Like most normal well adjusted people, I don't steal and I expect and find that those around me do the same. The reason my coworkers haven't stolen the keyboard off my desk when I go to get coffee isn't the government, it is just because they have some base-level respect for me. Clearly the concept of property, at least as it exists in my office, is not an artifact of some governing body. It exists despite that; it exists without any threat of force.
Or is that most basic mutual respect now "the government" in an office environment? If that is the case then we are basically removing any useful meaning from the word.
That's a good point. The last time I was reading about this I found out that some anarchists (pacifists, maybe) refer to this idea as "possession", to distinguish it from property. It's not "your" keyboard (in this case it probably belongs to the company), but you're using it right now, so it would be indecent to take it away from you.
Hmm, sounds about right. I haven't read much anarchist literature at all, but that meshes pretty nicely with what I know of anarcho-syndicalists.
Either way, I think it stems from the same basic human desire, probably hardwired, to not have things taken and to have some basic loyalty or respect to members of your 'tribe'. (After all, governments are made of people and those people must have thought the concept of 'property' was a good idea for some reason.)
So the reason I brought up physical property is because if that's not a complete fiction then it's bizarre for intellectual property to be a complete fiction. Governments don't create things out of whole cloth, the laws always correspond to something, even if they do it badly.
"the reason I brought up physical property is because if that's not a complete fiction then it's bizarre for intellectual property to be a complete fiction"
I am not following your logic here. The notion of physical property predates written records and codes of law, even if it has been approached differently by different cultures. The notion of intellectual property is a far more recent development that has nowhere near universal acceptance and requires a very particular kind of legal system to make any sense at all.
"Governments don't create things out of whole cloth, the laws always correspond to something, even if they do it badly."
No, laws are invented out of thin air with regularity and always have been. Governments create legal constructs for various reasons -- expediency, politics, religion, favoritism, etc. The history of copyright is a perfect example. Prior to the printing press there was no notion of copyright, and people made careers out of copying books. Alexandria had a law requiring anyone bringing a book into the city to give it to the library to be copied. Then the printing press was invented, and governments began to fear the mass dissemination of written material; copyright was invented to deal with that problem and the rest is history:
(OK, to be fair, the first "true" copyright law was created after that law was repealed and a bunch of businessmen complained about their lost monopoly:
The intellectual property laws are protections around concepts that existed previously. IP refers to trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and copyright.
Trademarks protect brands and go back a very long way; primitives would use them to distinguish themselves from each other, farmers would mark sheep, etc.
Patents are really protections on inventions. Inventions also go back a long way, although they were previously treated as trade secrets rather than open descriptions. Reverse engineering and a desire for openness instead of secrecy created the need for patents (I'm not saying the governments are doing a good job.) A chef's secret sauce is his intellectual property.
The idea of copyright stems from a desire to protect the older concept of authorship and goes back to antiquity as well; drawings in caves were certainly made by cavemen; the Greek philosophers certainly originated their words; narration in the bible is attributed to certain authors (although there is sometimes dispute here); Mozart (barely) survived on the patronage of his compositions.
That's all I mean by it's not a complete fiction: it's a set of protections around things that we already valued but that were started to get degraded by modern society.
Oh, I don't think it is a complete fiction either. Just for starters, something as simple as plagiarism is reviled with the law rarely being involved. We don't need the law to tell us that plagiarism is unacceptable.
What I do think is a fiction is trying to apply concepts meant for physical goods to ideas. Concepts like "theft", or being able to transfer ownership. It strikes me as the political/legal equivalent of what programmers do when they try to add a bit too much abstraction.
They saw a little bit of duplicated code about "ownership" and mistakenly though that the two concepts were probably related and rather interchangeable. As a result things become kludged with nothing working as well as it would if the concepts were left separate. Basically it is a botched attempt at optimizing for complexity.
I agree that conflating physical and intellectual property is a problem. I think we need a different laws that reward intellectual work directly instead of doing it by creating artificial value, e.g. with DRM, patents, lawsuits, etc.
There is a concept called stewardship, too. "I have a responsibility to this piece of property. I have a moral duty to safeguard, cultivate, and appropriate utilize this property. I expect that it will be passed on to another for usage at some point for some reason, and in recognition of that future steward, I will do my best to forward it in the best condition possible."
I don't feel like I'm doing the concept justice, but hopefully I'm conveying the gist well enough to distinguish from "ownership" and "possession".
"The reason my coworkers haven't stolen the keyboard off my desk when I go to get coffee isn't the government, it is just because they have some base-level respect for me."
- Do you really believe that? If someone wanted your keyboard their thought process - if conscious - probably follows the following: "If I take that and get caught then I'll likely be fired. So it's not worth me putting my monthly salary of $5000 at risk for a $50 keyboard" Well what if you do get caught? Just tell them they can't fire you! You won't leave the building!! Then they'll call the police and I'll be charged with a
I don't think it's good or bad. I just think it's entirely inaccurate to think that if someone covets what you have that they hold back due to a base level of respect for the other person. If that held true there'd just be no crime period in society because everyone would say "I'm not going to do that because I'd hate for that to be done to me as another human being"
"If someone wanted your keyboard their thought process - if conscious - probably follows the following: "If I take that and get caught then I'll likely be fired. So it's not worth me putting my monthly salary of $5000 at risk for a $50 keyboard" Well what if you do get caught?"
That is a depressing but thankfully unrealistic view of how people behave. In my office there are no specific rules about taking keyboards, monitors, or even computers off each other's desk. Once a year the department takes an inventory of the equipment to make sure it is still in the building, and once in the past five years an email was sent out to remind everyone not to take monitors home with them.
The reason nobody takes things from each other here is respect and courtesy. There are only about 100 of us in this building, making us a small enough group that we can trust each other. When things are truly stolen -- taken out of the building, rather than just moved between desks -- emails are sent out asking if anyone knows what happened. It is almost always the case that an outsider came in and grabbed something valuable, and that almost never happens.
Obviously this is not something that scales past a hundred or so people, but the point is that in small, trusting groups there is no real need for iron-clad rules or harsh punishments. People can and do behave respectfully and courteously.
Yes, I do. It is how I think, and I think well enough of my coworkers that I believe they think the same. I wouldn't assume that they don't think that way without evidence of it, since that is a vile thing to assume.
Are there some people without this respect who are held in line merely by the law, or fear of losing their job? Sure, of course there are some people like that. The fact remains that a notion of property/possession exists for the rest of the population; for the people who are not defective in such a way.
Not everybody would steal from those around them if they thought they could get away with it. To be perfectly honest, I am rather suspicious of anyone who assumes that everybody would steal if given the chance.
One thing to consider is the passive vs the active. The people in your office don't steal your keyboard because they have no need for it and/or they don't desire it. That's because they too are given one. That's because it's a very small cost to them to acquire one. The retribution that would come from taking your keyboard is completely out of whack with the benefit of taking it whether that retribution was becoming a social outcast or having the weight of the state applied to the crime. So they're rationale actors driven by self interest vs having any respect (or not) for you. The real test is when someone (rightly or wrongly) covets what you have. Perhaps they're genuinely starving or looking to feed their family. Maybe it's a step above that and they're quite poor and they perceive you to be well off. Those are the better situations to judge whether people are then constrained/motivated by only a self respect for you and/or a fear of state repercussions.
I get what you're aiming at but if you're holding the shotgun, that's not government. Government is when I cede the right to protect my forest with a shotgun in order that a government entity will do it for me. We give government a monopoly on force under the agreement that I generally should not be shooting people to protect my rights.
That's not entirely true, at least in the United States. That's part of the purpose of the 2nd amendment. We cede some of our rights to use force to the government, but things like Castle Doctrine and the 2nd amendment mean we also retain those rights in specific circumstances.
Another aspect of the 2nd amendment people often overlook (particularly gun control advocates) was that it was originally intended as a check to the power of the army. The idea being that should the government ever try to use the military to suppress the public, that an armed public would be able to fight back and presumably being bigger than the military, win. That theory has been greatly eroded in the last 70 years or so by the increasingly large gap between the weapons the military has access to and what the public has access to. Back when the constitution was drafted a rifle was a rifle was a rifle, and 200 soldiers versus 1000 citizens all armed with rifles, the citizens would likely win. These days with the military having tanks and jets and nightvision and all manner of other advanced weapons (including the much debated fully automatic rifles) means that your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict.
>your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict
I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing.
I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks.
That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection.
In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".
In general, the point of something like castle doctrine is to maintain defense of life, not property. If I went down to the edge of my property and someone came onto my property and was not threatening me you can't then shoot them. The argument for castle doctrine is you can consider the act of home invasion itself to represent deadly force and can respond freely.
Castle doctrine is a states-only policy and the feds have no position on it. The second amendment states only that people's right to bear arms shall not be infringed, it doesn't state anything about the application of force.
I don't want to get into this debate on HN but there's not that much evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant to be a check on the army. It's related to the long-standing English principle of the right to self-defense and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English always thought you had the right to defend yourself with deadly force and a long standing tradition of a natural right to bear arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms
It's a totalitarian government where the dictator and the sole citizen of the state are the same person, and the citizen works for the dictator (well, there's no choice). Government is simply the application of force to create rights. No more, no less.
But also, if you come onto my property, you don't have to cede authority to me, I'm still the government and I will make decisions about what happens to you, so you are bound to my laws whether you like it or not.
You need a society for a government to make any sense. One person defending their property is neither a society nor a government.
Until you have the minimum viable population for our species (i.e. the smallest group of humans that can avoid extinction) you cannot really have a society.
Of course, that number depends on things like the environment (a favorable environment will mean a smaller number) and the genetics of the "first" generation. I seriously doubt that the number could be as small as two for any species even under the most ideal circumstances.
The inability to enforce rights in nature is independent of the existence of those rights. You might need a shotgun to defend your life in a "libertarian utopia", but that doesn't mean you don't have a right to it.
In fact, your hypothetical correctly assumes that people need to protect their stuff. This need is evidence of self interest. The fact that there are universal norms that allow the use of force to protect things is evidence of a right to property.
In other words, a victim of theft is rightfully angry. This lets us conclude that he has a right to be free of theft. This indicates a right to property.
There's a difference between legal rights and natural / human rights. The latter are ideals, the former are what are brought into existence by the application of force.
Intellectual property corresponds (somewhat poorly) to the natural right of being allowed to profit from your ideas.
There is no natural right to profit from your ideas. Your ability to even try to profit from your ideas is substantially dependent on external factors in your life -- your position in society, your ancestry, the availability of capital and your ability to acquire it, etc.
Do not confuse the right to think with the right to profit from your ideas. You do have a natural right to think about whatever you want, as well as a natural right to communicate your thoughts to others.
I believe that creative expression should be valued by society, i.e. I believe that people have a natural / human right to rewarded for this kind of work.
But sure, I don't believe in absolute natural rights, much as I don't believe in absolute morals.
Put more simply, I believe that authorship is a natural right, just like ownership. You might ask, why should the idea be mine just because I got to first? And I would answer, why should the tree be yours just because you got to it first?
It is impossible to own an idea. You might be given a monopoly on the application of that idea, but by merely speaking or documenting the idea you distribute it to any that hear or read it and therefore can no longer truly said to own or control it. It's the difference between data, and matter. One is copied infinitely without destruction or consumption (although it can be "lost" in entropy) and can travel at the speed of light. The other is a unique instance subject to the laws governing all matter and capable of being destroyed. In fact it's impossible to truly copy or distribute a physcial object, you can at best create a new arrangement of matter that mirrors some existing matter.
This is why property is a concept solely reserved for physical objects, not to information. They are fundamentally different categories of things. You cannot own an idea any more than you can own a frequency (regulation of the broadcasting of certain frequencies of RF waves should not be confused with "owning" the waves themselves).
It seems to me that when you say that people have a natural right to profit, you actually mean a "right to exclude".
I think that's a whole nuther kettle of fish.
For one, the two are in contradiction. Suppose you believe that you have
the right to exclude, presumably you also believe that all other humans
have the same right, owing to its status as a natural right. By believing
that you can exclude, and therefore profit by way of eliminating competition,
you acknowledge that the competition can exclude you as well.
It boils down to whether or not by "profit", one implies complete domination
of a resource. I tend to think that many parties can profit, without the
necessity to exclude by brute force.
This is also the key difference between patents and copyrights. The former
demands total domination of a resource, while the latter does not.
> And I would answer, why should the tree be yours just because you got to it first?
It's a good point, but there is a difference. It is possible for two parties to arrive at the same intellectual destination without being aware of one another. The same cannot be said for two parties arriving at the same tree, at the same time, but one not being aware of the existence of the other.
I suppose you can construct an argument in which both parties lack all physical sense of awareness. :)
"You might ask, why should the idea be mine just because I got to first? And I would answer, why should the tree be yours just because you got to it first?"
The difference is this: share your tree with me, and there will be only one tree. Share your ideas with me and we can both think about them, utilize them, and benefit from them. This idea is self-evident; just as I am communicating it to anyone who reads this post, it was communicated to me by someone else:
It is true that creative expression should be valued and that people should be encouraged to be creative. I would add that society should set up a system where creative workers can derive an income from their work and that such a system will be vital as more and more things are automated. Property rights are orthogonal to this. I happen to be a creative worker, but there is no need for me or anyone else to "own" the products of my work; my research group's salaries are paid with grant money, because the government wants to encourage the work we do, and we want our work to reach as many eyes as possible.
I disagree with your definitions. Rights, though abstract, are real. This is why atrocities outside the reach of law (murder in international water, war crimes, genocide) are clearly wrong.
Laws are nothing but codified decisions from government. Sometimes they define the specifics of how natural rights are balanced against each other. However, laws sometimes violate rights, such as the now-repealed Jim Crow laws in the American South. Furthermore, the term "legal rights" can also be a misnomer for government-guaranteed privileges such as the "right" to government-provided benefits or (in my opinion) intellectual property "rights".
The difference legal and natural rights corresponds to the difference between laws and morals. That's all I mean. Natural rights are real things in as much as morals are real things.
Let me recap, because discussions become convoluted in forum format.
First ataggart makes the point that elevating patent and copyright privileges to the level of natural rights is wrong and implies (through Orwell) that confusing intellectual property rights and physical property rights leads to foolish thinking.
Then, you make the argument that it doesn't matter because, "Every legal concept is entirely the government's creation, including both physical and intellectual property...."
Then a bunch of people, myself included, disagree with that point by referencing Hobbes and Locke and providing examples of how ownership exists outside of government influence.
Now, I agree that "Natural rights are real things in as much as morals are real things." And since we are not amoral, we can presume that natural rights exist.
Remember, the original point is that labels matter here. Mislabeling things as "rights" causes people to both overvalue grants from their governments and (more importantly) to devalue natural rights as being decreed by government (which means they can be abolished or altered by the same powers).
When your "rights" are derived from government and they are taken away, you're on the losing side. When rights are inalienable and they are violated, you are being persecuted.
All that is to say, "intellectual property rights" is a dumb term.
The difference between legal rights and natural rights is that legal rights are guaranteed by force. As soon as you guarantee a natural right by force it becomes a legal right: you make the law.
You're free to define "government" in such a way, but that's not a very useful definition in a discussion about what role the "government" should play.
I think we went through this before. What was your definition of government again? A man and a woman alone together in a forest and the man has the shotgun?
Or is that most basic mutual respect now "the government" in an office environment? If that is the case then we are basically removing any useful meaning from the word.