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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I suspect that IP does not really meet the requirements of "scarce and rivalrous." Or at least, duplication of information is obviously the exact opposite of scarcity and rivalry.

In fact, IP tends to be used more from the utilitarian side that you hint at, i.e., IP in practice is (in theory) a right to compensation for work. Information itself is not necessarily scarce and rivalrous, but mindshare arguably is, and your ability to extract moneydollars as your IP is spread to mindspace is a matter of conflict. We might think of this as the symbol-manipulation equivalent of the appliance industry running out of potential customers to sell TVs to.

Trademarks are rivalrous; I can build public trust in "True Juices"-brand product quality only if I and they can be sure that it's unlikely for a "True Juices" bottle on a shelf to actually be someone else's food-coloring-and-corn-syrup knockoff. I think even the most anti-IP libertarian would be happy with me asserting 'ownership' of the ability to label something "from the 'True Juices' brand created by @roystgnr on 2023-04-26", just as a subset of fraud, and the only disagreement would be how much and with what restrictions I can contract that awkward phrase into something short and memorable.

Copyright and patents are interesting, because "copies of an existing IP" aren't scarce at all, but "copies of a not-yet-created IP that many people will prefer to anything existing" are incredibly scarce and valuable. For anything being created you can say "look, it's not scarce afterward!", just like Parfit's Hitchhiker can eventually say "well what's the point of paying you now?", but even the worst decision theories know to pay the driver in an indefinitely iterated scenario...

From: The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression https://archive.is/qz0b8

I tried to to explain what fraud is, if it is to be considered a species of aggression (and to briefly debunk Child), in A Theory of Contracts (p. 34). As I wrote there,

The theory of contract espoused here demonstrates that fraud is properly viewed as a type of theft. Suppose Karen buys a bucket of apples from Ethan for $20. Ethan represents the things in the bucket as being apples, in fact, as apples of a certain nature, that is, as being fit for their normal purpose of being eaten. Karen conditions the transfer of title to her $20 on Ethan’s not knowingly engaging in ‘fraudulent’ activities, like pawning off rotten apples. If the apples are indeed rotten and Ethan knows this, then he knows that he does not receive ownership of or permission to use the $20, because the condition ‘no fraud’ is not satisfied. He is knowingly in possession of Karen’s $20 without her consent, and is, therefore, a thief.

In other words, for the libertarian, fraud is a type of aggression (namely, theft), just because it is a means by which one party receives or uses or takes the property of someone else without their consent–and there is failure of consent because the first party’s misrepresentation meant that one of the conditions to transfer of title was not satisfied. (I have elaborated on this in various articles and posts: see, e.g.: Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer, pp. 60-61, where I tried to explain how a coherent theory of contract and fraud does, in fact, support a type of fraud claim compatible with the non-aggression principle; my exchange with David Heinrich in Comments: debt and the trade against risk; my comments in Objectivists on IP; my exchange with Heinrich regarding “limited liability” and corporations in this thread (2); my exchange, again, w/ Heinrich, regarding fractional reserve banking, in the comments section of Randians go from Mises to supply-side economics)

Looking at fraud this way, it is clear that for there to be fraud–at least of the type that counts as aggression–there must be some victim who did not give genuine consent for the defrauder to use or take his property. There must be a victim of the fraud, and the victimization must be of a type in which there is an ostensible title transfer but which fails because of lack of true consent.

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