Practical as it may be, that's not a natural right but merely a physical possibility. More generally, the concept of natural rights - except for a very narrow niche of special subjects closely centered on the individual's own life and bodily autonomy - is a shortcut to total subjectivity at best. And even for that very narrow niche, the "rights" part is a normative civilizational convention/construct, whereas nature conspicuously ignores such "rights" (as do humans for the most part when it comes to other species)
X has an mp3 file, Y copies it from X (copy), X still has an mp3 file. Economic scarcity is not inherent in the mp3 file, it has to be artificially enforced.
Don't know how it can be any clearer than that.
Economic scarcity may be inherent in the service of creating the mp3 file may be an economically scarce activity, consuming time and other physical inputs. The "correct" and most straightforward way to sell services is commissioning - 1 performance, 1 payment.
Intellectual property tries to make the output of a service subject to the same attributes as a physical salable object, and the artifice in American law has a specific Constitutional purpose: to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Consider this: Let's say you needed a repair on your house - this is basically a "I want this, let me pay you to do it" commission arrangement. Imagine if you had to continue to pay daily for the "rights" of using the repair. Honestly this is promoting the progress of "useful arts" more than suing kids for downloading mp3 files that they wouldn't pay for anyway.
If you are arguing that there is something inherently wrong with using legal systems and implied threat of violence to extract fees for the use of services you have made available to the public, you are basically arguing for the abolition of nearly all of the modern day concept of property, not just IP.
Interesting, but I'll counter and say it is, because there is only so much land. It doesn't matter any way because land cannot be copied like an mp3. Also I cannot trespass upon your mp3 and deprive you of a portion of its use.
The only way I can see a parallel to stealing is this:
- X pays Y to make you an mp3 in the future. - X makes the mp3. - Y is your friend and shows you the mp3 before it gives it to Y. - You copy it, and sell it to X before Y did at a lower price, or simply give it to X. - Now X doesn't want to pay Y any more.
but that's why contracts exist, so that X would have to pay Y anyway.
Of course the notion of property itself is an artifice, what makes an apple yours other than the fact you are holding it and no one is actively trying to take it from you--but physical property cannot be copied in the same way "imaginary" property can.
> If you are arguing that there is something inherently wrong with using legal systems and implied threat of violence to extract fees for the use of services you have made available to the public
Not arguing that. I am arguing that using the legal system to punish X for downloading an mp3 might be wrong, because that action has not harmed nor deprived the creator of the mp3 of anything e0xcept vague "might-happen" things that aren't based on explicit contract-like agreements.
The point is that property law is based around enforceable exclusivity of rights, not around deprivation of use (and making a copy available for free does deprive copyright owners of some portion of their ability to use it as a revenue stream) and contrary to the suggestion up front both intellectual and physical property involve surveillance and [implied] use of violence in order to turn commons into a scarce resource which can be charged for.
plenty of societies have existed without it
Physical property is zero sum. If you take something from me, I no longer have it. IP has zero marginal cost of duplication; if you take something from me, we both have it.
Physical property ownership is nearly universal, and is probably related to the way humans are more loss averse than gain seeking (losing $100 is more bad than gaining $100 is good).
There have been some societies with leased, or even no concept of physical property ownership, but those are exceptionally rare and can hardly be held up as equally aligned with human nature.
IP ownership, however, is recent and very artificial. The idea that any random person is prohibited from singing a song they heard or copying a painting is new to the past couple of hundred years, to the best of my knowledge.
It’s fine to be opposed to both physical property and IP, but let’s not equate the two as far as the history of the concepts goes. They’re very different.
This is both still the case today and probably was never the case in the way that I think a lot of people would read that sentence.
Property rights have always been maintained, to some extent, through force. This is the case today. The state maintains a monopoly on violence and uses it to enforce property rights.
It's also true that humans, generally, hold some innate concept of fairness which leads to us generally respecting each others property. The use of violence was only ever to handle the edge cases as a last resort.
And "stronger" doesn't imply that the single physically strongest individual maintained ownership. Humans are social creatures who have always banded together and lended resources and support to individuals they trusted to be the most fair when making decisions. This only extremely rarely was the single physically strongest individual.
You have the argument backwards. Even in the old times one would not go and occupy house in a village or milk others' cows not because of some innate concept of fairness, but rather because of genuine fear of backlash resulting in violence of other villagers banding together.
You can see the same thing in animal kingdom. Territorial animals do not cross into rival territories not because of innate concept of fairness (new leaders happily massacre offspring of previous leader), but rather threat of violence and resulting negative expected value of hunting in rival grounds.
Property rights exist primarily because of force. To some extent states exist in order to apply force on ownership rights
Modern world physical property rights - centred around permanent or fixed term tradable exclusive rights of economic exploitation - bear more resemblance to intellectual property rights than the relatively universal notion that people shouldn't have the stuff they're using taken away from them, as do the practical and moral arguments about people deserving fruits of their labour and being more productive when given exclusivity over them.
But at its heart, the concept of physical property ownership is fundamentally different from IP. The fact that there are hybrids doesn’t change that.
If property actually pertained to owners not being prevented from using things, property law would be a very short set of guidelines entirely approved by the author of Property is Theft.
The fact that modern physical property law is - like IP - almost entirely about creating artificial restrictions on other people's use of stuff and the right to charge for its use obviously changes the concept that actually it's fundamentally different.
(I also didn't state I disagree with the concept of private property)
Meanwhile physical property is bound by the fact that you can't create new matter.
- is there value in keeping it secret / not public? (e.g. commercial software, etc.)
- content, things that can be freely distributed without diluting the inherent value of the property
In the first case, I think it's analogous to not being able to create new matter. Once the secret is out, you can't put it back in.
In the case of content, I'm a lot more open about this but it does bring up all of the tricky questions of ensuring that content creators get paid for their work, etc. (another endless debate)
One can argue "intellectual ownership" doesn't actually _mean_ anything; it's a sum of unrelated laws - copyright, patents, trademarks, all doing a different thing and protecting different customers
What prevents Mallory from taking three friends, coming to your house and beating you with a $5 wrench until you give up the property?
I'd like to propose a thought experiment. Suppose you own a house. One day you decide to go on a vacation for a week and like most people you don't do anything with your house during that time. You just pack your stuff and leave. During that week somebody else sees that your house is empty and comes in to live in it. They go through your stuff, watches your TV, maybe even wears your clothes. They're careful to leave before you get back home, and they leave it exactly as it was. In fact you can't even notice they were there. Has that hypothetical person violated your property rights?
In your model I'd argue they haven't. You haven't incurred any costs, and you didn't lose anything. Yet I'd argue that most people have some intuitive sense that your property right has indeed been violated.
Now, with physical items 'personal' entropy is an unavoidable outcome of the universe we live in.
Even more so, if physics behaved like your example, why would we have ever evolved to give a shit if someone came into our house and used it if we couldn't tell. In this universe society would have evolved to share much more freely because it would have been a massive benefit for everyone.
This is what humanity has a problem with now. We still have the ancient lines of thought that we live in a world filled with shortages and if we don't acquire as much as possible as quickly as possible we're going to die. Meanwhile technology has and is progressing to a point that everyone on the planet could have a perfectly nice life except for the fact a few of us want to own everything all for themselves.
(The more a hypothetical requires you to assume things operating very differently from how they would in real life, the less useful the intuitions it generates are.)
The cases you propose all seem to relate to some "fear" or "risk" that your property degrades in value. I agree that those are real attributes of property, I wasn't arguing they aren't.
In reality my view of property rights is way more utilitarian and post-modern than i express in the hypothetical. I see property rights as a useful thing we made up to systematize and compartmentalize the messy universe we live in. In that system IP rights make perfect sense because it's useful to society that you can reap some benefit from dispersing good ideas.
Most Physical property is not real property either. It's all just legal voodoo to protect people's interest. The only real property is the one you can protect on your own with your own hands, everything else is protected by the law.
> If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple.
The apple is usually the result of work, time, resources...
> If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem.
...and the poem is also the result of work, time, and maybe resources. IP exists, because the creators invests into them and need an return for this investment to make a living, and maybe next time can create something even better.
> The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society
The general notion of property and laws is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. But we still need it because Humans are little greedy monsters, and somehow we all need to make a living.
It’s like a lamplighter being upset that society invented electric light bulbs and therefore stole his “intellectual property”. Poems, like lamplighting, just became a commodity.
You can use the law to protect workers from AI in your country. No different than if you decided to make electricity illegal to protect lamplighters. But good luck with that; we live in a globalized world and the end-result is that your country will become another dead end in the evolutionary tree of civilization when it fails to compete, as has happened thousands of times before.
IP is not real property; it's fundamentally different in an economic sense. If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple. If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem. The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society, because it necessitates a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance such that if Bob memorises your poem and tells it to his friend without your permission you're able to notice this and punish Bob for doing so.