Too bad it doesn't matter at all what you personally recognize. I happen to agree with you. And it does suck that reason has anything to do with this stuff. It's about money and control. This is just another example of a few people or corporate entities vacuuming up all the resources of the world. In this case they are vacuuming up raw ideas and the ability for individuals to profit from those ideas. They do this because they can. They have power and they use that power to change policy to allow them to do this. It's that simple. And it will only get "better" if it suits them. And I don't see it suiting them. Vive la revolution!

> It isn't property, I can't hold on to it, I can't touch it, and I can't steal it. You don't have any right to an idea over any other human. This is an abstract construct which attempts to create an artificial commodity where there isn't one.

Apart from "holding on to it," what you say in the quote sentence is true for pretty much any property. In a strict sense, property is what you can defend. However, in order stop people using violence to defend their property, the government steps in and defines material property and vows to defend it for you through laws about theft, etc.

So property is an abstract concept enforced by the government.

Now, the government simply looks around and says, "what else is valuable for people that we can protect for them?" One is land ownership. You can't physically be on the border of your land all the time with a gun, so the government has laws about trespassing and poaching, etc., and enforces them for you.

Money is another abstract concept the government defends. It makes things easier for everyone to have a common currency, instead of trading chickens and cows, so even though $1 doesn't have a "material" meaning, it represents value and therefore people have agreed to respect it. The government proposes a country-wide currency to replace instability of ad-hoc currencies.

Another is copyright. The government agrees that creative people deserve "ownership" over their work, so they can profit from it, and this bargain is struck in order to encourage development of culture. It's a concept of intellectual property that is simply a contract between the people and the government, and the government vows to defend it.

Another example is patents. The government wants to encourage research and development, and one way it sees to do so is to help inventors profit from their ideas by vowing to defend their rights to it for a certain amount of time.

Before you get all upset (if you're not already), I agree very, vere strongly with the position that there are clearly problems with patents--specifically that they encourage many things we find distasteful as society, and the minefield effect is terribly detrimental, especially in certain areas like computer programming. There's no question that patents are a problem today, with the pace of technological development being what it is, and it's clogging up the legal system like nothing else. These are things that need to be solved. If the solution is to abolish patents I'm not even necessarily against that, though I think I agree with Judge Posner that they make sense for certain industries.

However, the claim that patents and copyright and any intellectual property is not consistent with the idea of material property is, imho, completely false. All of these concepts share the same root, that the government vows to defend your ownership over something. Just because some property is material and other property is "intellectual" does not make the latter "abstract" and therefore invalid, because the whole concept of property is abstract, it is nothing but an agreement.

This is the role of government, really, and I'd say one of its only legitimate roles, apart from infrastructure building, is to establish agreements on what we consider property, and enforce them. Now, whether this is done well is a subject of debate, but conceptually it is self-consistent.

If you don't agree with this, feel free to grab your gun, squat somewhere with everything you own, build a wall, and try to keep everyone from taking your stuff, but otherwise you have to acknowledge that the whole concept of property itself is as intangible the idea of intellectual property.

That doesn't excuse certain aspects of intellectual property from being ill-defined or badly designed, but the concept is not invalid. The extension from material property is a logical one.

I think we should be careful about the word property. In the case of copyrighted works, you do not own the work, you own the copyright to it. In the same way with patents, you don't own the patented idea, you own the patent. Both of these are abstract constructs that means society gives you certain rights, but do not extend ownership to the ideas. This is plainly obvious with regards to copyright since the fair use clause gives anyone right to make copies under certain circumstances.

Even in the case of land ownership, one could argue that what you own is much closer to a "license to use the land surface" since you can have surface rights without having the rights to mine or drill for oil on that land.

So your idea that property comes about because government says "what else is valuable for people that we can protect for them?" I think is incorrect. Property rights aren't some God-given right, we as citizens agree to handing out the rights to pieces of the commons to individuals because there is some net gain to everyone from this. All of those "rights" you describe are therefore subject to an evaluation of whether they serve society's purpose, and I think it's pretty clear that's a discussion that is very relevant to patents and copyrights.

I agree with everything you just wrote, so if I came off as contradictory it means I wasn't clear about something. When said "government says," obviously it was a bit of hyperbole, I really meant that citizens and government agree on a set of rights, pursuant to certain goals we have as a society, and how they should be distributed. Of course there are subtleties that I tried to gloss over, such as owning a patent vs. owning an idea---I was just trying to emphasize the fact that even ownership of material property is such a right, based on agreement, and is basically already an abstract concept, and therefore consistent with other forms of ownership that may seem more abstract.

Another example is stock ownership, i.e. partial, tradeable ownership of a venture. No, you can't hold it in your hands[1], but people understand that it's property in all the relevant senses and can be meaningfully said to be "stolen" (e.g., if the votes you make with your shares are ignored).

[1] The stock certificate doesn't count; that's a representation of the property, not the property itself.

The stock certificate does count: 1) Its legal tender, 2), if you loose the certificate then you loose the property.

Its like trying to argue that money are not property, just representation of property.

Wait, what? Most exchanges and corporations don't even go by a paper certificate, proving my point: shares (and money, for that matter), are defined by a relationship, not a physical instantiation. If you lose a certificate (if they even still issue them), there are still records of how many were issued, and of when they were transfered to you. As long as that history can be reconstructed, you are still given the voting/dividend rights, and if you aren't, it's lawsuit time.

Same thing with contracts: a contract is a relationship. The signed piece of paper is not the contract, but proof that a contract exists.

It's just a case of Procrustean bedding to act like all property (or rights bundles isomorphic thereto) must be physical.

> Most exchanges and corporations don't even go by a paper certificate,

Except the ones that do. You're right; most don't by default, but if you DO have valid paper certificate, it is a bearer instrument. Who owns it, owns it.

Which is to say, that the physical piece of paper is not a defining characteristic of property in stocks (even one case would mean that paper is not inherently part of stock ownership), just as physical stuff is not necessary in many other kinds of property.

And here I thought a stock was a tiny piece of the company. And if you had all the stock, then you had all the company...

The preferred example would be futures, and oddly enough, something I also think is a scam.

It certainly is "a tiny piece of the company", at an appropriate level of abstraction. Expand it out to something more specific and you get that it's "right to cast a certain number of votes in determining who is allowed to manage (act as steward of) the company's assets and other major decisions, and to some proportion of the money paid out as dividends or when the company is bought out".

Somebody who owns their own company can be thought of as equivalently having 100% of its stock.

Don't see what's "a scam" about it, but I'd love to hear your thorough analysis on the matter.