[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Certain corporations have been trying to define content as "intellectual property" partly so they can insist that copying that property constitutes theft, for quite some time, and it appears that some people have bought into it. It's not the same thing, though.

You're trying to make your argument look better by suggesting that since corporations are behind the idea of "intellectual property," it's bad - but that's not even the case. The term was first used in the 1870's by the Swiss Office for Intellectual Property, which handled patents and copyrights. It has nothing to do with corporations.

And of course intellectual property *is* property. You can own it, you can buy it, you can sell it, lease it, rent it license it, donate it, give it away, pass it on to your heirs by will or intestate succession. It's *property,* and it's pointless to try to pretend it isn't.

I'm reminded of a case of a cracker from many, many years back who broke into the AT&T administrative system and, as proof he'd been there, copied a manual about setting up phone systems. In court, AT&T declared that the manual was worth -- and he had stolen -- thousands of dollars, as they added up all the time it took someone to write it, type it up, etc. (for reasons I'll leave open to your speculation, they didn't mention that when they sold this manual, it went for $20) They quite deliberately conflated the idea of taking something away from its owner, who then can't use it, and who has hence lost the value of all that staff time doing the writing, with the idea of copying that item, which, if they hadn't found out from other sources, they would never know had happened.

Relevance?

If I photograph your house, have I stolen the house? Obviously not; you're still living there. It would be ridiculous to say I've stolen your house. But mixing the idea of real or chattel property into the equation, and calling the privileges statutorily granted to content creators "property" as if it was no different from a house, makes people think that it's the same. And it isn't. A publisher can't do a print run of 50,000 copies of your house, or sell as many identical e-houses as they have buyers for. Only one person or specific group can use your house at a time. And once the builder sold that house, it's not his house anymore; he doesn't keep getting paid over and over when you sell the house to me, and I sell it to FizzyWater, and so on. When he stops building houses -- whether he died, or retired, or became a chef instead -- he stops getting paid for houses.

We have always had different rules for different kinds of property - real property as opposed to personal property, for example. For a long time, this was a huge distinction: personal property could be left by will; real property could not. Adding intellectual property to the mix doesn't really confuse people.

If I own a store and you steal my inventory, I lose money because I can't sell it to anyone else. If I write e-books and you give away copies of my e-book to people who would otherwise have purchased it, I lose money because I can't sell it to them. This is really simple point. And it is a much more important point than esoteric arguments that nonrivalrous goods aren't property.

Pensions, life insurance, and so on don't equate either. They're all things that you bought and paid for, and they're paying you back, usually with interest. You can designate a beneficiary for survivor's benefits, but they're still getting paid from (theoretically, at least, unless it's a giant Ponzi scheme) the money you paid in. You may not see it because the payments came from your employer or from your taxes but they're there somewhere. You pay in; it pays you out. It has nothing to do with this situation.

It has everything to do with this situation. In some case I do work, translate it to money, and spend the money on something; in other cases, I do work and produce the copyrighted goods myself.

The reason a monopoly on selling a book isn't the same kind of "property" as ownership of a house has to do with the nature of a book: You can duplicate the book without changing the original, or taking its away from the person who owns it. Whether it's a monk in a scriptorium with a quill pen or a person with a computer and a save button, the book is still there; now there are two of them. Or two million of them. That monopoly on sales is granted by legislation of some kind -- in the US, the clause in the Constitution about "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- for specific social reasons. It doesn't mention "for the enrichment of the first person to claim authorship" -- it's for the benefit of society as a whole (promotion of progress), and the benefit to an individual is a way of achieving that, by making it possible to make a living as an author.

The real basis for *all* property is legislation. Until the statute of wills (in England) in the 1500's, you couldn't pass land to your heirs by will. You still can't possess or sell certain items (i.e., cocaine) in the US or most other countries.

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