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That is not how intellectual goods work. They require their own class of property laws called "intellectual property" precisely because they are different from
by cookiecaper 9y ago
That is not how intellectual goods work. They require their own class of property laws called "intellectual property" precisely because they are different from real property.
Real property provides the basic needs of human life, and any single parcel or space can only be occupied or used by a single entity at a time. It exists in time and space as a physical good. Persons and families are entitled to protect this property, with force if necessary, because they depend on it for their ongoing maintenance and habitation.
Real property laws provide structure to our approach to real property so that we can live in a neighborly civilization instead of a smattering of independent militarized tribes.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, exists in an abstract, non-physical space. The same intellectual content can exist with perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds, and because intellectual goods are not subject to physical laws of space and time, they can be shared and utilized fully and simultaneously by everyone capable of processing and storing them.
This free-flowing nature makes intellectual goods extremely powerful, but it also gives them limited economic utility, because the supply is very hard to constrain. This was true in the past, and it's 1000x truer with the advent of the internet, which allows us to transfer intellectual goods practically anywhere in the world perfectly, exactly, and instantaneously. Now you don't even need to stay on good terms with the neighborhood sage for access to the treasure trove of intellectual goods!
Disembodied intellectual goods are useful, but they are not necessary for survival, and thus it is rarely if ever justified to use force in the "defense" of them. This is very different from real property, which must be reserved and defended to ensure survival.
To the extent that we do decide to use force to "defend" such goods, we should tread lightly. The analog to real property is very weak indeed.
Copyright essentially injects the government as a middleman into a voluntary and free market transaction, and says "I know you THINK you want that, but we aren't going to allow you to buy it from him, because we say someone else deserves the money more than him". Such interjections are another area where we should tread very lightly, and in recent decades, we have done anything but.
Our current iteration of copyright-gone-amok constrains our speech and does a great deal of damage that no one with an audience is willing to talk about, because they're all too busy enjoying the money stream from it to comment on its destructive consequences.
- flycaliguy 9y agoLanguage like "perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds" just doesn't add up in my head. Nobody can reproduce the sound of a recording in their mind without listening to a tape/record/cd/file of it. How is your speech being constrained by a record label anyways? A recording of a performance belongs to the creators of that recording. You don't have the right to reproduce it without paying them. That's that. It has nothing to do with your speech and everything to do with people in the entertainment industry getting paid for their work.