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Neither Intellectual Nor Property
Techdirt's Mike Masnick is writing a series of short articles on topics around intellectual property. His latest focuses on the term itself, exploring the nomenclature people have proposed to describe matter that is neither intellectual nor property. The whole series (starting here) is well worth a read.
Actually, anything with that many lawyers has gone way past intellectual and we all know the lawyers end up with more of the property than anyone else...so yes - I'd say he's right.
I better go RTFA now
The Mothership
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain? That everything that comes out of my brain is MINE MINE MINE and has nothing to do with the world I live in? You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right? and that even he decided it was wrong.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You're right, the answer is simple. No it does not exist. There is nothing physical, thus while you have the right to share or commercialize it, you cannot prevent anyone else from doing so as well, once they either learn of the idea or come up with it on their own. No matter what the facist corporatists say.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That's (one reason) why people get so upset over IP law - there's nothing stopping them copying ideas EXCEPT the law (it's so rare that something is produced by one person that it may as well be discounted), and there's no harm done by copying IP (RIAA/MPAA might argue that, but you could just as easily argue that their business system is based solely on the law, which means that it would be different/redundant without that law).
That's as succinctly as I could manage to summarise the article, and none of it seemed like intellectual wankery - this argument has serious ramifications IRL, and looking at the fundamentals of it seems as good a place to start as any. So, what you generate with your brain IS your property, but just like your money, it's completely useless if you don't SPEND it.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
So if you happen to simultaneously invent something with someone who beats you to the patent office by 20 minutes, you're happy paying him for his intellectual property that you clearly stole (telepathically)?
-- Alastair
IANAL (I don't even play one on TV), but it seems to me that IP might be considered a legal fiction, much like the equally disputed concept of corporate personhood. Maybe our resident NYCL could set me straight on this.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Code/music/data are no more than a sequence (pretty large sometimes) of numbers, that is, bytes. If I came up with sequence, say, 5, 10, 11, 35, 255 - can I claim it to be my property and sue you for copying it? If not, how long should such sequence be in order to allow this?
Coding etudes
Even if it is a nickel, it would solve so many problems. If it is worth so much to protect then there should be no problem in paying tax to cover for the mess it makes.
So you're saying that you owe society nothing for providing the stimulus to your amazing brain?
I thought he was saying that he owes the estate of Aristotle for his use of that idea, and he owes some money to various Germanic tribes for their contributions to the English language. I'd imagine that is keyboard is illegal, as it didn't include any payment to the estate of Christopher Sholes, inventor of the QWERTY keyboard layout. Does his power company pay rights to Tesla's decedents for their use of alternating current to power that computer? Is there anything that we as humans can make or do that doesn't utilize the ideas of other people?
We are all just people.
But we know that there is no scarcity on the bits themselves, and the copyright only creates the scarcity. What bothers me, and probably a lot of other people, is that they act like we're taking a physical object when we're not. If I download a song that I will never buy anyway, they've lost nothing by that download, unlike someone stealing a car, or a dvd off the shelf, or any of the other ridiculous bullshit analogies that they use.
The scarcity's in the time and talent of the artist. Rick Astley put time and effort into his songs, and he's considerably more talented than most singers. If he wrote the music and lyrics, then that's even more time that was put into the song. It's not property in the tangible sense.
Also, our law recognizes this, because you're not charged with felony theft when you download a shitload of music/movies off the internet, so try again.
If you read further down the Wikipedia page, you'd know that it actually did happen:
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Well, you're right, but only as far as the point that neither mortgage nor bond are property -- they are both financial claims against the future revenue stream of whoever sells them.
Similarly, copyright, trademarks and the host of related items aren't property. They are a limited monopoly issued by the government for whatever reasons to their holder.
Let's look at the difference between the two in the physical world, rather than the abstraction of the physical world which is the law. The right to exclude Real property - exclusion can be accomplished without involving 3rd parties.
Intellectual property - exclusion can only occur with the aid of 3rd parties (i.e. law enforcement). The right to convey Real property - Once conveyed, its gone.
Intellectual property - Once conveyed, you still have it. The right to subdivide Real property - Subdivision is finite, there is only so much to go around.
Intellectual property - Subdivision is infinite, you can give away pieces of arbitrary size to as many people as want them. The right to control how something is used Real property - control does not require 3rd parties.
Intellectual property - control requires 3rd parties (i.e. law enforcement) That is a non-rivalrous property right: my ability to get my golf ball is not impeded by the number of other people who have that right. Whether or not a right is rivalrous says nothing about whether or not the actual resource is rivalrous. The entire world could have the right to retrieve golfballs from someone's yard, but the entire world could not actually DO it because the yard is rivalrous. IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else. But physical resources do not resemble ideas anywhere but within the realm of some legal systems.
With physical property I (or me and both my friends) can (attempt to) physically secure property from you and your roving band of 6^2^2 friends. Regardless of whether or not I'm successful, only one of us ends up with it. Either I'm successful in defending it, or you manage to take it from me. This idea led mankind to villages and countries: To defend my property from the invaders.
Contrast this with an idea: Once I publish my idea (or even tell one person) it is impossible for me to ever be sure that no one else uses my idea. I suppose I could kill the first person I told, but this is an unusually harsh 'defence' for 'property' and still doesn't guarantee that either they already told someone else, or (as often happens) someone else had the same idea as me.
The reality is that physical property can be protected, but ideas can not.
The 'net is a perfect example of this: the more some organization tries to stifle the dissemination of something (perhaps internal e-mails) the more it gets copied throughout the net until it becomes literally impossible for anyone (including the government) to halt this spread.
That we may or may not make use of the government to help protect our physical property isn't really important. What is important is that physical property can be protected, while ideas can not. And this is true due to the rivalrous nature of property, and the non-rivalrous nature of ideas. This "problem" has been exacerbated by the internet, which is of course a giant idea copying machine: your idea goes in once, but comes out everywhere...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Calling us "idiots" was your first mistake.
Your second is jumping into a philosophical debate with something that doesn't make much sense -- the whole point of calling it "intellectual property" is so that there can be a concept of theft, right?
Well, I didn't steal the copyright, and can't.
I disagree with Stallman about many things. He did point out that Intellectual Property isn't a completely sound term, as it covers two or three completely separate branches of law.
But he didn't have a problem with the concept of copyright itself, which makes you an idiot for bringing him up in the first place. The GPL works through copyright. It could not work without copyright.
It ever occur to you that our legal system might be wrong? And that this might be the whole point of these discussions?
All this "sophistry" is very relevant to the point, which is this:
You can post as many Slashdot comments as you want. You can let the RIAA and the MPAA sue as many people as it can. You can pass as much legislation as you want.
But all of that is pissing in the wind. Piracy is a fact. It is real, it is happening, and it is not going away.
So, the question of whether or not to legitimize something that a large portion of the population is already doing anyway is a good one. Think Prohibition.
And think very carefully about how you'd like copyrights, trademarks, and patents to work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!