Discussion
Summary of the controversy?
It was a discussion of Intellectual Property. It was shocking to me to find people on Nostr that don't believe in the property rights of inventors, writers, artist, and other creators. The characters I was talking to considere themselves libertarian (Agorist) and where advocating that stealing the ideas and IP of others is perfectly fine; it was bizzare.
I don't think is that bizarre. Its a very common position on libertarian circles (particularly in agorist circles) as intellectual property is a state-given monopoly.
So libratarians don't believe that non-tangible property exists? No trademarks, no patents, no publishing rights for writers, no plagiarism laws, no protections what so ever for artists, creators, or inventors?
Holy shit! I looked into it, and yeah. Well I guess I must stop considering myself a libertarian because I believe that property rights are sacrosanct and the basis of a civil society.
It's not that libertarianism considers itself against those property rights, its just that as the matter is non-rivalrous, it cannot be considered property OR theft.
I'd make an exception for trademarks, as that could be interpreted as impersonation–a different matter altogether
Non-rivalrous, no that's idiotic. People have rivalries over ideas and inventions all the time; my favorite inventor rivalry is on who invented radio: Marconi, Telsa, or DeForest (I'm for DeForest).
Also those characters kept making the argument that "ideas are non-scarce" and property must be scarce for some inexplicable reason. First truly original and innovative ideas are expectionally rare and take tremendous time and effort to create making them scarce, if you where to believe property = scarcity then truly innovative ideas are absolutely property. Also by this line of logic I find totally bogus, anyone could steal anyone else's gold as the amount of gold in the universe is infinite, making gold "non-scarce". Again property = scarcity is a dumb, non-sense argument.
The more I dive into this subject the more all of it seems like a serious crack or paradox in libratarian ideology. It reads like religious zealots arguing over some non-existent utopian ideal, that if you implement in reality would destroy property rights of innovators, writers, artists, and other creators (literally Trillions of $ of GDP per year in U.S. economy) and encourage wide scale theft and fraud.
This is the spiciest conversation I've read here this week. 🌶