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Comment by opnitro | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure postmodern is the right word to use here? It's pretty standard liberalism in terms of creating/enforcing property rights over things.

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Information is not property. That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space. These are mostly thoughts being controlled under the rubric of property

Whether or not you agree with the notion of intellectual property. It isn’t a postmodern concept.

https://txpatentattorney.com/blog/the-history-of-intellectua...

You'll notice though, that the term 'intellectual property' wasn't invented until the (roughly) mid 20th century. After which time, copyright and patent law were affixed to this construction. There was no intellectual property, prior. I would politely suggest that this piece is a post-hoc justification, based on the ignorance of this arrangement. (Because the author, like all humans, is morally ambiguous. Intellectual property was an assumption going into this piece)

Copy rights, are not property. Patents are monopoly licenses.

Maybe it’s modern nonsense.

Copyrights _are_ property. They can be sold on the market and are enforced by the state. You can _own_ a copyright.

Surely information takes up space too, albeit virtually and as bits?

You're incorrect in your use of postmodern in this and the above statement.

See if you can acquire information without taking up space.

Again, the patent system is mentioned in the constitution. It's not "postmodern". You may not agree with the system (I certainly don't), but "postmodern" is the not correct movement to associate it with

> Information is not property.

That’s true, property is exclusive rights. Information is a thing in which property can exist, though.

> That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space.

One might choose to create a property regime in which only tangible items are subjects of property, but neither IP nor intangible property more generally have anything to do with postmodernity; while some forms of intangible property are earlier, the category (including the subcategory now known as “intellectual property”) really flowered as part of the same development of property rights that birthed capitalism.

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