I've been interested in the whole "intellectual property" issue for a long time, but only started digging into it about a year ago. As a kid, I owned a lot of records. You know, those big, black, plastic circles ... I got into music young, buying records by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Kiss (hey, I was a kid) as early as the 2nd grade.
As my music collection grew, so did technology. It took a long time as a young teenager to not only keep up my music buying habit, but to replenish all my old albums with cassette tapes too. When I went to college my freshman year, CDs started hitting the stores. At first, there were only a few CDs available, but soon, it was all CDs.
I have literally hundreds of albums I've bought 2 or 3 times each, due to advances in technology. And while it was certainly my decision to keep re-purchasing them, I gotta admit, I'm a little miffed. I purchased the music. I certainly didn't lease it. And if I purchased it, don't I own it? And if I own it, isn't it mine to choose what I wish to do with it?
How can someone else justify controlling what is mine?
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Sheldon Richman has a great "TGIF" ["The Goal Is Freedom," but released on a Friday--get it?] column out today, Intellectual 'Property' Versus Real Property: What Are Copyrights and what do they mean for Liberty?. For a very short column, it's packed with great insights.
Admirably, Richman focuses on justice rather than more utilitarian concerns such as incentive effects:
The crux of the issue is this: Do IP laws protect legitimately ownable things? One's view of the laws will proceed from one's answer to that question, and that's what I will concentrate on here. I leave for another time the issue of incentives. I do so because the justice of a claim must be decided before we consider the specific incentives and disincentives that flow from our decision.
Of course, a principled focus does not mean one doesn't care about consequences; as Richman adds parenthetically, "(No, this does not make me a "nonconsequentialist." Consequences figure in our basic conception of justice.)"Richman concludes that IP is difficult
to square with traditional property rights. 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.
Yes, this is the crux of the issue. IP amounts to trespass, or redistribution of property.
Continue Intellectual Property vs. Freedom »»
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