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Anubhav comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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But they're not exact even then.
Physical scenario: I pay you $10 and you give me a book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain the book, you lose it.
Your assumption holds so far. But now, consider...
Digital scenario (legal): I pay you $10 and you lease me a digital copy of the book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain a book, but you don't lose it, since my copy of the book was created (copied) as and when I ordered it, and you still have your copy.
Digital scenario (illegal/ legally free): I don't pay you anything and get a copy of your book. I lose no money, you gain no money. I gain a book, you don't lose a book.
On the whole (at least if you prefer digital copies and only consider first-order effects) it's a transfer of money that can be avoided and still have a net positive outcome. And as for the $10 you didn't pay to the author (publisher?) you can use it to pay for....
Wait, the author can use it to pay for something else too. You're right, this isn't the broken window fallacy; there is no destruction of value involved. It's still a pointless exchange of money though. (Assuming you're only interested in the contents of the book. If not, the exchange may or may not be pointless, but such cases are a minority.)
'his'. 'Anubhav' is an exclusively male name. </nitpick>
Digital scenario (legal, with DRM): I pay you $10 and you issue me a digital copy of the book, on terms that you can change at will. If you go out of business, I lose the book. If it turns out that you messed up your upstream licensing, I lose the book. If the book is banned by your government, I lose the book. If you decide to discontinue the service for business reasons, I lose the book. In some cases, if my computer breaks or if I upgrade it, I lose the book — at least until I spend an hour on the phone with your tech support convincing them to give it back to me.
Irrelevant, unless I'm confused. (Perhaps I am.) The claim I thought I was responding to is that one way in which buying a physical book is worse than taking a digital copy is that you have to pay for it and therefore lose utility; so I said why that utility is (roughly) transferred to others rather than merely lost.
I do, of course, agree that digital copying is fundamentally different from (legal or illegal) physical taking because it doesn't deprive anyone of the original. (This is one of the reasons why "intellectual property" is such a bad name for what it denotes.)
Thanks. (I did have a quick google and establish that it is a male name, but I didn't have enough evidence to rule out the possibility that it might be a female name too.)
But it's an excellent name in the sense that, for Lockeans, it is an obvious consequence of the right to property.
How so? (And what do you mean by "it"? "Intellectual property" includes, at least, copyrights, patents and trademarks, no two of which are at all the same as one another.)
For copyright, see this paper by Richard Volkman. Excerpt:
It's unpacked rather rigorously through the paper.
Certainly patents are dubious legal constructs, and trademarks are pretty much just a legal convenience, but they have much the same character in terms of ownership as copyright, so it makes sense to keep them under the same umbrella term (if they are to exist at all).
I disagree that they are not at all the same as one another; they are pretty much the only cases where one can own a pattern rather than a particular object. (Heraclitean objections notwithstanding)
The paragraph you quote from Volkman is arguing not that copyright is an obvious consequence of the right to property, but that the possibility of copyright is an obvious consequence of the right to make arbitrary contracts. I agree: it is (and so are lots and lots of other possibilities). But that's not at all the same as saying that copyright is a consequence of the right to property.
The rest of Volkman's paper does attempt to argue something nearer to what you said, but I have to say I don't find it very convincing. He begins well enough, by saying that you aren't obliged to write books or software or whatever if you don't like the ways in which they will be used. But then he abruptly changes the subject, apparently without noticing, when he says:
which in fact doesn't at all follow from what's gone before because it's a statement about "the product of my labor" whereas all the previous argument has been concerned with the labor itself. Now, that doesn't mean that this new statement is wrong, just that it's misleading to introduce it with "so". And in Locke's view, AIUI, the product of one's labor is indeed one's own to do with as one pleases. But here we run up against a key difference between "intellectual property" and more traditional sorts of property. It's much more obvious that (A) if I go to a lot of effort to make something, then others should not take it away from me, than that (B) if I go to a lot of effort to make something, then others should not look at what I've done and then make (near-)identical things for themselves. And while I'm willing to grant Lockeans premise (A), I'm not so willing with premise (B).
After that, Volkman spends a few paragraphs on matters that aren't (I think) directly relevant here and then turns to the argument you've cited above. As I've already said, this also doesn't show that copyright (or any other sort of intellectual property right) is a necessary consequence of the right to property, or that Lockeans or libertarians ought to approve of it. The most it shows is that you and I may make a contract that says you'll write a book and show it to me provided I promise not to give copies to anyone else. But such a contract can't possibly bind anyone else; your protection against others' actions, as far as that contract goes, is limited to being able to insist that I take steps to stop anyone else getting hold of the book. Whereas the whole idea of a copyright (and also a patent or trademark) is that a creator automatically gets to restrict the actions of everyone else, including lots and lots and lots of people who never entered into any sort of contract with her.
Sure, they have something in common. (Though I suggest that your choice of the word "own" is at least partly because we happen to use the term "intellectual property" to describe these things. If it weren't for that term, I suspect it wouldn't feel at all natural to say that one owns a trademark, for instance; "controls" or "have the right to use" would be better.)
But I wasn't denying that they have something in common. Just seeking clarity as to what particular sort(s) of "intellectual property" you think follow from (ordinary) property rights. It looks to me as if both Volkman's arguments, such as they are, apply to copyrights; the first applies to patents but the second doesn't; and neither applies to trademarks. (But maybe if it's possible to adapt his right-to-contract argument to cover copying done by people who aren't party to a contract with the creator, that will enable it to apply to patents and/or trademarks too.)
And indeed, that contract can insist that before showing the book to anyone else, the recipient must require them to sign a similar contract. Thus, under such a system copyright could exist as a direct consequence of contracts, but you'd have to bring a lawyer to the library, and you'd be at risk for damages for being negligent in locking up your books. But if the vast majority would want their books to be bound by such contracts, then a lot of time and money could be saved for everyone by enshrining copyright in the law.
Precisely similar lines of reasoning, of course, apply to most of the other things that libertarians often dislike, such as taxes and national armies and state-run education. (It's debatable whether they work, but then the same goes for the argument you're offering.)
Even better, a similar argument could be made in favor of state-sponsored charity. Though there is reason to suspect the government would not be very efficient in such endeavors.