@Zetherin,
Zetherin wrote:Emperor Nero wrote:Ownership has nothing to do with whether value is diminished, as some are suggesting. It is the right to exclusive control.
No one here (that I know of) suggested that. What was suggested is that the taking of an intangible can directly devalue a tangible.
Yes, that's what I meant. Whether the taking of an intangible devalues a tangible doesn't really matter. If pirating didn't devalue anything at all, property rights would still have to be observed because the owner has the right to exclusively control his form. And if people copy it then he doesn't control it.
I can't take your car at night and put it back in the morning as long as I don't diminish it's value. Your right to own your car is not a right to not have it's value diminished, but a right to exclusively control it. And exclusive control of forms means that you get to decide who gets to a copy.
Zetherin wrote:I still don't see how scarcity is of any issue here. Things can still have value which aren't scarce, and people can still have ownership over things that aren't scarce.
Because if something isn't scarce then there is no point in figuring out who gets to control it. Many commodities with value aren't scarce, like air and sunshine. But if what everyone wants adds up to less than there is, then everyone can have as much as they want. Only if there is a possible conflict of interest do we need to define who gets to control something.
People can have ownership of things that aren't scarce, but that might be because they were once scarce. Or because there is scarcity in one area and the value is transporting it. And some abundant resources that are owned are really representatives of something else which is scarce, rocks and sand are abundant but they can represent access trough a mountain pass. I can't think of any example of ownership that isn't based on some scarcity.
And that leads us to another reason for why we shouldn't define property rights until the issue of scarcity comes up; we wouldn't know how to define them in any meaningful way until we know what precisely is scarce. Nobody cared who owns the wind until wind-turbines started stealing each others output. Who could have anticipated that we need to define 'flow of air' property rights?
Notice that all this doesn't require a state. It's all individuals resolving conflicts with each others over who gets to have what. People can sue each others if they think they violated each others property rights, and the conflicts can be addressed by a private conflict resolution framework.
Zetherin wrote:Anyway, I believe it is unfair for the creators of the "immaterial structures" you speak of, in many cases, to not have some sort of legal protection. For instance, with my inventor example. And I don't see why the case should be different for software or music creators.
It's not really about fairness, but about economic efficiency. If you don't control a form then you can't demand money for it's use. Some might say "great, then we can all have it", but that's forgetting the macroeconomic implications. If you can't sell something for money, then there is little use in producing it. And then we are all poorer because valuable forms aren't produced. After all it may take thousands of hours of labor and millions of Dollars to create a computer program. In the long run we are all richer if stuff isn't free.
