It’s not the lawless society. It’s the stateless society. There will always be laws, even if they are only natural law. So far I find the common law, which was built up over centuries, to be compatible with a stateless society.

Thanks for your comments.

Of course, in the process you may bankrupt yourself and alienate your potential client base, defeating yourself.

Say for example, I invented the wheel. I sell wheels now, and am originally the only one to have realized its usefulness. It’s going to seem to be obvious to everyone how simple it is, and that they could have thought it up themselves, and that they don’t owe me anything. Before my idea truly gets off the ground, masons and stone carvers (who can make much better wheels than I can, given their expertise) start to work, and profit from my idea.

I’m not saying I would use force against these people, but it would definitely cross my mind. They are profiting from my incredible technological advance, and I am not. Only through my enforcement of my perceived property rights will I be able to generate profit.

How is my claim to my idea any less valid than your claim to physical property, and would you accept me using an equivalent amount of force to stop you that you would use to stop a thief from taking your property?

So ultimately, yeah, the only real issue is a monopoly on violence violating basic property itself.

I agree. There have been some good articles (and audio prz) on this topic out of The Mises Institute. Here’s one: http://mises.org/story/2632

But, again, it’s a moot point because the market will decide. It’s only a topic worthy of debate when the tyrant – who makes one decision for all – must be convinced one way or another.

Thanks for commenting.

Ryan

Right on. And I like the BSD license better too.

Is intellectual property a valid concept? I’m on the fence. But frankly I think it doesn’t matter. The market can decide that. People who don’t want to accept IP won’t, and those who do, will. I agree with you that it is impossible to really enforce consistently, so inevitably IP will de facto cease to exist without the aggression of government behind it. And that’s fine by me.

That said however I think intellectual property as it’s commonly known is invalid too. There is one way you could argue for it if you like I did here, but it involves some semantic modifications in language. Ever since writing that article though I found it simpler to just deny the possibility of owning ideas and information, but then emphasizing the fact that ideas and information by their very nature cannot even exist without a medium and you do own a medium, always.

So that’s the trick. You create a song. First it’s in your mind where the medium are your brain cells. Then it could be on your hard drive (another medium) and then it could be on rented server space online (another medium). You can’t precisely claim to own the song itself anymore than you can claim ownership of a number, but since you own these mediums (and in the latter case have a rent contract) you decide how are these mediums to be used. You can decide to deny a download for instance unless the would be downloader agrees to your terms. And a promise is a contract.

But even so this differs greatly from how copyright licenses typically works, and of course that’s due to aggression. If your downloader breaks a contract and gives it to Joe (provided terms are against copying to others) and Joe continues to share with others, Joe isn’t the one liable, only the first downloader is because the contract was between him and you. But copyright says otherwise and thus calls for persecution of Joe and everyone else whom he shared with despite the fact that they had no relationship with the original author.

This is also why I think that, while certainly possible (you can have the contractor agree to a scary enough damages payment to deter copying), it would be more difficult to enforce draconian contracts in realm of information, digital works and software than with government aggression and why in a free market “Open Source” would probably thrive a lot more than today (and more so with BSD style contracts than viral GPL style).