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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

That’s one difference, sure. But another difference is that intellectual property must be created by people, while other kinds of property often are created naturally. Somebody had to make Harry Potter. My yard was just there naturally. Why shouldn’t the property right in Harry Potter be stronger than that for land? Why is one kind of difference dispositive and the other not?

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> That suggests that intellectual property is even more deserving of protection than at least natural property

No, you suggested this out of nothing. It actually suggests the opposite, because protecting "intellectual property" takes away the freedom from other people to create it themselves as if they are somehow less deserving of something they created because they weren't the first ones to get that protection.

At least in the context of copyright, independent creation of something is not infringement.

> At least in the context of copyright, independent creation of something is not infringement.

The lines what is really counts as "independent" are deeply blurred.

You can say this, but it's not really true. Courts have sliced away at the "independent creation" aspect until it exists in theory but not in practice.

Courts have limited the degree to which you can leverage pre-existing characters, etc., but if you truly create your own thing without relying on the work of others, incidental similarity will not result in infringement. (Of course, incidental similarity might be evidence that you actually copied, instead of independently creating the work.)

It still has to go to trial to be determined. This is used as a punitive mechanism by prominent rightsholders. See the sad tales of Prenda Law, and Rightshaven. I'm not sure what the official term is in the case of "we assume X, but we'll have a trial to see if X is true", but the presumption is that whatever was copied, so it has to go to court. In combination with the "American Rule", that makes everyone shy away from coming too close to copying. You can lawyerly say what you want, the situation is that theoretically you can invent something yourself that's close or identical to some rightholder's ideas, but basically you're punished for it. SO stay away.

Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard".

Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.

No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.

Yes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.

If you completely redefine "improvement" and "labor" then sure.

> No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor.

The initial labor is what creates the property. It can then be traded and whatnot. But it was not property before the initial labor that transformed wild land to something useful.

> Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.

There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that?

Land exists before improvement, but it is not property until improved through labor by people. That's just how the property rights on which our civilization is based work.

> There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon_Treaty&oldid...

Exactly physical land exists, and the only "labor" required for it to be property is for people to agree on it being property. How does this constitute real labor or improvement?

Intellectual properties are generally more creative based endeavors and should be protected as such IMO

That's what nonsensical libertarian dogma insists, sure, but that pseudo-religious tripe has no relation to or bearing on reality.

Property is created when someone uses force to claim ownership of something. That's it. Anything else is post-hoc justification for said claim. You can indeed own that untouched forest if you can hold it with force. That's the ultimate basis of property, no matter how libertarians try to mask it: the imposition of force on the existing natural world to create artificial division of ownership.

Please don't call names in arguments or take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes discussion tediouser and nastier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is not a foregone conclusion that the universe must have a Harry Potter series of YA novels in it. Nor is it required that if such a series exists, that they be exactly as they were written. In our universe, we have seven books of Harry Potter, following an archetypal plot arc.

There is no particular reason we should believe that if Harry Potter did not exist, there would be nothing similar enough to Harry Potter to serve as close substitute. Kids could have gone nuts for Barry Brassgears, the steampunk airship cabin-boy that ultimately grows in knowledge and ability to defeat Max Clanks, the industrialist bent on clearing the skies of all independent captains. Or maybe they could have latched on to Sirene Ceta, the young mermaid adventuress who stumbles into a scheme by landswoman Gail Greywave to seize control over the Pacific salmon runs, and foils it. I just made these up, but anyone can write an automated generator to spit out these pitches.

Without the copyright-based business, the type and the quality of the popular stories change, but they still get written. The problem becomes discoverability, because it is harder to make money by promoting someone else's work. More promotion creates more copies, but you can no longer monetize the copies directly. You only have author goodwill and branding to work with.

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