The Myth Of Original Creators | Techdirt

The "Right" to Own Knowledge
by Slated - Jul 13th, 2009 @ 9:12pm

@Anonymous Coward - Jul 4th, 2009 @ 3:22pm

Reed: "There are no original works made by individuals in a vacuum is my point. This does go against the way you define "original" because it does not really exist in my mind."

Anonymous Coward: "This is a really amazingly extreme viewpoint to me"

I'm sure.

Equally, it could be argued that your viewpoint is extreme, since it supports the notion that originality is defined as mere contribution to accreted works, and thus justifies exclusive ownership and control by those new contributors, denying both attribution and right of access (and/or other rights) to earlier contributors.

Anonymous Coward: "you believe there is no such thing as an original creative work. Fine, but what, then, should be the implications of this? I take it that this inevitably leads you to intellectual property abolitionism, where you believe that everything created should therefore be in the public domain as soon as it's expressed."

Yes, and the "terrible" outcome of this "travesty" would be ... a return to normality - the previous and long standing condition, where for centuries there was no such thing as Intellectual Property.

And yet ... life went on. There was trade and commerce and invention. Society evolved, industry progressed, and technology was developed.

But how could this have been possible, without "Intellectual Property"?

How indeed.

Anonymous Coward: "The reason I find this a hard viewpoint to understand is because I am acutely aware of the tremendous work involved in the creative process."

"Work" does not bear any particular entitlements, other than the entitlement of wages paid for mutually agreed labour rendered. Once that labour has been rendered, and those wages have been paid, the employer's obligations have been fulfilled. You presume entitlement to remuneration in perpetuity, for a single act of labour, because the results of that labour may be utilised long after that labour has been completed. You presume too much.

Anonymous Coward: "In what other field of endeavor would people work so hard only to have their work declared the property of the commons as soon as it was made?"

In fact, in every "field of endeavour".

Are you not paid a salary for the labour you render?

What more do you expect? And what justification do you offer for those expectations?

Anonymous Coward: "When I spend three years of my life [snip "hard work"] I have difficulty coming to the conclusion that I have done nothing original."

Your difficulty in accepting the truth, does not negate that truth.

Your expectations are simply unreasonable.

People are not born with some divine knowledge, it must be acquired. The sources from where you acquire that knowledge are part of a chain reaching back to the dawn of man, and can be legitimately claimed as "property" by no one. Your contribution to that chain of knowledge is:

1. Observation of the world around you
2. Learning from knowledge passed down to you from others
3. Deductions and conclusions drawn from 1 and 2 above

Addressing your rights to ownership, with respect to the above:

1. You have no inalienable right to claim exclusive ownership of that which you merely observe. If you did, then this would create the paradox of many people all having exclusive rights to the same observations. Additionally, it is profoundly unethical to make such a claim, since mere perception of an entity does not define the observer as its creator, much less its legitimate owner. You might just as easily argue that to observe another person is to own that person, or that to observe the moon through a telescope is to own the moon
2. You have no inalienable right to claim exclusive ownership to knowledge passed to you from others, since the mere provenance of that knowledge precludes this possibility, and consensus for the transfer of these rights could never be reached, since it would require authorisation from every person on Earth, living or dead, published or unpublished, known or unknown, who may or may not have contributed in some way to this knowledge
3. Your deductions may be your own, but again, you simply have no way of knowing if your conclusions have ever been reached before, but simply remain unpublished or lost in the annals of time. To claim exclusive ownership of these conclusions is therefore a palpable lie. The best you can irrefutably claim is "I also deduced that". Also, consider the obvious fact that even your deductive skills were merely taught to you by others. As humans, we are undoubtedly all unique, but equally every aspect of our being is influenced by others. We can not, and should not, make claims of "exclusivity" to knowledge, even if we produce this knowledge without any conscious awareness of any previous contribution, since lacking knowledge of provenance does not mean there is none

And I feel I should expand a little on the subject of publishing or registering knowledge (copyrights and patents). I find this whole process deeply cynical at best - the idea that ownership can be legally assumed merely by the act of "staking a claim", much like a bunch of rabid gold prospectors rushing murderously towards a glint of gold in a rock face. This type of "claim" to ownership is utterly indefensible. It's barbaric, and has no bearing on true ownership. It affords no more inalienable rights than that of a predator hunting its prey.

Are these the "rights" you seek?

These are not entirely dissimilar to the rights demanded by slave owners.

Should we not have abolished slavery?

In fact, I have often drawn this comparison before, because I see very little distinction between the practise of physical slavery, and the equally reprehensible practise of intellectual slavery. Indeed, the latter may actually be more sinister, since it assumes ownership and control of that which touches all of us, not just an unfortunate few, and is a form of subjugation which travels silently and invisibly throughout all of society, tainting us and compromising our liberties, infecting us with the disease of intellectual monopoly, thus assuming ownership of our minds. More bluntly, Intellectual Property is a cancer.

Anonymous Coward: "For you, it seems, any distinctions among these are meaningless, because every creative work falls in a single equivalence class: remixes of existing ideas. For you, there is no appreciation of the subtle originality and unique perspective that even a student just collecting the ideas of others can manage.

You are attempting to inject colour into something that is clearly monochromatic. What part of the concept of "exclusivity" are you having difficulty with?

Should this "subtle originality and unique perspective" be allowed to subjugate all those who facilitated it?

Anonymous Coward: "Despite the "cultural Nazi-ism," all these works - these students' survey papers, my books, and so on - were able to be created. Others will be able to take my work and apply it in their own original ways, just like the students that will cite my papers in their surveys, the patent examiner who read my paper and used it to evaluate the novelty of another group's ideas, or the teacher who uses my book and puts his or her own unique spin on it in teaching a class. All this is legal and encouraged by the current system that you call Nazi-ism."

Correct, and with that you have merely supported the counter-argument to your own position, since you clearly accept the provenance of your knowledge, and admit that the exclusivity afforded to you can only exist by being enforced by law.

These are laws which I, and many others, consider to be profoundly unethical. Indeed, even these "IP" laws themselves concede to this fact, since they only offer these exclusive "rights" temporarily. If ownership of knowledge were truly defensible, then such rights would be in perpetuity, just like the rights to ownership of real property.

In fact this "right" to exclusive ownership of knowledge is not a right at all, but is merely a temporary grant of privilege, offered as inducement to selfish; greedy hoarders, in conscious violation of all moral tenets to the contrary, and thus offered only for a limited time. This is the compromise of ethics the lawmakers conceded to, for the sake of accelerating industrial and social development. I contend that such development did not require acceleration, particularly if the result was a fatal compromise to our liberties, at the most basic level of all - revocation of the inalienable right of free access to mankind's cumulative knowledge.

Anonymous Coward: "I'm sorry if, by selling the products of my own independent work rather than giving them all away, I'm stealing your culture."

Your work is not "independent". No man, nor his knowledge, exists in isolation.

And Intellectual Monopoly is not theft, since to proclaim it as such is to concede to the premise that knowledge may be owned in the first place. Intellectual Monopoly is more like kidnapping knowledge then holding it for ransom. This is the nature of academic exclusivity, and those unethical laws which support it.

I also feel it prudent to point out that dissent against Intellectual Monopoly has nothing to do with money, as you misguidedly assume. I take no issue with you being paid for your work at all, but should payment depend on exclusive rights? If so, then how do you account for the sale of works licensed under the Creative Commons license or GPL, such as these?:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/buy.html
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
http://twobits.net/
https://www.redhat.com/apps/download/
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/
http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html
http://www.qtsoftware.com/products

Odd that all these commercial "knowledge" products should be sold, and yet not compromise our liberty with exclusive "rights". Apparently, such things are possible. In fact, it has always been thus. As I've already stated, "IP" is a comparatively modern disorder.

Claiming that commerce and Freedom are mutually exclusive, is sheer hyperbole and propaganda, expounded by those seeking to pervert the meaning of Freedom, to marginalise as cheapskates those who would protect that Freedom from unethical exploitation.

But nonetheless, on behalf of the rest of mankind, from whom you kidnapped their culture ... apology accepted.