This is from an interview to Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hoppe:I agree [...] that the idea of intellectual property rights is not just wrong and confused but dangerous. And I have already touched upon why this is so. Ideas — recipes, formulas, statements, arguments, algorithms, theorems, melodies, patterns, rhythms, images, etc. — are certainly goods (insofar as they are good, not bad, recipes, etc.), but they are not scarce goods.
Once thought and expressed, they are free, inexhaustible goods. I whistle a melody or write down a poem, then you hear the melody or read the poem and reproduce or copy it. In doing so you have not taken anything away from me. I can whistle and write as before. In fact, the entire world can copy me, and yet nothing is taken from me. (If I didn't want anyone to copy my ideas I only have to keep them to myself and never express them.)
Now imagine I had been granted a property right in my melody or poem such that I could prohibit you from copying it or demand a royalty from you if you do. First: Doesn't that imply, absurdly, that I, in turn, must pay royalties to the person (or his heirs) who invented whistling and writing, and further on to those, who invented sound making and language, and so on?
Second: In preventing you from or making you pay for whistling my melody or reciting my poem, I am actually made a (partial) owner of you — of your physical body, your vocal chords, your paper, your pencil, etc. — because you did not use anything but your own property when you copied me. If you can no longer copy me, then, this means that I, the intellectual property owner, have expropriated you and your "real" property. Which shows: intellectual property rights and real property rights are incompatible, and the promotion of intellectual property must be seen as a most dangerous attack on the idea of "real" property (in scarce goods).
INTERVIEWER: We have suggested that if people want to enforce generational copyright that they do so on their own, taking on the expense and attempting through various means to confront copyright violators with their own resources. This would put the onus of enforcement on the pocket book of the individual. Is this a viable solution — to let the market itself decide these issues?
HOPPE: That would go a long way in the right direction. Better still: more and more courts in more and more countries, especially countries outside the orbit of the US-dominated, Western-government cartel, would make it clear that they don't hear cases of copyright and patent violations any longer and regard such complaints as a ruse for big Western-government-connected firms, such as pharmaceutical companies, for instance, to enrich themselves at the expense of other people.
Topic: Is copying a file still theft? Included propaganda (Read 17707 times)
