[LocalH]

Intellectual property is a misnomer. The word “property” contains some very physical connotations that ideas and media are not bound by. Unfortunately, too many powerful people have a vested interest in continuing to use the word “property” in conjunction with non-physical items.

[sacrosancty]

I think that's a bit of cultural bias there. Imagine a society without personal property, like some small tribe. Wouldn't they see our property rights as artificial? Maybe their "true" property would be something we don't even recognize like their honor or wife or other things they don't want to share with each other.

I have a wheelbarrow in my yard that I'm not using. Why can't anyone else use it? There's no natural reason why they couldn't. It's just there, they can take it and wheel dirt around in it. I might no even know it's happening, but my property rights say they're not allowed to.

I think the main feature of property is to disallow others from using it in a way that restricts your own use. For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you.

I wonder how you feel about medical information being free to copy? That's not property either, is it? Are you happy with no moral rights for subjects of photographs and no rights to privacy of medical information? Should patients "own" their medical records or should hospitals be free to use them however they like?

[ISO-morphism]

> I think the main feature of property is to disallow others from using it in a way that restricts your own use. For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you.

The main difference between the wheelbarrow and IP lies in the copies. If someone else uses my wheelbarrow I can't use it while they're using it, or they may damage it. If someone copies an mp3 of a song I performed, I still have my mp3.

We had a working economic model based on physical property and we've been crippling the wonderful ability to infinitely create zero-cost copies of digital artifacts in order to fit our existing model. It's not horrendous that we've done this, and I'd optimistically view it as a step on the road to something yet unrealized.

> medical data

That deals with privacy, which is a different can of worms.

[alexvoda]

Since medical data was mentioned, lets just bring in the topic of copyrighted/patented genes.

It is already a topic discussed in the agricultural space.

Just imagine a future where we will have cures for some incurable diseases, but as a consequence of IP laws, the pharma company now controls your reproductive rights because you are making copies of their IP.

[db48x]

> Imagine a society without personal property, like some small tribe. Wouldn't they see our property rights as artificial?

This is a common argument, but one that is ungrounded in reality. Ancient tribes were small and certainly had fewer (or no) written rules, but there is plenty of evidence that they had personal property. Grave goods are just one of the most obvious. Neolithic huts with fences built around them to keep the livestock safe are another. We have stories dating all the way back into prehistory of shepherds counting their sheep. Etc, etc.

[alexvoda]

> For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you.

Just because you own something does not mean you automatically have a right to receive the revenue you want.

Being undercut by free when selling copies of x is absolutely natural for a medium where producing any additional copy of item x is free and can be done by anyone.

Want to be paid for the original new content, then sell that. Plenty of new content is already being funded that way. And before IP existed, all creative content was funded that way.

What IP allows you is to instead of demanding a bounded ammount of compensation for a bounded ammount of creative output (demand payment per creative work), you instead can demand an unlimited ammount of compensation.

IP is monopoly rights and undermines physical property.

[LocalH]

Medical information has other relevant concerns besides who "owns" it. As a matter of fact, it can be hard (if not impossible) for an individual to receive a copy of their own medical records. There are privacy concerns that simply don't often apply to the types of data which are usually referred to as "intellectual property" (software, music, movies, literature).

"Intellectual property", as a term, also serves to further layman confusion on the topic. I can't count on all my appendages the number of times I've spoken to an average person (whether in person or via the internet) where they've said something about "copyrighting" a business name or other trademark. Let's call "intellectual property" what it really is - copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Each of those has a completely different framework of regulation and philosophy, and it doesn't really serve us to lump them all together into one term for most productive discourse on the topic.

[cturner]

The concept of property evolved independently in every civilisation that grew beyond a small tribe and predates the nation-state.

It exists to deal with the dynamics of scarce goods. If person a is using your wheelbarrow, then person b cannot use it as well. You can't raise cows on a piece of land, but also plant a crop of wheat there. This definition goes back thousands of years and is respected across cultures.

There is another practice that was respected across cultures for thousands of years: the free sharing and open remixing of songs, stories and ideas.

IP is a weaselly project to carry the advantages of property rights to non-scarce goods, and to things which were previously fiercely regarded as public domain. It creates a set of rights which did not previously exist and which created new benefits for people who were already elites.

"For IP, others selling copies would restrict your ability to sell copies as they undercut you." This does not follow from the argument you are making. Selling something is not a use of it. Carting things around in a wheelbarrow or playing a compact disk - these are examples of use.

Perhaps you bring some cultural bias to this conversation. Having grown up in a setting with IP, and having a career in a field where some people gain great advantage from IP, you have come to believe that it is reasonable to regard ideas as property.

But IP is an aberration, even in our time. It is not law in all places, it is not enforced well in the places where it is, and in those places people who are morally conscious and otherwise law-abiding routinely violate it.

IP is impractical to enforce equally, is inconsistent with the principle of live-and-let-live, it raises the barrier-of-entry to a range of industries, it grants extra privileges to existing elites, it is easily gamed by bad-faith actors, it is disrespected by the general population, it has at best a hand-wavey economic justification that is backed by no real evidence. IP is complicated when good laws are simple, and IP muddies the water for a concept that is a genuine foundation of our civilisation - property. IP fails all tests for what is reasonable law.

If the government were to say that black were white, this would not make it so. So it is with property.

[Retric]

Physical objects break down with use. That’s the natural impetus for personal property to be a thing. Ideas however don’t fail with use which is why no legal system has the concept of actually owning an idea rather than say getting a patent for a few years etc.

Intellectual property doesn’t exist, it’s all just privileges handed out at the whims of the the state the same way only Dentists can practice dentistry.

[Hasu]

I'm still not seeing the distinction on a fundamental ontological level. Physical property rights are also just privileges handed out at the whim of the state. There are plenty of examples of ideas that are less useful when they're common knowledge: Coke's secret formula, novel strategies, the passphrase to my private key, Apple's plans for the next iPhone, the list goes on. There are valid reasons to want to keep information secret or retain ownership over certain information patterns that you have mined or generated at great cost to yourself, the same as if you bought or built a physical object at similar cost to yourself. Just because the end product is information instead of a thing, why should you not have rights?

[Retric]

A sandwich can’t be eaten by 1 million people, it’s an inherent property of the sandwich and has nothing to do with the state. Animals have been guarding the kills for millions of years before humans even evolved. Meanwhile, a million people can all use a sandwich recipe that’s an inherent difference.

Secrets aren’t the idea. Far more than 1 million people use 6 digit pins therefore most if not all of them are shared by many people and that’s completely ok. The value is in the secret not the exclusivity. RSA private keys are compromised if someone knows the number and knows it’s part of someone else’s key, two peoples private key’s can happen to share a prime number without issue.

A sandwich on the other hand can’t happen to be eaten by 20 people without the others noticing.

Finally, what protects the company producing cokes is the trade marks on their packaging not the formula. I can know Coke’s formula or something close enough to be indistinguishable and nothing changes for them because I can’t undercut them and sell an identical product.

[Hasu]

A million people can't claim to have written The Lord of the Rings and sell copies of it for profit, not without greatly harming J.R.R. Tolkien, who actually did write it.

> Animals have been guarding the kills for millions of years before humans even evolved.

And in the state of nature, if a stronger animal comes by and defeats you, it gets that kill and you get nothing. In the world of property rights, the state protects your right to your stuff. The fact that you can own more stuff than you can defend with personal violence is not natural.

Also, the state can take away your things with taxes or eminent domain, and it can say you can't own certain things, like nuclear weapons, heroin, or other people. But the latter two used to be allowed, in the United States, at least.

Property rights are a function of law, not a function of nature.

[alexvoda]

> A million people can't claim to have written The Lord of the Rings and sell copies of it for profit, not without greatly harming J.R.R. Tolkien, who actually did write it.

The way you use harm here implies that you believe that the world owes J.R.R. Tolkien something for having written LotR. In the case of commerce, the buyer owes the seller the agreed price. But noone owes anyone for simply writing something.

If a creator creates a creation, nobody, by default, owes the creator anything for having created it. If the creator wants to make the creation the object of a contract, they can do so. In that case, the parties of the contract owe the creator whatever was agreed in the contract. This is how Patreon works. And how financing art worked before IP was invented.

IP is not a contract!

IP is a legal monopoly right on the duplication of an infinitely and freely duplicable item. And the only way to enforce IP is to infringe on everyone's physical rights.

[Retric]

By that logic every sale of an Android phone harms Linus Torvalds. It’s clear that such isn’t the case rather he and your author failed to be benefit from some transaction, but that isn’t harm. After all I don’t get a cut of every windows sale even if doing so would benefit me.

As to the law ‘respecting’ personal property, we have this thing called taxes that says the state just gets to take some of your stuff based on the same principles that a larger bear gets to take stuff from a smaller one. As to how much stuff you can protect, squirrels aren’t limited to what they can defend they can just hide it.

[alexvoda]

Property rights are a function of law because rights are a function of law. But property is a notion that arises naturally due to scarcity.

And scarcity is not a function of the digital realm.

[alexvoda]

Do not confuse IP with secret information.

The existence or absence of IP laws does not affect your capability to have secret information in any way.

Patents, one of the types of IP, was actually designed to encourage holders of secrets to release them. But the ability to hold secrets is completely unaffected.

Also, just because you hold a secret does not mean anyone owes you anything. You may sell a secret and you always could regardless of IP.

What IP allows you to do is, after you've made a secret public, demand compensation every time other people share it among themselves.

[Hasu]

I'm not talking about current IP laws, exactly. The parent's claim was that physical property laws are "natural" and IP laws are not. I'm saying the concept of property is not natural and some ideas and information share key properties with physical objects, but the larger thrust is that all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state, it's all a shared consensus and where we draw the lines isn't because of some inherent difference between ideas and objects.

[alexvoda]

Just as explained by Retric ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860308 ), while property rights may not be "natural" (define natural in this context), the idea of property does arise naturally in both humans and animals as a direct consequence of scarcity.

Scarcity and the lack thereof is fundamental difference between the physical and the digital.

A secret can be scarce but the more copies are made the less scarce it is.

Encoded information (either written text -language is an encoding- or digital information) can be copied losslessly infinitely for a vanishing marginal cost.

Sure, enshrining property rights as law is a human social construction. The goal is to limit the use of force, otherwise everyone has to guard thair own property, gun in hand. But property itself arises naturally.

[pessimizer]

Trade secrets like Coke's secret formula aren't protected by copyright, patent, or trademark, they're protected by keeping them secret, and by NDAs with employees who have to know them. So your dystopia has always been the reality. Every single example of intellectual property that you could come up that gets its worth from its privacy has never been protected.

So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?

[Hasu]

> So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?

No, I'm saying all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state and they're all figments of our collective imagination. There's no fundamental ontological difference and the lines we draw are arbitrary. I'd support rolling back some of the IP protections we currently have in place, and I'm also in support of higher taxes in some cases, and other restrictions on physical property rights, but there's not a magical difference between IP and physical property that means we should regard those things differently.

[alexvoda]

Law covers many many fields, and we treat all of them differently. Just because multiple notions are covered by law does not mean we treat them the same.

Maybe we even treated some of them the same but certainly not today.

I would argue that, at least from some points of view, in the past, marriage was treated similarly to physical property. Thankfully we no longer do so.

[jimmygrapes]

You contract out the use of the wheelbarrow so that you are aware it is not accessible.

[tremon]

I think that's just an unfortunate consequence of overloading in the English language (and others, btw). One of the meanings of the word "property" is just "ownership" and has nothing to do with the physicality of the items under discussion. In Dutch, it's called intellectueel eigendom which translates as ownership, not property. When the Dutch "eigendom" refers to physical items, it's usually used in the plural (e.g. mijn eigendommen == my belongings).

[pitaj]

Yes, that was exactly what I meant. Intellectual property is not property, and is therefore not private property.