Tag: Against Intellectual Property

The Minnesota Pirate Party

I’ve made my views on intellectual property well known at this point. Due to these views I was contacted by a friend who asked me if I wanted to participate in starting a Minnesota chapter of the Pirate Party. For those of you who aren’t aware the Pirate Party isn’t a unified organization but a loose knit affiliation of mostly political parties that focus on civil liberties, direct democracy, and reforming intellectual property laws. Being an anarchist of the individualist persuasion I don’t give a shit about direct democracy (or any kind of democracy for that matter) but I am a big fan of civil liberties and an even bigger fan of abolishing intellectual property laws. In addition to my desire to abolish intellectual property laws I’m also a fan of beer, which I was promised will play a major part in the Minnesota Pirate Party.

Obviously I’m not going to involve myself in the political side of things but I like the people starting this group and the offer sounds like a lot of fun. I’ll post more as we get the groundwork laid out but I thought I would let you all know that the Pirate Party is coming to Minnesota and, if I have any say in the matter, will be bringing the message of abolishing intellectual property with it.

Another Demonstration of the Absurdity of Intellectual Property

Even though intellectual property is going the way of the dinosaurs the state continues its attempt prevent the inevitable. This week one of the state’s many courts ruled that you can’t legally sell digital music files that you’ve purchased unless you’re given permission by the copyright holder:

A court ruling has put the kibosh on reselling digital media.

In a lawsuit between Universal Music Group’s Capitol Records and MP3 reseller ReDigi, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan has sided with the record label and said that reselling songs bought on iTunes, Amazon, or other digital music venues is akin to copyright infringement.

“The court grants Capitol’s motion for summary judgment on its claims for ReDigi’s direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of its distribution and reproduction rights,” Judge Sullivan wrote in a summary judgment filed Saturday. “The court also denies ReDigi’s motion in its entirety.”

This ruling brings with it some interesting ramifications. Intellectual property, if you can call it property, is unique in the way it is created. Most property, under the laws of the United States, is created when somebody labors to produce something. If you use raw metal and wood to create a hammer the resulting hammer is legally considered your property. Since it is legally recognized as your property you are able to utilize, sell, or give it. Since money, at least to a point, is considered your property you are able to trade it to another person in exchange for their property. Intellectual property doesn’t follow these guiding principles.

How is intellectual property created? Most people probably believe that intellectual property is created when an idea is created. If you create a song is that song legally your property? No. That song only becomes your property when you tell the state about it. The state has a monopoly on granting copyrights and patents, the only recognized mechanisms of creating intellectual property. If you don’t tell the state about your idea you can’t claim it as intellectual property. However, once the state recognizes your idea you gain legal control over everybody who learns about your idea. This is where the ultimate absurdity occurs, intellectual property requires legally recognized control over the minds of others. If you, or somebody else, tells me about your idea I cannot choose to forget it. The human brain absorbs knowledge whether we want it to or not. After learning about your idea I am not legally allowed to use that knowledge. If, after hearing the song you created, I recreated that same song you could bring a lawsuit against me for violating your intellectual property.

The above mentioned court case demonstrates this fact perfectly. Copying a digital music file is nothing more than an act of telling another about that song. Even though the knowledge of that song is forever in the listener’s head he is restricted from telling others about it. This is why the court ruling makes sense under intellectual property laws. Selling an MP3 doesn’t transfer knowledge of the song, it merely tells another person about the song. The absurdity lies in the fact that, legally, a person who hears a song is not allowed to tell another about that song unless the copyright holder gives the seller permission. In other words when you hear a copyrighted song you, without any say in the matter, are now partially owned by the copyright holder. You are no longer legally allowed to express all of your thoughts to other people, even if you took no action to acquire the copyrighted idea (you may have involuntarily heard the song while you were at a restaurant, party, or bar).

If one accepts intellectual property as legitimate they necessarily accept a legal ability for one person to own, at least in part, another person.

Beginning Tomorrow Unlocking Your Phone Will Again be Illegal

Here’s a question to ponder for a moment, is your cell phone yours? You paid for it, you pay for the plan that makes it useful, you have it in your possession, and you store your personal data on it so obviously it’s yours, right? Wrong. Your cell phone belongs to the state, which is why, beginning tomorrow, you could be kidnapped and locked in a cage for unlocking the phone in your pocket:

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out.

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.

Unlocking a phone frees it from restrictions that keep the device from working on more than one carrier’s network, allowing it run on other networks that use the same wireless standard. This can be useful to international travellers who need their phones to work on different networks. Other people just like the freedom of being able to switch carriers as they please.

How could the act of unlocking “your” cell phone be illegal? In the name of defending the legal fiction of intellectual property the state passed a law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which made it a criminal act to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM). In 2009 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was able to get an exemption in the DMCA for unlocking cell phones but those exemptions must be renewed periodically and the state apparently has no desire to renew such an exemption. Just remember that you live in a free country where the right to property is guaranteed by the Constitution. Oh, and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

The Slow Death of Intellectual Property

I’ve haven’t had time to write about the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz but his death demonstrated much of what is wrong with business models that rely on intellectual property. Aaron Swartz committed suicide while facing a potential 35 years in prison for the act of “stealing” electronic academic journals for the purpose of making them publicly available, for free, to everybody. I put the term stealing into quotation marks because I don’t believe what Aaron did qualifies as theft. Theft implies that another person was deprived of something. If I steal your car you are deprived of the use of your car. Aaron’s act of “theft” didn’t deprive anybody of those journals as they were still available to subscribers of Journal Storage (JSTOR).

Why does the state enact such harsh punishment for intellectual property violations? Because intellectual property lobbyists have invested a great deal of money in getting strong intellectual property laws enacted and the state takes care of its customers. People seldom stop to consider the fact that the state has customers and most people who consider this fact mistakenly believe that the people, that is to say you and me, are the state’s customers. In reality the state’s customers are those who purchase protection from the state. Lobbyists are in the business of buying such protection. Walt Disney, the Recording Industry Association of American, and the Motion Picture Association of American are examples of the state’s intellectual property customers. They purchase intellectual property laws through campaign contributions, giving former state agents cushy jobs as lobbyists or advisers, and other benefits to those comprising the state. In exchange the state grants those entities mafia-like protection. Anybody caught violating the intellectual property lobbyist’s laws can find themselves the victims of kidnapping, extortion, assault, and even murder. Unfortunately for intellectual property lobbyists their business model, which relies entirely on purchased intellectual property laws, is dying and the Internet is its killer.

In order to succeed a business model must be built around scarce goods. This is why nobody has tried building a business model around selling ice to Eskimos or air. Eskimos are surrounded by ice so they have little incentive to buy it and air is all around us so we have little incentive to buy it. The Internet has made things like music, literature, and movies superabundant, that is to say they are no longer scarce goods. Once a song, book, or movie is posted online it literally becomes infinitely reproducible. Intellectual property lobbyists have tried to create artificial scarcity through the purchase of intellectual property laws but to little avail. Even increasing punishments for violating intellectual properly laws has failed to create the lobbyists’ desired scarcity. The death of intellectual property is inevitable and businesses based on intellectual property will either adapt or die themselves.

Sadly many people fail to see the inevitability of intellectual property’s death so individuals like Aaron Swartz will continue to face the state’s violence for some time. What makes matters more depressing is the fact that intellectual property laws aren’t necessary. Just as the Internet has killed intellectual property it has empowered the producers of art. Bands, authors, and movie producers no longer need the assistance of the record, publishing, and movie industries in order to reach their audiences. With a little additional creativity a band, author, or movie producer can still make money off of their art, they just need to change their business model. Kickstarter is an example of a potential new business model for creative individuals. Once an idea has been made public it becomes superabundant but it remains scarce so long as the originator keeps his or her mouth shut. Consider an author. An author could release a title for free and make any future titles pend on whether or not they receive enough donates from a service such as Kickstarter. The first title would be used to build an audience who would fund future titles. The same business model would work for bands and movie producers. In fact the movie Iron Sky was heavily funded in such a manner.

The sooner businesses relying on intellectual property come to terms with the death of their business models the sooner tragedies like what happened to Aaron Swartz will stop. There is no reason state violence is necessary for creative individuals to make money and the fact that violence is still used in order to profit creative individuals demonstrates an ill in our society.

Opposing the Claim that Expensive Research Won’t Occur Without Intellectual Property

One of the issues many branches of libertarianism disagree on is intellectual property. Some branches of libertarianism, such as constitutional libertarianism, believe that intellectual property is just while others branches of libertarianism, such as anarchism, oppose the idea of intellectual property. Even anarcho-capitalists can’t agree entirely on the topic. Murray Rothbard believed certain forms of intellectual property, specifically copyrights, were valid if they took shape in the form of contractual agreements between a producer and a consumer. Objectivism is another school that generally advocates of very strong intellectual property rights.

I belong to the school that oppose intellectual property in all forms. It is my belief that enforcing property rights can only be justified in the case of scarce resources. If a resource is infinitely reproducible one has no justifiable claim to use force to protect it. Ideas by their very nature are infinite resources. Consider the difference between an idea and an apple. An apple is a scarce resource in as much as it can only be enjoyed by a fixed number of people. Once an apple has been consumed it is gone forever. Ideas are not scarce resources as they can be enjoyed by an infinite number of people. If I have an idea and tell you that idea I do not lose that idea, instead we both have that idea.

Many people support intellectual property for, what they believe to be, pragmatic reasons. One of the most common arguments I hear in favor of intellectual property involves the cost of developing new technologies. Advocates of intellectual property will claim that producers won’t risk the large expense involved in developing new technologies if they aren’t guaranteed some kind of exclusive period to recoup their costs. This argument is most often made in regards to intellectual property laws regarding medical technologies. If these advocates are correct pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t invest the resources necessary to develop new drugs without the monopoly guarantees patents offer. This argument is historically unprecedented.

Intellectual property is a fairly modern concept. If advocates of intellectual property were correct, if producers were entirely unwilling to invest resources to develop new technologies without the temporary monopoly granted by intellectual property laws, then the human race would never have developed the wheel. In fact many technologies we take for granted today were developed at a time when intellectual property laws didn’t exist. When I point this out advocates of intellectual property are quick to claim that such an argument is invalid because modern technologies, such as new pharmaceuticals, require many more resources to develop. Such refutations are the result of historical ignorance.

Students of viking history have likely heard of Ulfberht. Ulfberht was the name inscribe on many high quality viking age swords and is believed to be the name of the blacksmith who created them. Today one would believe that producing a sword is a rather simple affair, which is true. Back in the viking age producing a sword was a difficult task that required a great deal of time. There is a good video created by Google engineer Niels Provos that demonstrates how viking swords were created:

The primary difference between Provos’s method and the methods used during the viking age is that the blacksmiths of the viking age didn’t have access to powered tools. Instead of a power hammer blacksmiths of the viking age had to rely on manually operated hammers. What took Provos a few days to complete would have taken a viking age blacksmith far more time, even with several people under his employ. Producing swords was an extremely time and energy consuming affair. But Ulfberht’s swords weren’t merely swords, they were superior swords. Most swords of the era were made from an inferior steel:

Medieval blacksmiths in Europe didn’t make slag-free steel, because their fires weren’t hot enough to fully liquefy the iron. In modern times, metals are melted at temperatures over 3,000 degrees. This separates out the slag and allows more carbon to be mixed in evenly. But in the Viking era, carbon could only be introduced incidentally, mainly through the coal in the fire, and the only way to remove the slag from the metal was to try to hammer out the impurities with each strike.

Of the thousands of European swords from the Middle Ages that have been found, all were thought to have been made from this inferior steel, until Williams analyzed the Ulfberht.

One of the things that set the Ulfberht apart from other swords of the day was the use of superior metal, steel:

Produced only from about 800 to 1,000 A.D., this Viking sword was made from a pure steel, not seen again in Europe for nearly 1,000 years.

This high-tech weapon of its time was inscribed with the mysterious word “Ulfberht.” Carried by only a few elite warriors, the Ulfberht represented the perfect marriage of form and function in the chaos that was a Viking battle.

Medieval Europe did not have the ability to produce steel. The steel used to produce Ulfberht’s swords came from many thousands of miles away:

But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran. The tests at Teddington proved the genuine Ulfberht swords had a phenomenally high carbon content, three times that of the fakes, and half again that of modern carbon steel.

Today it seems inconceivable that creating a sword could compare to creating new pharmaceuticals. With our modern technology creating swords is fairly trivial and the task has been mostly automated. Back in the viking age creating a sword was a difficult task that could only be performed by individuals with a great deal of knowledge and skill. The secret of Ulfberht’s swords lied in the material, which had to be imported from thousands of miles away. That metal, also created in a time when intellectual property laws didn’t exist, would have been expensive and likely difficult to work with. Shaping crucible steel into a sword would have required a great deal of time and specialized knowledge in working with that particular steel. Combining the expense of importing the steel, the time needed to gain the necessary knowledge to work with the steel, and the time and physical labor required to shape the raw steel into a sword lead to a product that only the wealthiest warriors could afford.

Writing off historical technological progresses as easily achieved when compared to modern technological progresses show a lack of historical knowledge. Crafting a better sword required a massive investment, one that was undertaken in spite of intellectual property laws not existing. When an advocate of intellectual property claims that technological advancements wouldn’t occur without intellectual property laws you can kindly inform them of their error by pointing out historical events that contradict their claims. If they claim that those historical events are irrelevant because modern technological advancements require far more resources than historical technological advancements did you can kindly inform them of their error by explaining the processes required to achieve those historical technological advancements.