Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Oops, you missed some things!

Author:Dennis Grant
Posted:9/1/2000; 8:08:42 AM
Topic:The Lie of "IP"
Msg #:20676 (In response to 20656)
Prev/Next:20675 / 20677

> Now, the idea that you would charge for anything based on your time > is absurd, especially with software. Your third > grade teacher told you "A for effort", but if that is true you > should dig ditches. Digging ditches takes alot more time and > effort. Nobody buys effort because nobody wants effort.

Au contraire, people buy effort all the time. It's that "labour" cost on your car repair bill. You may not be _aware_ that that's what you're paying for - you want a hole, you want a running car - but ultimatly, that's what the money covers.

> That's is why your law of scarcity is false. When you realize that > scarcity is a lie is when you can begin to participate in > the magic of the markets. Remember that every exchange is a > win-win situation

Absolutely false.

Let's take your village example: Let's assume Village A needs a well, and has a hole-digger willing to provide a hole-digging service at no charge, thus donating his time to the greater good of the entire village (or, one could consider that Mr hole-digger is being compensated for his time by gaining access to water, and that the other villagers benefiting is incidental) However, nobody in Village A has the slightest clue of how to find water, and the few holes they try come up dry.

Village B has someone who can find water, reliably, on the first try. Village A must now contract for Village B's water-finding service, and they will have to pay whatever the Village B dowser charges, due to the scarcity of the service. Not only do we have scarcity, we have a non win-win situation. Village A is going to be out money that they would not otherwise have needed to spend had the water-finding service been so scarce. And, incidently, we have a non-voluntary exchange as well.

Now I suppose one could take a narrow view, and claim that the transaction is win-win, because A gets their water-finding (win) and B gets paid for their time (win), and in this very narrow context I suppose it's true. But in the wider context, it's a lose for A, because if they had any other choice they would have avoided the need to contract the service at all.

> no exchange ever takes place unless there is something created > that did not exist before the exchange!! If an exchange were truly > a zero-sum game, nobody would buy anything! When you buy an e-mail > address at well.com, you don't do it to get an e-mail address, > you do it for the prestige that name carries.

Bad example. I buy an email address at well.com for the email address. I pay EXTRA for it, compared to hotmail.com, because I want the prestige. And in either case, I'm not "buying" anything - there is no transfer of property. Instead, I am contracting for email _service_ - a service that can be recinded at the will of the service provider. Piss the admins of the well off enough, and they will pull the account. But I can piss the makers of my turnip twaddler off and at no time can they revoke the use of my turnip twaddler.

> Before the printing press allowed mass reproduction, IP was not > an issue.

Not according to most medaeval guilds. Well before the printing press was invented, the trade guild system actively defended - sometimes to the death - the "trade secrets" of how one performed a trade. Show up in town with a hammer and anvil, and you had better join the local smith's guild, or you would not be allowed to operate your smithy. Attempt to teach trade secrets to people not guild members, and you could wind up dead.

Not to mention that people were writing and selling books well before the invention of the printing press. The problem was that the effort involved with copying them was so labour-intensive that the number of books a given illuminator could produce was very small (scarcity) and so an illuminator could charge a very high price for his services.

> As the communications revolution changes everything around us, > intellectual property becomes the only property that has value.

In order to have monetary value, you need scarcity. The only way to provide scarcity for something that has no cost of duplication and no cost of distribution is to try and project onto it artificial constraints to make it scarce again. Thus, the completely bogus concept of "intellectual property" is a means to try and make ideas and information artificially scarce, so that they can be sold like physical widgets. But those scarcity contraints are artificial, not real. They don't have any practical means of enforcement. And accordingly, the IP laws attempt to enforce limits on actions that goi far beyond the common-sense limitations on real property we have today. A computer program, or a music file, or any other bitstream is just a (really big) number. But in order to enforce this artificial scarcity, the IP laws say that I cannot tell anyone else this number. The free flow of information is blocked!

The true benefits to society will arise when all restrictions on the free flow of information are removed.

DG

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