Originally I was wondering why this kind of response to what was a seemingly innocuous amusing post, but looking at the rest of the threads and the post times, I think I see what happened and why you were angry, so, I’ll “skip a bit”…

* RE: you categorically stating that Mike is an “arrogant prick” who belittles artists

May I ask for some examples of articles where you felt Mike did this? I can’t imagine from the stuff I’ve read that any of it was intended to belittle artists, but I’d be interested to see examples so I can perhaps avoid people thinking what an arrogant bitch I must be for belittling them… In fact, if anything Mike strikes me as someone who wants to protect artists from the predatory methods of those in big media.

OTOH, I have seen a bit of Mike standing up to the a**holes profiting off others from big media and our supposed representatives in the government, who sometimes seem to be constantly trying to stick it to us, their customers and constituents, as often and as hard as possible, for their own selfish reasons, so I suppose I can see that may come off as a little arrogant at times… although none of it IMO approaching the arrogance of those he speaks against. Anyways, it was the entire sentiment that is my main concern, although I think “strong” and “arrogant” are perhaps being mistaken, for one in the same.

RE: the fact that you seem to pretty much agree with the Techdirt/Mike’s/Our position on artists going directly to the fans and also on how to treat your fans

Is that an accurate reading? If so, am I correct in thinking that we pretty much agree on things other than whether it’s right to say music is property?

RE: your argument against saying “intangible means not valuable”

You’re responding to a straw man argument that I have seen *no one* on here ever make, although I could have missed it easily. But, in response:

Of course there are many valuable things that are not “tangible” property! But that’s because “value” is something that resides in every individual that “values” something, and there are many (most?) of us that value things like sculpture, music, painting, poetry, etc., and is entirely independent, like it or not, of something’s status as property. For instance, I think air is quite valuable, but (and let’s make it easy and just say: “in an area of the countryside, with no real pollution to speak of and few people around”) air is a great example of something that is very valuable, and yet it is not (in the countryside mentioned) a *scarce* resource, and it does not need allocation between the few people in that countryside to prevent conflict, and therefore, is not something which needs to be property in that location.

But saying something has value is a far cry from saying that the thing can be treated as property, at least for the important purpose of determining who has the right to use a resource which can only be used by one person at a time. And in the case of music, and I mean the underlying *concept* of the music, i.e. the idea, not any particular CD, but just “the song”, there is no conflict between the right of different individuals when two people both “have the song” and try to “use” it at the same time; me “having the song” at a particular would not deprive you of “having the song” at the same time, nor would there be any incentive for me to try to, say, hit you over the head and “take the song” from you, since, we’re assumedly talking about a song that’s already released and available somewhere. (You most certainly can keep complete control over the song, in which case you could be said to be the only one to “have” it. But, little short of never playing it except by yourself with no one else around to hear would really give you that kind of ‘ownership’ over it, and even then it’s a bit of a stretch of the concept of property/ownership.)

But, so, to answer your question, the line drawn which (historically, legally) has been used to distinguish property from non-property is just that: the scarcity of the thing in question–if something physically exists in the world, and can not be claimed by multiple parties with conflicting interests at the same time, then it is a scarce resource and can be property. Property law, in fact, provides ways acceptable to a majority of people to determine who is the “rightful” owner of a piece of scarce property in a conflict, without resorting to a “might makes right” philosophy.

In the case of music, yes it has a tangible effect on people! Yes, it is very valuable. I can’t even imagine how much less rich my life would have been in a world without music! But, since it (the sound of the music is what I’m referring to here) can be reproduced/play by one individual without at the same time depriving another individual of their ability to reproduce/play the exact same sound: even at the exact same time. It is not a scarce resource needing to be treated as property in order to decide the rightful owner in case of conflict; each person can play the music, therefore there is no traditional idea of a legal property conflict involved. (Yes, I realize there is a conflict here, but a property conflict doesn’t mean a conflict as in: “we have conflicting views on whether you should listen to that without paying” but a property conflict only arises when one party can’t use scarce resources because another person has deprived them of those resources.)

In fact (here’s where I am more extreme than most, including Mike, who has said on at least one occasion I saw that he is not totally against IP) considering music or other non-scarce goods as property completely turns traditional property rights on their collective head: because, in that case, whenever someone writes down an idea or makes a song or what-have-you, a corresponding restriction on scarce property, and, in fact, restrictions on the way that every other person may use their own, rightfully owned, scarce property are now given to the one who simply wrote down the idea or recorded the song. Like it or not, intellection restriction rights are not only “property” in the (historical/legal) sense of the word, they are the inverse of property: rights that you obtain in telling other people what to do with their property because you wrote something down.

Regardless of the points to be made in in favor of intellectual restriction rights, calling those rights “Intellectual Property” is misleading, and that has long struck me as fundamentally incorrect. I think those who are rabidly defend the extending of such rights beyond even their present unprecedented scope (for instance, treating them criminally instead of civilly is a rather novel concept for the U.S.

Much of this wouldn’t have gone through so easily if big media hadn’t managed to fire the opening salvos under the radar; things may well have gone differently if we had a real debate, framed as: “Hey, by having these rights, there are a lot of difficult issues, including, among other things: providing severe criminal penalties for the first time on many infringements that previously were purely civil matters; extending these rights is taking away even more of people’s freedom to use their own scarce property in nonviolent ways as they see fit; causing a number of actions which used to be, not only *not* a criminal offense, but perfectly legal under the law (such as sharing music without profiting from it); or the Constitutional issues at least in the U.S. where the explicitly stated purpose of copyright was to benefit the people, not individuals” etc. etc. as opposed to the (initially very successful) campaign by big media to frame the debate, almost in its entirety, as: “Copying is stealing someone else’s intellectual *property*, and we know that people who steal other people’s property are just thieves. We harshly punish thieves when we catch them, and we should harshly punish these thieves who are *stealing other people’s property* by copying, too. And why on earth would you listen to anyone about this issue who would copy things, since they are just thieves, and thieves will make any excuses for their behavior.”

Which was indeed a very powerful argument for those standing to benefit from ‘winning’ the debate, but which, as you can see, ignores every relevant point in an intellectually honest framing of the debate.

Hey, I disagree that copyright could ever be implemented in a way that does not reward or punish the wrong people. I also believe that the fact that intellectual restriction laws conflict with long standing property law used to remedy and reduce conflict over scarce resources in free societies is more than enough to reject it out of hand without very strong evidence showing, not only that there *might* be some benefit to intellectual restriction law, but that the benefit is so strong that it outweighs the benefits of having a simple, consistent way of dealing with the conflicts that naturally arise around scarce property. But I would’t for a second try to frame it, even if I knew I could score a quick “win” by doing so by saying, “Hey, people that want copyright law want to throw close to 1,000 years of property law out the window so they can steal the rightful use of your stuff. And people that want to steal your stuff are thieves…” etc. But that’s because I actually care to understand and to come to understanding, not to just ram my beliefs down someone else’s throat.

Of course, I’m sure if you were ask some of the people that post here, it’s clear that anyone that thinks what I think must obviously be a ‘freet*rd’ who ‘just wants something for nothing’ and wants to ‘screw the rightful owners of intellectual property out of their due.’ And, of course, anything I say must be just an attempt to obfuscate and confuse, because I’m just a thief trying to justify stealing your works as well as others’, and that’s what you get for coming here and talking to people that actually agree with that scoundrel Mike Masnick. 🙂

Anyway, post is far too long and it’s far too late, so I leave all typos, mistakes, ambiguities and other errors to posterity, but perhaps this is too long after the original post to be read by many anyway and people will mostly simply pull it out as evidence from time to time that I am far too radical on intellectual restriction law and therefore should be dismissed out of hand without really reading it closely enough to realize the plethora of errors which certainly remain. 😛

(*) the “tian” in “techdirtian” is pronounced like the “tian” in “martian”, and I immediately lay claim to this as my own work and place it into the public domain, or I give a license to it under the least restrictive license in your jurisdiction, or under your choice among several if there are several equivalently less restrictive licenses in your jurisdiction. damn, someone probably already has used techdirtian, though, haven’t they? ;D