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The most obvious distinction between intellectual property and ordinary property is their history. Ownership of things has existed for longer than reliable reco
by scythe 4y ago
The most obvious distinction between intellectual property and ordinary property is their history. Ownership of things has existed for longer than reliable records are available. Copyright and patents, by contrast, were created during the late Renaissance in response to the particular economic circumstances of the time. They have since become the tools of entrenched interests who would rather suggest that things have always been this way and we couldn't live without it.
Is anything humans do natural? The only thing that can make something unnatural, so far as we understand it, is human intervention. Insofar as we conceive of unnaturalness as a recognizable quality of phenomena, it is more acute when the humans responsible are more sophisticated in their methods. We can easily observe a very large difference between the primitiveness of human society when it created the ownership of things and the much more advanced culture that devised what we now call intellectual property. From this construction of what is natural and what is not, we clearly find that intellectual property is much less "natural", though there is still the necessity of accepting that "natural" can be a meaningful idea at all.
- canibal57 4y agoNearly everything humans do is natural. We have just made up clever ruses to hide the vulgarity of much of it and to dissuade ourselves that the disparity caused by the natural order has no chance to be solved.
- generj 4y agoI’d argue intellectual property existed earlier than that, as soon as states (or guilds) considered certain techniques and skills exclusive to them. Off the top of my mind, with a solely European view the Venetians moved glass production to Murano in the 13th century at least partially to make a monopoly on luxury glass. World History was awhile ago but other restrictions on technology transfer existed by at least 800 CE and probably in a limited sense well before 1000 BCE.
- mymythisisthis 4y agoGuilds would get the right to do something by the government, to the exclusion of others. Such as the haberdasher guild, that had the right to sew and no one else could sew commercially. Patent was invented to break the guilds. A guild member could reveal a technology publicly, and get a 10 year right to use it. This was to make progress go faster, as guilds kept technology secret.