Intellectual Property

-- Property -- A) Con begins to explain that "benefit" and "profit" are synonymous. A benefit is something that is advantageous or good; profit is pecuniary gain resulting from the employment of capital in any transaction. Clearly the two are not the same thing. I've argued that you can benefit from another's labor, but you cannot profit from it without their voluntary consent or it is theft (such as what the government does). Con didn't explain why it's not theft, and he never gave an example of an entity that rightfully profits from another's labor without their consent. The argument that benefiting = profiting is clearly untrue; a simple glance at the dictionary will reiterate that. Even abstractly speaking, I benefit from having a clean apartment but I do not profit from it. I'm quite confident the audience will understand this distinction. B) Con asserts, "What I did say is that property rights are determined by *use,* not usefulness". Of course the audience should keep in mind that this is nothing more than his opinion of what should constitute as property, and in fact we're debating what property should be so merely repeating the argument is not a contention in his favor. Nevertheless income from one's product is a form of use, so it is not the case that sharing IP is loss-free to the sharer. While sharing IP may not involve loss of possession or loss of personal use, the loss of income incident to such sharing is a true and significant loss not to be dismissed [1]. C) Con conveniently tries to make a distinction between ideas and labor which I've already demonstrated as indistinguishable. The 'idea' to be protected in this context is not just a frivolous thought, such as having the idea to put a jacket on when it's cold. Instead it's the RESULT of labor - labor that deserves to be paid to the fullest extent of its value. I'm arguing that the intellectual know-how into say producing a computer algorithm is far more valuable than the piece of paper it's written on. Ergo, it's absurd to compensate someone simply for the price of the paper and labeling it a fair trade as Con suggests. D) Ayn Rand writes, "Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind" [2]. She's also clarified, "What [IP] laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values... By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object's value; that the value is created by the originator of the idea" [3]. This combats Con's repeated assertion that labor alone determines value, and supports my position that the labor going into an idea is just as if not more valuable than the labor itself. What Con advocates is essentially likened to plagiarism: benefiting (in the form of profit) by reproducing another's ideas. E) Property is about ownership. Con repeats, "When you build a farm on un-owned land, you own the land in the same sense that you own your body -- you have the exclusive right to use that particular thing." In this way Con makes it seem as if it's a first-come first-serve basis; the first to "un-owned" land gets it. I still see no distinction between this and an idea. First to the idea gets to "own" it. So far every one of Con's explanations for justifying tangible property is equally applicable to intangible property. I've already thoroughly combated and explained how IP pertains to economic scarcity. Additionally, Con never addressed my analogy regarding owning a business (a word representing an abstract idea simply referring to the labor your provide). -- Economics -- A) Obviously IP increases an item's value because of lack of competition for selling that product. However in Round 1 I pointed out that this was not a sufficient reason to abandon IP, just as implementing price ceilings to keep costs down are not a sufficient reason to implement those. In other words, this is true but not at all relevant in a capitalist system. B) Con says IP increases costs for inventors (because they have to compensate others if they use something patented), and therefore, "it's not clear" that IP increases profits for inventors. This could not be further from the truth. If one didn't profit from their endeavors, they wouldn't invent anything. The fact that they do shows why this reasoning is blatantly false. They're obviously profiting regardless of any existing IP law or they would stop. C) Con notes higher development costs necessarily means higher costs for the people. Absolutely, but that's entirely irrelevant considering capitalism doesn't seek primarily to implement policies that keep prices down, but rather protect the rights of the individual as I explained. In fact high development costs is an argument in favor of IP. Going back to Con's pharmaceutical example, he forgets to mention that this more than any other technology-based industry has come to rely on patents as the primary mechanism to promote innovation [4]. D) While pharmaceutical products rely on substantial amounts of upfront investment and technical knowledge, it is easy to copy once they are widely distributed. As such, there is less incentive to put so much investment into something with a small pay-out. Providing market exclusivity to an inventor through patent protection can encourage the initial outlay of resources needed to develop the product [5]. It costs about 400 million dollars and 10-12 years of labor to do this kind of work [6]. Con thinks it's not fair yet "reasonable" for another to profit immensely from another's investment of this magnitude without *significantly* less time, money and work put into it. E) There are also moral concerns. Ambassador Tarso reveals, "A new generation of antibiotics - not available in Brazil because of lack of an adequate patent law - saved me" [7]. Lack of protection is inhibiting inventors from making their products available in parts of the world that do not favor IP, which can have detrimental effects including the loss of human life. IP including pharmaceutical patents enhance the conditions for investment, improve the quality of goods and stimulate indigenous innovation, creating better jobs and opportunities for local inventors [8]. F) Con said that historically the pharmaceutical industry grew much faster in countries were patents were fewer and weaker citing Germany and Italy as examples. What time period is Con referring to and can Con prove IP was relevant? A 1988 study of 12 industries indicated that 65% of pharmaceutical products would not have been introduced into the marketplace, and 60% would not have been developed in the absence of adequate patent protection [9]. Moreover in the 10 years after Italy instituted its pharmaceutical patents, retail and wholesale prices rose much less than did prices in general and less than the price index for health-related goods and services [10]. This shows how the institution of pharmaceutical patents does not necessarily lead to price increases. Because the U.S. has such strong IP combined with a lack of price control, this stimulates fierce competition among products competing in the same therapeutic class. This helped us achieve the smallest Producer Price Index increase in pharmaceuticals in the past 20 years [8]. G) The strength of a country's IP regime was clearly identified in a study by the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank: "We find that the strength or weakness of a country's system of IP protection seems to have a substantial effect, particularly in high-technology industries, on the kinds of technology transferred by U.S. firms to that country. Also, this factor seems to influence the composition and extent of U.S. direct investment there" [11]. SOURCES: http://tinyurl.com...