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Apply the same test to any other form of property. What natural law gives you the right to own land?

• vkou 4y ago
  What natural law indeed? There isn't one. It's an arbitrary social construct. The argument that IP is property is built on a circle of quicksand. In the case of land, at least, exclusivity of use can be an argument one could make (Only one person can physically use any one plot of it for any one particular purpose, and gosh, maybe it's in the social interest to have some set of rules for ajudicating disputes between two people who want to use it for different purposes, and one of many solutions to that question is private land ownership), but that's not even an argument that has any applicability in the IP space. What's most interesting is that the IP commons can be freely plundered, at no cost, to build IP that is owned by someone. If we're going to treat IP as property, why does the creation of new IP not require a tax, levy, or dividend to be paid to the collective owners of the IP commons? All ideas are, after all, derivative.