Ideas Are Worthless: No One Owns Anything

This week I highlighted several websites that are repurposing my content as their own, or (in a less litigious scenario) reposting my work without my permission as a way to increase their own traffic.  Surprisingly, I learned via the comments and Twitter conversations about this situation that a vast majority of the people I talk to don’t believe in intellectual property or the inherent value of ideas, and feel that piracy and conceptual theft are not only defensible but necessary for the advancement of humanity.

In the past, I’ve been a devil’s advocate on both sides of this debate.  I hate abuse of copyright law by corporations that stranglehold ideas and concepts, yet I appreciate the same law’s ability to protect individuals from having their ideas and concepts stolen and profited upon by those same corporations.  I even admit it’s illogical to argue that anyone can own an idea.  But now, after talking with Nick Pinkston, Steve Klabnik and Mary Hartney, I’m open to a new concept:

Ideas are worthless, and no one should ever be paid for them.

Our comments and conversations about this point were a bit scattered, but in a nutshell, here’s what I learned:

• Tangible goods have value due to scarcity
• Tangible goods have value due to physical production costs
• Ideas have no production cost
• Ideas are infinite, and therefore cannot be scarce
• Sharing ideas benefits the world
• Restricting ideas harms the world
• Therefore, ideas — which are inherently worthless — must be shared freely

Note that, to clarify, books should not be stolen, since — even though they merely contain ideas, which are free and therefore worthless — they incurred physical production costs and are property that is legally owned.  However, books should be photocopied for free and then disseminated, and CDs should be burned and shared without profit.  (This is a paraphrase of Nick’s multi-tweet response to my book-related question.)

Given that, I’ve drawn the following conclusions:

• Artists, authors, musicians, politicians, philosophers and linguists produce no work of actual value, and therefore should not be compensated.
• Unlike those who originate ideas, those who repeat the ideas in a tangible form incur physical replication costs and therefore should be compensated.
• Whenever possible, those physical representations should be copied and shared without actually paying the producers of the materials.

All of which adds up to one question: if ideas are worthless, and the dissemination of them is likely to incur more cost for the reproducers than anyone would advocate paying for, why develop new ideas in the first place?

The answer (at least via this debate) is that ideas are a means to an end, and that end should always be the production of a tangible good that can be owned.  So, to take the extreme long view, concepts like freedom, justice and identity are only of value in the sense that they permit individuals to produce and harvest rice, grain and wood.

To extrapolate further, it’s logical to presume that any non-tangible goods Nick, Steve and Mary have produced are free for the taking — or repurposing — by anyone else.  In that case, I have some suggestions:

• Steve already said that anything on his blog is free for the taking, including his code.  He’s even cool with you putting your own name on it and passing it off as your own.  High school and college students: this means you can use Steve’s code in any classes where original code is required, since his code is your code.  Enjoy.
• Nick is the co-founder of GearHeadz, a company that makes tangible items.  However, since Nick doesn’t believe in patents or intellectual property [CLARIFICATION: See comments below], it’s safe to say that anything intangible produced by GearHeadz is also yours for the taking.  That means you now have a corporate identity, a business plan, a marketing strategy and a relationship with investors like AlphaLab — all you have to do is demand that Nick turn them over to you.  Because those are all intangible concepts and relationships, they’re simply ideas; not sharing them with you, by Nick’s own admission, hurts other people.  (He also invites you to use his name, as long as you’re not impersonating him.)
• Mary’s case would seem to be a grey area, since she works for the Baltimore Sun and, therefore, it could be argued that the Sun “owns” her work — “copyright infringement” and “fair use,” etc.  But the problem is that the Sun is a newspaper, and since newspapers are simply physical representations of ideas (as per Nick’s valuation of books, above), it’s reasonable to conclude that anything the Baltimore Sun (or any other newspaper) prints is free to be redistributed or re-sold with no fee due to the paper, save for the actual cost of purchasing a physical copy.  (And since that information is also available for free online, you can simply copy and paste the articles and then reprint your own Baltimore Sun in your own city.  Have fun!)

I could go on, but the possibilities are limitless.  The bottom line is: ideas are worthless.  What matters is who can sell the most tangible goods the fastest, so they can earn more resources, with which they can buy more tangible goods.  Ideas merely get in the way… except for that part where they’re so important for the future of society that they must be transmitted freely.

Later, we should all debate whether anyone can truly own anything tangible either, since concepts like the state, law, ownership and identity are all intangible ideas and, therefore, unenforceable and inherently worthless.  But it’s already been a long week, and some of us have grain to produce.

Tags: Business, ethics, honesty, legal, perception, Social Media, Sociology