Reading about the Harvard vote to offer all research papers and notes online for free, one detects a strong anti-commercial ethic at work here, which also helps to sell the idea to an ideological “leftist” faculty. I’m reading about this after having laughed at the ethos of the Free Artist License, i.e. copyleft, the rationale of which is tinged with an anti-commerce, even anti-capitalist, attitude. It is striking because with copyright, we are, after all, talking about a legislatively imposed and artificial supply restriction based on coercion, not the free market. And yet it is the free market that catches the blame for all the increasingly obvious absurdities associated with IP. So with the movements at Harvard, Creative Commons, and copyright, we are seeing a market emerge via pure contract and the rejection of state privileges. These confused socialist ethics are giving us a free market by default. It’s worth an article that I hope someone will write.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/7821/freedom-via-socialist-ethics/
Freedom via socialist ethics
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An ironic turn of events. LOL
“It is striking because with copyright, we are, after all, talking about a legislatively imposed and artificial supply restriction based on coercion, not the free market. And yet it is the free market that catches the blame for all the increasingly obvious absurdities associated with IP.”
Who is “we” ? Sorry Mr Tucker but by all respect, as long as there’s no central agency giving individual licenses for material to be copyrighted (like the State does for patents), “we” are still talking about free market.
You may not like the natural law arguments in favor of what I like to call “rights of identity”, but it is still no government monopoly.
Trademark isn’t either… as Murray Rothbard explains.
The point is that copyright is a state-granted license and it should not exist. This solves the problem of having a central agency.
So I’ll just have to chose between between Manuel Lora’s word and Rothbard…
Artisan:
I was with Rothbard on copyrights too. Then I read Kinsella’s work on it, and the rest is history.
Copyright in Rothbard’s world was a matter of contract. I don’t think his theory really holds together even on its own terms but the real point is that we do not live in the world Rothbard even wrote about. Copyright is today purely a matter of legislation. Only the most cursory glance into the details of copyright law demonstrate that.
When I cannot share an idea, when I cannot makes something just because someone else built something like it before, when I cannot build upon what someone else has built, how can I be “free”?
I like copyleft. I like it because it’s basic contract rather than legislation.
Yes, those who invented it and first spread it are socialists, who would prevent me from choosing to license my stuff in any other way. But that’s guilt by association.
It’s like the “Linux is socialist” arguments. Laughable. The choice of how to distribute ones own labors is the pinnacle of capitalism.
Frankly I don’t see what is so different in the world of Rothbard, his copyright analysis has just been drafted… so it’s unfair to just mention the contractual aspect… because there are still some principles of identity that he mentions in his “trademark” critic that cannot be ignored either if you talk about copyright.
On the other hand, Rotbard tends to justify patents in a way that is not quite sustainable either on a contract base or in the name of identity rights… so I’m not saying Rothbard is the entire solution. At least it’s good not to just despise him if you know what a great free-market thinker he is.
However Kinsella in his own analysis fails to even distinguish between both those patent and copyright concepts. I read him too and was completely disappointed. Any of his anti-copyright arguments can be easily refuted.
To state that an issue is merely a matter of legislation… is a bit of a locally self-centered assumption anyways. Different countries rule differently, but seek the same sort of justification.
I don’t live in the US… I find it more relevant thus to just discuss the non political side of free-market issues. Strictly their moral aspect.
It strikes me as perfectly easy to understand: copyright is a modern legislative invention that amounts to a mercantilist privilege–a state-granted imposition of an artificial scarcity and a barrier to competition–like any other, most of which have long been repealed.
Frankly I don’t see what is so different in the world of Rothbard, his copyright analysis has just been drafted…
“Drafted” is the key word. In a free market of contracts, people are perfectly free to come up with different contracts if the need arises. Congressional legislation only changes when Congress decides to change it, mostly for political reasons.
Or to look at it another way, a lot of common law decisions ended up being adopted by state and local governments. The problem is that they adopted what common law had developed, not the process that common law used to develop it. Thus, the law went from being a flexible and adaptable system of law motivated by reason and economics to a system of law that was more rigid and motivated by politics, influence, and favoritism.
@jeffrey
as you put it “mercantilist privilege” is very easy to understand yes, though it stays but an analogy, which doesn’t stand a closer analysis.
As long as you say vague things like “barrier to competition like any other” you’re just doing politics though. You seem not eager to test what views really separate you from the opposed side anyways.
See, It strikes me also as perfectly easy to understand that homesteading of any natural resource for instance, would be considered a “state-granted” privilege according to your simplistic definition above.
Do you oppose homesteading of natural ressources like solar energy for instance?
You just have to sort it out better I think.
On Creative Commons et al as Capitalism, see these posts of mine as well as the Paul Graham article linked to from the first post.
Note that the former executive director of Creative Commons describes CC as a “voluntary, market-based approach to copyright”.
http://thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com/
Take a look at this embedded video – talk about healthy market forces!
and “How free trade and open market can save the world” @
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/
Without copywrites, does this mean I can take somebody else’s work, then publish it and not have to pay the original author, or even worst, claim it as my own.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but I think copyright is simply a private contract. It’s simply selling something with imposing some conditions on what the buyer can do with it, it’s similar to offering a crossbow for sales with a condition that the buyer may not use it for hunting because the seller does not like animals to get killed for sport, or offering a substantial donation to a charity that helps poor children in their education with a condition that at least 50% of the children must be hispanic etc. etc. I think these are OK.
As for the legislation, isn’t that legislation just a way to enforce these private contracts? I mean, like, when a specific kind of contract breach is very widespread it makes sense to legislate means of enforcing them more effectively than a usual lawsuit.
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