So I’m sitting here at my desk leafing through Software Magazine ("The Software Decision Journal"). And I see an article about the sad state of Novell, a software company which fell victim to Microsoft. One paragraph is entitled "Know Your Enemy and Beware of Predators." The paragraph begins "Microsoft is the ultimate predator in the software industry. It lets others do the R&D–and then it goes in for the kill."
As anyone who’s ever been anywhere near big business knows, this is typical language. (And as anybody who’s been anywhere near Microsoft knows, it’s perfectly accurate.) The vocabulary of battle, enemies, predation–and, especially, although it doesn’t occur in this example, survival of the fittest–is the standard way of describing the competitive environment. (The place of Darwinism in this mental landscape could be an essay in itself.)
Ten and twenty years ago, when intellectuals like George Gilder and Michael Novak were painting a glowing picture of the ethics of capitalism, I always thought they sounded like they really didn’t have any experience of the corporate world. I don’t necessarily consider myself anti-capitalist–I would want to define the term pretty carefully before saying whether it does or doesn’t describe me. But spare me the cant about mutual benevolence.
–Maclin Horton
Microsoft is particularly bad about this. If they had simply stopped playing like they were the new kid on the block–about 20 years ago–and acted like a friendly company that wanted everyone to win, they may have had a slightly smaller cash flow now, but they’d also be generally respected and appreciated. (I think–too hard to tell.)
But their corporate personality reflects the hyper-competitive personalities of Gates and Balmer. (I knew Gates in college, and he was a pretty intense personality.)
Since Caelum et Terra is an Agrarian blog, and since Agrarians do not recognize that there is such a thing as intellectual property, where is Microsoft at fault other than committing hypocrisy? Since Microsoft does recognize intellectual property.
But then again, I’m not an agrarian, and I do recognize intellectual property. But nevertheless, I don’t think the error is capitalism per se, but the sin of Cain when he said he was not his brother’s keeper. A sin which is far from limited to capitalism.
Mr. Salazar,
I didn’t notice anyone denying intellectual property rights. It’s not clear to me that Agrarians would deny, for instance, an author’s right of possession to a novel or a poem, for instance, or the right of someone to the possession of software he developed. But perhaps the difficulty here is what is meant by “intellectual property rights.” What do you mean by this phrase? What sorts of things does it cover? What Agrarians have denied the existence of intellectual property rights?
I won’t be appearing as a Microsoft apologist anytime soon. Novell has lost, because they, like many others in the industry, pursued a failed strategy. Microsoft got big, because they pursued development in the small- to mid-market. Novell, IBM, and Sun primarily pursued the large market. As hardware improved the small scale solutions became scalable. This put Microsoft in an advantageous position.
Going forward, I don’t see Microsoft as a key player. As XML further develops, the backend won’t matter at all. The front end will generally be a browser. Cross company compatibility won’t necessitate being a Microsoft shop. Who will be the winners? I don’t know, but I think the tech boom has ended.
Mr. Zehnder writes: “What Agrarians have denied the existence of intellectual property rights?”
Every Agrarian I have come in contact with when the subject has come up for discussion has “denied the existence of intellectual property rights”. A position they appear to have in common with the paleo-libertarians.
This is typical of their thinking:
http://degenhart.us/blog/?m=200501
The House of Degenhart » 2005 » January
or
http://tinyurl.com/7max4
or
http://www.littlegeneva.com/foundations.php?id=7
Foundations by Howard King
You will note that it does include author’s copyright to a novel or poem. And developed software.
And so since for Agrarians, Microsoft can take and use intellectual property developed by others, where is Microsoft at fault?
This is not “an Agrarian website” in the sense of holding agrarianism as some kind of ideology. As for copyrights and patents, I can’t say I’ve ever given them a great deal of thought but on the face of it they seem like reasonable constructs. I’ll leave it to the people who object to them to make their case.
Mr. Salazar’s argument seems to be: look, here are some agrarians that deny intellectual property rights. Therefore, all agrarians deny intellectual property rights.
I don’t find this argument convincing.
I consider myself something of an agrarian — at least, I dabble in some farming and think that a predominately (though not an exclusively) agrarian order healthier than a predominately industrial or information based/service industry-based society. But, I don’t deny intellectual property rights.
But maybe I do, since I’m not sure what Mr. Salazar means by intellectual property rights. I asked him what he meant by this phrase, but, alas, he did not tell me.
By the way: my original point was not about Microsoft particularly, but about the general ethos and atmosphere of the corporate world. Microsoft is generally considered to be a very rough player, but within the corporate context not especially worse than many others, just better at it.
Mr. Zehnder,
Intellectual property is the concept that inventions of a person’s mind can be owned exclusively by that person. Which is what a patent is. It is the recognized ownership of a concept. For instance I copyright every document I professionally produce. I in turn retain ownership of the intellectual property and sell the use of my intellectual property to my clients. Wendell Berry considers my selling to be theft because the intellectual property cannot be owned.
Wendell Berry writes : “I do have an interest in this book, which is for sale. (If you have bought it, dear reader, I thank you. If you have borrowed it, I honor your frugality. If you have stolen it, may it add to your confusion.) Most of the sale price pays the publisher for paper, ink, and other materials, for editorial advice, copyediting, design, advertising (I hope), and marketing. I get between 10 and 15 percent (depending on sales) for arranging the words on the pages.
As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no “intellectual property,” and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.” Wendell Berry
The argument against intellectual property is the same in principle as the argument against usury. It is the selling of an entity which cannot by its nature be sold.
Whether or not the position against intellectual property is intrinsic to agrarianism, I don’t know. But it is certainly the norm. I have never found an example of a single agrarian who has considered the subject who does not hold with Wendell Berry. It appears that agrarians look at the issue the way they do because of the connection between industrialism and intellectual property.
Ah, now I see what Franklin’s point is about. Interesting question. I can’t comment from a very informed perspective, but I would be surprised if Wendell Berry does not claim ownership of his compositions. I doubt he would allow me to, say, convert his novels into electronic text and make them available for free on the Internet.
I also think there is a muddled area where intellectual property apart from its specific expression or implementation may or may not be something to which one can reasonably claim ownership. Some companies have attempted to push this idea beyond reason. If I remember correctly, Apple sued Microsoft for “stealing” the basic concept of the point-and-click graphical computer interface (which of course Apple had lifted from Xerox). And lost–quite rightly, in my opinion. And didn’t Microsoft try to patent some fairly general concepts? I know some companies have tried this. Chris Ryland, do you know of any examples?
At any rate–and, again, this is aside from my original point–Microsoft’s terrible reputation doesn’t have anything to do with its assertion of ownership over its software products. As intimated in the magazine quote in my original post, its oft-reported practice of waiting till someone else has developed a cool idea, then copying it and freezing the original out of the Windows market, has much more to do with the resentment.
Maclin writes: “I would be surprised if Wendell Berry does not claim ownership of his compositions. I doubt he would allow me to, say, convert his novels into electronic text and make them available for free on the Internet.”
I don’t know if Wendell Berry would object, but I know Gary North wouldn’t object because I once put the question to him in an email.
As Berry writes, (which is the common argument), when someone sells a book, they are selling the paper etc, not the thoughts contained in the book. And since words in certain patterns signify thoughts, and since Berry is quite explicit that he does not own the thoughts, why should he object? In fact, when ever it is put to question, just as with Gary North, they do not object to copying.
I should add. If you think you don’t understand their position because it is to ridiculous to be their actual position. Fear not.
Berry , North etc. are playing a ludicrous slight at hand game when they argue that they are not selling the thoughts contained in their books, because as is obvious on the flip side, only a fool purchases their books for any other reason.
Would someone be just as satisfied if he purchased a book with a different arrangement of words? Is someone satisfied when he purchases a loaf of bread and is given a stone instead? Wendell Berry’s argument is the slight of hand that a loaf of bread is a stone is a loaf of bread.
Mr. Salazar,
Wendell Barry is not saying that when one is selling a book he is merely selling the material from which it is made; the author is also selling a particular expression of thought. Hence, he says: “As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement.” I believe the quote from which this comes derives from *The Unsettling of America* — a non-fiction work. In such a work, the author expresses in his own fashion a truth, or what he perceives to be a truth. The truth he expresses is not his own, since truth is never a private possession. It is a common good. However, the mode in which he expresses that truth is his own, since it is peculiar to him. This seems to be what Barry means when he says he is not selling his thoughts, only the arrangement of them.
A work of fiction would be different, since the story line, characters, etc. are the peculiar creation of the author. Likewise with a poem. But even in a poem — for instance, if I should write “all flesh is grass,” I may have a right to that particular formulation of words, but I would not have the right to the basic truth they contain. If someone else should write, “all men are short-lived,” I could not claim he was infringing on my property rights, even if I were the first to notice this pleasant phenomenon. Likewise, Barry doesn’t own the insight that the capitalist order undermines and destroys human community. He merely owns the manner or mode in which he expressed that idea.
Yeah, that’s what I would have taken him to mean.
Mr. Zahnder and Mr. Horton,
You’re missing the point to the argument against I.P.. The argument is simply that inventions of the mind cannot be possessed as property exclusive to one person. For instance, if I invent a gizmo, the knowledge of the gizmo ceases to be exclusively mine as soon as someone else understands my invention. The second person can turn around and produce the gizmo without acknowledgment to me because the second person possess the knowledge as property to himself just as I possess the knowledge as property to my self.
The same hold for the printed matter in a book. What is paid for is literally the arrangement of ink in the book. Not the thought conveyed by that arrangement. That’s why Berry says he was paid for the arrangement of words. He literally holds that he was paid solely to arrange words. It doesn’t matter whether or not the thoughts conveyed by those words are unique or well known. Fiction or otherwise.
You’re applying to Berry and others a position which they explicitly claim to be against. and in Berry’s case, you’re calling him a theif.
Perhaps this will help.
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
We’re calling Berry a thief? I must be missing something in what I or Mr. Horton said.
Berry does not say that “what is paid for is literally the arrangement of ink in the book.” He said that what is paid for is the arrangement of words. The printed word is merely an image of the true word, which ultimately an idea in the mind. Berry said, “as I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement.” He is using metonymy — letting the part stand for the whole. Properly understood, he is saying, “this book, this arrangement of words, chapters, sequence of thoughts (whether on a page or otherwise recorded) — this unique creation of my mind — is my own. The truths conveyed through this book are not my own.” And he is right. If he enunciates a truth, he is enunciating what belongs to everyone. Only his manner of enunciating it is his own.
Mr. Salazar, do you not agree that no one can own the truth?
Mr. Zehnder,
You are calling Wendell Berry a thief because you are insisting that he is selling the thoughts in the book.
If there was any doubt to Wendell Berry’s meaning in the original quote, he makes his meaning clear for all to read by reiterating his position a second time when he writes :”I have no “intellectual property””. The term “ intellectual property” in quotes clues-in anyone in doubt of what he is saying above.
Your argument that Berry is using metonymy is an interesting distinction, or spin, but it’s contrary to Berry’s position that he has “no intellectual property”, since your argument of metonymy grants that he does own intellectual property since “sequence of thoughts” etc qualifies as intellectual property in the arguments which are taking place on I.P.. See pages 22 and 42 of the link to .Kinsella I gave above.
Mr. Salazar,
I think I understand the point, but I am skeptical that you’re reading Wendell Berry correctly. I’d have to see more from him to be sure about that. But in any case your argument is with a belief you attribute to him, not with anything I’ve said or which I hold, so I’m bowing out of this.
Mr. Horton writes: “I am skeptical that you’re reading Wendell Berry correctly.”
Perhaps it will help to know that a patent is a grant of property right, while copyright is the right to copy or control, it is not a grant of ownership. So my contention that Berry doesn’t claim ownership of his arrangement of thoughts is not far fetched but rather the common understanding if you look at how copyright law and patent law looks at the issue.
Wendell Berry is arguing basically the same position as Kinsella who says that intellectual property cannot be real property because it lack the proper character of real property. But Berry, along with the other agrarians take the argument a step further. What’s most interesting about Wendell Berry is that he does call the selling of intellectual property theft, because his calling it theft follows the same argument as that which is used against usury as I mentioned above. Usury is theft because it is the renting of money which does not have the character of that which can be rented because it has the character of that which can only be consumed . In similar vein, the position with I.P. is that it does not have the character of that which can be sold.
There is something sold or rented which cannot be sold or rented because it does not have the character of that which can be sold or rented..
Thanks for joining in, although it wasn’t quite what I expected.:-)
Mr. Salazar,
Given the previous quotation from Berry you gave, which I explained, at least, to my satisfaction, I cannot see that Berry doesn’t think he owns his poems, his books, his stories, whether written down, recorded, recited, memorized, or placed on a DVD. I don’t know what to say about the second quotation, for which you gave no context.
It is probably idle to argue what Berry thinks about this, since it is not really all that important. I don’t think that there is no intellectual property, as I explained it above, so that’s all that matters to me.
Mr. Zehnder,
The “second quotation” I gave is the last part of the original quotation of Berry from my post of Jan 24 10:34 pm.
While its always a dicey proposition to attempt to determine the underlying arguments of the irrational. And while I may find Wendell Berry’s distinction of arrangement of words and intellectual property to be a rather questionable distinction, nevertheless, Wendell Berry does make the distinction, and thus what can that distinction be? Can he really mean truth per se, or some kind of truisms like “all men are short lived”, or some true proposition? Why should we understand him to be uninformed of the meaning of the expression intellectual property as it is commonly used? Or, just as all others use the term in the same manner as Kinsella, why should we expect Berry to use the term otherwise than as Kinsella uses the term?
Since Wendell Berry places the expression in quotes there is even less good reason to think that he is using the expression is some unique manner, and good reason to think he is harkening back to the common use of the expression. And since Wendell Berry claims he does not own any intellectual property, and since it is commonly understood that poetry falls in the category of intellectual property according to common use of the expression, then it follows that Wendel Berry does not claim to own his poems.
But as you write: “I don’t think that there is no intellectual property, as I explained it above, so that’s all that matters to me.”
So be it, But nevertheless, I do wonder, why do you think that there is intellectual property? How is a unique creation of the mind uniquely owned when it ceases to be uniquely held after it has been distributed to many?
What is the nature of the ties that bind the poem to the poet? How does the poet remain attached to his poem so as to possess it while that poem is in another man’s memory?
The poet possesses the poem insofar as the poem bears his mark and character. It is peculiar to him, it exists because of him, it is the child of his mind and of no one else’s. It is peculiar to him. He at least deserves the honor of writing it and the right to receive remuneration for it, according to the customs and laws of his people and time. For someone else to claim authorship would be a lie. And for someone else to claim possession — except insofar as the work becomes a common patrimony (like Shakespeare) or the author grants ownership — would be usurpation, since it could be based on no just claim.
Christopher Zehnder writes: “The poet possesses the poem insofar as the poem bears his mark and character. It is peculiar to him, it exists because of him, it is the child of his mind and of no one else’s. It is peculiar to him. He at least deserves the honor of writing it and the right to receive remuneration for it, according to the customs and laws of his people and time. “
So likewise does this hold for sandcastles or sidewalk paintings which bear the mark and character of the sculptor or painter.. But no one claims that sandcastles or sidewalk paintings are owned by the sculptor or painter because the medium to which the artwork is applied is commonly held. So likewise is the medium of words to which poetry is applied commonly held.
Further, laws and customs must be grounded, or they are only a shadow or a shade of true law and custom, with custom in this instance being informed by the law, thou shalt not steal. And as St. Thomas writes, theft is a type of deception. But it’s only deception if authorship of poetry is the cause of ownership regardless of the medium.
The painter owns his painting insofar as he owns the paint and canvas, so likewise does the sculptor own his sculpture insofar as he owns the medium. And insofar as the painter ceases to own the medium he likewise ceases to own the child of his mind that is peculiar to him. The poet likewise owns the poem insofar as it in printed form, but unlike the painter or sculptor, it is contended that the poet continues to own his poem even after he has sold the medium of the printed page. What is the proof backing up this contention?
Lastly, money cannot be rented because it is consumed by use, our barrowed cigrarettes are likewise consumed by use. A house on the other hand can be rented because it doesn’t cease to exist through its use. Why is poety not likewise consumed by use when it is consumed by the intellct?
Poems are not consumed by the mind. Shakespeare’s sonnets continue to exist even after I read them or memorize them. For me to claim any one of the sonnets as my own would be a lie and a usurpation. It would be claiming as the product of my mind what is the product of another’s mind. It would be a kind of theft of the honor due to another.
Now, laws and customs can regulate what profit, monetarily speaking, one can make off such a thing as a poem, primarily because the benefit of their use touches the common good. The same goes for an invention, which serves others as well as their author. But they cannot change authorship. Thus honor and attribution are always owed the author, but not monetary gain.