[pdabbadabba]

The scarcity points are interesting, but I'm not sure I agree that this has anything to do with the concept of ownership. Is it really necessary for a thing to be scarce in order for it to be "owned"? Why? I would have thought that scarcity would provide the motivation to buy and sell an item of property, but is not necessary for the thing to have been owned in the first place. Can we come up with a single thing out there that we think of as not property because it is not sufficiently scarce?

And what about things that are made scarce by the prevailing legal framework? Surely this is the case for copyrighted works and patented methods (etc.)--I take it that this is the root of your criticism--but it is also true of pretty much any other intangible thing that we think of as being property and, therefore, subject to ownership, such as stock, money, and debt. Is there any principled reason for requiring that things be naturally scarce in order to be subject to ownership?

Finally, I don't think one can simply ignore the policy reasons for the existence of the intellectual property laws that make intellectual property scarce. Maybe you don't think they are good reasons anymore, but simply ignoring the very copious literature on this subject doesn't seem like a good way to persuade anyone.

On the patent front, for example, the usual arguments are that patents 1) encourage people to make more patentable methods than they otherwise would, 2) encourage people to make greater use of the patented methods then they otherwise would (the so-called "extractive" theory), and 3) encourage people to make discoveries public (in exchange for legally enforced exclusivity) instead of protecting them by keeping them secret.

Maybe these arguments don't persuade you (some of them persuade me more than others), but I don't think they are so weak that they can simply be ignored in favor of purely metaphysical arguments about the definition of "property" and "ownership."