But we aren't talking about what the market does, we're talking about a creator's right to the potential benefits of any work he produces.

As I stated, this has additional purposes beyond just an individual creator's rights as well. A society that puts these protections in place creates an environment that encourages open innovation and development.


-karma

the creator can't set the price however he likes, he has to set the price according to what the market will bear (assuming he intends to make a profit). more importantly, in order to sell his product, the creator has to show it to people--at which point, it becomes easy for others to copy his idea without giving him a dime. the creator has a choice between not showing off his product (and therefore not profiting because nobody knows what he's trying to sell them), or showing off his product (and therefore not making a profit because everybody can steal what he's trying to sell). not being able to profit from a product that has high demand is not capitalism. as i said, it's a food chain.

it's interesting to note that the current IP laws actually tend more towards mercantilism than any modern economic system.

You have the rights to that dustbin.

But someone came up with the design of that dustbin. You don't have the rights the that design.

Nor the rights to reproduce that design and distribute it.

IP law is not about the product itself, but the specific expression of the idea behind the product. That's why it's called "Intellectual property".


-karma

Ho ho ho! Narse stole the dignity!

In order to enumerate natural rights we must first define natural rights. Natural rights are those that exist that exist in the absence of government, where government is defied as the use of force to ensure compliance with artificial law where artificial law is defined as any law enforced by arms rather than by the nature of the universe.

We can start with the natural right to exist, since it is the most fundamental of all natural rights. If you exist then you have the right to exist. Note that a natural right to exist does not imply a natural right to continued existence.

There exists an undeniable natural right to privately possess discrete tangible property. A discrete, tangible item held in the possession of one individual cannot simultaneously be held in the possession of another, after all.

There exists a natural right to share infinite intangible things, such an information and ideas, with others. While tangible resources are depleted as they are shared, intangible resources are only multiplied by sharing.

I don't particularly believe that it is necessary to enumerate beyond this point.

i guess going into that whole death sentence now would be going too far?

So essentially your natural rights are to a life "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short". right?

By your definition coping someone else's work is certainly a natural right as you also have the natural right to kill them, rape their children, and claim all their property for your own.

If you kill someone, rape his children, and take his property then you are, by definition, a government. Ntural rights are those which exist in absence of government, so no.

Actually, that's pretty deniable. Tangible property outside the body simply exists. A house doesn't know or care that some particular person says he owns it. If one person or a hundred different people sleep in the house consecutively or all at once nothing special happens. You don't accumulate time bars before the house transforms from one color to another.

Property, or indeed ownership of any kind is not a natural right because it requires recognition of law to have any meaning. The shoes on the floor are mine because the law of the Czech Republic recognizes my claim on them as open, notorious, and legitimate. But in the absence of law it's simply me here, and a pair of shoes 2 meters over there. No inalienable or natural connection exists between me and them.

Natural rights are simply Existence, Thought, and Expression. Everything else is a social construct created by those three.

-Frank

Interesting definition of a government, care to explicitly state it?

One theory of thought states that in the 'State of Nature' each person governs their own actions without external governance and could therefore be considered a government unto themselves. Why can't a single person be a government in nature? (that is what you are implying right?) I fail to see how a man can exist in a state (of being) without government if he can be considered to be a government in and of himself (as you imply). How can their be an absence of government if each person can be a government? Why would they choose not to be a government if no other government existed?

That was just several ways of expressing my lack of understanding of your point. Hopefully one of them will help you to clarify.

i fail to see how the fact that a given set of actions can be taken in the absence of government makes the ability to take those actions anything special. you call that set of abilities "natural rights", implying that they are important and worth defending. why? i don't see how anything you listed is a "right" at all, any more than picking up a rock is a "right" or blinking your eyes is a "right".

Government is defined as a monopoly on the [legitimate] use of violence. Since the term legitimate is meaninglessly vague, such that any use of violence can be defined as legitimate, we can ignore it.

Any entity that uses violence or that threatens to use without any meaningful violent opposition is, by definition, a government. An individual can't be a government unless there is also a governed, since a lone individual would only be able to use violence against himself and self-violence futile in that you cannot use violence to compel yourself to do something that you would not otherwise do.

While you wear your shoes, they are yours. No one else can wear them. Government only extends your rights over those shoes to the periods of time when you are not wearing them.

This applies to houses, beds, cars, refrigerators, and factories how? Basically the step from "I have the ability to design, make, and/or use tools" to "I have a right to own property" is unwarranted and indefensible. There have actually been many quite successful cultures which did not recognize even transient rights to property - although admittedly most of them were located in regions so mild of climate that noone cared to "own pants".

Property, whether large or small is an entirely socially developed concept. The land under your feet doesn't give a rat's ass whether you think you own it or not. The air you breath is as indifferent to your passing as the sun and the moon. Which of course, is why Kagetenshi asked you to enumerate the "natural rights" - because while Leviathan tells us that you have the right to Life, Liberty, and Private Property, there's actually no reason to believe that you have that last right. Indeed, if Hobbes had been writing on behalf of a Communist Dictator instead of a Theocratic Dictator he wouldn't have had that last one in there at all.

The argument that you can hold an ax and therefore have a right to own that ax is no different from the argument that you can swing that ax at some dude's face and therefore have a right to kill people with extreme face devastation.

---

Now in practice it is fairly difficult to find even the most ardent of Communists who would demand that people cease considering shoes and pants as "owned objects", juts as there are very few Libertarians so extreme of view that they seriously want to disband the police. Pretty much everyone wants a society that recognizes some form of property and ownership, regardless of how much of the infrastructure they want in public or private hands. But this is something that society recognizes, it's not handed down from the sky on clay tablets. It's not somehow discernable from pure reason based on the state of nature.

Currently, society has the rules on how much intellectual property it recognizes written by the people who own the most intellectual property. And it's gotten quite ludicrous. Like the Salt Monopoly which built a wall around Paris to cut down on salt smuggling, the DRM is a monumental expenditure of time and resources which serves no real purpose in the overall scheme of things but to hold us back as a society. It is a rather clear example of private ownership rights extended into madness and beyond.

When you get to the point where we are now, that it is no longer protected speech to quote material in reviews or research material, that's not benefitting society. That's not encouraging innovation, that's preventing it. Regardless of whether you think that the idea of Patents and Copyrights is a good one in the abstract, the actual implementation we see in the DMCA is beyond anything close to reasonable. Beyond anything which could possibly have an overall positive effect on anything.

The trade-off we are looking at with innovation is that if a prospective innovator (whether in a scientific or artistic field) does not think that they can benefit from an innovation, they might simply hide it away to be discovered only after their death. That would be a tragic loss for humanity in many cases. However, if workis legally protected in such a manner that future innovators are unable to build off it, then you're sort of in the same place you would have been had the original manuscript stayed hidden under the mattress. In our current system, work stays locked away, often without the possibility of being freed or used with permission for dozens, even hundreds of years. There is no reason to believe that the United States will even exist by the time it becomes legal for the folk process to make derivative work from Mickey Mouse.

And that is wrong. I don't care whether you think copyright should be done away with altogether or whether you think that society should protect an artist's wishes with an iron hand - the current digital rights rules are insane. They are more Draconian than even the tripe spouted in The Fountainhead. And when Capitalism has progressed to the point where Ayn Rand is no longer comfortable supporting it - you've gone too far.

-Frank

So what made you assume in my killing people example that the perpetrator has a monopoly on violence? It seems more likely to me that in the 'state of nature' which Hobbes would say is a "state of Warre" , many people are using violence to potentially legitimate ends and so this one person does not have a monopoly on violence and therefore by your own definition is not a government, of course you also explicitly stated that in this example the perpetrator was a government. How do your account for this discrepancy in your statements? (Granted I am assuming that this person does not have a monopoly on violence, if your problem is with this assumption please state so.)