Intellectual Property morality?

[thewanderer]

Bolding mine.

That is exactly my point. When you download a pirated song, you are avoiding paying royalties. Artists earn their living from royalties. Even if you don’t like it enough to pay money for it, you are still stealing from them. It is no different from shoplifting shampoo because “the manufacturers are ripping us off.” You’re still stealing. I believe there’s a Commandment about that.

If you’re not willing to pay for something, you don’t have to. You just abstain from owning it.

Well, see, that makes it sound as though you are working from a different principle than I am. I agree that copyrights ought to exist in some form. I am just not yet sure what form is the best form for them to exist. My main disagreement with lots of people who advocate for copyright laws is that they tend to speak as though immaterial property is of the exact same nature as material property. That is something which is just plain false. Stealing copyrighted material is not the same kind of stealing as stealing material property because they are not property in the same sense because of the fundamental differences in the natures of material and immaterial property. It is still wrong, but it is not wrong for the exact same reasons or in the exact same way as stealing material property. There is a lot of complicated reasoning that still needs to be worked out because of these differences which I am still trying to work out, but please recognize that there is a difference between immaterial and material property and that that makes a difference in how and when they can be “stolen”.

 

[jimperu]

Well, see, that makes it sound as though you are working from a different principle than I am. I agree that copyrights ought to exist in some form. I am just not yet sure what form is the best form for them to exist. My main disagreement with lots of people who advocate for copyright laws is that they tend to speak as though immaterial property is of the exact same nature as material property. That is something which is just plain false. Stealing copyrighted material is not the same kind of stealing as stealing material property because they are not property in the same sense because of the fundamental differences in the natures of material and immaterial property. It is still wrong, but it is not wrong for the exact same reasons or in the exact same way as stealing material property. There is a lot of complicated reasoning that still needs to be worked out because of these differences which I am still trying to work out, but please recognize that there is a difference between immaterial and material property and that that makes a difference in how and when they can be “stolen”.

You contradict yourself over and over. Please carefully read every sentence/statement that you have made. Example, you write, and I quote," STEALING copyrighted material is not the same kind of STEALING material property…". You made the statement that they are BOTH STEALING. Thou shalt not STEAL. What do you not understand? You also state, and I quote, “There is a lot of complicated reasoning that still needs to be worked out because of these differences which I am still trying to work out…”. ??? This makes NO sense whatsoever. I read all your rambling responses. They are wordy and very confusing. Please attempt to stick to the direct answers in a simple, readable, understandable manner. Thank You.

 

[thewanderer]

You contradict yourself over and over. Please carefully read every sentence/statement that you have made. Example, you write, and I quote," STEALING copyrighted material is not the same kind of STEALING material property…". You made the statement that they are BOTH STEALING. Thou shalt not STEAL. What do you not understand? You also state, and I quote, “There is a lot of complicated reasoning that still needs to be worked out because of these differences which I am still trying to work out…”. ??? This makes NO sense whatsoever. I read all your rambling responses. They are wordy and very confusing. Please attempt to stick to the direct answers in a simple, readable, understandable manner. Thank You.

I’m sorry that you find my posts confusing. I am not purposefully trying to be confusing or misleading.

I am not sure why you think that I meant stealing in the same way for both when the only time I brought both up was for the sake of saying that they were different. I also don’t understand why you feel the need to tell me that stealing copyrighted material is wrong, I already agreed to that and said that very same thing in my above post. It sounds like the problem is largely just miscommunication between the two of us. Do you want me to try and explain my point again?

 

[jimperu]

I’m sorry that you find my posts confusing. I am not purposefully trying to be confusing or misleading.

I am not sure why you think that I meant stealing in the same way for both when the only time I brought both up was for the sake of saying that they were different. I also don’t understand why you feel the need to tell me that stealing copyrighted material is wrong, I already agreed to that and said that very same thing in my above post. It sounds like the problem is largely just miscommunication between the two of us. Do you want me to try and explain my point again?

No further response is needed. However, I do appreciate your responding to my inquiry . Thank you. Peace

 

[Rete]

You contradict yourself over and over. Please carefully read every sentence/statement that you have made. Example, you write, and I quote," STEALING copyrighted material is not the same kind of STEALING material property…". You made the statement that they are BOTH STEALING. Thou shalt not STEAL. What do you not understand? You also state, and I quote, “There is a lot of complicated reasoning that still needs to be worked out because of these differences which I am still trying to work out…”. ??? This makes NO sense whatsoever. I read all your rambling responses. They are wordy and very confusing. Please attempt to stick to the direct answers in a simple, readable, understandable manner. Thank You.

It absolutely is not the same thing at all. Information cannot be property. We can pass laws that force people to pretend it is so, but it defies reason.

As has been pointed out over and over without the pro-copyright side even bothering to acknowledge, one cannot steal information in the same sense that one steals a physical object. For most of human history, when one speaks of stealing information, what they meant was for a person to gain access to private information to which they had no right to access. It was a figure of speech and it that figure of speech has been exploited to foist an illogical and unreasonable legal framework upon the world which only exists to prop up otherwise unsustainable business models. Nothing is stolen in the property sense when you make a copy of information. It’s nonsensical to speak as if this were so.

But most importantly, information lacks the very qualities of physical objects that necessitates the institution of property in the first place. We need the institution of property rights because a physical object cannot be simultaneously possessed by different people. It cannot be used by more than one person at one time (and sometime it has limited uses). That’s why we have property rights. Yet information utterly lacks the very qualities that necessitate property rights. So why even bother trying to extend the institution of property to substances which do not necessitate that institution? If physical objects had the same qualities as information, then we would never even have an institution of property rights, so there again it can be shown entirely nonsensical and irrational.

There really exists no good reply to that because this is logically self-evident knowledge. Physical objects are governed by the relationships of possession and property. Information is governed by the relationship of private versus public information. These are two different things and it makes no sense to pretend otherwise.

For the sake of propping up the present ridiculous system of copyrights and patents, it makes sense. But that’s hardly the only viable system of compensating artists and inventors.

Lastly, property rights are natural rights. That is, they arise from our very nature and human condition. They exist objectively and are self-evident truths. We know property rights are natural rights because of the very nature of what entails a physical object (that is is exclusive and cannot be possessed by more than one person or used by more than one person at a single time). Thus all men cannot possibly possess an object at the same time, so we must determine to whom each object belongs. That’s property rights. Information does not have this problem. NOBODY argued for things like copyrights and patents until very recently in human history. They were put in the US Constitution not as fundamental rights but as legal rights to be regulated by Congress for the* public good*. Congress could conceivably alter or abolish the present copyright law precisely because copyrights are not natural rights, but legal rights granted through positive law. So there again, comparing a copyright to property is nonsensical to its very core. Property rights are fundamental rights. To argue that copyrights are also property is to argue that copyrights are fundamental (natural) rights when that is not the case.

Likewise, the Catholic Church has long built upon natural law to establish Church doctrine on various rights. Property rights are as fundamental as they come. God Himself explicitly referred to property rights. But neither God nor the Church recognize copyrights or patents as natural rights. So to label them “property rights” is to grant them a status that not even the Church has. To claim that a person making a copy of information violates the commandment against stealing also would appear to me anyway as a form of recasting God’s words. I think it is true that we are called to obey the laws, and these are the laws we are currently saddled with, to our societal detriment I might add. But I don’t think you really violated that specific commandment if you copied a song on the internet. It’s probably a sin of some kind, but I really don’t think it is stealing, since you took no property. Nothing was taken from another person. You simply accessed information which the law says you are not allowed to copy.

And in the case of things like pharmaceutical patents and critical scientific research, I think people have a moral obligation to violate those patents and copyrights when not doing so threatens or costs human lives. If I were an African health minister, I would not bother confessing for violating international patent laws when I manufactured AIDS drugs to treat the poor. Indeed, I would feel the need to confess if I failed to do so. That’s a pretty big indicator that the legal framework is fundamentally unjust. It might be neutral in the case of music, but you can well see how it is not sound with respect to natural and moral law when you look at the wider picture.

 

[Monica4316]

That’s not what I meant. I meant, does the Church have a teaching on whether it is stealing to make copies of other intellectual work, assuming that you are not passing this work off as your own? I looked in the catechism and I couldn’t find anything about it.

I did come across this sermon: audiosancto.org/sermon/20060917-On-Restitution.html

copyright is mentioned near the end from what I remember.

it appears that it is stealing.

 

[Ruthie_again]

Rete, I’m afraid there are major holes in your logic.

… one cannot steal information in the same sense that one steals a physical object.

Yes, one can. Natural law covers it.

We know property rights are natural rights because of the very nature of what entails a physical object (that is is exclusive and cannot be possessed by more than one person or used by more than one person at a single time).

(emphasis mine)

If six people sit down at our table to eat or study, is only one of them using the table?
When my husband and I drive our car from place to place, we are both using it at the same time. Our sofa, our bed, our house – all are objects that can be used “by more than one person at a single time.”

We also own everything in common. All our stuff has two owners. Well, except the house. We only own part of it; the bank owns the rest. And the bank is owned by a lot of people.

Thus, it is false to say that a physical object is “exclusive and cannot be possessed by more than one person or used by more than one person at a single time”. So it follows that an idea, in a form that can be possessed my many people at the same time, is property and covered by natural law.

As for owning ideas themselves, think about the word “copyright.” It means that the right to copy an idea - a story, a cartoon, a song - belongs to the owner/s of the copyright. Thus, if you want to make a copy of something, you have to have the copyright holder’s permission. They can give permission, or sell it. They can give or sell the copyright, too.

Copyright law also covers the fact that an idea belongs to the originator of the idea. Savvy creators make a copy (or a photo) of their work, and seal it in an envelope. They take it to the post office, and ask that the stamps on the envelope be hand-cancelled. That insures that the time & date they mailed it is clear and readable. They mail it to themselves, and keep the envelope unopened. If they need to prove they had the idea before someone else, the envelope can be opened in front of witnesses.

There is no moral difference between physical objects and intellectual ideas.

copyright Ruthie 05/23/2015

 

[thewanderer]

Rete, I’m afraid there are major holes in your logic.

Yes, one can. Natural law covers it.

(emphasis mine)

If six people sit down at our table to eat or study, is only one of them using the table?
When my husband and I drive our car from place to place, we are both using it at the same time. Our sofa, our bed, our house – all are objects that can be used “by more than one person at a single time.”

We also own everything in common. All our stuff has two owners. Well, except the house. We only own part of it; the bank owns the rest. And the bank is owned by a lot of people.

Thus, it is false to say that a physical object is “exclusive and cannot be possessed by more than one person or used by more than one person at a single time”. So it follows that an idea, in a form that can be possessed my many people at the same time, is property and covered by natural law.

As for owning ideas themselves, think about the word “copyright.” It means that the right to copy an idea - a story, a cartoon, a song - belongs to the owner/s of the copyright. Thus, if you want to make a copy of something, you have to have the copyright holder’s permission. They can give permission, or sell it. They can give or sell the copyright, too.

Copyright law also covers the fact that an idea belongs to the originator of the idea. Savvy creators make a copy (or a photo) of their work, and seal it in an envelope. They take it to the post office, and ask that the stamps on the envelope be hand-cancelled. That insures that the time & date they mailed it is clear and readable. They mail it to themselves, and keep the envelope unopened. If they need to prove they had the idea before someone else, the envelope can be opened in front of witnesses.

There is no moral difference between physical objects and intellectual ideas.

copyright Ruthie 05/23/2015

I’m sorry, but there absolutely is a difference between material and immaterial goods. Sure, a table can be possessed by more than one person at a time, but it cannot be possessed by an unlimited number of people at the same time. The difference between material goods and immaterial goods is that material goods are limited, they can only be possessed or used by a limited number of people at any given time. Ideas, and imaterial goods, on the other hand, can be shared by an indefinite number of people. Because they are immaterial they do not have the same restrictions as material objects. Aristotle’s idea of form and matter can be shared among every person on earth without being taken away from Aristotle. Stealing immaterial goods is not the same as stealing material goods because when you steal material goods you are taking the material good itself away from the person who owns it so that the person who owns it no longer has it. When someone copies an idea from someone else they are not taking that idea itself away from the originator of the idea so that the originator no longer has that idea anymore. What people talk about as stealing in this case is that the originator can lose out on the ability to make money. That is a different case than with material goods where it is the material good itself which is taken away from the owner. I’m sorry, but the two cases are not the same and cannot be treated as though they are.

 

[LilyM]

I don’t know about there being limits on the number of persons who can own something. Who owns Buckingham Palace, for example? Not the Queen, for sure. The British people perhaps? But it couldn’t be sold off willy-nilly like British Rail or anything - it is a heritage-listed and thus protected monument.

We have things like World Heritage lists because some bits of property really are so iconic and of such significance that they really do belong to us all, as a global community. And not just the present generation either. That’s as near as makes no difference to saying that they really do have an indeterminate number of “owners”. And it is the organisations that speak on behalf of that indeterminate ownership that mandates that those properties are to be protected and maintained.

 

[thewanderer]

I don’t know about there being limits on the number of persons who can own something. Who owns Buckingham Palace, for example? Not the Queen, for sure. The British people perhaps? But it couldn’t be sold off willy-nilly like British Rail or anything - it is a heritage-listed and thus protected monument.

We have things like World Heritage lists because some bits of property really are so iconic and of such significance that they really do belong to us all, as a global community. And not just the present generation either. That’s as near as makes no difference to saying that they really do have an indeterminate number of “owners”. And it is the organisations that speak on behalf of that indeterminate ownership that mandates that those properties are to be protected and maintained.

You do make an interesting point. Yes, some material objects are owned by all in a way. But even taking that into account, what that means is that the line of difference is not nearly as cut and dried as I made it out to be, not that no such line exists. There absolutely are material objects which, in order to be possessed by a larger group of people need to be taken away from the person/people who currently possess them. These objects are property and are “owned” in a different way than something like, say, 2+2=4, or the philosophical idea of form and matter.

It is a really interesting question though, why some material things can be possessed by so many… I mean, in a way we would say the earth as a whole is possessed by all mankind, past, present, and future, but we still say that individual parts of the earth are possessed by particular people. It is confusing what exactly differentiates these different kinds of material goods. Thanks for making me think more about this.

 

[Fairwinds]

using Aristotle’s musing to limit the definition of property is funny. “property” already covers an enormous range of very different concepts. real property can exist forever, is always considered unique, can be owned by any number of people while possessed by different people at the same time. bits and pieces can be carved out, like easements or mineral rights or pledged as security.

likewise with personal property, which might also be nearly eternal (diamonds are forever) or might exist for minute or less. it might even die. it might be unique as a painting or a fungible as barrels of oil.

I could own a future right to purchase property (a foal or stock rights) that might not even exist at the time I acquire the right

so at the heart of all this blather about IP I think is a way to justify theft of some band’s music using outdated concepts that have cachet because, Aristotle!. I assume Ari would rethink his definition if he could have a look at how property as a concept has evolved…

 

[thewanderer]

using Aristotle’s musing to limit the definition of property is funny. “property” already covers an enormous range of very different concepts. real property can exist forever, is always considered unique, can be owned by any number of people while possessed by different people at the same time. bits and pieces can be carved out, like easements or mineral rights or pledged as security.

likewise with personal property, which might also be nearly eternal (diamonds are forever) or might exist for minute or less. it might even die. it might be unique as a painting or a fungible as barrels of oil.

I could own a future right to purchase property (a foal or stock rights) that might not even exist at the time I acquire the right

so at the heart of all this blather about IP I think is a way to justify theft of some band’s music using outdated concepts that have cachet because, Aristotle!. I assume Ari would rethink his definition if he could have a look at how property as a concept has evolved…

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Aristotle’s musings other than his musings are what set me off on thinking about all this. And I really don’t care if you use the word property, its just a collection of syllables.

What I do care about is making sure that if you do decide to use the word property you recognize that it does not mean the same thing as when you use the word property to speak about someones car or their clothes or jewelry. In other words, you can’t just say, but these ideas are my property therefore taking them from me is stealing and therefore wrong. That is because everyone will assume you are basing this conclusion on the definition of property and stealing used for things such as my car, clothes, and jewelry, which would be to mix up the meanings behind the words used. You have to show why this new definition of property has a moral imperative to it without making an appeal to the other definitions of property or else show that and why this definition falls has the same moral imperative as the other definition of property. But you can’t mix up the two and assume that what applies to the one applies to the other.

 

[Fairwinds]

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Aristotle’s musings other than his musings are what set me off on thinking about all this. And I really don’t care if you use the word property, its just a collection of syllables.

What I do care about is making sure that if you do decide to use the word property you recognize that it does not mean the same thing as when you use the word property to speak about someones car or their clothes or jewelry. In other words, you can’t just say, but these ideas are my property therefore taking them from me is stealing and therefore wrong. That is because everyone will assume you are basing this conclusion on the definition of property and stealing used for things such as my car, clothes, and jewelry, which would be to mix up the meanings behind the words used. You have to show why this new definition of property has a moral imperative to it without making an appeal to the other definitions of property or else show that and why this definition falls has the same moral imperative as the other definition of property. But you can’t mix up the two and assume that what applies to the one applies to the other.

the sarcasm shows you’re not up to speed at all on any of this.

you can’t define property the way you want to or impose a requirement like “morality” and expect me to buy into that. its a trap any high school debater learns on day one. come on. but if you insist on making up definitions, here’s PJ Proudhon’s: property is theft. there you go. now you can steal anything, IP included.

for the rest of the modern world property (real, personal, IP, intangible, future, contingent) is well defined today, by law, culture, practice. its just not defined the way you want. I don’t misinterpret real property law when someone’s referring to a lien on personal property. if you do, that’s your problem, not a problem with how property is defined.

and I don’t “need” to show a moral imperative. law doesn’t need to be moral anything. all it needs to be is internally consistent with the existing system of laws.

is a UCC-1 financing lien moral? that’s a kind of property. is an easement moral? is a futures contract moral?

 

[thewanderer]

the sarcasm shows you’re not up to speed at all on any of this.

you can’t define property the way you want to or impose a requirement like “morality” and expect me to buy into that. its a trap any high school debater learns on day one. come on. but if you insist on making up definitions, here’s PJ Proudhon’s: property is theft. there you go. now you can steal anything, IP included.

for the rest of the modern world property (real, personal, IP, intangible, future, contingent) is well defined today, by law, culture, practice. its just not defined the way you want. I don’t misinterpret real property law when someone’s referring to a lien on personal property. if you do, that’s your problem, not a problem with how property is defined.

and I don’t “need” to show a moral imperative. law doesn’t need to be moral anything. all it needs to be is internally consistent with the existing system of laws.

is a UCC-1 financing lien moral? that’s a kind of property. is an easement moral? is a futures contract moral?

I’m sorry that you mistook my sincere post as being sarcastic. There truly was no sarcasm whatsoever intended in my post. I am also not trying to “win” some “debate”. I am trying to understand reality. And what I have come to understand about it so far tells me that there is a difference between what property means when it is applied to common goods as opposed to what it means when it is applied to individual or private goods. That much is a just a fact. Because I recognize that there is a difference here I am not satisfied with arguments that act as though no such difference exists. I am sincerely trying to understand how reality is with respect to this issue. I don’t care how law or culture has decided to name things. I care about the truth about reality.

I also seriously do not understand a large portion of your post. I am not trying to define property however I want to. I am trying to understand reality. Words are just tools that we use to understand reality. So I could look at a leaf and a blade of grass and call them both leaf but it wouldn’t change the reality behind it. My point is that there is very clearly a difference in the reality behind common and private goods. Because of this, even if you use the same word for both of them that won’t necessarily mean that it means the same thing every time that you say it.

I also do not understand what you mean by saying I am imposing morality onto property. Or why you you think I am talking about law. I am not talking about law. I am not saying that laws have to be moral to be laws. I am saying that when you look at the structure of reality there is a difference between common and private goods. And this difference carries over into talking about the inherent morality/immorality of filesharing etc. What I am saying has nothing to do with law. That is a whole nother kettle of fish which will complicate things even more when it is brought into the conversation. Also, just in case you missed it, I do not condone illegal filesharing. So if you are going after my post because you think I am trying to find some sneaky side argument to say that illegal filesharing is moral you can rest easy, that is not at all my intention. I just like trying to understand reality, its why I studied phillosophy for four years, and I find this question in particular to be very interesting because it is so complex and I do not fully understand it yet. Not everyone who discusses filesharing is trying to encourage people to break the law. Some of us just like trying to understand reality.

 

[jimperu]

It absolutely is not the same thing at all. Information cannot be property. We can pass laws that force people to pretend it is so, but it defies reason.

As has been pointed out over and over without the pro-copyright side even bothering to acknowledge, one cannot steal information in the same sense that one steals a physical object. For most of human history, when one speaks of stealing information, what they meant was for a person to gain access to private information to which they had no right to access. It was a figure of speech and it that figure of speech has been exploited to foist an illogical and unreasonable legal framework upon the world which only exists to prop up otherwise unsustainable business models. Nothing is stolen in the property sense when you make a copy of information. It’s nonsensical to speak as if this were so.

But most importantly, information lacks the very qualities of physical objects that necessitates the institution of property in the first place. We need the institution of property rights because a physical object cannot be simultaneously possessed by different people. It cannot be used by more than one person at one time (and sometime it has limited uses). That’s why we have property rights. Yet information utterly lacks the very qualities that necessitate property rights. So why even bother trying to extend the institution of property to substances which do not necessitate that institution? If physical objects had the same qualities as information, then we would never even have an institution of property rights, so there again it can be shown entirely nonsensical and irrational.

There really exists no good reply to that because this is logically self-evident knowledge. Physical objects are governed by the relationships of possession and property. Information is governed by the relationship of private versus public information. These are two different things and it makes no sense to pretend otherwise.

For the sake of propping up the present ridiculous system of copyrights and patents, it makes sense. But that’s hardly the only viable system of compensating artists and inventors.

Lastly, property rights are natural rights. That is, they arise from our very nature and human condition. They exist objectively and are self-evident truths. We know property rights are natural rights because of the very nature of what entails a physical object (that is is exclusive and cannot be possessed by more than one person or used by more than one person at a single time). Thus all men cannot possibly possess an object at the same time, so we must determine to whom each object belongs. That’s property rights. Information does not have this problem. NOBODY argued for things like copyrights and patents until very recently in human history. They were put in the US Constitution not as fundamental rights but as legal rights to be regulated by Congress for the* public good*. Congress could conceivably alter or abolish the present copyright law precisely because copyrights are not natural rights, but legal rights granted through positive law. So there again, comparing a copyright to property is nonsensical to its very core. Property rights are fundamental rights. To argue that copyrights are also property is to argue that copyrights are fundamental (natural) rights when that is not the case.

Likewise, the Catholic Church has long built upon natural law to establish Church doctrine on various rights. Property rights are as fundamental as they come. God Himself explicitly referred to property rights. But neither God nor the Church recognize copyrights or patents as natural rights. So to label them “property rights” is to grant them a status that not even the Church has. To claim that a person making a copy of information violates the commandment against stealing also would appear to me anyway as a form of recasting God’s words. I think it is true that we are called to obey the laws, and these are the laws we are currently saddled with, to our societal detriment I might add. But I don’t think you really violated that specific commandment if you copied a song on the internet. It’s probably a sin of some kind, but I really don’t think it is stealing, since you took no property. Nothing was taken from another person. You simply accessed information which the law says you are not allowed to copy.

And in the case of things like pharmaceutical patents and critical scientific research, I think people have a moral obligation to violate those patents and copyrights when not doing so threatens or costs human lives. If I were an African health minister, I would not bother confessing for violating international patent laws when I manufactured AIDS drugs to treat the poor. Indeed, I would feel the need to confess if I failed to do so. That’s a pretty big indicator that the legal framework is fundamentally unjust. It might be neutral in the case of music, but you can well see how it is not sound with respect to natural and moral law when you look at the wider picture.

I totally disagree with you. You reasoning and examples are ridiculous. This is simply a moral question regarding stealing others property. Laws are written to PROTECT and
establish JUSTICE. You confuse the issue by your SELECTIVE EXAMPLES of what is, according to YOU, right and wrong. Thou Shalt Not Steal is very simple to understand.
One cannot rationalize or manipulate an argument JUST to make it favorable to them.
You wish to argue for the sake of arguing. I’m done with this. God Bless and so long.

 

[Fairwinds]

I’m sorry that you mistook my sincere post as being sarcastic

more proof those smiley things cause more harm than they do good.

I don’t know what ideas you’re trying to convey. you have an elaborate, highly personalized understanding of “reality” using personal classifications (“common”, “individual or private”) of property that overlap normal definitions of property, but not in a helpful way. a thing can have millions of owners, each with a distinct piece of that thing with only one person entitled to posses it.

studying philosophy has disconnected you from the mundane reality of the real world. you’re not even speaking the same language as most people who deal with property (and that means almost all of us). for example, I haven’t noticed that you are even aware of basic distinctions between ownership and possession.

if you want to understand property, then read a short treatise on modern property law.

 

[thewanderer]

more proof those smiley things cause more harm than they do good.

I don’t know what ideas you’re trying to convey. you have an elaborate, highly personalized understanding of “reality” using personal classifications (“common”, “individual or private”) of property that overlap normal definitions of property, but not in a helpful way. a thing can have millions of owners, each with a distinct piece of that thing with only one person entitled to posses it.

studying philosophy has disconnected you from the mundane reality of the real world. you’re not even speaking the same language as most people who deal with property (and that means almost all of us). for example, I haven’t noticed that you are even aware of basic distinctions between ownership and possession.

if you want to understand property, then read a short treatise on modern property law.

Again, the point is that I am not currently concerned with property law. And yes, I have been using the terms possess and use and ownership rather loosely, I am aware that they have different meanings and perhaps I should have been more exact in my use of them. No philosophy has not disconnected me from the mundane reality of the world. Nor am I the only person on this thread who has been trying to understand the morality of filesharing if no laws about filesharing existed. a large part of the problem for me is that whenever I hear someone argue for filesharing being immoral they treat it as though it is immoral for the same reason that stealing someones car is immoral, and that just is not true. I think that even without laws, it is still immoral, at least to some extent, I just am not sure to what extent exactly. And in order to understand that I need to better understand exactly why it is immoral. Appealing to law will not help answer that question and neither will equivocating on the words property and stealing. I completely understand if you do not feel like spending time trying to help me understand this better, but please do not tell me that to answer my question I should look at something which has nothing whatsoever to do with my question as though my question were worthless or meaningless. It might not be a question that interests you or that you have any reason to wish to pursue further, but please do not act as though that means that no one ought to pursue it.

 

[Fairwinds]

Again, the point is that I am not currently concerned with property law. And yes, I have been using the terms possess and use and ownership rather loosely, I am aware that they have different meanings and perhaps I should have been more exact in my use of them. No philosophy has not disconnected me from the mundane reality of the world. Nor am I the only person on this thread who has been trying to understand the morality of filesharing if no laws about filesharing existed. a large part of the problem for me is that whenever I hear someone argue for filesharing being immoral they treat it as though it is immoral for the same reason that stealing someones car is immoral, and that just is not true. I think that even without laws, it is still immoral, at least to some extent, I just am not sure to what extent exactly. And in order to understand that I need to better understand exactly why it is immoral. Appealing to law will not help answer that question and neither will equivocating on the words property and stealing. I completely understand if you do not feel like spending time trying to help me understand this better, but please do not tell me that to answer my question I should look at something which has nothing whatsoever to do with my question as though my question were worthless or meaningless. It might not be a question that interests you or that you have any reason to wish to pursue further, but please do not act as though that means that no one ought to pursue it.

then read a treatise on what IP is and, more importantly, why laws need to protect the rights of IP owners against what kinds of predation, if you need an explanation of why theft of a particular kind of property is immoral.

 

[thewanderer]

then read a treatise on what IP is and, more importantly, why laws need to protect the rights of IP owners against what kinds of predation, if you need an explanation of why theft of a particular kind of property is immoral.

I have read some on this topic, I am just not yet sure exactly what I think of it. So I like to try and get more (name removed by moderator)ut of other peoples opinions. But I like to make sure that they are actually addressing my question rather than saying things that are entirely unhelpful. As far as I can see, “theft” of IP doesn’t really come down to theft as it is traditionally understood, but rather to the fact that every person is due a just wage. I already suggested this earlier in this thread, but that line of thought didn’t really take off. If you have any treatises in particular that you think would be helpful then feel free to give a link for them here. I am sure I am not the only person who would love to give them a look.

 

[Fairwinds]

I have read some on this topic, I am just not yet sure exactly what I think of it. So I like to try and get more (name removed by moderator)ut of other peoples opinions. But I like to make sure that they are actually addressing my question rather than saying things that are entirely unhelpful. As far as I can see, “theft” of IP doesn’t really come down to theft as it is traditionally understood, but rather to the fact that every person is due a just wage. I already suggested this earlier in this thread, but that line of thought didn’t really take off. If you have any treatises in particular that you think would be helpful then feel free to give a link for them here. I am sure I am not the only person who would love to give them a look.

fair enough. Let me evaluate a couple of sources, rather than give a shotgun approach and list a handful.