[jlgreco]

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.

[foobarbazqux]

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.

[jlgreco]

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.)

[foobarbazqux]

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.

[betterunix]

"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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...

(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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_anne

Like I said, politics...)

[foobarbazqux]

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.

[betterunix]

What you are saying basically ignores the history of copyright law. Copyright was created not because society placed a high value on creative expression, but because of a desire by the government of England to censor printed material. Modern copyright was created when that system was abolished, not because of the plight of artists but because of the lobbying effort of publishers, who sought to restore the monopoly on printing they had enjoyed under the censorship system.

[jlgreco]

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.

[foobarbazqux]

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.

[saraid216]

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".

[jusben1369]

"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"

[betterunix]

"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.

[jlgreco]

> Do you really believe that?

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.

[jusben1369]

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.

[iopq]

Of course they can fire you. They can stop paying you. You can stay in the building all you want.