ars libertatis

Some Harvard professors are taking very seriously their “intellectual property rights” and have claimed copyright to the ideas that they spread in their classrooms. What prompted this was a website in which students posted their notes to help other students.

The professors have cracked down. It might have been enough to legislate against this behavior in particular. Instead, they wrapped their objection in the great fallacy of our age: the professor owns his ideas and they may not be spread without his permission.

This action has opened up a can of worms, and now other universities have taken up the puzzling question: how do you at once enforce intellectual property and uphold the ideal of a university, which is, after all, about teaching and spreading ideas to others?

The problem is a serious one that highlights the absurdity of the notion that an idea — infinitely reproducible and thereby not scarce, and also taught with the overt purpose of gaining adherents among students — can be somehow contained and restrained once it is unleashed. The only way to retain exclusive possession of an idea is never to share it with anyone.
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Another approach is the one taken by Harvard and, most explicitly, by the University of Texas, which has suggested that professors make the following contract with students:

My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.

You can make “no other use” of what you learn? Really? That sort of smashes the whole point of education, doesn’t it?¹

1. Jeffrey Tucker – If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others? [↩]

The state, through its IP laws, is bringing out the worst in most people. You can refuse to go along.

~ Jeffrey Tucker – Should you give away your precious IP?

Intellectual “property” (IP) is a sleeper issue. It seems uncontroversial: Someone invents or writes something and therefore owns it. What could be plainer? But IP contains the power to destroy liberty.
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When one acquires a copyright or a patent, what one really acquires is the power to stop other people from doing certain things with what is indisputably their own property. One can say that a copyright holder doesn’t actually own anything but the legal authority to stop other people from using their own equipment to copy a book or CD they purchased. And one who holds a patent on the widget actually only has permission to call on the state to stop others from manufacturing and selling widgets in factories they own.¹

1. Sheldon Richman – Intellectual “Property” Versus Real Property: What Are Copyrights and What Do They Mean for Liberty? [↩]

Tearful Atlanta Cops Express Remorse for Shooting 92-Year-Old Kathryn Johnston, Leaving Her To Bleed to Death in Her Own Home While They Planted Drugs in Her Basement, Then Threatening an Informant So He Would Lie To Cover It All Up
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This is what happens when you declare “war” on American citizens. You dehumanize them. And you instill an ends-justifies-the-means, win at all costs mindset in your “warriors.” This mindset infected the entire narcotics unit at Atlanta PD. You’d have to be awfully naive to believe the problem is limited to Atlanta.
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Kathryn Johnston’s death is tragic. But the real tragedy here is that had the cops found a stash of marijuana in her basement that actually did belong to her–say for pain treatment or nausea–her death would have faded quickly from the national news, these tactics would have been deemed by most to be wholly legitimate, and we probably wouldn’t still be talking about her today.

These cops were evil. But they worked within an evil system that’s not only immoral on its face, but is rife with bad incentives and plays to the worst instincts in human nature.¹

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…the Harvard Law School is having a conference to analyze the “free market mindset.” The basic premise of the conference seems to be that people who believe in limited government are psychologically troubled.

The conference schedule features presentations such as “How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community” and “Addicted to Incentives: How the Ideology of Self Interest Can Be Self-Fulfilling.” The most absurd presentation, though, may be the one entitled, “Colossal Failure: The Output Bias of Market Economies.” According to the description, the author argues that the market “delivers excessive levels of consumption.” Damn those entrepreneurs for creating so much wealth!²

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While the immediate causes of the various bushfires are thought to include arson, discarded cigarette butts, faulty power lines, or lightning strikes, these initial fires transformed into huge infernos and spread uncontrollably across Victoria only because of extremely high fuel loads throughout the state’s bushland. The reason? For years, local governments have neglected to manage fire hazards on their land in order to be faithful to the principles of environmentalism — a philosophy that contends that nature has intrinsic value that must be preserved, regardless of any use it has to man.[6] The result has been that people have sacrificed their prosperity and even survival in an attempt to preserve the unspoiled sanctity of nature.³

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Würde man das Urheberrecht – d.h. das Prinzip des Geistigen Eigentums, d.h. Ideen als Eigentum anzusehen und das “Kopieren” einer Idee (was nichts anderes darstellt als das, was Kunst und Kultur, ja unsere ganze Zivilisation ausmacht: Imitation) unter Strafe zu stellen – konsequent auslegen, so müsste man auch Tanzschritte kopierrechtlich schützen. Jemand, der sich eine neue Choreographie ausdenkt, einen neuen Tanz, müsste das alleinige Recht haben, diese Tanz aufzuführen oder aufführen zu lassen. Nachtanzen wäre nicht erlaubt.⁴

1. Radley Balko – Tearful Atlanta Cops Express Remorse for Shooting 92-Year-Old Kathryn Johnston, Leaving Her To Bleed to Death in Her Own Home While They Planted Drugs in Her Basement, Then Threatening an Informant So He Would Lie To Cover It All Up [↩]
2. Daniel J. Mitchell – Is Libertarianism a Sign of Mental Illness? [↩]
3. Ben O’Neill – The Victorian Bushfires: How Environmentalism Leads to Disaster [↩]
4. Stephan Kinsella – Copyrighting Dance Steps–The Death of Choreography [↩]

Ich habe beim Mises.org Blog¹ eine wunderbare Science-Fiction Short Story über Intellectual Property entdeckt, die die Frage behandelt, was geschähe, wenn Ideen geschützt werden würden und jeder, der eine bestimmte Idee (eine bestimmte Abfolge von Tönen, eine bestimmte Komposition von Figuren, Plot und Charakterisierung…) benutzen möchte, dies nur unter der Voraussetzung tun dürfte, dass ebendiese nie zuvor existierte. Sie also kein Derivat, sondern wahrlich originell ist.

(Natürlich, wenn man Geistiges Eigentum aus diesem Blickwinkel betrachtet, dann erkennt man rasch, dass Kunst nie neu oder originell ist, sondern immer bloss eine Neuzusammenstellung von schon Dagewesenem. Die konsequente Umsetzung von Geistigem Eigentum bedeutete also die völlige Stagnation in Wissenschaft und Kunst. Ohne frei fliessenden Ideen ist Fortschritt nicht möglich. Ich würde sogar so weit gehen und sagen: Ein wesentliches Merkmal unserer Spezies ist unser ungehemmter und anarchischer Umgang mit Ideen.)

Die Geschichte stammt von Spider Robinson und ist betitelt als Melancholy Elephants.
Hier ein kurzer Auszug:

She paused to gather her thoughts, sipped her juice. A part of her mind noted that it harmonized with the recurrent cinnamon motif of Bulachevski’s scent-symphony, which was still in progress.

“Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe–and telling ourselves that we ‘created’ them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility. As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators.”

She stopped speaking and sat very straight. Unaccountably her feet hurt. She closed her eyes, and continued speaking.²

1. mises.org – Melancholy Elephants [↩]
2. Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson [↩]

But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can’t be considered to be owned.

Merchants are free to attempt to create artificial scarcity, and that is what happens when a company keeps it codes private or photographers put watermarks on their images online. Proprietary and “open-source” products can live and prosper side-by-side, as we learn from any drug store that offers both branded and generic goods inches apart on the shelves.

But what you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity, which is all that IP legislation really does. Benjamin Tucker said in the 19th century that if you want your invention to yourself, the only way is to keep it off the market. That remains true today.

So consider a world without trademark, copyright, or patents. It would still be a world with innovation — perhaps far more of it. And yes, there would still be profits due to those who are entrepreneurial. Perhaps there would be a bit less profit for litigators and IP lawyers — but is this a bad thing?¹

1. jeffey a. tucker – Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success? [↩]

Anderthalb Monate bleiben noch bis zum ersten September. Danach, so hat das Bundesgericht entschieden, dürfen digitale Videorecorder und mobile Musikplayer mit einer Gebühr, der Leerträgervergütung, belastet werden. Abgaben, die dann an diverse Verwertungsgesellschaften fliessen.

Ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, wie der “Missbrauch der Urheberrechte” auf keinen Fall verhindert werden kann…