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Part Three

Patent Absurdity and Tyranny of the Mind (Part Three)

The response to my commentary (from the Autonomist’s Notebook) on Intellectual Property which I posted on the SOLO forum was very interesting. I have selected the best responses and my replies to share, because this very long discussion covers every aspect of the questions of patents and copyrights.

Because this discussion is long, I have divided this article into three sections. This is the final section; these are links to the Part One and Part Two.

My response to MS.

First, you do not have to worry about patents and copyrights going away. There are too many people with a vested interest in that particular coercive monopolistic scheme.

Secondly, I do not intend to change your mind, and am only answering the questions in the interest of clarity about the issue and for the sake of those who really would be interested in both sides.

To my statement: You ought to be able to tell me exactly what the inventor or creator had before the supposed, “parasitic theft,” they longer have afterward the “theft.” … you answered: What I had before the parasitic theft was the exclusive right to the use and disposal of my property – my design. What I no longer have – after your unauthorized use of my design – is that exclusive right to the use and disposal of my design.

But that begs the question. It is whether or not there is such a thing as, “intellectual property,” for one to have any kind of right to that is being debated. In reality, you never have the “exclusive right to use and dispose of an idea.”

But, you press on: What is stolen is the exclusivity – which means: the ownership – which means: the property. Non-eclusive ownership is a contradiction in terms. If you have no right to determine who may or may not occupy your home, then in what sense do you own it? Will you be consoled by the fact that your are still free to go inside, provided there is room among the strangers? And if the strangers push you out, will you be satisfied with the explanation, “Hey, there is risk in every investment, there is no guarantee of ownership.”

You again start by begging the question, assuming that an idea can be property to prove it is property. That has not yet been established.

Both this example of the house and your earlier one about the toll road ignore the difference between tangible physical property and intangible ideas. No one can use your idea without your permission. To do that, they would have to get into your mind. This seems to be the thing you cannot understand. The correct analogy would be this: if you have a toll road and your neighbor, having property adjacent to yours, thinks you are charging too much for the use of your road, builds a road parallel to yours and charges less, by your view, the government ought to prevent him from using his property as he chooses, because you thought of it first.

It is those who want to enforce so-called “intellectual-property” rights that violate people’s real property rights. There is no reason in the world why two or more people cannot arrive at a similar or even identical design idea entirely independently. (In fact, this very frequently happens.) If one of them obtains a patent, they can use force to prevent the others from using their own ideas. That is a true violation of property rights and the right of every individual to use their own ideas in any way they choose.

There is a very important philosophical principle violated by the idea of “intellectual property.” When an individual has an idea, it is his idea. Ideas, like any other kind of knowledge, cannot be transferred from one mind to another. When teaching others, the best one can to is explain, illustrate, and demonstrate what one is intending to teach, but it is not possible to put the concepts and ideas into someone’s else’s mind. The learner must use their own mind to understand and comprehend what is being explained and illustrated, and once they have understood it, the concepts and ideas are theirs won by their own intellectual effort.

How someone comes to have the ideas they have is irrelevant to the fact that whatever ideas they have, they are their own ideas. Any ideas an individual has is exactly the same idea, requiring the same amount of intellectual effort, regardless of whether the individual is the only person in the world to have that idea, the first person to have that idea, or the last person to have that idea. The attempt to make ideas, “property,” on the basis of when someone first announced they had an idea is totally arbitrary and without any factual (or moral) basis.

Ideas are property only in one sense; all the ideas any individual has are that individual’s property, no matter where, how, or when they developed those ideas. If it is possible to violate the rights an individual to use their own ideas, it is patents and copyrights that do it.

Patents and copyrights can be transferred, sold, and inherited. But if a patent or copyright is the, “idea,” without resorting to Platonic “real” universals, an idea has no existence apart from the rational minds that think them. Ideas do not have physical ontological existence, ideas only have psychological existence.

What is actually transferred, sold, or inherited is a government protected monopoly to produce a certain product. Ideas are non-transferrable, and cannot be property.

There was another response by MS, to which I responded as follows:

We’re not going to agree. You have made good arguments, I think all the arguments that are usually made in support of patents and copyrights. You, and most others are convinced by those arguments. You are in the majority. Be satisfied.

You are not going to convince me, and I have no intention of convincing you.

I have one comment to make after I respond to this one thing you said:

You have yet to show any reason why products made with little mental effort – like the carving of a toothpick – do qualify as property, but products requiring an enormous mental effort – like the development of a design for a powered airplane – do not.

Property is the product of man’s efforts – both mental and physical. When my effort creates a new design, it is MINE.

This is more of what I originally criticized. It is Marxism. Neither the value or nature of anything is determined by the amount of work or effort, mental or physical that produced it. The value of anything is determined objectively by how well it meets the purpose it is produced to meet, and market-wise, by how many people are willing to exchange how much value for it. The nature of a thing is determine by its identity, what it is, and no law and no way of looking at things changes what a thing is. An idea is purely conceptual with no physical qualities. It cannot be property.

I cannot make out what you mean by, “design.” If you mean the idea for how a thing should be made, such as what shape it should have, that is not physical, and cannot be property. If you mean, after the idea is implemented by someone, and the resulting product has the shape conceived in the idea, the product itself is the property of whoever created it. The “shape,” itself is a quality, and does not exist except as a quality of an actual existent. The shape itself has no independent existence, and cannot be property.

I agree, When my effort creates a new design, it is MINE. And you are free to use it in any way you choose. But when you choose to use it as an argument for initiating force against someone else to prevent them from using their own ideas, that is immoral. I will never accept any argument for the initiation of force, which is what all arguments for so-called intellectual property are.

MS makes one more attempt, to which I answered:

You said: You are continuing to argue with a straw man. I did not say that the value of what I produce is a function of effort – I said that what I produce is my property.

Since I do not believe there is anything wrong with your reading comprehension, you must not be reading carefully. What I said was, “Neither the value or nature of anything is determined by the amount of work or effort, mental or physical that produced it.” No amount of work or effort can turn anything that is only an idea into something that can be possessed. An idea has no ontological existence, only psychological existence–that is why it is called, “intellectual,“property.

You say that some things I produce do qualify as property whereas other things I produce do not qualify as property.

Absolutely not. I say everything you produce is yours to use in any way you choose, including your ideas. You may even call your ideas your property, even though such property cannot be sold to, stolen by, or even shared with anyone else.

_You said that “so-called intellectual property” could not be property because an inventory of items before and after “taking it”, would show nothing missing. I showed that:__

1) Whether or not “items” are “missing” or “not missing” after an unauthorized use is not a valid criteria for determining property status. I gave the act of trespass as an example, and: 2) In fact, something is missing after an unauthorized use of property: the owner’s exclusive right to its use and disposal.

Well, you can’t have it both ways, either an “unauthorized use” does cause something to be missing or it doesn’t. In fact it does, even in the case of trespass. In the case of ideas, however, there is no way one can use someone else’s ideas. An individual can only think about, choose, and act, on their own ideas.

You responded with the straw man claim that I would prohibit a competing toll road. I showed why that was, in fact, nothing but a straw man.

The toll road analogy was yours. I modified it, supposing you would not resort to dropping the context of our discussion, which is intellectual property, for which the toll road was being used as an illustration of theft, by you. When I suggest a competing toll road, I assume you would understand toll roads were a hypothetical new idea, of which yours was original. Your disingenuous switching of contexts surprised and disappointed me.

You said that patents are unfair to co-inventors. I have explained why that is not the case.

Not to me you haven’t.

You said that patents have resulted in “thousands” of coercive monopolies. You produced two examples, both of which I refuted.

I mean by a coercive monopoly one in which only one individual or company produces a specific product because all others are prevented from producing that specific product by the threat of government coercive force. If that is not what a patent is for, if, after getting a patent, anyone else may merrily go about producing that same product, what the deuce are patents for?

Every patent is by definition a coercive monopoly, and there are not thousands of them, there are millions.

You said that since ideas are in one’s head, no one can steal them because no one can get into your head.

That’s right.

I have shown that ideas – developed into designs – most definitely have a physical existence and can be “stolen” in the form of unauthorized use.

The principle behind the fallacious idea of intellectual property is that ideas are property protected by patents and copyrights. If it is the ideas, “developed into designs,” that is, the drawings, schematics, formulas, and process descriptions on paper, or stored in computer memory you mean, if someone takes or uses your paper or computer stored, “design,” that would be unauthorized use. If someone looks up your patent at the patent office, or on line, and learns from that the idea from which you “developed your designs,” and then he use those ideas he learned to “develop his own designs,” he is not using anything but his own ideas and designs he developed, and no one has a moral right to use force to prevent him from doing so.

That arrangement of features, elements, details, etc. is what the Wright brothers produced. It is what they created. The Wrights figured out what had eluded all the others that were trying to fly. They developed an arrangement of features, elements and details – a design – to control the airplane in all three axis – pitch, yaw and roll. This was the key to flight – controlled flight. What they patented was what they produced: the design of a three-axis control system for airplanes.

Why is the design of this control system not property? What entitles someone like Glen Curtis to use it?

If Glen Curtis, or anyone else, understands the principle of a “three-axis control system,” and is able to design a plane using such a system, what entitles anyone to use force to prevent him from doing so? There is no moral justification for such use of force. It does not matter how, when, or where Mr. Curtis learned the principle.

You claim that intellectual property laws prevent others from using their own ideas. Which of his ideas was Curtis using when he copied the Wright’s control system.

If I learn something, I have to use my own mind to understand it, it does not matter what the source is from which I learn it. Once I have learned something, the concepts and ideas that constitute what I have learned are mine. You seem to be suggesting that anything anyone learns from anyone else is not, once they have learned, an idea they then possess. Is that what you mean?

Who is initiating the use of force? The Wright brothers, who wish to maintain the exclusive right to the use and disposal of their control system design – or Curtis, who wishes to profit from the Wright’s efforts?

Nothing is stopping the Wright brothers from the exclusive use of their control system design. If Mr. Curtis creates an identical design and uses it, it is his design; nothing is stopping him from using his design exclusively either. What a patent does, however, is prevent some people from using their designs by force. There is absolutely no rational grounds for concluding that two or more people using identical things is an abrogation of anyone’s property rights. No one has a right to violate anyone’s property rights, even if they learned to create their own property by watching you create yours.

I have answered every objection.

No comment.

Believe me, I understand that value is neither intrinsic nor subjective but rather objective.

But, you do not seem to understand that an existent’s nature is also objective, not something determined by government fiat.

MS makes one last attempt. I include it all, followed by my comments.

Let’s see if we can simplify this.

I said:

Why is the design of this control system not property? What entitles someone like Glen Curtis to use it?

You responded:

The point is that Curtis doesn’t have to “understand” anything. He doesn’t have to “design a plane using such a system”. Nor does he have to “learn the principle”. He simply gets a third party to purchase a Wright Flyer, he takes it into his shop and tells his workers, “Start building copies of this.” And then he starts taking orders.

That is reality. It is not fantasy or exaggeration. Even with intellectual property protection, it happens. Hence the number of infringement suits.

Do you believe that Curtis should be allowed to do what is described above: sheer, blatant copying of someone else’s creation?

My Response

You asked, Do you believe that Curtis should be allowed to do what is described above: sheer, blatant copying of someone else’s creation?

Well, of course! I know of no moral or physical law the prohibits “copying.” We make machines that have no other purpose. There can be no grounds whatsoever for preventing one from copying anything.

You said, He simply gets a third party to purchase a Wright Flyer, he takes it into his shop and tells his workers, “Start building copies of this.” And then he starts taking orders.

I have no idea why Curtis would get a “third party” to by the plane, he could just as well buy it himself; but, whether the plane is his own (because he bought it) or belongs to a third party (because they bought it), if he chooses to copy it or the third party is willing to let him copy it, it is their property to dispose of and use in any way they choose, bought and paid for, fare and square. Anyone who attempts to prevent them from using their property in any way they chose is violating their real property rights, not some government invented property rights that do not exist.

This series of discussions, I think, pretty well exhausts the principles of “intellectual property,” but for those who would like to explore the subject further, I would suggest the following links:

Anti-Copyright Essays and links on anti-intallectual property.

Infoshop.com A page critical of copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual property.

Intellectual Property Issues Large resource of links and information about inti-intellectual property.

Anti-Copyright Resources Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. – Thomas Jefferson. [From the Molinari Institute]

—Reginald Firehammer (5/19/04)

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