" Intellectual Poperty " vs " Physical Proper

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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With the rise of the term “Intellectual Poperty” to discribe the creation of data, e-books, documents, music, movies, etc in a digital format, also came the comparisons that equate the unauthorized duplication of the IP with forceful removal of the physical property (to be reffered in this post as “PP” for short, “Intellectual Poperty” as “IP”). Can the analogy be considered flawed in one prespective, or have these people created a system too good to be challenged?

This is not just a discussion on whether or not something is legal, or illegal, or moral, or immoral, but whether the laws on the books as well as a sense of logic diffuse the notion that “Intellectual Poperty” and “Physical Property” can be “lost” in the same way, if the values are the same, and if overall, they should be treated the same thing.

I do not for one minnute believe IP and PP are the same for one distinguishing feasture IP has over PP is that IP can be duplicated a near infinite ammount of times, can be used by two or more people at one time at different places around the globe, while you can’t do the same with PP. It would also be easy to calculate the loss in a sale when PP is stolen, but if IP was copied without permission, there is still a chance, although the odds are unknown, that whatever payment is due can be still made by that one person, and that no actual “product”, in this case the IP is lost, and is still fully usable, and money can be made off of it if the creator wanted to, despite illegal copies floating around.

This topic is now open to discussion. I welcome input from all sides of the issue, but ask that you try to keep your cool, as I have seen doscussions on “intellectual property,” copyrights, downloading illegal stuffs, etc become quite heated, and oftentimes closed from flamewars that break out between people in that discussion.

Argue laws, as well as moral prespectives and even logic arguments to make your case if you wish, but do not mix the two as the same thing (keep law as one point, your moral prespective as another,) it can become confusing by some, especially me if the two are mixed because of the different moral prespectives and sense of ligic in the forums.

Let’s debate
digns bell

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Property is in fact a right, in as much as legal doctrines on the matter can be taken into account, and to be precise it is the right to exclusivity. The fact that i own something means that i am the only one who can use it, or conversely that no one else can use it without my permission.

Now it is easy to see how it is irrespective to this doctrine wether the property is in fact an object or an idea, and as such can be equally used to enforce both, with minimal effort.

The people who do not think intelectual property is a valid concept (myself included) point out that

  1. there is no valid cause to assign intelectual property to any one entity. inasmuch as the criteria is “who registered it first with some arbitrarily assigned registrar” their claim to precedence is entirely arbitrary. inasmuch as criteria is “who worked for it” that is entirely circumstantial, no matter how much you work to prove a false statement it will stay false. hence there is no good reason to assign effort any intellectual value.

  2. there is no valid cause to prevent people from using their own idea. It is entirely possible that any one human comes up with the ideas of any other human. the fact that one comes with them before another is nothing more than historical accident. this “first come, first served” approach is entirely abusive, considering some agency declared itself the “deed giver” over the land of intellectual products and tried to enforce borders. even if all humans alive signed the statutes of that agency, it would still be abusive because nobody can in fact own ideas in the first place, legitimately, and then trying to confer deeds is abusive. For instance, when the west was colonized, colonists did in fact make fences and became owners by virtue of that, but they did that because the US govt lent them a license to do it, as the first owner of the land. People who just put up fences on indian land, much like the us govt to begin with, were in fact abusive owners.

  3. While we recognize the social benefits of copyrights (ie they stimulate research, for people constantly strive to get the copyrights, which mean money, and in the process they generate valuable ideas) we also recognize the social damages of copyrights (especially visible in the realm of computer programming. because “proprietary” software insists to not divulge its code, we are stuck using tools we do not know or understand, that are ineffective and ineffectual and that we can not improve. Also, we are stuck constantly re-inventing the circle). It can be argued we will be alot better of if we just trashed that concept altogether. And yes, on the practical side, it is possible, i write now on a system that runs debian linux, which is an open source license, which i have in fact modified to suit my needs, im writing on an open source net browser etc etc and i really think i am, and can prove i am, getting alot more for my money than any windows user anywhere. (and the graphics are alot better too, unix isnt what it used to be))

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I think copyrights and patents in general should stay, but the way they work nees a real re-working.

If I have read correctly, in the U. S constitution, copyrights were mentioned as

I feel copyrights no longer fit this discription, holders still maintain the rights to their respective works, but the length of time (life + is it 75? years), which easily exceeds 100 years, and with some could come close to 200 years, doesn’t seem like a “limited time” to me. I also feel they are also leaning too far towards corporations and giand media companies instead of just what individual copyright holders share.

EXAMPLES:

  1. Getting sued because your ideas are too similar to anothers, when the one suing could have based his ideas off of somebody else’s already. :stuck_out_tongue:

  2. being sued because you find a flaw with CD copy protection and publish your findings(http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2003-10-27-haldeman-sunncomm_x.htm)

  3. Not being able to maintain “ownership” of your own works if you want, for example, music you made to get released on a major music label.

I could list more, but I just hit a brain drain.