Comment by streetfighter64
8 days ago
Again, what does government enforcement of a certain belief about nature, have to do with government enforcement of property rights?
Ownership of physical property is also an artificial grant from the state. (Or if you will, a recognition by the state of what people in general believe) Perhaps not a table or a knife, but a farm or a factory, have in many countries been suddenly disqualified as legitimate property of their (former) owner, as a result of e.g. a communist revolution. There's nothing more "natural" to owning a piece of land, than to owning a song.
I'm pretty sure physical possession was not generally considered equivalent to ownership before the 1970s, that's an absurd statement. Shareholders of the East India Company in the 1600s weren't in physical possession of the ships, yet they were considered owners. Even purely intellectual property, such as patents, have existed in laws since at least 1474. Albert Einstein famously worked in a patent office.
Property rights themselves are a codification of a belief about nature, from a natural law perspective. There are other conceptions of property, of course, but of the ones that are relatively common, I think the least useful is the one that views property as whatever government says property is. Most people--well, most USians--think property has (and rights have) a meaning more fundamental than whatever the State arbitrarily grants. We note that animals defend scarce territory, that toddlers are upset when something they have is taken from them, that we distinguish jealousy regarding something we have and want to keep versus covetousness of something another has and we want to obtain.
Obviously the idea of copyright and patent as property rights didn't spring fully formed in the 1970s, but the entertainment and software industries during the 1970s and 1980s really drove the idea that copyright infringement is exactly the same thing as theft of something that someone actually has. The idea of copyright and patent in most law, including the US Constitution, are held as special, limited-term grants, not property rights.
> I think the least useful is the one that views property as whatever government says property is.
That's not what I'm saying by a long shot either. And "intellectual property does not exist at all" is a far less useful view.
> We note that animals defend scarce territory, that toddlers are upset when something they have is taken from them, that we distinguish jealousy regarding something we have and want to keep versus covetousness of something another has and we want to obtain.
Well, do you not think this holds for ideas as well? Do you think nobody ever said "That guy stole my joke" before 1970?