>In particular, defense ought to be expanded to "the legitimate use of physical force or threat of force in proportionate response to the initial use of physica

>In particular, defense ought to be expanded to "the legitimate use of physical force or threat of force in proportionate response to the initial use of physical force or threat of force against your person or property." Why? You're arbitrarily narrowing down the definition of "defense" to suit your argument. Are you saying that anything short of physical violence or threat of physical violence is not a real threat that can be legitimately defended against (either through physical means or otherwise)? An if we're going down this route, an attacker may well choose physical violence to get me to divulge my knowledge just as they might use it to deprive me of a physical possession. >The only reason why you're depriving me of some tangible benefit is because it's scarce. If you take some resource from me that isn't scarce, then no benefit is lost because I can immediately conjure up another resource of identical value. Therefore, there is no conflict. True, but again, you're thinking of scarcity in purely physical terms. Say I run a food stand, and due to my grandma's secret sauce recipe, I have no shortage of customers. You, my competitor, acquire that recipe from me (you may have stolen a written copy, blackmailed me, or even simply beaten it out of me in a dark alley). You now start adding the same sauce to your product and take away some of my customers. Your knowledge of the recipe, has not diminished my knowledge of it, however it has diminished my competitive advantage (the scarce "resource" in this case) and so that knowledge no longer has the same value. >Defining property in terms of tangible benefits is simply untenable because there is no bound to it. For example, I could claim that the person who lives next to me lowers the value of my house because they never cut their lawn. I could therefore claim that they are creating conflict because they are removing some tangible benefit that I have. Yes, true, and certain councils and home owners associations do exactly that. It is a gradient. But that's the point -- the place where you choose to draw the "property" line on this gradient is necessarily arbitrary. You're claiming that your arbitrary point (physical exclusivity) is actually the right point, and any other point is "untenable". My argument is that this is not the case, and today, in a world of increasing automation of physical labor and freer, near-instantaneous communication, where an increasing portion of the population (in the West, at least) are engaging in what could be classified as "intellectual pursuits", physical boundaries are becoming increasingly inadequate. >The paper does address them, you just didn't read those parts. You're right, I've lost interest words the end of the paper, and didn't read it all the way through. My apologies. I have now. >Trademarks are discussed starting on page 43 and it's quite clear that no validity is given to the concept of intellectual property rights. Not in the case of trademarks. For trade secrets, the author, after wrangling with the legal notion of contract, does begrudgingly admit that trade secrets are a valid form of intellectual property (or at least, that they may form a valid grounds for legal recourse...). The author's argument against trademarks is absurd. After establishing the concept of a trademark in the first paragraph, they dismiss it out of hand and with no justification or argument to back it up at the beginning of the second. The author then proceeds to construct and knock down the strawman of consumer rights (which is not what trademarks are about). Finally, they use their (entirely unsupported) conclusion about the notion of trademark ownership to dismiss the idea of trademark dilution. >This isn't arbitrary at all because it's consistently applying the illegitimacy of owning ideas. Except the author never justifies it. Instead, they assume illegitimacy of owning ideas, and then proceed to use that assumption to demonstrate how the (a priori) illegitimate laws are, in fact, illegitimate. The whole thing is an exercise in circular reasoning: you can't own ideas --> laws that depend on owning ideas are illegitimate; there are no legitimate laws that support owning ideas --> idea ownership is illegitimate