The matter is that morality is based on a small set of axioms - personal sovereignty, strong property rights, and the moral binding power of contracts (not in the legal sense - in the sense that if two people agree to something, they are morally bound to following through on those commitments). Intellectual property is just as much property as physical property is; without going into too much detail here, it quite naturally follows from more traditional, physical property ideas like Locke's labor theory. To simplify (so disregarding subordinate issues like ownership of ownership of base products, work-for-hire etc), when a person puts his efforts into creating something, he owns it, regardless if that what he creates is physical or not. It's painfully obvious and intuitive; if not (to use a very crude argument), then why does CC with attribution even exist? Most everybody instinctively recognizes this concept, and no sophistic constructs about maximum social utility or information as an oppression mechanism (cough crazy man Stallman cough) can do away with that.

Anyway, I'm not saying intellectual property and 'regular' property rights should be treated the same under the law; there are valid technical and conceptual reasons to separate them. That's not the issue I contend; what I contend is the pervasive cognitive dissonance in the 'geek' community (of which, to be clear, I am part) that somehow they should have the right to download whatever they want because there is at the moment no effective way for creators to enforce their will on what happens to their creations.

For now, I hope we could reserve IP for Internet Protocol only.

I think the problem is that there are any rights involved at all. To be precise, I think nobody should have a right to download whatever they want but I also think that nobody should have a right to control copying either! They both seem ill-wrong, somehow.

I don't think we can possibly formulate our world based on rights. Going to the extreme, everyone has the theoretical right to not become killed and yet lots of people end up killed all the time by individuals, institutions and nations of much varying moral capacity and the world still goes around. So rights seem to be philosophical ideals: lots of should-nots and ought-not-to's but the actuality often doesn't reflect the rights at all. More so, often worst things happen when we try to be the judges of these rights ourselves.

I feel that there's no such thing as intellectual property. I don't know why exactly but I just know things are going terribly wrong with it. One indicator is the copying vs. stealing argument: we have lots of collective experience about the latter while the former has never been considered a major problem until the last few decades.

We have only recently built a commercial mechanism that allows certain individuals in a minority to make huge amounts of money by the music and movies they create, and keeps the rest a.k.a. the majority out of the picture, except for paying for that all. This is a new thing alltogether and concerns only a fraction of the whole population so it's funny to see the "problem" having grown out of proportions.

Imagine you've made up a song in the morning and you sing it aloud when you go outdoors gardening. Somebody walks by the street, hears the song, learns it and starts singing it along the street. All neighbours learn the song from him and soon the whole block is singing that song. Somebody will grab their guitar and go to the town marketplace to sing that song to everyone else, and he receives some money from it when people drop coins into his hat.

Is that a collateral wrongdoing going on there or just something that happens and nobody can't control? Major criminal activity or people having fun? Was the song writer deprived of lost sales or potential income by this ruthless copying? What if he never wanted any money? How could the other people know that? How could the song writer protect his intellectual property: by never singing his songs? What if he writes his songs out of love for music instead? Can we assume he did? What if he didn't care about it at first but becomes greedy and wants money from all his neighbours the next day, does he have a right to ask that money?

Who knows. Nobody knows.

The whole intellectual property thing is far from a clear-cut case and I consider it an open question at worst and a non-issue at best.

That is wrong. And it is easy to see there must be a problem with it. If you copy my stuff, you benefit and I am unaffected. If I in return copy your stuff, we both lose nothing and end up with twice as much as we started with. That does not sound like taking property at all, in fact it sounds good!

That really ought to be enough to seriously undermine the illusion of IP . . .

First ask: why do we have property? which is as much as to ask: why is it moral? Property is not an axiom of morality, it must be justified. Even more clearly so with IP, since it invents a kind of restriction where there is none in physical fact.

Property is moral because it gives a group/community as a whole a good way of managing things. Property is good not because it gives to someone what is 'theirs', but because as a whole system, in aggregate, it is good for all.

(If we want a rational principal of morality, it is universalisation. Morals are codes of cooperation. They are justified as to how they affect some group. That is what is distinctive in moral rules: they are not rules for individual purpose, they are rules for all (if they do not suit all, why should all consent to them?).)

The Lockean proposition of copyright really only establishes attribution: it 'attaches' a particular thing to a particular creator/author.

But attribution alone does not justify anything much. I may have made a shovel, but that does not then give me a right to dig anyone and everyone's garden with it. Attribution of authorship is merely the 'location' of some possible rights; it is insufficient to set the limits of those rights on its own.

Locke understood this, which is why, when we look at the source of this argument, we find he clearly included the condition of "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others". For a rule to be moral it must make sense more widely than for its primary participant. It must work overall for everyone. That is what sets the limits to rights.

'Abstract goods' (i.e. the subjects of copyright) are nonrival. They behave fundamentally differently to material things. Use by one person does not deny another. It means the tacit assumption that some restriction similar to normal property is implied immediately falters. And that puts an end to the Lockean 'argument'.

And if even that is not enough, reconsider from your own view: those proposed 'axioms' of morality. Either personal sovereignty and property rights are equal or, more likely, personal sovereignty has precedence. Well, IP imposes a direct physical restriction on others' personal freedom: telling someone they cannot copy something is telling them they cannot do as they please with themselves and their own property (and even though the IP 'owner' may be completely unaffected). Now either you have a deep conflict in those axioms or, more reasonably, IP must be overruled.

The only reasonable argument for IP is the orthodox economic one of supporting and sustaining a market. This is a pragmatic moral argument: one that is a matter of evidence and practicality, not of any kind of 'natural right'.

The other part is, people descended from apes have territorial instincts. This drives them to all sorts of behaviors. Some are very useful behaviors. Like creating things to be useful, yes, but also to impress others, create a reputation, gain value in the eyes of society.

If I create something like software, I still want it to be mine. Because that, in part, motivates the creation. Never mind abstract political arguments, you take my software for yourself without any acknowledgment to me, I get pissed. And probably stop creating it, go back to making shovels. Or at least stop showing it to you, since that just gets it appropriated for whatever you want, instead of what I want.

I don't work in the movie industry, which is its own can of worms since that product is Designed to be shared. I write software for particular purposes. And as it stands, I won't share it with anyone unless they properly pay for/acknowledge my contribution. Certainly not with folks with goofy arguments like "since you can't keep me from taking it, its mine!" Certainly not them.

"If you copy my stuff, you benefit and I am unaffected. <etc>"

If something is property or not, is irrelevant to what happens when it is copied. What makes something property are the natural rights of the creator, in short - that ownership is justified through the labor of the body, over which the individual has ownership by axiom and the fruits of which are also the property of that individual.

"Property is moral because it gives a group/community as a whole a good way of managing things."

No it is not, these 'greater good' theories are nonsense. Rights exist independent of their social context. Morality isn't just a tool to organize society, it exists irrespective of how people 'feel' about it or even whether there are people at all.

"Locke understood this, which is why, when we look at the source of this argument, we find he clearly included the condition of "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others"."

Right, and this is where intellectual property is even 'more' or 'easier' to see as property than 'physical' property. One man's idea does not preclude another from making his own; there is no scarcity of ideas or expressions. So there is no reason to not make an expression the exclusive property of the author; nobody else is limited in their freedoms because if the original creator would not have made the expression, it wouldn't have existed in the first place. I don't see how you're supporting your argument with this part.

"Well, IP imposes a direct physical restriction on others' personal freedom: telling someone they cannot copy something is telling them they cannot do as they please with themselves and their own property "

Yes this is faulty reasoning that I've had to put to bed several times here on HN, but I can't find my previous posts so I'll repeat. Freedom to do something only goes so far as long as that something doesn't infringe on someone else's freedom; of course my right to not be tortured infringes on your freedom to torture me. In other words, one freedom is always the other side of the coin of the prohibition of someone else to infringe on that freedom. I don't see how you can reasonably argue that freedom doesn't exist, because its very nature is that it is a protection against someone else's actions (those that infringe on the freedom being protected).

Besides, in your specific example it's not even telling others what they can do with their property; it's telling others (or rather, putting conditions on that that person can then choose to accept or reject) what to do with your property.

"The only reasonable argument for IP is the orthodox economic one of supporting and sustaining a market."

No it is not, and that's my whole point. For someone to own the expression of his or her ideas is perfectly reasonable and broadly accepted; and not (only) for utilitarian reasons, but also for fundamental moral ownership reasons. Which is why so many people feel wronged when a picture they took is used by someone else without attribution - a very common pattern, judging from the amount of blog posts about it.

Expressions of ideas represent the work of a creator just as much as a vase made by a pottery maker represents the work of that maker, and just like that maker is entitled to the ownership of the result of his labor, and any potential economic benefit he can gain from it, so are the creators and expressors (I think I'm just making up that word) of ideas. It's not because there are no practical ways of enforcing that ownership that the moral fundamentals change.

Let us assume mixing of labour gives ownership. Does that mean the owner can demand everyone pay not just when buying the product, but every time they use it? or every time their descendants use it? or every time they merely think of it? That surely sounds absurd. But what makes that absurd and not lesser rights? Aren't they all fruits of the original labour? Wouldn't they all offer economic benefit to the creator? How are the limits set to what rights the creator should be given?

You speak of the objectiveness and deducibility of moral rules. That is fine. So deduce the rightness of payment-for-copies, as opposed to the wrongness of payment-for-thoughts etc..

Somehow you are really going to need to refer to the real-world and its effects on people. What else is more fundamental? and that people really care about? And if you are to stay within any kind of bounds of normal ethics, any rules must be somehow general or universalisable -- that is what makes a rule ethical.

(A Kantian demonstration of the immorality of lying really depends on two things: universalisation of lying as a rule, and the substance of what lying does. Something is found contradictory in general -- what? the actual effective features concerned.)

Just look at the facts of reality. IP imposes restrictions on a beneficial abundance (copyability), where there is no intrinsic need. It is logically possible to compensate people for labour with no restriction on copies. And if you are not interested in the actual effects, why propose rules that have actual effects? Why not simply say that creations are owned in principle, but that everyone need only acknowledge that, and not in any way change their behaviour? Real rules need real justifications.