[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(OK, to be fair, the first "true" copyright law was created after that law was repealed and a bunch of businessmen complained about their lost monopoly: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.

[betterunix]

Read the history of copyright -- the Star Chamber, the Stationer's company, and how publishers lobbied for copyrights (using authors as a convenient excuse). Seriously, you should look at the actual history of copyright law. It was not created for the sake of artists. It was not created for moral reasons. It was invented for purely political and business-motivated reasons, nothing more.

"The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law"

So what? The point of copyrights is not to protect artists. The point of copyrights, at least in the United States, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The question is not about what artists feel, but about whether the majority of people feel that copyrights are working in the best interests of society. I suspect that most people would not care one way or the other about copyright if you were to ask, because most people ignore copyrights.

I also have my doubts about the majority of artists feeling protected by copyright law. Most musicians, authors, actors, painters, etc. are not even paid enough to live on and have to take second jobs. Either they have truly mastered doublethink or copyright is not really providing those creative workers with as much protection as we are expected to believe. This is under the current copyright system, which features the longest terms in the history of American copyrights and some of the most expansive copyright law ever seen.

[foobarbazqux]

Laws are programs. It doesn't matter what the programmer who wrote the program wanted the program to do. It matters how the program is used and what it does.

I agree that copyright law is terribly implemented (DMCA, DRM, expiration 70 years after death, 3 strikes rules, etc.), but nevertheless, I don't know a single artist (or knowledge worker) that doesn't feel that the Berne Convention provides them at least a minimal protection against outright plagiarism. Even the the most liberal Creative Commons licenses build on top of copyright, even BSD style licenses do.

I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?

[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.