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I don't get why anyone believes that owning an idea is more abstract that owning a house. I can easily "open" any door with an ax and/or battery-driven grinder.

I don't get why anyone believes that owning an idea is more abstract that owning a house. I can easily "open" any door with an ax and/or battery-driven grinder. Ownership is a legal construct of a society, meant to incentivese certain behaviours. It comes with both good and bad. This is true both for houses (inner cities are monopolized by the rich) as for software (key technologies being monopolized by few companies).

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Because exclusive use of a physical item is a fact of nature whereas exclusive use of an idea is a social construct that relies on a coercive social apparatus. The property rights we use for physical items are a social construct that is grounded in reality, whereas intellectual property is a social construct that is derived from a particular value-laden perspective.
- anticristi 6y ago
  Ownership in capitalism has nothing to do with usage. If I rent a car, I am using it, but I definitely don't own it. Ownership is about a right, the right to decide what to do with a property. Ownership is also not exclusive: Several people can own a house or a car simultaneously. Communist countries tried to reconcile ownership with usage by enforcing that everyone owns one flat at maximum. The results are mixed. To sum up, I still think that ownership is a social construct, be it for a physical item or an intellectual artefact.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Not all social constructs are created equal. Ownership of tangibles is grounded in the scarcity of tangibles. Ownership of intangibles is grounded in a value-laden perspective.
    - anticristi 6y ago
      I find scarcity of tangibles pretty artificial. Who says that a 200m2 house cannot be split into two 100m2 houses? Who says that you cannot replace a private swimming pool with another 100m2 house? Yes, some tangibles are scarce (water, petrol, raw materials, etc.). But what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        Physical goods are mutable but when we say they are scarce we mean that the same physical good can only be used by a limited number of people at the same time in the same way. For your example, a 200m2 house can be divided into 2 100m2 houses but the amount of physical living space hasn't increased. If there is one hammer between the two of us, we cannot both use it to nail different nails at the same time. We can even come up with a timeshare agreement but that just codifies the reality that when you are using the hammer to nail something, it is unavailable to me for the same purpose. You can replace a swimming pool with a house but that means no one can swim there anymore. > what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location. Yes there are interesting metaphysical dimensions that the philosophers can explore and we could all learn from them. Of course when you pay for someone's time it usually comes attached with some form of labor because what you really want is the product of that labor (which may itself be intangible). And when you pay for a location because it is useful, that use is grounded in the material relations, i.e. putting a gas station next to a thoroughfare rather than in a wilderness area. Note that both time of a person and location are also scarce in the economic sense.
        anticristi 6y ago
        I'm a bit unsure if you agree or disagree with me. :) My house costs at least 5*X, where X is the bill of materials. I pay way more for the scarcity of location and human time than for the scarcity of materials. Isn't that pretty similar to why some people ask to be paid for the software they produce? Just to make sure, I don't think as a society we reached "IP zen" where we found the optimal way to incentivese innovative, just as we haven't found the optimal way to incentivese quality housing for everyone. But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

Because exclusive use of a physical item is a fact of nature whereas exclusive use of an idea is a social construct that relies on a coercive social apparatus. The property rights we use for physical items are a social construct that is grounded in reality, whereas intellectual property is a social construct that is derived from a particular value-laden perspective.

anticristi 6y ago
Ownership in capitalism has nothing to do with usage. If I rent a car, I am using it, but I definitely don't own it. Ownership is about a right, the right to decide what to do with a property. Ownership is also not exclusive: Several people can own a house or a car simultaneously. Communist countries tried to reconcile ownership with usage by enforcing that everyone owns one flat at maximum. The results are mixed. To sum up, I still think that ownership is a social construct, be it for a physical item or an intellectual artefact.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Not all social constructs are created equal. Ownership of tangibles is grounded in the scarcity of tangibles. Ownership of intangibles is grounded in a value-laden perspective.
  - anticristi 6y ago
    I find scarcity of tangibles pretty artificial. Who says that a 200m2 house cannot be split into two 100m2 houses? Who says that you cannot replace a private swimming pool with another 100m2 house? Yes, some tangibles are scarce (water, petrol, raw materials, etc.). But what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      Physical goods are mutable but when we say they are scarce we mean that the same physical good can only be used by a limited number of people at the same time in the same way. For your example, a 200m2 house can be divided into 2 100m2 houses but the amount of physical living space hasn't increased. If there is one hammer between the two of us, we cannot both use it to nail different nails at the same time. We can even come up with a timeshare agreement but that just codifies the reality that when you are using the hammer to nail something, it is unavailable to me for the same purpose. You can replace a swimming pool with a house but that means no one can swim there anymore. > what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location. Yes there are interesting metaphysical dimensions that the philosophers can explore and we could all learn from them. Of course when you pay for someone's time it usually comes attached with some form of labor because what you really want is the product of that labor (which may itself be intangible). And when you pay for a location because it is useful, that use is grounded in the material relations, i.e. putting a gas station next to a thoroughfare rather than in a wilderness area. Note that both time of a person and location are also scarce in the economic sense.
      - anticristi 6y ago
        I'm a bit unsure if you agree or disagree with me. :) My house costs at least 5*X, where X is the bill of materials. I pay way more for the scarcity of location and human time than for the scarcity of materials. Isn't that pretty similar to why some people ask to be paid for the software they produce? Just to make sure, I don't think as a society we reached "IP zen" where we found the optimal way to incentivese innovative, just as we haven't found the optimal way to incentivese quality housing for everyone. But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.