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Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

Can you suggest a business not dependent on government grants? As far as I can tell, every business in the world is. Any form of property rights is a government granted monopoly. The only natural law is "If I'm bigger than you, I'll take what I want". No matter what business you're in, you're relying on government protection to stop me just smacking you on the head and taking your stuff, whether it's tangible physical goods or IP. They only difference here is that the internet has rendered the head smacking part obsolete for IP, so people can skip straight to taking the stuff.

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I have heard this argument before, but you are making a rather big claim when doing so. If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.

That mean you don't own that car. Its the government car that they have given to you under a granted permission to use it. Same goes for your house. All they need to render the third amendment void is taking back their granted permission. Basically we are now describing a capitalistic governed country like the US as if it worked like an communist controlled one.

So before I continue down this line, do you really claim that government is the rightful owner of everyones property? If not, then we must separate physical property with government granted permissions.

The government doesn't own it, but it enforces the right that you own it. Both for physical goods in the obvious way, and IP via the way of copyright.

Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century to address the failure of previous censorship efforts in a world of new technology (the printing press), and eventually became a means by which printers could secure a competitive advantage.

We now live in a world where the machines needed to copy things are commonly owned by individuals. Copyright, having been designed to regulate industry, is massively out of date -- individuals do not have the resources needed to decide if they are abiding by copyright. Even the entertainment companies that cry about the importance of copyrights know this, which is why they keep pushing for DRM. No sane person actually believes that normal people are going to stop and think about whether or not they are obeying copyright laws; that is just not how people generally behave.

The truth is, in the 21st century copyright is nothing more than a red flag law that exists solely to protect obsolete industries.

> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century...

So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.

> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government.

What people have in the absence of government is not property, but merely possession. No more or less binding on anyone else than a dog with a bone.

At least you are consistent: You make our rights a creation of government. This has the interesting side-effect of elevating intellectual property to the same level as real property.

You have to wonder if the framers talked about our actual natural rights in such disrespectful terms: "The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."

You know what industry is truly obsolete? The film industry. I mean the actual film-itself industry. Why? Because producers, studios, and exhibitors have nearly completed the move to all-digital pipelines. The product formerly made by Kodak and Fuji and processed by companies like Technicolor and Deluxe no longer has a market (or at least not one of any appreciably size). Thanks to digital media, the industry that produced and developed celluloid media has been rendered obsolete.

Does this strike you as being even remotely analogous to the situation faced by the people who make television, movies, books, and music?

IP is a granted permissions by the state. It can not be owned by the individual.

The same goes for any other form of permissions. If I get a government permission to sell drugs or produce weapons, I would not call that a property right, comparable to the car I own. The permission to enter a house is not comparable to the property right of the person who owns the house.

If we look at copyright specific, it is an intrusion into the property right of others. Its not just a permissions, but also a restrictions of the actually property owners rights. By calling copyright a property equal to physical objects, we are making the term property meaningless to the point of contradiction.

All "property rights" are sets of permissions granted by the state to an individual (or legal entity) to certain exclusive privileges with regard to whatever it is the "property right" relates to. This is just as true of rights to tangible personal property (like an iPhone) or real property (like a house) as it is to intellectual property (like a copyright), or intangible personal property that is not intellectual property (like a stock).

> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.

Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.

What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.

Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)

The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.

Gotcha - I grant myself my property, which I already had, by way of possession. :)

I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.

There, I've tilted at my windmill for the day.

"They only difference here is that the internet has rendered the head smacking part obsolete for IP, so people can skip straight to taking the stuff."

No. The internet has rendered the "taking your stuff" part obsolete. When you "take my stuff" I no longer have "my stuff". However when you "copy my bits" I still have "my bits". It is the essential difference between Property and Intellectual not-actually-Property.

What you're looking for has a precise definition in economics, and it's called "rivalrous" vs "non rivalrous" goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_%28economics%29

Many things are in this category, not just IP. Paying for them can be kind of tricky, because who wants to spend a year, say, writing a book when someone decides they can just go ahead and copy it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

IP has been a pretty good, if imperfect solution to the problem. Those wishing to be rid of it ought to either try and suggest another way of producing information goods, or be honest enough to say they have no idea and that information goods that require substantial time and effort may not be produced in large quantities in their imagined future.

who wants to spend a year, say, writing a book when someone decides they can just go ahead and copy it

The best books I've read were written by people who weren't financially motivated. Is it just me?

"Not financially motivated" is fair, but there's also "unable to work full time on something due to lack of funds" that you have to keep in mind.

About 10 years ago I had pretty much this exact conversation with RMS over email. As a video game developer, I made box software that I needed people to buy in order for me to get paid. I put it to him that without keeping our code and assets "closed" we couldn't make games. RMS's response was that he'd rather we not make games then: if we couldn't make them "open" then he'd rather we not make them at all.

I still write software for money. GNU/Linux is still doing rather well. Thanks to the law, I still get to make that business model choice.

However, I do not confuse a car with a piece of software or music track. If we are discussing moral rights, or "property", we cannot have such a discussion without being clear on our terms. Nobody is smacked on the head, nor any "stuff" taken, when someone torrents an MP3. However, people continue to die having their "stuff" taken.

I think RMS' response is honest, even if I disagree with it to some degree. What I dislike are the handwavy answers about people being able to work on stuff without some source of funding.

Right, but the bone of contention isn't the bits, it's the money that should, by law, change hands when a copy is made and which (quite obviously) doesn't.

You make a copy, you own me money. You decide to keep that money instead, and it's the moral equivalent of reneging on a debt or bouncing a check.

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