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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

Indeed they do. For example my hard drive belongs to me and yours to you. There is no way I can arrange the pattern of magnetic ones and zeros such that it magically becomes YOUR property in any way that any proponent of traditional property would understand. That is to say imaginary property is a set of restrictions on how I am allowed to use my actual property.

This restriction is supposed to be justified by society benefiting from the useful arts and sciences. I don't see a two-bit fight fitting that bill.

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"That is to say imaginary property is a set of restrictions on how I am allowed to use my actual property."

No. You yourself are not re-arranging any bits. Your computer receives bits, then decodes them, and plays them. There is no "re-arrange bits exactly like this album" button.

You wouldn't say that LPs are "placing restrictions on your record player". The artist may no longer have that specific product, but you can't really re-arrange the grooves on a record however you please either.

"This restriction is supposed to be justified by society benefiting from the useful arts and sciences."

I don't disagree that copyright law is poorly implemented. However, I do disagree that society somehow isn't benefiting from artists being paid for the work. It takes a -lot- of man hours to produce music, record it, mix and master it, and distribute it for release. None of that changes just because we distribute the end result electronically now.

If someone takes months and years to come up with an engaging story and universe for a book, they deserve to own that creation and get paid for it. Why would anyone make anything creative in a world where it would be impossible to make a living from that work? Are we to expect artists to have infinite money supply and just produce things for our leisure, for free?

This is just entitlement, with playing games about technicalities of distribution mediums to justify not paying people for their work. No one is forcing people to claim ownership of the things you create; Go ahead and write a book and make it public domain. Produce an album and make it public domain, if you feel that strongly about ownership. You can pay in the time, money, and man-hours of work involved yourself and still keep it free and public domain.

The point is that the user is in fact now able to rearrange the grooves on the record like magic and the artist wants to limit their way to do this if the user rearranges the grooves in a way that match their own work.

No, the user can't do that. They can't do that with records, and they can't do that with bits either.

Users can -download- specific bits and play them via decoding, and that's about it. Nobody can actually re-arrange anything themselves, although one could spend their life trying to manually flip bits to magically recreate it in the same manner. Good luck.

The artist isn't limiting anything other than sharing those pre-made bits without a license/permission. And that is not unreasonable. My stance on this is referring to works of art as merely "bits" for the sake of argument is a bit ridiculous. We don't refer to LPs as "a collection of atoms", etc.

Referring to art or products in general as "just bits" is just being pedantic for the sake of winning an argument.

You don't like fighting! Good for you! (Neither do I.) I'm sure a person like you has much more important things to pay attention to.

So people like you and me don't pay money to watch fighting. So far we agree.

But we differ here: I think it's fine of _other_ people pay money to watch fighting. And I think if someone produces a fighting program, he has the right to try to make some money from it.

People conveniently like to ignore the costs (time, money, social capital, etc) it requires to even put on boxing or fighting events. Or to make music or films.

It is particularly vexing for me to see all of this creative, hard work flippantly thrown aside because people suddenly become philosophers about bits and rearranging them.

If one doesn't like that people charge $$ to watch boxing fights... Then don't watch them! People are not entitled to having things for free because it's "theoretically possible to re-arrange my hard drive's bits in that exact manner".

edit; changed you->one to clarify I was speaking generally and not about the parent commenter specifically

You and I agree. But the "gatekeepers" on Hacker News believe that if something's not "hip" enough for them, it has no value and nobody should be enjoying it.

You are welcome to enjoy it but as copyright represents a substantial decrease in the liberty of society I think a shitty one round fight represents a particularly poor exemplar of why society ought to give up that liberty.

Perhaps I've misunderstood what you're trying to say, but I feel like this sort of begs the question. It seems like you're presenting this as some sort of argument against intellectual property, but to work as an intuition pump, you must already reject intellectual property as a valid concept ("proponent of traditional property"). It's not clear to me that you've actually said anything.

But, since we're here and discussing the concept of ownership of information - would you say that people have a right to secrets? There might be some bits on my hard drive that I don't want anyone else to know, and if they mysteriously turn up on your hard drive despite my careful precautions, surely that is evidence of some sort of malfeasance?

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