Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments or ideological flamebait to HN. It leads to tedious generic tangents and flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Weird coming from a site where most members are paid a lot of money for using their brains.

Eh, if IP wasn't a thing we could still make money in almost the exact same way via contract law.

Sure, but the value of the contract would be greatly reduced if no one could claim exclusivity over the output.

You could though, as long as you're careful with contracts. With backend software that just means a contract that you're not going to give a copy to anyone else. With frontend software that means making people sign contracts that they aren't going to further distribute it, before you distribute it to them.

All copyright really does is make these contracts "automatic". I guess that's important for things like web ui's, but it doesn't really matter for anything with an EULA, e.g. appstores like steam could work exactly the same as they do today.

> With backend software that just means a contract that you're not going to give a copy to anyone else. With frontend software that means making people sign contracts that they aren't going to further distribute it

You are basically describing intellectual property

Well yes, that's my point, you can recreate the parts of copyright that matter with contract law... so wanting to get rid of copyright isn't really a contradiction to our profession.

Yes: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.

You can deny its existence if you want, but that’s about as legally helpful and effective as sovereign citizen nonsense.

Zoom out a bit, maybe look at 1602 to the present and ask, "What can and can't be property, who decides what is and isn't property, am I ok with this, and why am I ok with this?" What are the second and third order effects that result from first principles here?

You're making a normative argument about what should be property. I'm making a purely descriptive point.

Yes, I understood this when I replied. Thank you.

So you were intentionally pretending to misunderstand? Cool.

No I was not. Hope you have a good rest of your day.

I'm not sure postmodern is the right word to use here? It's pretty standard liberalism in terms of creating/enforcing property rights over things.

Information is not property. That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space. These are mostly thoughts being controlled under the rubric of property

Whether or not you agree with the notion of intellectual property. It isn’t a postmodern concept.

https://txpatentattorney.com/blog/the-history-of-intellectua...

You'll notice though, that the term 'intellectual property' wasn't invented until the (roughly) mid 20th century. After which time, copyright and patent law were affixed to this construction. There was no intellectual property, prior. I would politely suggest that this piece is a post-hoc justification, based on the ignorance of this arrangement. (Because the author, like all humans, is morally ambiguous. Intellectual property was an assumption going into this piece)

Copy rights, are not property. Patents are monopoly licenses.

Maybe it’s modern nonsense.

Copyrights _are_ property. They can be sold on the market and are enforced by the state. You can _own_ a copyright.

> Information is not property.

That’s true, property is exclusive rights. Information is a thing in which property can exist, though.

> That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space.

One might choose to create a property regime in which only tangible items are subjects of property, but neither IP nor intangible property more generally have anything to do with postmodernity; while some forms of intangible property are earlier, the category (including the subcategory now known as “intellectual property”) really flowered as part of the same development of property rights that birthed capitalism.

Again, the patent system is mentioned in the constitution. It's not "postmodern". You may not agree with the system (I certainly don't), but "postmodern" is the not correct movement to associate it with

Surely information takes up space too, albeit virtually and as bits?

You're incorrect in your use of postmodern in this and the above statement.

See if you can acquire information without taking up space.