I took the post to be asking for opinions sufficiently far outside the mainstream to be rarely discussed even here, and I haven’t seen a significant amount discussion of this one. Then again, that could be because I wasn’t particularly looking; I used to be of the opinion “intellectual property law has gone too far and needs to be cut back, but of course we can’t do away with it entirely,” and only recently looked more closely at the but of course part and realized it didn’t hold water. If this opinion is more common than I had given it credit for, great!
I haven’t seen a discussion of the concept of intellectual property that did not include a remark to the effect of “Wait, whence the analogy between property of unique objects and control of easily copied information?”.
True. The usual reply to that is “we need to reward the creators of information the same way we reward the creators of physical objects,” and that was the position I had accepted until recently realizing, certainly we need to reward the creators of information, but not the same way—by the same kind of mechanism—that we reward the creators of physical objects. (Probably not by coincidence, I grew up during the time of shrink-wrapped software, and only re-examined my position on this matter after that time had passed.)
Property laws aren’t based on their owners having created them though. Ted Turner is not in the land reclamation business, and if I go down a disused quarry owned by another and build myself a table, I don’t gain ownership of the marble. All defenses of actually existing property rights are answers to the question “how do we encourage people to manage resources sensibly”.
The post asked for opinions so repulsive people have a hard time generating them in the first place. This is a relatively common opinion.
I took the post to be asking for opinions sufficiently far outside the mainstream to be rarely discussed even here, and I haven’t seen a significant amount discussion of this one. Then again, that could be because I wasn’t particularly looking; I used to be of the opinion “intellectual property law has gone too far and needs to be cut back, but of course we can’t do away with it entirely,” and only recently looked more closely at the but of course part and realized it didn’t hold water. If this opinion is more common than I had given it credit for, great!
I haven’t seen a discussion of the concept of intellectual property that did not include a remark to the effect of “Wait, whence the analogy between property of unique objects and control of easily copied information?”.
True. The usual reply to that is “we need to reward the creators of information the same way we reward the creators of physical objects,” and that was the position I had accepted until recently realizing, certainly we need to reward the creators of information, but not the same way—by the same kind of mechanism—that we reward the creators of physical objects. (Probably not by coincidence, I grew up during the time of shrink-wrapped software, and only re-examined my position on this matter after that time had passed.)
Property laws aren’t based on their owners having created them though. Ted Turner is not in the land reclamation business, and if I go down a disused quarry owned by another and build myself a table, I don’t gain ownership of the marble. All defenses of actually existing property rights are answers to the question “how do we encourage people to manage resources sensibly”.