Sorry, if it's you in the forest with a shotgun defending your property in a libertarian utopia, you're the government.
Or is that most basic mutual respect now "the government" in an office environment? If that is the case then we are basically removing any useful meaning from the word.
Either way, I think it stems from the same basic human desire, probably hardwired, to not have things taken and to have some basic loyalty or respect to members of your 'tribe'. (After all, governments are made of people and those people must have thought the concept of 'property' was a good idea for some reason.)
What I do think is a fiction is trying to apply concepts meant for physical goods to ideas. Concepts like "theft", or being able to transfer ownership. It strikes me as the political/legal equivalent of what programmers do when they try to add a bit too much abstraction.
They saw a little bit of duplicated code about "ownership" and mistakenly though that the two concepts were probably related and rather interchangeable. As a result things become kludged with nothing working as well as it would if the concepts were left separate. Basically it is a botched attempt at optimizing for complexity.
I am not following your logic here. The notion of physical property predates written records and codes of law, even if it has been approached differently by different cultures. The notion of intellectual property is a far more recent development that has nowhere near universal acceptance and requires a very particular kind of legal system to make any sense at all.
"Governments don't create things out of whole cloth, the laws always correspond to something, even if they do it badly."
No, laws are invented out of thin air with regularity and always have been. Governments create legal constructs for various reasons -- expediency, politics, religion, favoritism, etc. The history of copyright is a perfect example. Prior to the printing press there was no notion of copyright, and people made careers out of copying books. Alexandria had a law requiring anyone bringing a book into the city to give it to the library to be copied. Then the printing press was invented, and governments began to fear the mass dissemination of written material; copyright was invented to deal with that problem and the rest is history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
(OK, to be fair, the first "true" copyright law was created after that law was repealed and a bunch of businessmen complained about their lost monopoly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_anne
Like I said, politics...)
Trademarks protect brands and go back a very long way; primitives would use them to distinguish themselves from each other, farmers would mark sheep, etc.
Patents are really protections on inventions. Inventions also go back a long way, although they were previously treated as trade secrets rather than open descriptions. Reverse engineering and a desire for openness instead of secrecy created the need for patents (I'm not saying the governments are doing a good job.) A chef's secret sauce is his intellectual property.
The idea of copyright stems from a desire to protect the older concept of authorship and goes back to antiquity as well; drawings in caves were certainly made by cavemen; the Greek philosophers certainly originated their words; narration in the bible is attributed to certain authors (although there is sometimes dispute here); Mozart (barely) survived on the patronage of his compositions.
That's all I mean by it's not a complete fiction: it's a set of protections around things that we already valued but that were started to get degraded by modern society.
I'm not saying that IP laws are amazing by any means. I'm saying they are attempts to protect things that we have always valued on a moral basis: invention, creation, branding, and secrecy / privacy.
It doesn't even matter what the intent of the people creating the laws is, what matters is in practice whether people feel the laws protect those things that they value. The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law.
"The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law"
So what? The point of copyrights is not to protect artists. The point of copyrights, at least in the United States, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The question is not about what artists feel, but about whether the majority of people feel that copyrights are working in the best interests of society. I suspect that most people would not care one way or the other about copyright if you were to ask, because most people ignore copyrights.
I also have my doubts about the majority of artists feeling protected by copyright law. Most musicians, authors, actors, painters, etc. are not even paid enough to live on and have to take second jobs. Either they have truly mastered doublethink or copyright is not really providing those creative workers with as much protection as we are expected to believe. This is under the current copyright system, which features the longest terms in the history of American copyrights and some of the most expansive copyright law ever seen.
I agree that copyright law is terribly implemented (DMCA, DRM, expiration 70 years after death, 3 strikes rules, etc.), but nevertheless, I don't know a single artist (or knowledge worker) that doesn't feel that the Berne Convention provides them at least a minimal protection against outright plagiarism. Even the the most liberal Creative Commons licenses build on top of copyright, even BSD style licenses do.
I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?
"I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?"
In fact that happens all the time with work-for-hire copyrights. Anyone who works as a programmer for Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. can expect to receive no credit for their creative work, only a pay check for having done it. Think of all the independent contractors out there who write software for big corporations, get paid, and get neither recognition nor credit for their work.
Take a look at movie and music sharing on the Internet, and what you will see is that plagiarism is almost entirely absent. Nobody is claiming credit for some musician's work when they share that musician's recordings online. That is probably copyright infringement (whether a particular act even constitutes infringement is determined by a courtroom battle), but it is not at all plagiarism.
The history of copyright is important here, because it explains things that otherwise make no sense at all. If copyright is about plagiarism, why is there no requirement that credit be given the actual author / artist / creator of covered works? If copyright is about paying creative workers, why is it that the vast majority of artists need to work a second job? The answer is that copyright is about neither plagiarism nor paying artists; it is and has always been about business and government interests. The reason publishers, recording studios, movie studios, and so forth have become so disproportionately wealthy by comparison with the people whose works they sell is that copyright as a system was designed with industry in mind.
Your original claim was that copyright is the legal embodiment of a widely held moral belief or of some generally held value. I am asserting that this is as untrue in the 21st century as it was in the 17th century. Copyright continues to be a system that is design for and which favors certain industries; artists are a secondary concern, just as they were when the Stationer's company lobbied for the Statute of Anne.
Finally, plagiarism is readily solved with technology; copyright infringement is inherently unsolvable. The solution to plagiarism is watermarking, embedding a hard-to-remove message in images/audio/video/text that identifies the creator (technical details omitted). This was studied in the 80s and 90s and at one time it was believed that there might be a market for such technology, as a way to combat plagiarism on the Internet. In the end, though, it worked out that plagiarism is not so important as long as everyone is being paid; copyright became the important issue online, with plagiarism being a secondary and far less important concern.
When you write code for a company, the company usually owns the copyright, not you. You've assigned copyright to them. Do you release all of your personal code into the public domain? Why not? If you use a free software or open source license, you're relying on copyright protections.
To reiterate, I'm not claiming that IP laws are a perfect match for longstanding morals about invention, branding, authorship, and secrecy, I'm claiming that they are better than a 0% match.
I'm not even disagreeing that IP laws as they stand grossly favor big businesses instead of creators. I'm just disagreeing with the claim that IP laws are 100% made up by the government and have nothing to do with our morals about wanting to protect creative work. I think we need better IP laws that correspond more closely to our morals about creation and less closely to our morals about capitalism.
I don't feel like I'm doing the concept justice, but hopefully I'm conveying the gist well enough to distinguish from "ownership" and "possession".
I don't think it's good or bad. I just think it's entirely inaccurate to think that if someone covets what you have that they hold back due to a base level of respect for the other person. If that held true there'd just be no crime period in society because everyone would say "I'm not going to do that because I'd hate for that to be done to me as another human being"
Yes, I do. It is how I think, and I think well enough of my coworkers that I believe they think the same. I wouldn't assume that they don't think that way without evidence of it, since that is a vile thing to assume.
Are there some people without this respect who are held in line merely by the law, or fear of losing their job? Sure, of course there are some people like that. The fact remains that a notion of property/possession exists for the rest of the population; for the people who are not defective in such a way.
Not everybody would steal from those around them if they thought they could get away with it. To be perfectly honest, I am rather suspicious of anyone who assumes that everybody would steal if given the chance.
That is a depressing but thankfully unrealistic view of how people behave. In my office there are no specific rules about taking keyboards, monitors, or even computers off each other's desk. Once a year the department takes an inventory of the equipment to make sure it is still in the building, and once in the past five years an email was sent out to remind everyone not to take monitors home with them.
The reason nobody takes things from each other here is respect and courtesy. There are only about 100 of us in this building, making us a small enough group that we can trust each other. When things are truly stolen -- taken out of the building, rather than just moved between desks -- emails are sent out asking if anyone knows what happened. It is almost always the case that an outsider came in and grabbed something valuable, and that almost never happens.
Obviously this is not something that scales past a hundred or so people, but the point is that in small, trusting groups there is no real need for iron-clad rules or harsh punishments. People can and do behave respectfully and courteously.
But also, if you come onto my property, you don't have to cede authority to me, I'm still the government and I will make decisions about what happens to you, so you are bound to my laws whether you like it or not.
We give government a monopoly on force
No, that's just one incarnation of government.
Another aspect of the 2nd amendment people often overlook (particularly gun control advocates) was that it was originally intended as a check to the power of the army. The idea being that should the government ever try to use the military to suppress the public, that an armed public would be able to fight back and presumably being bigger than the military, win. That theory has been greatly eroded in the last 70 years or so by the increasingly large gap between the weapons the military has access to and what the public has access to. Back when the constitution was drafted a rifle was a rifle was a rifle, and 200 soldiers versus 1000 citizens all armed with rifles, the citizens would likely win. These days with the military having tanks and jets and nightvision and all manner of other advanced weapons (including the much debated fully automatic rifles) means that your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict.
Castle doctrine is a states-only policy and the feds have no position on it. The second amendment states only that people's right to bear arms shall not be infringed, it doesn't state anything about the application of force.
I don't want to get into this debate on HN but there's not that much evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant to be a check on the army. It's related to the long-standing English principle of the right to self-defense and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English always thought you had the right to defend yourself with deadly force and a long standing tradition of a natural right to bear arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms
I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing.
I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks.
That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection.
In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".
Until you have the minimum viable population for our species (i.e. the smallest group of humans that can avoid extinction) you cannot really have a society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population
Of course, that number depends on things like the environment (a favorable environment will mean a smaller number) and the genetics of the "first" generation. I seriously doubt that the number could be as small as two for any species even under the most ideal circumstances.
In fact, your hypothetical correctly assumes that people need to protect their stuff. This need is evidence of self interest. The fact that there are universal norms that allow the use of force to protect things is evidence of a right to property.
In other words, a victim of theft is rightfully angry. This lets us conclude that he has a right to be free of theft. This indicates a right to property.
Intellectual property corresponds (somewhat poorly) to the natural right of being allowed to profit from your ideas.
Laws are nothing but codified decisions from government. Sometimes they define the specifics of how natural rights are balanced against each other. However, laws sometimes violate rights, such as the now-repealed Jim Crow laws in the American South. Furthermore, the term "legal rights" can also be a misnomer for government-guaranteed privileges such as the "right" to government-provided benefits or (in my opinion) intellectual property "rights".
First ataggart makes the point that elevating patent and copyright privileges to the level of natural rights is wrong and implies (through Orwell) that confusing intellectual property rights and physical property rights leads to foolish thinking.
Then, you make the argument that it doesn't matter because, "Every legal concept is entirely the government's creation, including both physical and intellectual property...."
Then a bunch of people, myself included, disagree with that point by referencing Hobbes and Locke and providing examples of how ownership exists outside of government influence.
Now, I agree that "Natural rights are real things in as much as morals are real things." And since we are not amoral, we can presume that natural rights exist.
Remember, the original point is that labels matter here. Mislabeling things as "rights" causes people to both overvalue grants from their governments and (more importantly) to devalue natural rights as being decreed by government (which means they can be abolished or altered by the same powers).
When your "rights" are derived from government and they are taken away, you're on the losing side. When rights are inalienable and they are violated, you are being persecuted.
All that is to say, "intellectual property rights" is a dumb term.
According to you, it is morally OK for government to decide what is a right and what isn't. In that case, is there anything morally wrong with government deciding to nationalize all retirement savings?
Governments are a natural extension of parents. Goodness or badness is not an all-or-nothing proposition; nobody has perfect parents, but most people accept that in general, having parents that make and enforce the rules is a good thing. It is quite possible to have terrible parents though, in which case escape might be a good idea.
I just don't understand why anarcho-capitalist libertarianism is so great. The international situation today is a capitalist anarchy among nations, and the US abuses its immense power to call most of the shots. How would it be any different at the level of individuals?
Do not confuse the right to think with the right to profit from your ideas. You do have a natural right to think about whatever you want, as well as a natural right to communicate your thoughts to others.
But sure, I don't believe in absolute natural rights, much as I don't believe in absolute morals.
Put more simply, I believe that authorship is a natural right, just like ownership. You might ask, why should the idea be mine just because I got to first? And I would answer, why should the tree be yours just because you got to it first?
I think that's a whole nuther kettle of fish.
For one, the two are in contradiction. Suppose you believe that you have the right to exclude, presumably you also believe that all other humans have the same right, owing to its status as a natural right. By believing that you can exclude, and therefore profit by way of eliminating competition, you acknowledge that the competition can exclude you as well.
It boils down to whether or not by "profit", one implies complete domination of a resource. I tend to think that many parties can profit, without the necessity to exclude by brute force.
This is also the key difference between patents and copyrights. The former demands total domination of a resource, while the latter does not.
> And I would answer, why should the tree be yours just because you got to it first?
It's a good point, but there is a difference. It is possible for two parties to arrive at the same intellectual destination without being aware of one another. The same cannot be said for two parties arriving at the same tree, at the same time, but one not being aware of the existence of the other.
I suppose you can construct an argument in which both parties lack all physical sense of awareness. :)
This is why property is a concept solely reserved for physical objects, not to information. They are fundamentally different categories of things. You cannot own an idea any more than you can own a frequency (regulation of the broadcasting of certain frequencies of RF waves should not be confused with "owning" the waves themselves).
The difference is this: share your tree with me, and there will be only one tree. Share your ideas with me and we can both think about them, utilize them, and benefit from them. This idea is self-evident; just as I am communicating it to anyone who reads this post, it was communicated to me by someone else:
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
It is true that creative expression should be valued and that people should be encouraged to be creative. I would add that society should set up a system where creative workers can derive an income from their work and that such a system will be vital as more and more things are automated. Property rights are orthogonal to this. I happen to be a creative worker, but there is no need for me or anyone else to "own" the products of my work; my research group's salaries are paid with grant money, because the government wants to encourage the work we do, and we want our work to reach as many eyes as possible.