[gmw]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Which is a problem.

Copyright is the name given to the set of rights defined in law. Those rights are valuable - by which I mean, they can be bought and sold, or licensed.

The protections are also defined in law, typically as penalties - much the same as with protections offered by law for any other property. The penalties imposed for copyright violation are separate to the rights provided by copyright itself. As is quite usual in law, the penalties tend to be imposed after a violation rather than as preventative measures. More below.

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I chose the word "steal" specifically to highlight the fact that idea's are not the same as physical objects and therefore should not be treated the same. I guess I was being too subtle.

It wasn't "steal" I objected to, but "idea". You said earlier you were trying to confine yourself to copyright, but you keep bringing up the protection of ideas, which is not what copyright is about. Either admit you are talking about about something other than copyright, or correct your mistakes.

Originally Posted by PKFFW

[...]If you disagree feel free to explain how, without killing me immediately after expressing your idea to me, you could physically stop me from silently walking away and using that idea for whatever I want? I grant you that you could sue me in court but that wouldn't actually stop me unless I decided to comply. You could destroy anything I use your idea to create or you could do all sorts of things after the fact but none of that physically stops me from doing it in the first place. It only, possibly, redresses the issue after the fact.

If I bow to your insistence, now, that we include protecting forms of IP other than copyright, you would find that there are many mechanisms tried, with varying levels of success, to protect the ideas (electronic circuits embedded in material that destroys the circuit when tampered with .. and on and on and on).

And we might say exactly the same thing about PP. Locks have only varying degrees of success. Come to that, so do shotguns. You can only be awake for so long, and you have to avoid shooting yourself or your family (a big stumbling block for many), and when the time comes you have to be the first one to the trigger (defenders have to be right all the time, attackers only have to be right once). And, seriously, the community does not expect you to turn every minor property infringement into a life-and-death situation. Law is partly about avoiding such extremities.

Also, some physical property is complicated. The rights to irrigation water is one I've had some experience with lately: it's something not quite directly physical (you can't say this bucket of water is mine) but it is something few are likely to call intellectual (although understand the rights is definitely an intellectual exercise).

So the rights to property are defined by law with the anticipation that law will protect the rights it defines. Retrospectively, yes. So? The law doesn't stop someone walking past your apple stall and pinching an apple - it never has. And short of being the biggest person around, or being ready to blow someone's head off for an apple, preemptively preventing theft is often not possible - PP or IP. Protection, for the individual, has never been about constant vigilance and being the biggest and strongest, it's about depending on your community and the rights and protections (laws) it provides.


You seem to be presenting a strawman, a distinction that doesn't really exist in modern/western civilised existence. You present the difficulties of protecting IP as peculiarly special. The are special, but in the same manner that so many different sorts of property are special in their own way.

We have gotten so used to apparently owning physical property we've grown to think it is some inherent right. It's not. Both PP and IP are rights made available to us by the civilisation in which we live. They haven't always existed. IP is newer, and we're still coming to grips with it.