robbery. Thank you for that clarification."
No need for thanks, since that's not a clarification of mine but rather a distortion of my claim by you.
‘never mind the words I had to _invent_…)
Too bad for you ‘cuz I own each and every letter of the alphabet. See you court, bud!
""Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if
[…]
[T]hey’re equivalent to noting that I can’t make money as a bank robber unless the banks are required to leave their vaults unlocked."
—
So NOT CONTINUING to write books (that people still download several hundred times a month, years after first release) and stopping to do something else that pays the bills is morally equivalent to bank robbery. Thank you for that clarification."
No. First of all, your abbreviated quote makes it look like the antecedent of "They're" in the second sentence is the word "Creators" from the first sentence. But actually, the antecedent is the phrase "consequential arguments" from a sentence you did not quote. This point of grammar is worth mentioning because the way you phrase it would make one believe Mr. Knapp was judging creators, not logical arguments. He did not say that wanting to get reimbursed for your literary work is morally equivalent to bank robbery; he said getting reimbursed via the monopoly guarantee of copyright is logically equivalent to getting money from the monopoly-esque rule of an open vault for a robber. I'm not sure if I totally agree, or even fully understand that comparison, but it is kind of interesting.
Perhaps more importantly, and probably unintentionally, what I believe Mr. Knapp implied was this:
If you think "we should make laws (of copyright to guarantee a writer gets money) so that writers can get what they want BECAUSE WHAT THEY WANT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO BASE OUR RULES ON,"
then that is logically equivalent to saying "we should make rules (to leave bank vaults open and guarantee a robber money) so that robbers can get what they want, BECAUSE WHAT THE WANT IS MOST IMPORTANT THING TO BASE OUR RULES ON,"
But it is not a question of what people want, it is a question of what is good and what people's property rights are. Mr. Knapp has made the important point that if you want to defend intellectual property, it is ridiculous to do it on grounds of what people want and what they might do if they don't get what they want. Intellectual property must find another argument for its horrid, continued existence.
One of the loud arguments in favor of copyright is that without it, "people will use my idea".
Since copyright protects, not ideas, but only specific implementations of particular ideas, your statement is ignorant nonsense. Which, unfortunately, is par for the course among emanations coming from anti-IP fanatics.
Mr. Knapp should take some courses in logic. He apparently thinks that if he can cite person A who did not go broke, though he did not rely on copyright protection, and person B who did the same, and, hey, a whole bunch of other people, too numerous to mention, that this magically proves that nobody needs protection.
And the people who did go broke without protection for their creations? How many are there? Mr. Knapp does not know, and obviously does not care.
In case it's not clear what point I'm making (when it comes to anti-IP fanatics, clear thinking never seems to be a strong point), suppose I identified the worse crime-ridden city in America and found person A who managed to walk from one end to the other, unarmed, without getting robbed or killed. And, lo and behold, here's another person who did it! And by golly, there are SO many others, too numerous to mention, who did the same thing. Therefore, QED, nobody needs to be armed to walk through dangerous crime-ridden areas. Right, Knapp?
JdL,
I'd be happy to take a class in logic. But I'd hope to see you sitting in the seat next to me.
Here is the logic:
– The consequentialist pro-IP proposition I am arguing against is the proposition that people will not create new works (songs, stories, etc.) unless they receive monopoly 'rights' in reproduction of those works.
– Many people (Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, et. al) created such works before they received such protections (which only became prevalent in and after the 18th century);
– People (L. Neil Smith, Nine Inch Nails, Louis CK, et. al) continue to create works under circumstances in which such protections are unimportant to the profitability of the work;
– QED, the proposition in question is false.
I'd address the logic of your analogies … but they seem to lack any.