[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.