That mean you don't own that car. Its the government car that they have given to you under a granted permission to use it. Same goes for your house. All they need to render the third amendment void is taking back their granted permission. Basically we are now describing a capitalistic governed country like the US as if it worked like an communist controlled one.

So before I continue down this line, do you really claim that government is the rightful owner of everyones property? If not, then we must separate physical property with government granted permissions.

Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.

What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.

I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.

There, I've tilted at my windmill for the day.

We now live in a world where the machines needed to copy things are commonly owned by individuals. Copyright, having been designed to regulate industry, is massively out of date -- individuals do not have the resources needed to decide if they are abiding by copyright. Even the entertainment companies that cry about the importance of copyrights know this, which is why they keep pushing for DRM. No sane person actually believes that normal people are going to stop and think about whether or not they are obeying copyright laws; that is just not how people generally behave.

The truth is, in the 21st century copyright is nothing more than a red flag law that exists solely to protect obsolete industries.

What people have in the absence of government is not property, but merely possession. No more or less binding on anyone else than a dog with a bone.

You have to wonder if the framers talked about our actual natural rights in such disrespectful terms: "The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."

Does this strike you as being even remotely analogous to the situation faced by the people who make television, movies, books, and music?

So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.

The same goes for any other form of permissions. If I get a government permission to sell drugs or produce weapons, I would not call that a property right, comparable to the car I own. The permission to enter a house is not comparable to the property right of the person who owns the house.

If we look at copyright specific, it is an intrusion into the property right of others. Its not just a permissions, but also a restrictions of the actually property owners rights. By calling copyright a property equal to physical objects, we are making the term property meaningless to the point of contradiction.

No. The internet has rendered the "taking your stuff" part obsolete. When you "take my stuff" I no longer have "my stuff". However when you "copy my bits" I still have "my bits". It is the essential difference between Property and Intellectual not-actually-Property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_%28economics%29

Many things are in this category, not just IP. Paying for them can be kind of tricky, because who wants to spend a year, say, writing a book when someone decides they can just go ahead and copy it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

IP has been a pretty good, if imperfect solution to the problem. Those wishing to be rid of it ought to either try and suggest another way of producing information goods, or be honest enough to say they have no idea and that information goods that require substantial time and effort may not be produced in large quantities in their imagined future.

I still write software for money. GNU/Linux is still doing rather well. Thanks to the law, I still get to make that business model choice.

However, I do not confuse a car with a piece of software or music track. If we are discussing moral rights, or "property", we cannot have such a discussion without being clear on our terms. Nobody is smacked on the head, nor any "stuff" taken, when someone torrents an MP3. However, people continue to die having their "stuff" taken.

The best books I've read were written by people who weren't financially motivated. Is it just me?

You make a copy, you own me money. You decide to keep that money instead, and it's the moral equivalent of reneging on a debt or bouncing a check.

All forms of property are a government granted monopoly. God doesn't give you a monopoly over your lawn or the things you create with your hands, Uncle Sam does.

Copyright, trademark, patents, etc., are different; they were not considered natural rights, but are a social engineering effort, attempting to produce specific effects in society ("the progress of science and the useful arts", e.g.) by means of government-subsidized policy.

As an analogy, consider another government-granted monopoly, say taxi medallions. They're quite valuable in some markets. But they're entirely an artificial right, created by the city for the city's own reasons, not an inherent one.

Or on the opposite side, consider e.g. liberty or free speech. In the American or liberal conception, those are innate, inalienable rights. We create a government that hopefully helps us exercise those rights, but the rights inhere directly in us--- they are not granted by the government or some other third party.

Literally every business that relies on any kind of stock, real estate, or other form of property depends on the government for the security of that property. Yes, their survival depends - in part - on providing a decent product or service at an acceptable price, but it also depends on having the backing of a state that can inflict serious, life-changing harm on the Takers who have no regard for reciprocity, who will simply grab whatever they want with no recompense whatsoever, and who will continue doing so until they are physically thrown in jail.

These people aren't a majority. Heck, they aren't even a significant minority. But they're common enough to make the difference between profit and loss in any remotely competitive business.

Anarcho-libertarians are loath to admit this, but civilization depends of putting these people behind bars, along with the murderers, rapists, kidnappers, forgers, fruadsters, and other thugs who cannot suppress their own desires reliably enough to behave with decency and reciprocity.

A respectable country will do everything it can to limit incarceration to those who pose genuine, active threats to the persons and property of others. It will not subject them to cruel or unusual punishment that goes beyond their removal from the free population. And it will do whatever is possible to rehabilitate them so they they can become functioning members of society.

But make no mistake - it will throw those fuckers into jail without remorse if they decide to steal instead of deal. In a country ruled by law, businesses can count on this protection. Indeed, it's what they bank on, which is why well-governed countries tend to be far more prosperous than those that tolerate pernicious criminality.