Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@...> writes:
>
> I would advice this short book for all those interested in a copyright
debate.http://mises.org/document/3582Although the book is called "Against IP",
the first part gives a very thorough and fair overview
> of both sides. The arguments there are much deeper than the usual "artists
will starveand we will have no music".
I just read through it on a flight. I admit, the first sentences gave me cause
to read it skeptically, by using the term "libertarian" but not as a pejorative.
Conspicuously absent from his account is the situation of people who earn their
entire living by producing intellectual content. He tries to dismantle concepts
both of intellectual "property" and of contracts to protect an author's labor,
but has no answers: it's a purely negative exercise. He invokes "fairness" but,
in his view, if you write a book and I use materials that I own to reproduce the
text and sell it, profiting from work that I couldn't have produced on my own,
this is "fair." It's a silly conclusion: If I sell a copy of someone else's
work, I could charge roughly the price of, say, a printed novel. If I sell a
sheaf of blank paper for the same cost, it would be fraud. My profits from
selling the copy depend on the value added by another's work. I didn't do the
work myself and I haven't paid for it, but I'd be earning profit based on it. He
has no answer for this. In fact, he simply pretends this scenario either doesn't
exist, or is insignificant. Effectively, he denies that the original author made
any meaningful contribution to the goods from which I'm profiting: It's MY blank
paper, and if I want to use it to copy your work, too bad. My material rights
trump your non-material labor. (Typical libertarian claptrap, blindly following
principles all the way through to stupid results.)
In his defense, he is quite good at reductio ad absurdum argumentation,
extending copyright or contractual protection into situations where the result
really is mad. But he assumes artistic creation is the same, without arguing
why. That's important. Reductio ad absurdum works by analogy. If the analogy is
false, then the absurdity proves nothing.
I wanted to be impressed. I'm not a big fan of copyright myself, and I hoped
this would provide some strong counterarguments. Unfortunately, merely declaring
that the artist's labor has no value worth protecting does not make it so.
I also think the opposition to "reward" that you expressed on your site needs to
explain why governments and other organizations are slashing arts funding, if it
really is inevitable that societies will provide fair funding for essential
human activities.
I don't think copyright is the answer, but it's also a mistake, I think, to
discard every economic protection of an artist's work because the current forms
of that protection are flawed. "It's a hard problem, so let's not try." I'm not
buying it.
hjh
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Received on Tue Feb 12 16:15:08 2013
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