>> The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as wel

>> The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well. Yes, but being able to license intellectual property is a very different thing from ownership of a car, both in the effects on my rights and in the moral basis of the law. >>But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. I think the most important analogy between material and immaterial goods fifteen years ago was, that an immaterial good needed a physical medium, like a CD. And the buyer of the physical medium had after that property of a thing, and could do what he wanted ( in reasonable limits). Most importantly, as long as CDs were copied by cassettes, the buyer could supply his friends with low quality copies. So it seems to me, that the entire idea of intellectual property revolved around the inability of most people to produce a high quality copy of the medium. In contrast, nowadays everybody could easily produce and distribute a high quality copy. So I think that with the internet the physical medium vanished and with it the part of an immaterial good which made it possible to speak about 'ownership' and 'property' in the first place. So it is certainly the case that we need a consensus, what reasonable behaviour of creators and consumers is. But I think that talk about 'ownership' is just muddinging the water. And personally I find it quite frustrating that we have all these fascinating technology which create abundance of all digitial works. And we are not allowed to actually use them, because we can not figure out how to pay creators (which has not necessarily anything to do with copying in the first place).