I want to argue that any idea expressed to the public should be free to copy by other. Copies has no economic or monetary value. First, the argument must rest on the basic elements. So put aside the secondary consideration of economic effects assuming particular social or legal constructions, and look at copying in itself.
To evaluate something morally, we can follow Kant, whose fundamental moral rule is: Act only if the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal law. That is, we ask: would we want an action to be a general law?
If a digital object is good, then copying it duplicates and spreads that good. And the incidental cost of copying is practically nothing. We can certainly wish this were a general law: if everyone copied freely and widely, we would all benefit – we would all receive very much more good, and at negligible cost. Copying seems clearly moral, and any restriction such as copyright must therefore be partly immoral.
Creating an artificial scarcity to non-scarce things is morally suspicious to Grotius as he noted:
“If any person should prevent any other person from taking fire from his fire or a light from his torch, I would accuse him of violating the law of human society, because that is the essence of its very nature . . . Why then, when it can be done without any prejudice to his own interests, will not one person share with another things which are useful to the recipient and no loss to the giver?” (‘On the freedom of the seas’, p45; Grotius; 1609.)
Creating an artificial scarcity is a violation to the very nature of information because information is naturally non-scarce. Creating an exclusive right to non-exclusive goods like information is a violation to the very nature of information because information is an “unusually” non-exclusive good.
As Risha Aiyer Ghosh has put it:
Information is not just an extreme nonrival good, in that many people can enjoy
its benefits at the same time; information is also unusual in that ownership over it
cannot be expressed through a public act of possession. You can possess
information if you keep it to yourself – in which case it remains private, and
nobody knows what it is that you possess. As soon as you make public the
information you claim to own, it is public information that everyone can access
since you no longer have natural control over it.... With information goods, your
“property” can be secret and only possessed by you. However, if published – if
distributed even to one other person – that information is no longer within your
control.
Nobody has a right to have a monopoly on ideas or information, you have a right to keep your ideas and information private, but if you make them public, they are not your private property anymore. Controlling information and ideas cannot be done without controlling other people’s property. As Kevin Rahbar has put it:
If a person that came up with an original idea were to claim exclusive rights over
his or her idea they would ultimately be claiming the right to control someone else‘s
property – someone‘s mind, paper, computer, pencil, wheel, or widget. Intellectual
property claims ownership over other people‘s labor and by definition is an illegitimate
practice. In fact, it acts as a form of censorship by stymying the free flow of ideas. To enforce copyright laws is synonymous with preventing people from peacefully using the information they possess, or the idea that possess their mind. If someone comes to own information legitimately (buying a book for example), then on what grounds can that person be prevented from doing as they please with it? Information can never be a concrete thing that someone can control. Information is universal, existing in other people‘s minds which is their private property. Suffice it to say, you cannot own
information without owning other people. That’s why I call it intellectual slavery.
Nobody has a right to have a monopoly on ideas or information, you have a right to keep your ideas and information private, but if you make them public, they are not your private property anymore.
Copying VS Making or Manufacturing.
Rick Falkvinge has noted in his fantastic Article, Getting” or “downloading” doesn’t describe the process. No copy pops onto the wires, travels through the net, and sets itself on the hard drive on the person’s system. This is the copyright industry model of reality, their fake model, which they use to push for harsher laws and erosion of liberty. This is how they equate “stealing a copy of the Avengers” with “stealing a gallon of milk”. That the object is somehow stolen through the internet. That’s not what happens.
What really happens is that you have instructed your system to listen to a complex series of protocol packets, and using them as instructions, you manufacture a copy at your end. You are making a copy using your own resources and property, by listening to instructions online. If nobody listened to these instructions at the time, no copy would get manufactured. The copy isn’t downloaded, it is manufactured.
Thus, it becomes very clear that manufacturing a copy is something fairly normal, but that somebody is expecting protection money for us doing so. It becomes obvious that this was made from the person’s own raw materials using their own time, and if a law says that this cannot be done, then that law is interfering with how we can use our own property.
Labor is not a property
It is said that someone owns the fruit of their intellectual labor as much if not more than any other property. This claim attempts to work by a subtle equivocation on the word ‘own’. Certainly that product is attributable to the author – the author owns it in that sense, but the implication of property-like restrictions does not automatically follow.
The answer is that there is nothing in authorship itself sufficient to justify any of these rights. Who acts, and how, is incomplete without what is done. A right to a kind of act depends on the substance of that act, not merely on its primary participant.
Simply, Labor is not a physical object, it's an act. You cannot own the labor.
Anti-IP Liberterian Stephan Kinsella has discussed this issue in his Book ‘Against Intellectual Property’ . Kinsella is altogether opposed to intellectual property, and he explains his position in this wide-ranging book.
Conclusion.
Intellectual Property is a reaction to the fact that Information is a non-exclusive and non-rivalrous, Intellectual Property is creating an artificial scarcity, despite the fact that information is a non-scarce.
Intellectual property is a non-natural right to exclude other from using non-exclusive goods.
There’s nothing wrong with Copying, Sharing, and Imitation.
Let me conclude this article with some remarkable quotes. :)
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It’s a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.”
-- John Perry Barlow
“Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.”
-- John Perry Barlow
"Trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." ~ Bruce Schneier
References:
‘Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Ethics‘; Kant, Bennett (trans)
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1785.pdf
Anti-Copyright Summary
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/anti-copyright-summary_hxa7241_2009.html
http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/
Against Intellectual Property
https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
The Lockean Justification For Copyright: An Argument Against
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/lockean-copyright-against_hxa7241_2011.html
Intellectual Property Ethics: Arguments Against
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/copyright-ethics-against_hxa7241_2010.html
Events:
Fight Against DRM
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm
Wikimedia Public Policy
Save Copyright Reform
http://copywrongs.eu/