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JASKN

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Everything posted by JASKN

  1. Of course it takes effort to form any new idea (new to you, anyway) in your own head. What does this have to do with IP? IP says that creators of brand new, specific ideas should be the ones to benefit from those ideas. It's not a moratorium on all action, nor on *any* thinking. And why don't you just respond to what you want? I'm not going to worry about guessing what you think is principled or not.
  2. This is one of those moments where I wonder how the Internet has hidden this from me until now. According to Wikipedia, the fast speaking, "spreading," reflects longstanding rules and apparently weird tradition carried into today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate#Style_and_delivery
  3. This doesn't clarify, and you had to know I'm not going back and reading every one of your posts.
  4. Well if you say so, it must be true. You're the one who made a big deal about this. It was simply the analogy presented.
  5. Here is you snidely illustrating through the Donkey Kong analogy someone stealing someone else's idea for use in the market.http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=27246&p=323192 Please don't post that Diddy lost no value. While I was searching for this and reading through posts directed to you, and your responses, I was surprised to find your explanations even more empty than I'd remembered, and the explanations provided for you more thorough than I'd assumed, given your most recent posts on this topic. You repeatedly say you've covered this or that retort to your vague position, yet, where? A statement is not an argument.
  6. Harrison, nobody can or wants to stop you from thinking. If your thinking has the end of selling an original, patented idea, however, that's a different story.
  7. Your posting history says otherwise. One specific post I recall used a Donkey Kong analogy.
  8. Says you. I know you also say that the originator of an idea doesn't lose marketable value when someone else takes and markets his idea instead. Anything can be said, really.
  9. That was a bizarre post. I guess my reply is, again: IP is for specific, original ideas and applications. It's ironic to use human observation and learning as the argument against IP, when that is the very reason IP is necessary. Humans can learn something easily once it is observed in action. If that wasn't possible, there would be no reason to have IP laws protecting the original idea of the original thinker.
  10. "...to own every action..." Every action? Or just the specific actions which would lead to the specific duplicating of the specific manifestation of the specific idea for the specific person? IP laws today already function like this. Nobody owns the concept "IP," but they may own a scholarly work which explains the reasoning behind IP. Your question assumes more about IP reasoning and laws than anyone argues. IP has the element of actual implementation and application. It is simply a more refined step up from the reasoning behind all property, in the specific context of a society. It recognizes that the value of trade is derived from the thinking work of men, and that it is possible for men who did not do the thinking to suck dry the marketable value from the man who did do the thinking. Laws prevent men from "using the property" of his own body from taking your lawn mower from your yard. Why is this kind of law OK? The men are not permitted to use their property in the way they want to -- taking the lawn mower home!
  11. So, I emailed Leonard Peikoff about this, and last week he replied. He said he'd never heard the story, that he didn't know why Rand chose the name "Taggart," but that he could say that Frank O'Connor was born in Ohio and had worked with Lillian Gish on some silent movies. Unfortunately, googling those two people to search for more information brings up this very thread as just the 10th result. So, for now, it's a dead end until I can either discover a link to Lillian Gish, or find the reason Rand chose "Taggart."
  12. Your friends' comments don't sound like this explanation of "Intellectualization," to me. I've heard people make comments similar to your two friends. My guess is that they are simply trying to preserve an emotion that they like. They understand only implicitly that new information can potentially change an emotion. They've had some experience in the past where a strong, positive emotional reaction of theirs was shattered because they later discovered some inescapable fact that altered their underlying evaluations, which they then couldn't dismiss or forget about. Since they haven't identified explicitly, nor come to terms with, the fact that emotions follow facts and thinking evaluations, they're not sure how or when their emotions will appear. So, when they feel really great, they don't want anything to change, in case they never feel that great in that same way again. My best layman's psychoanalyzing guess.
  13. I was speaking as broadly as possible, because that's what howardofski is attacking -- the broadest idea that people don't deserve the product of their mental effort. There's no point in going to the next step and talking about how to apply this in society if you don't agree on that first, most basic idea. Of course, existing patent law already deals with those particulars. It acknowledges that a single person doesn't think of all uses, implications, applications for a given idea by requiring those things to be specified in the patent. It acknowledges that the protection against economic loss should be linked and limited to the individual's life who thought up the idea by limiting the time the patent is valid. In essence, patent law is a system that works fairly well at allowing individuals to more precisely use their ideas to support their existence. Maybe the system could be improved, and we could debate that. But at this point in this thread, people are undermining entirely the notion of having a system like this at all. They are saying that ideas should be considered valuable, but the value is "in the valuer," not the creator. They acknowledge the way in which men learn while denying the way in which they create.
  14. This about sums it up for anyone who is actually bothered by taxes, I think. When I first learned about even the basic facts and effects of government wealth expropriation, it also made me angry, for a year or two. Eventually, though, you see that the system is not going to change very much or very soon. So, it might become helpful to treat taxes like the saying goes, "Nothing is certain but death and..." Don't treat it exactly the same, of course, because taxes aren't necessarily certain. But, practically speaking, they will be certain for a long while, and there's not much you can do about it. Laws are difficult to change, people aren't that put-off by taxes, people aren't willing to speak up, people don't understand the situation very well, you're going to jail if you don't pay, etc. etc. You could easily dedicate your life to changing tax law and still not get anything changed. I think of taxes like I think of any stupid human behavior. It's a mix of bad ideas and lazy people. But, there are a lot more things that you can blame on lazy people with bad ideas. If you were to get angry and bothered by every stupid thing people do and its affect on your life, you'd be angry all day, every day. If I were to sum it up as a principle, it might go something like, "Don't let bad/stupid shit make your life worse than it needs to be."
  15. This thread has gotten convoluted with warped, minuscule side issues and made up detail scenarios that do not speak to the spirit or reasons for the identification of intellectual property -- that is, context has been thrown away. Defenders of IP have been painted as irrational and emotional, even immoral, while detractors of IP supposedly see the truth, and isn't it so sad that men's minds can't be changed, no matter how hard we try? It's not hard to see why people would decide to just stop engaging. But, IP is an important issue. So... There is really no point in arguing further if those opposed to IP agree with the following, since the fundamental beliefs of the two sides would be as opposed as a communist to a capitalist: "The men who originate ideas and realize them in physical products do not deserve to decide how they are to be introduced and sold to other men, ie. the rest of society. Any man who can grasp any idea deserves to use it however he wants, even if he did not think it up himself, and even if he could not have thought of it himself." To me, and not coincidentally, also to Rand, THIS is the immoral position. It is immoral to take the mental effort of another man and give him nothing in return. It is immoral (and parasitic) to receive the benefits of a rational, thinking society while rejecting what makes it all possible to begin with: mutual benefit through *mutual* trade -- and especially immoral to do this on *principle*! Personally, (at the risk of sounding like hyperbole) it makes me sick that someone would want to do this, and even have the nerve to parade around saying so. "Thanks for thinking of all these great new ideas. Ok, see ya! Sucker!" IP, like all laws and like society in general, isn't simple or automatic. It's difficult to formalize a way of recognizing who deserves what in the realm of mental effort. But, the alternative is to treat original thinkers like they are worth nothing. "It's the idea that's worth something, the guy who thought it up just happened to think it up! Oh well for him." Really... Well, those guys think differently, one way or another. They're either going to go after your dishonest self legally, or they're going to stop thinking up ideas to bring to market -- because no one wants to work for free, especially if the benefactor is an ingrate, on principle(!).
  16. We have some threads on this already, but taxation is coerced and thus contrary to the very individual rights it is supposedly taxed to protect.
  17. No, it is not. But, as you posted earlier, you think that her quotes can be used to support either side of this debate, so I'm not sure why you're using them now. But, it's not actually true that she can be accurately quoted supporting two sides of an issue she clearly wrote about. She had one consistent view on property rights, which includes intellectual property. In fact, if intellectual property is invalid, so is Rand's entire basis for ethics and politics. You say the man who did not think up the original idea deserves to be able to copy the man who did think up the original idea. This is the core of your argument, right? Do you not see how this contradicts your supposed emphasis on *use* in your justification for property rights? You can't use something without knowing how, and you say this is "OBVIOUS." Does use not originate from one man's ideas? If one man learns ideas for use from another man's prior thinking effort, who deserves the most benefit in a socioeconomic context? But, you drop the appropriate context, repeatedly. In every post. When context is brought up, you simply repeat the same statements again and again: "IP is not property." Why? "Property is only material things." Why?
  18. As to your point about and justification for property rights, that is not Rand's reasoning behind it -- it's almost the inverse of her reasoning. Rather than a fight against other people for the same space in order to struggle for survival, she identified the purposeful use of the universe for the achievement of survival. Human action in the negative, as framed by you, is an emphasis on consumption in a nobody-wins game. Action "in the positive," however, emphasizes the continual improvements in the shaping of the universe by individuals. The same elements of the universe which were once scarce, ready to be consumed into oblivion, are later used in ever more productive ways. In essence, there is no scarcity in the universe in the sense that things will "run out" of being useful. And in the sense that "we can't be both here and there, and use that simultaneously," well, who cares? So what. IP supporters wouldn't disagree with you anyway. Your reasons for supporting any property at all aren't legitimate because they ignore the source of property to begin with -- human ingenuity. And who is the source of all ingenuity? One person. So, it's not surprising that you reject IP, which refines further the reasoning behind property which you reject or ignore.
  19. This is just more of the same, changing your meaning after the fact. I could be wrong, but how would I ever know since, as you say, it's not possible to figure out what you're really doing in your head, or why you're doing it?
  20. A tactic is "an action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end." How could I plan as an argument tactic to accidentally misinterpret? "Misinterpretation is a silly debate tactic" was a jab at me, saying that I'm trying to misinterpret you to win a debate. It's dishonest to make jabs and then claim that there's no way to know whether it was a jab or not because nobody can know what anyone else was thinking. This is what I mean by it's impossible to communicate. Assuming is a part of communication, and to say that we can't assume really means communication is going to become endlessly convoluted, complicated, confusing.. And all along the way we'll be assuming things anyway! You want to ignore the human element of human communication, and I can't think of a way to communicate effectively with you like that. It's like a horse putting on his own blinders.
  21. I'm finding it impossible to formulate a reply in which I can't imagine you coming back with something like, "We can't know each other's thoughts," which, as I'm discovering, actually means, "There is no way for us to communicate."
  22. If you can't "read" my mind or otherwise know my motivations, how could you say whether I posted in knowing misrepresentation or in honestly mistaken interpretation?
  23. How do you explain wage discrepancies, project timelines, hiring practices, and disciplinary decisions? Not to hijack the thread... I suppose though that it is consistent with the way in which you discount human mental effort across many of your views, including IP.
  24. And yet, all businesses do this on a daily basis. Is this your view from another thread that no contents of anyone's mind can be known by anyone, in any way, ever?
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