Your statement is emotionally quite loaded, so that I couldn't refuse and had to create an account in order to answer you.
Maybe I start with the answer first:
- Yes, property exists for real life things.
- No, not every real life thing can become property.
- No, there is no such a thing like Intellectual Property (IP).
When I have a look through the responses I see answers that exactly play around my statements, but normally it is very hard for regular people to answer this hard question properly. I had to read a lot and do lot's of thought, before I really understood.
In legal terms, property is not really well defined. Legislature makes use of stomach-felt intuition about it and makes single rules and exception in how to deal with it. You guess it: it is always very dangerous to use undefined words. Property is also used in an attribute-of-something sense, which adds to confusion, but has no relationship to what we mean by property here. The result of this intuition-based approach is that every country has different rules for it and especially with immaterial property the discussion really heats up. But I think completely unnecessarily.
Property is the right to control the use of objects (entities). From an ethical point of view that kind of property concept arises, when the question comes up about who decides, what happens with the fruits of your work. Therefore, correctly, many people associate property with (hard) work. Unfortunately, in capitalism, work and property are set to be equal, to be kind of the same thing, instead of being just related concepts (work produces property). The laws in all capitalistic countries protect this unjustified "equal sign". The work of property is the "interest". This is the extra amount of work you have to do in order to make the other guy work less. You know it from the bank, but you also know it as the dividents to your company's owners or any kind of rent. The result of this is that you can acquire more property by owning property. I abbreviate this statement here and come right to the point: The result of the wrong equal sign is, that Adam Smith's "Magic Hand" doesn't work! The Magic Hand, expressed in terms of Systems Theory, is a negative feedback loop that makes a system converge to a stable (and by the way distributive) state. By allowing property to behave as if it was work on the market you convert the negative feedback loop into a positive feedback loop. Therefore, in capitalism everything has to go faster, bigger and bolder. This seems like a nice thing, but a positively feedbacked system also amplifies all negative economical and social developments in a unsolvable way like the problem of the rich and the poor and resource exhaustion. Capitalists are people, who favor the system of getting some extra property, without having done some useful work for it. Economy looks then not like a serious matter of using resources to provide people with things they need but like a nice game of chances where you can earn some extra score. In capitalistic systems there never arises a trade off between limited resources and gain. The very rich people do no do useful work, but their property "earns" the riches for them. And it does it, basically, with no limit, since doing less than nothing is not much of trading-off argument. From the statements posted here, I guess, that none of you guys is a capitalist, because everybody favors the principle of property as a result of work.
But doing work is, ethically again, not the only criterion to be fulfilled, when it comes down to the decision, if something can be property or not. Without getting into very long details, property must fulfill ALL these criteria:
- result of (human) work
- identifiable entity (i.e. not a class of things)
- quantifiable (can be counted or limited resource)
- has no will (no slaves, no animal property)
- was not obtained at the expense of others
- does not harm others
Slashdot Mirror
Your statement is emotionally quite loaded, so that I couldn't refuse and had to create an account in order to answer you.
Maybe I start with the answer first:
- Yes, property exists for real life things.
- No, not every real life thing can become property.
- No, there is no such a thing like Intellectual Property (IP).
When I have a look through the responses I see answers that exactly play around my statements, but normally it is very hard for regular people to answer this hard question properly. I had to read a lot and do lot's of thought, before I really understood.
In legal terms, property is not really well defined. Legislature makes use of stomach-felt intuition about it and makes single rules and exception in how to deal with it. You guess it: it is always very dangerous to use undefined words. Property is also used in an attribute-of-something sense, which adds to confusion, but has no relationship to what we mean by property here. The result of this intuition-based approach is that every country has different rules for it and especially with immaterial property the discussion really heats up. But I think completely unnecessarily.
Property is the right to control the use of objects (entities). From an ethical point of view that kind of property concept arises, when the question comes up about who decides, what happens with the fruits of your work. Therefore, correctly, many people associate property with (hard) work. Unfortunately, in capitalism, work and property are set to be equal, to be kind of the same thing, instead of being just related concepts (work produces property). The laws in all capitalistic countries protect this unjustified "equal sign". The work of property is the "interest". This is the extra amount of work you have to do in order to make the other guy work less. You know it from the bank, but you also know it as the dividents to your company's owners or any kind of rent. The result of this is that you can acquire more property by owning property. I abbreviate this statement here and come right to the point: The result of the wrong equal sign is, that Adam Smith's "Magic Hand" doesn't work! The Magic Hand, expressed in terms of Systems Theory, is a negative feedback loop that makes a system converge to a stable (and by the way distributive) state. By allowing property to behave as if it was work on the market you convert the negative feedback loop into a positive feedback loop. Therefore, in capitalism everything has to go faster, bigger and bolder. This seems like a nice thing, but a positively feedbacked system also amplifies all negative economical and social developments in a unsolvable way like the problem of the rich and the poor and resource exhaustion. Capitalists are people, who favor the system of getting some extra property, without having done some useful work for it. Economy looks then not like a serious matter of using resources to provide people with things they need but like a nice game of chances where you can earn some extra score. In capitalistic systems there never arises a trade off between limited resources and gain. The very rich people do no do useful work, but their property "earns" the riches for them. And it does it, basically, with no limit, since doing less than nothing is not much of trading-off argument. From the statements posted here, I guess, that none of you guys is a capitalist, because everybody favors the principle of property as a result of work.
But doing work is, ethically again, not the only criterion to be fulfilled, when it comes down to the decision, if something can be property or not. Without getting into very long details, property must fulfill ALL these criteria:
- result of (human) work
- identifiable entity (i.e. not a class of things)
- quantifiable (can be counted or limited resource)
- has no will (no slaves, no animal property)
- was not obtained at the expense of others
- does not harm others
That means, that for most of the things