This is about as meaningful a suggestion as "I think everyone should just get along and then we'd have world peace." It's not wrong, but it's so inapplicable to the world we live in that it might as well be wrong.
Copyright does not exist because it is thought to be natural — quite the opposite. Copyright exists because there is no natural property right to those things, but it is widely believed that granting authors some degree of ownership of their work serves the common good.
It is certainly true that it appears to be hard to get compensated for work that is not protected by copyright. Some might say that's all right, and people should just create things for the good of everyone else and they can mumblemumble to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads while they're creating — but that kind of "let them eat cake" attitude is unlikely to gain currency as long as people actually believe authors bring value into the world.
Incidentally, if we're actually talking about everything that's called "intellectual property" rather than just copyrights, your plan also means there will be nothing preventing me from, say, opening up a faux Apple store and selling knockoff Macs and iPhones that just run Gentoo with a crappy theme.
There's a significant difference between Copyrights (and Patents ... same argument, really) and trademarks. Passing off your knockoff Mac as an Apple product is actually a class of fraud, and should be treated as such. Selling something that just happens to look exactly like an Apple, but you clearly explain to the customer that it isn't? Go right ahead.
Re. mechanisms for paying authors and musicians (and other creatives) without Copyright or Patent law, take a look at that Molinari site. History is replete with examples.
Furthermore, even if your argument were correct, it still wouldn't justify the initiation of force inherent in Copyright and Patent law. That is, the desire of authors to earn a living from writing ought not to be sufficient cause for the State to coerce people into paying them for their writing.
The distinction between copyright and trademarks was my point. When you say "intellectual property," you're lumping together a bunch of things that aren't alike. (Also, if we do abolish all intellectual property, my crappy Gentoo computer with the aluminum case not only looks like an Apple iMac, it is an Apple iMac — just not the Apple iMac you're thinking of! Trademarks exist to prevent namespace collisions like this.)
As for the Molinari site, I looked at it, but it was very hard to find anything noteworthy in the wall of links with anchor text like "Copyright is murder," "The War on Copyright Nazism" and "On the Subject of Genocidal Rage." If you have a good piece in mind that argues against the historical utility of copyright, I would be interested to read it, because I've never seen such a thing.
And yeah, I think that there is a case for trademarks as distinct from other forms of IP. I think I'm on shaky ground here according to other market anarchists, but I think that trademarks serve a purpose of communication.
That is, that there is in reality a distinction between my 'iMac' and an iMac made by Apple, that trademarks exist to facilitate the communication of that distinction to customers, and that it's reasonable to deal with trademark infringement with force.
Of course, that opens an entirely new can of worms: what constitutes a trademark? The Apple logo? The shape of an iMac? The colour? Etc. etc.
Comments
This is about as meaningful a suggestion as "I think everyone should just get along and then we'd have world peace." It's not wrong, but it's so inapplicable to the world we live in that it might as well be wrong.
Copyright does not exist because it is thought to be natural — quite the opposite. Copyright exists because there is no natural property right to those things, but it is widely believed that granting authors some degree of ownership of their work serves the common good.
It is certainly true that it appears to be hard to get compensated for work that is not protected by copyright. Some might say that's all right, and people should just create things for the good of everyone else and they can mumblemumble to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads while they're creating — but that kind of "let them eat cake" attitude is unlikely to gain currency as long as people actually believe authors bring value into the world.
Incidentally, if we're actually talking about everything that's called "intellectual property" rather than just copyrights, your plan also means there will be nothing preventing me from, say, opening up a faux Apple store and selling knockoff Macs and iPhones that just run Gentoo with a crappy theme.
There's a significant difference between Copyrights (and Patents ... same argument, really) and trademarks. Passing off your knockoff Mac as an Apple product is actually a class of fraud, and should be treated as such. Selling something that just happens to look exactly like an Apple, but you clearly explain to the customer that it isn't? Go right ahead.
Re. mechanisms for paying authors and musicians (and other creatives) without Copyright or Patent law, take a look at that Molinari site. History is replete with examples.
Furthermore, even if your argument were correct, it still wouldn't justify the initiation of force inherent in Copyright and Patent law. That is, the desire of authors to earn a living from writing ought not to be sufficient cause for the State to coerce people into paying them for their writing.
The distinction between copyright and trademarks was my point. When you say "intellectual property," you're lumping together a bunch of things that aren't alike. (Also, if we do abolish all intellectual property, my crappy Gentoo computer with the aluminum case not only looks like an Apple iMac, it is an Apple iMac — just not the Apple iMac you're thinking of! Trademarks exist to prevent namespace collisions like this.)
As for the Molinari site, I looked at it, but it was very hard to find anything noteworthy in the wall of links with anchor text like "Copyright is murder," "The War on Copyright Nazism" and "On the Subject of Genocidal Rage." If you have a good piece in mind that argues against the historical utility of copyright, I would be interested to read it, because I've never seen such a thing.
And yeah, I think that there is a case for trademarks as distinct from other forms of IP. I think I'm on shaky ground here according to other market anarchists, but I think that trademarks serve a purpose of communication.
That is, that there is in reality a distinction between my 'iMac' and an iMac made by Apple, that trademarks exist to facilitate the communication of that distinction to customers, and that it's reasonable to deal with trademark infringement with force.
Of course, that opens an entirely new can of worms: what constitutes a trademark? The Apple logo? The shape of an iMac? The colour? Etc. etc.
No-one said this was easy :)
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf is a good start. It does reiterate the point that I'm trying to make, too, that utility is as bad an argument for IP as it is for slavery.