The new legislation certainly has its deep legal flaws (i.e. guilty by accidental association), but we need to realize that SOPA is only a consistent extension of intellectual property enforcement, nothing else.
SOPA is an increase in government power, so attempts to pin this on the free market are pointless. Music corporations aren’t the ones hiring police officers to arrest you for downloading songs, and, likewise, film studios aren’t the ones hiring these officers to arrest you for streaming television episodes; these actions are perpetrated by the government. Not only this, but the very idea of intellectual property is granted by government in the first place (e.g. the Copyright Clause, the US Patent and Trademark Office).
That being said, hopefully these few links will allow you to think further about whether intellectual property should exist in our world at all.
Walter Block, on property:
- Whenever one says ‘I own a house,’ what one normally means is: I have the right to determine how that particular resource—described in objective physical terms—is to be employed. […] Yet it is not to the value attached to a specific resource that property rights extend, but rather exclusively to the physical integrity of such a good. I do not own the value of my house. I own a physically specified house.
Stephan Kinsella, on ethics:
- A patent is a grant by the state that permits the patentee to use the state’s court system to prohibit others from using their own property in certain ways. […] The state is assigning to A a right to control B’s property—A can tell B not to do certain things with B’s property. Since ownership is the right to control, IP grants to A co-ownership of B’s property. This clearly cannot be justified under libertarian principles.
Michele Boldrin and David Levine, on utility:
- In the specific case of Watt, the granting of the 1769 and especially of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine: innovation was stifled until his patents expired, and few steam engines were built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occurred immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations. […] Indeed, even after their patent expired, Boulton and Watt were able to maintain a substantial premium over the market by virtue of having been first, despite the fact that their competitors had had thirty years to learn how to make steam engines.
Ludwig von Mises, on pricing:
- If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents. It would be absurd to grant patents and then to deprive them of any value by forcing the patentee to sell at the competitive price. If the government does not approve of cartels, it should rather abstain from all measures (such as import duties) which provide business with the opportunity to erect combines.
Me, on common sense:
- For the record—if I were able to download and copy a house, I would do it.
Related:
*In respect of due credit, the top picture was created by Nina Paley.
