All Episodes
Previous Next
April 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:07
178 Emails of the Week Apr 5 06 - Corporations and Intellectual Property

My responses to brilliant listener criticisms!

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's April the 5th, 2003, and I'm going to be... Oh, what time is it?
It's 8.30 in the morning.
I'm going to be absolutely perfectly rigid with dates from now on because there was a pretty funny comment on the board last night about how... I read an article, of course, yesterday about immigration that I'd written.
And somebody said, you always know it's an article when Steph doesn't say, good morning or good afternoon and doesn't misspeak the date.
So I thought that was pretty funny.
Now I'm going to do a radical new experiment in podcasting this morning.
OK, it's radical for me, probably not that radical for you, which is to do emails of the week on the road.
I've missed it, but I just haven't had time.
What with doing two podcasts a day and running the board and promoting the site and so on is great.
We had more than 200 hits the other day and so far we've had almost 40,000 shows downloaded.
Actually, it might be a little more than that by now.
In, I guess, about four months.
So I think that's great.
I'm very pleased.
And of course, it's only accelerating.
So I think it's worth getting the word out.
I'm very pleased with it all.
And thank you again, of course, to everybody who's donated to the project, to FDR, Freedom Aid Radio.
I really appreciate it.
And if you haven't yet, you can give me some hard-earned cash in return for my sweaty thoughts.
By going to www.freedomainradio.com and clicking on the donate button.
I really appreciate it and it gives me great confidence in anarcho-capitalism when people hurl me money without contract.
Don't make me call your DRO.
I will, you know.
So thanks again.
Now, there's three topics that I wanted to talk about today, and then I would like to get back to the topic that I am very interested in, which is human nature and its relationship to personal freedom.
So we'll get to that.
We really will.
Honestly, it's not like an asymptote where we're just getting closer and closer but never quite touching.
We will actually get there.
But I did want to clear up a couple of issues, at least respond to some questions and criticisms and comments, just to clarify things a little bit.
Now the first one is around corporations, which I talked about about two weeks ago, I think.
And I said that corporations love to be taxed.
Because it eliminates competition and so on.
And a number of people, quite rightly, wrote in and said to me that corporations do not love to be taxed because they do everything they can to avoid paying taxes.
And I think, of course, it's very important when you're listening to my podcast that you have to listen to what I mean, not what I actually say.
Just kidding.
No, that's perfectly right, of course.
I was not at all clear.
I'm sorry about that.
Thank you for pointing that out.
What I meant was, and did not communicate it too clearly, what I meant was that corporations like to have regulatory barriers to competition.
So corporations Like corporate executives, individual corporate executives.
You've got to understand, when you reach the top of a corporation, you are probably within 10 years of reaching retirement.
Now, I know a lot of corporate executives don't retire, but your time frame, your window for long-term planning is down just a little bit now.
There are some exceptions, like Jack Welsh.
from GE who has a magnificently long time frame and is still going on, paid a bit of a price, three broken marriages, but nonetheless he had a fantastic vision of his career and he made GE a little bit more decisive, right?
I mean, there's this joke in business that the sequence you want is ready, aim, fire, right?
So get yourself set up, get your target straight and then actually go.
And he said that the culture at GE when he joined was ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim.
And nobody ever pulled the trigger and actually got new products out and stuff like that.
So he was pretty magnificent at that.
And if you want to get some insights on business, he's got some great books out which are well worth a listen or a read.
But the vast majority of corporate executives they come in and they're sort of interested more in the short run.
This has been made much more acute as I talked about way back at the beginning of the podcast series when I was talking about the difference between speculation and investment.
This has been made much more short run by The enormous amount of liquidity in the capital markets looking for a place to call home.
However briefly, right?
This is why you used to be able to make long plans and now you've got a plan quarter by quarter because your career depends on your stock price.
Your stock price fluctuates because there are so many speculators in the market.
It fluctuates wildly and so you have a problem in that if you aim for something in the longer term and it causes a stock price hit in the short run, Then you're likely to get ousted by the board, right?
I mean, CEO gets fired by the board.
And so... CEO is Chief Executive Officer.
It's sort of the titular head of a corporation who is subject to the board in the way that the President used to be to Congress.
Anyway...
So when I say that corporations love taxes and unions and so on, what I mean is that in the short run, like when somebody becomes a CEO now, they really like the fact that there are lots of barriers to entry.
So to set up a manufacturing plant in Ontario here, I mean we're a big auto parts manufacturer, To set up a manufacturing plant would take you literally years, and it would take you such a vast amount of capitalization, because you would have to get all these regulations complied with, you'd have to deal with the union, you'd have to make all these promises, you'd have to sign these incredible leases, you'd have to... I mean, it's just the barrier to entry is enormous.
And it's all regulatory, right?
And what that means is that people who have capital to invest are not going to invest it in a manufacturing startup, which is why manufacturing jobs are dying off the vine.
And even if they were interested in manufacturing as a startup, they would be at a severe disadvantage because there would be no cozy long-term relationship with the government that the longer-term manufacturing concerns have.
See, the longer-term manufacturing concerns, as we talked about in the series on corporate welfare, or the show on corporate welfare, They have their hands deep in the pockets of the government and the taxpayers, and they have long-term relationships.
And if they've hired, already expanded their workforce to 20,000 or 30,000 people, then they have a lot of votes, so they can really swing the politicians their way.
And so that's a pretty significant hidden cost or risk factor that is involved in getting a manufacturing, say, startup up and running.
And so all of those things put together means that if you've got money to invest, I mean, unless you've got some bizarre fetish for manufacturing, you're just not going to invest in manufacturing.
It's too expensive, there are too many obstacles, there's too many politics, it's just a mess overall.
And this is why, of course, as corporations become more efficient slowly over time, they're shedding jobs, and there are no other manufacturing jobs for these people to go to, because the relationship between corporations and the state has raised the barrier to entry for that field so high that nobody is picking up the slack, right?
I mean, if you get laid off from a software job, odds are you're going to be able to find another software job.
But this is one of the reasons why people get so insane and desperate when they're in manufacturing all these sort of declining industries.
Because if those jobs are lost, if they lose those jobs, they're toast.
They just basically got to try and struggle their way through to the social security check or retrain or some horrible thing.
I mean, it's just a complete mess.
And this is the result of a lot of things.
You could do a whole podcast on them, but sort of in sequence, right?
It's parenting.
Parents which make people dependent upon authority and not question them and not criticize them and not grow and have their own thoughts.
It's the public schools which make people unable to think of solutions which don't involve government guns.
It is universities, if they've gone.
I mean, a lot of manufacturing people haven't gone to universities, but if they do, then they find out that, yes, in fact, corporations are evil, and the government solves all problems, the government is great, and so on.
That, you know, the government is God and the corporations are multiple Lucifers and devils.
Or another theory that I'm working on, which I'll just expose right now, and thanks for everyone who wrote in, another theory I'm working on is that God is the parents and corporations of the elder siblings, or the siblings, which is why the collusion between the two is often invisible to us, right?
A lot of elder siblings collude with parents to be mean, to demean or bully younger siblings, and so when those younger siblings grow up,
or any of the younger siblings except for the eldest grew up they have a hard time seeing the collusion between corporations and the state because the parents and the elder siblings have been colluding and it's hard for them to see it because it's hard for anything that's common and unspoken in our family whatever's there we cannot see in society because it's an unspoken right it's unspeakable you can't talk about it you can't even think about it really you certainly Can't discuss it with those who may have done you wrong.
So, just a little teaser there.
I'm still working that one out.
But I think it's got interesting possibilities.
Because for me, you can't explain how things are so invisible in society.
And yet, so obvious.
Unless you talk about what is unspeakable within the family.
Because it takes a lot of training and silence to miss the obvious.
So, basically what I'm saying, more accurately and correctly now, is that corporations love that taxes exist.
They love that unions exist.
Corporate executives in the short run because it eliminates competition.
It eliminates competition which keeps their share price high.
As soon as you have competition, then you have less capital coming into your organization, which means that because it's going into this other new startup, and so that means that your share price is going to go down.
Even if that competitor doesn't succeed in the long run, there will be a certain amount of diversion of capital from investment to you, to investment to that new corporation.
So they really do like, at the moment, in the short run, at the very top of the corporations, which is where the major decisions are made, and of course in the government they like it too.
The government likes it because if there is a minor capital flight from an existing manufacturing concern with lots of employees, those employees are going to get laid off and get mad at the government.
But of course the people who get jobs in the new manufacturing concerns that are sprouting up don't make the causal connection between government policies and their new jobs.
So they won't be as positive towards the government as those who are laid off are negative to the government.
So that's sort of one of the reasons why it doesn't benefit the politicians to have new industrial concerns.
It benefits them to have old industrial concerns that they are doing their best to and can, even if people do get laid off, the government can say, well we gave them this much money, we gave them that, we gave them the other, we're just out of money.
But hey, don't worry, we'll retrain you and we'll give you EI and we'll give you all this kind of stuff.
Unemployment insurance for those who are not in Canada or those who are in Canada who remember the real term, unemployment insurance, rather than the nonsense term which is employment insurance.
Anyway, so that's sort of my answer about corporations.
Yes, they like not paying taxes, but they like the fact that there's a Byzantine tax maze that other potential competitors look at and say, ah, forget it.
It's going to cost me, you know, 15 lawyers and $5 million a year to avoid paying $5 million a year in taxes.
I'm not going to bother.
Whereas for a corporation, it costs them $5 million a year to avoid paying $100 million in taxes.
It's quite a bit worth it, but there's quite a hump there at the beginning where you're going to have a problem competing.
So that's a clarification and thank you for those who wrote in to point out that it didn't seem to make too too much sense that they don't mind going down the rabbit hole but they do like it when it's coherent on the other side which I appreciate and thank you so much for that.
Now, the second one is a fascinating discussion that I've been having on the board with somebody about intellectual property.
And I think a lot of people went with me around the sort of voluntary DRO model, but there are a number of people who are focused on whether it's easy to copy property or not, and that being the definition of whether property rights exist.
And I don't really see that.
I'm still having trouble seeing that, so I'm going to try another way of approaching the problem to see if I can't make a compromise that works for people in this area.
Because somebody who, you know, this guy is basically saying, and I apologize if I'm paraphrasing him, and a fine and brilliant lady and a great writer actually came in to put in a compromise that I thought was very, very good too.
So have a look at this discussion if you like.
My particular response to it, which is not in any way shape or form to end the discussion, because I have a gut sense which doesn't mean anything in terms of validation.
It just means that it's worth something in me is saying that there's a way of resolving this in some manner.
And it's giving me some clues, and I'll try and work it out, as I usually do.
And the pauses are me thinking.
I don't have this all written out beforehand.
This is not any sort of final word on the debate.
This is just sort of my contribution to it.
So the question is...
If you download a song from the internet, you're not taking anything from the artist's time.
You are not kidnapping him, you're not locking him in a basement, you're not stealing from him.
And so, how could there be a violation of property rights, since you're not taking money away from him, you're not taking his time, or his energy, or his resources, or his property, or anything like that.
And I think that's interesting.
I'm going to try and see if I can come up with a short metaphor.
Oh my god, a short metaphor!
Can you imagine?
Do not imagine!
It shall be!
A short metaphor on how this might be explainable from my standpoint, and then we can keep the conversation going.
This is not, of course, the easiest of topics in the world.
So, what I would like to suggest is that if somebody steals A pair of speakers from a stereo store, and we're all going to recognize that that's theft, right?
I mean, the stereo store's paid for the speakers and so on.
So if somebody steals a pair of speakers from a stereo store, and then the back of their truck is open, and it falls out just in front of your house, well...
If you then take those speakers and you take them into your house and you keep them because you have no idea whose they are or where they come from or whatever, then it's certainly true that you're not stealing You are taking property, but the property is in a state of nature, because there's just no way to find out.
Maybe you ask your neighbors or whatever, you put up a sign or anything like that, but nobody comes and says, that's my stuff, right?
So basically it has been removed from somebody else and it now exists in a state of nature.
So I do understand that you are taking something and you are not stealing from anybody directly.
The property is in a state of nature, so to speak.
And so that's something that I find somewhat analogous to songs on the Internet, that they exist in an unowned state.
Because, let's say that there is a contract, and I do believe that there is, there certainly is on videos, DVDs and so on, but there's a contract on CDs, which is a condition, if you open the CD you are agreeing to not copy this and put it on the Internet, let's just say.
So that to me is, there is a contract with the guy who buys the CD.
I'm not saying that there would be in a DRO society, I'm just saying that if there was one in a DRO society, and I think there might be, if there was one in a DRO society, then the person who opens up the CD and copies it onto the Internet It's violating that contract.
They are equivalent to the guy who steals the speakers from the stereo store, because this sort of contract, the implicit contract, and that was another question which we might talk about another time.
The implicit contract is that if you go into a stereo store, you're not going to grab something from the store and run out.
There's no shoplifting, right?
I mean, there's usually a sign, but even if the sign isn't there, it's sort of understood that you've got to part with some cash in order to get the goodies.
So the person who initially violates the contract is the one who is acting immorally in terms of copying the CDs to the Internet.
I'm talking in a DRO society, because I don't necessarily believe in the legitimacy of state contracts at the moment, or state intellectual property laws at the moment.
I think that maybe they're perfect, but I doubt it, because it's the government and it's not been negotiated with the consumer at the table.
I would say then that the guy who copies a CD to the internet is equivalent to the guy who takes a stereo from the stereo store and then he drops it on the street.
So he turns the property from something that's owned into something that is in a state of nature.
Then you, as you download that song, are the equivalent of the person who is taking the speakers off your front lawn where they fell off the truck and putting them in your house and using them.
Now, I know that this doesn't address the issue of reproducibility.
I was thinking of using a metaphor involving counterfeiting money, where you're simply copying something very easily and then going out and spending it, but that seemed too complicated to be of help.
So, if this doesn't answer the question, then let me know, and I would be more than happy to try another metaphor around reproducibility.
Because it's an argument from a fact, I don't really see that it's that relevant.
I mean, for me, you own what you produce, and then you can lease it out or, you know, lend it out or whatever, but there's always terms attached to it.
Unless it's a simple gift.
If I buy a house, even in a DRO society, there may be clauses which say, in this neighborhood, you can't run a crack house.
You can't run prostitution out of your house.
Then there's no problem having these things associated, even with outright purchases.
So, conditional purchases are pretty common, as we've talked about a number of times before.
Condo boards and so on.
So I think that conditional purchases, like you can buy this but you can't copy it to the internet, is perfectly fine.
I know it's a voluntary transaction and if you break it then you have broken an agreement with someone.
And so I don't really have any problem with those kinds of conditional purchases or conditional transfers of goods.
And I don't really think that the reproducibility of a good is at all an issue.
Because that would be like saying, as robots take over factories and goods become easier to produce, then stealing them is less wrong.
There's always labor involved in it.
I mean, if you're enjoying these podcasts, you've taken the time to find them.
You obviously previously took the time to become interested in libertarianism, or at least objectivism, or some sort of ideas that led you to this place.
And then you downloaded, like you figured out how to download, you installed iTunes or iPod or whatever it is you're using to download, and then you nice and tidily downloaded only a couple of week or ten a week because you wanted to help me with bandwidth in addition to paying me money.
And then you transfer them to your MP3 player, or you burn them on CDs.
Like, all of that is labor.
In the ISP setup, the internet, the servers, and so on.
You know, there's labor that's always involved.
The reproducibility of getting it from me to you is not labor-free.
Now, it's to some degree labor-free for me, although not exactly, because I still have to maintain the ISPs, right?
I mean, if I take down my server, And I take down my list, then yes, it's possible that other people could then start releasing these, but it would be a little tougher to find them, and they'd have to put the labor in for no recompense, which would be sort of maybe interesting and flattering, but I'm not sure would happen.
So there is still labor for me involved in giving you access to all of my MP3s, all of my podcasts.
So, I don't know that there's a clear line between instant reproducibility and something that's tougher to reproduce.
That's something that I just... I mean, to me, if you have a property right, you have a property right.
It doesn't matter to what degree it's easy to reproduce and how easy does it have to be to reproduce in order to violate the copyrights, the property rights.
There's no clear line, so you get a lot of fuzziness around property rights, like if it takes one second to reproduce versus ten seconds versus a minute versus ten minutes versus an hour.
Where's the line where suddenly, bing, you have property rights again?
I mean, it just doesn't seem to me to make any sense.
It's just simpler from the argument of morality to say that whoever creates something has property rights, and then If they sell or lease their thing with Conditional and it's perfectly valid for them to do so, I can sell you these MP3s on the condition that you pay me 50 cents a podcast.
I could have something at the beginning of each podcast which says, if you listen to this podcast to the middle, if you get to 15 minutes, then I do consider that you owe me 50 cents.
Now, if you don't want to owe me the 50 cents, no problem, then please don't listen to the podcast.
But if you do listen to the podcast past 15 minutes, then you owe me 50 cents.
Now, that to me is a verbal contract that is entirely permissible, and if you then bypass it, I feel that it's a violation of a contract.
I haven't, of course, put that in there because I'm curious to see what comes out of the donation situation, because I'm curious to find out what the price, what the value of these things is in the market, right?
If I get nice juicy donations, they're more valuable, I feel more pleased, I'm more enthusiastic.
You get a better show for more money.
I'll absolutely guarantee you that.
I mean, if everybody sends me a buck, then I'm gonna say, oh, okay, well, this is about as valuable as, well, not even, you can't even get a cup of coffee for a buck anymore.
This isn't really very valuable, so maybe I'm not gonna bother so much, but if everybody sends me 500 bucks, then I'm going to be that much more interested and keen, and of course the option opens up that I work full-time on it, which to me would be very exciting, and I think would gain a lot of benefit for you, and have me out there promoting the course, doing speeches, writing articles, promoting the site, doing more fact-based and current event podcasts, as well as the regular podcasts.
I mean, I would work at this 10 hours a day, If I could do it full-time, and I would certainly be willing to take a massive salary hit, and I've got it all worked out, I just need to see if the donations are going to get me there, so it's an option.
But I would see that that's a perfectly valid thing to say, a perfectly valid contract, and it's what happens in movie theaters right now.
So you buy a movie ticket, and then if you don't like the movie within the first half hour, then you are more than welcome in this world, currently right now, To go back to the cashier and say, this movie's not very good.
I remember I did this with Lady Killers and probably about a dozen other or so films in the past couple of years, where you just start watching them and it's like, oh my lord, this is dragging, this is slow, this is illogical, this is... The acting's always great.
The acting is always great.
But it's the writing.
It's the writing.
It's the writing.
So, if you don't like the movie in the first half hour, you can go and get your money back.
And that seems to me, it's pretty fair.
I mean, I think that's a reasonable satisfaction guaranteed kind of situation, which is good.
And I would see the same thing as being valid with the podcasts.
That if you don't like them, or you start listening to them, and I might sort of say at the beginning, this is all stuff that I'm sort of playing around with in my head, so it's not too theoretical for me.
I might say something in podcast zero, like I've left room for podcast zero, which will be, this is sort of the deal, right?
This is the voluntary model of contractual cooperation that we're working with here.
Since you're in a site about a non-governmental solution, here is the way that things are going to work and I'm going to sort of find out the degree to which people have integrity in this area.
I mean, it certainly helps me figure out how far we are away from it.
Like, if everybody then were to ignore that contract that I'm coming up with, sort of steal everything in my words, right?
I mean, that they would then listen to everything and not pay me anything, then that would sort of be an indication to me that we're a lot more corrupt than I think we are, which would mean that, you know, we're too far away for me to bother too much with podcasts, right?
I mean, sort of leave the ones out there, but...
You know, working four hours a day on podcasts wouldn't be my first choice if it's going to be three generations of human improvement.
But if people are then more honorable and so on, then I know that they're that much closer.
So it's still worth pushing on.
I mean, there are lots of complicated things around this sort of stuff.
There's a lot of information that you can get out of compliance or non-compliance with contracts.
But if I said something like, you can listen to podcasts one through five perfectly free.
That's your preview to see if you like it.
To see if my voice drives you nuts.
To see if I'm making any sense to you.
To see if you can cut through my fruity pan-European accent.
Whatever you like.
You can see if this is of use to you.
Maybe it doesn't cover topics you like.
Maybe you're looking for how you build a shed with libertarian principles and I'm not so much with the gardening.
I mean, there's lots of things that you could not like about these podcasts.
But I say, once you get to Podcast 6, then you need to sign up to $20 a month, right?
I mean, $20 a month, or $10 a month if you want the commercial version.
I don't know.
There's just certain numbers I'm playing around with.
At $20 a month, we'll get you 40 podcasts, and a bunch of articles, and so on.
And that's 50 cents a podcast, and you know, there's a whole thing that I could sort of put out there.
I'm mulling it around, but I'm curious to see what comes out, right?
I would rather not do commercials.
I'm perfectly willing to do commercials, and we certainly have a large enough user base that people would be interested in inserting commercials.
But I would not be so keen on commercials because it's additional time and you're basically getting less philosophical rambling for your listening ear dollars worth of time and I would rather keep it sort of just about ideas and not about ideas and buying things.
Not that I have any problem.
I mean, obviously, I have no problem with advertising.
I think it's an excellent and wonderful part of capitalism and it gives us an enormous amount of things for free.
But I would rather not have him in these podcasts because I also think it's a little bit jarring to go from let's solve the problems of the world to buy this or that to let's solve the problems of the world and it also interrupts the flow and as you probably realize I hyperventilate for about 20 minutes before so I can do all of this on one breath.
Oh, if only I could.
Wouldn't that just be delish?
Anyway, so I think that if you take an MP3 file from the Internet, you are retrieving or receiving stolen goods.
In other words, goods that have been copied in violation of contract from a CD to the Internet.
So you are picking those things up.
Now, the argument could be that it is in a state of nature, and I do understand that.
I mean, and that may be true.
I mean, it absolutely may be true.
However, if I sort of go back to the idea that you've got these pair of stereo speakers that fell onto your lawn, that literally fell off the back of a truck in the sort of Sopranos context, And if you can't, for the life of you, figure out who owns them, to make it as morally sanctionable as possible, the box has no return address.
So there's no ship to XYZ stereo store.
So you can't return it to the store.
There's no manufacturer's logo or license or anything.
It's a complete blank cube.
It's like the obelisk or the big square from 2001.
So it's just a big black stonehenge.
You have no idea whose it is or how to return it.
And so obviously, if you don't know who owns it and there's no way to figure out who manufactured it or anything like that, then you can keep them because they're in a state of nature that can't be returned to the original.
Now if there is a label on the box of speakers which says this is the property of XYZ Stereo Store if you find this on your lawn please call this number toll free and we will send someone over to pick it up and we will pay you 20 bucks I mean just to make your time whatever worthwhile.
So if you then have a clear path to restitution for the property that you want to use then If you use the speakers you should send the money to the stereo store and if you don't feel that you want to use the speakers then you should return the speakers to the stereo store or phone them and have them come and pick them up.
It's no skin off your nose and it's hard to sort of argue that you own these speakers because you found them when the original owner is quite clear and they've expressed their intent on what it is that they want you to do which is to return the speakers.
To carry this weighty analogy over to the realm of the Internet, if you find a song on the Internet, you could say, of course, that it is in a state of nature because it has been stolen by somebody who has violated contract.
Let's talk about this in the DRO model.
So let's say this is a voluntary contract, there's no state involved and so on, and make this as morally simple as possible.
So somebody has voluntarily bought the CD in the DRO environment with a clear message which says, do not, you cannot copy this to the Internet.
Now, if they do then copy that to the Internet, then they have violated that contract, right?
They have appropriated property and done with it that which they should not, right?
It's the equivalent of buying a house with a contract that says don't open a crack house, and then opening a crack house, right?
You're going to face sanctions.
Then they have put this information or this data on the internet, and now it's in a state of nature.
Now the problem is, my friends, that if you take this, you know exactly who the owner is.
In fact, you probably searched based on who the owner is.
So if you like Sade or Sting or Sinéad O'Connor, then you absolutely know, if you download one of their mp3s, who was the creator.
Who, in a sense, was the original owner of the mp3.
So if you don't cough them up a couple of pennies, then you can't, I think, claim that it's moral anymore than you can say, well, these speakers fell on my property and so I'm going to keep them even though they're not mine.
And I'm not stealing from anybody.
Well, kind of in a sense, since you know the original owner, I think you sort of are.
Since you know that Sting, for instance, created these songs and, you know, spent years struggling and wrote the songs and so on, and you're taking and using his songs, and you also know that the property was originally stolen, because if it ends up on the internet, unless it's sort of a officially sanctioned b-side release or something,
If it ends up on the Internet, then it was definitely a violation of contract to begin with, then you are receiving property that was inappropriately appropriated, I guess you could say, and using that property, and you know who the original owner is.
So if you can make the argument to me that if the speakers land on your lawn and somebody says, give me a call, I'll come pick them up, but you decide to keep them anyway, if you can tell me that that's a moral thing to do, I would certainly be interested.
I don't think it is, but what I would feel would be wrong.
My conscience tells me that's the wrong thing to do, and that doesn't mean that it's right.
It's just that's where I'm starting from.
So, if taking property that has been misappropriated and keeping it for yourself when there's a clear path to restitution, in this case, of course, it's not emailing the song to Sting and deleting it from your hard drive because of the reproducibility aspect, but it definitely is coughing a couple of bucks Sting's way.
And if you can't do that, if there's simply no way to pay the money for Sting, then you can sort of do what I do, right?
Which is if I end up accidentally downloading a movie and watching it and enjoying it, then when next time I'm a blockbuster I rent it and put it straight in the bin so at least the people get the money, right?
That's sort of the way that I deal with things because I enjoyed a movie and so if I feel that the people should get paid for it, so that's how I handle it.
I cough a couple of bucks their way, and if I download and enjoy songs, if I sort of listen to the album once and go, oh, that sucks, then I'll delete it and I don't bother, right?
Because that's like the movie.
It's like the first half hour.
Because, I mean, CDs are long-term reproducibility things.
You've listened to them many times.
But if I download and enjoy, like the Pink CD, Misunderstood, I downloaded it because I was curious.
I liked one of the songs on the radio.
loved it and bought the CD because I can't go and give Pink like five bucks or something.
So I ended up buying the CD.
It's sort of a preview situation.
That's sort of my approach to it.
So I don't mind this situation.
It's sort of analogous to this.
I'll use the stereo thing just once more and then stop.
But if you have these speakers on your lawn and you need a pair of speakers, you're interested in a pair of speakers, and then you take those into your house, you unpack them, you hook them up to your stereo speaker, and you look on the internet to say, oh, these Haman Kahn speakers are what, for 500 bucks or 5,000 bucks or whatever, these Haman Kahn speakers are what, for 500 bucks or 5,000 And you say, well, I could afford that.
What's the sound like?
And you preview them.
Then, you've hooked everything up, you know, it sounds a particular way, and you like the sound, you like the price, then you phone up the store and say, here's my visa, I'm going to keep these.
And the store is going to be like, fantastic, it's found money for them because they've, you know, written off this stuff.
So, that to me is a perfectly valid thing to do.
I wouldn't have any moral objections to that.
Now, if you don't like the speakers, you've got to pack them up and return them to the store, in my humble opinion.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with previewing.
I think that's perfectly valid, and that, to me, is what downloading, to some degree, is about.
You're previewing.
Now, if you go through iTunes, or you go through the Yahoo Music Engine, or you go through the new Napster To Go, all of those kinds of things, well, you know, I for one would find out if the artist is getting any money, and I think that they are in those situations, so those seem perfectly valid to me.
But I would definitely feel that the reproducibility of the property is not an issue.
The question is, have you inherited property that was only inheritable to you because of a violation of contract?
A la the stereo speakers.
And so, if you have, then I think it's fine to preview, but I think if you decide to keep and use, that you need to cough some money up to the artist, because the artist is the original owner, for sure, of that song, right?
The artist owns the original track, and the original track is only released to other people on the condition that they don't copy it and hand it out like candy.
Which, to me, is a conditional purchase.
I think it's perfectly valid.
It may be something that is never done in a DRO society, but right now that is the situation.
And again, you know, for me, finally, I think it's specious and cheesy, which doesn't mean that it's wrong.
It's just sort of my particular opinion, sort of feeling about it, that if you have enjoyed, I guess what we're up to is now like 150 hours of podcasts.
If you have enjoyed all of that, it's been a net benefit to you.
And you feel that it's helped you clarify your thinking, or it's been exciting, or you've laughed, or you found it interesting, then if you sort of don't pay me, then you're getting a lot of my time for free.
And it's the same thing with the artist.
If you love a CD and you listen to it while you're working out, and it helps motivate you, and it helps get you fit, and all these benefits, And it's not worth the time or money.
I think that's not particularly right.
I could just be old school in that.
I'm not saying that this is a big... I sort of tried to put forward a logical defense of intellectual property rights here, because the only spread of this kind of intellectual property arises from an original violation of contract, which is, you know, do not copy, do not distribute, and so on.
And so, if you inherit these things, it definitely is a violation of contract.
Now, you can say that that contract is wrong, But that's sort of a problem, because if you buy something with a contract clearly written on it, if you open the seal, you can't copy the CD.
If you then do copy it, then that to me seems kind of wrong, right?
Because you've already agreed that you're not going to.
And so if you do it, you're definitely violating a contract that you have agreed to, which to me seems kind of wrong.
It's like breaking a promise.
It's like lying.
That's sort of my way of looking at intellectual property rights.
I hope that it's clarified at least my position, whether it's closed the issue off.
I'd be surprised, but it's possible.
But certainly do let me know what you think and maybe we can keep this going for another, you know, 20 or 30 podcasts.
Thanks so much.
▲
Export Selection