Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
I really don't see the difference. Physical property rights don't exist without government if you can't defend them yourself.
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Ability to control use of land exists outside of governments. We invented governments to make "guy with biggest club" not the biggest landowner. But the fact remains: guy with club, and a couple of friends, can demand that other people not be present on the land they've decided to control.
Ability to control use of a literary or artistic work does not exist outside of governments. Guy with club cannot follow everyone who's heard his poetry, read his book or seen his painting and prevent them from making a copy. The physics involved are drastically different, and that's before we touch on social issues.
There's a longtime understanding throughout most of humanity that where you live and sleep is, or should be, under some level of your control. There's an equally longtime understanding that the words you say and the acts you commit... are not. That your friend can go to *his* friend and say, "Hans told me [repeat Hans' words]."
We invented governments in part to limit people's ability to club each other and throw them out off land they wanted to control. We wanted *less* physical controls attached to physical property rights, and we established social controls so that people wouldn't want to rely on the obvious physical solutions.
And we invented governments to expand people's ability to control use of their words and actions... to declare some acts as private, some information confidential, some works only allowed to develop profit in certain directions. We wanted to establish social controls to make up for the lack of possibility of physical controls.
(All that is tangential to whether or not it's "correct" that these rights get passed to someone else after the death of the first rightsholder. So this may be nothing more than a distraction; sorry.)