> If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever.

Copyright lasts 70 years past the death of the author. I assure you, you will not own that chair after you die.

Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct. No will, and the decision is made by the probate court. No heirs? Then your chair does go to the state. Or maybe it gets left on the street to be taken by any member of the public who sees it and happens to want it.

Intellectual property in the end is really not that different from any other kind of property. Like any form of property, it's a social construct that exists because people think and act like it exists, and because the resources of the state are used to ensure that any dissenters are suppressed and/or punished.

Ultimately, the reason that your chair sits in your living room, rather than in your better-armed or more muscular neighbor's fireplace, is the same reason that you can't sell bootleg copies of the latest Disney movie on Amazon: the voluntary observation and enforcement of the law by human beings.

> Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct.

If inheritance didn't exist, I imagine people would achieve a similar result by gifting everything to their heirs towards the end of their life. And there would be cases where someone meant to do so but died earlier than expected, or where someone did so when they thought they were dying but then ended up living 10 years longer. Compared to that world, inheritance with wills is more convenient and orderly for everyone involved, but it is not the thing that enables people to pass things on to heirs.

> inheritance with wills is more convenient and orderly for everyone involved, but it is not the thing that enables people to pass things on to heirs

The state's monopoly on violence, and the rule of law it allows, is definitely the thing that enables people to pass things on to their designated heirs. Otherwise, every dispute between heirs, every contested will, every contested end-of-life "gift" would carry the potential for bloodshed.

The specific laws that we have right now could be written differently, and things like inheritance could work differently, but you cannot escape the fact that they are all just creatures of the human mind.

That is, until those concepts begin to be encoded in and enforced by machines.

Gosh how many folks here believe any sort of property is "real"? I guess I see intellectual property as made up rules, just like exclusion rights on real property are made up rules. We're just riffing off mammalian instinct. We have complete freedom to make up different rules.

"property" is the simplest form of governance, whereas a resource is assigned to a person which takes all the decisions regarding the subject including transferring the property to another person. it's really a very old governance model well understood in most societies.

now IP is a confusing form of governance because all the contradictions mentioned by gran parent comment while being named "property" and because it's being applied to something that is not a resource which means it does not even need governance in first place

I've come to view physical property as the odd one out.

IP makes sense to me - you are assigning ownership of purely human created constructs, and someone assigning me Mickey Mouse doesn't use up a resource and prevent you from making your own IP.

But physical property... you're telling me that someone ('someone' being a government - who probably took it by force from some other group of people) can just "assign" me something no human had a hand in creating, I can morph it, then sell it to some other person for a buck? The whole chain of custody is tainted. I should not be able to "own" these things no human created, at best, I should be able to rent it from

Exclusion rules of some kind are generally necessary for something that only one person can use at a time.

IP does not have that property.

IP was always taught to me as a negative right. Easiest explained with patents:

In that owning a patent doesn't even give you the right to make the invention described, it only allows you to prevent others from making it.

Especially true if you patent an improvement of someone else's patented invention.

Your patent isn't license to infringe on theirs.

But you can prevent them from using that improvement without having licensed your patent.

Although copyright and trademark are slightly different beasts.

Try making that argument to a peasant prior to Enclosure.

How is "I own this text" less arbitrary than "I own this forest"? You can't "own" a forest, you can only prevent other people from entering it but if the forest is large enough you can't even do so on your own, even if you live in the forest.

Heck, while you might "own" a chair, how do you "own" a million chairs? You can't use a million chairs. You can't even store a million chairs in one place. You certainly can't guard them yourself, much like the forest.

And how do you "own" a business? How do you "own" the factory when you're not even using it, nor would be able to do so yourself and instead you have to pay dozens of people to use it for you?

"Property" literally just means "exclusive claim backed up by force". That's the primary function of the state, it's why we have police.

"Imaginary Property" might be a better name for this pattern of thought.

> I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat

My view is that we should build a system that ensures every person gets to eat (and have shelter, medical care, other necessities) without the need to pay for it, simply because this is the right thing to do.

Then under such a system, we can eliminate intellectual property restrictions, because they will no longer be necessary to ensure that artists eat. IP restrictions actually slow down innovation, so eliminating them will have huge benefits to society.

By the way you can ensure that everyone gets fed etc without paying for it by building an economy where everyone is part owner of the productive machinery they depend upon. Then no one is poor. Creating an economy where a preponderance of the firms are cooperatives is a good start. So this can be done in a traditionally libertarian way, without high taxes or strong government intervention.