***Disclaimer: The following editorial is a rebuttal to Laughlyn12’s article titled, “Intellectual Fraud.” Laughlyn12 claims that using other’s opinions and ideas constitutes as intellectual fraud if you know nothing or very little about the topic being discussed.***

First and foremost I would like to point out that intellectual property is not the sole property of the creator. The reason for this is that almost all intellectual property is shared, meaning that others have access to its function and therefore have access to its ingenuity. If ideas stay in your head, they remain yours forever. When you choose to talk about them or make them publicly available, then you are granting others access to your intellectualism. For example, if I invent and patent a flying car tomorrow, a year or two later other motor companies will have had a chance to sample that car and come up with designs of their own. In a sense, one creation often leads to varying similar creations. Moreover, the flying car I have invented in this example will probably be improved upon by others ideas. This is the process of sharing, a communal, social aspect of society that has been a part of our world for hundreds of thousands of years. The very fact that you are reading this makes you a part of this process. You are sharing in the intellectual highway. Perhaps an idea presented in this article will inspire you to write about something similar, much like Laughlyn12’s article encouraged me to write a rebuttal.

Now, the premise upon which Laughlyn12 argues is that praising a flying car and its quick acceleration based on the fact that you read an owner’s manual telling you it has a special engine in it which enables the car to fly faster is fallacious on your part. According to Laughlyn12 you should know more about an item before you proceed to talk about it, otherwise you are stealing the concepts of another human being in an effort to make yourself look smarter. The inherent problem with this argument is that it is quite impossible to know everything there is to know about something. Even professors at the University level have their own intellectual limitations. How much should someone have to learn about a particular subject matter before they can discuss it in conversation?

Moreover, there is an enormous difference between recapitulating someone else’s argument and recapitulating what would be considered general knowledge. For example, I could ignore the fact that Darwin is considered to be the founding father of evolution and write a long and detailed journal of how I came to the conclusion that various plants and animal life have evolved and adapted to one another. This would be intellectual “fraud” of a sort. (Although, I should mention I don’t like the words “intellectual” and “fraud” together, because, to me, they reference the ongoing battle over online piracy in America.) Darwin’s hypothesis is still, to this day, unique in nature. To claim his ideas as your own would be an “intellectual hoax.” However, the words Darwin and evolution would be considered general knowledge because most people, the world over, have shared Darwin’s theory with one another and know something about it. Granted, they may not know everything there is to know about it. Most people don’t know that Darwin was a social recluse, and that when his work was published, “evolution” was not a word that was associated with his ideas. But, nevertheless, people still know of Darwin and of evolution. General knowledge does not require an intimate understanding to be shared with others because it is exactly what the name implies, “general.”

As a matter of discourse, some people will become interested in Darwin or evolution after receiving information about them. Some will choose to seek Darwin’s material out, read it, and ponder it. Like our flying car, Darwin’s ideas will be expounded upon, explored in new lights, and discussed in different ways. All of this is permissible, so long as the users of his work are not creating exact replicas of his work. Some people will argue that Darwin committed religious heresy, and others will praise him for his scientific genius. It does not matter how they discuss him, or in what context, only that people are sharing his information and thereby, making the world a more intellectually involved place. This only serves to further my point, you don’t have to have read a scientific journal or take a history class to know that Darwin’s ideas were important to science. People will tell you this because its general knowledge.

Of course, Laughlyn12’s main argument deals with the fact that a great number of gamers have mentioned Ayn Rand’s influence on the Xbox 360 game, Bioshock, and that it is highly probable that these same people have never read her work. Thus, Laughlyn12 is implying that Ayn Rand’s work isn’t “general knowledge,” and any discussion of her works as it pertains to Bioshock is intellectual (here’s that word again) fraud because people have stolen the idea that Rand’s work and Bioshock are correlated from other’s reviews.

Ayn Rand, while not a household name, certainly holds a spot on the information highway. People have discussed and pondered her work for years. My Mother recommended Atlas Shrugged to me because she believed that Rand and I shared very similar philosophies. My Mother did not go to a University like I did. She read it because she had heard about the book by word of mouth. So, Rand’s work was passed to me and then I shared it with a close friend of mine. So on and so forth, intellectual property has moved across meadows, forests, and oceans. Rand’s work is infamous in its own right and while she certainly doesn’t hold as high of a spot on the “general knowledge” list as Darwin, she has received plenty of acknowledgements for her work over the years. The very fact that an Xbox 360 game deals with some of the subject matter presented in Rand’s work speaks to her success.

So, Ayn Rand’s book sales (according to Laughlyn12) total somewhere around 35,000 last year. That means that 35,000 people have read her book, probably talked about it with someone else, and shared the book by loaning it to a friend. If you can imagine the world of “sharing” as a highway much like the internet, with no real stopping points, but as a chain of information that continues across continents and into every household, then 35,000 books is a LOT of sharing. Not to mention that this statistic doesn’t count the number of Rand’s books checked out from a local library, or buying the book at a yard sale. (My friend checked out her copy of Atlas Shrugged from the local college library.) Friends that I went to school with knew of Ayn Rand well enough to talk about her work, even though the majority of them hadn’t read a word of her writing. Did this make them “intellectual hoaxes”? I don’t think so. I believe it pointed to the fact that they were diverse enough in their knowledge to be aware of the fact that her writing exists. Rand is like Darwin because her ideas have been exchanged and expounded upon for years. People still talk about her writing. People also disagree over her writing. If anything, this makes her an important participant in the growth of intellectualism and culture.

When you write an article for a magazine or a research paper, you go and dig through other people’s collected information on the topic you are writing about before you write about it. You go to the library and dig through the stacks, or you painstakingly search for credible online resources. Chances are, someone, somewhere has all ready written about your topic. It pays to do research because it makes your writing more credible. The fact that Bioshock is correlated to Ayn Rand’s work in hundreds of reviews is not the fault of bad research. It means that gamers did research before writing their review of the game, saw the book mentioned, and decided to bring it up because they considered Rand’s influence on the game to be important. They don’t have to have read her work in order to bring it up, because hundreds of people all ready agree that this statement is fact. Its like getting information from an encyclopedia, only a community encyclopedia.

If you are writing about M&M’s and fail to mention that they contain chocolate, well, that’s mighty short-sighted of you. (Failing to mention Rand in conjunction with Bioshock at this point is short-sighted.) The fact that M&M’s are made of chocolate is general knowledge. I didn’t have to take a tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to deduce this fact. Nor did I need to read a recipe or watch a cooking show. I know they are made of chocolate because people the world over agree that this is what M&M’s are made of. If the world agreed the sky was pink and the grass was blue, then those are the colors individuals would associate with these natural objects. This is what we would call a collective majority. A certain number of people agree that there is a correlation between objects and ideas and then we (tend to) collectively agree with them. It just so happens that the collective believe there is a connection between Rand and Bioshock.

Asking a community of people to ignore information passed between one another seems very ignorant. That’s like asking people not to read the newspaper, or watch CNN, or go to school. Heck, the very moment your foot stepped on to school property you’d be committing “intellectual fraud” according to Laughlyn12’s definition. We all share. Whether its ideas, books, fashion, or games – we look to the people around us to help shape our knowledge and our understanding of the world around us. Should a news reporter fail to mention that a car accident occurred in a small town in Arizona if she doesn’t know where the town is? I should hope not. Whether or not the reporter knows where the town is, the fact remains that the accident occurred. This doesn’t render her incapable of discussing the accident. Nor should someone’s removal from a work of fiction render them incapable of discussing a game. The fact remains, Rand’s book had an influence on Bioshock. Not discussing it now would be about as ridiculous as saying, “There isn’t any chocolate in M&M’s.”

If Ayn Rand wasn’t general knowledge before, she certainly is now.

Tags: America, argument, Atlas, Ayn, book, Chocolate, conclusion, conversation, Darwin, evolution, fact, game, highway, hoax, knowledge, Laughlyn12, piracy, Rand, Shrugged, Willy Wonka, Xbox