All Property Is Intellectual: Real Estate & The 62 Cent Cracker

Except...
I find your use of the loaf of bread analogy interesting. I am reminded of a man that fed a rather large audience by infinitely reproducing a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. I'm not particularly religious, so I'll have to read that bit again, but it is an interesting parallel.

The fact with Nature is that offering a reward is a great motivator; rats press buttons to get food, dogs sit up for table scraps, etc. If you don't offer the reward, a few rats will still learn to press buttons and a few dogs will still learn to sit up, but on the whole very little progress will be made. We are wired this way by Nature too, except that its more than just food for us humans. We learned to think abstractly so we like to acquire wealth which can be converted to food, shelter, or luxuries.

Everything started with an idea. Man did not stumble upon a round bit of stone with an log in the center and a set of instructions on how to use the wheel. It started as a simple round log. The idea was refined by others and is still being refined today. No where in any holy book does it describe the gods as handing down the secrets of selective breeding to improve livestock or create super grains like emmer wheat. These ideas led to great rewards like the ability to move massive stones or the ability to feed a burgeoning population.

With improved communications, ideas could be spread more rapidly. Common languages allowed cavemen to physically spread an idea. Writing allowed the spread of idea through time and space. Printing allowed for consistency and even more widespread communications. Add the telephone, telegraph, and I can instantly tell a friend on the other side of the globe about my idea. Add radio, and TV, and you have nearly instant communications of ideas to groups of people. Now add the internet, and you have 2% of the world (and growing) able to instantly access your idea at any time: the permanency of writing, the consistency of print, and the instantaneousness of TV. All that’s left is the inclusion of one collective mind so everyone’s thoughts are instantly available to everyone else.

Am I doomed because Bell’s idea allows someone to instantly spread my idea to the world? Where did my reward go? What was my reward in the first place? Is wealth finite?

Ideas are not property

I think the extreme view that any information is inherently non-proprietary
just because it is information is simply a misperception of some new business
models that some industry players tried to push for. It seems to me that
"information wants to be free" slogan was actually coined in an effort to
market new business models that give away copyrighted information (like music)
freely and have revenue collection point somewhere else, but that slogan was
(and likely was intended to be) misunderstood as if absolutely all information
is inherently non-proprietary, which would generally be wrong. Nevertheless, my
point is that generally it still possible to have something that is
inherently non-proprietary, and that ideas inherently, as well as by
decision, should not be allowed to become someone's property.

Anyway, I am glad that we understood each other.

Ideas are not property
It sounds like we actually agree with other on a lot of this, and that I misunderstood your use of the words "ideas" and "implementation". I agree with you that "ideas cannot be property, they are not patentable. But specific
implementation of ideas can perfectly be made property with copyright", in your sense that general ideas like passion can't and shouldn't be copyrighted, but a specific piece of passionate music by Mozart can be.

The distinction I'm making is simply between intellectual and physical property, and I'm challenging the idea held by some that all information, including any specific piece of music, should be free because of some inherent quality it has as information. I'm saying that we consciously decide what is property in all cases, and that we should decide consciously, not automatically. (And of course people should always be outside the category of property.)

Ideas are not property

I understand the way your thoughts flow. Yes, there is nothing inherent in
something that makes it property - it becomes property by decision. That is
true. But it is trivially true, because every concept that people have is by
decision. Acoustic waves become music only because we perceive it as music i.e.
by decision. Some musical subcultures perceive as music what others perceive as
irritating noise - it is all by decision. We can spread this way of thinking to
absolutely anything we have in our human universe. This absoluteness is what
actually "makes" this way trivial - trivial things are absolute. But, there is
good common words for this - "simplicity is worse than a theft" (you may know
it worded differently).

The non-trivial thing is WHAT we decide. And also, who those "we" who
decide. Let me explain. Following your argument, we can say that there is
nothing inherent in, say, ... human beings ... that makes them property -
humans become someone's property by decision. We actually had cultures in the
past, that treated humans as property (slaves) of other humans. The only reason
a human being become property is that we decide it's property. Say, in our
culture we've decided rightly or wrongly that having privately owned human
beings yields economic benefits for the many that outweigh the disadvantages to
some (guess who)... But is it the RIGHT decision to have humans as privately
owned property, even if it would yield economic benefits? Has United States
abolished slavery just because slavery stopped yielding economic benefits? Was
there civil war to abolish slavery just because North though there is no more
economic benefits out of it, even if South definitely though there is yet some
to extract. (This, actually, a very good analogy to understand current
out-of-control situation - someone still want to extract huge economic benefits
for themselves at the expense of society out turning ideas into property, and
nothing but "civil war" can stop them.) And would you, personally, agree to
become someone's property, even not inherently - just by decision, just because
it yields economic benefits... I hope not.

This leads us to conclusion that there is something, yes, inherent in WHAT
we decide, that precludes us from making human beings a commercial property.
Put differently, there is something inherent in human beings that precludes us
from making them private property. Absolutely same way, there is something
inherent in ideas, that precludes us from making them private property (with
patents). Same way we strive to protect our freedom, freedom of speech and a
like - there is something inherent in all this...

This is it, ideas cannot be property, they are not patentable. But specific
implementation of ideas can perfectly be made property with copyright. (In the
context of above argument, it is same to that humans cannot be slaves, but can
perfectly be employees.) For example, specific Mozart symphony is the
implementation of musical ideas, say, passion (may be it is not well "timed"
example, but it doesn't matter). That implementation is copyrighted and Mozart
holds copyright on it. It is perfectly OK, cause it makes private property only
very specific implementation of music idea, and humans are perfectly free to
implement music idea of passion their own way, again and again, as they like.
But issuing patent on music idea of passion would prevent people from writing
another symphony that "implements" music idea of passion, and only someone in
possession of patent has "right" to write passionate music - definitely it
automatically creates badly smelling monopoly and monopolistic profit
opportunities that create covert efforts for such patentability at the first
place. Patent on music idea of passion is actually a crime against humanity -
same way like turning humans into slaves, depriving of freedom, even if it is
"mere" freedom of speech, are also a crimes against humanity. But patents on
music ideas are exactly what patents on algorithms, software and business
methods all about. They attempt to turn entire idea, not specific
implementation of it, into someone's property. And, like slavery, it is
INHERENTLY and fundamentally bad thing.

In addition to being inherently and fundamentally bad thing, turning ideas
into private property (with patents) is also very harmful to society at large,
cause it kills innovation. But it is very beneficial to the few, at the expense
of society, and this is the only reason why it exists and even resists its
removal - those few make all they can (and they are mighty few) to preserve
their patented monopolies to earn abnormal profits at the expense of society.
Same way there was large resistance to abolishment of slavery - such a large
resistance that only war can overcame it.

Ideas are not property
Very interesting points. But it still seems to me that drawing a distinction between ideas and their implementation, or between ideas and physical objects, doesn't let us off the hook of having to decide consciously in each case what is private property and what isn't. The only reason a piece of land becomes property is that we decide it's property. We're not forced to do that - some other cultures have no privately owned land. But in our culture we've decided rightly or wrongly that having privately owned land yields economic benefits for the many that outwiegh the disadvantages to some.

Similarly with ideas. The US and other governments have decided to allow private control over the right to copy new ideas (copyright) because it rewards innovators, and innovation leads to economic growth, a benefit for the many. But there's nothing inherent in an idea that makes it property, just like there's nothing inherent in land that makes it property - in both cases it's an intellectual decision. These governments believe innovation would go down if an innovator's new ideas immediately became free, since the innovator would be taking on risk with no reward, and there seems to be no economic system where that works - what people do when they can't earn a reward is to minimize their risk.

It's clear to me that some kinds of ideas should be free, such as ideas about what the government is doing, or how music theory works. And I agree that there should be reasonable limits on copyright protection, such as expiration dates, and restrictions on copyrighting public domain material such as fairy tales, as Disney seems to have done. But all of these things are decisions that we have to make based on what we value. I don't see any absolute quality in ideas or objects that will make the decisions for us.

The argument is often made that you can take information without depleting the original, unlike the situation with physical property. But I think this is based on a confusion. In both cases the value of the property depends on society's agreement that it has value. If someone takes a chunk of gold away from me, I do have less gold. But in a culture that sees no special value in gold, it would make no difference. (I might even pay them to do it, say to get that yellow rock out of my garden.) With a new idea, we've decided on copyright as a way to reward innovators - it's an artificial decision, but so is the value assigned to gold. If someone copies my new idea, they're not depleting my idea, but they are depleting my copyright, where the economic value is.

In a few cases, like food, shelter and medicine, the value of physical objects does seem to be inherent, since life depends on them. But even here, if we notice that by rewarding innovation through copyright we'll end up with more food, better shelter and better medicine, and that therefore fewer people will die, then we're not many steps removed from that inherent value. Should we decide instead that we won't have copyright because information by its very nature is free? Or is there a system in which all information is free and under which we also get the benefit of lots of innovation? If there is, I haven't heard of it but would like to.

It seems to me that with property we're always led back into having to decide what we think is the best solution under our values and under the circumstances. If we decide that all recorded music should be free for example, we may expand its availability, at least in the short term. But we will also be depriving many professional songwriters and composers of the ability to make a living (performers, if they're young and healthy enough, could earn a reduced living by performing). Such people have taken on the risk of trying to become expert at what they do, and the good ones do it much better than lay people can. If they can't make a living at it, they'll have to stop. It could be that society decides that's OK, but my point is that it's still a decision.

Ideas are not property

Ideas cannot be intellectual property. There is a manipulation of
concepts here. Yes, the concept of property, like absolutely any concept under
the Sun, is intellectual, notional - that's trivially true. But reverse is
trivially not true - intellectual activity CANNOT be made property, obviously.
If A, then B is in no way means that if B, then A, but it is seductive to
revert things when nobody is looking.

We should make a distinction here, cause things are often deliberately mixed
to be able to "catch fish in a mud waters". One can perfectly hold copyright on
work of art or specific software implementation of underlying ideas, and charge
for using them. It would be grossly unfair to deny people right to use their
work the way they like. But one absolutely should not be able to lock
away ideas. Imagine a sign that tells: "Notice. Ideas that you try to think or
implement are privately owned. Please, stay away from those ideas" - this is
exactly what patents on software, algorithms and business methods all about.
Turning ideas into someone's property is actually a crime against humanity.
Society that turns ideas into someone's property is totalitarian by definition.

The issue of evil big corporations was touched in the discussion. Actually,
of course, not sheer size is evil. The true evil thing that big evil
corporations enjoy is the monopoly. Big corporations are evil, if they use
their sheer size to destroy competition from small innovative companies and
individuals. In general, it is well known from economic theory that market
economy is plagued with a number of imperfections. Most dangerous imperfection
is that self-interested economic agents are constantly try to build monopolies
to lock away profits for themselves and keep most (small) competitors at bay.
They use every means, including covert ones and fake propaganda, to achieve
monopolies and would succeed in that, unless face strong opposition from public
in general.

All current buzz around intellectual property has objective reasons.
Currently, big corporations, with help from self-interested legal profession
and organizations of intellectual property, extensively and increasingly abuse
intellectual property law, in particular special legal devices called software,
algorithm and business methods patents, to turn ideas into their legal property
to block competition and keep emerging high-technology markets for themselves
only (the plain greed motivation), and wage propaganda war to deceive public
opinion and sell themselves as "innovators". Patents are, in essence,
artificial monopolies on ideas. The public wealth in general suffers as a
result, cause innovation in fact gets killed by patented monopolies. This is
where marginal self-interest of few large corporations goes against interest of
society. These things are well known in economic theory. Now things have got so
out-of-control, that it is obviously the time for general public to intervene
and rectify market imperfections accumulated so far i.e. reform patents low and
abolish patentability of software, algorithms and business methods, at least.
But even more important, ideas should NOT be someone's property (e.g. should
not be patentable) for deep philosophical reasons of freedom and humanity,
similar to freedom of speech and a like.

Ideas are not property.

IP is an idea
IP is something that was for some time increasing its grip on society. All knowledge was turning more and more into property. The big achievement of Open Content projects like Wikipedia is that they destroy much of the opportunity to make information IP.

Universities are also making more of their research open to everyone like recently many of the Dutch universities did.

The same thing is happening with images; Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a project started in October it has already 123.000+ digital files and increasingly it will allow kids to illustrate their projects without "breaking the law".

If anything the trent towards open content is growing. The technology to make content IP will increasingly turn people away from an industry that does not serve culture because if it was, the industry would take the responisibility to maintain the content that is still copyrighted and preserve it for the future.

Thanks,
GerardM

Except...
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on some of this (e.g. IP is itself abuse), although in many areas my position is fluid. I'm exploring these ideas from a skeptical point of view, and am not committed to one opinion - I'm skeptical because I don't think we know enough yet.

I would note though that the world has largely been off the gold standard for a while, with the value of currencies determined by economic strength and government fiat. Gold is used as a hedge. But the argument goes on over whether gold should be the standard, and I think it partly reflects the argument we've been having here.

I hope Creative Commons works, I just don't think it's been proven yet.

Except...
Sure, a keyboard would be worthless 200 years ago, but that's why no one produced or distributed them at that time. I really don't see what your point is. You may not have to think about it much, but paper money and credit cards are backed up by gold or silver. Currencies without this backing, as pure IP, fail immediately.

I did not intend to imply that taking information without permission was acceptable (this is a fairly typical strawman argument); secrets can still be kept using encryption. Once you've shared something that exists purely as an idea or data, you've surrendered control of it.

If the concept of mass consumption of your work doesn't excite you, then you aren't really an artist, per se, in that you aren't trying to communicate an idea, emotion, or point of view. If you want to make things for money, you should probably choose a medium that doesn't lend itself to perfect duplication.

IP is itself abuse. When is an idea original? At what point does it move from being derivative to being just original enough to merit protection?

Making decisions based on impacts is the definition of ends justifying the means.

The music and movie industries have been very successful in vilifying free content channels by branding them as being used only for piracy. The open source movement in particular, plus Creative Commons, and other works (Penny Arcade, for a time) have proven donation-patronage works.

Except...
I think in the case of basic staples like food and shelter, concrete items have intrinsic value, but beyond that it quickly becomes IP-driven. If we were to restrict value to concrete items, wouldn't we have to go back to a barter economy, or at least gold coins vs paper currency and credit cards? If so, we'd have to find a way to greatly reduce the population in a hurry because the economy would shrink so much.

I don't think that these distinctions are arbitrary. We find a good pen and some paper valuable because of a whole structure of other decisions that have been made, while someone living in a non-literate society would find them worthless. The fact that they're physical objects doesn't seem to be decisive - valuable in one context, not in another. If I follow you right, it seems to imply that I could just take (maybe in exchange for what I thought was a fair donation) anything that happened to be IP, like someone's plans for a new invention, or a company's confidential marketing strategy, or a songwriter's new song. But if they had baked a loaf of bread it would be wrong to do that? That's what is striking me as arbitrary. It may be that there's no help for it, that we can't help but go where the technology leads, but if so I think that's a problem in itself.

I was excited for a while about the fact that I could give someone a copy of my digital file and I wouldn't have lost anything, and I think it's good and often smart to voluntarily share files. But as it happens I think that something is lost if anyone can just take a copy - the more copies, the less my file or, more importantly, its content, is worth. If my job is creating the content of the file, or if my company depends on the content, copying the file may cause a problem.

I'm not sure I see why IP will always be abused. This is the idea I'm exploring - lately this kind of argument is sounding religious or at least essentialist to me. Similarly with large corporations. I don't have problem with them because they're large per se, though I do see that because they're large they pose extra risks because it's more serious if some of them do bad things.

I'm not sure I see how there's an ends-justifies-the-means problem. It seems to me that in discussing the design of an economy, jobs and economic impacts are pretty much what we're talking about.

The donations model is one I like in theory and have been following, but I suspect if it had worked well so far we'd see Tower and others trying it in their stores.

Except...
I'm not sure what reason we have to believe that this is merely a case of perception. Concrete items have intrinsic value: raw materials, construction and distribution. Given an existing loaf of bread, you cannot solve world hunger by making copies of it; giving it to anyone else deprives you of the item--this is the distinction. If you have a video file of a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech that could positively impact millions by offering it via a BitTorrent, that can be shared, at no cost, without depriving you of the data.

Concern about jobs or economic impacts is an ends-justifies-the-means argument, and is also an excellent rationale for legalizing professional killers (they need to make a living!).

Arbitrary distinctions are stupid. Are tomatoes fruit or vegetable? It depends who you ask: a lawyer or a botanist. Blue Man Group: musicians or performance artists? Treating different data sources differently based on subjective criteria is similarly troubling.

IP will always be abused, and always seems to find its way into the hands of large corporations.

With schemes like Amazon Donations, PayPal Donations, SourceForge, and others allows patronage on a much more democratic scale, encouraging future development on merits of past successes.

Except...
But I'm beginning to think the characteristic of being capable of infinite duplication may not be as salient as it at first appeared. I think it may still have a mystical aura about it, like electricity did when it first came along and people thought it would be good for everything from curing disease to executing prisoners, just because it was so different from everything else at the time.

Economic growth over the centuries has been tied to the development of IP, from the design of digging tools to digital technology. It seems to be better for some kinds of information to be free (because we decide it is) such as information about what the government is doing on our behalf, or how music theory works. But some people make their living, and contribute to economic growth, by coming up with original information. If no IP product should have economic value just because it's IP, I'm not clear on what the realistic model is for a healthy economy.

So I'd suggest, in the case of musicians and other artists in digital media, that it's up to us to decide if we think they should be paid for their work and how, and it may not be something decisive in the technical nature of the medium. The choice whether they get paid a few cents each for (potentially) many copies of a work vs. getting paid a larger amount one time seems to me to come down to a decision.

Although the former model is open to abuse, as when large IP-holders tie up copyrights through many extensions, for many decades, I think it can also be democratizing, in that the pre-sale value of copy #1 is zero, and any further value ultimately depends on how many ordinary people like the work, as opposed to whether or not a prince or a duke likes the work.

At least that's how it looks today...

Except...
The analogy fails because the landscape and the cracker-experience cannot be infinitely and precisely duplicated.

IP is a new concept (historically) for people who have no moral problem charging over and over for the same work. Since antiquity, artists have had to prove themselves worthy of a patron.