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Physical property rights are about things you can do. You have something, you get to keep it and do things with it. Intellectual property rights are about thin

Physical property rights are about things you can do. You have something, you get to keep it and do things with it. Intellectual property rights are about things other people cannot do. If Alice wants to give Bob a copy of a book Eve wrote, she has to go out of her way to find and get permission from Eve or risk facing state violence. That second one is unnatural (see also, positive vs negative rights). It is a deliberate state imposition, on the theory that society will end up better off as a whole. It's not a question of whether society "should" have rights, but of whether it's beneficial to interfere with the natural order of things.

rayiner 11y ago
> Physical property rights are about things you can do. You have something, you get to keep it and do things with it. Physical property rights are definitely about what others cannot do. The state threatens violence to keep people from growing corn upon or even walking upon plots of land without license to do so.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Huh. I definitely have the feeling that the difference is more than just information being non-rivalrous, but yeah it can't be as simple as I was trying to think... . Didn't absentee land ownership used to be looked down on? Maybe that ties in somehow. Trespassing, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam so it sounds like it's not nearly universal and at least in some places tied to liability concerns and (potentially) interfering with the owner's use of the property. Maybe with IP it's that the owner/creator can't know unless they're told or actively go looking? But then that more-or-less gets back to non-rivalrousness. Hm. Some information actually does have effects if known/used, like a successful stock trading algorithm. But then that's not "artistic", and brings to mind that IP is more than just patents and copyright.

rayiner 11y ago

> Physical property rights are about things you can do. You have something, you get to keep it and do things with it. Physical property rights are definitely about what others cannot do. The state threatens violence to keep people from growing corn upon or even walking upon plots of land without license to do so.

tbrownaw 11y ago
Huh. I definitely have the feeling that the difference is more than just information being non-rivalrous, but yeah it can't be as simple as I was trying to think... . Didn't absentee land ownership used to be looked down on? Maybe that ties in somehow. Trespassing, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam so it sounds like it's not nearly universal and at least in some places tied to liability concerns and (potentially) interfering with the owner's use of the property. Maybe with IP it's that the owner/creator can't know unless they're told or actively go looking? But then that more-or-less gets back to non-rivalrousness. Hm. Some information actually does have effects if known/used, like a successful stock trading algorithm. But then that's not "artistic", and brings to mind that IP is more than just patents and copyright.