My views on Intellectual Property have undergone some pretty drastic changes recently. Just a few years ago I was downloading MP3s because I wanted to listen to music, and I had a vague idea that the laws that made the downloading illegal were somehow flawed.
At this date, my ideas have a bit more form, though I can't promise that they won't be changing in the future. I invite those with opinions on the subject to help me form mine.
There seems to be a lot of argument going on over copyrights (giving an author exclusive rights to their work), trademarks (giving someone exclusive rights to a name or distinguishing feature), and patents (giving someone exclusive rights to an invention or process) recently.
This is important to me in part because I deal in intellectual property fairly often. I'm a programmer by day, and a musician by night (and often a programmer by night, as well).
I get paid to take ideas (often thought up by me) and implement them as software. For entertainment, I often take ideas (thought up by someone who is a better composer than me) and implement them as tasty drum beats in a song.
It is also worth noting that I am of the opinion that if a law or government function is not biblically supportable (based on Biblical case laws), it does not need to exist.
My statements here are based in the idea (which, to the best of my knowledge, is biblically based) that the best type of market is a free market, of the laissez-faire variety. The biblical basis for this statement is subject for other posts and books (and I'm open to more reading material!).
A free market means a general lack of government regulation of products and services. This would include products and services based on "intellectual property," or ideas and information.
Intellectual property laws are a government giving exclusive rights on a concept or piece of data to an individual or business. The traditional argument in favor of these laws is that without them, inventors and creators would be afraid to create anything for fear that their works might be plagiarized.
I do not think that this would be the case in a world where the government did not fight for some sort of special rights for creators or inventors. However, more relevantly, I do not know of any biblical basis for these sorts of laws.
The closest thing to biblical support for IP laws that I have seen is people making a shaky connection from the eighth commandment (do not steal) to the concept of "stealing ideas."
So if intellectual property laws are not biblically supportable, what are they doing? They are doing the same thing that every other man-conceived law is doing: enforcing someone's idea of fairness on others.
We all benefit from the creative works of others - we enjoy useful technology and entertaining media every day. We appreciate the advances that have come at the price of hard work from talented individuals. Our blood boils when we hear of some smart man getting cheated out of the fruits of his labors by others who use his ideas.
Why do we feel this way? Because we believe that somebody is getting less than they deserve, and that makes us righteously indignant. We believe that inventors deserve, at the very least, a comfortable life and the ability to keep inventing if they wish to. And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen.
God is the decider of what man deserves. At most, man should concern itself with enforcing the civil law given to us by God. When it comes to enforcing fairness, we tend to muck it up.
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"And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen."
This statement is based on the assumption that intellectual property is property that somebody owns.
Now, on to my main point that I will bring up today: brand.
In western culture, copyright laws allow us to use brand as a signal to quality. (Making general assumptions here)We buy apple because it is a quality product. We refrain from buying Mad Catz because their crap breaks pretty quickly. Beyond patents, in a world without copyrights and trademarks, brand equity would quickly go down the drain. Apple invests lots of money into a product so that the product attains a high quality. If a company were allowed to legally make and stock counterfeits, I can guarantee that they would do it. When that happens, they would make a killing during the next fleeting six months where brand meant anyone to anything.
http://fightbootleg.blogspot.com/2007/06/spot-counterfeit-gba-game-look-closer.html
The above is a link telling how to spot counterfeit gameboy games. These aren't bootleg, they are professionally manufactured by companies in China. It is a big deal to know how to spot these beyond just paying money to the idea maker. In an attempt to cut costs, these counterfeit games use a watch battery for memory, rather than a flash battery. That means that your save function will quit in about a month, never to start again.
Now there are easy tips to spot counterfeits in this one small industry, but what if this happened to EVERY product we consumed? No human would ever have the time, energy, or ingenuity to test for quality from every single product he or she bought. Sealed foods, since you cannot open them, would no longer be trustworthy (what if this similac formula is actually a counterfeit from China? I don't have a melamine tester - btw, this link shows the fear of people not being able to trust a brand http://www.gmanews.tv/story/121357/Parents-demand-answers-after-China-formula-recalls ) Consumer reports of quality, and even user reviews, would be thrown out the window because there is now guarantee that what they reviewed is what you are buying.
I would say the Biblical basis for brand protection lies closer to bearing false witness. This too is a shaky link, but if I spent more than 5 minutes thinking about Biblical links, I bet I could find something better.
Brand protection is truly just as much about protection of the consumer as it is about protection of the manufacturer. And brands are protected by the government through IP law. So in this case, it isn't nearly as much about fairness as it is about consumer safety.
I have many other arguments as well on the subject, but I will go to them later.
When I referenced "things you own" I was referring to actual things you can own - the gadgets you build into an invention, the instruments you use to play the music, the computer you use to write the software. IP laws prevent you from using these things to create certain things.
In your case of brands breaking down, I think that realistically there would be two cases -
1. The case where someone pretends that they are selling something that was made by someone else, when it was really made by them (X retailer selling a Mad Catz controller and claiming it was first party).
2. The case where X retailer sells identical-looking controllers, and doesn't lie about who made them.
In this situation, the brand name of the retailer means something. Do you trust retailer X to tell you the truth about where their products came from? Can they afford the damage to their brand, if they are not?
But these are just predictions about what might happen if a much less stringent (which I'm proposing could be biblical) legal stance was taken on IP.
I think that accurate predictions of what would happen if a biblical stance on IP was taken would be very positive. However, at the moment, I am concerned first with identifying what the biblical stance would be.
And I will say again, that anything more than the biblical law is just man's idea of fairness.
Matthew 22:19-21 (New International Version)
Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"
"Caesar's," they replied.
Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
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