Copying is theft [updated]

I commented on two local blogs recently on the subject of copyright—a hot issue, what with the latest round of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks just having concluded in NZ.  Both blogs at which I commented posted the same saccharine piece of agit-prop declaring that “copying is not theft,” to which I replied, in essence:

    “Copy­ing is not theft,” you say?
    Well, if you’re copying someone else’s creations without permission, yes it is.
    My ideas are my prop­erty. Steal the form in which my ideas are expressed or made con­crete, and you’re a thief.
    Since creation is a livelihood for artists, writers and inventors, stealing the form in which their creations are made is theft of their intel­lec­tual prop­erty–which means a theft of their livelihood. And since intellectual property rights are at the heart of all prop­erty rights, the pop­ulist attack on intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights is just the latest and most fun­da­men­tal front in the attack on all prop­erty rights.
    Abol­ish­ing copy­right pro­tec­tion favours theft over thought.
    You say-or, at least, your saccharine ditty says, that no-one is worse off if copy­ing is allowed?
    Well yes, we all are. We are worse off by the lack of new ideas pro­duced and made con­crete in the form of a book, or a CD, or a patentable invention.
    With­out copy­right pro­tec­tion, you load the cost of pro­duc­tion onto musi­cians, writ­ers, artists and inven­tors, while all the ben­e­fits that would have and should have accrued to these pro­duc­ers go to instead to the thieves.
    Copy my new kind of bicy­cle with­out my per­mis­sion, for example, and you take away from me all the ben­e­fits I’d hoped to derive from the inven­tion of my new bicy­cle. Take away all the ben­e­fits that all the inven­tors of new bicy­cles hoped to derive from their inven­tion, and pretty soon you have no new types of bicycle at all–-and, if the process con­tin­ues across all fields of endeav­our, even­tu­ally no new inven­tions at all, and no more technological progress.
    Why would any­one con­tinue to pro­duce new music, write new books or invent new things under such a set-up? Why would any­one sup­port such a set-up–unless they wished them­selves to steal?
    Lud­wig von Mises explained this point:

“[I]t is obvi­ous that hand­ing down knowl­edge to the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion and famil­iar­iz­ing the act­ing indi­vid­u­als with the amount of knowl­edge they need for the real­iza­tion of their plans require text­books, man­u­als, hand­books, and other non­fic­tion works. It is unlikely that peo­ple would under­take the labo­ri­ous task of writ­ing such pub­li­ca­tions if every­one were free to repro­duce them. This is still more man­i­fest in the field of tech­no­log­i­cal inven­tion and dis­cov­ery. The exten­sive exper­i­men­ta­tion nec­es­sary for such achieve­ments is often very expen­sive. It is very prob­a­ble that tech­no­log­i­cal progress would be seri­ously retarded if, for the inven­tor and for those who defray the expenses incurred by his exper­i­men­ta­tion, the results obtained were noth­ing but [gifting benefits to others while earning nothing oneself for one's creations].”

Make no mis­take, copy­ing with­out the per­mis­sion of the owner is theft–-no mat­ter how many sappy sugar-coated dit­ties you hear to the contrary.

So what’s wrong with what ACTA proposes?  Simply this:

The way ACTA proposes protecting intellectual property–by going through people’s bags, laptops and MP3 players at airports; by holding ISPs responsible for what their customers do; etc.–-is hardly in accordance with the principle of property rights they purport to be upholding.

That is the copywrong part of ACTA’s copyright proposals.  What is proposed violates the very principle they want to protect.

UPDATE: What’s written here is intended only as an introduction to the topic of intellectual property.  For a fuller argument, I highly recommend Greg Perkin’s post at Noodle Food, ‘Don't steal this article’—and dealing with the point that Greg makes therein: i.e., that to grapple with the arguments over intellectual property rights in particular,

    “[you must first] grapple with the meaning of individual rights in general, [and] their still-deeper basis in ethics, epistemology, and human nature. [For example, is] … the splendid characteristic of conflict-prevention the central purpose of property rights, or merely a benefit -- is it the cause or an effect? To determine this, we need to investigate the source of rights in general.

More on the source of rights themselves in these three articles:

• Man’s Rights – AYN RAND CENTER FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
• Some propositions on property rights – and IP – NOT PC
• Cue Card Libertarianism – Rights – NOT PC