Note that probably the most important part of the announcement by the appeals court is that the *full court* will take the case.
Normally appeals are heard by a 3-member panel of the full (11/12 member) court --- and the losing side can appeal the decision of that panel to the full court.
The appeals court has short-circuited that in this case, agreeing to hear the case directly. That's *extremely* unusual....
If my ISP could not handle the traffic, then they would not sell me the connection.
Uh... sure they would. Internet economics works sort of like airplane economics --- airplanes regularly oversell seats on certain routes based on the presumption that [x%] won't show, and sometimes they're wrong, and have to bump people.
ISPs do something similar: they regularly sell ~120% of their available bandwidth under the assumption that *it won't all be used at the same time*, and then once in a while there is a problem with it.
The biggest problem is with cable modem providers, where bandwidth is explicitly shared between multiple subscribers, but it exists with other types of ISPs, as well.
I'm sure you would like things the way they were "back in the day", when we all were using the Internet for nothing but Gopher and Newsgroups, and nobody transfered anything at speeds above 9600 baud, but that day has passed. Try to get over it.
The problem isn't that people are downloading more than they were back in the days of gopher, but that the rate at which the total available bandwidth has increased is *lower* than the rate at which the total amount of data being routed has increased.
Wouldn't sending email from a submarine allow someone to detect its location? If the whole point is that the subs are supposed to be hidden...
(Actually, there must be a way to solve this --- as otherwise radio contact from the sub to a base would have the same problem. I'm not schooled in military technique, tho; anyone know what the solution is?)
That would also explain why, in the US, use of any portable electronics is prohibited during takeoff and landing (the time when interference is most problematic), and in much of South America is prohibited outright. (Imagine traveling on a 12-hour plane flight with *no walkman* --- *shudder*).
I wonder if the massive expense involved in the recent move to put miniature tvs on the back of all seats in third class (oops. i mean coach, of course) seats on long-haul flights is due to the need to ensure minimal leakage?
On another topic --- what's with moderators today? Lots of stuff in this thread is moderated 'offtopic' which seems reasonably on topic to me....
They can't. The appeals court has the power to not hear the case (de facto endorsement of Jackson's decision), or to hear it. *If the court hears the case*, then whichever side loses there has a right to appeal; the case can't simply be made to go away by anyone other than the USSC.
DOJ has 15 days in which to ask Jackson to refer the case to the USSC. Once it has done so, he has 15 days to issue the referral.
What happens from there depends on if the court is in session. If the court is in session, it gets the paperwork and decides whether or not to take the case. If the court is *not* in session, than one of the justices gets the paperwork and can (a) issue an emergency stay; (b) call for an emergency court hearing; (c) postpone consideration of taking the case until the court session starts (in October); or (d) refer the case back to the appeals court. *Any* of those actions can be overturned by a full vote of the court if another justice chooses to press the issue (although that is fairly rare).
My bet is --- regardless of which path it takes --- the USSC will end up returning the case to the appeals court, mostly because it will allow the appeals court to help filter through the monstrous amount of data associated with the case (and because Rehnquist, at least, is well known for wanting to *reduce* the court's workload).
There's a rather credible (if somewhat paranoid) argument that by getting the judge pissed off at them, MS damaged *his* credibility, and thereby increased their chances of winning on appeal.
You're simply making a distinction between short-term self interest (immediate gratification) vs long-term self interest. In the long run, it's the latter that counts.
Sure --- but there's a trade-off; it's not in my long-term best interest to never do the things that bring me short-term gratification; i'd end up committing suicide from depression that way.
Sure... MS tends to have a 2-3 year release cycle for Windows. (Win3.0: 1990; Win3.1: 1991; NT3.5: 1993; Win95: 1995; NT4: 1997; win98: 1998; Win2k: 2000; Millenium: 2001?).
But the company I work for, for example, has a 1-year cycle (more or less). Thus, the idea frightens me...
2) The 2 NewCo. may not recombine, enter into Joint Ventures, provide APIs to each other that are not available to other ISVs.. or basically collude.
Which brings up an interesting question: what happens to further development on COM/COM+? The technology is *integral* to the functioning of the office products; it's also, in recent years, been repositioned to be essential to the operating system as well.
Under the literal terms of the judgement, the shared IP goes to the office division --- which may make sense legally, but is absurd technologically.
I wonder if this is part of why Visual Studio 7 has been so delayed?
So that means that MS cannot update the kernel in such a way as make any API obsolete or perform worse if any Windows apps still use it?
That's one way to read it. In intent, I think it's supposed to discourage changes which are *intended* to disrupt the middleware vendor --- and MS could probably work around it by inviting the middleware vendor in and offering to help them update their software to deal with the API change.
continue for three years after said release to license on the same terms and conditions the previous Windows Operating System Product to any OEM that desires such a license
Yowch! Given that most of the software industry seems to be working on a 1-year or less release cycle, the idea that you have to continue selling version [x] for *three years* after the release of version [x+1] is mind-blowing.
Wonder if they're also required to provide bug fixes?
Because of this, I claim that a mobile and fragemented society is more stable and more congenial then one which is locked up in position and with roots.
Certainly a taoist would argue this: it is only by seeking to preserve *the present* that we introduce fear and jealousy.
Ah, but *all* of those depend on people having different definitions of "self interest" than yours.
I use Windows; it's in my self-interest, as it earns my a paycheck. I smoke pot; it's in my self-interest, as it's often the best way available to relax. I occasionally drink to excess; at that time, I think it's in my self interest.
That you define *your* self interest differently than I define mine doesn't obviate the fact that i'm not acting contrary to my own self-interest, as I define it.:)
Also consider what happened with that movie The Program a couple of years back. It showed a scene where football players would lie in the middle of a busy street to build nerve. Some real football players tried it and died. No free speech issue here - the studio yanked the scene at great expense to avoid lawsuits. In a digital world, they could have done it overnight.
Again, that's hardly a feature.
I don't *like* living in a world where if I say "Chopping your arm off is fun" and someone does it, they can then sue me. The idea that technology would make that *easier* is disturbing. Probably true, but disturbing.
but they still keep with them the baggage of our society (drug use, anti-social behaviour, etc
it's a side topic, but i'm really not convinced that small-scale drug use is any worse than small-scale alcohol use (but then again, I live in a community where it's overwhelmingly common..)
A big part of anarchist organizing nowadays is not attempting to forcibly smash the state, but instead creating social groups (such as Anarchist Soccer with the hopes of getting people the hell out of their houses and into groups where people can talk.
Clearly a good thing even if it has zero effect on people's politics... I almost always work as a polling place guy during elections, and the thing that i enjoy *most* about it is the ability to meet, and talk to, people that I would never encounter under normal day-to-day circumstances; and I really wish there were more opportunities to do that...
the more society becomes privatized, and the more people are separated from eachother, the easier it is to control people.
That makes a fair amount of sense: without the ability to compare your experiences to those of others, you have no way of knowing whether your experiences are normal or not; and so it is easier for outside forces to influence what you believe about your life *without you even knowing about it*. Lack of comparison leads to lack of perspective --- and fear leads to lack of compassion.
Well, then you might want to volunteer at the Internet Service Collective, or the Electricity Co-op, so that people don't have such a crappy impression of your work ethic
ok, that works *as long as i care*; but what keeps me from stealing what I want? (Note: I don't think there will be very many people who do this --- but neither do I think there will be *nobody*; the system has to be able to deal with the one-in-a-million exception as well as the normal case. this is sort of like the problem with death penalty absolutists: maybe the best thing to do with charles manson *is* to kill him, even if the death penalty *in general* isn't a good solution).
People get bored pretty quick with doing nothing.
True enough. And, arguably, part of the problem with our current economic system is that it doesn't *allow* people to get bored enough to go figure out what it is that they really care about, and where their creativity would come out and they could produce something new and exciting and beautiful.
he idea of "freeloaders" is usually a scapegoat for people who's skills aren't "economically viable" or who are old or sick or disabled, or live in a place with high unemployment and very few jobs
Or marketing people.:P Seriously, though, most people I know have lived with housemates who were effectively freeloaders, and it isn't hard to imagine that generalizing to other parts of economic life... of course, that may well have been due to a lack of emotional commitment (the freeloaders didn't actually *care* about the other people involved). But how can you guarantee the presence of emotional commitment to a community?
A community would have to make a commitment to non-violence. If anybody breaks that commitment, then the community has a right to defend the victim
This is probably a semantic argument, but: how is that different from the community constituting a government?
Would you trust a political reporting/analysis site which was funded by advertising to tell you the truth at all times, and not allow the interests of their advertisers to obscure the information they were reporting on or analysing?
Maybe i'm more cynical than I should be, but I certainly wouldn't extend that kind of trust...
In this country, the way this system works, the only votes that matter are those of the electoral college.
Yes and no. You do, after all, get to vote for the members of the electoral college. Besides which, the electoral college only elects *the president and vice-president*; in practice, their power is more circumscribed than people realize.
Besides which, in many states, you can vote *directly on laws themselves* --- most notably in California, where there are typically 30 or so per election, but also in other states as well.
I think it was Winston Churchill who said Democracy is the worst form of government around, except for all the other forms of government."
maybe this says less about the merits of "democracy" than it does about the failures of government?
Absolutely. Yet, at the same time --- having *no* government isn't really a feasible solution, at least until you find someway to convince people like the thugs running around in Sierra Leone chopping off people's hands for refusing to give them money that they don't have not to do such things.
Democracy, flawed as it is, is better than the alternative. The thing that scares me is that a lot of the people I hear railing about the evils of our system haven't *considered* what the alternatives are.
Well, one thing that you're inadvertently doing is applying anarchist principles to a non-anarchist society
Sure... it's hard to avoid doing that, tho, as I'm not well versed enough in anarchist thought to have an image of an anarchist society to apply them to.:)
The difference is that there probably will be a social understanding (under anarchism, violence enforced laws are replaced by social understandings about acceptable behaviour)
I can sort of see that, with two caveats: (1) this assumes that I know enough of the people around me that this social understanding would actually have force. In *contemporary* society, that often isn't true --- I don't, for example, know my neighbors, nor have particular interest in knowing them; I don't see that changing in the near future.
(2) how does anarcho-socialism deal with the 'free rider' problem? (Boiled down to the essence, this is asking how you get your lazy/cheap housemate to buy toilet paper; more generally, it's a question about how you prevent people from profiting off of the efforts of others. Socialism doesn't have a good answer to this, and neither does capitalism [although it's more masked in capitalism, as the free riders *appear* to be productive]; does anarcho-socialism?)
In an anarchist system, who enforces your ability to charge rent?
Presumably I could use force to eject the person not paying rent, right? Unless they could use force to prevent me from doing so, or there were some *effective social sanction* against my doing so...
This is the center of the problem I have believing in anarchism -- I don't understand what, in the absence of a government monopoly on force, would prevent individuals from using force. I suppose you could depend on everyone agreeing not to use force --- but then the entire community is vulnerable to anyone who violates that agreement, and the incentive for individuals to violate it is going to be fairly high...
Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?
I'm *really* not certain that should qualify as a benefit. Sounds more like a nightmare to me --- both from the perspective of the director (who would have to watch his work being altered against his will) and from the perspective of an audience that likes thought-provoking films.
More bland movies that say nothing interesting would be a depressing effect of digital transmission.
Wow, cool: an interesting political debate on slashdot!:) [Feel free to take offline, if it's easier]
Private is based on *not* using what you own.
Isn't that to a certain extent an artificial distinction? Example: assume I am single and live in a house which, under the current legal system, I own. I'm seriously injured in a car crash and hospitalized for two months; do I lose the ownership of my house while i'm in the hospital, because i'm not using it? Or (perhaps more realistic) what if i'm in a work situation that requires me to split my time 50/50 between two cities on the opposite side of the country, and I have a house in both cities?
In an anarchist system, who enforces the distinction between personal and private? If i'm buying a house from you, because you're moving to another city, how do you know if i'm going to use it (in which case it's personal) and not rent it out?
A person "owns" them only because a peice of paper backed up by the violence of the government says that they own them.
I suppose that's one way to view it. On the other hand, usually they "own" the property because they made an agreement with someone else who owned it (say the first person was using it, to simplify) to exchange [x] for the ownership of the property; to invalidate that agreement would require violence of another sort, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Note that probably the most important part of the announcement by the appeals court is that the *full court* will take the case.
....
Normally appeals are heard by a 3-member panel of the full (11/12 member) court --- and the losing side can appeal the decision of that panel to the full court.
The appeals court has short-circuited that in this case, agreeing to hear the case directly. That's *extremely* unusual
There's always at least one (and often more than one) in any release of Delphi or C++Builder ...
Oligopolies do screw the consumer (Gasoline, Automobiles, Backbone providers); however, the exsistance of oligopoly is not illegal.
As long as they aren't in collusion with one another, in which case it is explicitly illegal.
(Note that the DOJ is currently involved in an antitrust suit against Visa and Mastercard).
If my ISP could not handle the traffic, then they would not sell me the connection.
... sure they would. Internet economics works sort of like airplane economics --- airplanes regularly oversell seats on certain routes based on the presumption that [x%] won't show, and sometimes they're wrong, and have to bump people.
Uh
ISPs do something similar: they regularly sell ~120% of their available bandwidth under the assumption that *it won't all be used at the same time*, and then once in a while there is a problem with it.
The biggest problem is with cable modem providers, where bandwidth is explicitly shared between multiple subscribers, but it exists with other types of ISPs, as well.
I'm sure you would like things the way they were "back in the day", when we all were using the Internet for nothing but Gopher and Newsgroups, and nobody transfered anything at speeds above 9600 baud, but that day has passed. Try to get over it.
The problem isn't that people are downloading more than they were back in the days of gopher, but that the rate at which the total available bandwidth has increased is *lower* than the rate at which the total amount of data being routed has increased.
Wouldn't sending email from a submarine allow someone to detect its location? If the whole point is that the subs are supposed to be hidden ...
(Actually, there must be a way to solve this --- as otherwise radio contact from the sub to a base would have the same problem. I'm not schooled in military technique, tho; anyone know what the solution is?)
That would also explain why, in the US, use of any portable electronics is prohibited during takeoff and landing (the time when interference is most problematic), and in much of South America is prohibited outright. (Imagine traveling on a 12-hour plane flight with *no walkman* --- *shudder*).
....
I wonder if the massive expense involved in the recent move to put miniature tvs on the back of all seats in third class (oops. i mean coach, of course) seats on long-haul flights is due to the need to ensure minimal leakage?
On another topic --- what's with moderators today? Lots of stuff in this thread is moderated 'offtopic' which seems reasonably on topic to me
They'll dismiss the case
They can't. The appeals court has the power to not hear the case (de facto endorsement of Jackson's decision), or to hear it. *If the court hears the case*, then whichever side loses there has a right to appeal; the case can't simply be made to go away by anyone other than the USSC.
DOJ has 15 days in which to ask Jackson to refer the case to the USSC. Once it has done so, he has 15 days to issue the referral.
What happens from there depends on if the court is in session. If the court is in session, it gets the paperwork and decides whether or not to take the case. If the court is *not* in session, than one of the justices gets the paperwork and can (a) issue an emergency stay; (b) call for an emergency court hearing; (c) postpone consideration of taking the case until the court session starts (in October); or (d) refer the case back to the appeals court. *Any* of those actions can be overturned by a full vote of the court if another justice chooses to press the issue (although that is fairly rare).
My bet is --- regardless of which path it takes --- the USSC will end up returning the case to the appeals court, mostly because it will allow the appeals court to help filter through the monstrous amount of data associated with the case (and because Rehnquist, at least, is well known for wanting to *reduce* the court's workload).
This means that OS can continue to use COM without restrictions, they just don't own it :) I don't see what the problem is?
COM is a half-finished technology, essentially; who gets to work on future developments, and what kind of licensing scheme works out of it?
There's a rather credible (if somewhat paranoid) argument that by getting the judge pissed off at them, MS damaged *his* credibility, and thereby increased their chances of winning on appeal.
You're simply making a distinction between short-term self interest (immediate gratification) vs long-term self interest. In the long run, it's the latter that counts.
Sure --- but there's a trade-off; it's not in my long-term best interest to never do the things that bring me short-term gratification; i'd end up committing suicide from depression that way.
Sure ... MS tends to have a 2-3 year release cycle for Windows. (Win3.0: 1990; Win3.1: 1991; NT3.5: 1993; Win95: 1995; NT4: 1997; win98: 1998; Win2k: 2000; Millenium: 2001?).
...
But the company I work for, for example, has a 1-year cycle (more or less). Thus, the idea frightens me
2) The 2 NewCo. may not recombine, enter into Joint Ventures, provide APIs to each other that are not available to other ISVs.. or basically collude.
Which brings up an interesting question: what happens to further development on COM/COM+? The technology is *integral* to the functioning of the office products; it's also, in recent years, been repositioned to be essential to the operating system as well.
Under the literal terms of the judgement, the shared IP goes to the office division --- which may make sense legally, but is absurd technologically.
I wonder if this is part of why Visual Studio 7 has been so delayed?
So that means that MS cannot update the kernel in such a way as make any API obsolete or perform worse if any Windows apps still use it?
That's one way to read it. In intent, I think it's supposed to discourage changes which are *intended* to disrupt the middleware vendor --- and MS could probably work around it by inviting the middleware vendor in and offering to help them update their software to deal with the API change.
continue for three years after said release to license on the same terms and conditions the previous Windows Operating System Product to any OEM that desires such a license
Yowch! Given that most of the software industry seems to be working on a 1-year or less release cycle, the idea that you have to continue selling version [x] for *three years* after the release of version [x+1] is mind-blowing.
Wonder if they're also required to provide bug fixes?
Because of this, I claim that a mobile and fragemented society is more stable and more congenial then one which is locked up in position and with roots.
Certainly a taoist would argue this: it is only by seeking to preserve *the present* that we introduce fear and jealousy.
Ah, but *all* of those depend on people having different definitions of "self interest" than yours.
:)
I use Windows; it's in my self-interest, as it earns my a paycheck. I smoke pot; it's in my self-interest, as it's often the best way available to relax. I occasionally drink to excess; at that time, I think it's in my self interest.
That you define *your* self interest differently than I define mine doesn't obviate the fact that i'm not acting contrary to my own self-interest, as I define it.
Also consider what happened with that movie The Program a couple of years back. It showed a scene where football players would lie in the middle of a busy street to build nerve. Some real football players tried it and died. No free speech issue here - the studio yanked the scene at great expense to avoid lawsuits. In a digital world, they could have done it overnight.
Again, that's hardly a feature.
I don't *like* living in a world where if I say "Chopping your arm off is fun" and someone does it, they can then sue me. The idea that technology would make that *easier* is disturbing. Probably true, but disturbing.
but they still keep with them the baggage of our society (drug use, anti-social behaviour, etc
..)
... I almost always work as a polling place guy during elections, and the thing that i enjoy *most* about it is the ability to meet, and talk to, people that I would never encounter under normal day-to-day circumstances; and I really wish there were more opportunities to do that ...
:P Seriously, though, most people I know have lived with housemates who were effectively freeloaders, and it isn't hard to imagine that generalizing to other parts of economic life ... of course, that may well have been due to a lack of emotional commitment (the freeloaders didn't actually *care* about the other people involved). But how can you guarantee the presence of emotional commitment to a community?
:)
it's a side topic, but i'm really not convinced that small-scale drug use is any worse than small-scale alcohol use (but then again, I live in a community where it's overwhelmingly common
A big part of anarchist organizing nowadays is not attempting to forcibly smash the state, but instead creating social groups (such as Anarchist Soccer with the hopes of getting people the hell out of their houses and into groups where people can talk.
Clearly a good thing even if it has zero effect on people's politics
the more society becomes privatized, and the more people are separated from eachother, the easier it is to control people.
That makes a fair amount of sense: without the ability to compare your experiences to those of others, you have no way of knowing whether your experiences are normal or not; and so it is easier for outside forces to influence what you believe about your life *without you even knowing about it*. Lack of comparison leads to lack of perspective --- and fear leads to lack of compassion.
Well, then you might want to volunteer at the Internet Service Collective, or the Electricity Co-op, so that people don't have such a crappy impression of your work ethic
ok, that works *as long as i care*; but what keeps me from stealing what I want? (Note: I don't think there will be very many people who do this --- but neither do I think there will be *nobody*; the system has to be able to deal with the one-in-a-million exception as well as the normal case. this is sort of like the problem with death penalty absolutists: maybe the best thing to do with charles manson *is* to kill him, even if the death penalty *in general* isn't a good solution).
People get bored pretty quick with doing nothing.
True enough. And, arguably, part of the problem with our current economic system is that it doesn't *allow* people to get bored enough to go figure out what it is that they really care about, and where their creativity would come out and they could produce something new and exciting and beautiful.
he idea of "freeloaders" is usually a scapegoat for people who's skills aren't "economically viable" or who are old or sick or disabled, or live in a place with high unemployment and very few jobs
Or marketing people.
A community would have to make a commitment to non-violence. If anybody breaks that commitment, then the community has a right to defend the victim
This is probably a semantic argument, but: how is that different from the community constituting a government?
Food for thought, anyways.
Indeed.
who is going to pay for it?
...
How about advertisers?
Would you trust a political reporting/analysis site which was funded by advertising to tell you the truth at all times, and not allow the interests of their advertisers to obscure the information they were reporting on or analysing?
Maybe i'm more cynical than I should be, but I certainly wouldn't extend that kind of trust
In this country, the way this system works, the only votes that matter are those of the electoral college.
Yes and no. You do, after all, get to vote for the members of the electoral college. Besides which, the electoral college only elects *the president and vice-president*; in practice, their power is more circumscribed than people realize.
Besides which, in many states, you can vote *directly on laws themselves* --- most notably in California, where there are typically 30 or so per election, but also in other states as well.
I think it was Winston Churchill who said Democracy is the worst form of government around, except for all the other forms of government."
maybe this says less about the merits of "democracy" than it does about the failures of government?
Absolutely. Yet, at the same time --- having *no* government isn't really a feasible solution, at least until you find someway to convince people like the thugs running around in Sierra Leone chopping off people's hands for refusing to give them money that they don't have not to do such things.
Democracy, flawed as it is, is better than the alternative. The thing that scares me is that a lot of the people I hear railing about the evils of our system haven't *considered* what the alternatives are.
Well, one thing that you're inadvertently doing is applying anarchist principles to a non-anarchist society
... it's hard to avoid doing that, tho, as I'm not well versed enough in anarchist thought to have an image of an anarchist society to apply them to. :)
...
...
Sure
The difference is that there probably will be a social understanding (under anarchism, violence enforced laws are replaced by social understandings about acceptable behaviour)
I can sort of see that, with two caveats:
(1) this assumes that I know enough of the people around me that this social understanding would actually have force. In *contemporary* society, that often isn't true --- I don't, for example, know my neighbors, nor have particular interest in knowing them; I don't see that changing in the near future.
(2) how does anarcho-socialism deal with the 'free rider' problem? (Boiled down to the essence, this is asking how you get your lazy/cheap housemate to buy toilet paper; more generally, it's a question about how you prevent people from profiting off of the efforts of others. Socialism doesn't have a good answer to this, and neither does capitalism [although it's more masked in capitalism, as the free riders *appear* to be productive]; does anarcho-socialism?)
In an anarchist system, who enforces your ability to charge rent?
Presumably I could use force to eject the person not paying rent, right? Unless they could use force to prevent me from doing so, or there were some *effective social sanction* against my doing so
This is the center of the problem I have believing in anarchism -- I don't understand what, in the absence of a government monopoly on force, would prevent individuals from using force. I suppose you could depend on everyone agreeing not to use force --- but then the entire community is vulnerable to anyone who violates that agreement, and the incentive for individuals to violate it is going to be fairly high
Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?
I'm *really* not certain that should qualify as a benefit. Sounds more like a nightmare to me --- both from the perspective of the director (who would have to watch his work being altered against his will) and from the perspective of an audience that likes thought-provoking films.
More bland movies that say nothing interesting would be a depressing effect of digital transmission.
Wow, cool: an interesting political debate on slashdot! :) [Feel free to take offline, if it's easier]
Private is based on *not* using what you own.
Isn't that to a certain extent an artificial distinction? Example: assume I am single and live in a house which, under the current legal system, I own. I'm seriously injured in a car crash and hospitalized for two months; do I lose the ownership of my house while i'm in the hospital, because i'm not using it? Or (perhaps more realistic) what if i'm in a work situation that requires me to split my time 50/50 between two cities on the opposite side of the country, and I have a house in both cities?
In an anarchist system, who enforces the distinction between personal and private? If i'm buying a house from you, because you're moving to another city, how do you know if i'm going to use it (in which case it's personal) and not rent it out?
A person "owns" them only because a peice of paper backed up by the violence of the government says that they own them.
I suppose that's one way to view it. On the other hand, usually they "own" the property because they made an agreement with someone else who owned it (say the first person was using it, to simplify) to exchange [x] for the ownership of the property; to invalidate that agreement would require violence of another sort, wouldn't it?