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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

Intellectual property is imaginary property, private or not. it's not a real thing until committed to a medium.

Upkeep of the fiction that intellectual property is real property has societal benefits for a limited time insofar as works of art - and the original idea of copyright was reasonably limited. Over 100 years is inhumane.

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One might argue that enforcement of traditional property rights is inhumane in many cases too.

I certainly would :)

No it has benefits only for the private property owner, never for society at large. All private property is this way. Capitalism is a system that deifies private property, so it will only ever get more and more 'private'

If capitalism is the nail, private property is the hammer. Quite a lot of development that the United States wanted to see happen in the west (which enriched it immensely) was done because it was willing to make grants of private property to the companies (largely railroads) doing the development.

You can debate whether capitalism is (or should have been) the only method for getting things done, but the use of private property as a viable incentive for driving innovation within that system is not really debatable.

This is pretty much the take you get right outta american high school: full of propaganda. This is extremely simplified, ignores mass amounts of genocide and slavery, and ignores historical events to compare it to. The development of america as a nation is built on the corpses of hundreds of millions of africans, chinese and native americans which notably were stripped of their 'right' to private property so that someone else's 'right' to private property could exist.

You do not in any way need to enslave people in order to develop land; only to develop land AND enrich a bourgeois class of people.

I never said any of that. I think you need to take a step back and re-read my comment. I'm not endorsing capitalism, I'm merely saying that so long as capitalism is the one way you can think of to get things done, giving people property is exchange for development is almost always the way that development happens.

This somehow didn't work for ISPs at all.

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