I'm a fan of Girard and have also been against IP laws for a few decades, I agree that ideas are not property, you can however keep possession of your ideas, by not putting them out, were they can end up in MY head. In other words you own your head and so long as the ideas remain within, they are yours and yours alone.
Society if not helped in the slightest by IP laws, they are a good way to create stagnation.
Have you come across David Gornoski from "A Neighbor's Choice"? He's a huge Girard Fan, I was on his podcast a few times, you would make a great guest and vice versa. https://aneighborschoice.com/
An early reader of my book mentioned Rene Girard to me, and when I didn't know who that was, he pointed me to David Gornoski. David and I connected over the winter, and he invited me to his podcast to talk about my book. I wrote about it here at Substack (and the link to the podcast episode is in the article): https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/can-you-resist-utopia-and-escapism
Share a link to one of your episodes, if you have the link handy!
Not sure if either of this will play for you, hopefully at least one will. The shows I did with him were up on youtube as well but they nuked his channel and he had to start over after covid.
If I am reading this correctly, you support industrial espionage. Why invent when you can steal? What's the harm? If there is no benefit to innovation, it will be funded to a lesser degree and therefore be less of it. There is a reasonable argument as to the reasonable duration of protection of a process or technological development...
If the scope of your thought is limited to Vanilla Ice stealing from Queen or similar... I don't care.
> If I am reading this correctly, you support industrial espionage.
I support competition. Opposition research is part of competition; is this what you mean by "industrial espionage"? If not, can you clarify for me?
> Why invent when you can steal?
First, it's not stealing 😉 Second, waiting for your competitors to get there first and claim the first-mover advantage in a market, is risky. Third, reverse-engineering is costly, too. It's far from easy and painless to devote your research and development to waiting for other people to gain the first-mover advantage and then making the effort and resource expenditure to discover what makes your competitor's product successful.
> If there is no benefit to innovation
Ah, but there is!
> There is a reasonable argument as to the reasonable duration of protection of a process or technological development
If that argument involves a monopoly-violence institution (government), then it fails to be a *reasonable* argument. It becomes chimpanzee might-makes-right, like everything else involving government. Whatever flaws you see in the marketplace of ideas, if the "solution" is government, then the alleged solution is a bigger problem.
I certainly consider it stealing to use someone else's work as the basis for your own without compensating them.
The approach you appear to describe means the end of the development of new drugs. The millions of dollars spend in R&D can be effectively stolen simply by analyzing the drug in a lab. You spend $100M in research. I spend $1M to reverse engineer the drug (it really doesn't cost that much- 1 organic chemistry grad student and some equipment). You go out of business because you cannot recoup the research expense. I steal someone else's drug until people learn not to do costly research.
While there are some industries that are more resistant to this approach, this one is obvious.
The solution is limited government, otherwise...
In lieu of government, you hire people to kill me instead as this will protect future developments. Since there is no government in this Utopia, this methodology has only the potential consequence that I may survive and return the favor.
Your words are inaccurate. Government is not a monopoly-violence institution. They only have a monopoly on initiating violence. I have the full right to use violence in response to violence initiated by another. At least where I live, that includes attempts to steal my property.
The definition of government is an institution claiming a monopoly on violence over a given territory and populace. That doesn't mean the government officials are the only ones who commit violence, but that government officials determine who is allowed to commit violence with the government's blessing and under what conditions. Governments may permit "defensive" force that rises to the level of counter-violence. The government claims the monopoly power to frame the issue and enforce it.
> I certainly consider it stealing to use someone else's work as the basis for your own without compensating them.
I don't, for the simple fact that ideas don't meet the criteria of scarce, alienable property. To be stolen, something must be scarce and alienable. If someone steals your capital, your private prototypes or other actual property, then it's the theft of that actual property, not of an idea, that is the violation. There's no such thing as the natural human right to control ideas.
> The approach you appear to describe means the end of the development of new drugs.
Do you have anything to back up this hypothetical? It's not necessarily true, from a logical standpoint.
> In lieu of government, you hire people to kill me instead as this will protect future developments.
Another fantasy hypothetical. Who's being Utopian? 😉
> The solution is limited government
"Limited" isn't an objective measure. Government is the problem, not the solution, to the exercise of natural human rights.
Perhaps the big issue is that so many people have gotten so used to government-granted -- so, systemic-violence-backed -- privileges, that real rights are difficult for them to grapple with.
You may define government that way, but it is hardly a universal definition.
Scarce? Not really an objective criteria either. By strict interpretation, that means you can show up on my property and take some dirt for your project. Dirt is not scarce, only alienable.
The cost to produce various medications is minimal. The cost to develop them is high.
The WHO 2022 study estimated that the average cost to develop a new drug ranges from US$43.4 million to US$4.2 billion.
Feel free to devise another way to protect your product. That is how people deal with one another in the absence of government. I hate saying that because government does a great deal that I despise. If you can't come up with a means to stay in business in the scenario I described, I consider the conversation over and that you are unwilling to face the consequences your theory would face in real world application. Your system works with better people. They don't exist.
Next. NVDIA designs chips. They are produced by TSMC. Nothing would stop Intel from analyzing said chip and having someone else produce them under contract. Your "first mover" advantage lasts about a month. That doesn't justify development costs.
Natural rights are typically defined as those rights that do not require another person to exist. IP rights are consistent with that. You have the right to speak, not the right to be listened to... You have the right to benefit from your ideas.
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE INHERENT RIGHT TO BENEFIT FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEAS. That is not a natural right. You are claiming the right of force here. You are claiming you have the right to benefit from the work of others unless they can stop you.
Government's proper role is to protect individual, natural rights. Even in the best of cases, it fails more than I like. Look to anyplace government has failed and tell me how much individual freedom you see. Hold it up as an example. I'm waiting...
Every civil government in the world fits the definition I provided in this thread (and elsewhere). If it's not a universal definition, then provide an example that doesn't fit that definition.
> Scarce? Not really an objective criteria either. By strict interpretation, that means you can show up on my property and take some dirt for your project. Dirt is not scarce, only alienable.
I defined scarce and provided the links in the article. The dirt you describe is indeed scarce (and alienable).
> Natural rights are typically defined as those rights that do not require another person to exist.
I've never heard that (false) definition. Your life, liberty, and property do not require another person to exist, but your *right* to life, liberty, property are all in relation to other humans who actually exist. I wrote about natural human rights in my first Substack article: https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/the-good-neighbor-bad-citizen-journey
> YOU DO NOT HAVE THE INHERENT RIGHT TO BENEFIT FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEAS. That is not a natural right. You are claiming the right of force here. You are claiming you have the right to benefit from the work of others unless they can stop you.
Once you express an idea, it becomes the idea of whomever else encounters it with their minds. You have no claim to the ideas that enter another person's mind.
You have the natural human right to try to benefit from anything to which no one else has a prior, better claim. And since ideas are neither scarce nor alienable -- and since once an idea is expressed, no one has a right to control the idea -- there's no possibility of someone else having a better, prior claim *to the idea that is now in my mind*.
Ideas fail the test of property. "Intellectual property" isn't real property in any natural-human-rights sense. IP is a privilege granted and enforced by a violent entity.
> Government's proper role is to protect individual, natural rights.
Government, by definition, intrudes upon natural human rights at the behest of some agents who perceive a benefit from the violent control of others. You might *want* a government to behave the way you described, but there's no evidence that it does so nor that it's even designed to do so.
> Look to anyplace government has failed and tell me how much individual freedom you see.
Black markets, agorism, and the like. Those who successfully undermine coercive civil authority exercise plenty of freedom. They still operate with risk, because all of human living is risky. But they have the freedom.
Yeah. Go check out a failed state and tell me about the freedom.
Natural rights are, by definition, those that do not require other people to act. You have the right to be armed. You do not have the right to force someone to make a weapon for you. And so on. If you are unfamiliar with that definition of natural rights, you are inadequately familiar with the topic. This is why healthcare performed by someone else is not a natural right. Natural rights do not require other people to exist.
You didn't answer the question. Until you do, I consider that you have acknowledged my point.
I'm a fan of Girard and have also been against IP laws for a few decades, I agree that ideas are not property, you can however keep possession of your ideas, by not putting them out, were they can end up in MY head. In other words you own your head and so long as the ideas remain within, they are yours and yours alone.
Society if not helped in the slightest by IP laws, they are a good way to create stagnation.
Have you come across David Gornoski from "A Neighbor's Choice"? He's a huge Girard Fan, I was on his podcast a few times, you would make a great guest and vice versa. https://aneighborschoice.com/
An early reader of my book mentioned Rene Girard to me, and when I didn't know who that was, he pointed me to David Gornoski. David and I connected over the winter, and he invited me to his podcast to talk about my book. I wrote about it here at Substack (and the link to the podcast episode is in the article): https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/can-you-resist-utopia-and-escapism
Share a link to one of your episodes, if you have the link handy!
https://www.podcastworld.io/episodes/slaying-the-sacred-cows-in-dc-part-2-a-neighbor-s-choice-nswfqvtn
https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/0e445543-5f3d-4214-a5d8-ce029984d81e/episodes/ddbd586e-eb10-4637-b0f8-fbfe0208cbc3/david-gornoski-trump-booed-at-ruth-bader-ginsburg-casket-visit-riots-resume---a-neighbor's-choice
Not sure if either of this will play for you, hopefully at least one will. The shows I did with him were up on youtube as well but they nuked his channel and he had to start over after covid.
I was able to listen to the show with your segment from April 7, 2020. Ah, to revisit the early days of the #COVIDHoax! :-D
If I am reading this correctly, you support industrial espionage. Why invent when you can steal? What's the harm? If there is no benefit to innovation, it will be funded to a lesser degree and therefore be less of it. There is a reasonable argument as to the reasonable duration of protection of a process or technological development...
If the scope of your thought is limited to Vanilla Ice stealing from Queen or similar... I don't care.
Howdy, Brian! Welcome!
> If I am reading this correctly, you support industrial espionage.
I support competition. Opposition research is part of competition; is this what you mean by "industrial espionage"? If not, can you clarify for me?
> Why invent when you can steal?
First, it's not stealing 😉 Second, waiting for your competitors to get there first and claim the first-mover advantage in a market, is risky. Third, reverse-engineering is costly, too. It's far from easy and painless to devote your research and development to waiting for other people to gain the first-mover advantage and then making the effort and resource expenditure to discover what makes your competitor's product successful.
> If there is no benefit to innovation
Ah, but there is!
> There is a reasonable argument as to the reasonable duration of protection of a process or technological development
If that argument involves a monopoly-violence institution (government), then it fails to be a *reasonable* argument. It becomes chimpanzee might-makes-right, like everything else involving government. Whatever flaws you see in the marketplace of ideas, if the "solution" is government, then the alleged solution is a bigger problem.
I certainly consider it stealing to use someone else's work as the basis for your own without compensating them.
The approach you appear to describe means the end of the development of new drugs. The millions of dollars spend in R&D can be effectively stolen simply by analyzing the drug in a lab. You spend $100M in research. I spend $1M to reverse engineer the drug (it really doesn't cost that much- 1 organic chemistry grad student and some equipment). You go out of business because you cannot recoup the research expense. I steal someone else's drug until people learn not to do costly research.
While there are some industries that are more resistant to this approach, this one is obvious.
The solution is limited government, otherwise...
In lieu of government, you hire people to kill me instead as this will protect future developments. Since there is no government in this Utopia, this methodology has only the potential consequence that I may survive and return the favor.
Your words are inaccurate. Government is not a monopoly-violence institution. They only have a monopoly on initiating violence. I have the full right to use violence in response to violence initiated by another. At least where I live, that includes attempts to steal my property.
The definition of government is an institution claiming a monopoly on violence over a given territory and populace. That doesn't mean the government officials are the only ones who commit violence, but that government officials determine who is allowed to commit violence with the government's blessing and under what conditions. Governments may permit "defensive" force that rises to the level of counter-violence. The government claims the monopoly power to frame the issue and enforce it.
> I certainly consider it stealing to use someone else's work as the basis for your own without compensating them.
I don't, for the simple fact that ideas don't meet the criteria of scarce, alienable property. To be stolen, something must be scarce and alienable. If someone steals your capital, your private prototypes or other actual property, then it's the theft of that actual property, not of an idea, that is the violation. There's no such thing as the natural human right to control ideas.
> The approach you appear to describe means the end of the development of new drugs.
Do you have anything to back up this hypothetical? It's not necessarily true, from a logical standpoint.
> In lieu of government, you hire people to kill me instead as this will protect future developments.
Another fantasy hypothetical. Who's being Utopian? 😉
> The solution is limited government
"Limited" isn't an objective measure. Government is the problem, not the solution, to the exercise of natural human rights.
Perhaps the big issue is that so many people have gotten so used to government-granted -- so, systemic-violence-backed -- privileges, that real rights are difficult for them to grapple with.
You may define government that way, but it is hardly a universal definition.
Scarce? Not really an objective criteria either. By strict interpretation, that means you can show up on my property and take some dirt for your project. Dirt is not scarce, only alienable.
The cost to produce various medications is minimal. The cost to develop them is high.
https://gh.bmj.com/content/3/1/e000571
The WHO 2022 study estimated that the average cost to develop a new drug ranges from US$43.4 million to US$4.2 billion.
Feel free to devise another way to protect your product. That is how people deal with one another in the absence of government. I hate saying that because government does a great deal that I despise. If you can't come up with a means to stay in business in the scenario I described, I consider the conversation over and that you are unwilling to face the consequences your theory would face in real world application. Your system works with better people. They don't exist.
Next. NVDIA designs chips. They are produced by TSMC. Nothing would stop Intel from analyzing said chip and having someone else produce them under contract. Your "first mover" advantage lasts about a month. That doesn't justify development costs.
Natural rights are typically defined as those rights that do not require another person to exist. IP rights are consistent with that. You have the right to speak, not the right to be listened to... You have the right to benefit from your ideas.
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE INHERENT RIGHT TO BENEFIT FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEAS. That is not a natural right. You are claiming the right of force here. You are claiming you have the right to benefit from the work of others unless they can stop you.
Government's proper role is to protect individual, natural rights. Even in the best of cases, it fails more than I like. Look to anyplace government has failed and tell me how much individual freedom you see. Hold it up as an example. I'm waiting...
> You may define government that way, but it is hardly a universal definition.
Sure, people can and do define things in ways that don't match reality. My second Substack article from a year ago tackles some of this issue: https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/what-is-politics
Every civil government in the world fits the definition I provided in this thread (and elsewhere). If it's not a universal definition, then provide an example that doesn't fit that definition.
> Scarce? Not really an objective criteria either. By strict interpretation, that means you can show up on my property and take some dirt for your project. Dirt is not scarce, only alienable.
I defined scarce and provided the links in the article. The dirt you describe is indeed scarce (and alienable).
> Natural rights are typically defined as those rights that do not require another person to exist.
I've never heard that (false) definition. Your life, liberty, and property do not require another person to exist, but your *right* to life, liberty, property are all in relation to other humans who actually exist. I wrote about natural human rights in my first Substack article: https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/the-good-neighbor-bad-citizen-journey
> YOU DO NOT HAVE THE INHERENT RIGHT TO BENEFIT FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEAS. That is not a natural right. You are claiming the right of force here. You are claiming you have the right to benefit from the work of others unless they can stop you.
Once you express an idea, it becomes the idea of whomever else encounters it with their minds. You have no claim to the ideas that enter another person's mind.
You have the natural human right to try to benefit from anything to which no one else has a prior, better claim. And since ideas are neither scarce nor alienable -- and since once an idea is expressed, no one has a right to control the idea -- there's no possibility of someone else having a better, prior claim *to the idea that is now in my mind*.
Ideas fail the test of property. "Intellectual property" isn't real property in any natural-human-rights sense. IP is a privilege granted and enforced by a violent entity.
> Government's proper role is to protect individual, natural rights.
Government, by definition, intrudes upon natural human rights at the behest of some agents who perceive a benefit from the violent control of others. You might *want* a government to behave the way you described, but there's no evidence that it does so nor that it's even designed to do so.
> Look to anyplace government has failed and tell me how much individual freedom you see.
Black markets, agorism, and the like. Those who successfully undermine coercive civil authority exercise plenty of freedom. They still operate with risk, because all of human living is risky. But they have the freedom.
Yeah. Go check out a failed state and tell me about the freedom.
Natural rights are, by definition, those that do not require other people to act. You have the right to be armed. You do not have the right to force someone to make a weapon for you. And so on. If you are unfamiliar with that definition of natural rights, you are inadequately familiar with the topic. This is why healthcare performed by someone else is not a natural right. Natural rights do not require other people to exist.
You didn't answer the question. Until you do, I consider that you have acknowledged my point.