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Comment by cmeacham98 | Hacker News Reader

> Ideologically, it's pretty simple: I don't believe that ideas can be meaningfully owned as property.

Software isn't an idea. It required real work of a scarce-ish resource (software dev time) to create that software. You could make the argument that software, unlike a physical good, can be copied at almost no cost after creation; however, acting as if all forms of IP are "owning an idea" is a weird take.

I'd like to put forward the argument that software _patents_ are the IP that most closely resembles the IP the author seems to hate, and the source of much of the troubles associated with IP in the sofware industry. Additionally, abolishing software patents is a realistic short team goal we can work towards, while abolishing all IP is too extreme to get the average developer on board with.

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> however, acting as if all forms of IP are "owning an idea" is a weird take.

Maybe you don't like my phrasing? But fundamentally, intellectual property is a form of property that includes intangible things. How can intangible things be owned? Intangible things aren't scarce.

> Software isn't an idea. It required real work of a scarce-ish resource (software dev time) to create that software. You could make the argument that software, unlike a physical good, can be copied at almost no cost after creation

It's not about the work required to create it or even the work required to copy it. The point is that it's not scarce. That is, I can use a copy of the software without inhibiting your simultaneous use of it. This is a fundamental difference from a physical good. My use of a physical good inherently inhibits your use. This creates conflict and property is a vehicle for resolving that conflict peacefully.

> I'd like to put forward the argument that software _patents_ are the IP that most closely resembles the IP the author seems to hate

I undoubtedly hate software patents. But I probably hate patents in the healthcare industry even more, because I perceive them as probably causing even more harm than software patents.

My article is just biased towards issues in software because that's what I have the most experience with.

> How can intangible things be owned? Intangible things aren't scarce.

Surely you own money?

> It's not about the work required to create it or even the work required to copy it. The point is that it's not scarce.

Right, the copying part is "free". The thing that software licenses try to protect, the part which is not free, is the effort that goes into making software. The end product is not scarce, but the materials that go into it are. So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way, and for open source projects it is hard to add value to the creation process anyways.

It sounds like "intangible" is maybe not the perfect word for it. Money is a promise, so a form of a contract, and promises or contracts cannot be meaningfully duplicated, so they are scarce.

Recordings of thoughts can be duplicated at will, and so are not scarce.

Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts :)

> So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way

If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.

> Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts

Yeah, but fractional-reserve banking ;) I'll stop here before we beat this dead metaphor any longer.

> If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.

I think pretty much everyone is in agreement with "the law is not great and we should change it", possible most of all the GNU folks. The issue is that this change is slow to come (and somewhat unclear whether it will come at all?) The whole point of the GPL is to use copyright law as a weapon until we can make a world where copyright law doesn't need to exist–I guess a sort of world where you keep around a military in the hopes that at some point people will realize war is useless and we should all be friends. So not using copyleft is being a pacifist (actually, I think this very word appears in the post) but the point is that if you're doing that you're kind of sitting around hoping for a better world while people with guns come and steal your stuff. Which is a valid position, I guess, but I don't think you should be surprised when people come up to you and ask, "why?"

> Surely you own money?

No you don't, just like you can't own a kilogram or a mile. Money is the government-approved measurement unit for value.

I'd call it a unit of exchange for things which really are scarce. And even if we do do think of it as something which we have artificially imposed scarcity on, this is an exchange process people opt into willingly. You're still free to consider it non-scarce and worthless. Unlike IP, which is for restricting use by people whether they want to opt in or not.

Money existed before government began to interfere with it, and lots of people own gold and silver coins. Its probablt best to consider government fiat as a special case of pseudo-money.

I meant "government" in a much wider sense; perhaps "society-approved" might be a better way to put it.

That makes sense but then you can still own money that is a physical commodity like silver.

> Surely you own money?

Money as a physical item is tangible, money as a ledger entry has more complicated rules of “ownership”. For example, you do not actually own the money in tour bank account, you have a claim on the assets of your bank equal to the amount on the ledger. Other forms of ledger money are equally bizarre in the limit. Suppose you use a weak address with bitcoin and someone transfers “your” bitcoin to a different account. Its not clear that they committed a crime and there is no recourse for the former “owner.” Similar cases abound with ETH.

Why should it be the case that non-scare resources cannot be owned? What if there were pragmatic reasons for providing property protections to certain non-scare resources?

I think your argument would be more convincing with some justification as to why scarcity ought to be necessary for property protections.

Property can be conceptualized as a social technology, an idea that is useful for solving problems and accomplishing goals. In that alternative view, we should apply property protections in cases where it's useful, regardless of scarcity.

> Why should it be the case that non-scare resources cannot be owned?

Well, I don't even know what it means to own something that is non-scarce. What does ownership mean? To me, it's exclusive control (or right to control) some particular piece of property. This is a natural thing that occurs with physical property because of scarcity. But it does not occur naturally with ideas. The only way it happens with ideas is if scarcity is created artificially, e.g., by a state.

I'd say "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella is a good deeper dive on this. But some may find it unorthodox.

In the case of intellectual property, it often means a "right to exclude". The right to exclude others from doing something is a property right. Using force to empower some to exclude others from doing something, is itself an idea that may or may not have pragmatic value.

The point is that there are useful views on property that do not require the object or thing to be scarce. For example in the US property is legally the bundle of rights people have in relation to an object or thing (including ideas).

Edit: And you're right, there's nothing "natural" about IP. It's just a tool that may or may not be useful.

> In the case of intellectual property, it often means a "right to exclude". The right to exclude others from doing something is a property right.

in the case of tangible goods, it makes sense because often one person's use precludes another person's use, and each use has a physical effect on the object in question. One person's use of a software doesn't exclude another person from using the same software, so the 'right to exclude' actually means the right to punish someone for using a software or idea. Exclusive use of physical goods makes sense because they are rivalrous. Exclusive use of an idea relies on a complex of relations including a regulatory state with a coercive apparatus. If someone wants to use my house they deprive me of my use of that house to the extent that they use it, and its natural that I would use force to prevent it. In this view, the use of the state coercive apparatus is on my behalf as a person who needs a house but lives in a society that doesn't want houses to belong to anyone strong enough to take them from the (former) owner. If someone wants to use a design that I have created and patented they aren't preventing me from using the design, they are just refusing to pay a license fee for my patent.

Essentially treating physical goods like properties that can be owned allows people to use them and predict their availability and incentivizes the creation of more physical goods, allowing intangible goods to be treated like property incentivizes rent-seeking behavior and allows people to collect rents on goods that could be duplicated for little to no cost.

It may be more useful to consider how copyright has been shaped by powerful interests to reflect their desires rather than how property rights in physical goods arise naturally from the existence and use of rivalrous/scarce goods.

> How can intangible things be owned?

The same way anything else can be; “ownership” is the legal right to exclude others from some set of actions with regard to something. Whether the something is tangible or not is basically immaterial, except as tongue set of possible actions that might be governed by ownership.

> Intangible things aren't scarce.

So? Property is about structuring incentives to create value, it is not intrinsically tied to scarcity (except that property—the legal exclusive privilege—is inherently scarce even if it's subject is not.)

> Property is about structuring incentives to create value

I think we just have a fundamental disagreement. That's not how I see property. I see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution. And I do see it as intrinsically tied to scarcity.

Considering possession of land is one of the leading causes of war, I would hardly see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.

Money in exchange for property as a lubricant for exchange of property (or the ownership and control over that property) is a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.

Strongly disagree. War and conflict is always possible, no matter what you do. But if we had no system for saying "this is mine and that is yours," then even the smallest disputes could lead to violence.

> Considering possession of land is one of the leading causes of war, I would hardly see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.

Peaceful conflict resolution only works when all parties to the conflict desire peace. In the presence of a conflict among peace-desiring parties, property is the notion that one party has the right to determine disposition of the tangible item in question. If they didn’t have a concept of property that they all assented to, then they would be more likely to fight about it.

> Money in exchange for property as a lubricant for exchange of property (or the ownership and control over that property) is a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.

The right to exchange for consideration presupposes property rights. You’re agreeing with the OP

> I see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.

Even if we accept that that is the sole purpose of property, I think it's indisputable that the desire to control due to sweat equity in a creation vs. the desire to free ride on it because it is “not scarce” is a source of conflict in the types of things covered by IP that is in need of resolution.

Probably. I just don't support the use of a coercive government to be responsible for resolving those things.

Aren't all agreements enforced via coercion? either via the law/government or personally (which can be much worse)

No, not all. Or at least, no, I don't see it that way. But this is getting deep into the weeds of semantics. The key is that coercion is typically defined to mean the initiation of some kind of physical aggression (or threat of it). I'd recommend Stephan Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" if you want a more philosophical take on it. But beware, he is a student of an unorthodox branch of economics, so depending on your flexibility, you may or may not dismiss it immediately as nutty mumbo jumbo.

I think the important bit here is that my outlook does not require such an obvious inconsistency.

Just because property can be used to artificially create scarcity, due to laws that were piled on by centuries of history and common use, does not change the nature of property.

You are not contradicting his idea of property, what you say only has an impact on how to use the current system. It's not relevant to the conversation.

The idea is to define property, to get the first principles before deciding how the Law should be to protect those principles.

To put it another way: that the current laws can be used to create a perversion of property that allows artificial scarcity, does not say anything about the nature of property itself.

> property—the legal exclusive privilege

There is a concept of property that predates and transcends your legal system, so this definition is insufficient.

Lots of people have written romance plays, but there's only one Romeo and Juliet.

There is scarcity in the relative value of intangible things.

When I make a copy of Romeo and Juliet, I don’t deprive anyone of their copy. This is what is meant by intangibles not being scarce.

> The point is that it's not scarce. That is, I can use a copy of the software without inhibiting your simultaneous use of it.

That depends. You could view the idea in it's abstract, intangible form; and then the manifestation of that idea in the real word, as symbols (letters, numbers, drawings, notes,...) which reflect that idea. When you download code, you ultimately make a copy of manifestation represented as electromagnetic signals encoded as digital symbols.

The process of having a novel idea consists of assembling mental constructs together as a thought proces and then expressing that through shared social constructs (language, art, symbols,...). What is protected by IP is your claim to be the first person - the original author - having had the idea. Not the idea itself.

The opposite of that is not making that distinction, collapsing the process of making copies of the manifestation of an idea, and having the idea itself into one. This would imply that being the first to have constructed a novel idea is no argument for a claim to intellectual ownership.

The real problem with copyright, though, isn't making that first claim. It's the abstract notion that rights to claim IP can be extended and transferred. Which creates a very different can of worms.

> What is protected by IP is your claim to be the first person - the original author - having had the idea. Not the idea itself.

I think it's just a manner of speaking. In order to create this protection, you have to elevate ideas to some kind of property by creating an artificial scarcity. Or at least, that's the result produced by a system of intellectual property. That artificial scarcity, introduced by a coercive state, is what I'm opposed to.

> The real problem with copyright, though, isn't making that first claim. It's the abstract notion that rights to claim IP can be extended and transferred. Which creates a very different can of worms.

Yes, removing the latter while keeping the former would be a HUGE improvement on the status quo I think. But I still see the former as problematic. :-)

Authorship can still be protected in two ways without property on ideas

1. Ideas as a secret. You can create scarcity at the initial step of sharing. You can even create monopolies at this step. The framework for this is NDAs. The vital difference here is that once broadcast an idea can no longer be exploited by the author. And once shared with a third party, repeated use can not be controlled. 2. Authorship as attribution. This is done by preventing plagiarism.

Replacing IP law with NDA contract law and attribution protection would still allow selling software but not subscriptions for software you run locally. Also it would allow everone to record radio broadcasts, which is illegal now but was never enforced.

I strongly believe the initial sharing of an idea/software/music/etc. Is the right step to create scarcity. Once something is provided to the public, the public should be able to use it in any way as long as attribution is preserved.

> That artificial scarcity, introduced by a coercive state, is what I'm opposed to.

That sounds like a take on the discussion about the 'social contract': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

I think that both positions are valid. That it is, it's fair to dismiss giving a part of your freedom towards a coercive state. But at the same time, you also forfait the future possibility that you might want to exert exclusive rights over your own intellectual work.

It totally works out if that's a decision made on a personal level. But when you expand that towards a first principle that applies to everyone, you run into issues. After all, authors relinquish control over who gets to use their work and how it gets to be used. And not all contexts in which one's creative work is consumed are equal.

This would range from opposing the use of one's music during political manifestations, to opposing the use of one's code in both private and public ventures which are ethically questionable.

When it comes to software, you can see this in efforts to create copyleft licenses with extra terms & conditions that restrict the use of how software is used. For instance, the Hippocratic License. [1]

[1] https://firstdonoharm.dev/

The net result is a contract with an inherent tension between giving as much freedom as possible and being aware of the consequences and ethical considerations of doing so to the point that intellectual property rights are exerted to enforce "desired behaviour" on the part of the licensee.

Removing copyright as a principle entirely removes the option to create such uneasy solutions, but at the same time, it also gives absolute freedom to re-purpose creative works in ways which are - arguably - counter to the interests of the public.

> intellectual property is a form of property that includes intangible things

What we call "intellectual property" is not "property" at all - it's simply a government-enforced monopoly on use of certain ideas (in case of patents) or their expressions (for copyright and trademarks).

Well, yes, that's pretty much exactly the viewpoint I'm espousing here. :-) That is, that ideas cannot be owned and I disagree with the artificial scarcity created by governments.

The entire point of patent and copyright is (in the US): "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

So it's government granting specific rights over intellectual items not the items themselves.

The name is confusing, it's rights granted over intellectual property ("writings and discoveries") to encourage the creators to share them for the common good.

The manifestation of that is ownership over ideas. If I recite the Harry Potter series to someone and they copy it down and publish it, they've violated copyright. That only happens because IP grants ownership over the idea (the story of Harry Potter) itself.

I'm not sure if we are agreeing and just missing each other on the words, it if there is something more substantive between us?

> Intangible things aren't scarce.

That's not true. Time is scarce. Good ideas are scarce (maybe because intelligence is scarce too). Beauty is scarce. Quality of life is scarce. Perfection is terribly scarce...

And I consider that I own my time, for example. I can either consume it myself or I can use it to serve something or someone, probably in exchange of some amount of money.

In terms of physics, the energy you expend when doing that work is the scarce quantity. Time is just the bookkeeping system.

Good ideas are uncommon but I wouldn't call them scarce, since they can still break the rules of scarcity and multiply without bound (i.e. no true limit on the number of people having the exact same idea).

You are taking an extremely theoretical point of view.

There is also no theoretical limit in the number of cars we can produce, for example. I would even say that it is easier to produce a new car than a great idea.

> But fundamentally, intellectual property is a form of property that includes intangible things.

I think the idea of code (or information in general) being intangible has some problems. Point me to information which exists without being encoded in physical phenomena. All information we've ever encountered exists in the form of specific configurations of matter and energy, and is therefore tangible, just as a house or a car is. It is just barely tangible, since there are many more physical configurations which can reasonably encode information than there are physical configurations corresponding to a usable car.

The term scarcity as usually applied to information is also somewhat problematic because it is not applied consistently between "physical" goods and information. Yes, the fact is that information is easy to copy because it is easily encodeable in a wider range of physical configurations. But we cannot reasonably ignore the effort required to produce it if we want to make a fair comparison. The quality we are interested in is how hard it is to obtain, to have something in the first place, not just whether it is easy to copy. Code is easy to copy, but is hard to produce, and hence I would argue it is still a scarce resource in this sense.

> My use of a physical good inherently inhibits your use.

Not if you first make your own copy of the physical good, the same way you do with information. You said it yourself: you can use your copy of the software without inhibiting someone's simultaneous use. It's just that information has the boon and burden of being easily copyable once you've initially obtained it.

You’re conflating software with “the physical medium used to store and run software”. Computers, like the paper that books are printed on, are scarce, but the software or story, is not.

I can recite Harry Potter without the book, the story has no scarcity to it. Similarly, I can write a for loop without reading it’s structure from a hard drive.

I don't think I am, but I am using the word in a way that is not very common, in order to convey a lesson.

Could you have recited Harry Potter easily before you've heard it the first time?

I don't get why anyone believes that owning an idea is more abstract that owning a house. I can easily "open" any door with an ax and/or battery-driven grinder. Ownership is a legal construct of a society, meant to incentivese certain behaviours. It comes with both good and bad. This is true both for houses (inner cities are monopolized by the rich) as for software (key technologies being monopolized by few companies).

Because exclusive use of a physical item is a fact of nature whereas exclusive use of an idea is a social construct that relies on a coercive social apparatus. The property rights we use for physical items are a social construct that is grounded in reality, whereas intellectual property is a social construct that is derived from a particular value-laden perspective.

Ownership in capitalism has nothing to do with usage. If I rent a car, I am using it, but I definitely don't own it. Ownership is about a right, the right to decide what to do with a property. Ownership is also not exclusive: Several people can own a house or a car simultaneously.

Communist countries tried to reconcile ownership with usage by enforcing that everyone owns one flat at maximum. The results are mixed.

To sum up, I still think that ownership is a social construct, be it for a physical item or an intellectual artefact.

Not all social constructs are created equal. Ownership of tangibles is grounded in the scarcity of tangibles. Ownership of intangibles is grounded in a value-laden perspective.

I find scarcity of tangibles pretty artificial. Who says that a 200m2 house cannot be split into two 100m2 houses? Who says that you cannot replace a private swimming pool with another 100m2 house?

Yes, some tangibles are scarce (water, petrol, raw materials, etc.). But what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location.

Physical goods are mutable but when we say they are scarce we mean that the same physical good can only be used by a limited number of people at the same time in the same way. For your example, a 200m2 house can be divided into 2 100m2 houses but the amount of physical living space hasn't increased. If there is one hammer between the two of us, we cannot both use it to nail different nails at the same time. We can even come up with a timeshare agreement but that just codifies the reality that when you are using the hammer to nail something, it is unavailable to me for the same purpose. You can replace a swimming pool with a house but that means no one can swim there anymore.

> what we actually charge for is pretty intangible, e.g., time of people, utility of a location.

Yes there are interesting metaphysical dimensions that the philosophers can explore and we could all learn from them. Of course when you pay for someone's time it usually comes attached with some form of labor because what you really want is the product of that labor (which may itself be intangible). And when you pay for a location because it is useful, that use is grounded in the material relations, i.e. putting a gas station next to a thoroughfare rather than in a wilderness area. Note that both time of a person and location are also scarce in the economic sense.

I'm a bit unsure if you agree or disagree with me. :)

My house costs at least 5*X, where X is the bill of materials. I pay way more for the scarcity of location and human time than for the scarcity of materials.

Isn't that pretty similar to why some people ask to be paid for the software they produce?

Just to make sure, I don't think as a society we reached "IP zen" where we found the optimal way to incentivese innovative, just as we haven't found the optimal way to incentivese quality housing for everyone. But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.

> But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.

Let me ask you this, what if in addition to paying for the scarce materials and scarce intangibles that make up a house, you had to pay a license for using the idea of a “house” to people who had inherited a patent on the concept of a house from their ancestor who was the first person who had been documented to leave caves and live in an adobe hooch? And then you had to pay another license to people who held a patent on indoor plumbing, etc. etc. Because of all these i.p. licenses suppose tour house cost an 100x or 1000x the cost of materials and no one could afford housing, but your employer was such a good guy that they just compensated you with a benefit where as long as you worked there, they would pay for housing, and the value of this benefit approached and often exceeded monetary compensation. And any time people criticized the arrangement, we were told that the inventors of homes and bathrooms needed to be compensated or no one would have bothered to invent homes or indoor plumbing and if it weren’t for licenses we would all still be living in caves and defecating in slit trenches. If this seems ridiculous then perhaps you can see why some people think its ridiculous that the same system applies to copyrights on media and patents on medicines.

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