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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 1462 days ago

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.

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.

> 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 1461 days ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 1462 days ago

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?

> 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.

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.