Quote:
Originally Posted by thersites
Yes, but most governments also provide incredibly generous copyright protection that make the publishing business possible, allowing the author (and others often well after his or her lifetime) to be compensated for their product. This is hardly natural either, and is created in large part for the public benefit. You can quibble with the details of either arrangement, but not the basic usefulness of one arrangement without undermining the other.
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Governments do make many thing possible, but copyright laws are no more or less natural than other property laws - there's nothing "natural" about owning a particular piece of land, for example. Copyright is a newer law, of course, and there's less consensus on what the rules should be. (Although the rights to own real estate aren't too much older than copyright law - in England until 1300, you weren't allowed to sell the land you occupied (it technically belonged to the king), and it wasn't until the 1500's that you were allowed to leave land to someone else in a will.)