OUDaily.com | COLUMN: Intellectual property is theft

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Jason Byas , The Oklahoma Daily

Updated: January 31, 2012

Recently, college students and others who visit Wikipedia on a daily basis were met with a 24-hour blackout. The blackout in question was in protest of two pieces of legislation related to the Internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act.

The bills had several draconian punishments that outraged many Americans (Wikipedia clearly included). Many of the bills’ opponents stated that, if passed, the laws would effectively kill the Internet as we know it, potentially prosecuting any companies or sites found to be “facilitating” in copyright infringement.

However, there’s a much more fundamental aspect of this entire issue that needs to be discussed more openly. Hopefully, public outrage over these particularly atrocious laws will provide a platform for the message that really needs to be heard.

The time has come to abolish intellectual property.

To be clear, I’m a firm defender of actual property rights, even to an absolutist point. That’s exactly why I oppose the charade known as intellectual property.

To begin a serious discussion on intellectual property, it’s important to remember what the basis for property in tangible things is in the first place, and that’s scarcity. Not scarcity in the relative sense of being rare, but scarcity in the absolute sense of being limited at all.

For instance, consider the idea of a world where, for whatever reason, cars were relatively abundant and nearly everyone had one. Even in this context, I could still not control the use of your car at the same time that you control the use of your car.

If I take that single physical thing that is your particular car, you no longer have it. Thus, we must have property rights in order to ensure that people can use their own resources without coercion from others.

Now let’s consider a second situation. We’ll say that I “stole” your car, but it was still there in the morning. As in, I, through some magic spell of conjuration, created an exact copy of your car and drove off with that copy.

Have I actually stolen your car? I’d say not. You certainly still have exclusive rights to your particular copy of the car. I’m in no way forcing you to let your property be used in any way that goes against your will.

Furthermore, not only is an invasion of another person’s intellectual property not an invasion of anything remotely similar to their actual property rights, enforcing “intellectual property rights” is an invasion of actual property rights.

It seems hard to see how it could not be an invasion of property rights to tell someone that they aren’t legally allowed to use their own ink to form words on their own paper in a certain way. It also becomes difficult to use different words to describe banning everyone who isn’t Apple from using their own materials to make a product that performs a function judged too similar to the iPhone.

In fact, one could even say that intellectual property laws are, in essence, a government facilitation of property’s conceptual opposite: theft.

As longtime intellectual property lawyer Stephan Kinsella writes in his essay, “Against Intellectual Property,” “if property rights are recognized in non-scarce resources, this necessarily means that property rights in tangible resources are correspondingly diminished. This is because the only way to recognize ideal rights, in our real, scarce world, is to allocate rights in tangible goods. For me to have an effective patent right — a right in an idea or pattern, not in a scarce resource — means that I have some control over everyone else’s scarce resources.”

It is often objected that the purpose of intellectual property is to ensure the profitability of the tech and entertainment industries, given the problem of free-riders. While this is an issue to consider, it hardly seems like a legitimate reason for the government to enforce a monopoly on their products.

Plenty of businesses that are liable to free-rider problems, such as movie theaters, radio and others, are able to either factor in “fencing” costs (methods of excluding free riders) or find revenue streams (like commercials) that make free-riders irrelevant. Why should the entertainment or tech industries be able to put their costs of business on the rest of us by having the government enforce intellectual property law?

Yet, even as it lurks implicitly in the outrage over SOPA and PIPA, the American people have not yet come to realize the fact that intellectual property is not property. They do not see that it is, instead, a warrant for the title-holders of intellectual property claims to infringe on the property rights of everyone else.

We must make that realization. We must take the momentum of SOPA and PIPA outrage and make it consistent.

It’s not only that the penalties in those bills are disproportionate to the crime of using your own property, in a way that conflicts with no one else’s property, to copy music or films. It’s that there is no crime at all behind such action, and therefore absolutely any attempt to forcibly prohibit it would be beyond disproportionate.

Jason Byas is a philosophy junior.

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Tank 3 weeks ago

Let's consider a third situation. Let's say you wrote a book that had not been submitted to your literary agent and I made a magical copy. You still have your ink on your paper and I have a "copy" on my own paper. I then publish my copy of the book and earn profits.

How about a fourth situation. Let's say you write, record, and release a musical album. I purchase the first copy and make magical copies for every other fan of your music. You still have your physical albums on the shelf at Best Buy and everyone else has their favorite CD. Win-win.

The problem with your argument is that you fail to account for the cost of creating "intellectual property" and the possible loss of profits. Labor should be remunerated and the cost of education should be recouped.

lolgan 3 weeks ago

There are issues with both of your points, Tank.

You have to provide services that the "pirate" can't offer. You have to include things with you album that they can't, you have to play shows, you have to make money off of merchandise that the pirate can't recreate. You have to offer a better experience than the person who copied your music. Most people I know that enjoy an artist support the artist when there is an opportunity to, the artist has to create that opportunity and give incentive. This creates competition, further legitimizing your product. As far as books go, that's still possible with IP laws, so I don't know how that's relevant.

LinnyO 3 weeks ago

Your analysis of "scarce" resources is incomplete. "property rights are recognized in non-scarce resources" Classical economics recognize human capital as a real resource and factor of production. Something does not have to be physical to be real. The time that people have is scarce. The talent necessary to create good IP is scarce. By addressing only natural resources, you're considering only one piece of the puzzle.

Tank 2 weeks, 6 days ago

@lolgan, I'm responding to the article, not the SOPA or PIPA legislation. Specifically the thesis, "The time has come to abolish intellectual property." and the examples of "copying" a car or putting words in any order on paper (insinuating plagiarism).

bravadoinboston 2 weeks, 6 days ago

Another problem with your argument is that movie theaters pay licensing fees and are guaranteed a seat minimum. They also are paid by advertisers: the money is then used to "license" the film they are showing. The theater does not own the movie. Radio Stations are required to have an annual license to play music from organizations like ASCAP, BI, SESAC, or in Canada, CRRAA. That annual license essentially becomes a "royalty" to play the music that is not theirs. And if they stream the music online (which is not theirs), they have to get a performance license and a digital mechanical license.

The only thing free in Intellectual Property is this blog, Google and gmail, and all the fun one could have with Yahoo. But they are only safe havens under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act....if someone balks, they have to take it down.

You sir, author, have never had to make a living on your abstract words, have you?! If you had, you would know how valuable a publishing agreement or recording contract is.

Long Live IP and the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)

ozzyo 2 weeks, 5 days ago

Your beliefs and major assure you of a position at the OWS table, but not much else.

oudaily99 2 weeks, 5 days ago

Tank: "Let's consider a third situation. Let's say you wrote a book that had not been submitted to your literary agent and I made a magical copy. You still have your ink on your paper and I have a "copy" on my own paper. I then publish my copy of the book and earn profits."

You would not make any profits because there is no intellectual property, meaning you have no rights to any profits. You could print your own copies and sell your own books, but good luck finding buyers when it's freely available online. The world has changed a lot, and it's time our laws also change to reflect this.

COLUMN: Intellectual property is theft

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