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The term of patent issue

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Mnrchst

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Assigned value of a thing can change over time for the same person, different people can assign a different value to the same object at the same time, the value assigned to an object by a crowd of people (the "market") can change over time.

Therefore.... what? What conclusion do you wish to draw from these facts? That value is hopelessly non-objective so can't be protected by objective law?

A person may have an objective standard of value -- and whatever one's standard, it's fine and well to value one's book of matches as one chooses -- but I suppose that the conclusion I'm drawing is that one does not "own" the value of the book of matches, either your valuation of that book, or mine, or whatever body you'd like to authorize to set the supposed value for it (and therefore the flooding of the market in my related example is not an "appropriation" or a theft or etc.); one simply owns the book of matches.

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What can it possibly mean to "simply own" anything? Is it an action? What action is involved in "simply owning" a book of matches?

I suppose "simply" in this case means owning the physical item (in this case the book of matches) -- the exclusive right to use, destroy, sell, etc. that item -- apart from having special claim to its "value," which is an evaluation performed by individuals (and with much potential for variation).

Or, if I could own the value of my book of matches (beyond the "simple ownership" I mean, if also we could agree on some means to determine its "true value"), and if another person's flooding the market destroyed that value, then surely I should have recourse to prevent that destruction of my property, or recompensation.

For consider what you'd said earlier:

The copying that occurs in a copyright violation and the copying that occurs in an unauthorized reproduction of an invention is in both instances an appropriation of the value of the work without the consent of the owner.

My example of flooding the market is likewise "an appropriation of the value" of my book of matches without my consent.

But no, value in this sense is neither owned nor ownable. There are a million things you could do to "destroy the value of my matches" (which really ultimately means to convince others that they oughtn't pay what I ask for it), including developing and marketing a better product, giving out matches for free, or etc. You don't need my consent for any of it. But the one thing that you can't do is take/destroy my actual, physical matches without my consent, because it is that which constitutes my property. Not their "value."

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Even though I'll go into it again in my response, I'm gonna put this up front, because it's the key error you're making:

Contracts only refer to the agreeing parties. Copyright laws refer to everyone. Copyright laws aren't an extension of private contracts, they are an application of intellectual property rights.

You need to stop using contracts and copyright inter-changeably.

When the original inventor first sells the good, part of the copyright could require the recipient and all future recipients (via sales contract with the first recipient) whether through sales or gift to abide by the the original copyright protection.

You're missing the point of what a contract is. It only binds individuals who sign it. You can't have a contract a buyer agreed to "extend" to a third person, who agreed to nothing. Whatever the third person does, your contract doesn't affect him in any way. It will affect the person who violated the contract by giving him the device or descriptions of it (in the off chance that you can find that person), but it won't affect the third person.

The same could be said for modern music copyright laws which are utterly unenforceable. Edit - while I agree that Rothbard's proposal seems difficult to enforce (especially with the "destruction" provision), I don't see how it is is any less enforceable than modern day IP law, which is a twisted nightmare of never ending litigation. As said, music copyright protection has pretty much been abandoned, and big patents tend to get lost in never ending chains of fights against "similar" products.

Music copyright protection has been abandoned? You should test that theory, by starting a company that prints and sells Madonna's records in stores across the United States, without the copyright owner's permission. See how far you get.

The problem with your proposal isn't the same as the problem with copyrighting text, audio and video. With your proposal, for it to be in any way effective, the government would have to prevent ANY sharing of descriptions of a "copyrighted" product, not just mass commercialization of it. That's why it's a silly proposal, not because copyright is failing.

The reason why copyright is failing, at least to some extent, is popular opposition to its enforcement on the Internet. Not because it would be difficult to enforce. It wouldn't be, sites which engage in mass commercialization of copyrighted materials they don't own could just as easily be shut down as a physical store which does the same. (as an aside, this popular opposition only extends to commercialization funded through ads, not direct sales - if someone sells copyrighted material directly, they will get busted, even on the Internet).

With the previosuly contract provision, there is no violation of freedom speech. It would be no different from taking a job in which your employment contract stipulates that you may not share corporate secrets with competitors.

Except that this one wouldn't attempt to prevent one or a few employees from releasing a secret, it would attempt to prevent millions of customers. All it would take is one transgression from one person, for the information to get out. From that point, anyone who isn't a party to a contract, is free to use it in any way they'd like.

That's exactly the difference between confidentiality agreement type contracts, and copyright laws. Contracts refer to only the agreeing parties, they don't "copyright" information. Copyright laws refer to everyone. They aren't extensions of contracts, they are extensions of intellectual property.

If the government decided to enforce confidentiality agreements the same way they enforce copyright (by going after third parties who gain access to information - a newspaper who publishes them, a competitor who reads that newspaper, etc.), that would be a violation of rights, because the object of confidentiality agreements, unlike the object of copyright, is not property.

So, I ask again: Which are you suggesting, contracts or copyright, as the replacement for patent laws?

Edited by Nicky
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P.S. Not sure about the context, but I do remember hearing about British courts enforcing some kind of private confidentiality agreement on the media (issuing a media gag based on a private contract). But that's because Britain doesn't have freedom of speech. That would never fly in the US.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Whatever value the matchbook may or may not have depends on the valuer (i.e. there is no free-floating "value" apart from some person doing the valuing). So to suggest that a person may appropriate or dispossess the value of some property without taking the property in fact seems... wrong to me. We do not own "value," we own things. Things which we may or may not find more or less valuable.

It seems to me that you're saying something to the effect of "How does it make sense to appropriate the value of some thing someone owns?" thereby implying "A patent isn't legitimate property because it controls what someone else supposedly owns--they already owned it so why do they no longer own it because they reorganize it in a certain fashion (i.e. a new invention)."

But where did the idea for that invention come from?

Personally, I've reached the (tentative) conclusion that the vast majority of patents and copyrights that have ever existed, if not all of them, were immoral, more or less because of the problem I outlined at the beginning of this thread, but I'm not following your reasoning here.

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The issue of patents is of interest to me because I think the practice of "first come, first served", doesn't adequately reward the efforts of every individual involved in the process of innovation. There's an aspect of synchronicity of development amongst innovators, working independently of one another, that's entirely dismissed by a process of assigning reward as though innovation only arrives from one source. I think the premise that the first innovator to lawyer up is entitled to profit exclusively from the efforts of numerous individuals working towards the same product ought to be checked. The reality is, we wouldn't all still be cooking over campfires if the first person to harness electricity had been electrocuted prior to marketing his idea.

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If the first man to discover gold in California had drowned before filing his claim no doubt someone else would have discovered the gold and filed the claim.

Gold was discovered prior to it being found in California. I suspect a great deal of innovation is similarly caused by knowing what to look for in the first place.

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