Alright, the format tonight is going to be a little bit irregular as far as what we've allocated is a half hour to each side for their presentations and then five minutes for rebuttal to each side, but in view of the length of the remarks that have been prepared by the speaker for the affirmative, could you give him latitude and let him use the time that, use extra time on his presentation against his rebuttal?
We each have 35 minutes total to allocate as we use it up.
In other words, whatever Wendy doesn't use up during her presentation, she can use in her rebuttal after.
In other words, it's not really a debate.
Yes, it is.
When all of that's done, we'll open the floor to questions from everyone here.
So, is there any timer is ready? Let's see if there's an assist with that.
There we are. You're ready.
Could we wait just a minute until the ice cream is here?
Is copyright a natural right? I'm taking the affirmative. Introduction.
I'd like to start off with an image to have in your minds during the course of this debate, and this image is a mnemonic, a memory aid for a point I want you to remember.
You're in the land of Oz, and you come across Dorothy, Tin Man and Scarecrow, at a fork in the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City.
Emerald City
Dorothy is arguing to go down one fork of the road, and Scarecrow is arguing that they
go the other way.
After the debate between Dorothy and Scarecrow has gone on pointlessly for what seems an
eternity, Tin Man turns to Dorothy and says,
We're never going to settle anything this way, Dorothy.
Don't you realize that you're arguing against a straw man?
Now, I didn't say that just to make an atrocious pun.
I want you to keep that image firmly in mind, and I think this will help.
The reason I started out with this mnemonic, this memory aid, is because I don't want
to have to answer or defend all the theories of copyright that I will not be advocating
tonight. So let me start out by stating what I am not talking about when I defend copyright.
I am not talking about a grant of privilege from the state. If it can be demonstrated
to me, but I don't think it can be, that the only way the concept I am advocating can exist
is through the state granting it as a privilege, then I will concede outright that it has no
place in libertarian theory or practice and the concept should be abandoned.
I am also not going to be talking about a defense of ideas as property or defending what historically has been called intellectual property.
Whatever the merits of these concepts, they are not part of the concept I am going to be putting forward tonight.
Therefore, any attack on copyright which involves disproving the validity of ideas as property or intellectual property will be arguing against a straw man.
What I am going to be doing tonight is to put forward what I believe to be a new and
original theory of copyright, a new concept of copyright, a word which I will be replacing
in a few minutes as inadequately defined for the concept I'm really advocating, defining
a new concept.
There are two kinds of definitions that can be given.
The first way to define a concept is with a lexical definition, that is, with a definition
by other words, such as you'd find in a dictionary.
The second way to define a concept is with an ostensive definition, that is, with a definition
abstracted by pointing out with several examples just what it is you're trying to define and
demonstrating what is common to each example and can therefore be induced from the examples
as an isolated concept.
With a new concept, it's always better to give the ostensive definition before the lexical
so you can get an idea of some of the contexts in which the new concept appears.
So before I give you a dictionary definition of this new concept, I'm going to define it
by example several times. I think the best first example is to be found in the following
question. Is computer hardware the only thing that can be property, or can computer software
be property also? And I'd better define those terms for those of you who aren't familiar
with computer jargon. In computer terminology, hardware is the computer itself and all the
machinery used with it. The microprocessors, the disk drives, the monitor, the printer,
and software is all the recorded orderings of bits, recorded information signals that
And let me be exact in my meaning. Because a computer disquette, a round piece of plastic with a magnetic coating, is what software is usually stored on. It is common use to refer to computer disquettes as software, but really, the disquette is hardware too, and the information on it is actually the software.
If you don't believe me on this last point, then listen to the language that comes out of the mouth of a computer user who plunks down 300 bucks for a couple of diskettes labeled WordStar that a salesman says contains information that tells the computer to do word processing.
When the user gets at home, she discovers that she's just purchased two diskettes with random meaningless characters.
Is it the diskettes themselves that the user has just paid 300 bucks for?
If so, she just got overcharged by around $292. She can buy two blank disquettes for about $8.
Okay, here's my second example, the same concept in a different context.
You go into B. Dalton's and plunk down $3.95 for a book that says on the cover, Atlas Shrugged.
You get it home, and the first sentence is,
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Now, what you bought is a book, and this book has got everything that makes a book a book.
A binding, hundreds of sheets of paper with printed ink impressions, and a cover.
Let's even pretend that the book you took home has the same number of pages, the same dimensions and weight,
the same binding and style of printing as the book with the composition called Atlas Shrug.
Do you have any just cause of complaint if the composition of words inside the book turns out to be something other than what the cover says?
If you answer no, then you got everything you paid for.
But if you answer yes, then you are saying that the composition of words makes this book a different commodity
from the book you thought you were buying, and therefore you are rightfully entitled to a copy of the composition of words labeled Atlas Shrugged.
Next definition by example.
A college student figures out a way to put together a few commonly available hardware items into a cheap device that moisten stamps without having to lick them.
Nobody has ever put together these commonly available items in this configuration before.
Has she invented anything? Is there anything new that didn't exist before? Has she in effect performed an act of creation?
Last example. An artist does a design logo for a company's product. Let's call this product a stamp moistener called Stamplex.
Stamplex stamp moisteners are put on the market with that design logo on it, and two weeks later, the company's competitor puts that same Stamplex logo on a different type of stamp moistener, their marketing and competition.
Is that second company violating anybody's property rights?
Now, you might have already abstracted the concept from the examples, but I have to assume you haven't for the sake of completeness.
In the first case, software, what I was discussing was orderings of information.
In the second case, the composition of words in a book.
In the third case, a new configuration of materials.
In the fourth case, an identifying mark.
And what is common to each of these is logos.
Logos was a word used by the ancient Greeks.
In fact, logos was the word the Greeks themselves used for word.
But they meant a good deal more than that.
Logos meant not only word, but also thought, speech, science, study, reason, and rational principle.
Logos meant the pattern of creation manifest in the universe.
What we libertarians might refer to as the principle behind natural laws and natural rights.
Later on, the Christians adopted logos to mean the second person of the Christian Holy Trinity,
identified by them as Christ when according to them he visited earth,
and the Gospel of St. John accordingly starts out,
Logos meant knowledge. It's the root behind the suffix "-ology," found at the end of biology, psychology, technology, ornithology, herpetology, and radiology.
Logos is the root word behind logic. Logos is also preserved in the modern words logistics, logarithm, and logo, short for a commercial logogram.
In using the word logos, I'll be going back to what is meant by all those usages, all of which refer to an observable order, array, pattern, form or identity to be found in the universe.
It is the logos of information imposed onto a blank computer disk that makes it software.
It is the logos of words in a book that makes it a novel.
It is the logos of an object to make it perform a particular task that makes it an invention.
It is the logos of a mark that gives us the ability to identify a particular product.
And it is property rights in logos that I'll be advocating tonight.
I told you before that the word copyright is inadequate to define the new concept I am advocating, which you now know is property rights in logos.
So I'm going to give you a new word to replace the concept of copyright and proceed from there.
The new word I'm going to use for property rights in logos is logo-right.
Now, for me to defend a particular kind of property rights, you need to understand first
what natural rights and property rights are in general, secondly, what property is in
general and how it comes to exist, thirdly, how property rights are established and what
they mean in practice. After that, I'll get to the case for logo rights in particular.
Natural Rights and Property Rights Natural rights and property rights theory
has a long history of development, but it is my purpose here to define natural and property
The best short definition of national rights and property rights I can give you is to be
found in five paragraphs from Ayn Rand's essay, Man's Rights, in the book The Virtue
of Selfishness, copyright 1963 by the Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., and reproduced here under
the Doctrine of Fair Usage.
I am quoting now.
I am quoting.
A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a
social context.
There is only one fundamental right, all the others are its consequences or corollaries,
a man's right to his own life.
Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.
The right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action,
which means the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being
for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life, such as
the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The concept of a right pertains only to action, specifically to freedom of action. It means
freedom from physical compulsion, coercion, or interference by other men. Thus, for every
individual, a right is a moral sanction of a positive, of his freedom to act on his own
judgment for his own goals by his own voluntary uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his
rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind, to abstain from violating
his rights. The right to life is the source of all rights, and the right to property is
is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since
man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of
his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose
of his product is a slave. Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action
like all the others. It is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences
of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property,
And only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use, and to dispose of material values."
Now, Rand uses two phrases in the section I just quoted which give us the beginnings of what property is and how it comes about.
So I'll focus on these, then expand on them in detail.
The first phrase, when interpolated slightly, is the product of a man's effort.
The second phrase is material values which are gained, kept, used, and disposed of.
These two phrases lead us right into the discussion of what property is and how it comes into existence.
The creation of property.
What does it mean to say that property is the product of a man's, or using the word
I prefer, a person's effort?
Do we mean property is that which a person creates?
If so, we need a concept of creation.
We are told by physicists and chemists that we live in a universe where matter and energy
can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed.
This change may include the transformation of matter into energy, or theoretically energy
Existence does not allow us the possibility of creation ex nihilo out of nothingness.
If we start with this premise, then it becomes curious, at the very least, how human beings have talked casually for quite some time about how anybody creates anything.
Why do we speak of engineers building, musicians composing, architects designing?
Each of these speaks of people by their actions, bringing into existence something that wasn't there before.
Here's where the concept of logos comes into play again.
Creation is a person's action which imposes that person's logos on something which exists
to give that thing an identity it did not previously have.
The fundamental act of creation is the act of patterning a logos on something, patterning
notes into a musical composition, patterning words into a novel, patterning bits into a
computer software, patterning ink into a blueprint, patterning steel into an automobile, patterning
There are, of course, questions about greater and lesser orders of logos that can be brought up now, but I am not arguing that every act of creation is on an existent that previously had no identity at all. I am merely saying that the act of creation is the act of imposing an aspect of a person's identity, a logos, on something to give that object an identity it did not previously have. From a physicist's point of view, we can consider creation as a
The Person's Revolt Against Entropy
Entropy is that universal process which takes things from a state of greater improbabilities to a state of lesser improbabilities, commonly thought of as the decay of order into chaos.
Creation, the act of imposing on natural objects a logos not naturally found, is the act of moving things from a state of lesser improbabilities to a state of greater improbabilities.
Some specific examples. Iron and carbon are both elements found in nature. In fact, iron
ore can contain carbon in large amounts. But steel, which requires the combining of a specific
ratio of iron to carbon at specific temperatures for a specific span of time, is rarely if
ever produced by the automatic processes of nature. If you make iron and carbon into steel,
the resulting substance is much less probable. Therefore, it is proper to say that an act
of taking iron and carbon and creating steel is lowering the entropy of that iron and carbon.
If you take that steel and press it into rectangular sheets of even thickness, length, and width, the result is even less probable, therefore it is proper to say that the act of finding steel and creating sheet metal out of it is lowering the entropy of that steel.
And if you take that sheet metal, form it into the body of an automobile, and paint it so the steel doesn't rust, the result is less probable still, and it is proper to say that the act of taking sheet metal and creating painted autobodies is lowering the entropy of that sheet metal.
Bridges are less probable than rivers,
symphonies are less probable than bird songs,
and houses are less probable than caves.
Engineers, composers, and architects each leave the universe a little less probable than they found it.
Specifically then, creation is the act of patterning less improbable substances and objects
to produce things more improbable of having resulted from the automatic processes of nature.
Now, the only sort of creation we're concerned with in this discussion is the creation of property,
If you then compare this definition with the two phrases drawn from Rand, the product of a man's effort, and material values which are gained, kept, used, and disposed of, you find no contradictions and a good deal of implied overlap.
Now, I want to focus on Rand's phrase, material value, long enough to point out the following.
Rand's definition of value is that which one acts to gain or keep,
and a material value would by her definition be something material which one acts to gain or keep.
Since the question of materiality is one which will come up again later,
I wish to point out that Rand's use of the word material in this context
did not prevent her from referring to as property things not comprised of matter,
such as radio frequencies, in her essay, The Property Status of Airwaves, in Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal,
or patents and copyrights in Patents and Copyrights, her very next essay in that book.
Before I leave the area of defining property, I wish to bring out what libertarian theoretician Robert Lefebvre uses for his tests.
Lefebvre asks three questions.
First, is that which is said to be property valued by somebody?
Second, does that which is said to be property have boundary limits?
And third, is that which is said to be property under an owner's control?
And these lead us to the last discussion necessary before we get to logo rights, establishing and using property rights.
Let me quote once more Rand's statement on property rights.
Bear in mind that the right to a property is a right to action, like all the others.
It is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object.
It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it.
Therefore, a property right, by its very nature, refers to an action with respect to a property.
The question arising in the establishment of property rights is, what actions are required to gain rights with respect to that property?
And the definitions of property we've already discussed provide, in no particular order, the following answers to the establishment of property rights.
That which is to be your property must be valued. That is, you must act to gain or keep it.
That which is valued as your property must be claimed as property. That is, it must be publicly available knowledge that you are declaring it to be your property.
That which is being claimed as property must in some sense be a product of human effort. It must be created. That is, a person must take it from a state of lesser improbability to a state of greater improbability.
The claim to the property must be defined within observable boundary limits, and the property must be subject to the control of the person claiming it.
The question arising once property rights have been established are, what actions is the owner permitted respecting that property?
And the question of what actions the owner is permitted respecting that property are dependent on the question, what rights specifically does the owner have in this property?
The best way to show the import of this is to give some examples.
Do I have the right to build a house on this lot and live in it?
Do I have the right to raise the building on the next lot over and build a three-car garage?
Do I have the exclusive right to use this driveway, or is there a public right of way?
Do I have the right to eat this sandwich?
Do I have the right to divert this stream so the water doesn't flow to the next parcel of land?
Do I have the right to broadcast radio signals on a certain frequency at a certain power output from a certain location during certain times of the day?
Do I have the right to take this book home from the bookstore, and what may I do with it when I get it home?
Note that none of these actions requires the property itself to be anything.
The property right, being a statement referring to the definitions of moral action, adheres not to the property, but to the owner and actions that owner may or may not take with respect to that property.
One last set of property rights concepts, and then we'll be ready to discuss logo rights.
Exclusive use, consumption, bundles of rights, and properties.
From the instant a property is created and claimed by a person, all rights to that property are held by that person, who I'll refer to as the property's first owner.
Since property results from an act of lowering entropy, creation, it should come as no surprise that the answer to the question of what an owner may do to a property includes the act of raising entropy again, consumption.
An owner may exercise property rights to the complete destruction of that property without the consent of anyone who does not share rights in that property.
The ownership of a property consists of all rights to exploit, consume, keep unconsumed, control, destroy, trade or otherwise decide the ultimate disposition of a property
without sharing the decisions regarding that property or its benefits with anyone else.
That property, by its very nature, is owned monopolistically, and the use of that property by anyone other than the owner requires the owner's permission.
When an owner creates a property, that property is totally and exclusively its owners.
Here we have the necessity of property rights to begin with.
The origin of property rights stems from the need of adjudicating conflicting claims about the exclusive use of something.
Since a property can only be owned monopolistically, property rights are the means of determining who holds the monopoly claim on that property.
Utilitarians argue that these claims should be adjudicated for the benefit of society as a whole, the greatest good for the greatest number.
The utilitarian premise is at the base of all non-theistic political systems, democracy, republicanism, communism, fascism, socialism, national socialism and militarism.
Even the worst dictator claims to act in the best interest of the people, or the will of the blood, or the proletariat, or the folk.
Libertarians, on the other hand, say that property rights adhere not to society, but to the individual person, arising out of the specific nature of humans having to control their material environment in order to survive as rational beings.
To survive a human being must be able to control the environment, the human being's domain.
To control that domain, the human being must identify the nature of each existent in the
environment and arrange them all in such patterns that they contribute to the purposes of survival
and well-being.
The necessity of property being by nature exclusive stems from the necessity of dedicating
an object to a specific function, giving a form to perform that function and having some
Now, because the first ownership of any property is a total and exclusive ownership, the owner
can dispose of the property in any fashion that owner sees fit. The owner can choose
to abandon the property, in which case it reverts to a state of not being owned anymore
and it is open to a new claimant. The owner can choose to sell the property. The owner
can choose to break up the property into smaller parts and sell those parts. Now, using the
From the first definition of property found in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, quote,
a quality or trait belonging to and especially peculiar to an individual or thing, unquote,
it is correct to say that this property consists also of its constituent properties. And we
can see from this first definition how use of the word property as something belonging
to an owner came about. That which was owned was thought of as a quality or trait, a property
in the first definition of the owner itself.
Therefore, it is equally correct to refer to each property, each quality or trait adhering
to that which is owned as a whole, as a property as well.
This leads us to the additional possibility that an owner may choose to break the property
down into its constituent properties, that is, each of the various qualities or traits
adhering to the property as a whole, and sell, as a separate property, the right to exploit
that quality or trait.
When this is done, a property is said to be made up of a bundle of rights.
Two cases showing how bundles of rights are dealt with in respect to land use will illustrate
this.
First case.
If I own a parcel of land outright, what is called in fi simple, then I own all the rights
in that parcel of land and I may dispose of it as I see fit.
As I've said, this is the situation enjoyed by a property's first owner or creator.
Second case.
However, and this is a big however, if a previous owner has broken a parcel of land into a
If a property is sold to a bundle of rights and sold me only the right to build a house on that land and the right to dig a coal mine there is owned by someone else, then the property is said to be fee entailed, that is, the rights to the various actions that can be taken with respect to it have been divided up by quality or trait among more than one owner, and the owner of each particular property right must exercise that right in such a way that it does not interfere with rights held by other rights holders. The various discrete properties taken from the original property are still owned exclusively,
The original property itself is no longer on the exclusive domain of a single owner.
We are now ready to ask whether there are in fact property rights in logos, whether
logo rights can be property.
Does logo right exist?
Earlier in this discussion, I referred to the necessity of imposing a logos on material
objects as a precondition to creating them as property.
This is not the point being debated tonight.
Having established that an object receiving an imprint from a person's logos becomes that
When a Logos is imposed on matter, creating a new property, the Logos becomes a material
quality of the property it is imposed upon.
Simultaneous with the creation of a new property, the Logos becomes the trait of that property
to display the Logos itself, which includes the possibility that the Logos can be copied
Starting from the creation of a new property, the first owner has total and exclusive ownership
of that property and all its different parts, qualities and traits.
One of the properties included in this total ownership of the created property is therefore
the logos itself.
Consequently, if the first owner, or any subsequent owner of the total property, decides to break
the property into bundles of rights and maintain ownership of some of those rights while selling
and others, that is, entailing some rights, this is perfectly within that owner's prerogatives.
Now this next point is crucial. Placing any restrictions on how the owner may dispose
of the property or its constituent properties would deprive that owner of the exclusive
and total ownership which belongs to a first owner. You cannot attack the rights of a total
owner to divide up rights to that property without destroying the concept of property
being exclusively that owner's. And a property right not exclusively owned is not a property
Once the property is broken up into its separate properties, each property requiring a separate
right to exploit that quality right aspect, each property right from the original bundle
of rights can be traded separately.
Remember, rights, being moral sanctions of what action a person may take with respect
to a property, adhere not to the property itself, but to the owner.
If you declare that property rights are inherent in the property rather than in the owner,
When you are reduced to the absurdity of saying that property, apart from the actions of its owner, is capable of committing moral or immoral acts.
Thus, it is perfectly within the prerogatives of that owner to maintain ownership to the rights and the logos and tail the logo rights in that property by valuing it, claiming it, defending its boundaries and continuing to control it.
Let's take those four points one at a time.
First, is the logo right of value? Yes, remember Rand's definition of value, that which one
acts to gain or keep. The owner has either created the logos, thus demonstrating that
it is something worth gaining, or the owner maintains ownership in it, thus demonstrating
that the logo right is something worth keeping. If you say that the logos doesn't have value,
then why does imposing a logo on two $4 computer diskettes make them $300 worth of software?
A blank diskette and the diskette with the logos of information on it are two separate goods with two separate qualities, two different properties which can easily be told apart.
Perhaps you can't tell those diskettes apart by looking at them, but my computer surely can.
If I stick in one diskette with a certain logos of information on it, the computer's display gives me an opening menu.
When I stick in a blank diskette, otherwise identical, it says, not a valid system disk.
And if a Logos has no valid value as a separate property from that object which it is imposed upon,
why would you be upset if you brought home the book you thought was at least shrugged
and found that the first sentence was not, who is John Galt?
To state the principle explicitly, if a Logos has no value in itself,
then removing it from the objects on which it is found should make no difference in the values found in those objects.
As a corollary, the value of the Logos is demonstrated by removing it from an object
and seeing whether that object is valued as a separate good or commodity.
Second, does the owner claim the logo right?
Yes, and here's where the term copyright can be used exactly for once.
Copyright is a claim of a logo right, and the claim is made by embedding what is called a copyright notice
onto the logos being claimed, putting anyone finding that logos on notice
that the property rights and logos are owned and not open for a new claimant.
The nearest equivalent in common law requires the posting of no trespassing signs on land if you wish to preserve the exclusivity of your property rights to prevent the land from lapsing into being a public thoroughfare.
I might also add at this point that registration of the copyright is the exact equivalent to the registration of the deed on a piece of land, a formal recorded proof that the property rights are claimed as of a certain date by a certain owner.
Such registration, of course, need not be with the state, but merely with a person, company or organization generally trusted to maintain such records.
As an example of private copyright registration, the Writers Guild of America West maintains an office for depositing copies of screenplays and screen treatments as proof that a certain person had possession of it on a certain date.
Such proof is commonly used in private arbitrations performed by the Writers Guild regarding disputes over rights and credits.
Third, can the owner of the logo right ascertain the boundaries of her property rights, that
is, are there limits to that which is being claimed?
The answer to boundaries, limits, on logos is again, yes, but, and this is a crucial
point to be understood, limits always are dependent on the nature of the property right
being claimed.
Let me explain.
When one speaks of boundaries of property rights in land, one speaks of dimensions of
area.
When one speaks of property right boundaries in the radio spectrum, complaining that there
There is no boundaries of an electromagnetic waves area would be meaningless in defining
the limits of that kind of property when rightly speaks of limits and an electromagnetic waves
amplitude and frequency.
And when one speaks of the property boundaries on a logos, one speaks of the limits of identity.
Each logos has a specific identity that differentiates, binds and delimits its nature, the qualities
and traits through which it is capable of being exploited.
Now I can anticipate the following question at this point.
Since a Logos can be copied infinitely without depriving the owner of the original, how can
you say that a Logos is a scarce resource and therefore an economic good?
The first answer here is, the scarcity of the Logos is a function of its being, like
all other kinds of property, a product of human effort. Someone had to put work, the
scarce resource of human labor, into the production of the Logos in the first place, and storing
that labor in a recorded form, patterning the Logos into a material object as a material
and Social Value constitutes the creation of a scarce good, a property.
But the answer here that I prefer to give is, if this logos is so damned unlimited as not to be an economic object, then why do you want to reproduce mine?
The limits on this kind of good are not drawn by its infinite ability to replicate itself, which is a way in which the logos is not limited.
However, just as property rights in the radio spectrum are not limited by area, but by amplitude and frequency,
the limits on logo right are not to be found in its ability to be infinitely reproduced,
In terms used by economists, when defining the limits on a logos, we must look to limits of horizontal competition between different kinds of goods rather than to the limits of vertical competition within a kind of good.
The fourth and last test. Does the logo rights owner control the logo right? Most definitely.
An owner controls property rights and logos by maintaining ownership of the logo right and licensing, that is, leasing the various rights.
You hear libertarians speak a lot about human rights and property rights, but what I'm most used to hearing about as a working writer
are primary rights and subsidiary rights, hardcover rights, trade paperback rights, mass market paperback rights, first serial rights, transcription rights,
Transcription Rights, Character Rights, Story Rights, Merchandising Rights, Movie Rights, TV Rights, Radio Rights, English Rights, and Foreign Language Rights.
Each of these is a separate right in the bundle of rights created with the original property, and each one can be sold or licensed as the logo right owner wishes.
Answering some objections. Very briefly, I'd like to anticipate the foremost common objections to copyrights and patents, and show why they do not apply to logo rights as I've talked about them.
Objection 1. How can you say that a logos is a separate property since it can be imposed on someone else's property?
Answer. The same way that a house can be a separate property from the land it is on.
Objection 2. What about two or more people who come up with the same invention or story independently? Who owns the logos then?
Answer. As I've discussed earlier, creation means the taking of something from a state of greater probability to a state of lesser probability.
To the extent to which a given logo of invention or story can be produced independently more than once, to that extent the probability is still low enough to question whether an act of creation has been performed at all.
In the case, however, where it is generally conceded, each logo is something rather improbable anyway, and it can be proven each was created independently, whatever small differences there are between each logo is sufficient that each logo can be owned separately.
In a practical sense, however, I think this is about as likely as a million monkeys typing for a million years and producing the play Hamlet.
Objection 3. What about a person who copies the logos accidentally? Isn't that person potentially a victim of the owner of logo rights?
Answer. This case is exactly equivalent of an accidental trespasser on someone's land.
In common law decisions, it has been determined that land must be clearly posted with no trespassing signs to remove the liabilities involved in a trespasser coming to harm your land.
The Copyright Notice is prominently placed on logos for the same reason, to warn trespassers that they are responsible for their own liabilities if they violate the owner's property rights.
Objection 4. Doesn't a logo right restrict the contents of a person's mind? Are you going to say a logos can't be memorized, that is, the logos imposed on a human brain?
Answer. The question of whether a logos can be imposed intact on a human mind is one that current neurology can't answer.
Memorization may involve other principles and the principles of imposing a logos on matter in some intact form.
The Theory of Money and Credit
If money or reproduces an invention from memory, then the logos to be found in matter must still be regarded as the property of the logo rights owner.
In essence, the person reproducing the logos without obtaining the rights has just erected someone else's house on their own land, and the true owner has the right to demand that her property be returned or destroyed.
Conclusion
If, after all this, you still think that logos can't be property because it isn't a scarce
economic good, or if you think creation isn't essential to the origin of property, then compose
your own damn symphonies, write your own damn novels, invent your own damn computer, much
less figure out how to program it, design your own damn houses, film your own damn movies,
and come up with a damned recipe for bread on your own, because a person who makes his
or her living by creating logos for license isn't going to work for free.
If logo rights aren't recognized as property, a creator of a logos is left with two choices.
Limit the circulation of the logos only to those who sign contracts agreeing not to copy
it, and pray that someone doesn't accidentally leave a copy unprotected for an hour in the
vicinity of a Xerox machine or camera, or produce only the least labor-intensive sort
of logos that can be quickly exploited in the few weeks before someone can undersell
the licensed product by reproducing its logos without having to pay royalties.
And don't kid yourself, Ayn Rand wouldn't have spent ten years writing Atlas Shrugged
If the marketing choices were limited to private circulation among readers signing contracts
agreeing not to copy it, or having the first edition copied by every moocher, out to make
a quick buck off the author of The Fountainhead by printing her next book without having to
obtain rights from the author.
If you don't think of logos as the scarce good, you'll find out how scarce it is damned
quickly if you declare open season on ripping them off.
And yes, I did say rip-off.
Logo rights are property rights, and they are entitled to the same respect and protection
as Property Rights in Land, Butter, Guns, Cars, Radio Frequencies and Gold that I have
heard libertarians defending endlessly over the last dozen years. Just as the communist
anarchist argues that it is only the monopolistic grant of privilege from the state that makes
property itself possible, so the anarchist opponent of copyright has been arguing that
it has only been the monopolistic grant of protection from the state that makes copyright
possible. As a propertarian anarchist, I see that both are making the same error. If anything,
The state is constantly violating logo rights by imposing through fiat the state's own
copyright laws on logo right owners.
Statists are willing enough to have the Rockefellers hand down the family trust for generation
after generation, but the logos that an inventor creates, with its meager recognition in patent
laws, is to be thrown into the public domain after a few years, depriving that inventor
of her property rights.
The current status laws regarding copyright are less noxious, but any restrictions at
all on an owner's maintenance of property rights is coercive, and that is why, as a
propertarian anarchist, I proudly declare that the presentation I've just read you
is my property, herein claimed by giving you the notice that this Logos is copyrighted
by J. Neal Schulman, 1983, and anyone who attempts to violate my property rights in this Logos
should expect to hear from the legal firm of Smith & Wesson.
Now, I went a little over time, so I assume that compensation will be given to Wendy in
additional time.
If this were a formal debate, you'd be disqualified, however, for having documentary proof that
you are long-winded.
My terms for agreeing to appear here was that I get to read this presentation in whole and
Copyright, which is the natural claim of ownership, the legal claim of ownership over a particular
arrangement of the alphabet, is a complicated issue because it is a claim of ownership over
an intangible.
Copyright, what it claims ownership over, has no mass, it has no shape, it has no color.
But the property being claimed is not the specific instance of any book, but it's the
idea of the book and all potential instances of that book, real or imaginary.
The title of a recent work called, Who Owns What's in Your Mind, concretizes a common
sense objection to the idea of copyright.
Most people in this room would gladly proclaim, no one owns what's in my mind. And yet, if
you own what is in your own mind, you must have the right to use and control it, because
that is what ownership and libertarianism means, the right to use and dispose of something.
And if what is in my mind is a novel that begins with the sentence, who is John Galt,
and I do not have the right to put it down on paper, does that not say that I'm Rand
assuming living Rand is the one that owns what's in my mind and not me?
Now, since I've already said that sentence, which is reproducing it, and no one has run to the door to call a cop,
I imagine that people don't consider this a very significant violation.
And this is one of the problems of this debate. It's very vague. What is a violation? What is not?
It's also a very unusual debate, because both Neil and I are writers,
and you would assume that both of us have vested interest in what should be a protection of what we create, copyrights.
If I wanted to needle Neil, I would say that, previous to this debate anyway,
I would quote Tucker who said that anarchists who advocate copyright are free traders who declare for protection in the sphere which involved their special interests.
But of course I won't do that.
And as a matter of fact, I advocate a form of copyright, a type of copyright, which could be called free market copyright.
In other words, I consider copyright, the protection of ideas in words, to be a very useful social convention that should be protected by free market means, by contracts and other market mechanisms.
Now, since Neil believes, or the other side of this debate would have believed, that copyright is a natural law, can be derived from natural rights, he would have said that in fact it should be protected by law.
by Law. If not state law, then the laws of a defense agency, because in fact it is yours
by right. There is no contract that is necessary to protect it. And that is the essence of
the difference between this debate. Do you need a contract? Is it something like labor
in which I have no right to Jeff's labor and I must contract in order to have a claim
to it? Or is it something that I have the right to, such as money I've earned, and
I need no contract to say this is mine, you may not have it, I will fight in order to
What is Property and What is an Idea? Does an idea embody the essential characteristics which makes something property, which makes something ownable?
But before going on to a discussion of theory, a discussion of what is property, I want to address an implication that often lurks beneath the surface, swimming like a shark, of criticisms behind free market copyright, and that is an argument of market failure.
As libertarians, we have all heard this argument in regard to free market defense systems, the inability of the free market to establish medical standards, for example.
In copyright, it is said that the free market cannot protect writers, cannot protect inventors who wish to throw their work out into the public.
This is new wine in an old bottle.
Now, I deal with the used book business quite a bit, and one of the things that has happened is, even being very free market, I've been astonished at how well it regulates ethics and basically how business practices are set up.
It's not unusual, for example, for a stolen book or forgery that's spotted in New York to be known in LA stores the next day.
This is because the free market tends to set up the standards, tends to put a very high premium on reputation.
and what someone who claims that free market cannot work is saying is that in fact the market is incompetent to deal with this issue, that again we must appeal to laws.
So the question between Neil and I is not whether there should be protection for ideas, both of us agree with that.
It's whether it should be on a free market basis or whether we make the statement there ought to be a law, a law by state or a law by a private defense agency.
And again this reduces to the question of whether ideas, in which category I place things such as logos, patterns of ideas, the sort of pattern of poetry as opposed to specific ideas that a poem expresses, that category I place logos into, into ideas, whether it can be property.
And this again breaks down to the question of what are the characteristics of property?
What is it that makes something ownable? Because not everything is ownable.
Human beings are not ownable, for example. Many people believe animals are not ownable.
Simply because something exists does not mean it can be property, cannot be owned by someone.
Now, Benjamin Tucker, of whom I'm very fond, addressed this problem in fundamental terms.
What is it about the nature of man and the nature of reality that makes the concept of property even necessary?
And he speculated that what made the concept of property arise in human society is the issue of scarcity.
Because the same glass of water cannot be used by the two people in the same regard, at the same time, for the same purpose, someone must decide who will use this glass of water.
The standard by which you decide who will use this glass of water is who owns the water.
Basically, you make a property claim. Who rightfully has the claim?
Tucker wrote,
If it were possible, and it had always been possible, for an unlimited number of individuals to use to an unlimited extent at the same time and in an unlimited number of places the same item, there never would have been any such concept as property.
Now since the same idea or pattern of idea can be used in unlimited extent to an unlimited number of purposes in unlimited places, he concluded that copyright ran counter to the very purpose of property itself, which was to ascertain the correct allocation of a scarce resource.
Copyright also contradicts, he claimed and I claim, the essential characteristics of what is property, what makes something ownable.
One such characteristic is that it be transferable, that it be alienable.
The individual anarchist James L. Walker commented, the giver or seller of an idea or anything that can be claimed as property, if you claim property in ideas, it must be true of ideas.
The giver or seller parts with it in conveying it. This characteristic distinguishes property from skill and information.
For example, when you go into a doctor for a checkup and you give him money, you are not paying for property, you are paying for skill and information.
And the thing that distinguishes that transaction from paying for property is the doctor does not alienate that from himself.
You do not in fact walk out having something that the doctor had before and has no longer.
He cannot transfer it to you, he can merely share it with you.
Now, it was this point that made Thomas Jefferson reject ideas as property.
He drew the distinction, I think it's a very nice analogy, between ideas and candles.
He said, ideas are like candles. I take my taper, I go up to yours and I light it with your consent.
Because without your consent is a violation of your self-ownership.
But with your consent, I light that candle.
I have taken nothing from you, yet I have a lighted candle to guide my way.
There has been a transaction in which both benefit and neither has anything taken from them.
Jefferson went on to say, if nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,
it is an idea which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, a point I will return to.
But the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
That is another characteristic of an idea which keeps it from being property. You cannot dispossess yourself from my words.
Right now you have heard them. You cannot go into your brain, at least now with technology, and electronically take it out of it.
When a poet reads or sells his poems without a contract,
When he throws his ideas and his patterns into the public realm, the listeners are receiving
information, they are not receiving property.
For the publicized poem to be property, it must be transferable, alienable.
Yet as the egoist J.B. Robinson said, what is an idea?
Is it made of wood or iron or stone?
The idea is nothing objective.
That is to say the idea is not part of the product, it is part of the producer.
In other words, if the poet maintains that he has a claim to the words that you have
heard and are now in your mind, what he is claiming is an aspect of slavery, for he is
claiming ownership in something that is within your own body, an aspect of you physically.
And keep in mind that ownership means in libertarianism the right to use and dispose.
So if he claims the right to use and dispose something which is physically within your
He is claiming that the electronic impulses in your brain, in the same way he would be claiming the blood that is running through your veins.
Don't deny that you can buy blood, but what I'm saying is you buy it as a contractual arrangement, you do not buy it as your natural right, which is the subject of this debate.
Now, the reason that title, ownership claim to the poem that's being read, is not transferable.
And again, I don't mean, it's very clear, you have to be very clear, I don't mean any specific poem.
I could hand this piece of paper to you and you would have the specific instance of this part of my talk.
But what is being claimed in copyright is almost a platonic ideal.
Not just this specific instance, but all instances possible.
The Platonic Arrangement of the Alphabet that constitutes this page.
The reason it cannot be transferred is because it is intangible.
Those who try to claim property rights in something that is intangible and untransferable
are trying to bring two mutually exclusive concepts together.
People who claim ideas of property are trying to do something very similar
to what Ados Huxley did when he defined God as a gaseous invertebrate.
Now in the example of a poet reading his work, the important factor is the act of throwing
the poetry into the public realm.
Because there's a great difference here between public and private ideas.
And by these terms I mean ideas, private ideas, ones that you keep to yourself, public ideas,
Everyone owns every idea that is in his own mind, and no one else has any right to that specific instance of the idea, even if that specific instance is the only instance, if it is a doctor who has created a cancer cure and he decides not to tell it, as long as it is in his own mind, he is the sole proprietor of it, as long as he basically produces it by contract, he also is the sole proprietor of it.
And this is because this idea is protected by his self-ownership, his right to live in peace, his right to have his body in violet, and there's no way to get at that idea without in fact attacking his body in some way, in fact violating his rights.
To restate this, I own my ideas, the ideas that are in my mind, very much the same way I would own a stack of money, a stack of dollar bills that's locked inside a vault.
in a vault. However, if I throw open the doors of the vault, I take the stack of dollar bills
and I throw them into the air, into the wind, into the street. The people who pick up this
money that I have thrown into the street are no more thieves, have no more violated my
rights than do the people who pick up the ideas that are thrown by the poet out into
the air. If you take what I am saying right now and use this analogy tomorrow, you have
I have not violated my rights, for I have thrown it into the air, and you are merely picking it up off the ground where it landed.
The ground being your fertile and receptive and sympathetic brains.
And yet, the poet might respond, no one is forced to absorb what I have to say to him.
No one is, you are not chained here, surely your being here is a matter of implied consent.
The little electrons running around the synapses of your brain right now are there because in fact you agreed to sit and listen to what I have to say.
Well, Victor Yaros, Tucker's main opponent on copyright in the 19th century movement, an anticipator of Neil Schulman, claimed very much the same thing when he wrote,
All Mr. Tucker has the right to demand is that these things shall not be brought to his own private house and placed before his eyes.
In other words, all he has the right to say is that he should be not forced into a position of absorption.
If he chooses to absorb, he has a liability.
Tucker responded,
Some man comes along and parades in the streets, and we are told that in consequence of this act, on his part, we must either give up our liberty to walk the streets or our liberty to ideas.
Not so fast, sir. Were you compelled to parade on the streets? And why do you ask us to protect us from the consequences of your acts?
Moreover, the introduction of implied contract between a listener and the person who is dispelling the ideas
basically grants the case that intellectual property or copyright is a matter of contract and not natural rights.
For to fall back on contract is to say you have no natural right to it.
If I leave a wallet on the table and someone steals it, I don't say that it's wrong because I had a contract with that person not to do that.
I say it's wrong because it was mine by right.
To imply a contract is an explanation as to say you had no natural right to it.
Now, historically, copyright has been handled differently than patents.
Many people, and as I said, it's somewhat of a shock, the idea of the stamp
liquor, because before that Neil had been included in the concept of rejecting
patents, but many people accept copyright while rejecting patents.
And the distinction is usually based on two points.
First of all, literature is considered pure personal creation, and this is opposed to
inventions which basically go out and say there is a relationship between nature such
as electricity and I am discovering it and someone else due to state of science two seconds
later would have discovered it had I not done so. That's the difference basically historically
between patents and copyrights. The issue of probability, the fact that it is pure personal
creation and it's not likely that two seconds after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet someone else
The second one is exactly what I have said, again, independent creation, close link between the true personal creation that cannot be done independently by someone else.
Most people agree that ideas can be created independently and even simultaneously.
In Austrian economics, for example, the instance of Walra, Jevons and Menger all coming up with the idea of marginal utility around the same time is pretty well substantiated.
And the specific issue in copyrights is that patterns. No one could come up with a specific arrangement of the alphabet embodied in atlas shrugged independently. It is totally impossible, we're told.
Well, the issue of duplication of the style or the patterns of an idea raises interesting questions.
For one thing, it's certainly not unknown for poetry, especially short poems, to closely resemble each other.
And the question is, do these chance similarities violate copyright laws? Does similarity constitute duplication?
If they don't, and this is an important question, which if Neil does a rebuttal, I wish he would answer,
if they do not, what is it that stops me from taking Atlas Shrugged, changing every the in the book to an a, or an an,
changing the pattern, that irrevocably changes the pattern, and publishing it under my own name,
If, in fact, it is not duplication that is being prohibited, but similarities, such as the similarity that I'm suggesting right now, then we're in a totally different ballpark, because even though I might concede that duplication is extremely unlikely, I wouldn't ever say that similarity is unlikely. It's happened too often in literature. Literature is my second love and I'm well aware of many similarities.
Moreover, in Handing Probability, Tucker pointed out that this factor should have no relevance to the forming of laws themselves.
He wrote,
To discuss the degrees of probability is to shoot wide of the mark.
Such questions as this are not to be decided by rule of thumb or the law of chances.
They are to be determined by reference to a general theory of rights.
He continued,
Among the things not logically impossible is that I know of few nearer the limit of possibility
that I should ever desire to publish in the middle of the desert of the Sahara.
Nevertheless, this would scarcely justify any great political power in giving someone
the right to stake out a claim and prohibiting me from publishing into the Sahara.
In other words, the possibility or the probability of him doing something is not to be the determining
In short, a discussion of rights must be determined by a general theory of rights, no likelihood of circumstance. Circumstance is applied after the general theory is established.
In regard to the ownership of a form of expression, Tucker wrote,
A particular combination of words and arrangement of the alphabet belongs to neither one of us.
The method of expressing an idea is itself an idea.
An arrangement of words and letters is itself an idea.
If you are not talking about this specific instance, if you are talking about the platonic conception of this,
which basically all specific instances are merely reflections,
It is an idea we are discussing when we are discussing the patterns and to say that that's not covered by intellectual property is absurd.
So, basically examples of styles of patterns surround us everywhere and it's rather bizarre to me to think of copyright because around us everywhere there are examples of chairs, shoes, hairstyles, gardens, recipe, clothing, wallpaper, even the use of slang, idioms, which are patterns of style.
And if it's out of respect for style that a publisher cannot duplicate a book, then for that same reason a shoemaker may not duplicate shoes.
For that same reason no one can make the same garden that they've seen in their neighbor's home.
It is only with the sonnet, with the book, with the pamphlet, with the arrangement of alphabets,
that we find someone appealing to law to protect a particular pattern that they say they have originated.
If copyright were not the norm, if all of us had not grown up with it, we might well consider it as absurd as arresting a houseowner because he painted his house with the same pattern of colors as another house three blocks over had done a week earlier.
And to be consistent, anyone who advocates copyright has to be reduced to the statement that since every sentence he utters or anyone else utters is a unique personal combination of words that another person would not have have uttered in exactly the same way, that in fact he is a claim to every single sentence he has ever uttered.
A claim so complete that he can stop anyone else from uttering these sentences, and in fact, Lysander Spooner, usually the person quoted in libertarianism to defend copyright, comes very close to this position.
At one point he writes, so absolute is the author's rights of dominion over his ideas that he may forbid their being communicated even by human voice if he pleases.
Now, you should think about this, because this is a rather frightening statement, just like vice police who might have word police going around checking our conjugations to see whether they match exactly other people.
Now, I want to end by dealing with the most complicated instance of intellectual property, and that is the owning of an arrangement of the alphabet, which is known as your own name.
Assuming at this moment I am the only Wendy McElroy in the world, do I have the right to prevent other instances of Wendy McElroy from occurring?
No, no shouts in the audience that I have the duty, just do I have the right?
Now, understand what this right would entail.
It would mean that I could go into the home of every other Mappleroy family in the world
and prohibit them from naming their daughters Wendy.
Or that I could at least prohibit her from ever publishing in my area
and competing in the area that I had staked out as being the Wendy Mappleroy in this area.
But if such a right is absurd as I claim it is, what would prevent someone from using,
if I don't have that claim, if I can't assert it, what would keep someone from using my name
I'm putting on a book of inferior quality or taking my book for that matter and putting their name on it and taking from me the royalties or whatever contractual things that I have negotiated for.
Well, I think there are three factors that basically in the free market would mitigate against that.
The first is that the free market in which reputation becomes far more of a business necessity than it is right now with minimum state standards or laws to back it up, tends to be self-regulating.
I gave the very flitting example of the views book business. You can go on and on.
Basically, books have been written on the subject.
Now, I don't claim here that the free market would basically solve the problem.
There would never be instances of injustice.
I'm just saying, compared to what's going on right now, there always will be instances of injustice.
However, it tends to be a fine regulating mechanism.
The second thing is that as much as possible, I would sell my works in a manner in which to protect them.
3. Anyone presenting work in such a manner as to mislead the public, such as putting my name on a book, and advertising in such a way as the public would reasonably expect that they would be receiving the work of such a person.
I don't believe copyright protects the just profits of an author, and that's exactly
George Bernard Shaw contended that copyright is the cry of men who are not satisfied with being paid once for their work, but insist upon being paid twice, twice and a dozen times over.
I think free market copyright would temper the immense profits that are presently available to writers in terms of movies and best-selling books.
What would probably happen is that the profits would lessen, the field would be more open to writers to make a modest profit, just as when you break a union.
When you break any state monopoly, that usually is what happens.
As to the claim that most of the world's literature, most of the innovation, most of the creativity in the world would dissolve if we basically took away this law protecting...
All you have to do is point out that most of the literature in the world to date has been written without copyright law.
Shakespeare was not protected by the state. He basically wrote his works, did his plays.
Most inventions have not been... Copyright is a relatively recent thing.
It has existed for some time in the common law tradition, but in terms of basically being an enforceable claim, it's a fairly recent thing.
And as for the possible destruction of the publishing industry if copyright were absent,
Benjamin Tucker, who was a journalist and a publisher, explained what he considered the situation to be when he said,
Why did two competing editions of the Krutzer Sonata, something he published, appear on the market before mine had even been there two months?
simply because money was pouring into my pockets with a rapidity that nearly took my breath away.
And after my rivals took the field, it poured in faster than ever.
Now, I believe that someday I will be a successful commercial writer, and I'm eager to maximize my profits.
But I'm not so eager that I will make the claim that I own what is in your mind.
My attitude toward writers and lecturers who throw their products into the streets,
To throw them on the wind to be disseminated like seeds, and yet wish to have an invisible
thread attached to every single idea that claims an ownership, a court claim on these
seeds is basically, if you want your ideas to yourself, for goodness sake, keep them
to yourself.
Well, there's a lot of fertile ground here. I want to start off basically, a lot of Neil's remarks at first, Dorothy, Wizard of Oz, straw man, were introductory, so I want to go basically out to the meat of what he was saying.
He fell back upon Randian definition of natural rights and property, basically, and said that other than a fair usage doctrine, that this is how he was going to be using property.
I'm interested for one thing in what he means by fair usage doctrine, because fair usage is either an appeal to a state law, or it's an appeal to a social convention that's arisen.
I believe it's an appeal to a social convention, and if in fact it is that sort of a thing,
it more or less proves the point that the free market can regulate, can give that kind of fair usage to copyrights.
Now the interesting thing about the Randian definition, which is something that one seeks to gain, to keep, to dispose of,
is that it never specifies how ownership is acquired, which is of course the main thing here,
The two points about property which relate specifically to ideas are that not everything is ownable.
Not everything has characteristics that make it subject to ownership.
And the very question that's presupposed in applying this Randian definition to ideas is what's being debated here.
Is this something that one can own?
First of all, what are its characteristics and how is it acquired?
Now, those are not basically dealt with in the Randian definition.
Neel goes on to talk about creation of property.
Creation is a very vague term.
One creates a child, yet one does not say one has rights in the child,
that one can own another human being.
Creation, according to Neel's definition, is patterning.
Now, this is a unique definition that's true, maybe because I've never used it before.
The creation being patterning raises a lot of problems. For example, what about discovery? I walk down the street, I pick up a diamond. In libertarian theory, I am the claimer of that diamond, yet I have patterned nothing.
There is also the issue of homesteading. If in fact patterning or creation is to be defined as a position of entropy, taking something from a lesser state to a higher state, what happens to the whole libertarian doctrine that if something is abandoned, I can come in and claim it as the first claimant.
I'm adding nothing, I'm just claiming. I'm basically going in, moving in the house and sitting there. So basically homesteading is thrown to one side.
I'm not saying that this is what Neil intends to do, I'm saying that his definition of creation patterning being the criteria of ownership and property creates at least as many problems as it answers, and it's one that I haven't read the answers for.
Now, it's very confusing, logos rights, because first of all, I came prepared to talk about copyright, and logos rights seems to be a synonym for intellectual property.
Because under logos rights, you talk about someone who invents a stamp-licking machine, and that is patent laws.
So there is a defense of patent laws in here. If someone is the first one to create a machine that licks stamps, it's not that concept, that logo to the machine, theirs.
Well that's consistent anyway with intellectual property and copyright, but it's an advocacy of patents. It's also an advocacy of ownership of your own name. It's an across-the-board advocacy of intellectual property.
And whether you call it logo rights or not really doesn't matter once you get down to
the description that's what it is.
So to deal with patents a little bit my understanding before coming into the debate was that Neil
was against patents.
I didn't understand why because in fact something that is formed with your hands surely is a
pattern as securely as something that comes out of your mouth there's no difference in
the uniqueness and the person who went into creating it.
The Theory of Money and Credit
Iron relationship, which exists in nature, such as that between iron and carbon, and
saying that no one can discover this relationship and use it in the same way I have, without
my permission.
Now, probability was brought in too, and it was used as a slide between entropy in terms
of discovering carbon and iron being far less improbable than two people writing Hamlet,
It was used as a standard, as long as, as well as creativity.
It was not, I, I really don't have much to say about it because not too much was made
of it and I'm really not sure whether Neil and I disagree that much about it.
Now test of property, though legally it does come in later.
Now tests of property, Neil presented some tests of property which frankly I find rather
The Theory of Money and Credit
and I refuse to have sullied, prosecute them, and it still would be mine, because I made it.
As to boundary limits, and I agree that boundary limits are important, that's why I don't believe an intangible,
such as the platonic ideal of the logos, can be found, that's specifically, in someone's control.
Again, I wasn't clear enough about what Neil was saying to really respond coherently.
Now, Neel seems to be saying two things.
He has two standards that he lumps together as one,
when you say you claim an idea or a logos.
It is that the first owner is the right holder
because he lowers the entropy.
Now, there's two things that make a person an owner here.
First of all, you are the first.
The second is that you lower the entropy.
There's two standards there.
Now, as I said, I don't think lowering the entropy
is the standard of ownership
I pick up a diamond off the street. I pick up money that's scattered on the wind as I scatter money, or a treasure, I hope, when I throw my words out and you pick them up.
So I disagree with that. I also disagree with the first-owner idea. It takes away the possibility of independent invention.
It takes away the possibility of two students coming up with a stamped liquor.
independently, one in Moscow, one in, well then the first owner standard is not a criterion, you shouldn't have put it there.
I shouldn't have shaken my head, I'm sorry.
The adjudication of intellectual property is important in terms of the probability thing.
Because what's smuggled into here, basically Neil says that probability is such that it's a million to one chance, monkeys,
Hamlet, all that you heard that whole thing, typing out, how many times could they do it without, you know, how could they possibly come up with Hamlet?
The great thing here is that he considers duplication to be so extraordinarily improbable as to be impossible.
What does this do to the whole system of the judiciary, which is based, one of the big things of common law theory and touted as a freedom of the western world, and I actually agree with it, is that you are innocent until proven guilty.
I write something that is so similar to someone else that he takes me to court. I am no longer
innocent until proven guilty, I am guilty until proven innocent. It reverses the whole
judicial procedure for I must prove that it was independent. The improbability is so reversed
against me that in fact, and this is necessary because if the prosecution went in with the
necessity of saying that I must prove this person did not independently produce this,
The Theory of Money and Credit
If you own Atlas Shrugged, you own every word in it.
Basically, all of us have committed millions of violations of rights then,
if in fact Ayn Rand has the bundles of rights to Atlas Shrugged.
Because what is a bundle of rights in terms of a novel?
It is sentences and words.
And yet how far, and if Neil says this is absurd, he didn't mean to take it this far,
well, how far do you take it?
May I quote a paragraph? May I quote a sentence? May I quote a word?
Ayn Rand said I had no right to quote things like the word objectivist
Neel is not willing to give as much property to Rand as Rand wished to give to herself.
However, where is this cut-off point? And without the cut-off point, how are we going to have a legal standard of enforcement?
Which involves a very pure-cut place of when has a right been violated.
Now, oh, I have a whole more page of objections.
The last thing, basically, is his idea of the copyright symbol, basically the idea of putting something on, part of it is publicly declaring that you own something.
Where does this come from? Why should you publicly declare it? If in fact it is an implied contract that part of ownership is that you must have that symbol on there, a must have a public statement, that's an argument for copyright.
It says that without that statement, without the implied contract, without the public knowledge, you don't own it, you have no natural right to it.
I don't tell people that the wallet in my pocket or the wallet lying on my table is mine and I don't put a big symbol saying mine on it.
If I must, it means that it is mine only through the goodwill and implied contract of people who see that sign and respect it.
The wall is mine because it is my money, period.
If the book is the same way, I do not need to put that contract, that copyright sign on it. Thank you.
Okay, I've got a lot less time, so I'm going to go very quickly.
I'm going to hit this last point first.
The purpose of putting the copyright notice on something is the same thing as I said before,
of putting a no trespassing sign on property.
You might argue that you still have a right to the property without the no trespassing sign,
but in common law decisions, case law has determined that there are liabilities
if you do not have the no trespassing sign on there.
And so I think that the same could be said of copyright.
You might argue that you don't need to have the claim stated publicly in order to claim it, but nonetheless, it makes it clear.
Let me just go through a whole bunch of things. Wendy talked about reimposing your pattern on somebody else.
There are two reasons why this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
First of all, there's a distinction between begatting and creating.
Our genetic pattern is not something we created, it's something that is within us and reproduces.
If anything, it would be an argument that if God exists and imposed a genetic pattern on us, he might have the logo right in this.
But inasmuch as neither Wendy or I are arguing for the existence of God who imposed the genetic pattern, this is irrelevant here.
The other thing is about a name. There are a number of things when he mentioned about a name in her talk.
She mentioned the absurdity of painting your house with the same colors as another house.
This all comes down to the same thing I was talking about before.
If the pattern isn't complex enough, if the level of entropy is too low to be considered creation at all,
there's a possibility that an act of creation has not taken place, therefore there's no property there at all.
The entropy must be lowered enough that an act of creation has taken place.
And the same thing happens with the possibility of two works of literature being reproduced identically.
The person who takes somebody else to court, because somebody else has published something which is similar to theirs,
or has a pattern or a logo which is similar to theirs, risks the possibility that if both were in fact independently created,
That the level of entropy is too low to exist as a creation in either one, and both of them will lose their rights.
This is the counter case to what Wendy was talking about before.
In other words, you have to prove that there has actually been an act of independent creation,
that the pattern is special enough, independent and discreet enough, that there has been an act of creation taking place.
And in the case where Wendy talked about changing all the ands to these in Atlas Shrugged,
It has to understand that there are a number of logos, to use the Greek for logi, a number
of logi in Atlas Shrugged. There is the logos of the pattern of words themselves, there
is the logos of plot, there is the logos of the various different character descriptions
and each of these is an independent and separate logos and they are all multiplexed on top
of one another and this is why you can separate out the rights. Now Wendy also talked about
bundles of rights being absurd because you talk about title as a totality. The title,
The rights can be divided up from the original bundle and each strand be a separate right.
Wendy talks about there are all sorts of unowned logos around us, such as the patterns of automobiles, this, that, and the other.
They are not protected now. I am arguing that under natural law they should be protected.
The fact that they are not protected in our current society is an argument against the state and its restricted copyright laws.
I believe that all logos should be protectable as property.
The purpose of a claim, the purpose of value in the statement before, about value being necessary before something is property, has to do with, again, the claim.
If something is not claimed, then it is open for claim. And the situation with homesteading before involves two things.
First of all, there is a lowering of entropy when you find something and you claim it.
When you homestead a piece of land, what you're doing is you're erecting boundaries, you're dedicating it to the purposes for which it's going to be used, whether it's building houses on it or grazing sheep on it, the grass has to be a certain sort of grass at a certain height, so homesteading does involve both the act of claim and the act of lowering entropy, and I would argue that all cases where a first claim must involve a lowering of entropy, otherwise there isn't in fact a proper property relationship
being created and that in fact homesteading involves an act of creation, that's all I have to say.
Let's build some questions now.
Thanks. A quick question.
Ever since the division of labor there's been this problem of how people can get away with their specialty
and it seems to me that what we're dealing with in the copyright question, at least this is how I see it,
The Preveyor of Wisdom lived, and the point that was raised that as a writer I know that sometimes I'll sell something to a magazine at a rate too little to say out loud, it's embarrassing.
But then if I can resell it to an anthology I get a higher payment, and maybe 10 to 12 payment sales down the road is the movie deal or whatever,
and I'm sure you have similar tales to tell on you that the money sometimes you don't make till many sales later.
So, the thing is, as a minarchist, it's not difficult for me to defend copyright, because I'm, you know, a petite status to begin with, I mean, that's easy.
But the question I have for both of you is a question regarding time frame.
And I guess I should ask you first, Neil. It's, would you advocate copyright in eternity?
In other words, if you could be made to live 3,000 years, would a copyright you had on something be good for the 3,000 years?
And the really tough question, descendants of J. Neal Schoen, how long should descendants have that plan?
The answer I'm going to give is twofold.
First of all, what you were saying before about how shall an offer live is not what I'm going to deal with.
It's a practical or a utilitarian argument in which property rights have to be justified by some sort of social utility.
And I don't believe in that. I'm arguing a straight natural rights position.
Out of that natural rights position, if logo rights are in fact property, then they are owned totally.
In the same way that ownership of a house or a car or anything else is owned totally.
And I do not believe that any restriction should be placed on that form of property as any other form of property.
In fact, if a lineal dissent can be maintained of those property rights, and it doesn't fall out of claim, then yes, as far as I'm concerned, for eternity.
Okay. As an author, basically, I'm more sympathetic to the idea of how can an author live. I think it's an interesting question.
This is part of it. This is part of the theory.
I haven't resolved in my own mind whether or not you can inherit something, whether inheritance is legitimate, but I think that basically if you have a contract, it will be to the end of your life for the specified term of the contract.
And the fact that people are in there right now have to basically invest and get very small returns in order to get immense returns perhaps in the future is the fact that the market is flooded.
But with people who want to write and the state is protecting and giving special privileges to certain people and were it not doing that I think the situation would be very different.
I want to talk about utilitarianism but I'll save that for later. I have a question for you. First I want to correct your physics name. Because entropy cannot be, at least by currently accepted physics, entropy cannot only be lowered locally, and any lowering of entropy locally raises it somewhere else, which means that your definition of any active creation is a simultaneous action.
I discussed this with Keith Carter, who's a physicist who got us to great USC, and he's the one who gave me this definition.
So, are we going to fall back on a scientist?
Argument for authority, but...
God damn right!
My question is, where do you draw the line?
Now, you can go to the extreme of Xilog Corporation that had turned to the trademark of letter Z,
or Ayn Rand, who was trying to hold rights to the word objectivist, or you can try the entire book.
Neil, at what point is duplication duplication and at what point is simultaneous intervention?
You use the argument from entropy, but Neil, we don't have an entropy gauge.
I'm using the argument from complexity, which is another measure of entropy.
Where do you have a complexity gauge, Eugen?
The answer I'm going to give here is that in practical sense, the market will draw the line in the same way that the market will draw the line regarding the rights of a property owner of land
with regard to who may have right of access or right of way or water rights of water flowing through.
To a certain extent, some of the intangibles of these questions are going to be determined by actual precedents in case law.
Now, in the case of no trespassing sign having to be put up on land in order to maintain it as a private preserve,
you also require under common law that if you have a driveway which you're allowing the public to go through,
You have to close it down for one day a year or something like that, to preserve it as a private drive, otherwise it falls into the state of being unclaimed.
All these are various different customs which have arisen to determine what in fact the boundaries of property are.
And what I'm saying here is that the test is, is it sufficiently complex and different from other logos?
Pardon, Neil, do I understand, are you saying that the market determines where the natural
right begins?
The complexity issue has a long history in terms of the copyright and patent debate and
in fact by saying what Neil has done he's abandoned his case because creation is not
A lot of complex act, creation can be very simple, and when it was debated earlier in, well, in the 19th century, it was pointed out that what are you saying when you're patenting and prohibiting people from sharing ideas, if someone comes up with something that's very simple, you know, someone walking down the street has to go like this in order not to see it or else they duplicate it, it's in their brain. If it's simple, it's not creation. Let me answer, please. And what happens is that
And the fellow giving this line was Victor Yaros, and Yaros backed off and said,
okay, okay, well, let's make complexity the standard by which a natural right exists.
It's property if it's complex. It doesn't matter if your labor produced it.
It doesn't matter if all these other standards just throw by the side complexity.
In which case Tucker came back, which I thought was a brilliant response, saying,
well, what do you do when you take a person to court? Complexity.
It's a steam engine as opposed to a toothpick that you have seen patented.
The person's level of knowledge, the assessment of the judge's level of the complexity of the thing become the standard by whether or not it's been a violation of rights or not.
You throw subjectivity into the court system to such a degree that there is absolutely no objective standard by which to say a violation of rights has occurred. What is complex?
Can I take it again?
I just wanted to make one other point. The full thrust of technology is to reduce the level of complexity, thereby simplifying things, and the same thing is true in theoretical law.
It layers it, it doesn't reduce it. You build upon Goldberg and a simplified device which does the same thing.
The primary thing I talked about here was not complexity, it was the lowering of entropy.
Locally lowering of entropy, even if at the other end of the universe it's irreconcilable.
What you're doing, too, Neil, if I have a bomber and I fly before them.
I want the moderator to take some control here, please.
Why don't we cut to the crossway?
John?
Yeah, a question for Neil regarding the distinction between intellectual property and logo,
which I think is something that we'll be telling you.
You started out saying one of the things you're not talking about is intellectual property.
That's correct.
You went on to describe your definition of logo, and I initially had this question logo, sorry.
What is the difference between this and intellectual property?
When you got down to unbundling...
Making bugs complex, might we dare to say?
The way you picked up on unbundling was unbundling down to words and paragraphs.
I meant unbundling lights. I meant separating up the rights.
What is the Difference Between Logos and an Electrical Property?
And what do you mean by unbundling?
and each one of those actions constitutes potentially a different right and what I'm saying here is that in terms of land the right to dig a coal mine may be separated off and sold as a different right from the right to build a house and live there in the same way the right to use a particular aspect of a logo such as a plot and take that plot and those characters make it into a movie is a separate right a separate action which can be taken from the right of printing the array of words itself
How do you know that he wasn't saying that I resemble him?
Okay, I came to the debate expecting to disagree vehemently with both of you, and if we push aside peripheral issues, like the nature of property and a lot of other things it's gotten into, and to talk about the essential issue which is copyright, I detect, and you can both correct me if you think I'm wrong, I detect a convergence, or I don't think the two parts are the same.
Convergence, or I don't think the two positions are that very far apart.
I believe that both Neil and Wendy are claiming that an approximation of copyright or a free
market copyright, if you prefer, can arise on the market depending on the terms of exchange
of a Manuscript. And the difference between them is, if I understand Neil's theory correctly,
is that in an exchange of a manuscript, Neil is thinking about dividing the book or the
manuscript into various rights, and the author retaining control over some of those rights,
and then the people who are buying the book are using the manuscript, having the residual
That's the way exchange creates copyright in Neal's view.
The way, Wendy didn't go into it in its great length, but I surmised from her remarks
that she believed that an exchange could create something that looked like a copyright
if, in the process of selling my manuscript to someone, I have them sign a contract
in which they agree not to do such and such and such and such with the manuscript.
So, in both cases we have a copyright arising out of an exchange, and the difference seems to me to boil down to, Neil is arguing that you can have a copyright just by owning conditionally part of the book,
And Wendy is arguing that no, that you have to have a contract which gives you, in addition, some conditional rights within the other person's labor, or over the other person, in other words, you can't only just retain partial ownership of the book, you have to have the person agree to choose certain acts.
So, really the difference is between those cases where you're talking about conditional
rights in a book as opposed to conditional rights in people, and the only area where
I think that this would come up with significant differences in how it worked out is the impact
on third parties, and so I just, the question is, is this a fair representation of the difference
between the two of you?
Before you ask me first.
I haven't gone first yet for a moment.
Go ahead.
Well, first of all, in some sense, no, it's not, it's the third party, what we're talking
about relationships here, the relationship, the creator to the product and the product
to the third party, it affects the creator as much as it does the third party because
under my system, basically, even if it were very strictly contractual, it would erode
over time.
There's no way, in fact, to enforce a contract.
I will fully agree that over a period of time what will happen is that your contract will
The Theory of Money and Credit
The point is that there can be no enforcement of a property claim whatsoever, that there is no property claim, nothing can be enforced without contract.
That's the difference between voluntary and involuntary action.
To say that there is little difference between there is to say that there is no difference between forcing a person to do something and having their consent.
I think that he cannot force me not to repeat his book, justly force me not to repeat his book.
In fact, there is a contractual obligation on my part. Short of that, absolutely nothing.
No moral, maybe a moral, but absolutely no legal obligation.
So the difference is between whether or not he can take it law, which is a point of a gun,
put it to my head and say, I may not do something.
And I'm saying that, is there a contract? No, no, we can't do that.
So in utilitarian grounds, however, you may be correct.
If there is a contract, I'm asking you to explore how you would do an author who sells a manuscript and puts on it, when he sells it to you, says on the contract, you may not copy this, you may not sell it to anyone else who copies it, you may not show it to anyone else who copies it, that sort of thing.
And in other words, what I'm asking is, couldn't a system of copyright that approximates what Neil is talking about arise from authors regularly using that kind of contract?
Oh, I'm sorry, I misinterpreted a lot of your questions. There was a lot to me. Never mind.
No, I think that in terms of if you walked into a bookstore under Neil's system and a bookstore under my system,
all that would happen was that it would be far more clearly spelled out what you were doing and what you were agreeing to.
But I would add on the fact that perhaps in answer to Brad as much as anything else, copyright would erode under my system,
The acid test is precisely the question of erosion and the question of third parties.
If you say that the logos is not a property right, if you say that the owner of that logos
does not have the right to exclusive control over that property and licensing it and leasing
it, and let's understand that there are uses of property which are not total title, which
In effect, what is happening in a licensing arrangement, licensing a publisher to reproduce
that logos is a leasing for a limited amount of time the rights to use that logos in the
same way that if I build an apartment building, I lease the rights to use that.
To say that I need to contract somebody not to use that thing is exactly the same as saying
that I need to contract somebody not to come onto my land and start digging a coal mine.
If I own the property rights, then they are mine to dispose of, as I will.
As I understand it, if I switch on the radio and the car and hear a song, I think we would
agree that a violation of property rights doesn't depend on whether I use it for economic
advantage.
I mean, I can destroy property for no real economic advantage at all, it would be a trespass.
Under your system then, technically, even though it may not be economically feasible
to prosecute, if I hum that song, I'm violating property rights.
Why not? Because you're not reimposing on matter.
Air wave is matter, the brain that is being posed on?
No. When I say logos, logos requires, if you will, a fixed medium in which to impose it, otherwise the pattern is immediately lost.
In the same way that there's a difference between an electronic wave going out into space
and an electronic wave being recorded in a magnetic form on matter,
If I were a professional musician, then I could get up in a concert and perform a song that I did not write without reimbursing the author of the song.
What you're dealing with is a specific right, which is, again, a right to perform an action.
Every time we're talking about a right, we're talking about a right to perform an action.
Inherent in a play or a piece of music is the right to recreate it for non-recorded purposes.
And this is a separate bundle of right.
I want to answer that, too.
Recreated for non?
What inherent right? Is there a clause to property rights?
A right it does not adhere in matter.
A right to life is not a right to freedom of action. A right is a claim of moral jurisdiction over something, which in virtue of that claim gives you freedom of action regardless of whether it is connected with a thing or something.
referring to what actions people may or may not take.
In the case of performance, from a logos or something like that,
the action of recreating it without recording it,
without reimposing it in matter, is also one of those rights.
Now, understand...
But I don't play at a concert. Now, I don't understand.
Am I violating the author's rights if I play at a concert,
if it's not being recorded?
Performance rights?
Okay. In the case of humming by yourself, okay?
It is an interesting test problem, let's put it this way. Potentially the performance before an audience for commercial gain may be a separate right for performance within your own sphere with nobody else around.
I would be willing to argue that on a separate case, but the case where I think there is no question about is reimposing that pattern on something else, such as doing it in front of a recorded medium or refixing it in some form into matter.
Okay, I want to comment on that because I left a few things. This idea of there being an idea without matter is absurd. There is nothing without matter.
I'm not arguing ideas. I'm arguing logos. They're two different things.
The thing is that when George in fact turns on that radio, it is being registered on matter, it's being registered on electronic impulses in his brain.
When he talks about it to anyone else, it's being registered on airwaves, and if in fact he can go to a concert and play it,
and whether or not he violates rights is dependent on whether someone in the audience switches on a tape recorder.
It is absurd. You violate rights if in fact you infringe on the title of someone.
And bundles of rights, I frankly, I think I'm as confused as most people. Yeah, turning on a TV basically would make all that, that's an implication I don't want to go into because there's so much fertile territory elsewhere.
When I refer to a logo, I'm referring to something in matter. Go with my definition at least.
Well, I disagree with your definition. What do you mean? All these hidden clauses are hidden that are in rights.
It's nothing hidden.
In fact, a righted property is not something that is necessarily produced by labor, it has to be concrete, it has to be complex, it has to be something that is in these bundles that are mysterious things that you can reproduce for some reason.
Is it yours or is it not? It's very simple.
Yes, it sounds like this debate could go on and on, but I would love to see this kind of debate at a norm convention.
I would like you to see it at Norris.
The thing that gives me, I'm against all form of copyright laws.
To me, it sounds like if somebody wants to tape us something.
Now, the record is not even available on tape, I'm going to tape it.
The thing is, people have not made a tape of the record.
If you don't have a car, are you going to take it simply because you don't have one?
Is your need a claim on it?
He's taping it already. Once he listens to it, it's being taped through electronic impulses.
This idea of not electronically reproducing something, it's reproduced in his mind.
There is a difference between imposing something in a fixed form on matter, in a record, in a disc, in a tape, or on the printed page, or going out uncontained. There is a physical difference between the two.
I have a question on that, which is, Neil, then why is a radio broadcast station precluded from... do you think that a radio broadcaster owes royalty to the artist? After all, is that going on any fixed medium in that case?
The only thing is, what I'm saying is, there's no tape medium on some of these records that some of the records that I get in, what am I going to do?
This is a utilitarian argument, not a national rights question.
The first question, which has to be answered, is, is it within your rights to do it before
you do it?
And if, in fact, the logos is somebody else's property, then you do not have the right to
and your need and claim and unavailability of wanting it gives you no claim.
I will pass on Coleman in order to recognize Victor Coleman.
Yes, you had your hand up before.
Your opinion just now.
Can you state for me how a printed book,
What to you are the differences that make a printed book and the ideas contained within it different from an acre of land with a house built on it, which seems to be the two images that Neela uses? What is the difference between the two?
Well, there's lots of differences between the two. For one, the house is tangible. It's something that I can go in and claim, and if Veronica came in and claimed it, she would be usurping on my right. It is a scarce good.
If, in fact, I went and said, shall I compare thee to a summer's day, and she repeated it back to me, we both have the same concrete thing, but neither one of us is conflicting with each other in terms of possession.
So one thing is that the scarcity issue is totally different.
What about time sharing on a computer?
Well, I'm answering the question as addressed.
One last question.
We haven't had a chance to answer all of them.
Next question.
I have a question, too.
Well, it's a two-part question.
If I create something by, say, taking a lump of radium and pulling it by one of my fingers, thereby inducing a mutation that turns out to create some useful insight that I can then use to extract my genetic engineering at least for other things, should that be something that I can copyright?
Yes.
Okay, now, if I have kids, do they have to pay me royalties?
No.
Do you want to know why?
Yeah.
There are first premises which go back to what Wendy was saying before about what can be property.
The first statement is that a person owns everything that is in that person's self.
That is the first right.
Property is a corollary, remember what Rand's statement was, property rights are a corollary of the right to life.
In this case, the right to life is a higher-order right than the right to any logos or pattern or something like that,
and therefore subsumes it.
The only case is when the logos is within a non-sentient,
outside the sphere of a non-sentient self-ownership.
At that point, the entire question of property rights begins.
So all I just understand is we have copyrights to the same piece of DNA?
The first question of ownership of that original pattern
may or may not go down to them.
They would certainly own the pattern, the logos, which is within them, as part of them.
The question of whether they would be able to re-impose it on matter outside of them,
I think is again a question of who has the logos to do that, which is a separate thing.
I wanted to add one further comment, which I'll harken to that.
There was a Nobel Prize winner named period previously in which he was working, not only
in the United Arab Emirates, and one of the results of his work was that he had a system
The theory is that the business is very far from firmly delivering and is processing great amounts of energy.
Actually, core systems of that form tend to be self-organizing.
Could you speak a little louder?
Yeah. So, systems of that form tend to be naturally self-organizing, so actually it's more probable that this is sort of counter to the creation margin from the classical author of economics.
Actually, life tends to be more probable in a given system where you have high order of input from the sun and things like that.
and Human Invention, given that sort of framework also has to be more likely than having random matter around, so you would expect the matter to be more or less on time, so I think your argument from thermodynamics, which involves entropy, is wrong, but there's another concept that I think you can replace that with, and get the same thing, and that is the locus of cognitive control, or the form of that, and still achieve the same result.
No, it's not. No, it's not. Because again, as Brad pointed out, we're talking about a localized case.
And we're also talking about the creation of, look, whether or not you want to use the term entropy or not, in the sense in which you're using it.
What I'm discussing here is the lowering of probable cases.
Whether or not you want to tie this in with the entire system of thermodynamics in a closed system.
I don't think many of us here are going to be able to intelligently evaluate this exchange.
I'm going to go back on my word and recognize one last question from the young lady in white over there.
Yes, Wendy, I'd like to ask you a quick, three-pronged question.
You're talking a lot about intangibilities here and kind of only tangible ideas.
Okay, number one. Example, George Lucas' Star Wars.
Is the script to Star Wars intangible property?
Number two, does it become tangible property when it's turned into a film?
3. After it is a film, does Mr. Lucas own the rights to the characters of, let's say, Luke Skywalker or R2?
Okay, first of all, at no point is it intangible in terms of what he can own. I think that if you're talking about he has gone, secrecy is a big thing in the industry and I think that's probably a large concession to the fact that how hard it is to own something like an idea, once it leaks out it goes everywhere.
If in fact you're talking about the films, the actual instances of the films that you can hold in your hand, yes, he owns all those.
If you're talking about the idea of Luke Skywalker, so that someone can go off that, whether or not it's in script form, whether it's in film form, before or after it's been released,
I don't think that he has any right to say that someone cannot take a character named Luke Skywalker
and use the characteristics ascribed to his Luke Skywalker to write a novel, or put out a glass, or put out a McDonald's burger.
I think that the secrecy is probably one of the large market mechanisms that would protect this.
The contractual arrangements he has with a lot of people are not legal in terms of...
they're legal in terms of legally enforceable.
But the fact that he contracts that way is very significant.
And the fact that, in fact, when you look at situations like that,
people are looking to the free market and applying free market standards and solutions all over the place
I think that he has no moral right to it. He may in fact have whatever legal right his ingenuity and the free market can provide him with, which is sizable because he's been very ingenious.
Wendy keeps on talking about the intangibles. I am not talking about something intangible here.
Logos is a tangible aspect of matter.
It is a material quality of the properties in which it is found.
The logos, the pattern in the script is tangible.
The logos of the images and sound on the film are tangible.
Each one of those is something tangible, found within matter.
It's an aspect, a quality, of the matter in which it is found.
And as such, it is part of that which, when George Lucas first did this,
I assume that he was the sole creator, which he's not, and he had to divide up various different things.
He would be the sole person who owns that property and would be able to divide up the various rights
regarding what action could be taken with each of those other things.
Regarding the question of whether or not somebody else could use Luke Skywalker or not
depends on whether that particular aspect is a logos in its own right.
is it a logos high order enough that it can be differentiated from the accidental creation
numerous times elsewhere. Now, I also want to point out that the reason that George Lucas
uses a lot of secrecy is in fact because his property rights and logos are not protected
all that well because of the state of society in which we live which doesn't protect any
property rights all that well and it is not because he requires contracts from other people
I'm going to follow this to a halt at that point.