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I can see the argument that you and I can make a straightforward contract of you giving me X and me giving you Y. I am much more skeptical of a contract that is supposed to constrain my actions in perpetuity, which prohibits me from trading with anyone who does not likewise agree to have their actions constrained in perpetuity, and so on over infinite recursions. It seems to me that such recursive, unlimited constraint creates little positive and much negative, and I'm not inclined to support its propagation. I feel similarly about contracts placing one in perpetual slavery, and other abrogations of what I perceive to be basic rights. The everlasting, infinite strength of contracts is not the foundation of my moral universe, and I am entirely willing to trade them off against other values.
Declining to watch Disney movies does not allow me to live in a world where the Disney Corporation has no perceptible impact on my life and the environment I live in. Further, if I claim that the Disney corporation is a net-negative, that doesn't mean that some of the things they produce aren't positive when consumed for free. I'm happy to forgo Disney products in exchange for Disney not existing, but not in exchange for voluntarily cooperating with the maintenance of Disney's existence. I see no contradiction here, only a question of practicalities.
True, and my attempt to argue otherwise was malformed. Still, it remains true that there's very nearly zero reason to obey the law that says you have to buy Disney movies to watch them. That's the core problem we keep circling back to: you can't enforce your ideological preferences, so you're dependent on the willing consent of others, and that consent can be withdrawn when the negative results of your ideological preferences manifest. Disney can't make money if they don't show people their data, and data is so trivial to copy and distribute that keeping it locked down is basically impossible.
As it happens, I'm free to copy things also because I see no reason to refrain from doing so and because you don't have the power to stop me. If you could prevent me from doing so by force, that would be one thing, and if you could persuade me that doing so was a bad idea, that would be another thing, but the first appears prohibitively difficult, and the second doesn't seem much easier.
I have every right to ideas, to data, to knowledge of reality and to imagination, to anything I can fit into my brain or the various brain-prostheses I possess. If you show me a picture, I own the sensory impressions it leaves in my mind. I reject the concept that any of these things can belong exclusively to any one individual in any fundamental sense. No one can own words, or language, or colors, names, plots, settings, dramatic motifs, or any of the rest of it. None of these things are worth anything unless they are shared, and neither you nor anyone else has a moral right to universal, perpetual control over how they're shared from now to the end of time. If you want such control, you have to negotiate for it, and if those negotiations fail, both sides revert to BATNA from their own perspective. BATNA from my perspective is I copy, remix, fold, spindle and mutilate the absolute hell out of anything I please, for any purpose I please, and thumb my nose at anyone who disapproves. If BATNA from your perspective is you secretly burn your Great American Novel rather than release it to those unwilling to pay you for the pleasure, I'm okay with that.
Delaying your grandfather's inevitable death is not a terminal value for me either; death is inevitable for all of us, and should not be greatly feared. I've already stated my view that the right to copy data is more valuable than all data that has ever existed; I'm pretty sure all the data that's ever existed is more valuable than one life by any reasonable standard.
Honestly, you know that private property itself is a social concept itself right? Adding an extra dimension onto that shouldn't be that unbelievable.
No, I don't know that private property is a social concept.
Personal space is not a social concept, but an emergent property of our brain. Individual identity, "I" versus "you", likewise is not a social concept. "Ownership", "belonging", "taking possession", "acquiring" or whatever you want to call it likewise seems to be an emergent property of individual identity, and the projection of that identity onto one's surroundings. Infants instinctively grasp and seize, grow attached to objects, but we have to teach them to share, to respect the property of others. The exact details of how we do that is a social concept, but the necessity for some way of doing that, bound by the constraints of physical reality and human nature, is not. Every society I've ever heard of has a concept analogous to personal property, and a concept analogous to theft. More complex societies lay down more and more refined ways of adjudicated disputes over proper possession, but the core concept seems quite primordial. No matter where or when they are, people are always going to consider some small sliver of all existent objects and territory "theirs", and all we can do is attempt to work around this reality as best we can.
But again, none of this applies to the immaterial. If I compose and sing a song, I have neither a right nor even much of a motivation to insist that you pay me before you sing it yourself. And indeed for nearly all of history, the idea of someone "owning" an ordinary song or story they'd come up with and renting it out to others, was preposterous. People might be paid to perform, and they might even be paid to compose, but "intellectual property rights" was not a thing, even millennia after "physical property rights" absolutely was. And in fact it was the crudity, limited supply and expense of early recording, copying and distribution tech that made the idea even remotely practical. The social structures that grew up arbitraging these inefficiencies are now doing everything in their power to maintain their niche, but it's easier, cheaper and better just to let them go extinct, and we will not suffer greatly from doing so. The case may be different in the world of physical goods, high-tech engineering and so on; then again, it may not.
Do you think that there is anything primordial in people that causes them to always consider some small sliver of all the ideas in the universe "theirs"?
Sure, but what "theirs" means changes drastically when the item in question is infinitely replicable. People often spend considerable effort preventing people from carrying off their possessions, and expend similar effort trying to encourage people to carry off their ideas. Ideas become more valuable the more people take them up.
So, no, the two attitudes don't seem comparable.
...except for the cases where they do the opposite and try to prevent people from carrying off their ideas.
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The relational parts of our languages are called possessives. Of course humans instinctively believe in ownership.
If FC agrees with you, then IP is essentially as primitive as (nonI)P. The whole shebang about it being an emergent property of our brain holds for IP, just the same. All we can do is attempt to work around this reality as best we can, just the same. Most importantly, his entire second paragraph seems to be based on a false premise.
This is, of course, IF FC agrees with you.
Personally, I agree with you. I think that prior to socially-agreed-upon law protecting physical property, brains held that some sliver of atoms in the universe were theirs, and they did what they could to preserve their personal possessions. They hid them, they fought others off who wanted to take them, etc. The socially-agreed-upon law worked around this as best we could, trying to make a credible promise that you didn't have to go to extreme measures all the time. That, in fact, you could loan your neighbor your ax, and if he didn't return it to you, the rest of the group would agree that he had wronged you. People could share more freely, given some contextual rules.
Same as IP. Before patent/copyright protection, you do still see some innovation in technology, and you see that people went to extreme measures to hide and protect the ideas which they believed they "owned" that they felt were most valuable. They didn't ever just share their ideas, and often, when they sold physical goods made using those ideas, they would even distort it from the optimal instantiation specifically to make it more difficult for someone else to "take" their ideas. You still see this on the international scene, where IP isn't socially-agreed-upon. For example, most militaries sell equipment to other countries, but they hobble the technology that goes into those products for export, specifically to prevent other countries from "stealing their ideas". Maybe patent/copyright law isn't the best law that could be socially-agreed-upon, but it has reason behind it. "How do we do our best to work around the fact that people want to hoard their best ideas?" Well, we'll give you limited time exclusive use, but in exchange, you have to share your idea publicly. It has to be published in a regularized format, to serve both as a mechanism of society knowing which specific idea is to be protected and as a mechanism to ensure that the idea is eventually shared to the benefit of everyone. Just the same as with physical property, people can now share their ideas more freely, since they have some contextual rules governing that sharing.
Can you give some examples, particularly in the field of media, entertainment, data generally?
High-tech weapons and state security information generally are among the few areas where restricting knowledge is straightforwardly useful, explicitly because the entire enterprise is predicated on serious conflict between the parties in question. But what's the equivalent of this for music, art, theatre, writing, the areas where the piracy debate centers? Where's the history of people attempting to keep their plays or songs secret?
This would be a more attractive argument, if we didn't see the history of copyright extensions in perpetuity.
From Wikipedia:
Literally went to war for it.
For a long time, things in media/entertainment/data weren't easily infinitely copyable. Text was hard/expensive to reproduce. With the rise of the printing press, making it much easier, we see the rise of formalized copyright law. Old plays, musical scores? They were physical objects. You could literally just keep a hold of the physical objects. Performances were ephemeral and literally uncopyable. Hell, the oldest known chess masters claimed exclusive rights to the list of moves they played.
I am 100% on your side that in perpetuity is a bad policy. That has literally nothing to do with your original argument, which was from first principles arguing that no such possible policy could make any theoretical sense.
As a general matter, I also reject your insistence that the debate is only concerning music/art/theatre/writing. The first principles argument you made was broader than that. We have good reason to reject your overly broad first principles argument. If you would like to make a different first principles argument such that those principles distinguish between those categories and, say, general trade secrets, I'm all ears.
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