You are allowed to copy other's books. You just can't derive a revenue from them.

> You just can't derive a revenue from them.

I wish this were the case, but you cannot distribute them either. I would love to collaborate with a team on an app that let's you instantly query all books ever published and revenue from that is the least of my concerns and it would be easy to do if we weren't forbidden from doing that by intellectual slavery laws.

You seem to be under the strange assumption that it's morally acceptable to use knowledge others generated to claim an advantage for yourself over other people. If your friend did research, and found a great house for him and his family, at a great price, told you about it, and then you went and bought it, most people would consider that highly unethical. Your friend did all the work to generate the knowledge, and you used it against him. Certainly you could demand that if you pay someone for knowledge, then it ought to be yours, but I think you undervalue knowledge at that point. The idea you could pay a few tens of dollars and be entitled to someone's perhaps decades of research is absolutely ludicrous. Be willing to pay thousands upon thousands for that privilege (which by the way, you can certainly negotiate).

> You seem to be under the strange assumption that it's morally acceptable to use knowledge others generated to claim an advantage for yourself over other people. If your friend did research, and found a great house for him and his family, at a great price, told you about it, and then you went and bought it, most people would consider that highly unethical

This is a bizarre argument. I am not claiming any such thing. What I'm saying is if my friend writes a book, and publishes it to the world, I should be free to copy and benefit of the knowledge in my friend's book. I'm not saying if my friend tells me a secret I should use that secret against him. That's bizarre. I believe in the right to privacy and secrets. I don't however, believe in the right to restrict what people do with knowledge that's been intentionally and willingly made public.

> I think you undervalue knowledge at that point

I think you overvalue the incremental knowledge generated in our time, and greatly undervalue the hard won knowledge of the past thousands of years (which was almost entirely generated without intellectual monopoly laws). The words we are using? Invented and given away freely. Even the letters. Even the concepts of words and letters! These computers? They are running on binary notation (330 years old—the 330 is written in Indian-Arabic numerals from over 1k years ago). The current contributions of all our best scientists, engineers, authors, musicians, etc, are trifles compared to the body of work we are building upon.

> I don't however, believe in the right to restrict what people do with knowledge that's been intentionally and willingly made public.

But it's not been made public. It's only available to the group of people that buy the book. As evidence of the fact it's not intended to be public, I cite the fact that the author has sought out legal mechanisms to potentially prosecute those who share what he or she has published.

> The words we are using? Invented and given away freely. Even the letters. Even the concepts of words and letters! These computers? They are running on binary notation (330 years old—the 330 is written in Indian-Arabic numerals from over 1k years ago). The current contributions of all our best scientists, engineers, authors, musicians, etc, are trifles compared to the body of work we are building upon.

The good news is that intellectual property expires after a while. There is no danger the next binary is going to be patent encumbered. Firstly, because it's likely 'obvious' (although I recognize this has been exploited due to asking patent clerks to go above and beyond the fields they are familiar with) and secondly because it's unlikely to be encumbered for thousands of years.

Buy selling a book or work to the public you are making it public.

“After a while” now means 90 years after the creator is dead, or something atrocious like that. So that new study on Alzheimer’s that the government paid for with your tax dollars? Yeah, you can’t read that unless you shell out a small fortune (or go to scihub, which most true scientists use and support). People are dying. This is a real serious problem and we need to start changing the wording so people realize it’s not just bad economics to have intellectual monopoly laws, it’s bad morally.

The issue of government funded research is separate. I actually agree with you that it should be available to the public given that public has purchased that right. However the same cannot be said of private endeavors.

You are claiming that its okay to take peoples labor to save lives. Taking peoples labor is slavery. Yes it is wrong to do that even to save a life. Pressuring people -- sure. Shaming people -- great. Forcing them at the end of a gun barrel. No.

When the janitor cleans the authors home does the janitor then get to charge a royalty to everyone who enters the home?

Um no. Janitorial service is not intellectual property. It doesn't qualify in any way as a 'secret'. There's no 'secret' or private information being shared. If the Janitor publishes a tell-all story about what went on in the author's home, then yes, he does get to charge everyone who reads it.

I appreciate you engaging in the conversation. Thank you for your thoughts. I’m not sure if we’ll come to a consensus at all, but it’s interesting to read your responses. My take is “intellectual property” is a joke of a concept, that is completely arbitrary and has no grounding in the real world (because if you dissect any piece of work, you would find that it “infringes” on the “rights” of the “labor” of countless individuals before). It’s a lie. Plain and simple. Used to benefit the rich and powerful. Intellectual slavery or intellectual monopoly. Those are the true terms here.

You are just defining harm using your preconceived notions about rights.

How are you any more harmed by me preventing you from growing crops, than I am harmed by you preventing a sale of copy of my book because you sold it to them first.

One system is grounded in physical laws (you can’t “git clone” land), and the other is a manmade restriction on the mind’s natural ability to grow.

Depriving you of a future sale is just saying you are not entitled to some unnatural profit that you feel entitled to, even though your book is worthless in value compared to all of the intellectual products that you so freely use from prior generations.

Anyone who thinks their ideas are so precious and important that they should be able to control how people use those is oblivious to their true negligible contribution.