[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.

[foobarbazqux]

Publishers represent artists and take a cut. Of course they want a monopoly, otherwise how can they pay royalties to artists? Walt Disney was an artist, and what we have now is Mickey Mouse copyright law.

I'm not saying that IP laws are amazing by any means. I'm saying they are attempts to protect things that we have always valued on a moral basis: invention, creation, branding, and secrecy / privacy.

It doesn't even matter what the intent of the people creating the laws is, what matters is in practice whether people feel the laws protect those things that they value. The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law.

[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".