[sgoranson]

One might argue that the "default state" for all forms of property, including my car and dinner plates, is in the public domain. What fundamental law that transcends the Constitution says my car is "mine"? Yeah the Constitution has some base in natural law, but that's subjective western thought too, nothing universal. I agree 100% that IP laws today need tweaking, or scrapping, but GP is right that the philosophical debate over it is an unrelated issue.

[ctdonath]

Taking your car or movie is a fundamental issue. Copying your car or movie is not.

Edit: reflecting on my comment I realize everyone, me included, is looking at this wrong. There is a Constitutional issue - Fourth Amendment "secure in papers and effects". Nobody has a right to just look at & act on the contents of your "papers" (now extending to digital video etc), and contractual access thereto must be respected. You may not like the contracts limiting access to something, but you have a natural obligation to respect them. Copyright and patent law were stopgap measures in place for where such controlled access was hard to implement.

Just a thought.

[lisper]

Indeed, communists do argue that, and the experiment of basing a society on that theory has been done a number of times. The outcomes have generally been poor.

There is also a physical difference, which has been pointed out many times: if I take your car and dinner plates, you no longer have them. If I make a copy of your data, you still have it.

There is also a contemporary debate about whether the term of ownership for physical property should be for limited times, or whether rent should be charged on physical property. Of course, the debate is not framed this way, it is instead framed in terms of levying property taxes, sales, taxes, and inheritance taxes. This is another example of how framing the debate can affect the outcome.