[9dev]

> limit the concept of property to scarce goods

This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results.

You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.

[cturner]

There is no analogy between (strengthening scarce-property rights) and (communism). There is no analogy between (preventing copyright) and (communism).

[9dev]

You did not say strengthen scarce-property rights; you mentioned abolishing property rights for things other than scarce goods.

[cturner]

Higher up, I phrased it the other way around - but they are the same thing. The creation of property rights around non-scarce things undermines scarce property rights.

There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights.

Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc.

Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.)

By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards.

Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now.

A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.

[9dev]

I respectfully disagree. The world is so reliant on the way digital goods ownership is set up, you can't just revoke this without extremely far-reaching consequences. If you take that away, I do not see how you automatically strengthen scarce property rights – you're merely destabilising the economy with hope that it reassembles itself into something more aligned with your own ideology.

Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad" doesn't help to improve the current situation, neither does abolishing it. The way I see it, there's definitely reason in protecting ideas and the result of creative work, even if that result is a sequence of bytes. Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.

That's not to say the current situation is ideal – far from it. But I strongly believe your suggestion would lead to chaos, and it's dangerous to go there.

[cturner]

> If you take that away, I do not see how you automatically strengthen scarce property rights

I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.

> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"

But that is not what I did. I made a first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustration.

You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.

> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.

(heavy edit)

There was incentive to create in the pre-scarce world. Large bodies of great work were produced in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP, lower living standards and no copyright. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes. People routinely copied their works. That we have these works is evidence of their incentive.

The licenses that sit behind Linux and similar systems go to great lengths to cancel protections given by copyright. Yet great work is done on these systems. The incentive must be there.

Non-scarce rights create incentive against creation. They discourage remixing of existing work, and they create legal barriers against entry into fields that are affected by patents.

[chownie]

These things don't relate to one another in any meaningful way, it's like telling people to be wary of marching in sync because the Nazis did it.

[9dev]

That isn't a good analogy. A more apt comparison would be saying it's like being wary of legislation that enables punishment for government workers that step out of line, because that's one of the things that the Nazis did which absolutely leads down a slippery slope.

Revoking the right to own things and transforming almost all private property to public goods is an extreme measure and almost certainly leads to some kind of fascist regime to enforce and maintain it.