Dear L. Neil Smith,
It seems that the past five days did not clear up your confusion about the distinction between the actual "negative" and the non-existent "positive" Intellectual Property Rights, and with your "Little Criminals" article you continue to dig yourself further down the pit of irrationality, pettiness, and self-delusion.
The latter particularly applies to your estimate that Free Talk Live -- the most popular Anarcho-Capitalist syndicated radio show in the world, and the #84 talk show nationwide according to Talkers Magazine -- only has "sixteen listeners". I don't know whether to laugh at your research incompetence or to question your sanity for saying something like that... A person whose Web-sites rank #779,396 (ncc-1776.org) and #8,380,291 (lneilsmith.org) according to Alexa.com probably shouldn't be throwing any stones, and that might actually be reflecting a recent boost in recognition your name has received due to the coverage on Free Talk Live. You could have stopped at only losing this little conflict intellectually, but now you're going to lose it in terms of libertarian "noosphere pull" as well.
You are reminiscent of a little kid who was the first on his block to open up a lemonade stand, but when several other kids got the same idea you went crying to your mommy that it's "not fair" for other people's actions to diminish your profits. Sorry, Mr. Smith, but you do not own the minds of others, and those minds are capable of reflecting off your ideas and thus diminishing your ability to make a profit. The downstream inheritors of your ideas did not violate the rules of any contest, as was the case with your flashback to the 9th grade, nor did they commit any force or fraud. Their alleged "crime" is just an amplification of the alleged "crime" committed against you by every other economic actor in the world who might buy the same resources that you want to buy, thus raising your costs, or who might sell the same resources that you want to sell, thus diminishing your income. Conversely, every person in the world is also a potential customer or a business partner, and a civilized society encourages people to simply accept their loss of potential profit and try again. You could have tried to compete with the new lemonade stands on the basis of merit, perhaps aided by your advantage of having been around a lot longer. You even could have partnered with them in the areas where your interests aren't in direct competition - a minute that a libertarian spends listening to Free Talk Live is a minute he doesn't spend reading L. Neil Smith books, but many libertarians can make time for both, and thus advertising one from the other produces mutual benefit. Etc. Instead you chose to get your mommy involved, which doesn't speak very highly of the quality of your lemonade, or your own personal character for that matter.
We are living in a world of many exciting new possibilities for innovation and entrepreneurship in all fields of commerce, including business models related to intellectual property. Much of my own income as a freelance "open source" programmer comes from selling my time to support and extend the software that I give away for free (and I even strongly prefer Copyfree licenses or "as is" / "public domain" over Copyleft and/or Copyright). I don't need to hold a gun to anyone's head to ensure that companies hire me and not somebody else to provide those services, even though a lot of people around the world would be able to compete with me for a much lower price, because of the recognition I get as the initiator of those projects. The Internet is one giant time- stamp machine with countless redundancies - I don't need to threaten arbitration against anyone, since it's obvious to everyone who wrote what piece of software first. Google can make its billions without prodding anyone's eyelids open to make sure they look at the ads - in fact those ads are very easy to automatically block, even on the open source Web browser that Google itself releases for free. A growing number of fans are willing to pre-pay to finance the creative projects they want to see, in exchange for "bragging rights", access to exclusive real-life events, and exclusive tangible merchandise. The free market is moving forward from a business environment of information scarcity to one of information super-abundance, just as it once moved from hunting / gathering to the domestication of animals and agriculture. One wonders what would have happened if the hunters who used to bring home the bacon believed in positive intellectual property rights - would every domesticated boar and its offspring constitute an act of "theft" from the hunters' position within the tribe?
The economy moves ever-forward through endless paradigm shifts and cycles of innovation and creative destruction. It is a great shame that the otherwise distinguished name of L. Neil Smith will now be associated with that most unlibertarian of ideas that humanity is about to leave on the dust heap of history - the "positive right" to intellectual property. Once again, this pronouncement should not be confused with the actual, negative right to Information Property, which will continue to exist even in spheres of application that were are only beginning to imagine - mind uploading, artificial intelligence, self-owning "information based life-forms" who are just as sentient and worthy of Rights as you or I, galaxy-sized super-computers used to emulate realities that minds like ours cannot even begin to vaguely comprehend, and so on. Trying to apply old ideas about intellectual monopolies to such a world is a terribly dangerous endeavor, and I can only guess at all of the possible new layers of tyranny that fallacy could bring. Far from resisting the baseless power of the state, you may in fact be strengthening a new "divine right of kings" through which civilization will remain enslaved for eons to come!
Best regards, Alex Libman |